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bcac07c2-361e-11ea-822e-ebb92ad1061a | Short Stuff: AAirpass | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-aairpass | In the go-go 80s and 90s, American Airlines offered the AAirpass, a lifetime pass for unlimited first class travel. It was an amazing deal, but AA didn’t predict just how much some travelers would use it. They played with fire, they got burned. | In the go-go 80s and 90s, American Airlines offered the AAirpass, a lifetime pass for unlimited first class travel. It was an amazing deal, but AA didn’t predict just how much some travelers would use it. They played with fire, they got burned. | Wed, 08 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=99, tm_isdst=0) | 14016298 | 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. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, 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. Hi, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry is absent, but we're still making do. We're muddling through with short stuff. Like I said, I said it twice, which was redundant. And as everyone knows, it's a huge waste of time and short stuff, so we're going to have to cut out a few facts. That's right. But the first thing we need to do is decide on what we call this thing. Do you know what they called it? Who's they? American Airlines. Do you pronounce both a's I don't know. I don't think so. I think that was more just for looks. So it's Aarpass? No, I think it's just airpass. Well, just so people don't think we're crazy, what we're talking about is a program where American airlines wanted to and did, in fact, sell people lifetime tickets. Unlimited first class travel. And they called it AAirpass. And I just don't know whether to call it a airpass or a a airpass or a airpass. I like the way I said it the most. Yeah, it's got a little mustard on it. We'll call it air path. Okay, cool. Think about this for a second. Unlimited first class travel. For the rest of your life, anytime you want to fly anywhere, you just show up, flash your card, get on the plane. I think you had to book first or whatever, but in addition to that, you got frequent flyer miles, as if you needed them, that you would rack up with each flight. You also had a lifetime membership to the admirals club, which was american airlines said their lounge or whatever. I guess sky club is what you call it. Yeah, they're lounge their VIP lounge at the airport. So you can have a pretty cushy experience with this thing. The thing is, not everybody could afford it. There was a very expensive thing to buy at the time and remain such as long as they were selling it for until, I think, 1994. Yeah. So I guess we should point out the reason they did this was because there was a time in the early 80s where air travel was not doing so great. The airlines were suffering in a lot of ways. Their revenues were way down, and they said there was a deregulation act of 1978, and American airlines actually posted a $76 million loss in 1980. So they're like, we got to do something here. Why don't we see if there are some rich people out there that would buy into this deal? And there were. Yeah. I mean, rather than go borrow it, interest rates are really high. So it made a lot of sense to just go turn to consumers and say, hey, you want to basically prepay for a lifetime of first class travel? And they figured that probably, like, they could go to really well heeled firms to say, hey, you got some top employees who fly a lot. This actually would probably make sense. And I think they were successful in that respect. But some famous people bought it, too. Willy Mays had one. Sure. Mark Cuban still has his. He said it was one of the best purchases he's ever made. Oh, I bet Michael Dell, founder of Dell Computers, had one. Or still may. And ultimately, 28 people bought into this thing, which cost at the beginning when they started offering at $250,000, and then you could add a companion pass for another $150,000. Yeah. So let's talk about the money for a minute. 250 plus 150 is $400,000. That's a lot of money, to be sure. But if you've got some dough and you like to travel or have to travel, it's a great deal. Yeah, it really is. It's a fantastic deal, because if you travel enough, this thing is going to pay for itself potentially within just a few years, depending on how much you travel. And if you travel a lot, like you're a super traveler, you could conceivably make this thing pay for itself within a single year. Yeah. So that's the first offer they laid out. There 250 grand, plus 150 for the companion. They realized, wow, we didn't charge enough. So nine years later, they said, all right, how about $600,000 including the companion? So that's an extra $200. Right. Then in 93, they bumped it to 1.1 million. Yes. That extra $10,000 is super important at that point. I think they must have been doing some really specific math to come to that, though, right? I would guess so. Like, no one in the history of the world has ever charged $1.1 million for anything. It's weird. And then I think at the very end I can't believe this lasted this long. In 2004, their final offering was in ANEMAN Marcus catalog at $3 million plus two mil for your companion. Yeah. And in between 1994 and 2004, they just stopped offering it altogether. But they tried it out back one more time in 2004 for that Christmas catalog, but nobody bought it, as far as I know. No one bought it. So I think the number that I ran across so there's some really good articles on this. There's one by Zachary Crockett on the hustle. There's another one by Ken Bensinger from the Los Angeles Times. And the number that I saw is 28 there's 28 people who ever bought an Airpass air pass. How many? 28. 28. I'm surprised. It was it more to be frank, I'm a little surprised, too. And the thing is, some of these people bought it and I think really didn't get their money's worth out of it. But then there were a couple of people there were a few people, a small handful, who got so much of their money out of it that American Airlines said, we can't take this. Remember how we said that you had a lifetime pass? We're going back on that deal, and I think we should take a break, and then we'll talk about those guys right after this. Okay, let's do it. 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. 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. All right, Chuck. Let's talk about Jacques room and Steven Rothstein. Yeah, so these were a couple of people who became pretty prominent in this whole almost called it a scam because somehow it seems like it it's got a flavor to it. For sure. It does. So, Steven Rostein, he bought his pass in 1987. He was an investment banker for Bear Stearns. And then there was Jacques Vroom, like you said, and he was a direct marketing catalog consultant. He actually took out a loan, $400,000 loan at 12% interest over five years to get his in 89. And these guys, boy, did they travel. Yeah, they both made fun of something that part up in the air where George Clooney gets congratulated for hitting the 10 million mile mark. Right. They just both kind of scoffed at it. They're like, we don't even remember when we hit that mark. Yeah, they hit that. By July of the first year, basically, I think Vroom has an estimated 38 million mile traveled to his name, and Rothstein has about 30 million. Yeah, that's a lot of miles. And you would think, like, even if you like to travel, you can't go on that many trips and like, vacations and things, and you're kind of right. But here's what some of the things these guys were doing. Like vroom. You know what? I need a babysitter here in Dallas. So I'm going to fly to Washington, DC. And pick up my father in law, bring him back here so he can babysit tonight, and I'll just fly him back afterward. That's exactly what he would do. Yeah. He once flew to London to get two tires for his motorcycle because it was cheaper than paying for the freight shipping. Let me see here. July 2004. In one month, rosten flew 18 times to places like Nova Scotia, Miami, London, Los Angeles, Maine, fort Lauderdale, New York. Yeah. And so this is like flying for these guys was a lifestyle. Like, it was part of their life. It was actually kind of like the center of their life. They both have families, but they both had families that knew that they were going to be probably in a different country just about every day of the week. It was just what they did. And so American had not planned for guys like this to buy the Airpass. This is not part of the original plan. So when they started to realize that Room and Rothstein were each costing them about a million dollars a year in travel, they decided that they needed to find a way to basically cancel their Air passes. And so they got an elite task force on this, the Revenue Integrity Team, and said, go find a way to get rid of these guys passes. Yeah, because there are obviously rules, but not enough, because they were doing things. And it wasn't just them. There were other people in the program doing things like booking multiple trips in case their one vacation didn't work out or they changed their plans last minute. They could just jet on over to Paris instead of Hawaii or I don't really like flying with anybody, so I'm just going to book my companion seat to be empty on every single trip. Exactly. Yeah. Basically what I would do. Yeah, right. What a lot of people would do. And they were definitely not the only ones doing this. And from the rules that AA had, it was not against the rules. AA didn't like it because they couldn't sell that seat. And they had trouble filling a seat when their extra flights were canceled at the last minute because these people didn't pay cancelation fees, but there wasn't anything they could get them on. The one that they went after these guys for was selling their extra companion pass. Right. And it turns out, like they both did, they both gave away their companion passes to total strangers pretty frequently. Vroom had a habit of finding people who suffered from HIV AIDS, and this was back in the when it was a totally different jam. And he said, hey, let me fly with you and you can go see your family for free. It really is. They also definitely sold them too. Vroom made 100 grand alone from just one couple, or one couple alone paid them that much to shuttle them back and forth to Europe. So they were both definitely making money off of this on the side too. And that's what American went after him for. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like for that one couple, he was just acting as their de facto travel agent at one point. Yeah, and almost travel agent escort too. Yes. Well, because he kind of had to fly with them, right? That's my understanding of it, yeah. So if you read some of these articles, you can read from Caroline Rothstein, who was, I believe, his daughter, and she said, you know what, my dad gets a bad rap. Sure, he sold some, but it's not like he was out there getting rich off this. And it's not like there was anything in the policy at all saying they couldn't do it because they got the first version, which didn't say anything about selling them. I guess they didn't think ahead. And then later in further subsequent contracts, they pointed out that you couldn't do it. But she was like, they didn't break any rules even. No, they didn't. And so American just basically said, well, we still say you're abusing your passes, and they terminated both of them. And so some lawsuits started going back and forth and then American's parent company filed bankruptcy. And so from everything I could find, those lawsuits are now still sitting out there in legal limbo, but neither man has their air pass anymore. And so you might say, oh, boohoo. These guys made their money back many times over with all the travel they did. And they kind of almost seemed like they took advantage of AA and played them for chumps. But Carolyn Rothstein, Steven Rothstein's daughter, says, my dad lived to travel, or lives to travel. I believe he's still alive. And he was basically lost his life when American took away his air pass. And much the same for Jacques Vroom too. Like all that guy loved to do was travel. That was what he loved to do. And that's why one of the reasons he would travel so much. Yes, I got a couple of feelings about that. One is you make this deal with American Airlines, they should have honored it for life. Yeah. But the other also is like, these guys could still travel. They just got to pay for it, right? Well, yeah, it's true. No, for sure. It's not like they're, like not like they borrowed them, right? I bet they didn't fly American Airlines ever again, though. I would guess not, but yeah, I just have the impression that was a very bitter pill for both of them to swallow, and they both, I think, feel like they were targeted because they were among the least wealthy airpass holders, so they made easy targets, but they were also probably among the two that were using it far and away the most, too, so who knows? But as far as I know, it's not really resolved legally, but I'm guessing as far as American Airlines is concerned, it's done. Totally. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I've never heard of this. It's super interesting. I love it. If you want to go learn more about this, go check out Zachary Crockett stuff. He is a writer. I don't know if he still is or not, but a long time writer for Price, Anomics and others, and he just really does a great job of finding really interesting stuff and writing about it. So hats off to him. Hats off to the la. Times and to Carolyn Rothstein for publishing all these great articles, and hats off to you for listening to short stuff. Adios. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
41b1a59a-53a3-11e8-bdec-172de16e05fc | 10ish Cases of Really Bad Luck | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/10ish-cases-of-really-bad-luck | Some guys have all the luck, some guys have all the pain. So said Rod Stewart. And if this list is any indication, “guys” is gender neutral. Listen to this episode as Chuck and Josh cover some instances of amazingly bad fortune, most of it true!
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Some guys have all the luck, some guys have all the pain. So said Rod Stewart. And if this list is any indication, “guys” is gender neutral. Listen to this episode as Chuck and Josh cover some instances of amazingly bad fortune, most of it true!
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 16 May 2019 15:20:56 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=15, tm_min=20, tm_sec=56, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=136, tm_isdst=0) | 47846795 | audio/mpeg | "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 Bryant. There's Jerry over there. This is stuff you should know. It's about people who have really bad luck. Nine of them. Yeah. I don't think we've ever done a full Top Ten list, have we? Yeah, that should be our last episode. Yeah, it's like stuff you should know is Ten biggest regrets. Right. That's a great idea. Yeah, that'll be the last one. All right, let's write that down. We don't have ten regrets. Yeah, I guess we couldn't do it full time. No, actually, we could probably come up with ten. No, we couldn't. VidCon number one. That's a big one. This intro is definitely up there, too, number two. So we're on our way. All right, good. How are you feeling? Pretty good. I'm great. You feel lucky, punk? I'm a pretty lucky person, I will say that. I would agree with that. Or good fortune. My friends have called me the Rabbit's Foot over the years. Yeah, that's why they're always rubbing you. But that's mainly for narrowly escaping trouble more than anything. How about a story Chuck laid on us? I was very famous among my group of friends for getting pulled over by police and not getting tickets. Right. I mean, at one point, it had literally happened, like, 14 times in a row or something over a span of, like, ten or twelve years. Okay. It happened a lot. And I didn't get my first ticket until probably in my mid 30s. What happened? Talk your way out of it. Yeah. You know what you do, man. And my brother always gets a ticket, and he's much nicer than I am. But you just got to be as humble, humble, humble, humble as you can be. And if you show the slightest bit of attitude, then that police officer, in my experience, will delight in writing you that ticket. Sure. I mean, even if it's a sideways look. And I basically just throw myself at the mercy of the court on the side of the road. I'm like, I'm so sorry, officer. You should have pulled me over. You did the right thing. I was wrong, and I'm sorry. There's no excuse. I was going to eat these crunch fries, but you should take them. You're the hero here. I think they're always a little disarmed, and they're like, oh, okay. Well, I guess I can let you off of the warning. I don't know. That's been my experience. All right, there's Chuck advice right there. Yeah. So you get out of 14 tickets. So did you forget to the last 15th time, did you forget? Did you sneer calling them a pig? No, I think it was just one of those things where they were writing the ticket even before I had a chance to do my little song and dance. And they brought me the ticket. And I was kind of like, oh, wait a minute. Don't you know who I am? I'm the guy that gets out of tickets. I thought you were going to say I'm Chuck from stuff you should know. No, that means nothing. That's how you get out on these days, buddy. Well, we're talking today about some people who have very bad luck. And a lot of these lists usually are just like, no to this one, no to that one. No, this is wrong. I think we tried to do a list once where, man, I can't remember which one it was, but every single entry was just false. Right? Yeah. That's only the case with like three of these this time, which I'm pretty that's not a bad batting average for a listicle. Yeah. And some of these are the word luck kind of bothers me sometimes because, as is the case, we'll go ahead and get to the first one, ron Wayne, who was one of the original three partners of Apple Computers. That's not bad luck. Ron Wayne made a poor business decision. That's a good point. Have you ever heard of Ron Wayne before? No, have you? No, I haven't. And had I heard his name, I would have been like, he sounds like porn actor, but he's not porn actor. Oh, no, that was another guy. I can't say his real name, though. Who I demand that you say I'll tell you off, Mike. Okay, so it turns out this guy was not a pornography actor. He was one of the three founders of Apple. And as far as I had known at this point, there were two founders of Apple. It turns out there were three at the beginning for the first twelve days. Yeah. So go back to 1976 in our way back machine, and nerdy little jobs and nerdy little wozniak are young guys in their twenty s. And they had this great they didn't know it at the time, or they may have known it or suspected, but this great vision for the future, but they were kind of kids and they didn't have any experience. So they look to a guy named Ron Wayne who was in his forty s to come in and kind of help what they called with adult supervision, because they were programmers from Atari. But yeah, they didn't have the actual business sense or whatever. And Atari was just a party job at the time. I believe so, yeah. But I had no idea Atari produced Apple, though, did you? Oh, yeah. I did a bunch of Atari research stuff for my tech Stuff guest spot. Okay, cool. Yeah, we did a history of Atari two partner. Oh, speaking of guest spots, man, let me just also give a shout out real quick. Sorry to interrupt this little entry, but I was on our good friend John Go Forth and our new friend Brent's podcast Hysteria 51, recently. Nice. Yes, we talked about the Fermi paradox for, like, an hour, and it was awesome. So go check that out. Hesteria 51. Go check that out. Okay, so plug out. Right? So we're in 1976 was and Jobs have recruited Juan Wayne, ron Wayne, to be the adult in the room to help with engineering documentation. And it was actually Ron Wayne who drafted the very first Apple contract and said, this is what they agreed on, he just make it up, which said how much everyone is going to get. He got 10% to Jobs in Wozniak, 45. And he even created the first Apple logo, which was not the logo we know and love now. It was like a woodcut style thing of Isaac Newton under the apple tree. Right. Not bad. Sounds terrible. I disagree. I think it sounds ugly. So Ron Wayne, while he was there, he very quickly was like, I don't know if this is my kind of place. I thought it was a good idea. I like what these guys are doing, but this company in a garage. Steve Jobs keeps taking acid during the middle of business hours. Did he really? Yeah. Oh, wow. Steve Jobs thought he was pretty cool, from what I understand. Sure. Ron Wayne was like, I don't think I fit in here. Also, apparently he was worried that he was going to have to pony up for whatever business debts they incurred. I think that was a big deal. And he was like, all right, I'm out. I'm out. Yeah, because he was an adult, and he was like, I've got a house, and I'm a real adult human. Like, they're going to turn to me, certainly when they need to go. So he cashed out in twelve days. Twelve days after they established their contract. And the contract was kept by Ron Wayne. Actually, we'll get to that in a second. But he cashed out for $2,300. 230,000, you say? No, 2300, which is still today worth less than, like, ten grand. And he didn't even get it all at once. He got 800 right then, and then he agreed to take 1500 later. And that was Apple went public, and everybody involved became an instant millionaire. And years later, it hit the trillion dollar mark for valuation. And all the while, Ron Wayne got to watch this company grow and grow and grow and realize that he'd sold off 10% of the stake in the company for $2,300. Yeah. And apparently, if he had held all those stocks, he'd be worth close to $100 billion. So he takes issue with that. He said he probably lost out on tens of millions. Yes. I guess it depends on what? Since you can't go back and do it all over again like Eddie Money says. Right. I guess there's always the thing of, like, well, yeah, but he always maintains, I would have gotten out after that before the big cash in anyway, probably. So I don't like to look at it is that sort of a loss? Is what he tells himself, basically, or else I would have gone totally insane a long time ago. Yeah, but he did, apparently. He wrote a Facebook essay and said, I probably there would have been around in 1980 and gotten some pretty good change and I think regrets it. Yeah. He said had he known that everybody was going to become a millionaire in four years, he definitely would have hung in there. But hindsight is 2020. Yeah. And the cherry on top here is pretty interesting, though. He said he kept that contract, that very first Apple contract that he drew up, and he kept it and he auctioned it off in the early 90s for how much? 500 simoleons. $500. And what happened? Not bad. It was just a piece of paper he had hanging around. Oh, sure. Somebody turned around and auctioned it off years later in 2011 for almost 1.6 million. Poor Ron Wayne. Now that one's bad luck. Wonder what he did, though, with his life. He wrote essays on Facebook. No, I mean, I bet he did okay. Yeah, I guess so. Steve Jobs okay, but I doubt if you, like, got a low wage, hourly paying job. I don't know. He became Eddie money's tour manager. Things worked out then. Every time Eddie Money saying, I want to go back and see here down Ron Wayne's face. That's right. So I think we should move on. We're going to leave Ron Wayne because also we should definitely tip our heads to anyone who faced adversity like this and was like, this happens, and had tipped to Ron Wayne for that one. And Hodges did not have that kind of experience. She is the only person, as far as anyone knows, the only human being in the history in recorded history of humanity to have been hit by a meteorite. I'm laughing and I shouldn't actually, she didn't get that hurt, so that's why I feel okay laughing. It's not like it fell on her head no. And killed her. It's November 30, 1954 in Alabama and an 8.5 LB meteorite came through her roof, bounced off of a radio and hit her in the hip. Yes. It makes you wonder, like, if she had been where the radio was and this wasn't like a bounce ricochet. Yeah, a ricochet. How much worse would things have been? Yes. Probably dead. I saw a picture on Reddit of her just randomly. We had already picked this episode and started researching, and I saw a picture of her bruise on reddit and it was pretty nasty. Pretty nasty little bruise. Yeah. But that was about as bad as it got physically. So she was laying on the couch, a meteorite came through her roof, hit a radio, hit her, and she became almost immediately a media sensation because we got out very quickly that a woman had been struck by a meteorite. Probably the first and only person ever. Yeah. And that's super rare. It's rare for a meteorite to fall just in an urban area where people live or suburban area where people live because they don't know. I would call Alabama urban. Yeah. I mean, it's just not usual. Like, usually meteorites, there's a lot of water on Earth. Usually they'll just land in the ocean somewhere. So it's big news if a meteorite hits anywhere near people, much less hitting a person. Right. There is a meteorologist named Michael Reynolds who told National Geographic, get this. He said, you have a better chance of being hit by a tornado, a bolt of lightning and a hurricane at the same time than you do a meteorite. I'm not sure how we actually quantify that, but that's one of the better quotes I've read in a while. Yeah. And this is where it gets this is just so America and USA is there was a court battle between her and her landlord because her landlord was like, that's my space rock because it's my house. And Anne Hodges was like, no, that's my space rock because it hit me in the hip. Right. And they went to court, and Hodges actually won and got to keep that, sadly, ultimately Valueless meteorite. Yes. She settled actually, she ended up paying the landlord $500 for the right to the rock. But by the time this was finally settled, two years later, they found out that nobody cared any longer. It was old news. So nobody wanted to buy the meteorite. And you might think, well, okay, it's not clear that anyone would ever wanted to buy the meteorite to begin with. Not true. They have a neighbor just down the road who had just the tiniest little piece of that space rock and sold it. At the time, this thing was a big media sensation and was able to buy a new house and a new car from the proceeds. So the Hodges were like, clearly, we've got the space rock. We're going to cash in. We're going to buy the state of Alabama with the proceeds. But two years later, it was totally valueless. And Ann Hodges actually just kept taking turns for the worst and ended up dying in a nursing home at age 49 after having a nervous breakdown from the whole ordeal. Yeah, it's very sad. But that meteorite is on display. The Alabama Museum of Natural History. And I hope that there is at least a small plaque that memorializes her. Surely there is, right? I would hope so. Yes. That would be a nice thing after a string of bad luck. It's pretty bad luck. Should we take a break? I think we should. All right, we're going to take a break and talk about the unluckiest person in the music industry right after this. Chuck, I have a tad bit of anxiety. No. Okay. I have anxiety about this one just because it's so rotten and rough. I feel so bad for this guy. Well, here's the thing. Before the break, I called former first Beatles drummer. Not former first, but former and first Beatles drummer. Pete Best, the unluckiest man in music. He's been called that. That's not true either. Pete Best didn't have bad luck. Pete Best didn't have good chops. Oh, is that what it was? Yeah. Okay, that's totally different. I didn't think it was bad luck necessarily. Obviously didn't jive with the group. But I thought maybe it was like he had to walk around being like, I have a terrible personality and that's why I'm not a Beetle or whatever. No, we'll get to that. So let's go back in time. Pete Bess in the very early days of the Beatles, in the 1950s, when they were known as the choirmen, his mom, he was a drummer, and his mom owns something called the Kazba Coffee Club in Liverpool. Cool. And she was cool. And she was very, like, ahead of her time as far as the Liverpool music scene, very much out in front of it. So it's the kind of deal where, like, well, pizza drummer and his mom owns a place where we can play I Got You. So he's in the band, and it's good because now we've got a place where we can gig and we got a drummer that can play. Okay. And he's handsome. That was a big part of it. Was he? Yeah, that was a big thing. Over the years, that was rumored that he was kicked out because Paul said he was too handsome and he didn't want any competition. Is he still around? Yeah, he's alive. Okay. I'm not going to say the next part then, I guess at the time the Beatles, by the time Pete Best was kind of brought on, he wasn't officially brought on as the Beetles. Beetles, as we think of them today, where there was four of them, there was like a rotating bunch of drummers. And Pete Best was one of those drummers, right? Yeah, but he played. I mean, he was sort of like when I rotated and stuff, you should know early on a little bit, there was still a rotation going for a short time, and I think and then everyone else just went away. Right. Like, Pete Best played, like, 80 something gigs with the Beatles prehamberg, I think. Oh, okay. And then they took them to Hamburg, which apparently was a big turning point for everybody. They paid, like, 80 shows a week in Hamburg. I saw a great quote in Hamburg is where the Beetles really started to become like the Beatles, like they coalesced into a band. I saw that they arrived wearing lilac sport jackets and trousers and left wearing black leather jackets and jeans. It's where they learned sex, drugs and rock and roll. Yeah. Pete Best wasn't into the drugs, though, like the other three guys. Oh, really? So that was a problem. Sure. That's a buzzkill. When the one guy in the room is just sitting there staring at you judgy. Yeah. Well, that's kind of a buzzkill, I would guess, right? Yeah, probably so. I think they were all doing Speed back then. Oh, sure, because they were playing literally like six or seven shows a night. Were they really playing that many? Oh, it was ridiculous. Wow. Yeah. So he was in a group called The Blackjacks before that, though, went to Hamburg with The Beatles, and then right after that, the Beatles go back to England in 1962 and they were just about to go into the studio to record their first singles for EMI, and legendary manager Brian Epstein called up and said, sorry, Bloke, the boys want you out. And it's already been arranged. Yeah, meaning like, don't even bother, it's done. Which is sad. And Pete Best took it pretty hard, from what I understand. In a horrible twist of irony, he ended up working at the unemployment office, but working there, not hanging out there. And by this time, like, he had made a name for himself around Liverpool as a musician and a Beatle. The reason why he's called the unluckiest man in music is not because he was a Beatle at one point in time, but that he was a Beatle at one point in time and was kicked out of the band a few weeks before The Beatles blew up. Yeah, and it almost makes you wonder, like, did they blow up because they moved out of Ringo, or was it like, that was just bad timing? Well, I mean, here's the deal. There are interviews out there with both John and Paul. There's always been a rumor, like I said, that Pete's handsomeness threatened the band. That is not true. Paul is on record as saying it's just something that happens early in the days of bands. Like, we were just really struck by how great Ringo was. Pete Best sat out one gig because he was sick or something. Ringo sat in and they were all just like, wow. They all felt it. And it was just sort of that magic happened where they were like, oh, boy, I know, it's got to happen. John, for his part, said it had nothing to do with his looks. He said he was just kind of a crap drummer. John was not the nicest guy in the world, so he really kind of threw it all on the table and was like, he wasn't a good drummer, he just wasn't. He was a good first drummer and clearly it was time to move on from him and it was mainly because his mom owned a place where we could play. Got you. Not very nice. Got you. No, but I mean, that doesn't make him unlucky. No, he didn't have the chops he's reckoned with it. I saw an article from last year where he was like, he never spoke to the other three guys again. And he was like, yeah, me and Paul, I'd love to sit down and have a scotch and talk about it. And he's like, the door is open. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't know if Paul is going to do that, though. Maybe not. He was on Howard Stern, paul was and Howard was like, you're just going to write him a check just out of guilt, he would have Paulson. He's just like, no. He did get royalties, though, later on when The Beatles Anthology came out, because that included stuff from Pete Best. So he ended up getting some money. He made that okay. Yeah. I think the lesson here is don't ever get sick. Yeah. That's the key, everybody. That's right. So we're going to go from 1960s Liverpool over to the New Orleans area where they have hurricanes. Supposedly they have a hurricane party every time the wind blows have heard, but they actually do have legitimate hurricanes. And those hurricanes can do a lot of damage, as we saw in 2005 with Hurricane Katrina. By the time Hurricane Katrina rolled around, a woman named Melanie Martinez was on her fourth house having been destroyed by a hurricane. Yeah. Previously, George in 1998, betsy in 1965, had destroyed her house by the time Katrina came around. But after Katrina, everybody learned their lesson. They're like, okay, we've been taking this way too insuishly. We need to really actually protect New Orleans from flooding, from hurricanes. And so the federal government stepped in, the government of Louisiana stepped in, and they really fortified New Orleans. So that years later, seven years later, actually, to the day of Katrina making landfall, when Isaac made landfall, New Orleans held up. It was a pretty big hurricane, but it weathered New Orleans weathered it, unfortunately, in little tiny town of Bathwater, just a little south of New Orleans, which I thought south of New Orleans was like the Caribbean or the Gulf, I guess. There's a little town called Pathway. They did not fortify this town. And it just so happened that's where Melanie Martinez builds another house that proved to be her fifth one that was destroyed by a hurricane. Yeah. This is truly bad luck. Granted, all of those houses were in the same flood plain, but it's not like everybody's house was destroyed every time. This was truly bad luck to have five houses lost. And this last one before Isaac, she was selected for an A and E reality show. Hideous houses got a $20,000 makeover, brand new kitchen, new appliances, and a new sewing room. And apparently that episode aired just a few weeks before Isaac came around, destroyed that house, too. And when they asked her in 2012, why do you keep building here? It's like everyone else. She's like, this is my home. I want to live where I was born and raised, and this is my home. Yeah. Can you imagine what that phone call is like? It's like, hey, I'm a producer with hideous houses, and your house has been selected to be on hideous houses. She probably applied. Is that how it works? No, I think they just go scout your house and really, I'm sure you apply. I think it's very from show to show. So for that last time with Hurricane Isaac in 2012, she and her husband and their pets and Melanie Martinez's elderly mom barely escaped with their life. They had a hammer through their roof. They were trapped in the attic with the floodwaters rising. They had to hammer a hole into the roof and climb out where they were rescued. Yes. Man jeez. At least they got out. They did. But the thing that makes it really bad luck real quick, Chuck, is that Melanie Martinez said she would never have stayed around for that hurricane because of her elderly mother. She wouldn't have risked her health. They got stuck there because her van broke down. Well, but she got out. Okay. There you go. She couldn't save the house. Yeah, it's true. It's very sad. All right, so this next one is this is pretty remarkable. Whenever I hear about people that are and I've heard stories like this over the years, where people had the bad luck to be in various places where, like, terrorist attacks have happened, like, more than once. Right. And this British couple. Jason karen's Lawrence and his partner Jenny. This happened three times. They were in New York City on 911, right? On just a regular holiday there. So that's number one. A few years after that, they went vacationing in their very own London in July 2005. And just a day into that trip was when the suicide bombers attacked the London Underground, which was horrific. I don't think they're in the Underground at the time, but I imagine at this point, they're like, all right, what's going on here? A few years after that, in 2008, they were like, all right, we're going to get out of town again, and this time we're going to Mumbai, India. And another terrorist attack when the luxury hotel was attacked in the railway station and 174 people died there. They were all three of those. All three. The three biggest terrorist attacks, I guess, in the west, in the 21st century. They were there for yeah, the deadliest ones, at least. And they thankfully survived all three of those. But I imagine after those three trips, they're probably not going on vacation very much anymore. They built a pool in their backyard and they're like, this is what we're doing from now on. Man I can't imagine. I really can't either, tell you the truth. Should we take a break? Let's take a break, and we're going to come back and talk about some more hard luck cases after this, okay? Okay, Chuck. So this one I can't quite put my finger on, whether Alexander Graham Bell is a no good thief or not, I don't know, because I think I saw some more recent stuff, and I think that his image has been a little more reformed. We'll get to that. But if you're in Italy and you're a little kid and you are taught who invented the telephone, they do not teach you that it was Alexander Graham Bell. As a matter of fact. They may spit when they say the name Alexander Grand Bell because they very much believe that Alexander Graham Bell stole the idea for the telephone from Antonio Meochi. Who is an Italian inventor who seemed to have invented something very telephone. Like. At least a few years before Alexander Graham Bell supposedly invented his yeah. He actually filed a patent. Preliminary patent. That is. In the US. Five years before Bell, for what he called the Teleterophone, though, which is a much better name than telephone. Do you think so? I would love it if people were like, can I buy your Tele trifono? Let me see your trow bro. Yeah, see there? I love that. So, Antonio Miucci, he definitely realized that you could send sound over electrically activated copper wires back in, like, the 1830s. He knew this, and he started kind of messing around with it. At one time, he created, basically, a telephone between his workshop and his wife's bedroom because his wife had been stricken with some sort of paralysis. And to be able to communicate with her without having to go in and check on her all the time, he basically rigged up a telephone. This is in the, I think, the 1860s in New York, right? Yeah. And even debuted this invention to the press. But he didn't speak English, and the English speaking press in New York didn't speak Italian. So it was really just covered by the Italian press. But this guy in 1860, gave a demonstration of his telephone, and again, it wasn't until 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell got his patent. And like you said, Miyucci, he filed a preliminary patent. And I looked into this. You know what those are? Yeah. So the preliminary patent is basically this. You pay a much lower fee to basically put a hold on your invention. You say, this thing is coming. If anybody else starts sniffing around with their own invention, you let me know. And then the patent office will give you three months to file a formal patent, which is, again, more expensive. So the idea is that Mauchi didn't have enough money to file a full patent, so he placed a preliminary patent and didn't have enough money to renew it. You have to renew it annually, and Alexander Granbell swooped it. Yeah. And here's the thing. I thought, well, I mean, there have been plenty of inventions where people working in a vacuum came up with a similar idea with similar technology. Sure. But Miyogi actually shared a space with Bell that's when I was like, okay, it's not a good look for Bell for sure. Yeah. And. Then I did a little more research. I was like, did Alexander Graham Bell steal the telephone? And this is not news. And I saw an article that was like, yes, he stole it from Elisha Gray. And I was like, who. Well, he's the one who supposedly went to the patent office the same day, within hours of Bell to file a patent on the phone and lost out. Yeah. So there are several people that claim that Bell it was not his original idea. Well, Mauchi actually sued Bell. Oh, yeah. And the case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but then Mauchi died before it was resolved, and they threw the case out. Very sad. But the House of Representatives in 2002 voted on a resolution to say, yes, Antonio Mayoche is the inventor of the telephone as far as we in the US. Are concerned. What I saw what I referred to earlier, that I was wondering if his image had been reformed. He had his extensive notes about his invention that he would have had to have falsified and that apparently had been scrutinized by historians. So if he was a fraud, he was a really methodical fraud, I guess. Well, that's one of the complaints with Elisha Gray, is that the sketches were, like, virtually identical to Greys. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. I think we need to do at least the short stuff on Alexander Grand Bell. Yes. I think that could be a full EPI. Okay. Full EPI? Yeah, full EpiPen right in your thigh. All right. Like the time you got stung by that bee. You remember that? I know, it was harrowing. All right, so this one's actually kind of fun because I like it when the bad luck isn't super devastating to someone's life and that they kind of roll with it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Castus mitzotakis definitely rolls with it. Yeah. Nothing bad happened here. There's an annual lottery in Spain that dates back to 1812 called El Gordo. It's a Christmas lottery, and they call it El Gordo, the fat one, because it's a big, big fat payout, and it's very much a tradition in Spain. And in 2011, the jackpot was, at the time the biggest ever, close to a billion dollars. $950,000,000. And there's this little town called a sodetto, and people in this town is it Italian? No. Okay. I didn't say soDet, though. It was close. No, it was just a little flair. Okay. So in Sodeto, residents there would pool money together, sometimes buy their lottery tickets because it costs $26 a piece. It's not like going down and buying, like, the I don't even know how much Plato costs in America. Is it like a dollar? Yeah, exactly. Sure. We did a lot of episode back in the day, didn't we? I think we talked about El Gordo in the lotto episode because I recognized the name. Yeah. El Gordo. So the tickets were $26 at least in 2011. And this town pools their money together. 70 different families all chipped in because times are tough. And they didn't spring for their own ticket. And they won. They did win this town of, like, simple farmers whose backs were kind of up against the wall from the economic downturn you referenced. Apparently they were also experiencing a prolonged drought, too. Everybody's a little tense overnight. Had all of their money troubles just go away? Every single household in the town won a minimum of $130, $130,000. I'm sorry. Up to millions. Right. Like, if they bought full chunks of the tickets from this lotto. And so all these people rode their tractors into town on Christmas Day to celebrate that they had all just won the lottery. All except one guy, Costas Mitzotakis, whose house was not visited by the people selling the lottery tickets for the town fundraiser and who didn't buy a ticket as a result. Right. He lives a little bit on the outskirts of town with a woman, his romantic partner at the time, and she actually bought in and won 100,000 American dollars. Now I guess it was \u20ac100,000. Okay. So, yeah, it was about 130,000 American dollars. Yeah. So she won and he did not they're not together now. I don't know if that had anything to do with it. I'm not saying it does. I think they had already split up. Okay. But at any rate, he didn't win any money. But he's a filmmaker, and he was like his quote was it was really a gift from heaven, as if someone had given me the perfect script. So he decided to make a documentary about this town and about this lotto in and about these villagers who apparently did not change their ways much. They all still live very simply, and they all still shared lots of family in a single house. And it was really kind of heartwarming. And I read an article from just, like, a year and a half ago where he was supposedly finishing it up, but then I never saw anything about the actual documentary, so I don't know if it was ever released or finished fully. I also read that he made out okay. He'd been trying to sell his property there for a while, but because of the economic downturn, he couldn't get rid of it. And right after, somebody bought it from him. Well, that's good. Hopefully at full asking price. Yeah. And he seems like a good guy. He was kind of like, I didn't buy a ticket. Yeah. What are you going to do? Make a film about it? I guess s happens. That's right. So hat tip to costas mitzitakis too. That's right. So, Chuck, we're moving along. We're going from Spain to right here in Atlanta. Yeah. Do you remember the 96 Olympics? I do. Because I was on a road trip out west, my friend and I, that's when we took our two and a half month trip in a Volkswagen van, and we're like, we're getting out of Atlanta for the Olympics. You did not miss much. Yeah. I remember everybody in Atlanta who owned a business sunk tons of cash into their business to revamp it for Olympic fever. And no one left downtown. Nobody. They just stayed downtown. But one of the other things about the 96 Olympics, aside from one of the most mediocre, maybe actually just outright bad opening ceremony pretty bad. I just remember being on the road in a cheap hotel room in New Mexico and seeing stainless steel pickup trucks, and I was just like, oh, my God. What's going on? So bad. That's so Atlanta. It's hot. Lana right there. Yeah. Jeez. In addition to that, the 96 Olympics is also remembered as the Centennial Olympics is 100 years after the first modern Olympic games in 1896. But really, more than anything, it's remembered for the Olympic Park bombing, which is a huge deal. And it was memorable because it was a big deal like that. This was an act of domestic terrorism here in the United States, and it was at the Olympics, and it actually could have been way worse than it was. One poor woman from, I believe, Albany, or Leesburg, Georgia, died. I think a cameraman from Turkey died from a heart attack running to the scene, but, like, 100 people were injured. But right before that bomb went off, it was a 40 pound pipe bomb filled with screws and nails and all sorts of projectiles. There are a lot of people standing around at watching a concert by Jack Mac and the heart attack at, like, 01:00 A.m. In Olympic Park. And had they not been moved by a security guard named Richard Jewel, surely more people would have died. Yeah. So Jewel sees this backpack again. This is now a backpack on the ground. Like, everyone would be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What's that thing doing there? See something, say something. See something, say something. Yes. 96. It was just a year after the Oklahoma City bombing. It wasn't like this was on everyone's mind at the time. And Jewel said, hey, I think we should get out of here. There's a backpack on the ground. Something smells fishy. And I don't think he meant there was literal fish in the backpack. Sorry. That was terrible. It's okay. And he got people out of there and alerted authorities, and they started clearing the area pretty heavily and very quickly. Richard Jules on the news is a local hero. National hero. Yeah, national hero. And everything was going great until all of a sudden, he was looked at as a person of interest, like, the next day. Yeah. Apparently the AJC got a scoop from the Atlanta PD that the Feds and everybody were starting to wonder if Richard Jewel wasn't the type of guy who would plan a bomb in order to put himself in a position of being a hero. Yeah. They were like, he fits the profile. I remember all that stuff going down. Yeah. And it's crazy how you can see somebody differently when people paint them a certain way. He just looked like he had that mustache. What's he hiding with that mustache? His eyes are a little beady, aren't they? He had been charged with impersonating officers, so he's clearly like a wannabe cop kind of thing. And he looked really bad. And then finally, in October, the FBI was like, Richard Jewel. No, we cleared him. He's not a person of interest. It was surely somebody else. But by this time, Richard Jewel's name had been drugged through the mud associated with a major act of terrorism at the Olympics in the United States for months before he was cleared. And the damage was very much done. Yeah. Of course, everyone knows the real bomber was Eric Rudolph. And again, those four months were really rough on Juul and his family. And even after he was cleared in October, it's like everyone knew he was cleared, but it's still one of those things where it's attached to his name. Yeah. He went from the suspect phase to the late night talk show monologue joke phase. Yeah. That's not a good transition. No, it isn't. Very sadly, he died in 2000, just the young age of 44 from complications of diabetes. Yeah, so he had it rough. He got, like, a settlement from CNN and New York Times for, I guess, overzealous and unfounded reporting. Maybe, but he did not have a great last part of his life. All right, the last one, folks. Breaking news. Josh emails me about 30 minutes before we record or so and said, by the way, the number one guy on the list is a fraud. I said, he may be a fraud. Oh, I thought you said he was a fraud. Oh, I'm trying to see away here. Okay, sorry. It's not proven that he's a fraud because let's just get into all this, okay? Yeah. What's his name? Selak Franny. Selak Frani everywhere else. I saw it. F-A-R-N-E-I don't know what to believe anymore. I know. We've just lost touch with reality. Charles So, he has been dubbed the luckiest man in the world for supposedly surviving seven brushes with death, ranging from a train going into an icy river to cars going off of cliffs again into icy rivers, cars catching on fire, cars plunging off of cliffs, like, so much stuff that you're like, can this be true? Especially the plane crash that went down where he supposedly was sucked out of a door and landed on a haystack. Yes. Before the plane crashed? No. Is this real? So here's the thing. All of this starts in, I believe, 2005. He buys a lottery ticket, wins, like, a million dollars or million euro lottery. And that happened. That definitely happened. Okay. And he was interviewed by the Scotsman, the newspaper, the Scotsman. And in this article, he's like, oh, you think it's lucky that I won a million dollars? Let me tell you about some of the unlucky things that have happened to me. And he starts reeling off these stories of, like, just narrowly escaping death, and The Scotsman's like, wow, that's fantastic. We're going to print this. And the Scotsman printed it. And all of a sudden it started getting picked up by other news outlets and other news outlets. And other news outlets. And then finally, in one of these articles, there was a commenter who identified himself as Franay Selak's son, who said, hey, not one single journalist has ever independently verified a single one of these stories. This guy is actually my father, and he has always wanted to be famous. So when he was interviewed for winning the lottery, he saw his chance and he made all of this up. Well, if it was an Internet commenter, it must be true. Exactly. That's why I was COA, because it's like is that the only place you found that? Yes, but the point remains correct. None of it has ever been independently verified. It's entirely possible that he wasn't on any plane or in a bus accident or that his car crashed. It's not verified that he has been. It hasn't been clearly shown that he hasn't been. It's just this guy makes a really good point, that this dude who everybody says is the luckiest man in the world. It's possible he made it all up. Now, how can we not get to the bottom of this? What do you mean? Well, I mean, we found out the world is flat and that they fake the moon landing through research. Why can't we find out what happened with Franaisella? Like, you and me specifically, or anybody? Like, surely you could find this out, right? Yeah, I guess you could. I think no one's gone to the trouble of doing it. It's a good story that everybody likes. It's not really hurting anything for him to be lying and for the lie to be perpetuated. It's more just kind of laziness among journalism, I guess, including us, because I didn't go get to the bottom of it. I didn't go independently verify any of his claims. Well, I did see an article that is that where you saw it at all? That's interesting.com. No, I didn't see it on there. I don't remember where I saw the article. Go ahead. Well, there was an article that talked about the fact that mentioned the commenter or whatever and the doubts. Yeah. I think that's become kind of a thing because there was a viral video that made the rounds that was really interesting because it's just this cute little animation of this guy's story in his life. And I guess I saw the thing about him being a possible hoax on BBC. Yeah. So if you put BBC together and all that's interesting, you have legitimate fact. Right? And I apologize for looking at my phone right now, but I'm doing a real time investigation, and apparently some people have Googled and these plane crashes and things aren't documented, so it sounds like it might be false claims. I don't know. Okay. But even still, it's a great story. I mean, just the fact that this guy made up all of this load of BS during an interview, it's pretty hilarious. He's one of the great improv comedians of all time, right? It's a good way to end things, too, don't you think? I think so. Well, thanks for joining us, everybody. Thanks for putting on your smoking jacket and your house slippers, putting on a nice berry white record and relaxing with us. I hope you feel relaxed now. Do you feel relaxed, Chuckers? I do. And Jerry does, obviously. Jesus, sleep. I know. Well, if you want to know more about the unluckiest people in the world, just go look at stuff on the Internet. May or may not be true. Who really cares, right? Yeah. And since I said that, it's time for a listener mail, I'm going to call this one sort of an older one that I forgot about. So, apologies to Jessica Breslin, because I told her I would read this a month ago. Oh, boy. Hey, guys. Love the recent episode on rape kits, but wanted to make a tiny correction about how the Golden State Killer was caught. Although there was a time that the Golden State Killer's DNA was part of the backlog, the DNA had actually been identified and linked to his crimes. Since the problem was they had no person to compare it to. This changed in 2018 when they compared it to DNA submitted to a familial DNA base. When a relative submitted their DNA to the familial DNA site, they were able to see that the DNA was related, and from there were able to narrow down their suspects to two likely family members. After narrowing it down to those two, they're able to identify their suspect, collect a sample of his DNA to compare it to the Golden State Killers. However, still good proof of why testing backlog kits is still so important. You never know what sort of technological breakthroughs will help law enforcement catch the perpetrators, even when you don't have a suspect. I love the podcast. I appreciate all the hard work and keeping entertaining and respectful, even when it's such sensitive subject matter. And that is Jessica Breslin. I guess I said I was going up there at the end, wasn't I? Yes, indeed. You did go up there, Chuck. It was kind of a nice little flourish. Well, thanks a lot, Jessica. We appreciate the email. And if you sorry for being a month late and reading it, that was all Chuck. And if you want to get in touch with us, like Jessica did, you can go to stuffishnelo.com, check out our social links, get in touch with us that way. Or you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know now 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. 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 Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you want anymore 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 SETI Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-seti-works | SETI stands for 'search for extraterrestrial intelligence,' and the term is used to describe both the SETI institute and the search for alien life in general. In this spaced-out episode, Josh and Chuck explore the origin, aims and challenges facing SETI. | SETI stands for 'search for extraterrestrial intelligence,' and the term is used to describe both the SETI institute and the search for alien life in general. In this spaced-out episode, Josh and Chuck explore the origin, aims and challenges facing SETI. | Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:24:03 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=16, tm_min=24, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=61, tm_isdst=0) | 36974407 | 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. 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. 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, as always, it's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and this stuff you should know the podcast don't get it confused. Burgess Meredith. Okay. Thank you. That's pretty good. Thanks. A good Burgess Meredith. Chuck? Yeah. You in the mood for alien talk? Sure. This is the second time we've done something like this. Almost a year later. Yeah. Right at it. We did. How UFOs work? Live in Austin. Yeah. Last March. So, yeah, I guess once a year we do aliens. We talk aliens. Yeah. Before we get started, may I take a second? Yes. I wanted to say special hi to my wife Yuumi right. Who made me the happiest guy in the world. You should just call her dude on February 13. Yeah, I could just call her on February 13 when we got married. Indeed. Yeah. Any deeds or you're just going to no, that's all right. I wanted to share my happiness with everybody out there. Very well done. Thank you very much. Hey, Yummy. So let's get back to aliens. Okay. Yes. Okay, so we are doing this in honor of Are We Alone? Month on Science Channel, right? Yes. So the month of March is are we alone? Month. And Science Channel, every Tuesday, I believe, at ten is having a premiere of some new show that has something to do with the search for extraterrestrial life. Yeah. Cool stuff. Yeah, it's going to be very cool. And I mean, all shows are going to be awesome. Sure. But there are some that are clearly going to be really awesome. Like through the wormhole with Morgan Freeman. With Morgan Freeman. I mean, that in the context of an are we alone month. Yeah. It's big news. Also, the alien encounters with Nick Sagan got to be related to Carl, correct. Carl Pilkington. Yes. And then if you're in the mood for a contest, what would a month be without one. There is a SETI Live contest where the prize is to go visit SETI. No way. Go to California, to the institute. Yes. Well, pretty sweet. Yeah. So this is all going on on Science Channel all month long. And if you want more details, watch Science Channel, pal. Yes. Or hit him up on Facebook. I bet they have info there. Yeah. And in honor of this month, it's very special month, we are doing How City Works, which is an acronym saidi, if you don't know the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Yes. And I joked before we did this that are we alone? Month will be followed by yes, we're alone day. Sort of a joke, but they haven't really found a lot of stuff yet. Well, I don't know. Let me give you an example of something. The wow. Have you heard of the wow signal? Yeah, we talked about this before. We did? When I think it might have been one of the webcasts. Okay. It definitely rang a bell that had your Stank on it. No, we talked about the Yosemite Sam signal. Oh, I know, but I think we talked about why a couple of years ago. Okay, well, old webcast. Let me tell you again. Let me refresh your memory, because you clearly don't remember clearly. August 15, 1977. A guy who's now known as Doctor Jerry Ehman E-H-M-A-N-I keep wanting to call him, erman he was manning the Big Year radio telescope at Ohio State University and was analyzing some data from it and basically saw this is what it looks like. It's a bunch of numbers and letters. It looks like the Matrix scroll. Very much so. Captured. Yes. But what that is, is a burst of radioactivity transmitted on the one Ford megahertz frequency for 72 seconds. W. And it was basically the closest thing we've ever gotten to hard evidence of a radio transmission from an alien civilization. Right. It meant, like, all of the criteria that said he follows, which we'll talk about later for radio transmissions from intelligent life. Right? Yes. The problem is, after searching for it for, like, 50 times, specifically, it's never been found again. Right. And the reason it's called the wow transmission is because Jerry Ayman circled it and wrote wow with an exclamation point, and that's why it's called that. So although since that time, nothing else has come up in that same area, and we haven't had anything even remotely close to it, SETI still continues. Right? Yeah. And SETI is both a movement and a group of people. It's an institute. Yeah. Well, there's the SETI Institute, and there's just independent SETI operations. Yeah. I mean, you can use SETI as a would that be a noun? Because it is a search. Yeah, you're right. Just a funky noun. Right. But let's talk about it, Chuck. Let's talk about City, the challenges that has well, first of all, if you've seen the movie contact I have. Apparently it's not too inaccurate from the writer of this article, who was Freuden Lake, wouldn't it? He said that that movie, if you want to watch that one, is fairly accurate and on track. Well, it was based on a book written by Carl Sagan, and he definitely knew his stuff. Yeah. The Segan Institute is one of the parts of SETI Institute. Very nice. Or the Sega Research Center, I think. Got you. So go ahead. You were saying? Oh, well, let's talk a little bit about the origin of it. SETI came about in a time when there was a large intellectual push towards searching for alien life. A lot of very smart people suddenly started postulating that. There's probably other people out there. Yeah, there's got to be two guys. Philip Morrison and Joseph wrote a paper in Nature, and they basically said, look, if we look, we may very well not find anything. But if we don't look, we're definitely not going to find anything. And that came at a time when a guy named Frank Drake, an astrophysicist and astronomer, was trying to start his own search. And he eventually founded SETI, I think, in 1960. Founded the SETI Institute or just SETI? SETI. Well, he conducted the first SETI search. The Drake did. Yeah, Frank Drake did. And it was based on something called the Drake Equation, which I find just utterly fascinating and refreshingly understandable as far as theoretical math equations go. Yeah. N is the number of civilizations in the Milky Way whose electromagnetic emissions are detectable. So N equals R times FP times Ne times FL times Fi times FC times L. And then there's the R is the rate of formation of stars over the lifetime of the galaxy, and that's anywhere from, like, ten to 40 a year. Yeah. Star suitable for development of intelligent life. That narrows it down. Then there's the fraction of the stars with planets FP. Then there's the average number of those planets that are Earth type, meaning suitable for life as we understand it. Yeah, that's the Ne. That's about 50% of the 50% of stars with planets. We're starting to whittle down pretty quickly. And then there's a fraction of those planets where life develops. That's estimated at as much as 100%. Yeah. And then there's a fraction of life that develops intelligence. So it's not just enough to be in Amoeba. You have to be in Amoeba. Capable of creating a radio. Right. That's pretty low as well. About 10%. And then another 10% of the fraction of planets where intelligent life develops technology. Such as radio. Yes. Okay. So you've got life and then L, intelligent life and then technology. Yeah. And then you have the lifetime of that communicative civilization in years. So, boom, multiply that on out. You got your Drake equation, and you have as little as one as much as billions. Well, plus it's as little as one or billions because it depends on what value you put in there and everyone's going to put in different values. So the Drake Equation is going to have a wide swath. Yes. Makes sense. Yeah. So you've got this. This is the framework. The Drake equation, created by Frank Drake, the founder of SETI. This is the framework that SETI conducts its research with. Like, one of the things they do is try to figure out exactly how many stars out there have planets with that are suitable for life, to really kind of plug in the best possible data into the Drake Equation and to help them figure out where to look. Because there's three main challenges for SETI that they face just as a concept and an organization. And you have a really big sky out there, right? Yeah. You have a lot of frequencies, you have a lot of radio frequencies and you have a limited amount of telescopes. Not much equipment. No, because it's very expensive. Exactly. And while Setting is funded to a large degree, it's not funded to a large degree compared to like when it was part of NASA, I think it's only like 1% of their budget. Even still, that was like the most money cities ever had. Yeah, but they're pretty well funded. The SETI Institute is as far as private funding goes, they're doing okay. Yeah. They're nonprofit, obviously, so they're not getting rich, you know what I mean? No, they're kind of hurting right now. Oh, are they? I thought they were doing all right. They also received federal funds and that's all but dried up right now because of the economic downturn. He said he is the first to go. Yeah. All right, so you proposed the three problems. Here are a couple of approaches for the large sky problem. A lot of area out there. So they have two approaches. There the wide field search, basically casting a wide nonspecific net over a low resolution over a short period of time over a wide area could get you some nibbles if you were fishing, let's say. But it's going to be difficult to find out exactly, like where this stuff is coming from. Right. Or a targeted search, which is what my money would be on, which are limited to sunlight, stars. They basically factor in more of Drake's equation in this one. So let's look at places where we might find target these things, where we might find ETS. Right. And they do both of those, depending they have various projects going on ongoing and some are targeted, some are wide field search, so they're kind of covering their bases as much as possible. The next challenge was what frequency to listen for. To listen to? It's not a radio dial. No, but even with a radio dial, even with like a walkie talkie, like if you've ever used one of those, if you're not on the right frequency, you are going to miss everything that's being told to you. So, as you said, it's not a radio dial. It doesn't go from like 88.5 all the way to 107.5. They're billions from alternative to country. Exactly. There are billions of radio frequencies. Which one are you going to listen to? You can listen to them all, but again, you're cycling through them. You're not able to spend a lot of time. It's much like the same dilemma with the sky you have with the radio frequencies. Plus you're full of noise. Yes. That's another problem. Natural occurring stuff. Right. But there is a window in the radio frequency that's called the water hole, which is pretty cool. It's a natural place in the radio frequency spectrum. And by the way, radio, they're light waves. It's a type of lightweight, but they're very specific. They exist on a specific frequency. But in the spectrum, the band, there's this thing called the water hole, which goes from the one to 10 GHz range. Yes. And it has very little natural background noise. Yeah. Like very few things broadcast in this frequency. And the reason being, these frequencies are caused by hydrogen atoms and hydroxyl ions, both of which are constituents of water, which is why it's called the Water Hall. And they suspect that for a couple of reasons, alien civilizations would be aware of this one, that it's just so profoundly unique in the radio spectrum that if you had any kind of awareness of the radio spectrum, you would stumble upon us. Yeah. And that you would intentionally broadcast in a low noise frequency exactly. Because you want to be heard. Sure. Yeah. I mean, anybody who broadcasts on the radio wants to be heard, right? Sure. And then the other reason they think that alien civilizations would know about it is because water with which it's associated is considered an essential to life and therefore universal among intelligent life. It's not geocentric. The concept of water is so aliens would be familiar with water and would thus be familiar with the water hole in the frequency spectrum as well. So this is probably where they're putting most of their research or their effort into this waterhole band of frequency. Yeah, I mean, they search all over, but pretty much all SETI operations will search the waterhole as part of their ops. Then there's magical frequencies, too. Basically, they're saying, like, where on this band of billions of frequencies is there some sort of universal pattern? And one of the things that they figured out is prime numbers might be a good place to look because prime numbers are part of math and they're universal, constant. Right. So an advanced civilization might be aware of prime numbers, and if they're trying to communicate to another advanced civilization, they may be broadcasting on prime number channels. Crazy. That's a magical frequency. 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. 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. I wonder if they search the Pie station. So far, we've got two of the big problems tackled. Yes, generally. The third one is the most down to earth problems. Yeah. No equipment. Basically, these radio telescopes are expensive to build, and so there's not a whole lot of them. So they said, there's a few ways we can handle this. We can conduct limited runs on ones that are already out there, basically rent space from other dudes. We can conduct analysis of data already acquired by other dudes. So like, hey, you've been listening in on all these frequencies. Let us see your data, and we'll just work from that. Or we can build steady, dedicated radio telescopes, which is clearly the least popular because it's so expensive. Right? It's the most popular, but least feasible. Yeah. And like, the projects that they have ongoing for wide target search or wide field search or targeted search, they have different projects dedicated, different types of radio use. Like Project Phoenix rents time at some of the better radio telescopes around the world. Australia. Erasebo in Puerto Rico. The one in West Virginia. Green bank, west Virginia has a huge radio telescope. And that's where the first setting conference was held. 60, I believe. Yeah. And then there's the Serendip Project, which piggybacks cracks me up for some reason. Why Serendip? I don't know. Just because it's short for Serendipity. It sounds like your friend Adam that shortens everything. Oh, yeah. Like he would say, yeah, we met up. It was a bit of Serendip. Yeah, he would say that. Serendipit. Serendip. Yeah. So they piggyback by basically saying, like, hey, like you said, let me see your dad, and once you're done with it, we want to go over it, too. Yeah, it's like, hey, man, it's like the hippie rob version of astronomy. Why? He had made an appearance in a while. He just did. I didn't expect him to pop up in steady if he didn't pop up in magic mushrooms. So Project Serendip, like you said, it takes advantage of a lot of telescope time, but they don't have the control to say, hey, point it over there. Right. So they have a lot of hours, but they're just basically that's the wide search being cast. And then you said the most desirable one was having their own telescope. Well, yeah, that'd be great. Said he figured out something. Rather than making a huge you're paying for a huge radio telescope, they figured out that they can take a bunch of backyard satellite dishes, which I'm sure are really easy to come by these days. The kind like, from the 80s. Yeah. Put a bunch of those together, they're like 8ft wide, right? Yeah. You put a bunch of those together and connect their signals using a process called interferometry. Nice. Thank you, dude. Well done. First try and you can basically simulate a huge, large telescope for a fraction of the cost. Yeah. It's like linking a network of computers, which is actually something also being done. We might as well get into that. The SETI at Symbol at Home project. And that's actually the SETI Institute, isn't it? Yeah. So they decided that, hey, instead of building a couple of supercomputers to analyze this data because that's one of the big problems. There's so much data. It's not like you can just plug it into your laptop. Right. But you can plug a tiny chunk into a laptop and network a bunch of laptops together to do the power of these super computers. And that is what they've done. And you can participate. Yeah. It's pretty ingenious. And there's other things that I think SETI at Home started it. Now there's things like folding at home, which you simulate protein folding for cancer research. Same thing. And I'm sure there are other ones that I didn't get a chance to look but said he at home started it, where it's a screen saver, but it's also a program. And while it's running, it downloads a chunk of data from the Are SIBO radio telescope. Yeah. That's like your little assignment. And it's like a 102nd chunk, maybe, something like that. It doesn't seem like much, but it takes like ten to 20 hours for the normal computer to process it. But like you said, if you have thousands of computers doing this, you have 1000 times the processing power all of a sudden for free. Pretty cool. And while your computer is analyzing it, it's making notes of all this stuff using SETI's algorithms, and then it uploads the results to SETI and then downloads another chunk for analysis. And dude, I bet this is a very popular thing to do for Stargazers. For Stargazing, nerds of the world. There's a guy I remember who was in Arizona, I think, and he was fired from his job as the It head for the Department of Education in this one community because he booted SETI at home onto all the computers without asking. But I mean, it's not a big deal. It doesn't take that much processing power and it just kind of runs in the background. Yeah, who cares? Well, he was made a mockery of by the local news. Like he was fired because of his search for aliens. Right. They made him up to some crack bot. Yeah, it was pretty bad. But yeah, some poor guy got fired for that. Said he at home, got him fired. I said, I bet he got a job with Settee or something there. I don't bet that. You don't think so they just said, Sorry, thanks anyway. Pretty much. Well, you talked about building your own and the alien telescope array. I'm sorry? The Allen Telescope Array. Yes. I kept taking it like that until I found out it's named after Paul Allen, the co founder of Microsoft who donated all of the money for it. Well, that is still underway. As far as its construction, I think they were down for a little while because of a lack of funding and it's a $26 million deal. But I think as of 2011, they were up and running again and part of it is complete to the extent, I think, where they can use it for things. Right. But they're still not finished for them. No, they're not. They have enough money to construct it, but they didn't have enough money to run it. So they have like a skeleton crew on it right now. Got you. But it is operational, I think. It is. They're hoping that they're going to be able to fund it by leasing some time on it to the Air Force, who is interested in using it. They should try bake sale. I know it'll be a great day when schools have all the funding they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a stealth bomber. That'll be the day. Somebody should put that on like a bumper sticker. We could shorten it, but yeah, agreed. Should we mention the fermi paradox? Yeah, it's good a time as any one of the things that happens to Settle is that they're constantly pummeled by critics, and a lot of them cite the Fermi paradox, too. Well, here's what SETI Institute says, because I dug into their FAQ a little bit. One of the questions is, why do we think that there might be life out there? Quote and Settle said, you should keep in mind that we are one planet around a very ordinary star, and there are roughly 400 billion other stars and nearly 100 billion other galaxies. And they think it would be extraordinary if we were the only thinking beings in all these enormous realms. Fermi Enrico said that if it takes life billions of years to develop intelligence and signal or travel to the stars, and there are billions of the worlds in the universe and the universe is 13 billion years old plus, then why haven't we been visited yet? Yeah, when you look at it like that, the odds are makes sense. They just increase exponentially. It's kind of like a perverted version of the Drake equation used to disprove the existence of life. The anti Drake. Yeah, this is the anti Drake. So what happens if we get a signal? What happens if they're sitting around one day and they hear phone home, come over the radio waves? Well, they have a strict set of protocols that start with the first person who finds it to who gets told first what agencies learn of it. It's pretty cool. Apparently, contact follows the course of it pretty accurately. Yeah. But so a signal is detected, right? And the first thing they do is they move the radio telescope away from the signal and then they move it back. I bet that's nerve wracking. I'll bet too, because you probably just want to stay locked on it, right. You're going to lose your signal. But you can't do that because you got to prove that it's genuinely coming from there. Right. So if you move it and then move it back and the signal wanes and then comes back, you know that you have an extraterrestrial signal, right? That's a big one. The next step, then is to figure out whether you're getting it from a satellite or from elsewhere on Earth, right? After that, you're starting to shake, your palms are sweaty, and you start to rule out extraterrestrial sources like pulsars, quasars, other things that broadcast radio frequencies. By this time, you may have tinkled a little bit in your pants, and you are on the phone with another radio telescope, hopefully one on another continent, saying, hey, can you go check these coordinates and see if you're getting this frequency? Point your little machine that way. What do you see? Or here? And if they come back and say, yeah, you say, well, it's time to announce it to the world now. I got to get out my book. The SETI Institute. The Declaration of Principles Concerning Activities following the Detection of Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Yeah. And SETI Institute says no one is keeping anything a secret. No, they want it disseminated quickly and widely. Yeah, but they want you to follow the proper channels first. And all the astronomical community gets first dibs on learning of it. Sure. Then after that, you go to the UN. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. The UN a lot of other international bodies. And you say, hey guys, we have confirmed extraterrestrial contact. And they say, awesome. And the astronomer goes along and said, okay, we're moving on to the next people. Eventually you get to the public and the person who discovered it is meant to have the honor of announcing it to the world. Yes. According to the protocols. Jodie Foster and SETI is on record, by the way. The SETI Institute is saying that they don't think that there are aliens that we've been hiding in Roswell, New Mexico. They said that the presence that would be like the biggest discovery in the history of science. And A, you wouldn't want to keep it a secret and B, there would be thousands and thousands of people working on it and they said it would just be impossible. So they're not these crackpots. They think, oh, we've got aliens hidden away, working on a farm in the desert of New Mexico, harvesting on water farms. That's where we get our microwaves from. Exactly. And I also looked at their FAQ under the are we sending signals? Because I thought that was kind of interesting because obviously Close Encounters, they sent messages out and they said they are completely passive experiment. They're only looking, they are not sending. However, we have been sending signals unintentionally for 50 years or more. Yes. Since the 30. Since we started broadcasting. On the radio. Yes, on television. The early TV broadcast reached out about to about 1000 nearby stars. But they said it's very unlikely that any alien civilization could have picked up on that. But we are inadvertently broadcasting probably in the water hole too, I would think. And the other reason we don't send out signals is because if the nearest civilization they said is 100 lightyears away, it would be 200 years to get a reply. And it's just not a very good way to spend your time. Well, plus also it's in the protocols that we decide through like the UN and other international bodies whether or not to respond to a signal. Right. That's like one of the last steps. Well, they said that we've sent symbolic messages before. Like, hey, here's what our solar system is like. Here are the compounds important for life. Here's the structure of our DNA in the form of a human. They say it's symbolic, but I think they're like, oh, you never know. Right. So they're liars then, when they say they're passive. Well, they are passive. They have done that in the past. They said it was like the 70s. They're passive as far as astronomy goes. Active. As far as lying on their FAQ goes, no, I think it was 1974 was the last time they sent out a message. There was what? The Viking or something. I can't remember. The spaceship we sent into orbit or into outer space that had gold records containing all sorts of information, like the world's great information and knowledge on them. Do you remember that? Sort of Viking? Yeah, I think that's Viking. We probably got that wrong there. So what's in the future for SETI right now? Well, the future with the programs like SETI at Home could get more people active. If they're interested in their home. Future could be good there. They said they might be sending or looking for light at some point because it may not come via radio. It may come via light. You never know. Yeah, Frank Drake is all about that one now. He says that this is like the hot new field for SETI is optical astronomy. And of course, finishing up things like the Allen Telescope Array is important. And then there's city at home. If you want to go do that. It's pretty easy to go download. I have folding at home. I've never had steady at home. Oh, you did folding. Cool. And then my computer crashed and I was just like me, really? Maybe that crashed it. I don't know. Maybe I could tell the difference when it was processing. 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 Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstarke 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. 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 500 Advantage bonus miles after qualifying purchases, adventure is on so fast in 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. So if this kind of piqued your interest, there's plenty more information out there. You can also check out SETI's stuff on Science Channel during our week alone month in March premieres. Come on. I think Tuesdays at ten, starting March 6. Every Tuesday? Yeah. Like Moonlighting. Was that on Tuesday? I think so. I seem to remember being drawn to the television on Tuesdays. I think it was Moonlighting and 18 Night. Or was it moonlighting in Love Boat? No, it was Love Boat. Fantasy island. Yes, those two are definitely let's see, recap what else is at the beginning. I'm married you. Me and I are married and I guess that's it. If you want to read SETI, you can type that word into the search barhouseofworks.com SETI. And that will bring up this very nice article, including cool graphs and screenshots from setting at home for some reason. And since I said search bar, I think I said handy search bar even. It's time for listener mail. Wait, Chuck, before we do listen or mail, let me stop you. I know you're usually stopping me, but I got the drop on you. You did? Let's announce some very important things. VIPs, as it were. Yes. Our Austin, Texas south by Southwest activities. We will be live podcasting. This is for official badge holders. We will be live podcasting sunday, March 11 at 330 at the Drisco Hotel, one of our favorite places. The Maximilian Room in the Drisco Hotel. In the Drisco Hotel. Awesome. Did you have brunch there? Yeah, I actually managed to eat. You mean I did. Before we live podcasted. Last time I just had a thing at a Bloody Mary. I know you've been asked about all I did. You had a sweaty Bloody Mary. We were nervous. Yeah, but this is in the afternoon, so it will be more acceptable to have you'll have had five Bloody Mary. Exactly. So that is a live podcast. And then the following day, Monday, March 12, from five to nine, fidel Irish pub on Fourth Street, 214 West Forth in Austin, Texas. This is for the public at large. Yeah, you don't need to be a bachelor. No, you don't need to be a south by Southwest attendee. You can live in Austin, you can live in Greater Austin. You can live in New Mexico and just drive there and show up. Don't pay any cover. You get in to the Stuff You Should know variety show. And in fact, if you're one of the first 100 people we will even give you a drink ticket. Get yourself a little drinky. That's a present from uncle Josh and Uncle Chuck and uncle Science Channel and uncle how stuff works. That's right. And the reason we say Science Channel is because they have been kind enough to give us a chance to do a TV pilot for their network. And they are super cool and awesome, supportive, creative people. And we did that TV pilot about a month ago, or actually, I don't know when this comes out, but it was a month ago today. Oh, was it? Yeah. Well, we're close to Chucker and we are putting that thing together in the edit room and we are going to be previewing clips from said show, like, before anyone else gets to see this thing, literally, except for people at Science Channel. You can do so if you come to fido. I don't know if you really got that point across, Chuck. We made a half hour TV pilot that's going to air and Science Channel at some point, correct? In the spring, yes. And this is the public debut of any even a second of it. That's right. Everybody has seen it are just some sweaty, weirdo editors in a man cave that stinks to high heaven, I can tell you. Yeah, it's a little stinky. This is it. This is it. If that's not enough, although it should be, special appearances by Mr. John Hodgman, comedy set by stand up extraordinaire Eugene Merman, music by Lucy Wayne, white roach who plays Jerry in the pilot. Yeah. Henry Clay. People are buddies. For a while now, they worked on the score. Not worked on the score. They did the score. They did the theme song and local Austin band Crooks, who are awesome and we're kind enough to let everyone else use your gear, which is a big deal. They will all be rocking and rolling. That was about the squares thing I've ever said. Yeah. So that's it. Comedy, Hodgy, us, TV show, pilot and music. Excellent. Well done. It's a big deal. It's a big two days. March 12, five to nine. Fidel Irish Pub. 214 West Fourth. And if you're laying around in your hotel room not wearing pants or a shirt and it's March 11 and it's 03:00, be like, I should probably get up and get dressed and get down to the Drift School and watch Uncle Josh and Uncle Chuck do some live podcast. Great. Good night. Back to listener mail at long last. All right. On the listener mail. Yes. All right, Josh. I'm going to call this Lucha Libraamericanwrestling from Zach as a given. Chuck, you suggested that wrestlers carry fake blood packs. Not quite true. Or at least usually not true. Instead, most wrestlers carry a razor blade in order to blade their foreheads. I've heard this, actually. I knew that they'll make a little cut and bleed right around the hairline after being hit in the head with a chair or a cage or another hard weapon. We're also talking about the big companies in America. The WWE is the biggest right now, with TNA is the second biggest, and Ring of Honor is the third. WWE and TNA are on big TV networks, while the Ring of Honor is only on the air in certain markets. And there are many independent leagues, including Smashing Pumpkins, billy Corgan's, resistance pro. Did you know that? No. I guess so. Dude, he's got his own wrestling link. I wonder if he's still on the dope. I don't think so. I saw him one day. He's really tall, which surprised me for some reason. I think I noticed that when the Cubs were in the World Series. And he's saying the national Anthem. No, he's saying that taking out of the ball game. It's stretching. Zack says when talking about the rules, you're saying that weapons are not allowed. And I think I might have said that it's different with American wrestling, but not true. He said the chair was just really popular in the late 90s because they book matches specifically to be more violent. So they would knock the ref down and people would use the chair when the rep wasn't watching. But you would still get DQD if the rep was to see that. And he also said Ray would get Dairy Queen. Oh, man, that'd be great. And then he said, Ray Mysterio is out with injury, but there's a good chance he will be back soon. He's still kicking it. That was a heck of a dispatch from the wrestling world. Yeah, and dude, I redacted about half of it. Thanks, Zack. That is Zach from I don't know where he's from. He's from Billy Corgan's basement. Well, wow. If you have some supplementary information not even necessarily correction, I think Zach handled that very well. Sure, we like to hear that stuff all the time, and we frequently read them as listener mail. So please feel free to go ahead and send us something you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can send us a note or a message on Facebook@facebook.com stuffysnow, and you can email us at stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House department 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? 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, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients plus probiotics. For Digestive Health, find us at chewy amazon and haloopets.com.com." | ||
Stuff You Should Know July 4th Extravaganza, Part 2: Baseball and Apple Pie | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/stuff-you-should-know-july-4th-extravaganza-part-2 | What makes America unique? In the second segment of this special two-part episode, Josh and Chuck join up with guests from The Daily Show and The Onion to take a closer look at the Stuff You Should Know About America. | What makes America unique? In the second segment of this special two-part episode, Josh and Chuck join up with guests from The Daily Show and The Onion to take a closer look at the Stuff You Should Know About America. | Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:42:34 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=18, tm_min=42, tm_sec=34, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=195, tm_isdst=0) | 49585132 | 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. 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 s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, we're back. I guess you could say it's part two of two. This is the second concluding part of our two part series on America July. You got to say, hey, and welcome to the podcast, because this is the beginning of part two. Yeah, but we're technically in the middle. All right. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you. You feel better? Yes. All right. So this is picking up where we left off. We still don't know where we cut off, so our guess is as good as yours and vice versa. Awesome. This is Stuff You Should Know About America from the Sirius XM studios in New York City. Now. More from Josh and Shaw. That was as great as I hoped it would be. Joe angel, that was something he told me. He's like, we're going to need another mic in a VIP seat because I got someone doing footnotes. Like, what? What does that mean? And now I know. And knowing is half the battle. That's what I hear. So, Chuck, I don't think we could do a July 4 show reasonably and not talk about fireworks. Right. That'd be a big rip off. I mean, I don't think there's any better way to enjoy a fireworks display then to know the chemistry that's going behind it. Right? Yeah. I feel like you take that kind of understanding. Well, whether you like it or not, we're going to teach you this right now. Right? Yeah, man. You're the expert on this. But I do like well, I'll chime in. Go ahead. I like the name of the Chinese manual. Well, you take the name of the Chinese manual first. Let me set you up. Okay. So fireworks are based on black powder, which has been around since at least 1044. And it was discovered in China. Right. It was either the result of some alchemists who are looking for a way to preserve youth or a hapless chef who accidentally discovered it. Can I stop you there? Please. Because the first one doesn't make any sense to me. The second one does. I get it. Chinese chef making bananas foster or something. Right? Boom. And all of a sudden, there's gunpowder. But how does gunpowder figure into trying to make yourself look younger is what I want to do. I don't know. I have no answer for that. Charcoal, I guess. Okay. Potassium nitrate, which is salt peter and then sulfur. I think if you applied those things separately to your face and then wash them off well enough and just don't light it. Right. Well, if you got too close to a fire, then kaboom. Okay. Yeah. All right. Well, it makes sense now, but those are the three ingredients in black powder, right? That's right. And I wanted to point out, the Chinese we know it has been around since 1044 because it was in the collection of the most important military techniques. That's what they called their book. It is a good book name. Pretty straightforward. Yeah. So, however they discovered it, now I don't know if they understood what was going on back then. Now we have a pretty good understanding of what's going on with black powder, right? Yeah. So you've got potassium nitrate, which is salt peter, which is an oxidizer, right? Yeah. That's like 75% of the mix. That's the bulk. 15% is charcoal, which is fuel. And then you've got sulfur, which is a reducing agent. And that's the last 10%. That's right. So you mix them all together, you introduce flame, which ignites it, and all of a sudden, the potassium nitrate starts releasing all this oxygen, which feeds the charcoal, binds to it, and creates the light and the heat that you see in fireworks. Right. Boom. Right. Or not yet with the boom, we're almost there. Okay. And then you have the oxygen from the potassium nitrate, also reacting with the sulfur to create this explosive force, as CO2 and nitrogen are produced, and they expand. Right. And that's the boom. Right. Okay, miss McGill. It was okay. You just hit it earlier. Try it again. So, you've got the sulfur and the oxygen binding together, creating CO2 and nitrogen, and that's where you get the explosive force. Boom. Nice. Thank you. That's good. You wouldn't think it'd be that hard. And that's the basis of fireworks, right? Yeah, that's the basis of the firecracker. And so now we move on to sparklers, which is pretty much the same thing. It pretty much is. But what you do with a sparkler is you have that black powder, add a little sugar, add a little water. You get something called sort of like a slurry. You dip your stick into it, as it were, and metal stick and because everything is spread out. It's not going to be like as volatile and create a big flash bang. Boom, it's over. It's spread out because it's mixed with a slurry and you add a little what, metal to that? Yeah. Like some sort of metal dust or shavings. And then that heats up and jumps off and becomes incandescent. And there's a sparkler. What's the noise for? That okay. There's no sound effect for sparkler. Okay, there we go. There's a sparkler. And the reason this is important is because when you go out on the 4 July, wherever you do that here in New York, I imagine they're everywhere. And you see the big pyrotechnic display. It is really just versions of sparklers and firecrackers. Right. The sparkler and the firecracker are the basis of all other fireworks, right? That's right. So the aerial displays, it's just a shell, which is like a ball filled with black powder and then little pellets of sparkler composition that they call stars. Right? Yes. And in the middle of that is a firecracker, and you use a lifting charge to send it into the air, and the lifting charge ignites the fuse. Nice. And then when it hits a certain altitude and that fuse goes off and the firecracker in the middle blows up, it ignites the black powder. Right. So there's your explosion. And that in turn, sends the pellets, the stars scattered, lights them, and there's your firework. That's it, as you say, bada bing, badaboom bon jovi. Right there's. Your firework does say that. And you can get fancy with it. If you want to cobble this together, you cobble the shells together, add something called a breaking charge, and that is when you see, like, the one shell explode, and then that breaking charge sets off the other ones, and that's where you get the cool little things that everyone Ooze and Oz at. Right. And then you add some chemical salts for color. That's right. Like, what do we have? Blue for copper, blue is copper, strontium is red. Yeah. And then Stronium and copper make purple. Wow, look at you. I got sodium for yellow, calcium for orange, aluminium for my British friends is silver and barium is green. Pretty neat. Right. So now when you're watching the fireworks display, you can curse us because you're sitting there thinking about the sulfur as a reducing agent. What's that smell? Oh, that's the reducing agent. Josh, just give me a beer and shut up. Exactly. So that's fireworks. Right. But that's just like fireworks and they go right. That's the optimum of what can happen with fireworks, what we just said. Right. But we live in la la land in a lot of ways, and fireworks don't always go well. No. Right. So we have our friend Holly Hagland here to talk to us about when fireworks don't go so well. Right? That's right. Haley apparently has a pretty true story for us. So everybody welcome hallie. All right, let's see. That's right. Is this good? Should I lower this? I don't even know who I'm talking about. You can probably angle it down. Okay. This is the highlight of the show. Yeah. Never let it be said that Josh and Chuck don't teach the controversy, because that's why I'm here. All right, well, I have some facts and figures in my presentation, so I may need to refer to my notes, but I'm sure that you've all seen the public service videos that local news stations roll out around this time of year. There's, like, a fake adorable child posed in a field of grass and obviously celebrating something because they're wearing something really nice from the local JC Penneys. And it's a mannequin that's completely faceless and yet humanlike because they put a straw sun hat on the head to remind you, like, be careful, this fake child is sensitive to the sun. So the mannequin is posed in, like, some position of youthful curiosity, and all of a sudden, boom, a Roman candle blows its head off. And in the blink of an eye, there's nothing but, like, a cloud of smoke and lime dust and a sin straw hat 200ft away in the grass. So this is what we all see every day, the hazards of fireworks. And if it's a low budget sort of news station, they actually just blow up a watermelon. But either way, they teach you the havoc that fireworks can wreak upon our nation's children or our nation's fruit. So if you don't think fireworks are dangerous, can I ask you a question? Okay. Since 1998, how many fireworks factories do you think have burned down? According to my not very thorough research, it's five. Okay, so Denmark, Holland, the UK, England and the Philippines. So, here, let me get my numbers. If you don't think they're dangerous, just ask the 1250 people in Nshade. Holland left homeless after 900 kg, which I did the math. It's \u00a31980 of fireworks were accidentally detonated at their local factory. Or talk to the people of Caveat in the Philippines, who felt the ground shake nearly 2 miles away from the explosion when a demonstration at their local firecracker factory went wrong. Or the 2000 people evacuated from Ceased, Denmark, when factory workers accidentally dropped a container of fireworks, somehow causing it to ignite. I watched a lot of internet videos in my research and they will say, if you have to witness a human tragedy firsthand, a fireworks factory exploding is definitely the coolest you are going to come by. I mean, it's like, cooler than the Disney World fireworks display. I'd say. Did you know that while celebrating Chinese New Year in 2009, it only took one stray firecracker to burn down Beijing's 30 storey luxury Mandarin hotel? Now, to be fair, the Chinese are an incredibly efficient people. So what took them? One firework would probably take us, like, at least a box. Okay. In the United states. In 2010, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported three firework related deaths, which is up 50% from 2009, when only two firework related deaths were reported. And I don't expect the trend to turn around because let's face it, the economy is going to hell. This 4 July, americans are going to want nothing more than to just throw back a six pack and just sparkler the world away. Okay? Okay. So maybe the cold, hard statistics don't touch you. Maybe something more anecdotal will get through to you. So I have witnessed the brutality of the firework. Firsthand, let me take you back to Denver, Colorado, 1991, the 5 July. I am about to turn ten, and my older brother Eric is 14. And you should know in Denver, there is about a week right around the 4 July where summer drought and a child stockpile of fireworks both simultaneously reach their peak. So we have really hoarded this incredible stash. I mean, we had every kind of firework. We had snaps, we had sparklers, we had bottle rockets, we had Roman candles, we had tanks, we had snakes, we had bird cages, and of course, we had smoke bombs. So we had sort of burned through most of our reserves on the driveway the night before. My father has all these pictures they took of us that night. And we're like, crouched next to the garage door. And I'm wearing this Mexican pueblo dress that my mom bought for me in Puerto Vallarta, and my brother's wearing his hot pink jams. And you can see we're just sort of mesmerized by this black cat screech and scream fountain that we've just ignited. And there's like a deadness in my eyes and something about how I never brush my hair that I'm really like. Spot on for Drew Barrymore and the fire starter posters. And my brother just keeps begging, like, just one more, just one more. Like he's going to go into withdrawal if we stop lighting fireworks. So what I'm saying is, I feel like looking at this picture, you could tell we were already struggling with some pretty serious demons. The next day, I was in a fog all day. Despite a full night of sleep. I was exhausted after our explosives bender. And so sometime in the afternoon, I went to the basement to find a cool place, and I was watching A Current Affair, if you guys remember that. And I must have drifted off because I remember I was awakened by the sound of sirens. Now, my brother, I didn't know this at the time, was upstairs with three other boys from our block on the street, and they were playing this game that we played in our neighborhood all the time. I really hope no children are listening to this. And if you are, this is really bad game, so don't play this game. It was a spin off of Ding Dong. Ditch them so one person would go stand on the porch poised to ring the doorbell while another person would stand in the street with a smoke bomb. So as soon as the smoke bomb was lit in the street, the person on the porch would ring the doorbell and then run away, and the person in the street would throw the smoke bomb. So ideally, your neighbor opens their door to a cloud of smoke, and they think like a wizard just rang the door loud, and then they got really shy or something. But let me remind you again that Denver was a tinderbox at that time of year. So my brother and his friends probably should have skipped the house across the street, the fourstar house, which was flanked by these two huge juniper trees, actually historic trees, we later found out they were planted by the then governor Roy Roamers father in law and about 50 years prior. And every so often, the Roamers would pile in their car and just drive through the neighborhood to check out how their trees were doing, because that's really what people in Colorado do for fun. They go and check out trees that they planted a long time ago. So it was actually my brother who threw the offending smoke bomb, and the smoke bomb was blue, so he lit it and he aimed at the porch, but his aim was off. And so instead of landing on the porch, it landed in the juniper tree on the right. And everyone just sort of sat there stunned as the smoke billowing from the tree turn from blue to light blue to bay. And then you just heard this crackling sound, and it didn't take long for the fire in one tree to spread to the adjacent tree and then to the roof of the fourStar's house and then to the roof of the neighbors of the fourstad's house. And they just sort of stood there stun, like, how could this game have possibly gone bad? And my mom actually I was talking this morning, and she reminded me of the fact that she at some point had come out onto the porch when she saw a fire, and she just saw the kids frozen in the street. And they just looked in and they said, we don't know what to do. We don't know what to do. But then instead of running to my house, they rent to one of the other boys houses because the mom was way nicer, and they hid in the bathroom while the mom called the fire department. So after all the two trees were totally destroyed and there was serious damage to two rooms and also the four stops car, which had been marked in the driveway. So that night, everyone assembled for sort of a disciplinary meeting on our side porch, which happened to offer a prime view of the charred scorched earth across the street. And it was all the boys and all the parents, and I sort of tiptoed out and was just standing on the edge watching everything. And all the parents thought that the boys were just staring down because they were so shamed and sort of in shame and deference, when really it was just nobody wanted to look up because if they looked sideways, they would just burst out laughing. I mean, it was so pathetic how this foresight house looked. It looked like one unlucky house on, like, a beautiful block had just been struck by lightning. And as they discussed what kind of work the boys could do to pay off the foreshops insurance deductible, I listened. And I really had no impulse to laugh because I thought about how easily that sorry smoke bomb toss could have been mine. And so as they laid out chores that they could possibly do, I just thought, there but for the grace of God, go I. 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. 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 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. I feel safer. Now, that's a true story, right? Yes. She said she talked to her mom. Oh, wow. That makes it true, right? So, Chuck, I used to blow stuff up like crazy. Did you? Yeah, like model cars. Any guys ever strapped, like, bottle rockets to their model cars and try and make them? The guys are like, oh, yeah, dude. Still do. Did you ever break the sticks off of bottle rockets and light them and just throw them and see where they go? Do you see what happened? I did see, actually. Me and my buddy Chuck built this. I had a friend named Chuck growing up. He is at a very sad child. We built bottle rocket guns in his little wood shop. His dad made the little rubber band guns and sold them at fairs and stuff. Wow. So we modified those to hold bottle rockets. And you drop it in and throw the little flap down and shoot them at each other. So what kind of modifications are required specifically? Well, we used the stock of the gun. It was like a rifle. And then we basically just got rid of the rubber band part and made a box with a flap on top, like a door. Because you didn't want it to shoot back at you. You would like to put it in there. And we kind of dug out a groove so it goes straight. We put a lot of thought into this. And you would light it and shoot at your friend. Bada bing, badd bing. Bong jovi. Yeah. Nice. So did you patent that? No, we should have, actually. Yeah, we'll have to go home and make it. Sold them in Denver, evidently. So let's talk American Dream, shall we? Yeah, man, the American Dream as a thing. And you did most of this research, and you're putting this one on me, too? No, I'm not putting this one on you. But I noticed from your research when I looked at this, the American Dream sort of has ebbed and flowed from its early origins, and it sort of coincides with how the economy is doing right then. Pretty much it's either like, yes, the American Dream or, oh, it's dead. Yeah. And then it's alive again, and then it's dead. And I also noticed the American Dream is either, like, every man for himself, and you just do the best you can and make as much money as you can, or it's all about community and looking out from one another. And all that depends on how the economy is doing that's right. Because if everybody's broke, everybody's like, yeah, of course, government spending. That's what the American dream is about. And if everyone's making money, then everyone turns into Patrick Bateman all of a sudden. So let's talk about it. Chuck, where did this come from? Obviously, it was the famed historian James Truslow Adams who wrote the 1931 book the Epic of America. Right? Yeah. And that's where he mentioned the American Dream. But earlier than that, in 1630, John Winthrop gave his famous city upon a Hill sermon to his fellow Puritan colonists. And he didn't use the word dream, but he did detail a vision of society where everyone could prosper, everyone could get ahead. As long as you just team together and work together and follow the Bible. Right, exactly. But that kind of laid out the groundwork for the American Dream that in America, specifically, if you worked really hard, the sky was the limit, right? That's right. Okay. So that was 1630, when Winthrop gave that City Upon a Hill sermon. That's right. And then by 1776, when TJ sat down from June 11 to 18th. Right, yes. It was a God given, inalienable right to succeed because it's in the Constitution. We're guaranteed the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Right? That's right. Which is kind of the American dream in a nutshell. It's the pursuit of happiness. Yeah. What is the Statue of Liberty say now? That's awful. I don't know. That is that what it says there now? What does it say? Something? It says, like yeah, all that other stuff, people are just shouting out words. It says, welcome to Shoney's. Did you see that? And it's not a torch, but it's a burger. So the Declaration of Independence really kind of gives a lift to the American Dream, but it really becomes embodied in the 19th century. There's a guy named Alexis de Tocqueville. Right. That's what this is sort of a snotty thing to say. It might not have been a snotty thing to say, but because he was French, I took it that way. He visited the United States in the 1830s, and he called this belief the charm of anticipated success. And that just sounds sort of like it's not real, it's just the charm. He's British all of a sudden. He could also be a Nazi. I took it as kind of like a pat on the head. Or he was charmed himself. Okay. Either way, he was an outsider making an observation that the Americans over there think like they have this thing called American exceptionalism, which means there's no other country on earth like America. Right, that's right. And that's what he was mentioning. And then I think it got another boost by Henry David Thoreau walden he really kind of laid out the American dream as well. Yeah. That was 1854. And his quote, I actually like this one. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and I'm going to say her dreams, let's modernize this, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with his success unexpected in common hours. Right. Can you see that in one of those posters? It says, like, effort. Underneath there's, like a whale's tail. Back then, the Walden, it was a guy chopping wood. It was thorough himself, actually. Right. He was the first guy to do an inspirational poster. It was a wood carving. It so that's the mid 18th century no, the mid 19th century. I'm sorry. Yes. Towards the end of that, you had a lot of immigrants coming and also a westward push. And so the American Dream kind of gets laid onto these two things, too. Yeah. It's actually written about they use the words American Dream more and more in newspapers and richest books. Exactly. Yeah. And magazines, that whole kind of thing, where people love their rags and richest stories in the late 19th century. We still do. Right. But they really loved them then. Okay. Really? Like, compared to today, it's like everything's going and going by the time the 20th century comes around. The American Dream is pretty much like code for upwardly mobile. That's right. The person is living the American Dream rather than a promise to be able to try. The American dream starting to become wealthy. Like you're wealthy. Exactly. About the time of the turn of the century. And then by the time James Truzlow Adams writes his epic of America, there's a lot of doubt. Right. Because this is 1931, something really big happened that kind of put a ding in the American Dream. Yeah. The Depression came along and destroyed a lot of these big fortunes and these people that had lived the American Dream rags or riches, self made millionaires and the like. And Herbert Hoover said, you know what? Prosperity is just around the corner. And everyone said, screw you. They threw rocks at him. That's right. But FDR came along and did usher in a little bit of real hope after that. He did. Even before going to war, which I think most historians kind of point to as the turning point for the American economy was all the military spending in World War II. Sure. So I guess Roosevelt introduces the new deal. Right. Which is, again, all the government spending, social programs. So the American Dream kind of becomes more of a sense of community where America is a place where you can not only make your own way, but if you can't make your own way, like you're elderly or you're disabled or whatever, the community is going to take care of you. That's right. And then we go over to Europe and do Africa and Italy and the Pacific and tick tail and come back and the suburbs are born. And then the American Dreams are right on this uptick again. Right. So we're on the uptick of the roller coaster. In the 1950s, Americans at the time made up 6% of the population and consumed one third of the goods and services, which means we're doing great because we're Americans and we're using up all this stuff, which is awesome. Wages rose. Yeah, that was pretty good. Affluent workers moved, like you said, into the suburbs, spread out. And I guess at the time that meant things were good if you moved to the suburbs. Well, I wonder if the suburbs were kind of a turning point as well. Because when the suburbs started to hit their stride, that's when the social stripe in the 60s came along where basically African Americans said, like, hey, I'm really happy that you guys are having a great time over there, but there's this whole other part of America that's been left out so far. And MLK famously redefined the American dream. Yeah, he called America a dream yet unfulfilled. And he was kind of right on the money. And he said that it shouldn't be about wealth. It should be about thomas Jefferson TJ again, saying, all men are created equal and give equal rights to minorities. Rebuild these inner cities that are decaying and let's eradicate hunger. And people are like, Wait a minute. I just thought I was supposed to get rich and move to the suburbs. What are you talking about? Exactly. At the same time, their kids are doing the same thing. They're attacking them from another side. Right. Waiting for them to come home from work and then jumping out of the closet. Maybe the 60s are at their peak and the 70s hit, and the economy just slides down the toilet forever. So there's social strife and now there's economic strife. And at every turn, the American dream is analyzed in this context. Right. Which is what we're doing. We're just following in tradition. That's right. And thankfully, another French person came along to point this out. In 1974, French historian Ingrid Carlander published a book called how do you pronounce it? Laser American. It sounds very much like lazy American. No, you really don't like the French? No, I love the French. She proclaimed that the American dream was, in fact, dead, and that was pretty much it. And with the gasoline lines and the empty swimming pools, because you shouldn't put I think it was La. They suffered the drought, and they were like, we can't afford all this water for swimming pools, even. But luckily, that was good for skateboarding. It was. It gave rise to skateboarding, didn't it? It did. And then out of California, out of the promised land, came the golden child, right? The former governor, a guy who came from a farm family, who worked his way up to a star in Hellcats of the Navy, and he took over. And basically that's Ronald Reagan, by the way. He said, The American Dream is back, baby, I think is what his words were. And his deal, very simplified version, was, hey, let's cut taxes and stimulate growth. Let's reduce some of these government programs because we want self reliance. And that's what it makes America strong. That's what makes America strong. Italian as well. And it worked to a certain degree in America started to prosper again, but then critics came along and said, yeah, but you know what? We don't know about all this, how it really helped the common man. It may have just been the rich you were helping out, and we don't really know if you cut spinning, the Reagan went, what is that? Easy Chinese. So we find ourselves now after the affluent eighty s and the ninety s, which is just a party, man. We have kind of this hangover now where we have all this stuff, but we also have all this debt and reality of just buying stuff and just consuming without producing anything. Because remember back in the 40s or 50s, we were producing one third of the world's goods, but we were consuming that too. But we're producing as well. And then through the we stopped producing and just started consuming. And we got to this point where this Harvard professor named John Quelch pointed out that basically too many Americans have been expressing the American Dream through the acquisition of stuff. Right? True. So now everybody's getting browbeaten with the American dream. That's the point that we're at. Right, right. It's greedy. Is that the point? Is that what he's saying? I think what he's saying is it's kind of become greedy like it was originally an opportunity and now how much stuff do you have? Right. So what he suggests we do is go back to the original James Truslow Adams ideal of the American Dream and through that allow it to survive. Right? Right. And we'll finish up with a quote from Adams. A social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain the fullest stature to which they are innately capable and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position. And how about that? That's right on the Money truthless. This is Stuff You Should Know About America from the Sirius XM studios in New York City. Now more from Josh and Chuck. So I would argue I might cry at this point when I was researching. I was crying, laughing. Yeah, this is good stuff. We have one of our good friends here, Joe Randazzo. He edits the Onion, like we said. He threw that away like it's no big deal. He said, The Onion? I'm turning into a Frenchman. Yeah. And he was so kind as to go through the 1783 edition, right. And come up with some great headlines for us to share from the era, from the age. So everyone, please welcome Joe Randazzo. Hi, Joe. Hi. Are you aware of those? Yes. I like it. Joe put on headphones and now I feel naked. Why do you have your hat on? I got nothing. That's true. I have to say that last segment I was stating off a panic attack, roller coaster ride, the ups and down. When is the American dream? Is it even achievable? Oh, I thought you meant because you were nervous. No, it was terrible. Awful segment. So how did you end up panicked? I don't know. I'm in the midst of it right now. We're going to see what happens. Well, take us through some of this. You guys have been america's finest news source for how many years? Well, the onion was founded in 1765 by Reedrick Zwiebel, who was a prussian tuber farmer, and the only words that he knew, I think this is right, joe was an onion. Right. Oh, mercantile and onion. So it's found that it's a mercantile onion with the express purpose of accumulating capital and fleecing its readers. All right. And that's called the y. Right? O-N-Y-O-N-I-O-N. Okay. No, I thought at the time, though, it was, no, you're way off. So then it was found in 1765, and then the mercantile and the onion split in 1783, and the onion has continued on since then, independently since 1783. So these are articles from our 1783 edition, which is technically the first issue of the onion as it's now. Okay, so they split in 1783. Yes. Okay. Well, share with us some of the highlights of what was going on that year, because it seemed to be a busy year from what I was reading. Yeah, it was a busy year. We reissued this in 2008, so that's a fact. Let's see. Where do you want to start? I mean, one thing that we like to do in America today is read books, right. Am I right? Yes. Oh, I forgot. The line I wanted to say was an amazing line. American dream. More like American night terror. Just in October of 1783. These are the top 20 best selling books in print at present. Little section of the paper called publishers corner the 20 top most books in print at present. Number one is the Bible with 226,339 copies. Number two is common sense. The third most popular book is the Thousands upon Thousands of the Mohicans. Number four the return of common sense. Back to basics. Five. The diary of a woman who knew how to write. Number six, the Bible with a red Cover. Number seven the Plowman's diet. The 8th topselling book is the book of Blank pages. Number nine is a comprehensive tome of the known medical Facts. Ten. The Bible with the blue cover. The Gentleman of New Amsterdam. Twelve. God's revenge against idleness. A children's book. Number 13th guide to North American Jews. 14th. The Bible, german edition. Number 15, common Sense. Three, it just makes sense. Spelled as a c, it's a pun. 16, the Lever and Fulcrum for village Idiots. Number 17, natural Stillbirth and 1819 and 20 do not exist. There were only 1823. That's a strong way to start. Right. A list. I think so. Rattling them off. You guys clap, you're going to get over everything. What else is going on at the time? Joe Randazzo, were there any of these of interest that kind of stood out to you? I have one, yes, that I thought was pretty neat. The surgeon general has added snuff to the tobacco pyramid. Yeah, that was a controversial move. Everybody is familiar, of course, of the food pyramid as I stall, but I'll just read a little excerpt from here. So obviously this is written in 1783. The language is a little more kind of flowery and baroque almost, than what we're used to now. So this reads from our Baltimore cousins comes news of the felicitous health benefits of the powdered tobacco snuff and the recommendation that multiple pinches be taken until blood flows freely from the nose. In service of balancing the humors, preeminent barber surgeon and former general of loyalist Ilk, Thomas Haysworth has added the curall physics to his famed and most singular tobacco pyramid. The robustness chart in grammar schools cross the whole of our nation and has given snuff greater importance even than pipe smoke. Let's see. A measure of stuff suggested by General Hayesworth. To be most advantageous for children under six years of age is not to be in excess of four sizable nose packings per four and 20 hours and taken always with two drafts of strong brandy. Those unable to procure the finely ground tobacco should qualify freely from cuspadors at every opportunity to derive at least a little benefit from the meritorious effects of snuff. Excellent. Obviously, snuff is no longer on the tobacco pyramid. You took it off in the 70s. Yeah. So, Joe, one of the ones I ran across was there was a woman who wandered out of her house and they couldn't figure out what was going on. Yeah, she caused quite a stir. A mischievous woman wandered outside of home. The headline. A mischievous woman Wandered Outside of home. I'll just read a little bit of this as well. The gentle town of Harrisburg was confronted with the most worrisome and shocking sight the day before last one owing to the sudden appearance of wife and Childbearer, margaret Cook. From the interior of her home. Defying all reason, Cook was observed to exit into the open air, though no man had instructed her to do so. No domestic task required her to be out of doors, and no sign of suffocating fire had surfaced from her modest dwelling. So she wandered around town, brought up quite a consternation, and then the last line of the story. Margaret Cook was reprimanded, disowned and hanged until dead after returning to her place of residence. Tougher times. One that you alluded to earlier. It was foreshadowed yesterday. We're all interested in sort of news of the weird and these peculiar news items from around the world. I think the world's oldest person just recently died. Now there's a new oldest person who's alive. So the world's tallest man towers at 5ft and eleven inches. Should I read a little passage from the honest and sworn captain of the Bark Silla, freshly returned from the Baltic? News of the existence of a modern longshanks, a veritable giant before whom many tremble. Said Pentregwal, who makes his residence in the city of Danzig, reaches nearly 6ft into the heavens at an astonishing 18 hands high. He is head and shoulders above even the loftiest of his brethren. And when striding, the thoroughfares of Danzig can be seen from 30 paces away. So colossal is he that master carpenters cut a hole above his door and raised the portal to accommodate his great head. This Ajax sleeps in a specially fashioned bed so that his lower limbs do not dangle off the edge. His tailor keeps a stock one surplus bolt each of wool and muslin should delivias and desire a new suit of clothes. To him, our daily bread is but mere crumbs. The proprietor of an inn where the mammoth takes meals testified that he could devour one half of one 100th of his weight in beef steak in one sitting. It is a further wonder that the floorboards of his house have not given way under his great heft. And that being estimated at nearly twelve stone, or \u00a3165. That's it. He's a giant. Yeah, 5ft eleven inches. 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. 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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. I've got one for you, Joe. We all love Ben Franklin, right? Yeah. Invented lightning. That's right. And he invented a lot of things. And from the historical archives, he invented so many things that they would actually print them week to week. Yeah. Every week there was a feature. Ben Franklin inventions this week. That's right. And I will go ahead and read a couple of this week. I don't even know what week it was. This is, I think, the week of October 8, 1783. Okay. He invented the death kite. He invented the Carton device for conveyance of eggs to minimize breakage on even the most uneven of footpaths. He invented the US. Patent are these all appropriate to read radio? I think the next one we shall not read. He also apparently that we convented power windows. The inflatable oblong balloon. The sort that emits, say, thunderous crap. One resembling sorry. Thunderous clap. One resembling the loud exhale from one's nether regions. The whoopi cushion maiden head glue. That one flies and math. And I love the last one. He invented being a great and pretentious old windbag. Yeah. Joe, do you have the one about the amazing public spectacle? It seemed like almost an advertisement or like an upcoming event that captured my attention. I do, Josh. And public is spelled with a K in this case. And that is right? That's right, Chuck. We'd be in the joke. I have it right here. No, I need to do this on my own. People still needed their entertainment in the 18th century. Sure. So this was an amazing public spectacle. Indian taught to wear hat. See the savage mohican who by grace of God and much patient training has been taught to wear a hat in the manner of an actual human. An amusing novelty for the public. Different times. Those were different times. Can we scoff at a Lexus to tokaville again? Those are the best moments. I like this one a lot. This was very important when a kidney bean shaped organ recently discovered this was by Cherosurgeons and Blood Letters in Boston. Discovered in organelle of the body and that human excise from the back and modeled purple in color and very likely a kidney bean in shape, which removed, when removed, causes expiration, as with all organs. I found it here's. The kidney bean one. And then even then there was some you did the podcast recently on Malthus, right? And overpopulation. Sure. They were even worried about this in 17 three. This sort of opinion piece will New York someday be too crowded for farming? An issue even more worrisome to experts is the reduced acreage of cleared forest available for farming within the city limits is a well known fact that no urban community can survive without an agricultural base on which to found the city's infrastructure. Go online and read. It really hilarious. Read silently to yourself. And then there was another one about New York where the population was expected to go over $10,000. It had already reached 12,000. It was causing a lot of concern. Yeah. New York is threatened by overcrowding as population climbs to 12,000. And that had a companion piece, another worried one, where it was urban sprawl. And then there's only 13,000 acres of forest remaining on Manhattan Island. Right. Urban sprawling. So severe settlements, cooking fires can be seen from as far as Greenwich Village. As true today as it was back then, right? That's right. Yeah. You have anything else, Jeff? I was going to say a fact from the real history of the world, which was stuyvesant was the original governor of New York, I believe. Okay. And when he was banished from New York, he went to retire in his farm in the West Village. That's where he went to get away from everybody, was the West Village. Wow. And that's true. Yeah. Only in New York. So thanks for coming by, Joe. Thanks for having me. And, Chuck, do you realize what that means? We are out of bits. Yes. We're out of segments. I think that means that you will be able to have a drink in your hand soon. Yes. Which I know is something you've been looking forward to. Yes. All day. Sure. Every day. All day. Every day. Everybody, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate you can clap for yourself. We'll clap for you, too. You guys are great. Everybody out there listening in your car right now. Clap for yourself, but keep your elbows on the steering wheel while you do so maybe everybody else in the car can clap for you. The driver. Yes. While you keep nine and three. It's not sending two anymore at home. You can clap if you're listening to this in a shopping mall, clap. Everybody clap. And have a very safe 4 July. And when you see fireworks, remember, sulfur is a reducing agent. Yeah. Don't throw smoke bombs at brittle trees. Right. The American dream will never die, no matter what. And buggery is not only bestiality, but also sodomy thank you very much. Until next time. This is stuff you should know. So, man, how fun is that? Wow. Yeah. Wow. That was epic. Monumental. Okay. And it ran longer than I thought it would. I was worried about it lasting an hour, and it was an hour and 45 minutes. Once we get a Gavin, it's hard to shut us up. It lasted 14 hours in full bladder time. Yeah. So we want to say thank you to all the fans who came, what we like to refer to as the 50. Looked like everyone had a good time. It was good meeting folks. I saw faces from the Brooklyn trivia night. Yeah. Saw some familiar faces. We got some bread. Chris Kyne was there, who did our two headed Josh and Chuck thing. He was the dude in the Ghostbusters. Okay. Yeah, I saw that guy, but he didn't come up afterward. Weird. I know. I was like, Dude, what's your deal? That's really weird, Chris. And we met coub's don Kuby. Yes. And you called her out. I called her out a little bit. Which you heard. You humiliated her. We also want to thank Wyatt Sinek and Halle Haglin of The Daily Show with John Stewart. And thank The Daily Show for letting them do it. Yeah, that was a big deal. So thank you. Thanks to Jen over at The Daily Show for helping us with that. And then all of our pizza, the Onion, the Joe's, and the Jill. Yeah. Thank you to all three of you. Yes, and big thanks to Paul from SiriusXM. Yeah, and I can't remember our engineer's name that day. He was a really nice guy and says that he's a new fan. Oh, really? And also Jeremy of Sirius who came to the show. Yeah, and he's a big wig, and he came by to see it. So thanks for all that. Thanks to Roxanne. I had a video for helping us out up there. And special thanks to the video team that we had assembled, fans that said, dude, we will shoot this in a professional fashion for free for you guys to put on your website and every step of the way, you're like, well, you can use my camera. No. Well, you don't need to edit it. No. Well, it doesn't need to look good. No. So every step of the way, they've wowed and amazed and topped our expectations. Yeah. So we want to plug them for sure. That would be Martinlacahenson of Handcraftedbymarton, and you can see his work at www.handcraftedbymarton.com. Right. His live in gal. He called his wife domestic partner, Satoco Subiyama, and she was one of the main shooters. And you can find her work at www.thepassagechronicles.com. And finally, they had one more shooter. They had three cameras, and she did sound as well. Laurie Sumi, who you can find her work at www.larrysumi.com. L-A-U-R-I-E-S-U-M-I-Y-E. Very appropriate URL. Yes. And they did an awesome job. And we really can't say thanks enough. And you can find that video, look for it. We'll have it put it on Facebook to point people to the website, where you can watch this thing in pieces, in full. Yeah. And thank you, dear listener, for plodding through this thing with us. We hope it was worth it. And we'll be back to our regular scheduled podcast next week. If you want to, as always, shoot us an email, send that thing to stuffpodcast@howstuffs.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff From the Future. Join House of the 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, 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 know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo, we get it, because we are pet moms, too. 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43b29f3e-53a3-11e8-bdec-7b0d81977d8a | Bruxism: Grinding Your Teeth Is the Pits | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/bruxism-grinding-your-teeth-is-the-pits | Researchers have noticed that as incidence of anger increases so too has teeth grinding, known clinically as bruxism. That’s a problem because when people grind their teeth, especially when they’re sleeping, they can wear them down to nubs. | Researchers have noticed that as incidence of anger increases so too has teeth grinding, known clinically as bruxism. That’s a problem because when people grind their teeth, especially when they’re sleeping, they can wear them down to nubs. | Tue, 30 Jun 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=182, tm_isdst=0) | 46849136 | 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 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 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 Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant speaking to me today through clenched teeth. Gerry is off doing who knows what, but she's here, so this is Stuff You Should Know. God's work. That's probably right. She's ministering to those in need. Yeah, we might as well call this episode a peek into Chuck's private life. You're going to have a lot of personal stories about this. Yeah, okay, well good. Well, I'm looking forward to that. Yes, I'm a brucer. I was just about to say Chuck euro bruxer. B-R-U-X-E-R. Which is a great word imprint, at least in Brooks. It's alright out loud too, I guess. But I really don't think we can start this episode any other way aside from how this House stuff Works article. Kicked it off. Okay. Okay, go ahead. So, Chuck, when we're trying to figure out what bruxism is, no, it's not a strange new religion or the latest exercise craze to come out of La. It's the complicated medical term for the simple act of grinding your teeth in La. All those wacky exercise trends. I know strange new religions with exes in the middle of them that make you give them all your money. Yeah, bruxism. Teeth grinding. I'm a tooth grinder. So you've had serious dental work from that, right? Correct. And did you grind? Because we should probably tell everybody. There's really two big categories of grinding teeth. One is daytime grinding, and the other is nighttime grinding, and nighttime grinding is way more intense. So were you a nighttime grinder? I am currently both oh, you still are? Oh, yeah. Okay. And then when you're a nighttime grinder doing your grinding thing, do you wake Emily up? No, she sleeps pretty soundly. Okay. Because from what I understand, it's not hard to actually wake the person sleeping in bed with you up from grinding your teeth that loudly like that's how loud it gets from how much pressure you're exerting on your poor teeth. That's what I've heard. I've never recorded myself. I've thought about doing that. They have those apps, I think, that will trigger by sound or whatever to record. Sure. Bruxy. I need to get brexit going. All right. But I am one of possibly 15% of Americans that are brexit. They say roughly $15. That's a lot of people. That was a surprising amount to me. I did not think it was going to be that high. Yeah. And I don't really know if it's I only know my experience. When I was reading through this, it was just triggering me all over the place, because from grinding to gnashing to clenching to TMJ and TMP, like, I've got it all. Do you really have TMD? Because that sounds really bad. Yeah, it's just a mess. Yes. Have you ever heard of getting Botox for TMD? No. So, you know Botox is from Botulin, right. And it paralyzes the nerves temporarily, but for a really long time, like months, you get it in your jaw, and it relaxes the jaw muscles, actually. Interesting. I wonder why they're in there. I can get this cocoon under my eyeball taken away. You have a cocoon under there? Yeah. It looks like a butterfly is about to sprout from this sleeping bag under my eye. I think it adds a lot of character. I don't think you should change anything like that. No, I'm not worried about any cosmetic things. Good. You're looking good, man. Thank you. I can't see you, and I know you're looking good. Yeah. I'll chat about my experience throughout this, but I had been fitted for a mouth guard, which I do not wear, and I should yeah, it's supposed to be kind of helpful, but I also saw that it can actually make you brux. I guess that'd be the verb. Right? It makes you brux more sometimes, yeah. I think the deal with the mouthguard is it just provides a barrier between your teeth, so it doesn't stop you from grinding or clenching or anything like that. But there's no sexiest contact, which is tooth on tooth. Right. It's almost like giving condoms to teenagers. It's been demonstrably irrefutably proven that it makes them have sex when they otherwise wouldn't the same thing with a mouth guard. You probably wouldn't even grind your teeth, but you put a mouthguard on and you're going to grind. You know, we get an alarming amount of emails from people who don't understand your I don't even know what you call it. It's not sarcasm. Humor. Sure, we can just throw it under the humor label. Hurt. Well, no, I mean, when you say something and you're totally kidding, but you're just being deadpanned about it. People buy that. Yeah, they catch on eventually. I think. They don't. They think you're a monster. So let's get into this. Okay. Because I didn't know much about teeth grinding. I do grind teeth, but not to a clinical degree. So I didn't know quite a lot of this, but I came across this article that was written by an NYU dental student named Jordan Moskoviche. Yeah, Moskovich. I think I nailed it out of the park. Sounds like a dental student from NYU. If I've ever I just came across this paper. I don't remember how I searched it, but anyway, it had some really interesting stuff in there. And the way that possibly by now Dr. Moshkovic put it, that as we understand bruxism, it occurs, it's cyclical, so it starts out and it follows a distinct pattern, and then it kind of crests, it intensifies, and then it wanes, it goes away, and then the cycle eventually starts up again. And so that these cycles can happen in clusters. So your actual attack of brexit might only last somewhere in the neighborhood of like four to 15 seconds. I think that's on the low end. But when you have a bunch of them, these different attacks, these cyclical attacks in a cluster, it can add up to quite a bit over the course of your sleepy time. Yeah. I mean, if you're grinding for 15 seconds and then taking off six or 8 seconds and then grinding again, I don't know what the distinction is. You just take a little break. Yeah. Your brain is like, this is too much even for me because to me that's constantly grinding. Right. So no, apparently it does. It like there's an increase in it, and then it gets really bad, and then it stops, and then it starts to slowly to build again. I think what makes it cyclical in building is that it's also associated with an increase in heart rate and brainwaves. So you're grinding your teeth, your heart is going faster, and your brain is working overtime, and then I guess it all just kind of crests and goes away for a little while. Yeah. And I don't think we said we'll talk about all the reasons it can be pretty bad, but you're exerting a lot of force up to \u00a3200 of pressure per square inch, and that is not like even when you're chewing something super tough or like saltwater taffy or something, it's like ten times the force that you use to chew food. Dude, saltwater taffy is so great. You're a big fan. I really am a big fan. And it's one of those things where, as I've gotten older, I've realized that some of the old time candy, like nougat, just plain old Nugget nougat, is great. It was perfected. We've perfected candy in a lot of ways a long time ago, and you overlook it now just because it's been around for so long in favor of a Watch Macaulay or some kind of go go candy bar today. And there's nothing wrong with watching McCall. It's probably my favorite modern candy bar. But saltwater taffy? Nougat, stuff like that. It's been around for this long for a reason, I guess. Yeah. You love the candies that you can get for a nickel by reaching your hand into it. Well, you can't do that kind of thing anymore, but by reaching your hand into a big germ bucket right. Full of discarded candies from children. Sure. But they're individually wrapped so I'm safe. You know, when Little Bit Sweets used to love us, they used to send us that. Nougat, I know. As a matter of fact, now that I think about it, they're the people who introduced me to Nugget. Straight up. Nugget? Yeah. It was one of those care packages of theirs. They introduced us to Nugget and Honeycomb Candy. Yeah. Why don't they like us anymore? I don't know. I have to get in touch with Liz and be like, what's up? Yeah, hint, hint. We'll still plug them, though. Yeah, well, we just did. Yeah. So you were saying \u00a3200 of pressure and that's per square inch. I saw up to \u00a3250 of pressure per square inch. That's about ten to 40 times what you would exert normally when you're chewing. And as you can imagine, like, your poor teeth can only take so much. And it's not just the pressure, it's the pressure combined with the grinding motion. Right. That can really wear down the old enamel. I saw something like ten times faster than somebody who doesn't grind their teeth while they sleep. Yeah. So, I mean, that introduces yet another problem. So not only will it make your teeth wrigglier and just they could crack, they can fracture. You can wear them down to stumps. You get rid of that enamel like you said, and then you're just ready to get a cavity. Plus, your nerves can be exposed. Have you ever got a root canal? Shockingly, no. I have three fake teeth, but I've never had a root canal. They are not fun. Yeah. I still don't even quite know what it is, to be honest. So they go in and they actually remove the nerve at the base of the tooth. They take the nerve out so you don't have any sensation right there anymore. Which is good, because by the time you need a root canal, you don't want to ever feel anything, ever, of any kind. I got one once by this guy over in Brookhaven, and he apparently is a master at root canals because every dentist I've been to since then, this is years ago, has commented on, like, what an amazing root canal that guy did. Yeah, you can tell years later. I guess so, yeah, because I still get comments on it whenever I go to a new dentist and they take X rays. They're like, wow, that is a really great root canal. It's not like the guy in the grocery store parking lot that fixes your gent while you shop. Not really. He doesn't do that good of a job. I think the words root canal, just the combination of those two words, is probably a top tender for just most loathed combinations of words. That moist. Well, that's just one word combination of words. Moist. Anything? Yeah, moist underlined moist thighs. How about that? That's pretty bad. They did a little survey with the Chicago Dental Society, which is a real swinging club, and they found 65% of those dentists said that they are hearing about Jock Lynching being sort of an increasing thing. I don't know when this was written, but apparently it's russia is on the rise, as is stress. Right. That's what they're saying, that they correlate it to stress in adults, and they think that it's basically as simple as that. There's a lot of other things that can cause bruxism, as we'll see, but stress seems to be the number one driver of teeth grinding in grown ups. And as stress increases in our modern whatchamacallit type world, brexit is increasing as well, which is sad, but at the same time, it's also like, okay, well, then there's real hope for this. It's not like you have some biological short circuit in your brain that you'd have to go get neurosurgery to correct or cure. Yeah, you're just riddled with anxiety. Right? Exactly. And I don't think we officially pointed out, or maybe you did, that grinding is that back and forth motion. And clenching is just sort of just locking your teeth together and as if you're biting on an irresistible salt water taffy. So with clenching, too, that seems to be more associated with daytime bruxism than nighttime bruxism. True. And the other thing about daytime brexit, so bruxism is considered a para functional habit, is what it's called, like chewing on pen caps or biting your fingernails or something like that. It doesn't serve a good purpose for, like, you're not breathing or eating or drinking, so you're doing other stuff with your mouth. That makes it a para functional habit. But the thing about it is, during the daytime, it's unconscious, whether you're doing nighttime breakfast or daytime breakfast. But in the day, you can stop and be like, I'm clutching my teeth, and stop yourself from doing it. Yeah. So it's involuntary, but it's also unconscious. When you're asleep, you're probably not going to wake yourself up. So you're going full bore. Yeah. And, you know, I try and catch myself during the day when I clench, and I find it happens a lot. What I've started doing I don't know if it was a conscious effort or not, but I've started widening my tongue between my teeth, kind of not at all times, but a lot of the time, if my mouth is shut, I have my tongue in between my teeth. I got you to prevent that. Like, in the front or on the side? Kind of all over, man. So you're just kind of constantly moving it? No, I just fatten that tongue out. Are you doing it? That's quite a talent. No, I can't do it. I'm impressed, really? With your tongue? Look. Yeah, I guess I can. And I should point out, too, that the history of my fake teeth are well chronicled on the show. And I've talked about why, but it's not just from grinding. Like, I've always bitten my fingernails, and that pressure forward on the front of your teeth is no good. And I've got shallow roots and sort of a host of things that kind of led to those teeth not working out for me. Let me ask you this. Where either of your parents proxy know? I don't care to ask at this point. I don't want to bring it up, but who cares? I mean, maybe I could, but it's not like that would satisfy me in any way. Well, the thing is, they think that it's an inherited trait, because apparently your chances of brexit are way higher if your parents are brexit's. But do I need one more thing to blame on my parents? Right. Exactly 49 years old. That's right. So just chalk it up to the fact that you're a young woman who smokes. Right? That's where you got it from. Because women are three times more likely to brexit and smokers are five times more likely to brooks right. Smokers people who drink heavily, and a lot of that they attribute to dehydration. Yeah, and here's the thing. This one is what reveals the weirdness of all this to me. So your body becomes dehydrated for whatever reason, and when you're dehydrated, a whole cascade of stressors just kind of take place in your body, right? It can trigger allergies. It can trigger inflammation. It's just not a good jam for your body to be dehydrated. The thing is, what your body does in response is make you grind your teeth. Like, they've shown that you grind your teeth more when you're dehydrated. But like I was saying, that raises the big basic question that I've never seen anybody answer. Like, why would you grind your teeth? What kind of a weird physiological response is that to things like stress? Whether emotional stress or physical stress? It's a very bizarre thing for your body to be like, oh, cue the teeth grinding. Let's get rid of some of the stress. Well, I don't know. I think you could file all of the things I'm about to say under that same weird category of why. But the same reason you might tap your foot when you're nervous or the same reason you might clench your fists if you have anxiety. I think they're just your body's responses to anxiety. They come out in these little weird physical ticks. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense, but to me there's still like you can still keep walking aback to white teeth grinding. Why clenched fish? What do we get from it? The closest I've seen to an explanation is it's a stress reliever. Right. And I get that. But again, maybe my question is where along the way in our evolutionary history, the teeth grinding become the response. Rather than blinking in an alternating sequence really fast, like, why teeth grinding? Because ultimately, grinding your teeth produces more tension and more stress concentrated in your jaw. It doesn't get rid of it, it just basically concentrates it into one painful area. Yeah, I mean, one might say that one reason is because it's a silent form of releasing that anxiety. It's something you can do in a business meeting. It's something you can do in church or wherever. You might feel really stressed out. Sure, you can't do primal scream therapy in the middle of a tense meeting, but I know what you mean. You're a man of science. You want to know the pathways of satisfaction that are happening there. I think. Yes, because that is the pathway to my satisfaction. Understanding. Should we take a break? Yes. Alright, I'm going to go grind for 30 seconds and we'll be right back. 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 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. How are you feeling now? That was great. So it was a stress reliever for you then? I'm not stressed right now. Well, except for everything in my life. That's super stressful, right? Yeah, we got a lot going on. A lot going on. We have a book that we're working on. Yeah, at times been stressful. It has. But it also has been fun. Like, I'm really proud of how it's coming together? No, it's great. It's fun, but it's like, hey, you're all working from home now with a five year old, so you have half as much time and twice as much work. Right. Enjoy it. This will be a fun process. Yeah, but no, we're coming up on the finish line is in sight. Yeah, for sure. And it's been more fun lately for me, which is good. Good, I'm glad. And what's that book called? Oh, are we plugging it? We might as well. It's called Stuff You Should Know. Colon. You always make me say that part, too. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right. And you can preorder now, and you get a little preorder gift. And if you have questions about whether or not you get a pre order gift with the audiobook or whether you can get assigned edition, we're trying to get answers to that stuff. We're new at this. Yeah, we're brand new. We're green. We're green authors. Yes. Okay. So we were talking about some of the things that caused bruxism that they've definitely shown, and again, no one has ever explained why brexit, just how brux ism, I guess. Yeah. Like any kind of sleep disturbance can do it. We already talked about anxiety and stress. That seems to be the go to for doctors. But any kind of sleep disturbance, if you are on some weird bed in a hotel that is uncomfortable to you, that might cause you to clinch up during your sleep. Weird things like that. Yeah, if your bite doesn't form symmetrically, I guess, is the word. That's me too. So that's called mal inclusion. Yeah. And there's all sorts of stuff I didn't realize this, but there's all sorts of stuff to correct it, including shortening your jaw, which I'm like, okay, we don't have hover cars, but we have surgery that can shorten somebody's jaw. I'm impressed. Right. Did you get that done? No, I considered having surgery at one point where they break your jaw and realign it and then wire it shut. Okay. But there was never a great time to do it because I have a job where I run my mouth for a living, and I don't know, it got to the point where I got to a certain age, I was like, you know what? I just don't think I want that surgery. I'll live with my misaligned jaw and my TMJ. And my TMD. Man, I hope you get the last part worked out. Thanks. So maybe it'll just magically clear up when we're not podcasting any longer. Well, you never know. I remember you talking about getting a surgery, and that kind of jogged my memory. I didn't know you ever got it, but yeah, you probably couldn't wire your jaw shut. I was just clinching just then you go, should we took work? Yes. It would be kind of weird now. People don't want to hear that for like six to eight weeks or whatever it is. Right. Man. The soup, though, yeah, it probably dropped some good weight. Drink it to a straw. Yeah, but I mean, there's some good soup out there. You also grind up a cheeseburger. Yes, you could. And soup. God. So I saw another thing, thanks to presumably Dr. Moshkovic's article, that they have connected teeth grinding to parasitic worm infections. Oh, really? Yeah. And I was like, that doesn't sound right at all. I went and looked and yeah, there's a definite, like a bunch of papers dating back to the 70s where they're like, yeah. It seems like if you have pin worms or hookworms, they directly cause teeth grinding. Weird. I know that certain psychiatric medicines and antidepressants and stuff could cause it. This one of the side effects sometimes could be comorbid with sleep apnea, which I've had people write in and say, hey, check about sleep apnea because you have dreams about breathing water. That doesn't sound fun. No. I don't think I have sleep apnea, though. And maybe I'll get tested for that one day too. Yeah. One other thing, though, about parasitic worms is it actually correlates to something else that's mentioned in this article, which is allergies can kick it off. And remember, they think that parasitic worms has to do with either an increase in allergies or a decrease in allergies or something, but they think that it's tied with allergies, so that would explain why it kicks off teeth grinding. Yeah. And I don't think we said that. You may not even realize that you're a brexit. Right, I do, because of my history. But I think a lot of people don't even realize they'renashing their teeth. In the night, you may wake up with a sore jaw and wonder what was going on. Think you might have slept on your face funny or something. Right. But a dentist can help diagnose, that for sure. If you go in and say, hey, something's going on here. Yeah. If you live alone or you're not grinding your teeth enough to wake up your partner, there's going to be like little signs or whatever, but if you don't start paying attention to it, you might not notice it unless it's a bad case. If it's a bad case, you're going to notice because your teeth are starting to crack and chip and wear down. And even if you don't notice that, your dentist is going to be like, I think you grind your teeth and that might be the first person to tip you off. Yeah, swollen gums. That could also be a little tip. Mine sort of happened all at once with the jaw. Like I've always had a bad bite and two rounds of braces did not cure it. Oh, man. So I've got sort of a it's not quite an underbite, but my bottom teeth and my top teeth are aligned instead of having an overbite. Right. And I remember distinctly when I started having these problems, like ten or twelve years ago, and I would tell Emily, I said, it feels like my lower jaw is from someone else's body. All of a sudden it just doesn't fit anymore. And that's the easiest way I could describe it. And it just kind of happened, like suddenly or you noticed it in a short time. Started noticing it over a shortage span ten or twelve years ago. I remember one time I was singing in the band for band night one time, and I had my mouth open singing, like, if I might say so, pretty powerfully, and something popped, like I felt something almost like come unhinged. And it got worse after that, so I don't know what that was all about. Was that during your famous cover of Ave Maria? Yes, it was. Oh, holy night. We better change those for our closure. So another sign that you might have brexit is if you wake up and the inside of your cheeks hurt because they've been rubbed off from getting caught up in the brexit. Yes. If you're a side sleeper, for sure, yeah, that's when it'll be particularly bad. You might also wake up with bite marks from it not like you can see it, but you can definitely feel those. I went through a little period where I was biting, like, where my canines are. I have like, vampire canines, and I don't know, it was almost like what you were just describing, like, all of a sudden my bite or my jaw or something just changed. And for like a month or two, I was biting this one part of my lip in the lower right corner, and it was happening a lot. And then finally it went away. No idea what happened, but I'm just glad it cleared up. Yeah. I'm a side sleeper, sort of side chest sleeper. And I will tuck a pillow up under my arm and face as well as the one I'm laying on with my head. And I think that has contributed to sort of misaligning my jaw. And I looked online and sure enough, there are TMJ pillows, I think, to help thwart that. Have you seen, like, some of, like, the I think Casper makes one. There's one by Avocado. They're basically like anti snoring pillows. I don't know. It lifts your head up so that your head is not going downward, which helps you keep your airway from being obstructed and hence snoring less. It actually works really well. I'm a bit of a snorer. And they've cured it totally. I know you do. We're like the Three Stooges since we're on the pillow front too. The other thing that I do is I sleep with my arm kind of under my head and under my pillow. I never know what to do with my arms as a side sleeper. And that is sometimes I wake up and my arm will be numb from just being. In a weird position, but they have these pillows now that lift you up a little bit and have a little hatch there where your arm fits through. What? I haven't gotten one of those yet, but I'm looking into it. Wow. It's amazing. The sleep product industry, and I'm not talking about mattresses, is just ridiculously dense. Sure, dense like memory foam. Yeah, I love a good memory foam. You're talking about? TMJ and TMD. From what I saw, TMJ is the name of the joint, and TMD is the name of the disorder of the stuff hanging around that joint. Is that correct? Well, I've always heard it called a TMJ disorder. They may have just shortened it to TMD. Okay. Yeah, I've always heard TMJ too. I haven't even heard it called TMJ disorder, just TMJ. But from what I can tell is everybody's been getting it wrong all these years that TMJ is the joint, not the disorder. Yeah, like, if you say I have TMJ, they're like, yeah, everyone's got a temporaromandibular joint. Jerk. What? Yeah, TMJ disorder. I think it's just become one of those things that's shorthand, but I think TMD is inflammation of that joint, and that can affect kind of your whole face. It can spread around to the other muscle and tissue. Pain, swelling. We talk about swelling a lot. Inflammation, swelling. That's sort of the key to good health, is keeping that down. That seems to be, like, what science is starting to figure out for sure. All about inflammation, isn't it? It seems like it seems like it. There's also clicking and popping that comes along with it too, which is not fun either. Not necessarily because it hurts. It's just distressing psychologically. Like, you get worried, like, oh, man, is this next time? Is my job just going to stay open? Yeah, because isn't lockjaw, like, a potential outcome of TMD? I don't know. I don't know anything about Lockjaw. Is that maybe it's like a flea circus. It's just one of those things that was made up, but everybody started to think it was. I thought lockjaw came around because tetanus or whatever. Oh, yeah, you're right. It's like an infection. I forgot about that. And I think it's not your jaw locking up. It's just a weird name for it. Oh, I thought your jaw stayed open. Well, I think it can cause muscle contractions in your jaw, so maybe that is where the name comes from, but I think it's from, like I know I'm speaking out of my butt right now, but I think it's from, like, a bacterial infection. And this is why you get tetanus shots. Yes, but that's weird that it would focus on your jaw muscles. Hey, man. Pretty specific. It's a mystery. It is a mystery. You want to take a second break and then come back and talk about kids and getting rid of this stuff too? Yes. Okay. Everyone will be right back. Hi, everybody. Buddy, 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 Smalltown 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. Okay, so everybody knows adults are super angry, not to be looked squarely in the eye, easily set off, that kind of stuff. And that explains teeth grinding in adults. Mostly that and MDMA. With kids, it's a totally different story depending on the age. And actually, kids tend to grind their teeth almost as a matter of course. They found that 50% of babies grind their teeth, but they do it typically when they're teething, which makes a lot more sense. Although grinding like your gums as the teeth are just breaking through is that it's like nails on a chalkboard to me. Like just that really sensation about that, like moist. I mean, I got to say there is something very creepy about a baby locking down on your pinky before the teeth are in. But those teeth are right behind that gum skin, right? It's very weird. Yeah, it's very creepy. It's nothing cute about it. If you're a baby, you might also grind your teeth because your top and bottoms aren't aligned as of yet. Or like allergies, like you were talking about, if they're congested. The same with adults, it could be a sign of allergies or something. Yeah. Again, allergies produce inflammation, which produces teeth grinding, which is the key to the existence of life in the universe. I think if you're older and you're not like a toddler, then it may be stress, it may be just that kid anxiety, which is super sad. Yeah, you might have trouble at school or if your family just moved or something like that, it might produce teeth grinding. It might also make you eat entire ten packs of Twix in one sitting after school. One of the two outcomes. Yeah. Not speaking from experience or anything, just speaking in generality. By the time I think they say not to worry about it too much if your kid is grinding their teeth before they're seven or eight years old, between seven and eight and twelve is usually when it'll go away once they get those big weird looking adult teeth that are still in that kid's head. Yeah. In a big old attitude to accompany it. Yeah, no kidding. But if your kid is like over seven or eight years old and they're still grinding their teeth, you might want to go see a dentist and they might say, Go see a therapist. Yeah, why not Frank, or whatever their name might be. That's right, frank the chair therapist. Sure. So because it's so prevalent and because it clears up on its own, you're not going to treat your kids breakfast. Like you were saying, if it is pretty bad, though, your doctor might be like, let's get a mouthguard. And the mouthguard might help. Probably will help. It won't keep them from doing it. But one of the other things that I saw, like if your baby does grind his or her teeth, one of the problems it can have, which is probably why you would want to treat it, is that it can keep them awake at night, which makes them cranky during the day. Right. So I can see wanting to treat teeth grinding, especially if it starts to become even remotely an issue, although you don't have to. I could see treating it if it starts affecting my quality of daytime life. Exactly. But this article is so adorable. It says there are some things you can do if your young child is grinding his or her teeth. You can draw them a warm bath before bed or read them a story. That's the most heartwarming treatment for any condition I've ever heard. Yeah, try reading a story to your kid before bed. That's novel, right? Don't try to read them a novel, though. Let me see. I think they also recommend, if you're an adult, something topical, like an analgesic, like Tiger Balm below the ears, like sort of right there outside the jaw. I don't know about that. We could give that a try, but I don't know if that'll keep me from grinding. It might just provide some relief. Have you tried warm baths for yourself before bed? Get those thighs moist. It says here to keep your tongue and the roof of your mouth. That's sort of a version of what I'm doing, but I don't see how the roof of your mouth helps so much. I think it cuts down on the chance you might bite your tongue, but it's also keeping your mind focused on what your mouth is doing at any given time. That's what I would guess. And of course, there's a lot that you could do as far as just relaxing is concerned. Like meditation helps with absolutely everything. Not drinking as much, cutting down on caffeine, not smoking. All those things are linked to it not chewing gum. So basically, you know how I think I've said recently where if you have a sleep disorder, your bed who was I telling this to? Do you remember? I don't remember either, but your bed should be just for sleep. Go to bed to sleep. Like no TV, no reading, no nothing. And then over the course of time, you'll train yourself to associate bed with sleep and you'll just be able to sleep better. The same thing goes with these other functional habits, like chewing on pencaps, chewing gum, chewing your fingernails. You have to make sure you're not doing those because your mouth is just for eating and drinking and talking and breathing and that's it not for chewing or grinding your teeth. And you can kind of train yourself and that really kind of gets to the heart of this whole thing, that it's an unconscious habit that your body has said, this is what we're going with for stress relief. So you're clearly stressed out, but you've developed a habit and you need to break the habit. And there are some other techniques that seem to work fairly well that are aimed at breaking this habit of grinding your teeth. Yes. I've always been in my nails and I used to massacre pens and pencils in school when I was like, elementary school and high school. I don't do that anymore because I literally stopped myself from doing it because I know how bad that is for my teeth. But that's when I was a kid, I didn't have the smoothest childhood and home life, so maybe that was that stuff coming out. I don't know. I wasn't stressed about work and adult relationships and stuff. I guess maybe I always just had anxiety and never dealt with in a healthy way. I tend to think puberty is a pretty stressful event too, so going through that will make you go through a few pain caps. Yeah. What's happening down there? Doc dressing me out. My thighs are all moist. Oh, no. So grind care, this thing I thought was amazing. I looked it up and I'm like, Here you go. This is what cures teeth grinding. Yeah, I went to buy one today, but I don't live in Germany, Denmark or Sweden. That's the only place you can get them still. It's what it said on the website. So grind care is a headband. They describe as a headband, but really it's these little modules that you put on either side of your temple, basically, and it's a monitor that censors whether you are about to clench your jaw or not or grind your teeth. And it shoots out a little pulse of electricity. It says, no, I don't think so, and it relaxes your jaw. I mean, as soon as I saw this, I was like, that's it. That's the answer, man. Well, hey, like listeners in Denmark, Germany or where symmetry one of these things. Sweden. Yeah. Hook Chuck up. Yeah. It's amazing that it's not available outside those three countries. It really is, because it sounds like it works. They say that it reduces grinding by 50% in the first three weeks. 80% between week six and eight. Yeah. I mean, I was sold. Maybe I can get my hands on one through the dark web, we found out. So we had this portrait made of Momo and the artist was featured in Harper's Bazaar Netherlands and she had the portrait of Momo in the magazine. Oh, that's fun. Yeah. But try to get your hands on a Harper's Bazaar Netherlands edition. You can't do it. I bet you could get one. Yummy. Was like, you know what? I'll bet this stuff. You should know, army could help. So she went on to the SYSK Facebook Army page and just asked for help and got a bunch of people who offered, which is super nice, I am happy to report. I believe we're getting a few copies. That is fantastic. Yeah, it was either that or flying to the Netherlands in the middle of a pandemic. Well, in any other time that might be a fun little adventure. It could be. But it was cool because everybody was just so happy to help too, you know? Yeah. We have the best listeners on the planet. I drove to Vegas one time with my friend Johnny Pindell to get a T shirt and drove back. Wow. What was the T shirt? If I remember correctly, johnny wanted a Iheart New York. No, I think it was it a Krispy Kreme Vegas or some sort of larger brand with the Vegas specificity Hard Rock Cafe. I don't think it was. And this was pretty like you could buy anything on the Internet at all times. Right. So he's like, hey, you want to drive to Vegas? I want to get this shirt. And I was like, sure, let's do it. Wow. How long did it take you? I mean, it's from La. It's not far. Oh, I was thinking from Atlanta. Oh, good Lord. Now it's like, wow, it must have been one hell of a shirt, even from La. That's pretty impressive. Yeah, it's a common route. Did you guys engage in a huge drug collection spree first? Oh, sure. And start seeing bats. And then blew it all on amyl nitrate and blackjack. That's right. There was one other thing we should mention, though. There is apparently something you can put in your mouth. It's got a nasty tasting liquid. I guess it's like a gel pack or something that you put between your teeth and when you bite into it when you're asleep, that thing is punctured and that you get that nastiness in your mouth. But I don't know if that would work on me because I used to paint my fingernails with deterrent when I was in elementary school. My mom. What did it taste like? It was just super bitter. Like the most bitter thing you could ever imagine. And I just chewed right through it. That's gross. It didn't stop me from what I could tell it was just a patent somebody has. It looks like a retainer, but then in the back where the molars are, there's packets and they suggested sea water or hot sauce. And I was like, Jeez, that seems like it will wake you up. Apparently that's the point. I guess you just annoy yourself and not grinding your teeth any longer because you just want to get some sleep. So what do you think, Chuck? Did this cure you? Nah. What's it going to take? I don't know. I'm not having that surgery. And I don't like wearing the mouth guard. I wear the mouthguard sometimes when I know that I know for sure. I'm going through a particularly stressful period, but it's just not comfortable. No one wants to wear those things. Well, if you are listening to us, in Germany, Denmark or Sweden, hit Chuck up so he can get a grind care from you. That's right. And in the meantime, if you want to know more about teeth grinding, go check out the article written by Jordan Moskovich called I can't remember what it's called, but anyway, just look up Jordan Moskovic. I don't think there's more than one of them running around. And there's other stuff all over the internet, too. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. By the way, I bet you there are at least ten dentists in New York City named Doctor Jordan Muskovich. You think so? Sure. Okay. Just sounds like a dental name. You know, my first dentist's name was Dr. Tuggle. That is a really great name in general. Yeah, Dr. Tuggle, that's a great name for like a cat, too. Yeah. One time I was in the airport. This is when we had our dog Buckley, and we called him Buckles a lot. And I was in the airport and Delta was paging someone at the Little when you check in there and they said, Paging Mr. Buckles, mr. Buckles, can you come to the desk? That's amazing. It just killed me. I immediately called him Lee. I was like, they're paging, Mr. Buckles. Yeah. All right, I'm going to call this something that we got wrong, sort of you got wrong on the heroin podcast. And we heard from enough people about this that I thought it bore an email or a read. Hey, guys, as a former opiate addict, now almost ten years clean with lots of education and experience in this area, I'd like to gently suggest that a correction be noted on your recent very good episode on heroin. And discussing the withdrawal detox period, josh stated that if an addict were to get through that miserable week of suffering, then he or she would be essentially over the addiction. While it's true the acute phase of heroin withdrawal lasts about a week, addiction as a disorder far more complex and insidious and long term than physical dependency, which is only one aspect that a week's worth of detox can cure, a secondary kind of withdrawal can occur. Known as post acute withdrawal syndrome, pause, in which the brain has to sort of recalibrate and heal from protracted dopamine. Imbalances, pause can trigger episodes of anxiety and profound depression, which can even lead a recovering addict right back into active addiction. Moreover, addiction rarely happens in a vacuum. Most addicts need long term support, therapy and coaching. You weren't suggesting that's not the case, by the way, right? To redevelop or develop coping skills that will enable him or her to live a drug free life. But recovery from addiction is absolutely achievable. It's not short or as simple as a few days of nausea, aches and diarrhea. Thanks for all you do. That is from Jason in San Antonio. Nice. Thanks a lot, Jason. Absolutely, Chuck. Thank you for bailing me out on that. It's not what I meant, but I definitely should have been a lot clearer than I was. Well, we should have talked about pause because that's a big deal. We heard from a bunch of people talking about pause, but boy, we heard from a lot of people that were current and former addicts. It was more so than our other drug podcast. It was really pretty enlightening and heartening and disheartening all at once. Yeah, I mean, it really kind of got across just how widespread the opioid crisis is, for sure. Well, thanks to everybody who wrote in and hang in there. To everybody who's still struggling with addiction of any kind. And thanks a lot. Jason from Santa Fe or San Antonio. San Antonio. If you want to get in touch with us, like Jason did, you can send us an email, 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. For more podcasts My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. 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 all auto 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." | |
410e10ec-53a3-11e8-bdec-5f21fcba678c | What was the Tunguska event? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-was-the-tunguska-event | In 1908, the most powerful meteoroid explosion in recorded history happened over a remote area of Siberia. But the weird thing is there was no impact crater and no asteroid to be found – so was it an asteroid? (Yes.) | In 1908, the most powerful meteoroid explosion in recorded history happened over a remote area of Siberia. But the weird thing is there was no impact crater and no asteroid to be found – so was it an asteroid? (Yes.) | Thu, 03 Jan 2019 15:32:57 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=15, tm_min=32, tm_sec=57, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=3, tm_isdst=0) | 40359890 | 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, 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 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 howstafworkscom? Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. The trio known as Stuff you should Know. The trio Jerry came to our live show. I know I'm still a little giddy and in amazement. It's been a while, Jersey. I know it's not personal, but remember she used to actually go on tour with us before she got a family? Before she checked out. Yeah, she loved other people more than us. I'd also like to point out the fact that Jerry is writhing in discomfort right now. Chuck. Yeah. You are really sticking a tour. No, she's fine. Well, it was a great show. Probably because Jerry was there and everybody well, I guess you would have heard it by now because these are coming out after Christmas. Time Warp. Yeah. Let's do the time warp dance. Chuck and everybody's like, gee, she would be nice to see some of the things you're talking about, which you can do maybe next year. You mean in person? Yeah. You want to do another live Christmas show? Sure. Yeah, I'm done with that. We paid money for Christmas decorations. We did not feel like we need to reuse those. Yeah. Hopefully everybody has heard it already, and now they're like, yes, I know exactly what these guys are talking about, and I'm enjoying this horribly awkward intro diversion. It's not awkward. Speaking of intro diversions, Chuck, I want to mention two things. The Stuff Network has a ton of really good shows. Yes. And there's one that I was on recently called behind the Bastards. I was on a two parter. Nice. It was nice. So Robert Evans is the host, and he basically just does tons of research about some of the worst human beings who have ever lived, many of whom are celebrated in some quarters, and he just kind of tears them down to size. Did you do a show on me? No, you're just celebrated. There's no tearing you down. Oh, I'm sure people tear me down. I don't care. The ones that I sat in on were based on scientific racism. Wow. The history of scientific racism and how it's been used to justify, like, colonialism and all sorts of stuff. And the level of research this cat does is astounding. Yeah, it's a good show. It is. It's a great show. So I was on that. But that's maybe a good primer. But really, any behind the Bastards would be a great place to start. Yes, that show was and I don't want to say surprising success because Robert is awesome, but I think everyone was just like, wow, look at this thing. Look at them go. Look at them go. And we've got another new show, actually, from our pals that start to blow your mind. Joe and Robert. Yes. They just launched a show called Invention. Yeah. I don't remember if they went with the exclamation point or not, but it's just awesome, I think. No, but that's their album art is so cool. It's really great. It's just a cool maze where you're just waiting for a minotaur to leap out. Yeah. And for the people that are like, album art what are you talking about? Did they record an LP? Little industry lingo, everybody. The little icons that you see on your podcast players, it's called album art in the industry for some reason. Yeah, I still haven't figured that one out. I think it's just a holdover from itunes days, I guess. But it would be funny if they called it, like, the Casingl Art. That would be pretty funny, actually. Still never bought a Casing in my life. Oh, I have. Yeah. I don't remember what they were, but I have. So anyway, go check out Invention. You're going to love it. If you're A step to blow your Mind fan, it's Joe and Robert doing their thing, but on different topics. You're just going to love it. And then if you're not A step to blow your Mind fan, well, you're welcome for introducing you to two awesome podcasts at once. Yeah, those guys are great. Okay, let's talk about our own thing. Okay, let's do our own stuff. Yeah, what about us? So we're talking let's get in the way back machine. And we need to put on our high temperature protective suits that we use to hang out on volcanoes sometimes. And also our low temperature protective suits are in the back. They are. We don't need them for this one. Well, what day are we going to? We're going to june 30. Temperature is probably about 70 deg, actually, early in the morning. We're going to get there around 07:00 A.m. To give ourselves some time to get set up. But 07:00 A.m. On June 19 or eight in the Russian wilderness around the Pad Camino Tonguska, which means the Stony tongueska river, it was probably about 50 deg. Okay. Yeah. That is like choice summertime weather for the siberian plateau. Yeah. And this place is gorgeous. The Stony Tonguska River is a nice, wide, meandering, slow river. And it's named Stony because the bottom is all beautiful pebbles and its banks are not really well defined. It just kind of goes into the land and swamp land, and then suddenly the land rises upward into ridges with huge, tall evergreens everywhere. It's just gorgeous. I love it here. You know what we call those rocks in the south? Skipping rocks. They are skipping rocks. They call them that in Russia, too. Oh, really? Yeah. Skavinsky rock. Emily the other day was like, I wish I could skip rocks. And I was like, Dude, you just got to get the right rocks. That's really the key. I mean, sure, there's techniques in the wrist and everything, but it really is the rock. Although there are people who can skip just about any rock. You can hand them. Well, I'm a pretty good skipper, but you still need those good little smooth little river rocks. It's true. It makes it way easier, for sure. Yeah. So in this beautiful place, I also failed to mention, there's lots of reindeer wandering around, and they're not wild. They're actually being hurted by the Avenki people, also known as the Tungus, who are basically nomadic reindeer herders that live in the area. Yeah, these are work and deer. Right. So everything's pretty idyllic and sweet and nice. It's the Siberian summer, and then all of a sudden, there's a streak of cloud across the sky, a fireball at the tip, it looks like about a spear. And then all of a sudden, this is 07:17, a.m. Local time. All of a sudden, that fireball disappears, and then a huge flash of light explodes in the sky. And that's followed very quickly by a huge burst of heat. And then after that is followed by a huge shock wave. And a massive explosion has just taken place, the likes of which have never been seen in recorded human history. Yeah. Where are we? Are we dead now? No, we're in our protective bubble. Since we're actually visiting from another time. We're still in this time, we're just kind of visiting, as in a movie. I've never really quite wrapped my head around the physics of it, but we're safe. Okay, good. We're not dead. Now, if Jerry killed us while we were paying attention to the tonguesco blast in this life, we would be dead. Yeah. When you talk about explosions, depending on where you look, it was something in the order of 100 to 10 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. I did the math. I saw 200 to 2000 times more powerful. Yes, man, that's the thing when you're talking about explosions in range. But the thing is, the Hiroshima bomb was 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNT yield. Yeah, it was a big explosion. So much so and we'll get to more details, but supposedly you could see the light from this thing as far away as London. Yeah. There was a lot of worldwide effects that happened from it. Yeah. So the Hiroshima one was 15 kilotons. This is an estimated three to 30 megatons million tons of TNT. Just an astoundingly greater explosive force. And it just happened out of the blue, literally out of the clear blue sky on this day on June 30. Yeah, that's right. And thankfully, it's not a very populated area, but there are people there, and there are native tribes, people that make their way there, and they live in huts and they raise those reindeer. And while there weren't a lot of people there, it was an awful thing if you lived in the area. Some people died of shock and heart attacks. Reindeer died, HUDs were leveled. It really kind of wiped out the way of life for these people. Yeah, big time. Because if you live in Siberia, you're spending your summer, like, preparing for the winter. And this blast, like, just leveled their supplies. The reindeer that they depend on, it had a huge impact on them. And some people did die, although I think no one died directly, like being blown to bits by the blast. It was like elderly people had heart attacks and things like that. Yeah. And it was a very interesting pattern that emerged here. So these trees were flattened out in a radial pattern that pointed away from the center of this explosion over in the area. This is about close to 775 sq. Mi, which is a huge explosion. There were trees that remain standing, and this is really interesting, but there were no branches, no leaves, no needles or anything. They were just basically the stem and the trunk of the trees bear standing straight up. Yeah. And those trees were right in the middle of the radio blast pattern. Yeah. And the fact that they were basically just stripped bare means that it was a very huge but super fast impact that blasted all those branches off without affecting the tree itself. Yeah. So this blast, this explosion, this very hot, fast explosion actually lit the trees on fire from the temperature that formed the leading edge of the explosion. And then the shockwave that followed that moved the air actually put the fire out. So they were like flash charged and then immediately extinguished. Yeah. There's one quote here, because this is not a lot of direct accounts, but they do have a few, and we'll talk about how in a minute, but this is one hot wind blew past us. The ground and all the huts trembled, causing the sod packing to fall from the ceilings. The glass was blasted out of the window frames. Scary moment. Yeah. No, I can't even imagine. Supposedly, the Avencki people believe that their god ugdi, who is, I think, the god of either lightning or fire or thunder, one of those. I've seen different accounts of it. They assumed so imagine this. Like, you're the only people that you're the only people are used to reindeer herding, tribes, people who live in the area, and this happens. You have no scientific frame of reference for it, and you believe your God came to punish you, wipe out all of your stores and all of your reindeer and everything, and then that's just what you had to live with because you were in such a remote area. No one knew about this. No one knew that this happened for a very long time. Actually, I think some of the local papers began to report it by the end of the summer. But the larger world had no real idea what had happened, even though there were effects worldwide. But no one traced it back to this moment in Siberia for decades, at least a full decade, I think, actually. Two. Yeah. And it wasn't like the scientific community just descended upon this place ever, really. And we'll talk about some of the superstars of particularly this one man that went and investigated. But that's one of the reasons that we still don't know exactly what happened. We have a pretty good idea, which will save for later, but this was a singular event. It's not the kind of thing that we could say, well, this is like that other thing that happened. Right, exactly. Yes. There's nothing like although they think that there was at least one other thing that happened. Like, it in the 20th century, actually. Now two things have happened that are similar to it. So we're kind of dancing around it a little bit. But let me tell you let me point out one thing that has happened. Even though this is considered far and away the largest cosmic, I guess, explosion that we have ever recorded, there was something else that happened in Brazil, in the carousel, I think I'm saying that right. River. Sure. Where there was a very similar event. Huge explosion in the sky, scared the bejesus out of the indigenous tribes living there, burned a significant portion of the Amazon for a full month. And there was a Jesuit missionary who came along five days after and got a lot of first hand accounts from that one, but they think it was similar, but much smaller than tangoska. Yeah. And the mystery of this whole thing has led to some weird theories that will hit on later. Some of them are, of course, just like aliens and beasts and things like that, which is we obviously know that's not the case, but it still remains somewhat of a mystery after 100 plus years. Right. And then so there's one other that this wasn't in recorded history, as far as we consider recorded history, typically. But there is evidence that this happened one other time, and then this time, people weren't so lucky. Something like about 3500 years ago, around the Dead Sea, there was a large area, I think about 500 km\u00b2 wide, which is a pretty significant amount of land that was just wiped bear of life, including humans living in the area at the time, and that it was an explosion from the sky and it wiped out one village in particular called tall El Hamam. And get this, Chuck, you know what, tall el Hamam was also called at this time 3500 years ago. No. Sodom. Oh, interesting. So they think that this is where the legend of sodom being wiped out comes from, that it was actually an explosion much like tonguska. And they found shards of like pottery from the time that the outsides have been turned to glass, some of the particles inside have been gasified. And for this to have happened without doing anything more to the pottery means that it happened in an instant and that the air temperature was suddenly about 4000 degrees Fahrenheit. Amazing. And the other thing that happened too. And this I think also kind of bolstered the sodom legend was that a lot of the dead sea salts were pushed across the land over this huge amount of land and took like what was once fertile and turned it into like dead sterile land because it was salted and it took something like 600 years for the area to recover from that. Wow. Isn't that fascinating? It sure is. Let's take a break because I think you can tell I'm getting a little worked up here. Indeed. All right, well, we'll be right back, everybody, with more amazingness. 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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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 USbased 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 L-I-F-E stuff. For 25% off your first year, LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, dude. So from the outset, some scientific minded types were like, well, I'm hearing reports of this weird event that happened in the tongueska area and it sounds to me a lot like a meteorite. So I'm going to go check out the whole thing and try to find this meteorite. Yeah, I mean, that was one of the early theories. There were seismographs that did register some activity. So some people thought it was an earthquake at first. Yeah, it lit up the sky and created this massive dust plume. So that's where people in London and Germany, they said that they could read newspapers at midnight even that far away. So it was causing a little bit of commotion in the scientific community. And still, consider this was 19 eight. It's hard for word to get around. So you can hardly blame people that this event happen kind of in the middle of nowhere in it didn't exactly shake the world. But there was one man, and this was later on, his name was Leonid Cubic and he was a scientist. He had a pretty interesting life and career. He was born in 1883 in Estonia, which was later part of the Soviet Union. He studied math and he studied science. He fought in both World War One and World War Two, which is really interesting cause I'm curious about the number of people who are unfortunate enough to experience both those wars. There are probably a lot, not a ton. I mean, if you do the math, like, you would have had to be pretty young and then pretty old. I got you. Not that many to have fought in both of these. Right. But in 21, he had the task of examining meteorites within the Soviet Union. And that's where I got the impression that the first sort of scientific fire was lit under his butt to get into studying meteorites. Yeah, well, no, he was already studying meteorites and he read some of those local press clippings that had been written like ten or twelve years before and he kind of put piece together like, oh, this sounds a lot like a meteorite impact. My job is already to go find meteorites because when they strike the ground, they have all this rich mineral ore with them. So I'm going to go find it and the government can come mine it and that's my job. So if Leonard Kulak had not bred some of these accounts and then traveled to the area, we would probably not have anywhere near the kind of understanding or awareness of the impact that we have today. Yeah. Was that succinct enough for you? Yes, I think so. Okay, good. So, like I was saying, in 1921, he was given the task of studying meteorites in the Soviet Union. And so by the time 1927 rolls around, he's got a pretty good knowledge bed that he's sleeping on every night. All right. So he makes, eventually, three trips here to try and study things. The first one, unfortunately, he didn't even find the site because there was poor mapping going on. He was really sort of charting new territory, exploring this area, and was just getting help from anyone he could. A lot of people were scared to go there because they thought it was a judgment from the gods. Yeah. Ogdie. Yeah. So it was slow going. So that first expedition in 1027 was basically to just say, hey, I think I know where this actually happened. Like, that's how rudimentary things were back then. Yeah. So was it the first expedition in 1927 he didn't make it in? Did he also make it the same year, or was it a different year? Did he also make it back there the same year? Yeah. Well, I saw that he went in 27, 28, and 29. Okay. So whatever time he made it in there, he made it in there at least once the first time. And he knew pretty much right off the bat that he had found the site because all around there were trees that were laying on their sides, but they were all pointing in the same direction, which you just don't see very often. Yeah, for sure. And then at the center, those trees standing straight up with nothing, there was another pretty good indication. Yeah. So the thing about Leonard Kulik is that he was very frustrated. Like, again, he was a meteor hunter. This is his thing. So he fully expected to find an impact crater and hopefully the meteorite that had all sorts of iron or whatever, or it bore for him to go back and tell everybody about, but he couldn't. He could not find this. He did find those trees standing upright at the center that indicated that the reason they weren't blown over was because the force had blown directly down on top of them. So he knew he'd found the center, but there was no sign of an impact crater. And he suspected that there was a swamp in the south, just south of the place where the trees still stood that was hiding the impact crater and the meteorite itself. And I think that's kind of like what he went to his grave believing that he just could never find it because the swamp had basically swallowed it up. Yeah. Which you can't blame the guy in the 1920s. Sure, it was a pretty decent idea because he and again, he had no idea that well, should we go ahead and say what people think happened? Oh, okay. All right, let's do it. Yeah. He had no idea that a meteor could explode pre impact, which is basically what most people think happened now. Yes, he died in a Nazi prison camp in World War II, so he would not have had the benefit of that knowledge. That came later on. I think starting in the 50s, they started to really suspect that. Yeah, but at the time when he came back and said, this is definitely like look at these pictures. An explosion unlike the kind that we are even remotely capable of creating here on Earth. So therefore a natural explosion took place here. I have photographic evidence here. I've interviewed locals who were there. So firsthand accounts of the experience, I've documented all this stuff and I cannot find the meteorite or the impact crater. There's the sum total of all the info that I can provide, and some people took that and pieced it together to mean that, well, maybe it was a comet impact then because comets are largely icy, they're rocky, and they have minerals and stuff as well, but they're not like an asteroid or meteoroid where they're made mostly of rock or metal. They're made mostly of ice. So when it does explode, it would just kind of evaporate and it might have the same kind of impact, but it would also not leave a crater or any real remnants of itself behind. So for a very long time, and among some quarters, that still explains the tongueska event that it was a comet impact rather than a meteor. Yeah, it's like that riddle. Yeah. The one where the guy's hanging and there's a puddle of water. Yeah, that's it. I love that one. Culic was like, there's a big puddle of water here. Actually, he thought the swamp swallowed it, but that didn't explain it. And Culic, I will say, although I feel bad for the guy, that he died well, obviously he died in prison camp. That's the worst thing. But that he died not really getting to the bottom of this, but he kind of kept that drumbeat going for people to study this, took those great photographs, interviewed locals and really did a lot of the groundwork for other people later to build on. Yeah, if he hadn't taken this expedition on himself and really gone in and piece together the first bits of evidence we had fairly shortly I mean, what, this is 1927, and the thing happened in 19 eight. So within 20 years, he really went and documented it heading up. And for his work, we would probably not have any kind of anything like the understanding that we have today. And who knows, it might have been lost to history as well, too, maybe. Although I doubt it because you can still see evidence of this today, which is pretty amazing. It is for sure. Like the fact that you can still find trees laying on their sides. Right. Or laying on the ground. Yeah. I mean, like, the forest has grown up around it, but that stuff is still there in some places. I would love to see that in conversion. Yeah, of course. In person, I would definitely go in the summer for those two weeks between late June and mid July, right before winter sets in, late July. And I should also say, yes, I just saw it in the wayback machine, but you know what I mean. Yeah. And this was like it's still not a populated area, so it's not like things have built up around it. It's still largely the same as it was back in 19 eight. Yeah. There's a little town called Vanavara, and at the time, it was basically a trading post. And it's not much bigger now. It's really small. They have an airport which is basically a strip of concrete that has been cleared, and you can get in and out of it, but it's not an easy place to get to. It requires helicopters, horseback, some people ride reindeer in on some of it. A lot of hiking, there's a lot of bears, there's a lot of wolves. But the blast site, the epicenter, is preserved in a nature preserve in Siberia. So you could conceivably go study it. And people do. I think the most recent expedition was in 2013. They're still trying to get to the bottom of it. Yeah. He took every available mode of transportation he could to get there. It took him days and days and days over these expeditions to reach it. And he was a brave dude and very determined. So Cubic found a couple of other things. He found that the ground around the epicenter was actually scrunched up like a rug from the blast, which must have been astounding to see on a massive scale. But he also saw that there were holes, really like strange circular holes that were just a few yards deep, but up to 50 or 100ft in diameter. And he had no idea what he was looking at. He knew that it must have something to do with the explosion, but it's just peculiar he hadn't seen those before. There was nothing in the literature to explain what he was looking at. And so some of the stuff that he documented, it was great documentation. And he was a very brave person for going and undertaking this expedition. But he also laid the groundwork for basically everybody with a theory to come along and suggest that their theory was what explains the tongueska event. And like you kind of referred to earlier, some of them are kind of out there. So let's take a little bit of break and we're going to come back and get into some explanations for the tongueska event, including the. Real one. 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. 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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, Charles, you've heard of this before, right? Yeah. So did you grow up with this? Is just one of the things you were aware of as a kid? No, it's something that I became aware of with the Internet. I think I heard about it from my Time Life. Unsolved Mysteries books. Oh, sure. Which just God bless those things, the set of those books, the Uncle John's bathroom readers, and David Letterman Top ten list from the probably are the three things that shape my brain more than anything else. Yeah, it says a lot. Mad magazine, too. You got to throw Mad. Oh, yeah. I can't forget Mad. Sorry. Thank you for saving me on that. Yeah. So here's some of the theories that have kind of come and gone over the years. As we said, that Q looks that this meteor was swallowed up by the swamp south of the impact zone. Other people suggested that it was lake Chico in Italy and that they were just off by their mapping skills were poor and so this was the actual impact crater and it is now a lake. But now we think that they just didn't draw maps well back then because that wasn't on previous maps and everyone's like, but now it's here, so that's what it is. Right? Yeah. Like you're saying it was just so remote and people weren't drawing maps of it that it just hadn't been bothered to be put on. Exactly. Which I totally believe. Are there people that still believe it was comment? Yes, there are. Really? Yeah. Well, let me explain why. There have been surveys of the site that are looking for traces of things that would be telltale signs that it was definitely a meteor. Like there are different kinds of meteors, but most meteors are either really stony, rocky it's basically like a chunk of Earth, or it's like super metallic. It's basically like a big ball of metal or whatever and there's like different it's a spectrum. Right. It can fall anywhere in between those totally rocky and totally metallic. But the stuff aboard are going to be basically the same things. It's just the concentration of them. But one thing that you would find on like a meteorite is something like iridium or osmium. There are things you would find in Earth, but you have to go to the center of the Earth to find them. They're not on the surface. So if you find those things on the surface of Earth, it strongly suggests that a meteorite impacted Earth. Well, they've found not much osmium or iridium around the tongueska site. So they think that actually is kind of a thing that it suggests that maybe actually it was a comet because a comet would have those things, but just not in high concentration because it would mostly be a big ball of ice. Right. So that's kind of kept the comet thing alive as recently as just the last few years. Yeah. Well, they did surveys in the they did find space dust is probably the best way to say it. They did. It's true. Yeah. So they found what was extraterrestrial rock dust. They found it in the area, they found it in the soil. And again, it does match the date of the event. That to me means that the leading theory is probably correct, which is that a meteor exploded about 3 miles above land, which basically just blew it to dust and that's why there aren't huge chunks of rock laying everywhere. Yeah. So that's the predominant theory right now is that it was a meteor that blew up, like you said, I think something like half a dozen miles over the surface of the Earth in the atmosphere. And it blew up with such force that not only did it caused the ground to buckle and bend and turn into like a rug and blow 80 million trees down over a couple of hundred square miles. It also just blew itself and any evidence of itself just into smithereens, into dust. And so that dust layer is the only remnants of it left. But the problem is they didn't know how that could happen. If you put all the evidence together, that's the picture it painted. But at the time and until very recently, science is like, we don't know how something like that would happen. It seems like that is what happened. But how would that even happen? Yeah, and it explains the fireball in the sky, because that's what you would expect to see when a meteor is trucking toward the Earth. This thing was about 120ft or larger in diameter, was going about 33,000 miles an hour. And it was hot, like super hot because of friction. Right. So the thing this huge rock, and they got all those numbers just basically reverse engineering the force of the explosion. Right? Yeah. So that rock that's traveling so fast, what did you say, like 34,000 miles an hour or something like that? Yeah, I said 33, but give or take 1000 miles. All right. Who cares? At that point, right, when it hits the atmosphere, it suddenly met with that friction and gravity and drag and everything, and that these forces acting on it all of a sudden just destabilize it. And that the pressure that's building up at the front of this huge rock is different by so much to the pressure behind it that the differential just destabilizes this rock. And because it's traveling so fast and has so much energy and there's so much heat associated with it, it doesn't just break up, it blows up. Yeah. What I'm surprised about it is that this hasn't happened more and it must just be a very specific combination of size and speed and heat. But I'm surprised that that doesn't happen more, that combination. Well, some people are worried that it could happen more. Like, one of the predictions I saw is that a Tangusco like event, we could expect it to happen over Earth maybe once every 100 to 300 years. Yeah, but we haven't seen that. That hasn't played out right. No, but somebody who wrote an article I read pointed out there's not some schedule that rocks follow when they're coming into Earth's atmosphere. This is not how things work. So we hope it's like that, but it's probably much less predictable than that. And we actually did a survey called Project Space Guard, I think, where we surveyed all of the near Earth rocks, the big ones, and we found that none of the big ones are probably going to come near us anytime soon. But we found also that we had trouble seeing the small ones. And the small ones could still create like a tonguska event, which, I mean, like you said, it happened over a pretty depopulated area and it still affected humans. If it happened over like a city, a major city, it would be just lights out for the entire city. So the chances are pretty low that it would happen over a populated area just by virtue of the fact that we tend to populate in dense clusters while leaving also huge portions of the Earth, especially the oceans, unpopulated. But if it did happen over a populated area, it would be really bad. Yes. I mean, they make movies about like fictional movies about that stuff. Right, exactly. So hopefully it doesn't happen. But it could is the point. Yes. And I always wonder, like, man, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened over, like, a big city. But like, you said that we always think like others, just people everywhere, but that's not the case. Oh, like how our settlements are. Yeah. Like when you think about how large the Earth is compared to where the people are, we're not everywhere. Water is everywhere, right? No, it's true. I think in 2013, Chuck, there was the Chelibinsk meteor. Do you remember that? Over Russia? I don't remember that. It was very well documented because everybody has a video tape camera on their cell phone these days. And there was a meteor that basically did the same thing in Tonguesca, except it was far smaller. It was something like 2000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. Now that doesn't sound right. 30 times more powerful. I'm sorry. Well, Tonguska was up to 2000 times more powerful, but it blew the windows out of places, it knocked people down, and it really caught people's attention, saying like, hey, everybody, this is a real thing that this can happen. And if a huge one happens over a population center, then we will be in trouble. So I think it kind of caught the attention of the scientific community that this is something we need to keep an eye on, literally. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Hopefully we will. I'm glad it's not up to me. You got anything else? I got nothing else. All right, well, if you want to know more about the tongueska event, type that word in the search bar of your favorite search engine and it will bring up all sorts of interesting stuff. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this letter from a teacher. We love these. Hey, guys. I'm writing to thank you for helping me teach my AP Psychology course. I have a degree in history and had taught just United States history and world history up until last year. But I wanted to thank you guys for helping me teach my own class. Needless to say, I have a lot of self teaching to do in order to prepare. And years of listening to stuff you should know is prepare me in a way that I was not expecting. As I taught the class, I found myself referencing knowledge I picked up from you guys, including how to train a pigeon. Stockholm syndrome. Umami, interesting. And the effects of bath salts on the brain. To me, it also seemed at least once a class, I would utter the words, I listened to this podcast once and then dive into something like Feral Children and how that gives insight into development or how a social panic works. Even got a few students to listen. Just a few. Nice. Thank you for that. All that's to say, thank you so much for what you guys do. You've given me confidence in the classroom in a constant stream of entertainment that isn't mind numbing. And that is from Michael Jacobs from Fayetteville, Arkansas. And he came and saw us in St. Louis in May, which is where he's from. Cool. And he said, Joshua actually ran into my sister on the street right before the show. I ran into a few people at St. Louis, like, more than usual, and everybody was super friendly. Well, this was Samantha, so we're giving her a shout out. Hey, Samantha. So Samantha, michael. Michael's sister. Thank all you guys and ladies for the support. Yeah, thank you, everybody who came out to that show and actually all of our shows. We appreciate all of you for it. Heck, yeah. Actually, you can come out to our other shows. We got some coming up. You can go to Sysklive.com to find out where to see us all over the map in January. And if you want to get in touch with us, follow us on Social. Just go to Stuffieshano.com and you can find all the links there. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.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 play time, give epic bell rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. 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42411acc-53a3-11e8-bdec-93126e104068 | Special Effects: A Short History | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/special-effects-a-short-history | Special effects have been around since the first movies. In fact, the techniques the earliest filmmakers created are still around today, we just use computers to do them faster and cheaper. Put on your beret and get ready for SYSK film class. | Special effects have been around since the first movies. In fact, the techniques the earliest filmmakers created are still around today, we just use computers to do them faster and cheaper. Put on your beret and get ready for SYSK film class. | Thu, 12 Sep 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=255, tm_isdst=0) | 53055404 | 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, 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 Kilgara 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. Hello, stuff you should Know listeners, if you want to come see us live, you've only got a couple of more cities this year that still have tickets, and that is Orlando and New Orleans. Yeah, we'll be in Orlando on October 9 at the Plaza Live, and we'll be in New Orleans at the Civic Theater the following night, October 10. And friends, like Chuck said, you better go get your tickets. Go to sysklive.com for info and ticket links and everything you need to come see us. 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 wearing his Stone Temple Pilots hat. And there's Jerry over there. She's not wearing any hats. She's got really cool hair. It's non Stone Temple pilots. It is too. I've seen the Stone Temple Pilots hats before. And that's why it is STP, because I bought two hats at AutoZone yesterday. I have a champion spark plug hat. Yeah, they have good hats. They really do. I was getting a battery and I was like, I want these two hats. It was a good year. Akron, Ohio. Goodyear hat. Nice. Which is where Emily's from. Sure, I wanted that. And then I saw this STP hat. Stone Temple Pilots. But I would get a champion spark plug hat, too. That's great. Okay, I'll let you borrow mine anytime you want. Just got to give it back. I don't know if I've ever seen you in a baseball cap. It's a weird jam, is it not what you want to see. I've seen you in shorts like twice in twelve years. I keep the legs covered. I think one of them was when you came over to borrow my lawnmower. I remember that. Yeah, like nine years ago. Sure. I've got to mow the lawn sometimes. Now things have changed. You can buy a lawnmower. Yeah. Where we're at now, we can afford lawn mowers. I can wear shorts, too. I actually have one of those plug in lawnmowers. I have a battery power lawn mower. Do you? Look at us stupid liberal hippies. Well, mine is battery powered, too, but you have to plug it in and charge it. Yeah. What kind do you have? I have the green one. Yeah, I think they're all green. No, there's a blue one. Oh, I've got the green one, too. The sun Joe? No, but I have a Sunjo pressure washerly. Is it battery operated? No, you plug that in. I was going to say, I bet it just goes like tinkles out water. But they do make plug in lawn mowers like, it's not a battery. You just have a cord that you walk around and run over with your lawmark. I guess they're called electric. Sure. But yeah, I got the battery because I have so little grass now, and we may be done period with grass. Oh, yeah, that's right. You're zero escaping. Well, we're definitely doing the front, but the back, it just got smaller and smaller. And my last lawnmower broke, so I was paying a guy to come cut it. I was like, Why am I paying this guy to cut to do a seven minute mow? There's just that one blade of grass that sees the lawnmower. Companies like Mother. Yes. But then I went and got the battery. Because lawnmowers are terrible for the environment. Yeah, that's why I got it. They're one of the worst polluters. We're both also aware that we are charging our battery powered lawn mowers with coal fired power. Yes, we understand that. We know. We're talking about exhaust fans. I don't even need one. I live in a condo. But I'm so dissatisfied with the landscapers that take care of the condo that I bought. Yes. I bought a lawnmower just to do the little patch out in front of our buildings. Poor Momo doesn't get long grass against her junk when she's pottying. This is a great way to start this episode. So we're talking special effects. Obvious. This has been lawn talk. We're talking special effects. Chuck yes, movie special effects. Which we could do ten parts on this. This is kind of a big summation, because movie special effects can be everything from the movie that you walk out of saying, oh, that movie had no special effects, when in fact it did. Yeah. Wrong. Yeah. Just tiny little things that you may not even notice to. Things that are almost whole. Cloth special effects. Like sky captain in the world of tomorrow. Yeah. Or SinCity. Yeah, I like both of those. Yes. Did you know CinCin City? Every single bit of the set was CGI. Yeah. And that sky captain did it first. Yeah. Year before. Yeah, every bit of that. It was a green screen movie. I never saw it. Was it good? It was interesting. Like, the look of it was amazing and very much ahead of its time. Like real Art deco, right? Yeah, for sure. I call it black and white, but it wasn't. It was just this really washed out color. But it looked awesome and was not bad. Thanks. I'll have to check it out. And I think the dudes that made that kind of quit making movies after that it's a very unique story. Have you ever seen this has nothing to do with anything, but have you seen the changeling, George? Sure. Oh, my God. Did you just see that? Yes. And I have to tell you, I don't think I've ever gotten chills more frequently from a movie than I did with that one. It is great. It's a genuinely scary ghost story. It is wonderful. Yes. I miss Georgie. Scott, too. Yeah. He's a good actor. And I don't remember who the female lead was in there, but she was great, too. It's been a while. I haven't seen it in many years. So, anyway, special effects. Let's try this again. We're going to get derailed like every 5 seconds. Okay. Effects are divided and this is by the grab. Surrey helped us out with this edge, a big movie guy and horror movie Sci-Fi guy. Sure. So he probably enjoyed writing this one up. They are divided into three general categories and this all has to do with where the effect is happening. It can be practical, which is in front of the camera. And that means it's a physical thing that's happening. I think that's what most people think of when they think of special effects. You think? Sure. Okay. By most people I mean me incamera effects that happen inside the camera and then post production effects. And many times you're using one or all three of these. Right. So with practical effects, it's things like makeup and prosthetics. Like Ed uses the example of David Lynch's the Elephant Man. Like the prosthetic makeup that was used to turn John Hurt heard. Or John herd. Which one? Herd into Joseph Merrick. Yes. That's a special effect. An explosion on set, that's a special effect. A blood packet to make it look like somebody just got shot in the chest. A squib. That's a special effect. All three of those are practical effects. They're actually happening in the physical world in front of you on set, being captured on film. That's a practical special effect. Yeah. And the other one I wanted to mention there that you might not think of is stuff like if there is a fire, like a fireplace in a scene and then you flip the camera around to show the people and you see that fire shimmering on the wall. That's a practical effect. Too little things like that. It's a lighting effect. Yeah. Or it's a fire. Those aren't real fires. I mean, it's real fire. Somebody should put that out. But it's not like someone lights a bunch of wood. They put fake wood and they have these fire bars. It's like what you have under your grill, basically. Right. They hide those and then that's your fire. Sure. Because it has to look perfect. You can't just chance somebody not being able to start a fire or looking wonky. That's why movie fires look perfect. Yeah. Because they're fake. They are kind of dreamy. They're so good. So incamerafx is just basically messing with the way the film is being produced inside the camera, not what's going on in reality, the film is capturing, but how the film is actually capturing this stuff. Yeah. Slow motion is a special effect in camera. Special effect, yeah. Or fast motion, too. Which is ten times more hilarious than fast motion, if you ask me. Like, where would the monsters be without fast motion? Yeah. Or Benny Hill, for God's sake. Sure. That lived and breathed on fast motion. What else can you do there? And we'll see that some of the early special effects, like stopping the film, changing something, starting it again right. Like bewitched appearing out of nowhere. Yeah. That's an incumbent special effect. Yeah. One thing that struck me about all this from researching this is how the basis, the foundation for special effects was laid immediately upon motion pictures being created. Like the whole industry, not even the industry before the industry existed, but basically after the invention of motion pictures and that it stayed virtually the same until the 90s. Yeah. People refined it and got better at it and techniques got more the same. General crafts were used. Very much so. Which is why craft service is called craft service. Oh, yeah. Because each department is their own craft. I didn't know that. They're there to serve them pizza rolls. Yes, man. Or whatever. You can put on some weight filming something, I'll tell you that. You can. Oh, my God. So stop motion animation. That is an incamera effect. You're moving a little clay figure or whatever. A doll or a King Kong. A raisin one. A California raisin. One frame at a time. 24 frames per second. Can you imagine? Didn't you do that with your brother? With GI. Joe? I did. And then years later, I did a little Star Wars thing when I got a high eight video camera and spent like three days working on something that ended up being 9 seconds long. And I said I'm done. What's funny is you're going to get a cease and desist letter from Lucasfilm after talking about us in the podcast. Right. And then we have post production effects. And that is I think that's what a lot of people think of as special effects these days. Really? Because that's all the CGI stuff that you will see it all happens in post production. Okay. All right. Yes. These days. I got you. Like, almost all special effects happened in post these days, right? Well, no, they still combine some of the old crafts as well. But yeah, surely a lot of it is CGI. I mean, computers can do some amazing stuff. They can. I mean, stuff that used to take months to do. A computer can do an hour now and do it a million times better. Yes. So depending on your taste, I should say that's right. So those are the big three practical in camera and post production. And like I was saying, the basis of special effects was founded, like, in the 19th century. There were just some people who had kind of followed in a tradition of still photography. Still photographers by that time, had already figured out some cool stuff that you could do. Messing around with cameras, something like double exposure, where you take a picture of one thing and then take a picture of another thing with the previously exposed film, and all of a sudden it looks like there's a ghost looming behind you, stuff like that. So out of the gate, when motion pictures were beat started to become a little widespread and people could afford them and try messing around with them, they had a basis of trickery to begin with. But there's a lot of stuff you can do with motion picture cameras that you can't do with still photo cameras. And they figured this out right away. Yeah. That first guy who's credited as the first special effect is Alfred Clark. And then they don't have the year exactly right. It's either 93, that's 1893 or 1895. He made a short film called The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and he did that little stop trick. Like I was saying, you shoot something, you stop the camera, you replace it or you remove something and then you start the camera. And in real time, when you go to play it back, it's seamless. Right. And in his case, did you look at it? No, I didn't even see that one. He uses a stop trick with Mary getting beheaded, and right when the axe is going to fall, he switches her out for a dummy, then starts the camera back up and he chops the dummy's head off. Right. And it looks pretty good. Like there's no big weird jump for 1893. He did a really good job. Yeah. And the key to that is just making sure that no one touches the camera or even breathes on it. Don't move. And then getting the dummy in the same position as the actor. Yes. And in fact, as we'll talk about later with Matt paintings, it's so crucial that the camera not moved. That one technique was they used to bury the camera tripod, like a couple of feet into the earth. Makes sense. Just to make sure no dumb dumb PAMPs into it. So Alfred Clark is credited with the first special effect but a guy named George Male lee did they get it? Mayley we should go ask KC. Pegger oh, yeah. He would know. I think it's melier. Oh, nice. I think he just nailed it. George. Millie at any rate, this guy is known as the father of special effects. He was very early on doing stuff that no one else was doing. Granted, there were very few people working in this field. None of the five people did. But he was an illusionist. And he said, oh, man, I can really do some amazing tricks with this camera. And he really put it to good use from a very early turn of the last century. Yeah. He actually stumbled upon that little stop trick by accident when he was shooting a street traffic scene in Paris in 1896. The camera jams while, I think, a bus was coming across frame. He's like, Mad, fixes the camera. Can we say that? Sure. All right. We don't have any French people listening to yeah, that's true. It starts the camera back up and of course, there's different things happening. And then when he went back to look at it he kind of just stumbled upon this weird little substitution supplies that became part of filmmaking. Yeah. Because by the time the camera had started up again the bus was replaced by a hearse. So it looked like when he went back and watched it the bus suddenly transformed into a hearse. And he said, Wait till they get a load of bewitched 70 something years from now. Yeah. No, I guess what was that in the? All right, so you may not recognize George Melissa I got at that time. I think so name. But you probably have heard of his work, like A Trip to the Moon. What's very widely cited is, like, one of the first actual movies. I think it was in the 20 something minute range. But it was about some explorers in the Victorian era getting in a rocket and traveling to the moon. And the rocket lands and the man in the moon's eye. Everybody see that? I don't care who you are. If you say you haven't, you have. Yeah. This was the guy who made that. And this is a very early movie. It was from 19 two. But he was doing all sorts of amazing stuff. He was using extensive Costuming masks, all sorts of in camera techniques. He was painting on film frames. Yes. And this is and like I was saying, this stuff was refined but it was the basis of special effects for the next century to come. Should we take a quick break? I think so. All right, let's take a quick break and we will talk a little bit about the Matte technique right after this. I'm actually pretty psyched about 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 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. All right, Chuck, as I said, I'm very psyched about the math. Yeah. So this is a little confusing, the way it's laid out here. Okay. Because what Ed's talking about here with Norman Dawn is called original negative matte painting. If you hear of a matte painting that is a piece of glass, I'm going to talk about the most common way you might see it employed is you take a big piece of glass and you paint like a cityscape on it, like, really realistic, and then you put that in a scene and shoot it instead of having someone in front of a city. And this is pre blue screen and green screen technology, you would just put Kurt Russell and escape from New York in a field. And there's a matte painting of New York City behind him. Right. And it looks great. And James Cameron painted that and escaped from New York. He was a map painter. Oh, I didn't know that. That was, like, his first job. It's neat. Even if you do know what Chuck is talking about, go to the Internet and just look up, like, great map paintings. It's amazing. There's a lot of really wonderful ones when you've seen before, ones you haven't. But basically, any time you've seen a movie pre 1993, maybe 1990, where somebody walks into this enormous place or this amazingly elaborate future city or something like that, what you're actually looking at is an expertly painted painting that has been messed with in post production or using an Incamera technique to make it look like it's alive or actually bustling or energetic over there. But it's a painting. It's a painting that some amazing human being painted by hand. Yeah. And we should point out they still do this today. They just do it digitally and digital map painters are super talented as well. Sure. But it's kind of neat to think about that old craft and James Cameron painting a piece of glass and sticking that behind Kurt Russell and, I mean, it was used in everything. For my money, matt painting is the single most important and widespread special effect ever. Maybe hard to argue that. Thank you. Like it was in Mary Poppins. When Mary Poppins is coming into the city of London, floating down. That's a map painting. When Superman walks into the what's the name of the place where he's from? Like the Crystal Cave? Where fortress of Solitude. Yeah. Is that where he talks with Marlin Brando, his dad? Yeah, I think so. Okay. That's a map painting. And I think the Fortress of Solitude are the remnants of Krypton. Okay. And, boy, Superman. People are so mad at me right now. Are there people still? I thought everybody was on the Marvel train. No, people love Superman. Really? Not the comics. Okay. Because I was going to say, you've seen what they've done in Superman lately, right? In Batman, yeah. So that's the map painting. And what that is, it's called set extension. So that basically means you're just sort of extending the real life set to make something bigger and more opulent. Got you. Or maybe not more often, just bigger and more. Right. But here's the thing. Relying on that map painter and having the glass there and glass can break and it can onset with lighting can be weird. So that all can get a little hanky. So that's why this technique called original negative matte painting was developed by Norman Dawn. And that is when nowadays you'll use what's called a matte box, which is literally like black. I don't think it's cardboard these days, but whatever they make out of a cardboard thing that you put over the lens to block out whatever you want to block out. Back in the day, they would paint cardboard and hold it in front of the lens, or they would actually paint the lens. And what you're essentially doing is painting away. It was early green screen. You're painting away what you don't want in the frame or what you want in the future and then adding that later on. Right. And because it's black or because it's covered there's, light is not hitting that part of the film. That part of the film, the actual film strip itself that you're recording onto or filming onto. That's unexposed. All that gets exposed is the part of the lens or the camera that is not covered that has, say, your actor, like doing the Herky Jerky Dance. Right. And then so what you do after that is you take that film that has your actor doing the Herky Jerky Dance, project it onto a screen so you see where the actor is. And on this screen, you literally paint the background that you want. Then you film the whole thing a second time. And now you have your actor in the set that you originally wanted. Right. The only difference there, which is something that wasn't quite right here, is they don't like, project it. They just develop a few frames of it and project it like a slide. I got you. So it's not like the camera the film is moving through on the wall because in the article here, it says and then you just stop it. And what happens if you do that is the bulb burns the film. Okay. So you can't just stop a moody projector. You produce like a slide of and project that. Yeah. And then you paint in the castle or the mountain or the whatever you want, and then you go back and expose it again. Pretty neat. You just open your trench coat. There you go. And the big innovator with the original negative matte painting was Norman Dawn, and he really led the way. But again, most of the stuff that does this now is done by computers in post. But this is like the links people were going to to make movies at the time. And you watch them today and you're like, God, that looks terrible. But if you stop and think about the effort that they were going to they were inventing this. Yeah. It's just mind boggling that they managed to get it to this point. Yeah. Norman dawn tried to patent that technique as well, but they said, no, you did not invent this, you popularized it. And you can't patent something that you made super popular. Yes. There are some other stuff, too. There's like rear projection and front projection, which is basically like projecting the background and moving background onto a screen behind the actors. Basically, all those hokey driving scenes where the person the car is being rocked or whatever, the road behind them. That's front or rear projection. Yeah. And people still will use that as homage. Like in Pulp Fiction, very famously, bruce Willis, or I guess not when Bruce Willis gets in the cab after the fight. Yeah. And if it looks old fashioned, that's because QT used rear screen projection for that. And there's also a technique that's not in here that I just remembered. So I'm actually having to look up what it's called when you're in a car scene, but you're not doing a rear screen projection. So what happens here is you're sitting in a car and a still car on the set, but they're not projecting anything behind you. Okay? What you've got is two people shaking the car right frame. What are they? Grips? Yeah. Usually a grip, but I've shaken cars and trains before. Okay. Because I'm just a body on the set. I got you. Get in there and shake that thing. In fact, one job I was on, there was a fake subway train and the hydraulics broke early on and they're like, Bring out the PA. You are going to shake this train for 12 hours. They're like, you got rhythm. Get in there. Yeah, we couldn't have too much rhythm because we got yelled at for that because it looked too rhythmic. Got you. So we're like, I don't know how to do this. Who are you working for? It was just a commercial director got you. That said that our movement of the train looked too rhythmic and not believable. Right. So anyway, this Fruit of the Looms commercial is totally unbelievable. You sit in the car, you're acting like you're driving. There's someone else shaking the car. There might be someone else off camera, like flashing a light through the car, like you're going by a street light or a headlight goes across their face. And there may be fake rain in the background. And this is sometimes like six, seven or eight people working in concert to make it look like you're driving at night in the rain or something like that. Right. So there's not like an obvious background. Trees or road or whatever, but maybe there's headlights coming up behind you. It's just dark. Yeah, but there are people with a spotlight. Yeah, it's really cool. Old fashioned, but people still use that stuff. And I wish I could remember the full name of that technique. The Shake and Shimmy. I'm going to be so mad later on. We'll just call it the Shake and Shimmy. Okay? That's right. So you talked about green screen, and that's actually super old, too. There's a really convoluted explanation about how originally green screen employed sodium vapor lights, which would actually mess with the yellow exposure on pancrematic film. And my brain, I started bleeding out of my ear. I cannot tell you how many times I read descriptions about this, and I can't quite get it. So suffice to say that that was one technique for green screen. What really kind of changed the industry is when they figured out that, again, if you film in black, the film is not going to be exposed. So anything you go and re expose it to it will cover over that stuff like it's transparent. So, for example, in the invisible man from, I think, 1933? Yeah. Claude Reigns wore a black bodysuit and the background was black. It was a black screen, like a black green screen. But he wore clothes and everything in bandages and sunglasses. And I think he smoked a cigarette or whatever. But when he took the bandages off and we took his sunglasses and clothes off, there was nothing there. It was a black bodysuit and a black background. So when they filmed the background later on, all you could see was the background and the clothes and the bandages. It looked like there was nothing there because as far as the film was concerned, when they were filming it, there wasn't anything there. So the film wasn't exposed in those sections on each frame. That's right. That's called the Williams process. And a key part of the Williams process is the optical printer, and that is a. Projector that actually prints an image directly onto the film that runs through the camera while the printer and camera are synced up. Yes. So this is to me, the optical printer is the second most widespread and useful special effect technique in the history of film. You just waved your hand. I did. So I suddenly had an ass got in a beret on. Yeah. Hard to argue that, too. But all this stuff was just precursor to what was blue screen early on, chroma key blue and then later became chroma key green. I'm not sure why they made the switch, actually, other than maybe the green less prevalent or less use, I think. So probably maybe the blue was because you know what? You don't want anything close to that color will disappear against the green screen. Anyone who's ever done the weather on the newscast can tell you that. Yeah, there have been there are blooper reels of weather people disappearing when they wear, like, a green jacket or something. Right. It looks like the weather is going on through their body. Same thing. So I want to say one more thing about optical printers or another little bit about it. Sure. So what you have is a projector projecting a film onto a screen, and you have a camera recording what's being projected, right? That's right. That's the optical printer. And you could do all sorts of stuff with that. So let's say you have a shot where you have one mat in the foreground and live actor, and then another mat in the background that has a bunch of different people in it or something like that. Four stormtroopers. Okay. So you got three different elements to that shot. What you would do is using the same film, film each thing. So you go film that like the actor, the live action actor. You got that on the film, and you project that. And you take film where you're filming the mat, and you project that and film that. I just totally have screwed this up. Oh, my God. This is just like what was done. No, it's worse than that. Was it false positives? Do you remember that time where I was like I took a pretty simple thing and just completely walked the dog with it? Yeah. Okay, well, just do that again. Everyone, I want you to go look up optical printers, read a little bit about them, and then you'll say, oh, Josh is right. Yeah. This tough stuff. It is. Essentially, you're filming a projection, and you can do that multiple times with the same film, and it adds up to where you have the shot you wanted, where it makes it look like all these things that you filmed three separate times are all happening together in one space. Yes. You are marrying separate images together onto a single piece of film. Right. You couldn't do that with before. Optical printers, which is a projector in a camera working together. That's right. Okay. I think I needed that. We should mention briefly, motion controlled cameras. This is a system that allows it's basically taking the person out of the equation. There is not a person pushing a dolly. There is not a person moving the camera. It is a machine that is programmed to move a camera through space very precisely and exactly the same every single time. Yes. So you can do the exact same motion over and over again, over and over. And a lot of times, if you're on a TV commercial, as boring as that is, you will see stuff like this for like a food shoot, because food shoots are notoriously tricky because everything is super close up and has to be perfect. And you can't be off a little bit with a camera because a lot of times you'll sub in stuff later in post. And that's the whole reason for motion control, is to replicate moves with exact precision. So I was reading about industrial Light and magic, using this to really great effect with the first Star Wars, which is episode four. Right. The New hope. That's the first one. Right. I'm not confirming or denying anything. I'm just going to let that stand. Episode four is the first Star Wars movie that ever came out. Correct. Star wars a New Hope is the first episode that I ever saw in a movie theater because it's the first one that ever came out. Anyway, when they were making this. Is it a Star Destroyer? The big daddy ships. Okay. Oh, man, we're going to get murdered. Everything all of the ships in Star Wars were models. Yes. Fairly small models. Actually. They were not that part. Okay. I think it was episode four. I'm almost positive. Okay. So those models were not moving in these shots, in these enormous, huge panoramic shots where there's tie fighters flying around shooting everything and x wing fighters shooting the tie fighters. None of those models were moving. What happened was they figured out how to use motion controlled cameras so that the camera would go through the shot around the model and make it look like the model was moving. And plus, it was moving the shot through space. Right, right. The thing is, let's say you have five different ships. You film those five ships separately, but those five ships are all going to be in the same shot. So you have to film that same shot the exact same way five different times and then run it through an optical printer so that you can get all of them, all five shots onto the same strip of film. But that's one of the ways that motion control cameras were really put to good use. And it was extremely groundbreaking because not one of those ships were moving in reality when they were filming Star wars. Can you name five star warships? X wing fighter. You already said one. Tie fighter, two the deuce is what the people in the know call it. Sure. You already said Star Destroyer, so stardestroyer was right. Yeah, there's a Star Destroyer. Okay. You made a face like I was just totally off. You could make the case that indoor was a ship even though it was a planet. There was the forest feeder, the podracer. Yeah, dr. Zaeus. That's right. He said final ship. Yeah. Oh, boy. Their calf muscles just popped right out of the back of their legs. Holly Fry is, like, hyperventilating somewhere in the office and she doesn't know why. So, as I said earlier, it's usually a combination of these different techniques to create one overall special effect using these different crafts. And a great example is Jurassic Park in the scene with the velociraptors in the kitchen. That great sequence when it was playing cat and mouse with those children. There were puppets, there were actors and costumes. There were animatronic raptor heads and there were full CGI raptors. And you throw this all in a hat, mix it all up, and it comes out to be like a really believable looking scene. Yeah. It comes out as an Oscar. Yeah, I'm sure they want Oscars, right? They had to have I don't know, but there's just no way. It was groundbreaking. I remember being just gobsmacked in the movie theater when I first saw those dinosaurs walking across the screen, and that was 1993, I believe, for the first Jurassic Park. Right? Jurassic park. A new hope. The first one that came out. But that was five years after the first Oscar had been awarded for special effects, as far as I know. Oh, really? I believe that The Abyss was the first one to win an Oscar for special effects. Maybe. No, I'm sorry. I'm way off. Way off. The Abyss was the first movie to win a special effect for CGI effect. Okay. Remember the water? Sure. Still looks pretty good. It looks amazing. This is 1987 we're talking about. Wow. Was that when that came out? Yeah. I was surprised to see that, too, because I thought it was yeah, it's a good movie. I really like that movie. How do you not like Ed Harris? What? Did you not like Ed Harris? No, I like him as an actor. I think a lot of people might have problems with Ed Harris as a person. He's notoriously can tankerous. I've never heard that. I believe it. Sure. He looks like he could yell somebody down, didn't he? Sure. But he also keeps a cool head when he's an actor. As a 70s or 60s NASA guy. Hey, I love that harris. All right, let's take another break. Okay. And we're going to come back and talk a little bit about Star Wars episode whatever, 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, 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. Okay, we're back. And we should mention the garbage mat really quick. Okay. Because that is a big deal. A lot of times you have wire work or you have things hanging from wires. It doesn't have to be a person. It can be like a model plane or a tie fighter or whatever. Sure. You got to get rid of those wires. Unless you're atwood, you can't have fishing line. No, you're supposed to not, but yes. Or if you're charlize thrown in mad Max fury road, you got to get rid of that arm. Or if you're in force gump, you got to get rid of lieutenant dan's legs. Man, that was amazing. That was the first time anybody's ever done really something like that throughout. Yeah, I have my problems with that movie for sure. And one of them is I think he way over. He was like a kidney candy store and way overdue the like, and now forest is in the white house and using archival footage and sticking forest in it. Yeah, that whole half hour dialogue he has with Peter cushing's goat, it was uncanny. But I get it. I get why these filmmakers get excited. These really technical wizards, they get a new technique, and they just hammer it. The guy from industrial like magic when they made the first star wars call it what you will. His name was, I think, John Dijkstra. And this motion controlled camera assembly that they created was called dijkstra flex. It was super groundbreaking, and they really did amazing stuff with it. Well, he's like a legend in this industry now. And I saw an interview with him recently, and he was like, I'm so tired of seeing just whole cities levels and just the most amazing stuff you can possibly think of being done just because we can do it right. He put it really well. I think it's an embarrassment of riches. Yeah, totally. It can be done. So it's being done. Everybody's doing it, and it makes it less amazing. Not necessarily because it looks bad. It just keeps looking better and better every time. If you look at Charlie's, theron's prosthetic arm or missing arm, compared with Lieutenant Dan's missing leg, looks radically different. It does. So it's getting better. There's just too much of it, I think, is the point. Just to be all at Harrisy on this? No, I have long predicted a return to practical effects. Really? And it's starting to happen a little bit more and more. Yeah, I could see it starting with indie filmmakers. Yeah, for sure. Which is funny, because finally, computer generated effects have trickled down enough. Like, you or I could just walk out of the studio and probably get on any one of those Macs out there and use stuff that ten to 15 years ago, $500,000 to set up a rig like that. Yeah. And that's how some young filmmakers have gotten noticed, is by making these short films with, like, zero money on their computer that get a lot of action on YouTube because it looks so amazing. And the studio will be like, Sign that person up. Yeah. I can't remember the guy's name, but that's happened a couple of times in recent years. Ed Harris. We should talk about a few of the groundbreaking people over the years. Oh, yeah. We'll go through these a little quicker than what we have in front of us, I think. But we should mention Lon Cheney. Sure. One of the original superstars of film in the silent era, the man of a Thousand Faces. He was very talented, doing his own makeup and changing his face. That's why he's called the man of a Thousand Faces. Right. He's like, here's 997. What about Willis O'Brien? He was one of the pioneers of stop motion photography. Again, if you're a California racing fan, you have a lot to thank Willis O'Brien for. He also just do the stuff he did. I mean, if you look back, he did King Kong in the 1933 King Kong. And if you look back at this, you're like, this is cool. But if you research what was done to create this, you're just blown away by it. Yeah. Again, many processes coming together to create that 1933 version of King Kong. And that fight looks good still. I mean, it doesn't look realistic, but consider the year. It looks awesome. It does. And it's about three and a half minutes long. King Kong fighting the Tyrannosaurus Rex. But it took seven weeks to film because there's 24 frames shot per second in a film. That's right. And for every frame, they moved the models a little bit here or there. Yeah. So that's why it took seven weeks just for that fight scene. I think it was 55 weeks for all of the stop motion photography that was done in that movie. Yeah. That's impressive. It really is impressive. Especially when you realize the trouble they went to. When you go back and watch it. This is pretty nuts. Yeah. Ray Harryhausen continued the work of Willis O'Brien and very famously in, like, the with movies like Jason and the Argonauts. Clash of the Titan. Remember Medusa? Sure. Scary lady. Yeah. That had to be toward the end of his career, I guess, because that was in the 80s. Yeah. I think like 81, maybe. Remember The Minotaur, too? Man, that was a cool movie. That was a big movie for me as a kid. Yes. And I was like, when la Law came along, I was like, I know that guy. That's right. There's a titan's guy. We should shout out Millicent. Patrick. This is a very interesting story. She was one of the only well, first and only women working in special effects back in the day. And she created the very famous Mask of the Gillman from Creature from the Black Lagoon in the mid 1950s and was unceremoniously fired. Not just fired, stricken from the credit. Yeah. This guy named Bud Westmore, he assisted her and then basically had her fired rather than give her the credit for the mask, which he would take credit for because I think he was the supervisor in charge of effects or costume or something. I thought I guess he assisted her. But he was her boss. Yeah. Okay. But she very clearly, on her own, came up with the Gillman for the Creature from the Boss. And this has only come out in the last few years. They've kind of dug up the original stuff and yeah. Sexism just basically pushed her out of the industry altogether. Very sad. She's starting to get her due now, though, which is good. Yeah, that is very good. Dick Smith is amazing. He created The Squib. Oh, really? Yeah, he's a very famous makeup artist. He's really good at making people look aged. Yeah. He made 47 year old Marlon Brando look much 45 than The Godfather. Oh, yeah. He was a year younger than me. Brando crazy. I never thought about that. Wow, he really is good. He also did Death Becomes Her, which is one of the all time great movies, for sure. And the Exorcist and Scanners. And have you ever seen Ghost story from 1981? Oh, yeah. Very scary movie. The Old Dudes. He did. What else? Very famously aged Dustin Hoffman. And Little Big Man by many years. Sure. And then in the last 25, 30 years, Rick Baker and Stan Winston. Stan Winston. He got my vote. Yeah. I mean, these two guys were both just creative leaders in the industry and trailblazers in the industry. And as Ed says in here, like, mentor a generation of special effects employees. Employees, creators, artists. Sure. All three of those work. Lord Gig workers. Rick Baker, American World in London in 1981, which still holds up the Thriller video in 1983. Star Wars Masai Cantina. He made all those. Yeah. Did you know that? About the Maze Isley cantina sure. I didn't know that he was almost single handedly responsible for all of them. And then Stan Winston, you got to talk about movies like The Thing and Predator and Terminator and they both have set up foundations and schools and things like that. Stan Winston also did the makeup for what I think is maybe the best film of all time, friday the 13th Part Two. Yeah. Two is when Jason comes along, right? Yes. It's Jason before he got his mask. He gets his mask in three. I think the 13th franchise is as good as it gets for horror movies. I dropped off at a certain point. Did you see all those? No, I still haven't seen all of them. But even just putting like the first five or six up, I think it's like watching them again as an adult. I'm like, these are really good films, even better than I remember from being a kid. Yes. And the reason Stan Winston filled in for Friday 13th Part Two is because the guy who did Friday 13th, the first one, Tom Savini, was unavailable. He was off doing creep show, I believe. But Tom Savini is another legend. I think they're redoing creep show. Are they? Okay, I'd watch that. Different stories. Oh, even better. I think, if I'm not mistaken. But yes. Savini is well known for being sort of the godfather of gore. Yeah, he did Maniac. Did you ever see that? Yeah, that was an off the rocker movie. And then these days there are companies ILM and Weta. ILM industrial Light Magic is Lucas's company. And they're cool because they invented this stuff, because Lucas needed stuff to be done that couldn't be done right. And he was like, Go figure out how to do it. And they did. They really did. And then weta is Peter Jackson's company. Okay. And he's the one that has really pioneered the mo cap. The motion capture techniques where a person's wearing. Like. A suit and the suit has a bunch of different kind of like almost ping pong balls all over it. Like joints and crucial places where the body moves and the actor. Stunt person or dancer. Whoever wearing the suit goes through the motions and then they just go through the motions. Sure. And those motions, what's captured is fed into a computer and the computer generates a character doing all those same motions, creating the performance. But it's a computer generated character. Yeah. I don't think he was the first, but the gollum character in those Lord of the Rings movies was really one of the first. Really terrific looking, fully CGI character. Yeah. I found, from what I could tell, the first full CGI character ever in a movie. You want to guess? You'll never guess. Well, I mean, it's touted as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Wrong. Really? What is it going to be? It's another Spielberg movie. Okay. It's young Sherlock Holmes. Do you remember the Stained glass knight that comes to life and tries to slash one of them with his sword. First full CGI character in a movie. Well, why? I don't know, but that's what I could find. And that one's from 1985. Well, it says maybe it's in the Nitpicky language because in The Last Crusade, when Walter Donovan's face melts and turns to dust when he drinks from the chalice that's in Raiders of Lost Ark. Oh, no, you're right. Okay. Yeah. It says here it was the first ever digital composite of a full screen live action image. There's something in the language there. Yeah, because it was a full screen or something. Got you. This was the first CGI, but it wasn't the first CGI image. This is the first moving CGI image. The first CGI image was in. Looker. Remember that movie I totally saw? Looker? Yeah. That was a big HBO movie for me, for sure. Same here. It was Looker, Runaway. Runaway is Tom Selik. Yeah. And Jean Simmons, the bad guy. That's right. I saw Crow a lot, too. Yeah. Look ahead. Albert Finney. Right? If I remember correctly. Albert Finney and Susan Day. Yeah. Susan Day written by Michael Crichton I think that was the first full body 3D human. But it did not move. It was static. And the very first computer generated effects period, funny enough, were used to replicate computer screens. So whenever you would see a computer screen in, like, Westworld or Aliens or Star Wars, and they were like, what is the computer going to look like? Not now. That was the first time they used computer generated imaging, was to make a fake computer screen. And the first full CGI scene ever done was in The Wrath of Con, which I believe came out in 1982. But there's a genesis, like Earth being cooling and turning into the Earth, and there's this amazing shots around it. That's all CGI. And that was the first one. And Tron yeah. I thought for sure Tron would have been among the first. Apparently, most of that was animated by humans, not computers. That's right. All the glowing lines, all that stuff, animated. Which makes it nuts that they were able to create that. Yeah. Now the big thing is the aging technique, that they're getting better and better. Yeah, they really are. Yeah. So the new Scorsese pick, the Irishman, I think De Ages has taken a long time to get out because the Dehaging didn't look good enough for Scorsese. So they de aged, de niro. And then I saw this new angle movie, Gemini Man, where Will Smith of now, he plays an assassin and he has to go kill his younger self. Looper. Yeah, sort of like looper, I guess. But this Gemini Man script has been in development for like, 25 years with various people attached, but they could never do it because of the technology. Yeah, it's finally here. But here's the thing. I didn't know, like, I've seen this trailer and I'm like, man, that Deaging looks great. They didn't dehage them. It is a fully CGI. Will Smith. Oh, and it looks that realistic? The younger version is, yeah. Wow. So I was like, man, they're getting so good at the DHS. That's amazing. So he mocapped his whole performance motion captured. And they just used Fresh Prince photos. They just basically deep faked him. Sort of Fresh Prince photo. Have you seen the Bill Hayter deep fake that's going around now? It's pretty cool. Yeah, because he goes from hater to Tom Cruise to Seth Rogen back to Tom Cruise. It's, like, kind of all over the place. Yeah, it's really well done. And then, like we said, they use CGI for so many movies. Little mistakes that can be corrected. Little things that it's just much cheaper to add digitally later on. It could be a movie that, like I said, looks like it has no CGI whatsoever. And it's cheaper to put a plate of food in the background digitally, then cook the food and put it on set. Right. That's a bad example. Or you can color grade a movie. You completely change. Like the movie. O brother, where art thou? Has that yellow hue for everything. Yeah, all that stuff is green. They're in the Deep South in the summertime, right. And they used to have to film it at some weird exposure and then projected at another exposure to some filter and then record the whole thing on an optical negative. Yeah. Now they can just do it all with the computer. Easy peasy. It's great. I'm kind of looking around, but this is, like, one 8th of this topic. Hopefully, it made you appreciate movies more. You specifically. Me. I know you love the movies. Sure. If you want to know more about movies, go listen to Chuck's podcast, Movie Crush. You'll love it. Hey, thanks. And since I said Movie Crush, it's time for listener mail. And actually, since you said Movie Crush, we're about to release an episode on The Matrix. Haven't seen that movie. It's been 20 years since it came out. You've never seen the Matrix? No, I hadn't seen it in a long time. I got you. But I didn't realize this is the 20 year anniversary. Watched it last night. Still totally holds up. Really? Looks great. Fun. Yeah. Well acted by most of the cast members who didn't act well. You know, Keanu always gets picked on. I love that guy. I know kung fu. He's perfect in that role, though. Yeah, he's great. I can't imagine anybody else in it'd. Be just too serious, I think. Like imagine Tom Cruise in that. In The Matrix. Yes, you're right. He adds a little, like, something light, doesn't he? Yeah, it makes it a little more every man almost a little more believable in a weird way, I think. So. Do you see those John Wick movies? I've seen some of it. It's just like a little too video gamey for me. But it's fine. I respect that. People like it. Sure. Here we go. Okay, this is about 3D. It's about solar panels. I got movies on. Well, they are in three D, I guess. Okay, I got movies on the brain. Hey, guys. Being a roofer my entire life, I never thought I'd have much input until now. It's my time to shine. One thing that wasn't mentioned in the solar panel episode is that people really need to consider the age of their existing roof before installing solar panels. That's a good point. A new residential shingle roof should last about 30 years. But if the roof isn't nearly new, I would not suggest installing solar panels and definitely don't install it if the roof is on fire. Once the panels are installed, roof repairs or replacement is very difficult and much more expensive. If the life of the roof ends before the solar panels die, you can easily add 50% to 75% or more to the cost of the reroofing due to the added labor costs to remove and reinstall the panels. Yes, you think about that. So you should align it ideally with your new roof. Sure, I do. Mostly commercial roofing. Can't tell you the number of customers who I talked to had solar panels on an old roof and are now paying through the nose for repairs or replacement reputable. Solar panel specialists should have this roof conversation with a potential customer before installing the panels. I'm afraid it doesn't always happen or customers underestimate the added reroofing cost once they're installed. And this is a great PSA. It is. Thanks again for what you guys do. I'm in my truck a lot, driving to different job sites, and it's always easier on Tuesday through Thursday when I have a new stuff you should know. And that is from Owen, Cincinnati. Great name. First and last. Yes. Love the name. Owen steven King's kids name one of them. Yeah, Owen King. Thanks a lot, Owen. We appreciate that big time. That was a great email. I would have never thought about that. And he didn't even send his business in to be plugged. Just google his name and roofing and if he happens to live near you, use them. That's how dedicated this guy is. He sounds honest. Well, if you want to be a cool person like Owen, you can get in touch with us. You can go on to stuffytorenow.com and check out our social links. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.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 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. 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." | |
6e5de55e-1478-4c09-885b-aeb400024226 | How Wind Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-wind-works | Beloved egghead Buckminster Fuller said the wind doesn’t blow, it sucks. And he was pretty much right, depending on your perspective. Find out how everything from the hurricane to summer breeze makes life on Earth possible.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Beloved egghead Buckminster Fuller said the wind doesn’t blow, it sucks. And he was pretty much right, depending on your perspective. Find out how everything from the hurricane to summer breeze makes life on Earth possible.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 14 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=165, tm_isdst=0) | 40866861 | audio/mpeg | "Shady Rays is an independent sunglasses company that gives you the features of $200 sunglasses for a fraction of the price and the strongest protection program in all of eyewear. Every pair of Shady Rays includes lost and broken protection, meaning if you lose or break your shades at any point point, they'll send you a brand new pair no matter what happened. Exclusively for our listeners, head to shadyrays.com and use code stuff for 50% off two or more pairs of polarized sunglasses. That's code stuff for 50% off two or more pairs only@shadyrays.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 at citi comAdventure and travel on with City Advantage. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know. Yet another edition of our never ending please don't ever let it end. Earth science. That's right. Can I tell you a quick story? Have at it. You edged I know. Actually considered what I should say. Listener would have heard you go before you said yes. Hopefully Jerry can edit that part. So I think I may have talked about this before, but I had aims at one point and not like the most passionate Ames, but I thought about being a meteorologist for a little while in college because I was headed toward a journalism major and I think I'd mentioned before my best friend from high school, the Map illustrator today, Rad. We used to sit around and watch the Weather Channel, largely due to Rad's influence, and I just always thought it was cool. I took a meteorology class in college and it kicked the poopoo out of my body. Yeah, I had a similar experience with astronomy. Yeah. So I knew you wanted to be an astronomer and then you're like, no, it's too hard. I thought it was going to be like, look at this star, this is pretty awesome. And then the first day, the Sigma sign shows up, I'm like, I don't know what to do with this. I think I get where you're coming from. Yeah. So that kind of dashed my dreams of being a meteorologist because I think people can teach themselves things and like, part of the hard part of our job is to teach ourselves something. Really? Like the people go to school for four years to study and I think you can sort of teach yourself stuff, but unless there's a you have just a fundamental, weird, innate understanding of that stuff, it's just really challenging. Like, if you're not a math person, you can learn math, but not like someone who just really gets numbers. Sure. Yeah, definitely. Does that make sense? Totally. I'm not sure we've ever really by we, I mean humanity, have put our finger on what that distinction is. Isn't that weird? It'd be interesting to know what some of the hypotheses are. Maybe we should do a podcast on it. Yeah, that'd be good. So anyway, that's a long winded way of sort of saying, I did this over and over and studied wind over the past couple of days and I kind of get it enough for this show, but I'm not going to be a meteorologist for a very good reason. Yeah, I'm with you. I've got it. Just enough that it feels like there's a massive opening on the side of my head and everything I know about wind could just fall right out at any moment. But it's in there for now. Yes. Keep it shut for the next 45 minutes. I'm trying. I've got my hand covered. It's really gooey in there. Yeah, it's more complex than you would think, but some parts are easier as well. Yeah. And I mean, like, even if you're talking about wind, you can kind of break down what wind is and what causes wind and what creates wind into basically three different things. The first one is heat, which we'll get into. Another one is pressure differences. We'll get into that as well. And then the rotation of the planet, which we will get into in this episode. Yeah, that's where it gets a little tricky. Yes, totally agreed. And I say we just dive in and we start with pressure differences creating wind, because I think it's the simplest thing to understand. And I think once you have pressure differences down, you can move on to the heat part. Yeah. I mean, was this the Grabster? Did he help us with this one? Yes, and I have to say The Grabster did an amazing job wrangling this info. No, hats off to him, because I think it always has a knack of delivering a metaphorical type example that really hits home. And with pressure, he uses just a balloon filled with air where you have high pressure and low pressure. And when you take your fingers off the tip of that balloon, all that changes, because what wind is really always trying to do on planet Earth is equalize and reach some sort of equilibrium. And that's basically what's happening with wind. If you have high pressure, which is technically more air, and that's going to flow away from itself because it wants to equalize. And then when there's less air, the surrounding area is going to flow towards the lower area. So as it relates to when there's basically more wind and the winds are faster, when those two disparities are the greatest. Yeah. If you get a parcel of air, which is just kind of a stable mass of air as far as meteorologists are concerned, that's really high pressure. And you get one that's really low pressure along the edges of those two places, there's going to be much higher wind than if they're a lot closer between high and low if they're closer to the same. Yeah. That's wind right there, it just changes in differences in pressure, different parcels of air coming up against one another and saying, I'm going to fill you up, and then the other one says, Fill me up. And the filling up is the wind, the movement of the air. Yeah. So pretty easy. I think so, yeah. Where do those differences of pressure come from? Are you asking me? Yeah. Well, they come from well, the heat is a big source of where all this comes from. Well, I thought you hinted, but then we did a different take and you rescinded that hint. But the sun, when it heats the Earth, it heats the surfaces of the Earth. It doesn't really heat the air so much as it heats the surfaces, whether it's water or land or like asphalt or sand or green grass. And they all have different temperatures. And that disparity is kind of the key to it all because that's going to reflect back up and that's kind of what heats the air is the reflection of the sun onto these various temperature surfaces, or not temperature, but I guess ability to soak up that sun maybe, right? Yeah. Because it's not at all uniform, like you said. All these different kinds of materials found on the surface of Earth, like, absorb heat differently and radiate heat differently. So that means that the air above it that's getting heated by that land is going to be different than a different parcel of air, like over water, right. Yeah. And so because heat has to do with pressure and typically is associated with low pressure heat, warm air makes it expand, which makes it less dense, which means it starts to float up away from the Earth's surface. And as it's floating up away from the Earth's surface, because of that equilibrium that air seeks, areas of higher pressure move in to fill that vacuum, that space that's being left by that lower pressure parcel of air that's floating up into space because it's warm. Right. And this is that circular, it's called convection. Like you've ever bought or seen a bad infographic on a convection oven. It's bound to have like red pulsating, circular arrows, right. Kind of going up and then back down again in a circle. And that's what it is. That's all it is. It's convection. It's the same thing. Remember that visions cookware in the 80s that you could see through? So if you ever watched a pot of water boil in one of those things. That's convection as well, like those bubbles going up, the hottest ones start to float and they're replaced by cooler stuff that in its place starts to get heated up and starts to float. And so what you've got is basically like a circular conveyor belt, like a Ferris wheel almost or the air that's heated at the I think so too, especially if we're talking about one of those Ferris wheels where the little cabin spin all the way around on their own axis. Terrifying. So you've got a Ferris wheel and as the Ferris wheel goes up, warm air becomes less dense and it rides to the top. And when it hits the top, it's colder up there than it is at the surface. So it starts to cool down. So it comes back down the other side. And as it's coming down because it's cooler, other air that replaced it before is going up because it's gotten warmer in its place. And it's just this constant moving Ferris wheel. Like you said, convection. That's convection rising and falling parcels of air in this case. But it can also be bubbles of air and water for boiling or pockets of air in your convection oven or something. Right. So now everybody, we talked a little bit about the Coriolis force or the Coriolis effect before. I don't remember what it was in. I don't remember either because we definitely have talked about multiple times about your sink or toilet drain. Right. So here's what I understand. The part where I get a little fuzzy is how as it relates to wind and I know that you've got that down. So I think we should make a pretty good dance partners here. Awesome. But I do understand like the Coriolis force only affects objects that are moving around something that's rotating. And in this case we're talking about the Earth. But it's very easy for me to understand that if a plane takes off in Miami and tries to fly to Seattle, it's not like by the time it gets to Seattle, the Earth is going to be in a different position. So Seattle. Because it rotates. So Seattle is going to be in a different place. So when you look at the little flight map you can't fly in a straight line from Miami to Seattle. You have to fly on a curve to meet up with where Seattle is eventually going to be. Yeah. So that all makes sense to me as it relates to wind, even after reading this like eight times, got a little hazy. So the way that I saw it described that makes the most sense to me is that the Earth being like a sphere or kind of like a sphere shape. But every part of the planet rotating. Making a full rotation in 24 hours means that some parts of the planet have a lot further distance to travel than other parts of the planet. Yes. The equator has to travel about 40 0 km in 24 hours. But as you go closer to the poles, there's a lot further distance. I think at 89 deg north latitude, right below the north pole, it has to travel 69 miles in 24 hours so no part of the Earth can arrive before another part of the Earth within 24 hours. It just doesn't work like that. So some parts of the Earth travel more slowly than others. You got it so far? Yeah, that part is easy. Okay. Now what I saw was that if you fire, say, like a cannon from the equator toward the north pole, when you're firing with the north pole, it's like one of those cannons that the cannonball is filled with candy. So it's not hostile at all. It's a very fun cannon. Exactly. I think we just invented a new great thing. So when you shoot that cannonball north towards the north pole, you're shooting it at the speeds that the cannon was already traveling, which is something like 1000 miles an hour on the equator. And as it gets further and further north, it's reaching a part of the Earth that isn't moving as fast as the equator. So that means that the cannonball actually appears to curve to the right because it gets ahead of the Earth as it's traveling. So that cannonball is going to land east of your target of the north pole. Got it? Yeah. But see, what's confusing me now is the thing that you sent me that said explained it best was from a surfing website and it had to do with Spanish roundabouts. Okay, that's another way to put it too. We have a cannonball thing though. Well, we haven't quite reached that. We haven't quite reached that. I have one more part of the cannonball to say. Okay, if you're at the poles and you shoot a cannon toward the equator, you're shooting it from a slower place to a faster place. So the cannon is going to curve behind your target to the west of the target. But to you, the person firing the cannon, it's still curved to the right. So no matter where you're firing a cannon from, whether the equator or the poles is going to curve the same way in the northern or the southern hemisphere to the right and the north to the left in the southern hemisphere. Now we hit the roundabout part. Okay. Do you want to take that one? Well, I mean, sure, it's sort of common sense. If you drive on the right hand side of the road and you enter a roundabout, you're going to be going counterclockwise around it. And if you drive on the left hand side of the road, it will be the opposite. Is it really that simple? Yes, it depends on which way the air is moving. So if you're talking about a roundabout, do you remember our episode? We just did the short stuff on the direction humans tend to travel. Yeah. Go to the right. If you're certain countries, and we talked about how if you're entering a circle and you go to the right, you end up going counterclockwise, but if you're in the circle and you go to the right, you end up going clockwise. Yeah. Okay. The same thing happens. So if you have a high pressure system, air is flowing away from it, so that air is coming out of the circle. But any direction that that air is going, say, in the northern hemisphere, it's going to veer to the right. But since it's coming outside of the circle, that means that all of that air eventually is getting spun into a clockwise direction. Yeah. If it's going into that parcel of air, that circle of air, because it's low pressure, everything's coming into it at a right hand angle, which means that the spin of the air is counterclockwise. I love it. I think it's really interesting. I was watching, as always, a lot of kids science videos to learn this stuff, and one of them had a sort of a map of the hurricanes of the world and as far as the directionality, using just little lines and arrows. And it's just fascinating to look at the band of the equator. I don't know how wide of an area that is that deflects it, but there are no hurricanes at the equator or within that certain band of width around the equator. And it's just cool to look at above and below the equator, how these hurricanes approach it, and then almost are like, no, thank you, and go and just take a turn. Yeah. They get deflected by the convection currents there, right? Yeah. It's really fascinating. I think it's fascinating, too. I say we take a break and come back and talk more about Wind, of all things. 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. 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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 an industry. IBM, let's create learn More@ibm.com 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 all right, Chuck, so you're talking about how the movement, the convection of air combined with the Coriolis effect, creates cyclones and hurricanes, depending on what hemisphere you're in in the world. Right. Also like that. A cyclone or hurricane is a really tight weather system. They're rarely that tight. They're usually much more spread out and much looser, but generally the same thing. And because of those two things, the convection currents and the Coriolis effect, that means that air spreads around the world. It travels around the world. If we didn't have a rotating planet, we would just have a convection current that went from the equator to the poles, the equator to the poles, and that's it. But because of that Coriolis effect, it spreads around the world, right? That's right. As it kind of spreads around the world, it's also kind of staying within a certain number of latitude and forms these large giant cells so that each band of latitude around the world generally has its own weather. Yeah. I mean, this part is really cool, and it makes perfect sense. The equator is where it's going to be warmest on planet Earth. And as the air is reflected back up with the Coriolis effect and it goes further north, it's going to start cooling down. And they've basically figured out at about 30 degrees latitude, it will have cooled down enough at that point to finally descend again. But when it's descending again, it's always seeking that equilibrium. So it's going to be pulled back toward the equator again by the low pressure caused by heating and rising to begin with. So again, it's that convection cycle, but they figured out that it's about 30 degrees, where that temperature change finally is enough for that to happen again. Yeah. And so because of that Coriolis effect, you have high atmosphere winds traveling from west to east, and then when they descend, they come back down from east to west. And those form the trade winds in this giant cell that's called a Hadley cell, which is between the equator and like you said, about 30 degrees north latitude. There are two of those. Yes. There's one in the north and there's one in the south. And then around the poles there are two other cells, appropriately called polar cells. And because it's so cold, the equator has its cells because it's so hot, the poles have their cells because they're so cold that any difference in temperature is like a radical difference in temperature. So they have their own convection currents that operate at the poles as well. That's right. And like you said, that's the polar cell that hits at about 60 deg. And it's just two, basically temperatures of convection happening on both sides of the Earth. And then in between you've got what's called the feral cell frrel. And this is between 30 and 60 deg, obviously, roughly. And right here, the heat differential isn't that much. It's not super, super cold or super, super hot. So you're not going to get as much like radical convection going on. And most of the movement there is caused by the Hadley cell below it and the polar cell above it sort of knocking it about in between. Yeah. Which is really cool because that means that the friction from the Hadley cell below it and the polar cell above it are actually spinning the air in the feral cell. And because the polar cell yeah. And the Hadley cell are both spinning counterclockwise, they're like gears turning a cog in that cog is the feral cell. And because they're both spinning counterclockwise, they spin the feral cell clockwise. That's right. That's just not so amazing to me. This is happening at all times on planet Earth. Yeah. Invisibly yes. And because of the tilt of the Earth on its axis as it rotates. Which gives us the seasons. The different strengths and amounts of this kind of movement of air and where they are within that band of latitude that they exist in changes over the course of a year. Which gives us different kinds of weather on different parts of the Earth over different times of the year. That's right. And all of this stuff going on, all of these the Hadley cells, the polar cells and the feral cells, all interacting with the coriolis force that we talked about and that you've wonderfully explained with candy cannons and all these different pressure gradients that we explained at the beginning, all of this stuff together causes the jet streams. If you've ever flown there's an airplane and they say we can make up some time, or if we fly a little higher, or if we're going east to west or west to east, things are going to like your speed is going to be different because of these jet streams. They're super powerful and very focused wind bands few hundred miles wide that just wrap around the planet. And the polar jet stream, that's the money one. That's where you're really going to be able to utilize an airplane's efficiency at its maximum, the subtropical jet stream isn't as powerful, so it doesn't get as much press. But the polar jet stream can go like 200 miles an hour. Yeah. And that's when you fly up in that thing. It's like walking on a moving sidewalk in an airport. Yeah, but one that goes 200 miles an hour. So hang on to your hats. Right. So you're still walking, but you're getting that extra boost. Exactly. And the reason the jet stream is so powerful up north, the polar jet stream, is because the difference in temperature between the polar cell and the feral cell is much different. It's much greater than the difference in temperature between the Hadley cell just above the equator and the feral cell between the polar and the Hadley cells. Right, right. And because of that temperature gradient, there's density differences. So air moves really fast, and it wants to go from the north, from the poles toward the feral cell into the mid latitudes, but it can't go all the way down because the pull of the Coriolis effect is such that it stretches it out into a stream. And it's a messy stream. It's not like a clear, easy going stream. And it changes from point to point around the Earth, and depending on the time of the year and even time of the day, I would imagine. But it stretches it out. And sometimes when the difference in temperature is so extreme, the jet stream can actually come down further south. And that's what happens. Remember when we get a polar vortex every once in a while, that's the northern polar sell extending like so powerfully into the United States, into the heart of the feral cell, where most of us in the US. Live. Right. I just think that's fascinating. And if you want to see that in action, there's a really cool video called NASA satellite sees polar vortex on the move. And I guess satellite imagery of the moving polar cell as it creates a polar vortex. It's pretty cool. And it kind of gets across, like I said, just how messy the jet stream can be. No, it's awesome. I think it's pretty cool. It points out that it was really World War II, where we saw where we really started to understand the benefits of the jetstream because there were just so many more planes than ever before. People are like, wait a minute, there's a jet stream up there, and we can really use this to save time and fuel and money and get advantage on our enemies, perhaps because we're moving faster. And even though in the 1800s, you might see volcanic smoke hundreds and hundreds of miles away, thousands of miles, because it got caught in the jet stream and they recognized this, but there weren't planes, so they didn't really understand. Like it didn't really matter, basically. Right. Because we're here on Earth. Who cares yes. So what we've been talking about so far, Chuck, like the jet stream, it's a very high altitude parcel of air, or movement of air, stream of air. I guess I'll just go ahead and call it that. But there are other things that also affect wind as well, and it has to do with the differential between the land and the sea and then also the topography of the land as well. Yeah. So if you've ever gone to the beach at all, you know that it's cooler near the beach and near the ocean than it is inland. If you ever lived in Los Angeles, I think Matt granny had a very funny quote years ago. Someone interviewed him. What did they say? They said something like, if you could give advice to anyone about living in Los Angeles, what would it be? And I think he all he said was, it's cooler near the ocean than it is inland. Some very kind of funny quip about that. But it's true. When you drive toward the beach in La just gets the air gets cleaner and cooler, and it's like someone flicked on the air conditioner generally. And that's because those temperature differences that we talked about of water and land, like the sun is heating this stuff up. It's heating up all that inland asphalt and everything else, even the ground and the grass, and it's heating the water differently and not right, is it? Therefore erstwhile? I never use that. I like that. So the reflected heat is going to be different over the water than over the land, and the land is obviously going to be warmer. So the air above it is warmer. That air is going to rise and create a low pressure system, and it's going to pull that cooler air from the water back toward the land. And if you're on the beach or near the beach, you're just getting the benefit of that cooler air being pulled in. Yeah. And if that didn't happen, that Frank Sinatra song Summer Wind would not exist. Oh, man. Even more importantly, there would not be one of the greatest endings to any Simpson ever. Speaking of Matt Greening, the end of the Bard of Darkness, one where Bart breaks his leg and ends up doing a spoof of Rear Window and The Simpsons get a pool and Martin Prince gets a pool to compete. And he wants to be popular, too, but his pool bursts and somebody, I think Nelson Muntz Pants is him, and he just stands there singing Summer Wind at the very end with his pants pulled down around his ankle. I don't remember it's as good as that episode is just fantastic. That's where Mill Pool came from. That's right. Top notch. I love that song, too. It's so great. Yes. So we need to talk about mountains, too, because we talked about ocean and how that kind of the ocean and how that topography can change how. Wind acts, but mountains simply get in the way of wind. If you've ever been hiking, it's much windier on the top of a mountain because there's simply nothing in the way. And that has a lot of weird effects on how the wind travels. Right? Yeah. If there's like, a gap in between mountains, it actually funnels the wind together, which makes it much higher pressure because there's a lot more air in one smaller space that can definitely affect wind speeds. And then also when it hits the mountain, like you said, because the mountain got in its way, it goes up and then comes down the other side. And on the other side, there's all sorts of weird turbulence that is really hard to plan for, which is apparently why flying in and out of Las Vegas can be a difficult takeoff or landing because of that turbulence from, I think wind coming from the west to the east. Yeah, I feel like there's been a lot of movies where, like, a helicopter crash has happened in real life range. Yeah, movies based on real things, probably. Exactly. So you want to take a break, Chuck, and then talk about all the things that Win does for us? Yeah, wind does a lot of things. Hey, everybody. 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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. All right, so we're going to talk about what wind does. What good are you wind? Well, if you like weather, you can thank wind because wind basically creates the weather that we feel as humans walking around on planet earth. It's going to pick up moisture and then drop that moisture again and give us beautiful cleansing rain. It's going to affect the temperature because like we said, it's moving air at different temperatures all over the earth and that air is going to change the temperature where you're standing. Yeah, I mean, it's weird to think about weather is just wind plus water mixed together in different interesting ways, but that's it. I thought that was the definition of comedy. Oh, no, wait, that's tragedy plus time. Yeah, you just busted my brain. Wind plus water, right. Not the same. So depending on where you are on the earth, it can be windier than other places. And in fact, I think for a long time, for a good 70 years, maybe 80, the highest wind speed record ever recorded was on top of a mountain in New Hampshire. It was exactly mount Washington, part of the presidential mountains, it turns out. Get this. There's like President Jefferson, President Washington and then President Eisenhower. What are these mountains? Yeah, that's the name of the mountains in this presidential mountain range. I just think that one sticks out a little bit. It's a big leap. So on this mountain, they recorded a wind speed of 231 miles an hour in 1934. And that stood all the way until, I think, 2011 when it was finally confirmed that something that had happened years before in Australia knocked the Mount Washington record off of the top of the peak, I guess, as it were. Yeah, I think this was in 96 is when it actually happened. There was a 253 miles an hour gust. But the interesting thing here is this was during a tropical cyclone. It was named Olivia at Barrow Island, Australia. And I think like you mentioned, it was only confirmed in 2010. But the interesting thing is Mount Washington, this was not a hurricane happening obviously in mountain Washington, New Hampshire. This was just a massive pressure gradient and multiple storms, sort of like the perfect storm crashing into one another. And then obviously mount Washington, that we already talked about the wind being greater at the top of a mountain, but usually you would expect a wind record to be during a hurricane and that wasn't the case. No. But also I've read that the jet stream dips frequently near mount washington. Interesting. So it had the advantage of the jet stream adding in there, too. Apparently, they bill themselves as the world's worst the place with the world's worst weather. Like they have hurricane forced winds. Yeah. Like 100 days of the year. And they are definitely hanging on to their status as much as they can. Right. In tornadoes, we should point out, don't count because there have been 300 plus mile an hour winds during tornadoes. And those are just separate records. Yeah. And then actually, we measure wind speeds from things like cyclones and hurricanes certain ways. So there's a scale called the Safir Simpson scale, which I'm sure we talked about in a hurricanes episode, but that ranges from category one to category five, and they base it on wind speed and potential for damage. And then for tornadoes, there's a scale that also has to do with damage, like how destructive the tornado was. It's the enhanced Fujita scale, and it goes from zero to five. I think we talked about that. What's it like inside a tornado episode. Yeah. Because one person survived it and told their story. Yeah. And everyone's been writing that story since then. That's exactly right. All right. We can go through some of the more things that wind does because it's pretty remarkable. It doesn't just give us weather. If you've ever been to the beach and looked at waves and thought they were kind of cool, you can think the wind for that. And we're not talking about, obviously, under the surface of the ocean where tidal forces are at work. We're talking about winds blowing across the surface of the ocean and literally pushing ocean water and circulating this water in what's called a gyre, which could be great. It can move nutrients and stuff like that and help marine mammals with their migration patterns and stuff, like marine animals with their migration. But it can also move around great garbage patches, as we've talked about in the past. Yeah, we did an episode on that, too. Edgy's is this example of how water can actually pile up, which is just so fascinating to me. When wind is strong enough and persistent enough, it can actually push water so that either end of a lake, like Lake Erie, can have a difference in surface level of like 15ft. It's just all the water happens to be on the east end at that time because the wind, these seasonal winds pushed it down that way. That's just nuts. I always think water's level. It's just always level. No, our friend wind makes it not so. Yeah. And I think Lake Erie is even a stand out in that it's at one end. It's a phenomenon called a sage. But from what I read, I looked up on stage a little more. I think that's usually water piled up higher at both ends, and it's lower in the middle. It's like less oscillation in the middle. They kind of likened it to a seesaw. If you look at the center of a seesaw, it's not moving as much as both ends are. Got you. But again, Lake Erie, that wind goes one direction, and it's just stacking up there on the sides, and the planet tilts a little bit when it gets too piled up on one side of Lake Erie. Does it really? I don't think so. Maybe, but probably not in any way we're equipped to detect at this point. You can really take advantage of how little I understand all this just by saying things like that for the seriously? All right. Good to know. I wish you would have told me that at the outside of this. Yeah, you could just make fun of me this whole time. Another thing wind does is help spread plants far and wide across this Earth, because a bunch of plants have evolved to disperse their seeds by hitching a ride on the wind. Huh? Sure. A lot of plants are built to do just that, whether it's the way they're shaped, like, if you think about a little dandelion. I mean, talk about something that was made to move with the wind. What are those whirly gigs? The helicopters? What tree is that? Are they maple to do that? I don't know, man. I always call them helicopters. Yeah. But it's almost like more like a clothes hanger. Like the old, fat wooden ones with a seed in each end to balance it out, and it just spins down like a helicopter rotor. They were all over when I was a kid, but I cannot for the life of me remember what tree they came out of. Yeah. And I don't think I feel like I see them like I used to. I wonder. Species has gone extinct. No. Someone will let us know what it is. I'm sure they're everywhere. But that was certainly made to move on the wind. Ed pointed out something I had no idea. It's kind of a cool little factoid, which is, when you go out west and see first of all, when you see your first legit tumbleweed, it's kind of a nice moment because it just seems like something from the movies, but when you see it, you're like, oh, wait a minute. That's a real thing that happens. There are a couple of weeds out west. They're dropping seeds all along the way, thanks to wind. Yeah. So there's seed dispersal unit is what you call it. Pretty neat. And SDU. It also carries dust, for better or for worse. We did an episode on desertification. We also did one on droughts. And in both of those, I think we talked about the Dust Bowl in the 1930s where the middle of the United States was turned into a desert because we didn't know what we were doing with soil tilling until they do erosion, terrible drought, some really high winds that just basically blew all the soil westward. I believe in blue. Basically everyone who lived in Oklahoma westward as well, to settle out in California. It can also, over time, over a long enough time, wear down the same geological features that get in its way. Sure. I mean, the mountain, the Appalachians are smaller now than they used to be, and that's because wind has just sort of eroded those over time, and they're still wonderful and great. But it's not like the Rocky Mountains out west. No, but they're about 400 million years older than the Rocky, so give them great weather now, stumpier. But so as wind taketh away, wind also giveth. And they think actually because of dust storms from North Africa, from the Sahara being kicked up and carried all the way across the Atlantic, which actually, sometimes, if it's good enough or strong enough, can cut down on hurricane season rather dramatically because it keeps tight systems from forming. But they suspect that possibly this dust, which is nutrient rich, which makes land in some part in South America, may have contributed to the Amazon reinforce being so lush. That's amazing. It is. And Chuck. What's causing that? Wind. That's right. But like you said, it can take us away. Wind can carry disease in that dust as well, and they're also from Africa. They think there have been some meningitis outbreaks around the world because of these harmonic winds that have carried it with the dust. And I guess the theory is that dust particles are going to carry a virus more effectively from person to person. I know. They've even talked about that with Cobid. Yeah, I remember that too. Like the reason why masks are effective, because I know at first there was a lot of people going, oh, these particles are so small, they can get right through those masks, but the particles are carried on droplets and the droplets don't get through. It's the same theory with the dust. Very nice. Thank you for the covert update, too. It's been a little while. Yes. It's still out there, everyone, just in case you're wondering. Yeah. Has it gone anywhere? You got anything else about wind, one of the coolest things on the planet? No. Okay. Yeah, it does. If you want to know more about wind, then just start researching. Maybe you'll be a meteorologist. You can pick up where Chuck left off. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Pick up where I left off. Which is to say after one class. Right. I made a CN. You got to start somewhere. All right, I'm just going to say this is one of the nicest thank yous that we've gotten in a long time, and it's been a lot to me, so we're reading it. Okay. Hey, guys, I wanted to write in and thank you for putting the superb content out in the world for people to enjoy. I appreciate that your show enforce and educates, but even more importantly, to me. Your opinions give me perspective on my own thoughts and beliefs, and I often find myself participating in introspection to check myself on outdated ideas that have been challenged by my friends and peers. Wow. You bring a modern, thoughtful approach to your outlook on life. And I can't tell you how helpful it is to have that presented in a friendly and accessible way. It takes work curating one's media intake nowadays to avoid negativity divisiveness and bias and having a platform like Stuff you Should Know that I trust to always put the best foot forward. We try to, my friend, is immensely appreciated. The impact you both had on me and countless other people helped shape a healthier, happier, and more inclusive generation. For that, thank you. Hardly cuts it. I know, right? Man, that was one of the best thank you ever. If you're ever in Austin, the barbecue and the drinks are on me. And that is from our new best friend, Tom Tap. It gets even better. He offered barbecue and drinks for free. Chuck for free. You don't have to do that, Tom. But if we ever come how about this? If we ever come back to Austin, Tom, you, my friend, and your plus one are on the guest listed. Listed. Tom just got listed. Just right us an email from that same thread, Tom, to remind us and say, hey, buddy, remember me? You promised me free tickets. Yeah, and to prove you are who you say you are, Tom. Well, I mean, if someone wants to go through trouble getting a fake ID that says Tom DAP, yeah. Then I guess that could probably work. I would not encourage that. If someone writes in and says, hey, I'm the guy, but my name is Bobby Juniper, Tampa. I got it mixed up. I don't know where Bobby Juniper came from. I don't know. Hotel check in name? That's a great one. It suggests that you smell really nice. Sure. And all you need to do is make that suggestion and people will take it and run with it. And as far as they're concerned, you do smell nice. If you want to be like Tom and send us one of the greatest, nicest thank yous ever, we would sure appreciate that. But that's not the only reason you have to have to write in. You can write in for any reason. Whatever reason you write in for, you can send it in an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. 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027ce3bc-3b0e-11eb-947e-bf04f1a52173 | Havana Syndrome: ¿Qué Diablos? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/havana-syndrome-qu-diablos | In 2016, diplomats at the American embassy in Cuba began suffering weird neurological symptoms after hearing strange noises. Some say it was a sonic attack using a secret weapon, but the Havana Syndrome remains a baffling scientific mystery to this day. | In 2016, diplomats at the American embassy in Cuba began suffering weird neurological symptoms after hearing strange noises. Some say it was a sonic attack using a secret weapon, but the Havana Syndrome remains a baffling scientific mystery to this day. | Tue, 06 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=96, tm_isdst=0) | 40109537 | audio/mpeg | "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 I think Dave's around somewhere, sitting in and for Jerry. Who's. Can we say where Jerry is? Chuck? I don't think we can yet, but it's pretty cool. Okay. Yeah, Jerry's on a cool field trip. That's Nunia. Okay. You ever say that when you were little? No, I had it said to me a lot, but I never had occasion to say it none of your business. Right. By the way, this is Stuff You Should Know, for those of you like. Say it. Yes. So, Chuck, speaking of anticipation, we're talking today about one of the greatest medical mysteries that has hit the world, at the very least the United States in a really long time. It's a little something that's been flying under the radar and really flew under the radar for a while, but there's probably a lot of people out there who haven't heard of this something called Havana Syndrome. And Havana Syndrome is, we should say, at the outset, there's not going to be any resolution to this episode. I thought I was missing some pages. Yeah. It's really dissatisfying, the whole thing. It is we don't know what it is. Nobody knows what it is. And really, honestly, the theories are not great. There's no one theory where you're like, of course, that's it. Everybody else has been ridiculous. Yeah. So in one way, it's kind of interesting and that we get to cover a lot of stuff, but in another way, it's, again, deeply unsatisfying. But the whole thing of Havana Syndrome is it all begins. I believe. The end of 2016. Around December of 2016. Just like a year after the United States had opened its embassy again in Cuba. After decades of this kind of chilly Cold War like pretending one another isn't their relationship. Just a year after that. There was a station agent. A CIA station agent in Havana. Who started complaining of some really weird symptoms after hearing a really weird noise. And that kicked this whole mess off. Yeah, this is worth reading, I think, from The Guardian in 2017. And I don't think this is the first one, but they were all very similar to people who are affected by this mystery. It says this the blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet and there was silence. He climbed back into bed inexplicably the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he had walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. And doesn't really describe much, but when you talk to some of the people who and we did personally talk to all of these people, right. We were given clearance for this. There were weird symptoms ear pain, tinnitus, headaches, hearing loss, vertigo, dizziness, nausea, disorientation, blurred vision, nosebleed, fatigue, sometimes the symptoms were sort of temporary and not too bad with some of the people. Sometimes it was really bad, and some people ended up retiring and saying, this is it. I'm out of here. Yeah. Some people went on to be diagnosed with swelling of the brain with a concussion. Some people suffered what seems to be permanent hearing loss. And all of this was localized just in the Havana Bureau of the American or the American Embassy to Cuba in Havana. That's it. So there was suddenly this weird onslaught, symptoms. I think as many as 90 people came down with this, what came to be called Havana Syndrome. Some of them said, I heard a weird noise, and then all of a sudden I had vertigo. Other people didn't hear anything. They just all of a sudden couldn't concentrate any longer, and the symptoms all seemed to nobody said I had a fever or my legs started swelling. It all seemed to be kind of clustered around your hearing, your ears, your nose, your throat kind of thing, but without the throat and without the nose, mainly just your ears and your brain. They seem to be a cluster of neurological symptoms that no one had any idea what was going on. Yeah. So of course, the US is going to investigate something like this. And we'll get into there were a couple of pretty well, as deep as you can get in this case, investigations. But the very first thing that happened was the FBI was like, hey, this is some sort of acoustic attack. Some sort of sound waves are being used. Let's get in there and at least check out the locations, check out everything around where these people are living, where they're staying, and they found nothing. They came up really pretty much empty. And we should also point out this is, I think, a few Canadian diplomats, too. It wasn't entirely us, right? But for the most part, it was us. And it seemed to be concentrated in the homes of the diplomats. And by diplomats, we're including CIA agents who weren't known. They weren't like, hey, I'm the CIA agent here. They were posing as diplomats. So the diplomats, they're in. Michael Keaton Well, who is he posing as? Michael Keaton? What was it? Out of sight? He's an FBI guy. And he showed up with a big T shirt that said FBI. And Dennis Farina had that great joke. You got another one that says Undercover? Yeah. Nice. I love that guy. He was the best. All right, people, who else could by Dennis Farina could follow up after Jerry Orbach? Nobody. And he did it with class. He brought his own character. Just amazing stuff. And I was about to say, I didn't see any of that show, but I was about to say, except he was no singer. No, like Jerry Orbach. But we might be wrong again. I really walked past that one, I guess. So the diplomats were being seemed to be affected at their houses. And then there were two hotels in Havana that these symptoms started their onset on. So, again, that was basically like the first investigation the FBI the FBI conducted was just like I don't know, but clearly it was an attack. It's localized to diplomats and their families. It's in Havana. It's not happening anywhere else for now. So some sort of attack. We just don't know what it was. That was the first investigation. And so the State Department said, let's dig a little deeper. Yeah, I mean, they kind of kept it quiet for a little while. I think the media eventually got wind of what they were calling a sonic attack. And then the former president administration, presidential administration, as things were starting to, I guess, thaw a little bit, said, you know what? You guys are out of here, and kicked out two Cuban diplomats kind of as payback, basically, when Cuba the whole time was going, we didn't do this. We don't know what you're talking about. And as we'll see later, they supposedly even investigated and tried to help investigate. Yeah, that was one of the longstanding things the Cubans have said basically from the outset is twofold. One, they had nothing to do with it, knew nothing about it, and that they would take something like that very seriously. And then two, they seem to suspect that this eventually snowballed into an easy way to cut ties again with Cuba. That was kind of something that was driving this narrative as well. Part of the problem also is, like you said, the State Department was keeping this secret, not just from the American public. Congress hadn't even heard about this. And everyone found out about the same time. When the media started reporting on it, congress found out about it. And apparently Marco Rubio latched onto this because he's a Cuban ancestry. I'm not sure if he is or his parents are from Cuba, but he hates the Castro regime. And so this is a big thing for him to kind of clump on to and really kind of enrage his base, the Cuban expatriate community in Miami, in South Florida, and he out of the gate, I think even released a press release referring to this as a sonic attack. Like really kind of taking whatever the FBI had surmised and just basically saying, this is what happened. We just haven't figured out how, but it was an attack. And that really set the paradigm moving forward for basically everybody except for, thankfully, large swaths of the scientific community. Yeah. So they commissioned the National Academy of Science to undergo an investigation in 2019. And even by that time, people that understood things like acoustic or possible acoustic attacks or just acoustics, basically said this wasn't some kind of a sonic attack. It is possible that you can focus a sound beam to an area, but you would have to truck in some equipment that's so big the FBI would have found it. And even if they managed to do that and get away with it, there were so many different symptoms going on with these people. It can't all be explained away by an acoustic attack. And let's say that even happened, it definitely wouldn't cause brain damage. Like the worst acoustic attack wouldn't cause somebody brain damage. No. So really there's two ways. Because here's the other thing. People said they heard a weird sound or whatever, but it wasn't necessarily some like they were clearly being attacked by the sound. That wasn't what they reported. Some of them said, I heard a weird sound first, and then all of a sudden they have these weird symptoms. That's what gave rise to the sonic attack theory. But there are basically two ways to attack people with sound, especially sound they can't hear. It's either below our threshold of hearing, which is infrasound what? I was trying to make a Yoko on a joke. Right. That's the third route. She combines the two. It's a sound infrasound is below our threshold, below 20 Hz. Right. And you actually can cause things like vertigo in somebody, or vomiting, loss of bowel control if you hit somebody with a loud enough infrasound blast. But like you said, yeah, you can make someone poop their pants with infrasound, but you would have to basically, like you said, truck in just this huge rack of subwoofers and shoot it right at somebody to make them lose control of their bowels. It would be very obvious that this is being done. Yes. You can't use that as an excuse moving forward. Anyway. I still will. Okay. Ultrasound above our threshold of hearing, or 20 above. There is stuff on the market that you can actually direct at somebody a beam of ultrasound and hurt their hearing, but you're not going to cause vertigo or anything like that. And to really cause major symptoms or something approaching a concussion or traumatic brain injury, which some of these people were diagnosed with. There was a scientist who said, I think his name is Joseph Pompey, he's a psychoacoustics expert, which is awesome. He said that you would basically have to dip your head in a pool lined with ultrasonic transducers to get like actual brain damage from that. So that didn't happen to anybody. So again, they said sonic attack, but it must have been some sort of exotic weapon that even the CIA isn't aware of. Alright, I think good. Time for a break. Yes, I agree. Stick our head in a pool of ultrasonic transducers. Yeah, I can't wait to see what happens. I'm going to poop my pants. All right, great. Okay, Chuck, so you said that the State Department sick the National Academy of Sciences on the Savannah syndrome thing, right? Yeah, like everyone at this point is saying it's not a sonic attack. So they started focusing on potential viral attack, pesticide poisoning, because this is when Zika was a thing and Zika fumigation was going on either microwaves, which is interesting. Yeah. And then our favorite frankly, one of our favorite topics is mass hysteria. Yes. We talked about it twice, at least. We did a short stuff on Gloria Ramirez. Remember her? And then we also did a full length episode. Some really interesting cases of mass hysteria from 2016. Yeah. So put a pin in that. Nas is doing their study. They were sort of behind the eight ball a little bit, because by this point, things had already progressed. They were at a disadvantage in a lot of ways. This was after the fact. They didn't know, like, these doctors who were treating these people, they didn't know. They were investigating a mystery. They were treating people for a medical issue. Yeah. So your approach to a situation like that is a lot different if you're not investigating. Like, no one was back there saying, hey, found out what weird thing happened to these people? They were just, like, treating tinnitus and nausea and stuff like that. Yeah, that seems to be a really big ball drop on the part of the State Department. A lot of things here. Yeah. In particular, the Cuban Bureau or Havana Bureau, there wasn't anybody at the top saying, hey, there's something clearly going on here. All of these people, when you go to this one particular doctor and have the doctor, this one medical center, or somebody looking at looking for all these symptoms and documenting this, they were just being treated individually. Finally, at one point, they did kind of bring everybody together and have a meeting. But before that, there was just a lot of treatment going on, and it wasn't being documented properly. So the Nas just right out of the gate was like, this is what we're working with for real? Yes. I mean, they didn't even have stuff like original blood samples for when these people got sick. There was a lot of time that passed, so they really had no way to tell anything. They had incomplete data to begin with. And then, of course, you're dealing with Cuba. They're investigating some stuff, but it's not like if this happened to Canada and we were really sharing information like that. Well, from what I read, the Cubans are saying, like, we were totally willing to collaborate. The State Department refused to let the Nas talk to us. I believe that they couldn't accept our data. Yeah, I guess the Cubans had conducted neighborhood surveys, had done its own investigation, and the Nas was barred from using any of that data. And then one other thing that hamstrung them right out of the gate was the medical files. These are medical files of diplomats and in some cases, CIA agents. So not only is there, like, HIPAA stuff going on, like HIPAA protection, so that their things have to be redacted, there's like national security stuff too. And the State Department is very redaction happy when it comes to stuff like that. So they were basically handed medical files that had huge black bars everywhere over possibly important information. So you put all this stuff together and the National Academy of Sciences cannot possibly arrive at a clear picture of the problem, the symptoms, what happened when, who was near whom, at what point. And so they can't possibly map could produce an epidemiological map. So whatever they come up with is going to be flawed. And they realize this from the get go. Yeah. So what they ended up coming up with the Nas said, you know what? It was a directed pulsed radio frequency energy. And we think that's the most likely cause a couple of keywords they are directed and pulsed means someone did this. It was a very specific intentional attack. It wasn't just some random thing that happened because of microwaves or cell phone towers or anything like that. It was a purposeful thing. And they said one of the reasons that we think it might be this is this thing called the Fry Effect. F-R-E-Y. Nothing to do with the deceased former eagle Glenn Fry. The H is O. What? The heat is on. I've told you about this before. There's a Sarah Live sketch featuring Ben Stiller. I don't remember. He sees Glenn Fry, who's actually will Ferrell, our colleague and coworker, sure. As Glenn Fry at a club. And he's like, I'm going to seduce Glenn Fry to his friends. And he goes over and he actually is successful, but to his own detriment because Glenn Fry makes him eat out of a dog bowl and keeps him on a chain. And there's this wild, like, just crazy sex that's going on. And the guy really regrets having seduced Glenn Fry. But they refer to the heat as on as the H. As Ollie I have it is impossible that I have not mentioned it before. So when the words Glenn Fryer uttered, that's the first thing you pretty much every time I have another Glen Fry store if you want to hear it. I get it all the time in the world. So you and I were traveling in our car and this Eagle song was on which one? The one about the wheels driving you crazy. Take it easy. And I hate the Eagles to begin with. From start to finish. I hate their entire catalog, every moment of it. That song in particular is one of the ones I really hate. And we have a pause button on our radio. And so I paused it because this is live radio and I unpaused it and there's the song still. I'm like, man, this is a really long song. We do this like five times before I realize that our radio can actually pause live radio and that we're not like in some new concentric circle of hell. There was a moment they were like, did we die or are we in purgatory? Because this is awful. That's really funny. Well, I am back loving the Eagles after many years of not, and so I wanted to thank self. You should know Lister Clayton James, who invited me and Emily to the Eagles concert last time they came to Atlanta. And I got to go backstage there and stand on the stage of Phillips Arena and touch Don Henley's drum kit and look at Joe Walsh's and Glenn Fry's guitars that his son now plays in his absence. Yeah, I think he told us about that one. It was awesome. And I know now why you weren't there. Yeah. But Clayton is a good guy. He does other bands. Like, I think he works with Kiss a lot, so you probably enjoy that. I would definitely go see Kiss. For sure. Yeah, for sure. So if Clayton's listening, we want to go there. Yeah, I want to meet those guys. Okay. They scare me still. There was another guy named Josh who's a cool guy I've lost touch with, but he used to invite us to the New Kids shows because he was like he was like a production designer. It's like you're talking about with Clayton. He doesn't just work with the New Kids, but he's like this in demand production designer. But one of the shows that he's done for multiple years in a row is New Kids, and he kept inviting us to the New Kids show, and not because I didn't want to go through the New Kids, but there was no I couldn't go to the New Kids every time. But we turned out to be friends. He's a cool dude. I haven't heard from him in a while. That's awesome. I guess if you're listening, Josh, get in touch. Yeah, because we want to go that's the first show I want to see when this whole thing is the New Kids. Oh, yeah. Then Kiss. Okay. So the Fry effect. Boy, that was a good long segway or not segway. Tangent. What do we call those? Tangents irritations. It's the lifeblood of the show. The Fry effect, basically, is when pulse microwaves directed at a target can make a clicking sound in the target's ears, and only the person can hear that sound. So they kind of go back to those I don't know how many people, but some of the people said they did hear a clicking sound before all this stuff happened, so they kind of were like, all right, it's the Fry effect. So here's the problem with that. At this point, the National Academy of Sciences, the people, the group they empaneled are just now just ticking off the scientific community because they're like, oh, there's this one quality that can happen from this one weird, random thing. That's probably what it is. We'll just completely ignore everything else in favor of that one little piece of information. And so it's really kind of interesting if you read articles on the Havana Syndrome, there's a lot of cattiness going on. Like, you can get a scientist to call somebody else basically a clown with this stuff. It's really interesting to read a lot of, like a flame war stuff. But the problem with the Fry effect, well, there's multiple problems. One, they recorded the sound. There's a recording of it out that the AP leaked that you can hear, which would discount the Fry effect because only the person being targeted by microwaves here's the clicking, that's a big problem. The other thing is that other acoustic or microwave experts say to produce that clicking in the person's ears, you would cook them to death. The amount of energy it would take to make that Fry effect happen would kill the person. It wouldn't just create the clicking in their ears, but that's kind of one of the things that they settled on as a potential explanation. Well, the State Department was like, sounds good to me. I buy it. Yeah. And I mean, the Nas said, we're considering all these other things. This is what we think is the most plausible, which is actually really the least plausible. Yeah. And some of the people in the framework were like, why did they like, they have these medical experts, basically, and neurology experts. What you need if you're going to investigate something like this is a lot of different kinds of experts. You need some acoustic experts apparently didn't even engage acoustic experts talking about this acoustic stuff. And they were like, you need a multidisciplinary team in here in a lot of different fields if you're going to investigate something like this. And they just never did. Yeah, and one of the interpretations I saw was that, again, they were working backward from the Rubio FBI, State Department idea theory that it was a sonic attack. That was what the premise they were really going on, and then they were trying to work backward to figure out what the attack was made of, rather than, okay, maybe it was intact, maybe it was also natural, that kind of stuff. Or accidental. Who knows? Yeah, I mean, there have been other smaller studies not from the US. Government. Like, there was one from Ben Gurion University that said, you know what? We studied some of these Canadian diplomats, and based on their data, we think it was pesticide poisoning. But then a lot of people, and it seems like the most popular, including the Cuban Academy of Sciences, take that for what it's worth. But a lot of them came back and said, I hate to say it, but this was maybe mass hysteria and some sort of psychological either illness or mass hysteria episode going. Yeah, a lot of people agree with him on that. And Cuba, by the way, has a really good healthcare system and a really solid scientific community. So the Cuban Academy of Science is not like the banana republic Academy of Sciences or anything like that. From what I understand, I've never been to Cuba, but that seems to be the most widely subscribed to theory that it was what's called conversion disorder, where you basically have a psychogenic illness. Somebody is told what the suite of symptoms is, they start developing it themselves, and then this tight knit community, it starts to seem to spread. And the thing about it is called conversion disorder. You are actually experiencing your body is experiencing those symptoms, just like in the placebo effect where you take a pill and it actually does make you healthy, even though it's not an active ingredient. But your mind can make your body do things if it thinks something is going on. This is the kind of like the mirror image of that where you start to suffer because your mind tricks you into thinking that you have these symptoms, and it seems to spread because people are like, fear is the contagion in an instance like this. Yeah. And this stuff has happened before. I think we talked about at least one of the Portugal yeah. In 2006 in Portugal. Gosh, are we doing this in 2006? No, we talked about it after, for sure. No, we definitely went. It was two years before we were born. We were just embryonic at that point. Yeah. Twinkle in Adam Curry's eye Gross. Yeah. 2006 in Portugal. There was students in high school. I think it was high school, right? Or was it college? I think it was high school. Yeah. There were hundreds of students in 14 different schools. All developed these weird symptoms, rashes and dizziness and breathing difficulties. And then it happened again in New York in 2011. Twelve high school students developed what they thought was Tourette syndrome, or at least symptoms of Tourette. That sounds made up. If I were a principal, I'd be like, you're all suspended for even trying this. Yeah, because all they did was yell. Right? Exactly. Yeah. There was another one in Oklahoma in 2017 that actually was happening about the same time as a Savannah syndrome outbreak, where there was actually the kids were paralyzed. They thought that there was some sort of crazy, like, mold or autoimmune disorder or something like that, and they were suffering paralysis. And that's the thing about conversion disorder, is these kids were paralyzed, but it was their mind that had paralyzed them, because they thought they'd been exposed to something that was making them paralyzed. And it turns out it was just in their minds. And that's what a lot of people think Havana syndrome is, that it was just a psychogenic illness. Yeah. So I think we should take a break, but we'll leave you with this little cliffhanger. In this Nas report, they reference data from an earlier report by the CDC that was commissioned and completed, and Congress and everyone else looked around and said, what CDC report? What are you talking about? So let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk about this mystery right after this. That's a nice cliffhanger. Okay, Chuck. So everybody's saying, wait. This is December of 2020, when the Journal of the American Medical Association published the Nas findings. Finally. Mere months ago. Yes. And in that, they made mention of a CDC report that no one else had heard of, and like you said, including Congress. And it turns out that the State Department had initially commissioned the CDC shortly after this outbreak began, and said, can you guys figure out what's going on? And so it turns out that there was actually the Nas study was the second scientific study done on this, and the CDC didn't really come up with much more than the Nas did. Yeah, they issued an 18 page report titled and they spent half the time trying to figure out how to spell yeah, there was a vigorous debate over that. No, it was really called Cuba Unexplained Events Investigation. And like you said, they kind of came up empty, too. They were hamstrung in a lot of the same ways that the Nas was, and they had a State Department that had dragged its feet and didn't have the protocols in place for the investigation. I think one of the only things that kind of came out of the CDC report that was helpful, which I guess is why the NES used it in the first place, was it did fill in a few of the details about what happened to whom. Yeah. So they managed to nail down Patient Zero, who first reported some neurological symptoms in mid December of 2016, and that was a CIA officer in Havana. That CIA officer mentioned their symptoms to a second CIA officer who, like, a couple of months later, developed the same symptoms. See where this is going? Yeah. And so after that time so apparently, Patient Zero, the first CIA officer who has happened to, was really instrumental in spreading the word about this. And it seems to have been very convinced that they had been attacked, that there was a sonic attack going on, and that the word needed to be spread about this. And so, as a result, I think the Havana Embassy held a meeting and basically said, listen out for weird sounds, and if you start to get this huge, weird collection of symptoms, let us know, because we're probably under sonic attack. That solves that. And went back to bed. That's right. And maybe not coincidentally, a lot of incidents happened after that happen. And at the end, they said, if you want to go home, right here's one way to fast track that. Although Cuba think it's supposed to be very nice, so maybe they weren't trying to get out of there. But in the end, 95 people were seen for these symptoms. In the CDC report, it said that 15 of those had a two stage illness. First was the noise. That we talked about and those acute symptoms, and then second, a few weeks later, a couple weeks later, they had that neurological damage. I think 31 of the cases were maybe 49 were unlikely. And then of those 15 who had that two stage syndrome while the report was issued, there were six of them still getting treated. So it wasn't even like their treatment was completed. Right, yeah, that's the thing. Like, whether it's psychogenic illness or a sonic attack or fumigation poisoning from Zika pesticides, there were still people that were still being treated for symptoms for over a year. These are nasty symptoms, like vertigo is nothing fun, or vomiting or dizziness, or inability to concentrate. There's a lot of terrible stuff that people were having to deal with, whatever the reason for the symptoms were, which makes a lot of people think like, no, this is a real thing and these people were attacked, and we need to find out what it is. The CDC at least said, we have no idea. We cannot figure it out. In their conclusion that they couldn't possibly put forth any kind of explanation. They just mainly documented everything, which is certainly a mark in the CDC's favor and a mark against the Nas of the CDC resisted saying, yes, it was microwaves, and it was probably the Ruskies. Yeah. And that all came about after everyone. A lot of scientists that has rejected the findings, cuba rejected the findings. We told you earlier that they got all up in arms and said, hey, listen, we tried to help. We take this stuff seriously. We weren't a part of this. But in that Nas panel, somebody said something about Russia, and obviously Russia is in bed with Cuba. And they said, you know what? Maybe it was Russia. We do know that in the 70s they were trying to weaponize microwaves. They, in fact, for like three years straight, three and a half years, pounded the American Embassy and Moscow with microwaves. I don't even know if they had an end game there. I think they were just like, hey, let's see what this is. Hey, turn it on. And I don't think it really did anything if it went on for three and a half years. And apparently, of course, we'll never know because it's Russia, but supposedly they kind of gave up all that stuff decades ago. Yeah, this is the 70s when they were shooting microwaves at the American Embassy in Moscow. And, yeah, as far as anybody knows, that that technology wasn't pursued any further. So if there is any kind of sonic weapon that is concealable, that is capable of producing the suite of symptoms, it is news to the world. Right. And there are people who say, like security experts, that kind of group, who say, yeah, it's entirely possible that somebody's developed this without the US. Being aware of it. I saw a quote that America tends to be very surprised that not that certain things exist, but that other people have caught up to America's technology. Hubert yes, but at the same time it's kind of like it's suggesting that America or certain quarters of America are fully aware that this is possible, which is why they're pursuing that sonic attack thing. But they can't just be like, it's this see everybody, we've had this for 20 years now, we just didn't know that the Cubans had it, kind of thing. So the US. Still seems to be, with the expulsion of the two Cuban diplomats, is basically saying if Cuba doesn't know if they didn't do it, they know who did it. And they maybe even let it happen because apparently diplomatic residences in Cuba are owned and maintained by the Cuban government. So it's not like they just had no opportunity to do this kind of thing. But Cuba, like you said, is extremely adamant that they had nothing to do with this and that they would never let this happen to any accredited diplomat in their country. And if you step outside of the United States, it's really kind of funny because the rest of the world is totally fine with Cuba. It's really just the United States that's at odds with Cuba and Cuba is cool with everybody else. Like apparently a million Canadians go to Cuba every year on vacation. So it's kind of like something that they're not really happy about. The idea that if you go to Cuba, you might suffer the sonic attack that could at the very least hurt their tourism industry, if not just impinging how they treat diplomats from other countries or allow them to be treated. It's a real insult in that respect. Yeah, and I think also one of the end results was the US. Government and was kind of exposed a little bit of dragging their feet and not being coordinated and not maybe having their ducks in a row. And I think if anything like this were to happen again, I think they had enough egg on their face to sort of get it together to at least sort of be coordinated from the get go and have a multidisciplinary investigation going on. Yeah. And this whole thing like the big argument and push and pull among the scientific community still very much ongoing. There was a paper published that examined some brain scans of some of these diplomats that were taken at Penn State, I believe. And the authors of the study concluded that a lot of them showed evidence of trauma. And then other scientists responded and said this doesn't show trauma at all. This is exactly what you would find from a random sample of the population. Other people remember I said that they recorded the sound that they heard. Apparently a couple of biologists ran that sound through spectral analysis and showed that it exactly matches a specific kind of cricket that's native to Cuba and the Caribbean. So there's just like it's still being hammered out, like we said at the beginning, that this is not settled. No one has any idea yet exactly what it is, and it seems like the most satisfying answer would be psychogenic illness. But even still, I mean, that doesn't seem to really explain everything necessarily. Yeah, a pretty good mystery. Still a good mystery. And who doesn't love that, right? I know. Glenn Fry. I hated I don't care what Glenn Fry liked or didn't like. If you want to know more about the Havana Syndrome, go check out the copious amounts of articles about it. There's a lot of stuff out there. It's really interesting and engrossing stuff. See what you think. And since I said, see what you think, it's time for listener mail. When you think about that H is O story. The h is no. Isn't that from Beverly Hills Cop? I think the heat is on one. Yeah, that was the one where he's, like, hanging off of the back of the semi. Yeah, he did a few of those soundtracky type things and he was an actor on Miami Vice, which is one of your favorite shows. Miami Vice. It's fine. I refuse to watch the episodes of Clem Fry. All right, I'm going to call this just a nice email from a listener who has kind of grown up with okay. Hey, guys. I'm writing to say that I first discovered your podcast way back in 2010 when I was in the 7th grade. I had just moved away from many of my neighborhood friends, and your podcast was a source of information and comfort during that transition. Having always been a nerd, I was immediately hooked on your podcast and have listened to it on many of my travels for sports teams, college trips, and international adventures. In fact, your podcast had a major impact in keeping my curiosity alive and well throughout my life. I just accepted an offer for grad school in Georgia and wanted to write to say that although we have never met, you to have positively impacted my life for more than the past decade. So thank you for everything. I hope you're well. And that is from Abigail. That is a fine lasermail. Thanks a lot, Abigail. That's very sweet. I love it. And best of luck in grad school. That's great. Yeah. Go kill it. Yeah. But not literally. No. That's the figure of speech, meaning go do a great job. The best you can. Do a great job. Okay, well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Abigail abigail. Abigail's. New nickname. Not Frank Abigail. No. Abbigale Master Ford, known as Abigail. Yeah, we talked about Frank Abigail in the five successful counterfeiters episode. He's number one, wouldn't he? He was up there for sure. He's good. Well, anyway, if you want to get in touch with us, like anybody, including Abigail, Abigail or Abigail, you can send us an email to stuffedpodcast diehardtradio 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." | |
871d6844-3b0e-11eb-9699-f3cf26b95979 | The Flannan Isles Mystery | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-flannan-isles-mystery | In December 1900 three lighthouse keepers vanished without a trace from a deserted island in Scotland. To this day no one knows exactly what happened to them. | In December 1900 three lighthouse keepers vanished without a trace from a deserted island in Scotland. To this day no one knows exactly what happened to them. | Thu, 11 Nov 2021 14:41:48 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=14, tm_min=41, tm_sec=48, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=315, tm_isdst=0) | 47564667 | audio/mpeg | "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 over there. And Jerry's out here, too. So since the the gangs all here, the three of us alone on a deserted isle, stuff You Should Know. Can I mention a couple of things here? I think you should. I want to pre apologize to our Scottish listeners whom we love. We toured in Scotland, had a great time. One of our best live shows in the beautiful city of Edinburgh. Yes, wonderful people, love the Scots. But we are going to butcher some of these names, and I apologize. Yeah, we're sorry. And what was the other thing? Oh, the other thing was it's impossible to talk about the Flannon Isles lighthouse mystery and research it without almost always thinking about the movie the Lighthouse. Yeah. And actually it comes up a lot in the research, too. Yeah. I think one reason is because it's clear that what's the guy's name? He made it. I can't think of his name. William Eggers. It's not William Eggers. Well, it's definitely not Dave Eggers. It's an eggers, right? Yeah. Robert, I think. Robert, okay. Robert Agars. Okay. Yes. He clearly did his research. And I remember when that movie came out, I spoke on the show that I wrote a movie, a period movie about a lighthouse and a murder that takes place. And then the movie The Lighthouse came out, and I was like, so much for that. But I did a lot of research at the time, and it was clear that Edgers did a lot of research because it was a very accurate film, especially when you read and research the Planet Isles lighthouse mystery. Like, oh, yeah, that's from the movie. And that's like, from the movie. Apparently they mentioned it in the movie. I didn't go back and watch it again, but I saw somebody really? That they make a reference to the mystery in the movie. Oh, cool. That's awesome. I thought so, too. Yeah. Man, I can't wait for that Viking movie to come out. Me, too. And this made me want to see the lighthouse again, which I didn't think I wanted to do, but now I do. Same here. So we are talking about one particular lighthouse called the Flannon Isles Lighthouse, and it was located on one island in the Flannon Isles called Island Moore. That's not exactly like Chuck was saying, the Scottish pronunciation Scott Gaelic, but it's close enough. And it actually means in English, I guess the Moore island. Right. Okay. Anyway, that's where this lighthouse is. And it's situated. It's still there today. It's automated, though. It went automated in 1971. But it's light is about 75ft atop the cliff, which is the highest point of Island Moor. And that cliff is 200ft above sea level. And it's a pretty good place for a lighthouse because this area of Scotland is kind of treacherous for ships. Yes. And it's important how high this one was. It figures into the story. I'm not just showing off with stats here. Yeah, it is treacherous. It's a windy area, there are big winds in Scotland, especially out there on those islands. I think it is close. And this is kind of funny, the name of it, but isn't it nearby, supposedly the Windiest place is it the Windiest place in the UK. And what's the name of it? The Butt of Lewis. Come on. I'm serious. But it makes sense. I know, not twelve years old, but Lewis is a nearby island which is inhabited in the region, which is pretty rare, but this part of it, one end of the island is called the Butt of Lewis Island and it's the windiest part. The butt of Lewis is the Windiest island. Right. So the area that these flannon isles are in so island. Mower is in the flannon isles. The Flannan Isles are part of the larger island chain on the northwest of Scotland called the Outer Hebrides. And to the west of them you can just keep going and going and going and then you'll finally reach North America. They're pretty remote, they're pretty isolated. They are indeed windy and like we're saying, the seeds are kind of rough around there. I think that's kind of putting it mildly. Plus the islands themselves are often very rocky and jagged and so it's treacherous. So of course you'd want to put a lighthouse there. Oh yeah. The winds blow strong from the Butt of Lewis, but the lighthouse that was built there finally on island Moore wasn't installed until 1899, which is kind of late considering that Scotland had something called the Northern Lighthouse Board that they organized in 1786 to basically oversee and standardized lighthouse keeping in that country. Yeah, so they were headquartered there in Edinburgh and here's how it worked at the time. And this checks out according to my research when I was writing my movie and the movie The Lighthouse. Oh, nice. They were staff. You had your principal lightkeeper called the principal keeper, and then usually depending on where the lighthouse was, how busy it was, how big it was and as far as needed personnel for operation, you had one or two assistants and they were all ranked as you weren't just like, oh, I'll be the first keeper this week, like you earned that spot. It was a promotion. And then you were assigned to these stations by the board, just like in the movie. You don't stay there forever, you kind of rotate and you go there for a little while and you may get stationed with someone you've never worked with before and you have to get to know that person very intimately over the course of a short period of time or it's somebody you have worked with before and you're old friends with, maybe. Or old enemies. Yeah, exactly. Or old enemies. So aside from these two to three people, as principals and assistance, you had what was called the occasional keeper. And this is someone who actually lived nearby, either an inhabited island residence or, if it was uninhabited, if it was at least close enough to where they could get there easily. And they would help out during the day, but they would go home at night and sleep and stuff in their own Betty by, and that was the standard. But for a place like Island Moor, where the Flannel Isles Lighthouse was located, if you were an occasional, you were there for two weeks. That's how hard it was to get to the island and how hard it was to get off of the island. Right. So the purpose of the occasional was to give two weeks rest off to one of the other two or three people who are permanently, temporarily stationed there for much longer than you. Right. And in those cases, the keeper, the occasional, does not go home and sleep. Right. So one of the things that stuck out to me, Chuck, was that when you think about lighthouse keeping yes. The person has to live there and it's a lot of work and they have to attend to the light and everything, but I think lighthouse keepers are very frequently portrayed as weirdos, just complete alcoholics who can't do anything else but live by themselves, almost like their place there, because there's nothing else for them to contribute to society. So they're kind of cast off or ostracized. That's not the case. At least not in Scotland. That was not the case. Like, if you were a lighthouse keeper, that was a very important job, you took it very, very seriously. So much so that there is a study that found between 18 51,950 years, there were only 15 recorded instances of a lighthouse keeper falling asleep at their post, which was about as bad as it gets as a lighthouse keeper. Yeah. That's not to say there weren't drunks and missing throats here and there. Maybe those are the 15. Yes. But I did a little more further math, Chuck, if I may be so indulged as to share it. I saw that, I thought that was pretty funny. Get this, let's say you have about 150 lighthouses in operation between 18 $51,900. And if you calculate that number of lighthouses times the number of nights that occurred over that 50 years in Scotland, you have what we'll call 275 million lighthouse nights. Out of those 275 million lighthouse nights in Scotland over those 50 years, only 15 of those nights found a lighthouse keeper asleep on duty. That's how seriously they took it. Did you account for leap years? Oh, Chuck, I just really wanted to drive that home and I really thought that was an important point and it didn't come across with 15 instances in 50 years. Who cares? No, I mean, it's a big deal because the purpose of the lighthouse, I guess we have not really said, is to light the way around rocky shores and islands so boats don't run into them. Yeah. Unless you've been living under a rocky shore. You know that it's a very important job, though. I love lighthouses. We've talked about them quite a few times on the show. Big, big fan. Every time I am near a lighthouse, I will do my best to climb that thing if it's allowed. So who done it in your lighthouse? Mystery? Who did do it? It was a good story, actually. Well, then maybe you should hang on to it in case somebody comes along because it's not like The Lighthouse is the only lighthouse movie ever made. Yeah, the briefest synopsis is it's two sisters who are tending the lighthouse because it was their family job and their parents died there. So it's these two, sort of like maybe a 20 year old and a 16 year old out there alone in this island. And then these two men wash ashore one day in a shipwreck and they tell the awful story of their ship going down. And it turns out that the real story is they were prisoners aboard a ship being transferred and they escaped their shackles and murdered everyone aboard. Wow. And then there was a shipwreck. So they were bad guys who got washed ashore. Oh, it's a bit like a reverse dead calm, sort of. And they charmed the girls, but I guess I didn't know the name was an occasional keeper. There's a guy that lives one guy that lives on the island that helps them out, that is sort of suspicious of the guys. And it sort of plays out over the course of the movie where they're exposed ending in a game of cat and mouse one night. Nice. It was okay. I did it as an experiment because all I've ever written is comedy. And I thought, hey, maybe I'll write a serious thriller and it could be better if a really good thriller writer got a hold of it, I think. But were there still, like, little jokes peppered as a side? Like one of the sisters is running from the murderer and says to herself, I left the mainland for this. Like your comedy shines through still. Oh, I don't know. I'll have to dust that thing off. You should, man. It sounds like a good one. Thank you. So this lighthouse back to the Flannel Niles Lighthouse on Island More. Like we said that most of the Outer Hebrides are uninhabited. I think we said that, didn't we? I don't know, but you just said it then, I think. There's 70 islands in the Outer Hebrides and only 15 of them are populated. And Island More is definitely not one of them. The only remote it is extremely remote. The only people, the only beings that live there. What you would recognize as a genuine, normal being as opposed to say paranormal, which we'll get into are the lighthouse keepers and some sheep. Even the people whose sheep those are don't live on the island or even stay there overnight. They go out a few times a year, check on the sheep, and then leave before nightfall. That's kind of how Island Moore is viewed. It seemed kind of as a place where maybe gods or ghosts or just something otherworldly lives on island more, according to the locals. According to lore written about the locals. I've never spoken to an Outer Hebridian. Yeah, and I think the other thing we need to mention, too, because I believe it comes up later in one of the supernatural explanations for what is to come here with this mystery is the name Saint Flannon comes from the fact that Island Moore was the site of a chapel in the 7th century built by a traveling Irish monk who eventually became Saint Flannon. And that's going to come up. Just put a pin in that. It's a big time pin. Hang on to it. Okay. Is that a good set up? Should we take a break? I think so. Man all right. We'll come back with more spooky lighthouse mystery stuff right after this. All right. So we should probably mention the steamship actor or archdor archer? I've seen it both ways, but that kind of kicks off the story for us, don't you think? Yeah. Well, we haven't mentioned the major players either yet, have we? No. I guess we could go either way. We can mention one or the other first. All right, let's mention the players because these are the actual keepers of that lighthouse. Okay. You had the principal keeper, James Ducat. You had the second assistant. Wouldn't he be the first assistant, though? No, donald MacArthur. We'll get into that. Okay. Thomas Marshall was the second assistant, and then Donald MacArthur was the occasional. Right, yeah. Here's my bit. So he was filling in for a guy named William Ross. William Ross was the first assistant keeper, which meant that since Donald MacArthur was filling in for him, donald MacArthur was the first assistant keeper, even though he was an occasional keeper. Okay, that makes sense. And William Ross was on sick leave. And just judging from the movie The Lighthouse and all this research, like, you must have had to have been really sick to get taken off the island. Yes, that's what I thought, too. But doing research for this, I found that these guys had, all of them had a rotating two weeks off. So at any given point, over a stretch of two weeks, one of those men, James Ducat, Thomas Marshall or William Ross would not be on the island because they rotated two week shore leave, basically. So, yeah, I was over the impression that if you went and ended the lighthouse, they dropped you off, left you with some food and said, See you never. But that's not the case. No. I think they were well taken care of. I get the impression the Northern Lighthouse Board was pretty good at its job and really cared about these people and looked after them. I didn't see anything to deny that. Yeah, well, it's a brutal and important job, so surely that they were taken care of, at least to a certain degree. Yeah, but the upshot of all this is that there were three men on the island, three dudes working that lighthouse, and aside from some sheep, that was it. That was the only people on the island. And by the way, this is December of 1900, right? Yeah. So this thing is brand new. Yeah, they built it in 1899. That was scheduled to take two years. It took four years. The construction was started in 1895. And what they built was, at the time, a state of the art lighthouse. But it took so long, it took twice as long as they anticipated because the cliffs and the island itself was so treacherous. That's how long it took just to get materials up the cliff to build the lighthouse. Yeah. So it's finally in operation and then now comes the actor, which is what you mentioned earlier. Not A-C-T-O-R but the actor. A-C-H-T-E-R. Yeah. It was a transatlantic steamship from Philadelphia to Lease, which is the port for Embra. That's right. So they were out there, it's about to say, sailing around, but I guess they were steaming around and they waited out of storm for a few days. And then this part got confusing to me. So the actor was passing by Flannon Isles. It passed by on December 15 and the actor noticed that the light was out. Not that they couldn't see the light because of weather or anything like that. The light was straight up, not lit on the lighthouse? On Flannel's Lighthouse. It was a very strange thing to see and it was very noteworthy. They ran into some weather on their way to Leaf and had to wait it out for a few days. And when they finally made it into port, I guess they passed the information along. But the Northern Lighthouse Board didn't catch wind of it until the official relief supply ship showed up a few days later. And the actor's observation that the light was out wouldn't come into play until an investigation was launched later on. Right. So that relief ship was the Hesperus Hesperus, and that arrived on December 26, 1900, which is Boxing Day after Christmas. And what these ships brought was they usually brought either supplies or fresh dudes or both. And in this case, I think they had supplies and a fresh lighthouse keeper. And it was captained by Captain Harvey. And they were like, all right, something's going on here. This lights out. The flag is not flying. Let me toot on the horn a few times. Nobody comes out. All right, well, let me send up a flare. They send up a flare, no one comes out. And what they're trying to do is say, hey, we're here. Get your little rail car system going. It had a little cable pulled railroad system that was operated by a steam engine and a shack. And so when the chip pulls up, they would toot the horn and the dudes would come down and they would get that steam engine going and get that cable car ready to transfer the goods onto this thing so they could it's like hundreds of pounds of stuff going up a really steep cliffside. Yeah. There's just no way to move that stuff otherwise. No, you'd have to do it. So nobody came out. No one gets that steam chat going, and they're like, all right, something's going on. We're going to have to go on land and figure this out. Yeah. And just the fact that they weren't greeted by one or more of the guys from the lighthouse, which is apparently custom, like even the most grizzled, misanthrope lighthouse keeper just knew it was custom to come down and greet the relief ship. You're still dying to see someone else? Pretty much, I think so, yeah. So the fact that no one showed up and then no one responded to their signals, they were like, something really weird is going on here. And they had Joseph Moore, who was the relieving keeper, which makes me think that William Ross was really sick because he would have been on sick leave for way over two weeks by the time because I believe the relief ship was five days late because of weather. So he must have really been laid up. And they sent another relieving keeper, Joseph Moore, instead. And Joseph Moore went ashore and he was friends with these guys. He wasn't some new dude or anything like that, so he was genuinely concerned. And he went up the steps to the lighthouse. There's apparently 160 of them. And he just knew right away that something was way off. There was no sign of life. There was nobody around, nothing was going on. It was abandoned, basically, and he didn't have a very good feeling about it. So he runs back down to the boat to say, I think we have a problem here. Yes. So he says, I think we have a problem. And then that's when basically everyone on board said, all right, this is the situation now that we all have to deal with. I think it was the captain who went with More to search for other stuff, and they said, in the meantime, you other guys, you got to get up there and start operating this lighthouse because it's been down and we need to get that thing cranked up again. Yes. For the first time, possibly since December 15, the lighthouse was lit again by these relief guys who took over and kind of settled in and were like, all right. This is our job now. But that follow up search, it's weird. We'll talk about some of the legends and layers that were added to it over the years, but to me, the thing that was so weird about the follow up search is that everything was in place. It would be way more like kind of middle of the road to me, this mystery. If there were signs of struggle or everything was just kind of a skew. It's way more eerie to me that everything was exactly how it should have been. It's just the three human beings that were supposed to be there were missing, but that's what Joseph Moore found and the others found when they searched a lot more thoroughly. Yes. The door to the keeper's house was closed. The gate was closed in the kitchen, everything was all spick and span. Everything was all cleaned up. It was clear that someone had done some cooking in the grate, but not anytime soon. There were ashes in there, the beds were made, the clocks had all stopped because no one was there to wind them, obviously. And everything was fine except, like you said, that there was no one around, that there was a full fountain of paraffin oil. Like the light was ready to be burned. That French lens was cleaned up and ready to go. The blinds were drawn, the records were all filled out all the way up until Saturday, I think, the morning of December 15. Right. Yeah. And so everything was great, except for there were two missing sets of rain gear they're called oil skins, their coats and their boots. Two of those were missing out of the three guys. So that's sort of the only thing out of the ordinary at this point. Yeah, that was basically the only trace of the missing men. Like, had those oil skins still been there, you would have taken the lighthouse in the area as, like, having been prepared for somebody else. They just hadn't shown up yet. Like the missing oil skins were the only trace that those men were missing, that there had been men there that were no longer there anymore. Right. And then there were a couple of pieces of literature that kind of confused things after the fact. Right. Yeah. That really kind of made this to a lot of people, like, a much bigger mystery. I think some people came along and weren't satisfied with how mysterious it was on its own and so added to it and added to it over the years through magazine articles and newspaper reports and then later on, like, podcasts and stuff. And so you really have to be careful navigating these waters, if you'll excuse the pun or the stupid metaphor when you're researching this, because so much of it is just regurgitated as fact because it has been part of the story for 100 years. It was actually thanks to the efforts of a journalist named mike Dash, who, if you are at all interested in nonfiction writing, especially nonfiction history writing, go check out Mike Dash's website. He's probably the best in the business. Oh, yeah. But yes, he's just amazing. But he set his sights on getting to the bottom of this, and he did some stuff and basically finally definitively proved, no, this was added to it later on. This was added to it later on. This is not true, that kind of stuff. So hats off to Mike Dash for demystifying. A lot of it true, but also making it not as fun because it's decidedly creepier with these newspaper stories as they were written. One of the newspaper stories talk about the log book, and this is completely fabricated. Like Mike Dash exposed it as fabrication. Right. But it's still pretty creepy. The log entries and the fake log entries were by second well, not by second assistant Marshall, but this is how they wrote it, right? And wrote, on December 12, they saw severe winds, the likes of which I've never seen before in 20 years. And these are people that have seen some of the worst storms you could imagine out there on these outer islands. And pretty unshakeable guys, I would think, right? And he said he wrote in the next few days that the storm continued. It was so unbearable that Ducat, the principal keeper, was struck mute by the storm. And the occasional keeper, MacArthur, who is supposedly a really tough guy, was recorded as weeping uncontrollably for days because of how bad the storm was. Right. Yeah, it's good stuff. It is good stuff. But Mike Dash made mincemeat out of it, and he's kind of my hero for it. One of the things that he basically just points out is if this were an official log book, if you were a second assistant, you put that in there, you would basically get fired for that kind of thing. Like, that's not what a log book is for. And you certainly wouldn't put that your superior was weeping uncontrollably in the log book. Like, that's just not what you would put in a log book in the first case. And then secondly, he also said that somebody being quiet because of a storm or whatever, or their mood, like, it also kind of mentions their mood a lot, too. That would have no bearing on anything. And the only way that that makes sense in relation to the story is after the fact, which he said, obviously, that means that these were written after the fact. And then years later, after he first investigated it, he finally turned up a copy of the magazine that this came out in 1921, and it was like a pulp magazine called, like, True Confessions or something like that. So he definitely deconstructed that for sure, to my great satisfaction. I love it. Yeah. It's kind of funny, though. Like, the logbook was basically like your diary. That's exactly right. He says log books were not diaries. No, they were he actually specifically said that. Yeah. That's funny. The other thing he uncovered, did he uncover the poem, or was that just I think that was a little more common knowledge, but yeah, he wrote about the poem being the poem, too. Okay. So in 1912, there was a poem by Wilfred Wilson Gibson, who wrote a poem about this mystery, where he says, there was an untouched meal on the table, cold meat, pickles and potatoes. The kitchen chair was knocked over. The only sign of life was the keeper's canary half starving on his perch. These are all the things that you mention would have made this a different story, but everything was really just fine. I don't even think the chair was turned over. Right. I don't know. The guy later on well, we'll get to him. Yeah. The way that Mike Dash treated it is that it's possible. Okay. I don't know if Mike Dash treated it like that way. Mike Dash wrote about a later guy who we'll talk about who treated it as fact. Okay. I think with the upshot of it is that in doing this research on primary resources, like what Joseph Moore wrote, what Robert Murhead, who will talk about, wrote, these people who were actually there when it happened, right after it happened, that nobody mentioned anything like a turned over chair. And based on what they did mention, it seemed like they probably would have mentioned a turned over chair. They were so meticulous in the details. All right, well, let's talk about some of the evidence that was there. Okay. Because what we're really talking about is the kind of obvious thing you would think about is, was there some big storm that washed these guys away forever? That's kind of the one reasonable explanation. And so as far as evidence goes, most of it is storm related to sort of support that and to go against it. There was a railway that we talked about and that had a crane, and the crane was sort of built to help unload things off of this platform, off the cargo container, and it was about 70ft above sea level, and it was fine. It even still had the canvas wrapped around it. So if there was some big storm and evidence shows there probably was one. Right. But at least this crane, 70ft up, wasn't damaged, and that canvas was still there, which is a little weird. It is a little weird because even a little higher up toward the top of the cliff so the crane was at about 70ft above sea level, right? Yeah, a little higher up than that, at about 110ft above sea level. There was a box, a big box that held a lot of, like, mooring ropes and ropes for the crane and just some really important stuff, tackle. And it had been busted open, and the contents, like, strewn all down. The cliff's face. There was a buoy that was tied to the railing right around the same places that crate 110ft above sea level. It had been torn clean away from the ropes that had lashed it to the railing. The ropes were still there, but the buoy, just a little piece of buoy was left attached to it, and yet the crane was intact. And then, even weirder, the iron railings around the crane that you would use as handrails had just been completely twisted and wrenched out of place. That's a heck of a storm. It's an amazing storm. It's crazy to me that the crane was left and that the canvas was even on it. That was really weird. There was a 2000 pound stone that was up on the cliff that slid down. And then I believe the railway tracks were even torn up from the concrete. And then the grass at the top of the cliff, this is 200ft up at the very top, was ripped up as far back as 30ft from the edge. That's nuts. Do you know how much force a wave would have to have to tear up grass in the first place? And then that thing would have to be over 200ft tall to even reach that grass. That's a bad storm. It's a monster wave. But the storm part that kind of confounds things big time. And I think we should take another break and we'll talk about how everything is so confounded still to this day. Which is why this is a mystery right after this. All right, we've got this mystery brewing. These three men are missing. It's pretty clear that there was a big storm that blew through there. So, like I said earlier, the obvious explanation was the strong Windsors came along and just blew these guys the heck off this island and they were never seen again. That's not entirely out of the question because of the butt of Lewis. That's right. Strong winds flow from the butt of Lewis, as everyone knows, and I'm twelve years old. Robert Muirhead, he was the superintendent of lighthouses and he investigated this disappearance. He knew all these guys some really well, but I think the occasional keeper. He knew the lease, but he still knew pretty well. Right. He's the one that did this investigation personally and went out there, wrote up this report, and I think he was the last person he was out there because it was a new lighthouse, I guess, sort of finishing up. And I don't know if he Christian it or whatever, but he was one of the last, in fact, maybe the last person to even see them alive. Right. He says in his report that he's probably the last person to shake hands with these men and see them alive when he shoved off on December 7, when the last ship, the previous release ship, had come along. All right, so in his official report, he said, I don't think it was a strong wind that literally blew them off the island. It was blowing westerly that day. And that means it would have blown them back inland toward the island. And there's no way that these guys would have blown completely across the whole face of the island off the other side, because they know what to do. They know to drop and get flat and hold on, and they probably would not have been blown all the way off if it was westerly. They need to stop, drop, and do not roll. Right? Yeah. Don't roll. Please don't roll. Not in that case. I would grab something heavy. Yeah, anything. A sheep, whatever. Anything that will keep you from being blown off. But that's just nuts. It shows you how windy it is up there. That was a possibility that Muir had considered and was plausible enough that he had to at least put it in the report as a possibility. That's right. The one that he focused on, that most people who think in level headed ways kind of agree with, too, is that instead a wave probably came along and knocked these men off. Yeah. This one I'm an amateur when it comes to figuring out Scottish island mysteries and weather. This one makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, totally agree. So being blown away by wind sounds kind of nuts, unless you think about it, in which case it's not super nuts. In this instance, at least, there were more slightly nuttier explanations. And the thing is, you can't fully discount any one of these, because the men's bodies were never found, so there was never any conclusive proof of what happened. Even still, to this day, and some of the, likelier, less likely scenarios seem to always focus on Donald MacArthur, who was supposedly a bit of a hothead, quick to fist kind of dude, not necessarily the kind of occasional keeper you'd want to have on rotation for two weeks with you, but that's what a lot of these secondary theories kind of presuppose. He would have been the William default, right? I guess so, yeah. I kind of imagined him as such. He got the story from this, didn't he? I don't know. I'm curious. I bet you did. I don't know. I'd have to watch it again now that I know that I hadn't even heard of the story when I saw the lighthouse, so I need to watch it again and see what I think. I'm going to do some research on that. I doubt if he, like, based it on this, but I wouldn't be surprised if it triggered the idea or something. Got you. All right, so MacArthur was, like you said, a tough guy, a hothead. And of course, there's going to be speculation that he started a fight and they all got in a big fight and they all fell off the cliff together. Or maybe he murdered these two guys and then knew what his come up and would be and flung himself off the cliffs himself in sort of a murder suicide situation. Yeah. Again, it's plausible some people can go nuts, especially in extreme isolation kind of thing, but there's just no evidence whatsoever of any sort of fight. It's possible to fight started entirely outside, but it just doesn't satisfy all of the evidence. Right? I don't think so. Like, the guy whose weatherproof coats were still there was Donald MacArthur. So why would he start a fight outside in weather that was bad enough that his comrades would put on their weather gear? Right. Or maybe when it comes to fighting, you don't want that raincoat on. I guess maybe you found it restrictive. That's entirely possible, too. But again, as far as the secondary kind of paranoid theories go, those make a lot more sense. The other ones just are much more squarely in the realm of paranormal. Yeah, you could say that. The Outer Hebrides are home of the Kelpie, and the Kelpie is a water spirit, a shape shifting water spirit that drowns human victims. But there are two problems with this. One, that is not real, and two, even if it was real, let's just do a thought experiment. Everyone knows that the Kelpies are not seaside dwellers. They are inland at the locks. Right. They're not known to frequent the seaside. They don't like that saltwater. No. So the Kelpies probably did not kill these men and cart them away. There's more supernatural there, right? Yeah. The island being named after Saint Flannon and that ruined chapel being there, and the idea that the locals just kind of view that island as a weird place. There is this one author, a supernatural, like, Fortien type author, who came along and said, all right, I've got it. Everybody ready for this? So the locals think that this place is kind of inhabited by spirits. I'm guessing that the pagans who used to live here sacrificed people on this island and that the gods came to be used to a certain type of sacrifice. And that was a northern lighthouse board installed these three men in a tower on Island More. It awoke something, and the gods mistook it as a sacrifice. So they took their sacrifice, and that's what happened to the three men. I think you skipped over the best part of this whole thing, though. It was an ancient race of tiny people. Well, I can't tell if that guy made that part up or if that is actually a local belief, but, yeah, that was part of it, too. How small were they? Supposedly they found small bones that seemingly belong to humans. And so there was a race of tiny people who supposedly lived there before. But are we talking, like, are they the size of a sea rat or like, two or 3ft tall person? They don't. Am I Scottish? I don't know. All right. I was just curious. A sea rat. It was tiny. That's a very tiny, tiny person. Pagan. But I think that's really interesting, the idea that the gods mistook the lighthouse keepers as a human sacrifice. That's what happened to them. I love that one. It's like a big Wicker man or something. Yes, exactly. I think that's exactly the point that I was making. All right, so those are obviously all bunk. What probably really happened is as follows. And I think this is a pretty plausible I think this is pretty plausible. But even still, it's still astounding if you step back and look at it. Yeah. And there's no way to prove it. So I kind of like these mysteries. We just don't know. So here's what could have happened, is that there was bad weather reported, but it wasn't maybe that bad on the 15th. But let's say that box is loose or not going to get loose. Let's say that box needs tending to. It's holding all this stuff, right? It's an important box. Don't forget it's an important box. And I think Marshall had previously been fined what would be about \u00a320 today for having lost some equipment. So he may have been really quick to like, hey, we got to secure that box. And so maybe Ducat and Marshall went out there, they left their quarters, while the other dude, the occasional keeper, MacArthur, is up there in the lighthouse still, and they're securing this box down. And then maybe this freak wave comes through, or maybe they just get in trouble and then MacArthur needs to really leave quickly, which would explain why they did have their rain gear on and MacArthur didn't because McCarthy had to leave really quickly to go down there and help these guys. Yes, that definitely checks all the boxes. After that, MacArthur was swept away as well. But the thing is that suppose is something really amazing, Chuck, that there was a freak wave that the men just did not expect that carried at least one of them away. The second one who survived that wave ran back to get help from MacArthur to help get the first guy who went in. And a second freak wave washed those two away, just cleaning the island of its human inhabitants. And two swift waves over the course of a minute or two. Because the idea is that the storm wasn't bad enough to just sweep them all away. Yeah, it had to be a rogue wave, right. And the steamer, the actor noted that the area because the actor passed by just a few hours, a couple of hours probably after this event happened. And they noted that it was calm but stormy, which is the opposite of what you would think. You would think it was not stormy. Which would draw the men out to make them I mean. Stormy enough that they needed to secure the box. But not so stormy that they felt like they couldn't go out. But calm really kind of makes it the idea of two freak waves really freaky. Because that would mean that those waves just came out of nowhere and swallowed the men up. But we did an episode on rogue waves, and the idea is that it's a wave. Yeah. Or is there a set of rogue waves? I think if I remember correctly, it was aware, but that's what I think. Maybe there is more, I don't know. But yes, that's the only way that could happen is because MacArthur wasn't wearing his rain gear, which suggests that he ran out in a hurry into bad weather, which means that one of them would have had to have come and gotten them. He wouldn't have been there with the other two. So it could not have just been one freak wave. It would have had to have been two successive freak waves that cleared all three. Well, and this does lend some credence to the idea that this thing was big enough to damage the turf 200ft above sea level and destroy that box and wash that 2000 pound stone down the cliff too. Right? Yeah. And there's a chance that all that stuff that just was evidence of a terrible storm actually came after the men had been washed away from the island several days later when there was a really bad storm on December 20. Okay, that makes sense. I didn't think about that. Isn't that weird to think that that damage had happened after the fact? Right, sure, that makes sense because it's almost certain that this event happened on December 15. The last info they had on the log slate was 09:00 a.m. December 15, like we said. So it couldn't have happened earlier than that. And it would have happened before dark on December 15, which would have happened about 04:00 p.m.. Because otherwise they would have lit the light that night and the steamer actor would have seen the light in the lighthouse as it passed by on December 15. That's right. I think all this gets really interesting in the 1950s when a lighthouse named Robert Aldebert, who worked there, served as principal keeper between 53 and 57. He lived there, obviously had a little time on his hands and was really enthralled by this mystery and was like, I'm going to do some research and I'm going to take a lot of pictures and keep a lot of records in my diary. I was in the lighthouse itself. So that's how many feet above sea level? 25, close to 300ft up and got sea spray from some waves. So he's like, it's very possible that a big wave could come through and reach these heights. Yeah, he did test where he took coils of rope and put them on the top of the cliff and they get washed away by some of those horrible waves. So he basically said it was almost certainly a wave that got these guys that's not the craziest part? The craziest part is it was two waves, almost like the sea was waiting for all three of them and took them all. It's pretty weird. I wonder if he got fine for losing those ropes. I don't know. Maybe so. If it's the Northern Lighthouse Board. I know he definitely did. Well, what was his final expedition? Because he's the one that we mentioned earlier that said that one of the chairs was turned over in the kitchen. Right. Like he kind of bought into that false narrative. Yeah, but I wonder because this is a good 40 years after that poem had been written. Maybe it was so woven into the story by then, he just presumed that it was true or not. So how that comes in is he's basically like, all right, after dinner happens. Like there's bad weather going on. These two guys go out there and see, this doesn't make sense to me, and I'll tell you why in a second. But these two guys go out there to secure this box or whatever, cookies back in there washing up and cleaning up. And that's where everything's nice and tidy. And then all of a sudden they need help. And so he turns the chair over because he just runs out of there real quick. Yeah, but wouldn't someone have to be in the light, too? Isn't that four guys? No, that's why they think that this happened in the afternoon of the 15th because they never went to light. The light. They hadn't lit the light yet. Remember? The light was all set up and ready to be lit for the evening. It was daytime. Yes, it was before sunset, which would have been before 04:00 p.m.. All right, that's the one part I didn't get. I get it now. White houses shine at night. Yes. I forgot that part when I wrote my movie. Everything takes place during the day. Right. I left the mainland for this. You got anything else? Good stuff? No, I like a good mystery. You're good at finding these, man. I love this one. So thank you very much. Yeah, well, if you want to know more about the Flannel Niles mystery, go read Mike Dash's work on it. It's really interesting stuff. It's pretty comprehensive, too. And since I said it's pretty comprehensive, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. I thought this is really interesting. This is a follow up to the Dingoes episode about dingoes not really barking much. Hey, guys. In response to the statement that dingoes don't bark, you left out a very fun fact and perhaps a topic for another show. While domesticated dogs bark throughout their lifetimes, wild adult dogs do not routinely bark. One popular theory is that domesticated dogs were bred for tameness, which as a result, selected for dogs that never reached full maturity. The upshot of this is that our domesticated dogs are trapped in a state of suspended adolescence. They're more or less trapped in puppyhood, an age where all dogs, wild and domestic, bark play lick, and most important of all, don't kill, which is an important trait for the family pet. And sent an article from Tampa BayCom. Why do dogs bark? From love the show. That is from Peter Vonier. V-O-N-I-E-R. Vonier. Yeah, either one of those will work, depending on whether you're in France or not. And Peter is a PhD in owl oncology research, also with an interest in dog barking. Sounds like Peter just is interested in Stuff, which is our favorite kind of listener. Yes, that is a diet in the world. Stuff you should know. Listener. Thanks a lot, Peter. That was a very interesting email and we appreciate it. Belated. Congratulations on your PhD. If you want to get in touch with us, like Peter did, you can send us an email, right, Chuck? You surely can. Then you might get a response, even yup. Or you might end up on listener mail. Who knows? Yeah, I try to answer these. Why don't you roll the dice and find out by sending your email to stuff. Podcast@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." | |
What is China's one-child policy? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-chinas-one-child-policy | China's one-child policy, implemented in 1979, was designed to limit population growth. In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck examine the policy's surprising origins, impact on Chinese culture, and pros and cons. | China's one-child policy, implemented in 1979, was designed to limit population growth. In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck examine the policy's surprising origins, impact on Chinese culture, and pros and cons. | Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:34:07 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=16, tm_min=34, tm_sec=7, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=293, tm_isdst=0) | 24286439 | 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. This channel. Charles W, chuckers Bryant. You know, one day I'm just not going to show up. I'll do both of our bits and be like, hey, I'm Josh. Hey, I'm Chuck. Hey, I'm Chucky girl. Hey, Josh. I think it's pretty accurate. Good luck with that show. Good luck. Although I finally get to be shirtless the whole time. True. You're ready for a little bit of irony this afternoon? Yeah. Let's hear it. Back in 9th. Okay. Short, little 36 years before ghostbusters apple cheeked. No, 35. Okay. Short, little happy apple cheeked chinese man named Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, established the People's Republic of China. Hazard. Yes. And one of the things that they were big on was reproduction, I guess is the only way to put it. Okay. The Communist government under Chairman Mao. They oppose birth control. They banned the import of contraceptive in 49. He said, of all the things in the world, people are the most precious. Are you ready for the ironic twist? Yes. 30 years later, China catapulted itself to the forefront of state controlled reproduction, which is what came to be known as its one child policy. Right. Discuss. You know what? I got a little stat for you. Speaking in 1949, the life expectancy in China was then, like, 735 years old. Holy cow. And it's 73 years old now. Yeah. With the Communist government came things like sanitation, a relative peace. Sure. War had beleaguered China for generations, had been killing people left and right, and as a result, the population just skyrocketed. Indeed. And the old image of China that we have is probably, like, four or five kids, a couple of parents, a couple of grandparents, auntie and uncle, like, packed together, living in a house. Right. Not true anymore. No, not anymore. Because of the one child policy. So let's talk about this. This is something people might have heard of before, but first of all, why did it come about? It came about from the population skyrocketing. Right. Well, I've got some more info, actually. Are you ready for this? I am. You want to know how it really came about? Yeah. You didn't look at any of this song Jian no. Okay. All right. We're all going to learn here then. Let's hear Mr. Smarty. Apparently, there was a systems control specialist in China. In 1978, he decides to visit Europe. And back then, he was kind of isolated from the outside world, like many of the people in China. Pretty known for isolation. Yeah. So he goes to Europe, and he picks up a little book called The Limits to Growth. You ever heard of this? The Limits to Growth was a really controversial book study put out by a think tank called the Club of rome, and basically they said, in a nutshell, the world will end by 2070 because of population overrun. And they brought it out to big fanfare, along with The Blueprint for Survival, which was published in 72 in England, who basically said that people in Britain were reproducing too quick and they couldn't maintain. He goes back to China with these books and he said, It really made sense to me. And so he was connected. He formed a little group and decided to take it to the government and said, hey, he started applying these studies and these statistics to China and said, we're in big trouble. Yeah. And so he took all this stuff, and basically it was from there that it leapfrogged that it catapulted rather into a reality. However, the ironic thing is that whole Limits to Growth apparently was a bunch of bunk, and it was based on bad statistics. And I'm sorry, the founder of The Book of Rome who actually helped write the book came out a couple of years later, and they had a retraction that said they wanted to jolt people from the comfortable idea that present growth trends could continue indefinitely. So they basically said, we were trying to scare people, and we cooked up a bunch of studies which led to China's one child policy. Yes. That's nuts. Pretty cool. That's not the only thing, though. I think China has never apologized for its policy, and one of the reasons why they instituted it was because the population was growing rapidly. Which is fine. Right. The reason that Chairman Mao was, like, reproduce. Reproduce. Was because his vision for China was this huge booming economy based on tons and tons of labor. Right, right. Kind of makes sense in a way. It does make sense. The problem is, right now China has a quarter of the world's population, but only 7% of the world's arable land. That is a rub right there. Yeah. So one of the reasons, in addition to this fake book that they institute, the one child policy was to slow this population growth. Right. And it worked tremendously, right? It did. Well, it worked to the team of about 400 million kids not born. Is that right? It depends on who you talk to. 400 million is the high end that I've seen. The lowest I've seen is 250,000,000. Even. Still, that's substantial since in the last 30 years. You know, they said in 1980 was what's it officially called the National Population and Family Planning Commission of China state agency that runs the reproduction control. They said in 1080 that we must have a cap by the year 2000 of 1.2 billion people. And it's projected that they had 1.27. They weren't too far off, but that's Chinese figures continue to grow. Now there's 1.33, actually, and more than that. That was 2008. Yeah. Apparently every year, China adds the population of Belgium to its own population. 10 million people. They literally bring over everyone from Belgium. Yes. Come on. And then Belgium has to start from scratch again. They get the 10 million and every January. Come on, Belgium. I'm going to go to Belgium next January. So you can get a free trip? Trip to China? Well, no, so I can stake my claim there in Belgium. Okay. Just move into somehow we'll move you to China eventually. Chuck oh, that's true. Okay. We have this huge population explosion. It's still going. Just because if you have 1.3 billion people, even allowing them to have one kid is going to add an add up. What's the projection? I believe by 2050, they're expected to peak at 1.6 billion. That's a lot. That is a lot. But actually, that's nothing compared to what it would have been had they not instituted this policy, which at first was voluntary. And they saw a greater decline in fertility when this policy was voluntary. Right. In 1970, they had a fertility rate of, I think, six births. Per woman. Per woman. Just so people understand what that means. That's the mean. Yeah. And then by 1979, it was down to three. So they have their fertility rate. You know what it is now? What? In the urban areas, 1.7. I'm sorry? In the urban area is 1.3, and the rural areas, two point out for about a 1.7 average. Right. But even still, if you look at the numbers, that's less of a decline than there was when it was voluntary. Yeah. What China started out with was a campaign called what? Chuck longfew. Late. Long and Few. So you married late in life, you wait a long time in between births, and you have few children. Right. And couples who volunteer for this get a little certificate. Yeah. What's that called? The certificate of honor for single child parents. Yes. Must be nice. I guess. Is that enough? It depends. I don't know. Sure. We should also say that the one child policy that was instituted in 1979, I don't know if we actually came out and said that yet. Yeah. That was when it officially became a mandate. So the one child policy, at least at first, and generally in practice, has restricted almost exclusively the Han ethnic majority. Those are the people who are really subject to one child policies. And the people who are under the most restrictions are urban couples. From the Han majority? Yes. Ethnic minorities are allowed to have more kids. They've generally been excluded from the one child policy. Well, you have to get permission, I think if you're in a rural area, you have to get legal permission to have a second child if you're first born as a girl. And if you're an ethnic minority, you can have three kids. Well, you bring up a really good point that's one of the huge byproducts huge, this one child policy, is that the culture of China, not just the government, the culture, has been accused of preferring boys over girls, accused of the tune of encouraging abortions for females, stuff like that. Who knows if that's true? But that's been floated. It's true. It is, yes. At the very least, there's been tons and tons of reports and allegations, but if state pressure, if not state mandated abortions. Okay. Or at the very least, local pressured abortions. But one of the ways China still has a low abortion rate, 25% of the female population report having an abortion. Where? In the US? 43%. That was higher than I thought. That's apparently really low. Yeah. At the very least, low compared to anecdotal evidence. Okay. There's probably a lot of girls out there who aren't willing to say that they had an abortion in half. Sure. But still, let's say that those numbers are completely accurate. Right. China has 25% abortion rate. The US has 43%. One of the reasons that they've been able to maintain a low abortion rate comparatively is through open and universal access to contraception. Yes. IUDs and sterilization is what they prefer over there. 90% of contraception is long term. Right. They don't do the condom or the birth control pill that much. Not much. Or vasectomies, of course, in China. No, they put it all on the woman because, again, they have been accused of preferring boys. It's a very patriarchal society. Right. You can't do that, though, in the long run, because I got another stat. In the end, they think in the future, I would say 15% of the men in China won't have access to a wife. No, there aren't enough women. There won't be enough women. Right. Which in and of itself is a problem, but it also gives a rise to other problems. Apparently. There's been a huge rise in prostitution, which has led to a huge rise in the prevalence of HIV. There's been all sorts of social maladies, I guess, among men who can't find a wife. Imagine they're just not being a woman out there that you can find to marry and settle down with, like it's just not an option for you. It's going to produce all manner of psychological and social problems. Absolutely. So, yeah, there's all sorts of weird things that are kind of popping up from this. One child policy, another one that hesitate to use the word weird, more like horrific, is female and fantasy. We said that China has been accused of preferring boys over girls. Right. I should say there are surveys out there, there are facts and figures that China puts out that contradict. Any criticism? Sure, but there's two sides to this coin. But in the west, there's lots and lots of accusations of female and fantasy. Apparently, it was traditional until the Cultural Revolution, and it started to kind of pick back up again, there's no statistics or figures on how many girls might be killed at birth, but number one, apparently, abortion after ultrasound, sex screening. Sexing was so prevalent that in 1994, china banned sex screening or prenatal sex screening. Wow. So you couldn't tell whether you're having a boy or girl. There's a private sector that's picked up in black that will give you an ultrasound to let you know what you're having. Sure. And apparently, the female infanticide, if you view abortion as infanticide, has increased well, even fantasy under the medical or sociological definition of killing a child when it's born or leaving it to die is still around. Right. And those are reflected in the boy to girl ratio. Right. Which is pretty significant. It doesn't sound like a lot, but what are they charging? In 2005, an estimated 118 boys were born for every 100 girls, and that peaked at 130 boys for every 100 girls. And just to compare that to the rest of the world or industrialized countries, I should say roughly 104 to 107 boys for every 100 girls. Yeah. So definitely a big difference. One of the reasons why boys would be preferred is they can earn more than a woman. Let's say a woman marries a man, she gets married off, she gets absorbed into the man's family. What happens to the parents? Here's part of the problem. What happened? 70% of China's aging population doesn't have a pension. They don't have 401 KS over there. They don't say, the government is starting to encourage it. This is what I see as the biggest problem. Maybe this is a huge problem. Who's going to take care of people when they're getting older? So here's what's resulted in a phenomenon called right. You have a couple, it's the two, and they're responsible for the care of one child and four parents. Four grandparents. Yes. So that's like the new family structure as far as financial support goes. And as you keep having just one child, one child, that for two. One structure keeps going on, and then it's one six. Well, you know what I mean. Right. That one child will have to be responsible for the care of ultimately six. Right. If everyone is still alive, his two parents and the four grandparents, well, then you just start killing the grandparents. That's just too much of a burden. No one expects that, right? No. Because I guess if it's a boy and he has no one to marry sure. And he's unlucky enough now, that wouldn't work out if it were just a boy, and he never married. He'd just be responsible for his own parents. But what about the grandparents? Again, I think that was one of the points they made, though, was as your parents old and the grandparents are hanging in there, all of a sudden, your parents are in their 70s, your grandparents are in their ninety s, and you're the sole child. Right. If you are lucky enough to marry, and if your grandparents are dead right. You still are saddled with two sets of grandparents and a child. Right. And that's what you're responsible for, providing for. Right? Yeah. That's a big problem. Part of that has been alleviated by a revision in the policy where urban couples who are only children themselves right. Can have more than one child. True. So that leaves two siblings, but you have to apply to Sarah, right? Yeah. It's still very much unless you're an ethnic minority, I don't think you have to apply for a child if you're an ethnic minority. Okay. Another revision that they had, Chuck, was they stripped local birth quotas. Is this the birth permits? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They stripped the requirement to obtain these birth permits in a lot of the provinces recently. Right. Yeah. Which basically they did it by taking away the requirement to get a birth permit for a first birth. Right. So what happened before was any locality had a quota of how many births could occur, saying, in a year or a month or something like that. And if that quota was filled already, then some couple applying for a permit to have a birth would be denied until the next cycle. This is nuts. It is nuts. I'm all for family planning, but this is turbo family planning. What's nuts is that aside from these social problems, it actually has led China to become a burgeoning economy. Right. I mean, it's actually worked in an economic sense, but in a socio economic sense, it's exacting these huge tolls. I do have a couple of stats to back that up. Before they instituted this policy, the population in poverty was 250,000,000. That's been reduced to 40 million. Wow. And education of the average 15 year old went from 4.5 years to 8.5 years. Yeah. So these are the stats that China is going to point to. Clearly to say that, hey, it's working. Right. And I think it's so easy to vilify China for this. Christian pro life groups are hugely against this one child policy because it does suborn abortion. Right. Very clearly. So there's a lot of people opposed to it. But if you're an economist and maybe an economist with no heart damage to your prefrontal cortex, then it makes a lot of sense. And it worked. They've also started the girl care program. Have you heard of that one? And that's basically, in a nutshell, kind of trying to encourage the fact that girls have value and worth and are not second class citizens. You like that billboard, don't you? Yeah, the billboard. They have a billboard in China that in the Hebai Province that says there's no difference between having a girl or a boy. Girls can also continue the family line. Yes. Genetically speaking. So they're trying to do what they can there. I guess probably the biggest rub of China's one child policy is that reproduction is a basic human right. The government is not supposed to tell you how many kids or do anything to interfere with your reproduction. And it's also contrary to the will of the people in a 2003 Chinese study, there were some people who said they preferred one child. It's about 35% of the population surveyed, but 57% said they preferred too. Right. So it's directly flies in the face of them. Exactly. What's interesting, though, is that there was a huge decrease in preference of three children or more. Oh, really? Like 5.5% of the population surveyed said that they would want three kids. So it seems to have peaked around too. And one of the reasons why China announced recently that it would be another decade before it repealed its one child policy is because they're afraid of another baby boom, and what they're trying to do is create a small family culture in the country. Got you. But surveys like these suggest that they've been successful in doing that. Right. I think it's up for review next year, isn't it? No, it's up for review next year, but I don't know if that means anything is going to change. I think they said this summer, in July that it was going to be another decade before they repealed it. And there were a lot of people after. Remember the earthquake in Sichuan province? Yeah. Killed, like, 10,000 kids. Yeah, a lot of people's. Only child. That's your only child. So long, kid. And what happens if you were 50 when your child died? Right. Because you wait a long time to get married and you're so thank you, government. Yes. I know plenty of Americans, though, who think that it's the responsible thing to do to only have one child. I've heard people say that as a human, it's like, irresponsible to have two and three kids these days. Well, yeah. The toll we exact on the environment are adding to the strain on the carrying capacity of agriculture. Supposedly, the agricultural techniques we have now can support a global population of 10 billion. So we have a little ways to go, but who knows what will happen before then? How much technology will advance? We may turn to Soylent Green, who knows? Do you know there are two women out there walking the planet right now? At least two who were sterilized before they ever had kids because they wanted to save the environment. Now, who are they? They're both English, as far as I know. Really? I remember reading about that. Yeah. Thank you. Pointed that out to me. Has nothing to do with China's one child policy, but yeah. Right. So, Chuck doesn't look like they're appealing it for those people who were still in reproductive age following the earthquake of lost kids. They were making exceptions. Right. Did they? But ultimately, it looks like steady the course with the one child policy. Right. So it's okay if you want to read anything more on China's one child policy, we've got an article on the site appropriately entitled, what Is China's One Child Policy? I'm pretty sure if you just type in one child, it will come up in the handy search bar@houseupworks.com. And let's do listener mail. Josh, it's listener mail time, and I'm just going to call this from Austin, our young fan who had a dream about us. I've tried not to read dream emails because it encourages people to send in their dreams. And we've gotten a lot of this weird dream, but this one was about us, so of course I'm going to read it. My name is Austin. I'm 14 and I'm your fan, and I live in Atlanta. And it makes the show so much better because you're located in Atlanta. True. He feels at home with us. He's been listening for a while. He loves us, and he's just starting high school this year, and his podcast has been a lifesaver in AP biology. Anyways, I finally had my first dream about you. His first dream. He anticipates more. This is a good one, though. He awakes from bed and he notices that he's falling asleep while listening to the podcast. Sounds like reality so far. He walks outside and there's a small red plane with a huge banner that reads, all hail Chuck and Josh. There was no dream. Yeah, we sent that plane over your house, buddy. I'm a little confused about it, and even more so when I arrive at school and see that there is a bronze statue in your honor because you guys saved the economy with our audiobook. Yeah, how about that? However, it takes a gloomy turn from here. After a day of many questions and much confusion, I finally put together the clues. After saving the economy, you both take charge and become dual dictators of America. Sounds about right. You require everyone to be educated by your podcast and only your podcast, as made by the Stuff Amendment. We actually amended the Constitution, and we institute a half child policy. Sure, a half child policy. And we all must obey your command immediately. China declares war on us because you try to expand your banned podcast to their country. We had a guy that wrote in, by the way. It says it was not banned. No, the blog fan, not the podcast. Okay, good to know. The rest of the dream is a bit foggy, and I wish I could remember more. However, it seems to be a theme that the dreams that people write in end up being true. In the unlikely chance that this does happen, please remember me as a fan. That's from Austin in Atlanta. And Austin, we will definitely remember you. We will. We will remember you when we take power and crush you. If you have a super cool dream about me and Chuck, or if you want to comment on China's one child policy, or you have more than ten children. More than ten. Send us an email about it to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com homepage brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylight is 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 Hardstock, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes. Episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
03112cde-3b0e-11eb-947e-67637e5f14d6 | How Reverse Osmosis Will Save the World | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-reverse-osmosis-will-save-the-world | Can we save the future of the human race with some thin membranes riddled with ultra-tiny holes? Science says yes! Thanks to reverse osmosis filtration, we can turn saltwater to fresh and finally say, Water, water everywhere so let’s all have a drink! | Can we save the future of the human race with some thin membranes riddled with ultra-tiny holes? Science says yes! Thanks to reverse osmosis filtration, we can turn saltwater to fresh and finally say, Water, water everywhere so let’s all have a drink! | Thu, 15 Jul 2021 11:49:12 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=11, tm_min=49, tm_sec=12, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=196, tm_isdst=0) | 41435728 | audio/mpeg | "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 over there somewhere on the other side of the membrane because she's insane in the membrane. And this is stuff you should know. I think it's pretty funny that I used to love Cyprus Hill. I downloaded their album again, like, the other day. Yeah. And it still holds up. Insane got no brain. I love that guy. I don't remember his name. Actually, now I think about it, I don't remember the other dude's name either. I just remember their DJ was DJ Mugs. Right? That sounds about right. Yeah, I remember his name. I don't remember the other, like, the two Ms. I don't remember. I think they liked marijuana smoke, if I remember here or there. Yeah, they had a song about a bong, I believe. Yeah. Hits from the bong. That's right. I'm going to go listen to that now. You should listen to the album again. It's still pretty good. I mean, they're talking about, like, shooting people and everything is like, come on, now, you don't do anything like that. No, they don't, but there are other stuff. The other stuff they talk about is pretty good. Yeah. So I am literally going to go listen to that now. And you can talk about reverse osmosis. All right. So, Chuck, you made a reference before we started recording that sounded really familiar to me, but it's probably only going to sound familiar to, like, eight other people. You referenced Osmosis Jones, right? I did. And I was like, It sounds really familiar, and I cannot for the life of me play it. And then you said it's from our TV show, still can't really place it. But now I kind of know what you're talking about. Actually, now I'm doubting myself. Okay. I think Osmosis Jones is a movie. Okay. Yeah. I think you're thinking of Nash Pluto. No. Osmosis Jones is Chris Rock animated movie. Okay. I got it mixed up with something one of our co star actors used to say a lot, which was to say Jones on the end of anything. That's right. And I think it reminded me of Osmosis Jones. But I have Cobb, so I'm all over the place. You are all over the place. But one thing where you really nailed it, Chuck, and I'm really appreciative that you brought up Osmosis Jones is because we're talking about osmosis today, and in particular, we're going to focus mostly on reverse osmosis, although we'll have to talk about regular osmosis as well. How does that sound? Yeah, I mean, can I go ahead and talk about regular osmosis? Is there any better time? I can't think of a better time. Certainly not in our Radio Girls episode. Yeah. I mean, this is basically like if you took chemistry in high school and you have forgotten everything about it since then. You might hear the words osmosis and reverse osmosis and be like, wait a minute, that's tickling my brain a little bit. I know. I knew that at one point. So just a little basic Chemistry 101 is let's just talk about saltwater. Lay it on. Salt water is going to figure in almost heavily here because as you'll see, reverse osmosis is a great kind of modern way to sort of the hip new way to take salt from water so we can drink it. If you make a cup of salt water and you gargle it for your throat and you have some leftover, you could use reverse osmosis to convert it back into regular water. That's right. We don't waste it. And we talked about I know we've done stuff on desalination. Yeah, we did an episode way back in the day called is It Possible to Drink the Ocean? Or something like that exactly what happens when we run out of water, I think is what it was. I was way off. And then I'm pretty sure we talked about drinking the ocean. We also did one on manufacturing water, too. But we talked about this desalinating before. That's right. So back to Chemistry 101. It's very simple. I don't know if you folks remember what a solution is, but a solution is when, and in this case, it's with salt water, you have a solvent, which is the water, and then you have the solute, which is the salt, the thing that dissolve in the water or whatever else you want to have in there. And this whole thing together is called a solution. And if you put the solution in a YouTube, not Y Ou tube.com, but a literal beaker shaped like a tube, and you had a semi permeable membrane in the middle, let's just go ahead and say Gore Tex in this case, because that's what that is. Shout out Gore Tex. And you poured this stuff in there on one side, and then you poured regular water on the other side. That water on the other side is going to want to just balance out. It's going to want to seek thermodynamic equilibrium, and it's going to fight its way through there through that membrane until everything is nice and level. It's got this osmotic pressure, and it's going to push through there until it reaches that equilibrium because that's where it wants to be. And that's yeah, because nature is seeking equilibrium. And because the higher concentrated side is separated by a membrane from the lower concentrated side, it's got to make it through that membrane to even things out. And as it does, it's actually going to push the concentrated side up the beaker because it's moving into that side through the membrane. It's pretty amazing stuff, but yeah, that's osmosis, Chuck. Nicely done. Why don't you tackle reverse osmosis first? Osmosis. So osmosis, what you just described as a passive process, it happens because the atmosphere above us has weight like air has weight. And in fact, if you took one square inch of a column of atmosphere of air from the surface of the Earth all the way up to the exosphere, the tippy top of the atmosphere, that one square inch column would weigh about 14 and three quarter pounds. So another way to put it is there's 14 point \u00a375 per square inch of pressure at surface level on Earth. Because of that pressure, we have that osmotic pressure. And so the stuff can kind of move from one side to the other, from lower concentration to higher concentration to balance things out. And it's all because of that. But the whole thing is a passive process. There's nothing moving this it's not requiring energy to take place. Okay. With reverse osmosis, you're doing the opposite of what you just described. And it actually does take energy. You have to create more pressure that will overcome the natural osmotic pressure. And what you're doing in that case is actually taking the solvent, in this case water, and moving it out against its natural will, against every fiber of its being screaming at you that, no, this is wrong, this is an importance against nature. It's moving it through that membrane to the other side, to the lower concentration. So what you're doing is taking a concentrated solution and making it even more concentrated by taking out, in this case, the water. So what you have on one side is salt water and then salt water concentrate. And what you have on the other side is just pure water, what they call ultra pure water. And that's basically reverse osmosis. Yeah. So if you're looking to make saltwater, not salt water, and you had a couple of tanks, and on one side you had that solution of salt water, or let's just call it saltwater, okay? And it's under that regular osmotic pressure that we were talking about. It's all happy and well, you got to apply, I think, about 50 to 60 bars of pressure. And you got to push that thing through there. And those salt molecules are too big to pass through the membrane. And it's really pretty easy. I can't go out and build one of these. But it's not the most complicated process. It's really just if you think about trying to fit something too big through a small hole, it's not going to go. Everything else will. So what's left over is salt or sort of a briny solution. Right. And what you're saying is using pressure to push it through, that basically makes sense. But you're not using pressure to push it. You're just increasing the pressure in that concentration. And then reverse osmosis happens by magic because you've overcome that natural osmotic pressure. And now to the solution, or the salt water and the ultra pure water, what's up is down. Nothing makes sense anymore. All bets are off because you've overcome that natural osmotic pressure. So it's not exactly like pushing it through a membrane, which is how my brain kept going. It's a little more magic than that. But the upshot of it is that the membrane you're using is so small, the pores in it are so small that only water can make it through. Water, it turns out, is really small. Chuck, do you want to know how small water is? Sure. Well, prepare for it, because I'm about to lay it on you. The average actually, it wouldn't be average. It would be exactly the same size. The size of a water molecule is 00:20 7 nm, which is 2000, 700,000 of a micron, and a micron is a millionth of a meter. So a human hair's diameter is about 70 microns. A water molecule is 2000, 700,000 of one micron. So it's really small. Which means that if you can make a membrane that is large enough for water to get through, but not much larger than that, it's going to keep a lot of other stuff from passing through that membrane as well. That's right. Maybe we should take a break and we'll talk a little bit about what we've been teasing, which is Desalination, right after this. All right. Water is a commodity. We've been talking about that a lot on the show for a while and kind of trying to bang that drum. Potable drinking water. It could be a crisis in the near or far future for the world. So there have been a lot of efforts over the years, kind of to try and get ahead of this a little bit. And the ocean is an obvious place to look because there's a lot of water out there. Sure. So the efforts have been made since, I believe, about the 1950s, to try and turn that salt water into something that people can drink or at least use for other purposes. Not necessarily like potable water, but using industries and stuff like that. Yeah. In particular, we've known how to distill or to get water from salt water, pure water from salt water using distillation. But that uses a lot of energy where you boil the water. It takes a lot of energy to boil water and boil the salt out of water. And that was kind of the first attempt. But I think in the 60s they started to say, maybe we could take this osmosis thing that's happening all over the place and reverse it and we could use that to get salt out of water. Yeah. And they figured out how to do it, and it was going pretty well, but they didn't have a great way to do it on a large scale that made it kind of financially practical to do until a couple of engineering grad students at UCLA came along. One was named Sidney Loeb. The other was named Srinivasa Surrey. Rajan Boy. Yeah, you did. Would you say it another way, or no? No, I don't have their names in front of me. But I think that it sounded pretty believable. Chuck, you know what? I do. Here's a little trick for you. Okay. And of course, this only works if you're pronouncing the parts correctly, but I just feel like I look them up on the Internet and call them and ask them how to say their name. Well, you could. Sometimes I look on YouTube to see if they're interviewed, but I just spell it out dictionary style, like syllable by syllable with big spaces in between. Oh, yeah. And then do you make the one with the emphasis, the syllable with emphasis, like, in all caps or something like that? Sometimes. Or they'll scribble underline or none of it's. Like real dictionary style. What's that called? The schwa. I don't even know what schwa is. It's the upside down e. Oh, that's a schwa. Yeah. What's the word we were talking about the other day that I loved in Terrabank? Schwing. I think everybody hated schwing for a little while there. Yeah. Not a fan. All right, so I nailed those two names. They were grad students at UCLA, and they were the two gentlemen who came up with this basically the first practical reverse osmosis membrane using cellulose acetate. And it was the first time that they could actually use this on a large scale, and they did. So this is actually more of a small scale operation. But the idea was the same at a place in Koalinga, California, in 1965 that was online for seven years and worked pretty well, from what I understand. Yeah. And at the very least, it was a very good proof of concept, I guess. And it showed that with this new acetate membrane, like you were saying, you can get a lot more through it at a much faster pace. And that's kind of what you need if you're going to ramp this up for industrial style production. And they definitely did. That was 1965. You said it went online. Yeah. As of 2019, there's now 177 different countries producing desalinated water using reverse osmosis. And in fact, there's, I think, 16,000 desalination plants in the world. By far the most are in Africa and the Middle East. But there's a total capacity now, today. Just since 1965, this has developed where 100 million fresh water can be produced every day worldwide. That is just nuts, though, from taking seawater and using reverse osmosis to turn it into pure fresh water. That's right. And those numbers are growing, and they need to, which is a great thing. I love it when we figured out how to do something, and then it's just a matter of sort of getting more and more of it going. Yeah. And I think, from what I understand, everybody's trying to figure out how to build on efficiencies, how to continue to scale up and how to use less energy and time and all that, but it seems to be one of those technologies that's roughly the same as it was when they invented it initially. And basically to kind of give just a little bit of detail on how it goes, you take in seawater. Most reverse osmosis plants that desalinate seawater are built pretty close to the sea because transportation is a big cost. So if you can just pipe it right from the sea into your plant, that saves on a lot of costs and time and energy. It's ramped up using pumps, and then it's run through the reverse osmosis filters and under pressure, like you said, I think 60 bars of pressure. So it's pressurized so that it overcomes the natural osmotic pressure. And it goes over, not through. I keep wanting to think of it going through, like there's a membrane in the water's way, and it has to go through this membrane. That's not how it goes. It goes through a tube, and in the center of the tube is another tube that's wrapped in the membrane. And the concentrate, the salt keeps going, but the water that's in that concentrate, that solution goes through the membrane into that inner tube. And that inner tube pushes that fresh water, that reverse osmosis water along into what's called the production water stream. And then that salt water just continues along its way back out to the ocean under pressure and what's called the reject stream, which is not nice, but it's an accurate description. That's how you would desalinate water. It is reject water stream. Sure. Okay. There you go. When you have three names, I think that's more an album title. So maybe just regex stream. Yeah, I think reject stream is great. And we'll talk about that more later. Not the band, but the imaginary band of their debut album. Yeah. And who's playing what? So reverse osmosis is not the kind of thing that you can just use for saltwater. It's a great application, of course, but you're filtering something else. You can filter out almost anything. If you have a local water source that has way too much fluoride, you can filter out some of that fluoride in a much more efficient way than you can using charcoal filtrations. We did a show on fluoride like a thousand years ago. I remember that one. Yeah, I think it says Fluoride making us stupid. I feel like that was one of our, like 15 minutes episodes or something. Yeah, easily at most. I think you talked about the ultra pure water, which is one side of the result. And some companies need that stuff, and some industries need that stuff. So sometimes you're filtering out things just to get that ultra pure water to use as an industry application. I think when you're manufacturing electronics sometimes, or pharmaceuticals, different kind of chemicals, certain medical applications. We talked about wastewater a lot. The toilet to tap thing, that's using reverse osmosis. Right. That's one of our best episodes, I think. Do you think so? Wastewater treatment. I mean, it's hard to say. Best episode when we've been doing this for 80 years. But I thought it was a good one. No? Yeah, I thought it was good too. I was just surprised to hear you say that. But yeah, and toilets, it's just gross. But it's sensible for sure. And the point of it is it's gross entirely in your mind. Like when you raise that glass of water that used to be waste water, it's just water after it's undergone reverse osmosis. That's it. There's nothing else in it. There's not even a memory of that kind of stuff. Despite what homeopaths say, there's nothing in that water except for the water. There are some things that make it through what are called contaminants of emerging concern. Some kinds of pharmaceuticals can actually make it through. They're small enough that they make it through with the water molecules. But for the most part, everything else is filtered out by reverse osmosis. And one of the reasons, or one of the other industries that use it, Chuck, is like the beverage industry, because you can take tap water from anywhere, run it through reverse osmosis filter and move even more of it through faster. Because you're not dealing with a Briny salt solution. Like this is just tap water and you're basically turning it into a blank slate so you could make like a soft drink taste the same anywhere in the world just by using the local tap water to produce it. And now you have production facilities all over the world so you don't have to transport it because you're able to start with reverse osmosis water. Oh, yeah, they use it separating away from milk. They use it in the wine industry. Some now they use it to make maple syrup. They remove that sugary goodness from the water and the SAP, let's see. They use it for recycling one of the other this is a big deal as we'll see when you produce all sorts of stuff through industrial processes or if you recycle things, you have to use all sorts of other chemicals. You produce sorts of wastewater as a byproduct. And wastewater is really hard to get rid of without contaminating other water because it mixes really well. So one of the good things you can do is take wastewater, run it through reverse osmosis, and you're basically catching all of the stuff that was once mixed in with the water and making it into a much more disposable, much closer to solid form. And then also producing reverse osmosis water that you can use for all sorts of other applications as well. And speaking of recycling, a little bit different kind of recycling, but some of these and not all of them, there's nothing that gets me going more than a contained system. And some of these are contained systems, which is when you have a system that kind of feeds itself. We talked about these high pressure pumps that force out what did you call it again? What was the band? Reject Stream. The Reject Stream. No, not the god help you call them the Reject Stream. Just Reject Stream. That's like a Letterman misstep or something. And you got a cool logo, just an R and an S that sort of are sneaking around each other or something like that. This is what I see. Do you remember the Grateful Dead kid with the ice cream cone on his head? Sure, it's along those lines, but then rather than an ice cream cone, he's got a reverse Mohawk. Like the bad guy in death. Wish three. See, I was thinking more like the white snake logo. Oh, no, I don't think so. No, you just blew my mind a little bit. I'm trying to recover here by tap dancing, but I don't know, man. Maybe not to get further down this road, but the other day I saw that there was some big festival in Europe with all these metal bands, and I was like, that's kind of cool. And White Snake was playing. I was like, Those guys still playing? Let me go check them out and see what they sound like. Just do yourself a favor and go to YouTube and watch, like, a White Snake festival from just put in 2019, let's say. Do they just play all their old hits or are they making new music? Well, I don't know. I can't speak to that. The old hits are what's on YouTube. Okay. It's not great. David Copperfield. Okay, I'm glad you said his name, too, because I almost said David Copperfield. It's great. He makes the stage disappear beneath his feet. That's right. It's the most important part. Yeah, it's not great. Just go check it out. Boy, this covet got you trash and everything. The Radiant Man. Yuck and yums. White Snake 2019. I know. I love White Snake. Tonicaine passed away. Maybe that's something to do with it. What? Yeah, she died a couple of years ago, I think. I didn't know that. Yeah, or maybe even last year. It might have been no, I don't know. Yeah. Are you on meds right now? No, I'm high on stuffy headedness I got you. You know, the natural high. Sure. So where was that contained system? So they're pumping out this stuff with high pressure, and as we'll see, that can just go out into the ocean again and we'll talk about that more later. But they can also use that force of pumping this stuff out to use it to spin a turbine or old friend spinning a turbine and basically reusing that stuff to make it a closed system where it's operating itself. Yeah. Pretty amazing. I get jazzed by that as well. And I just realized, Chuck, basically these desalination plants that are close to the ocean are basically a giant YouTube. And in the middle there's that membrane. But really also in the middle is the entire desalination plant. But it's just coming up one side and passing through the other. Actually, it's not a very good analogy now I think about it. But it's a ushape at least. How about that? Yeah. You can also get them under your sink or on your countertop in your kitchen. It sounds like the most large scale scientific thing you could imagine, but if you just go to a big box hardware store and you look up water filtration systems, a lot of them are reverse osmosis. Yeah. You're going to be hard pressed, actually, to find one that doesn't have that, like one of those under sync, like multi stage water filters that comes with its own faucet that you have to install. I was looking there, actually. I think they've actually come down since this article was written, right? Yeah, something like that. It seemed like you can get a pretty good one for about 200, $250. Like basically everything you need. Yeah. And then there's also countertop versions too, if you want to just have one on your countertop. But I say I say we take a break. Okay. Yeah. Because we've talked all upside, right? There's a dark side to this. Well, not really, but you know, there's some downsides or drawbacks. Nothing dark. I would say that might be overstating it. Agreed. Alright, we'll be back right after this, everybody. Okay, Chuck, welcome to the dark side of reverse osmosis. Very nice. You got compliments on your bella, Lagosi. Oh, yeah, it was very good. I don't remember what episode that was. Me and a lot. I'll take it. Good. I'll take any compliment. Sure, same here. Unless you're really good at not doing podcasts. Well, yeah. Took you a second, didn't it? It really did. I think I have sympathetic covet. I'm a little foggy myself. That's sweet. Well, you got to get out of that bunk bed underneath me. You might catch it. So first, before we get started, I want to shout out Perth, Australia. Get this, 43% of Perth's drinking water is made from desalinated seawater from reverse osmosis. They have two plants. We probably drank some while we were there. I'll bet we did. I'll bet we did. I didn't know it. Couldn't even tell. Pass. So that's right. It's funny. Is everyone outside of Australia got that joke? Because I guarantee you they didn't show that ad in Australia. And they also think that Tom Brokaw runs Motel Six. That's right. So we were talking about the dark side of reverse osmosis plants or desalinating using reverse osmosis. And reverse osmosis in general. There's some problems with it. For one, it's really well, I don't want to say it's really energy intensive, it's actually not as bad as you would think. But the more you scale up where you're supplying, say, almost half of your town's drinking water through reverse osmosis desalination, the energy usage scales up, so the cost can scale up. And then also, so does the carbon footprint. Of these things because they're burning fossil fuels to run those pumps, to pressurize that column of water when they send it across the reverse osmosis membrane to overcome the osmotic pressure. That's a problem with it, I guess you could say. Yes, I would say that another problem that we tease earlier was the, what do you call it, a harmful byproduct or just a waste byproduct reject stream. Yeah, sure, okay. But it is a byproduct. Basically, it's salt, it's brine, there's a lot of it leftover and you got to do something with it if you're not going to run it back into a closed system. And some places they just say, all right, well, it's saltwater and very concentrated form, so let's just pump that back into the ocean. Sure. And I'm glad I kept reading because my first thought was like, sure, it's saltwater, but the ocean has a certain amount of salinity on purpose, probably, and that can't be great to just add a lot more. And my instinct was right. It's not, I think. Australian center for Water Research says things get back to normal at about 1600ft, 500 meters from the source. It's pretty far. So anything within that 1600ft, it's really bad news when they're pumping that stuff back in and a fish can get out of there pretty quickly. But if you're not a fish, if you're something that crawls along on the sea floor or plant life on the sea floor, then that's really bad and it's going to kill off a lot of stuff in that area. Yeah, which is problematic. I mean, high salinity decreases the dissolved oxygen and fish and sea life needs oxygen in the water. So it is a real problem for that life that can't move away very easily. And then in addition to that too, they actually introduce certain kinds of chemicals and metals into the feed water stream to keep the membranes from fouling up, which happens really easily. You can imagine if you have a membrane that has pores that are just big enough to allow something that's 2000, 700,000 of a micrometer, a micron across through like all that stuff that's left behind is going to gunk up the membranes really quick. It's going to get insane in the membranes. Exactly. So they take steps to keep this from fouling, from getting clogged up by adding additional stuff. Well, that additional stuff also gets pumped out into the ocean too, which is a problem as well. There are calls for additional steps to be added onto that reject stream so that before it hits the ocean, it runs through like a UV light that kills off pathogens. Maybe. Or maybe they need to filter out some of the stuff and reuse like the chlorine and the copper that they're introducing. There are things that we could do to make the whole thing a little more environmentally friendly. For sure. I think the plant operators in Australia say that they're. Like you're pumping it out so fast, mate, it mixes in a really quick and I don't know if I buy that. I mean, it makes sense that it mixes faster than if you're just like leaking it out slowly, but I would say just spread it out a lot more if you could. Maybe that's not practical and that's just like a dumb guy who doesn't know how it works talking. But I would disperse it more. Yeah, I guess you kind of could. You could put like a sprinkler head on the end so it's not just one big column. Just when I thought it was a dumb idea. No, it's a great idea. Now we need to go invent like a giant sprinkler head and patent it and use it. It's not just a danger for oceans too. Most of these plants obviously are near the ocean, but if there are plants that are more inland and they're storing this stuff in tanks just like you have an oil spill, you could have a saline, like a brine spill and that would be really harmful to the dry land, vegetation and plant life and the whole ecosystem. I don't think we kind of walk past the fact that when you're pumping this stuff in the sea, it's not just like, oh, some lobsters and coral dyes. That's part of the ecosystem that's going to set off a chain reaction to everything around it as well. Yeah. So there are people who are trying to come up with, like we were saying, like more efficiencies and ways around some of these problems. One of the things I saw was out of the national laboratory in Idaho that uses something called switchable polarity solvents. Did you see that? No. So there's a different kind of osmosis that they're using that doesn't require the artificial pressure built up using pumps and all that. So automatically it's less energy intensive and they add a kind of chemical called a switchable polarity solvent, which when you add it to the solution, it actually raises the osmotic pressure itself so the water comes out of solution on its own without having to be pressed. And then that switchable polarity solvent comes with it, you hit it with some heat and it basically shocks the SPS that chemical out of the water and then you've just got your water and then you just remove that switchable polarity solvent. So it requires far less energy, which is a big improvement for sure. That's pretty amazing. It is. And I saw another one that uses a double piston set up where when they do the water treatment basically in batches, where they added to that barrel that has the hollow barrel going through with the membrane involved, the actual reverse osmosis filtering on an industrial scale, they added in batches and they use a piston to push the water through. And then as the pistons moving, there's another chamber opening up behind it that's getting filled with seawater. So there's no downtime where, like, the piston moves to one side and then seawater fills up and then the piston moves to the other side. It's just constantly going back and forth. And on either side, there's sea water that's being treated or filling up to be treated next, so you don't have downtime. But then also the sea water that's coming in is pushing the piston the other way, too, so it requires less energy as well. And I think that one's out of Purdue. So there's some people figuring out how to make this a little better, less energy intensive, a little faster, and we'll probably see a lot more solutions, especially as water becomes more and more precious starting now, basically, yeah. They're also trying to find more uses for that Brine instead of trying to put it in the ocean. They're like, surely people can use Brine, right? Sure. And there are some aquaculture applications in commercial aquaculture, I think Tilapia farms, if you like tilapia I'm not a big fan, but Tilapia love, really, I think high selenic. Would that be it? Sure. High selenic water. Sure. At this point, it doesn't matter. All right, great. They like really salty water. That's how I should have said salt water. And I think Bream do as well. So they're starting to ship some of that stuff there. And I think sometimes it can be used to grow stuff like sea beets or in animal feed or in biofuel. But I don't think it's like there's still going to be that byproduct even if every Tilapia farm on Earth wanted this water, this Brine stuff. And especially the more we produce, the more Brian we're going to have, because I don't know if we said it or not, for every one liter of fresh water you produce, you've got 1.5 liters of Briny water, higher salty concentration water that you're sending back out to seed. It kind of mess with the selenic count so that's reach extreme's first album. What is it again? Selenic count. Selenic count, reject stream. All right. So Chuck, actually, we got to finish on this one point. There's a debate especially, it seems like, on Facebook, just how healthy reverse osmosis water is, and in a lot of ways, it makes sense on its face, to tell you the truth. Is it really people are like Facebook. That seems to be the kind of sites that are really touting that seem to have their links promoted on Facebook a lot. That's as diplomatic as I can. Okay, so the idea is that reverse osmosis is all well and good for preventing pathogens, viruses, chemicals, minerals, metals from passing through. And when you run water through reverse osmosis filter, the ultra pure water you have on the other side is great. But the point that these people are making is that it's actually too great, it's too pure, and that humans actually need more stuff than just hydrogen and oxygen. Mixed together that we need other kinds of trace minerals in our water, and that reverse osmosis strips it out. So there's remineralization filters that you can actually get for your reverse osmosis filter to where it goes through all the stages, pretreatment treatment, reverse osmosis. And then on the other side of the last filter is Remineralization, where it might add a little bit of boron, a little bit of sea salt, something like that. It's got a little calcium in it. And now the water is ultra pure, but also beneficial for your metabolisms, optimal function. It makes a lot of sense. I didn't see a lot of academic debate over it. It was happening more peripherally, it seemed like. So that's why I'm a little incredulous of the whole thing. But it makes a lot of sense. I like a good mineral water. Yeah. And apparently also if you want if you have reverse osmosis at your house and you are like, I can't afford to remineralization picture, give yourself a little Himalayan salt or a little bit of sea salt, you should have that's more than just salt. That contains a lot of other beneficial elements and metals, alkali, earth, metals and stuff. And just put a little sprinkle in there. Yeah, there you go. Little dabble to you. That's right. That's the second album from Reject Stream. They're going pop. They're like kings of Leon. They started out kind of edgy. The record company came to call and they said, Sign us up. I loved that first Kings of Leon's album. And then they said, all right, Hillbillies, go get a haircut. Yeah. And get rich. They're like, Get hot. Yeah. You got anything else about Kings of Leon? No? Okay, well, if you want to know more about Kings of Leon, reject Stream, reverse osmosis, Desalination, any of that stuff, go check it out on the Internet. See what happens when you search all of that at once. Maybe the universe will explode. Since I said the universe will explode, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this conveniently, an email from Pest. Oh, wow. Isn't that crazy? Full circle, man. That's synchronicity serendipity. I'm not going to read it in my terrible ossie accent, though. I wish you would. I can't do it. I'm fading. Hey, guys, big fan here from far, far away Western Australia. My husband and I spent two years traveling and exploring Australia in a ute, towing a caravan. I don't know what that is. SUV van truck. And in the process discovered the delights of stuff you should know. It was great for days with long outback drives. I remember our very first episode that I randomly selected when we lost our podcast, virginity Cave diving. Totally nuts. And we were hooked. We sent returned home to our city of Perth because of COVID put an abrupt end to their travels, and now they listen on their daily drive to and from work. Luckily, there are so many years worth of chose for me to catch up on on our travels. We spent a week in the outback town of Cooper Petty. That is P-E-D-Y-C-O-O-B-E-R. Cooper Petty, where a lot of the world's opals come from. You should do an episode on Opals. Anyhow, I couldn't help but notice that you failed to mention that town in the select scave dwelling episode. I listened to that one recently. Despite most of the town living underground and having some beautiful underground churches. Check it out on Google. There's another ini who keep up the good work. I'll keep listening. Warm wishes. That is from Tamara. Well, thanks a lot, Tamra. Enihu. Appreciate that. Did Tamara spell it hoo or W-H-O? Oh, yeah. There's two kinds of people in the world, and it's divided by how you spell anyhow. There are three kinds. You know what the third is? What? The people who don't use anywho. I don't know, Chuck. I think we all have a little bit of anywho user in all of us. I think you're right. You can take the person out of the anyhoo, but you can't take the inhu out of the person. You sure said it. Well, thanks again, Tamra. And shout out to Perth for a third time. Might as well make it a hat trick. And if you want your town to get shouted out, why don't you get in touch with us? Or build some massive desalination plants, one of the two NATO. That would help a lot. Actually. You can get in touch with us via email at stuff. Podcast@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." | |
Bioluminescence: A Bright and Shiny Fish | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/bioluminescence-a-bright-and-shiny-fish | Science has a handle on fireflies and glowworms, but most bioluminescent animals live in the ocean and are tough to study. Today, researchers are still figuring out why some animals produce light. Dive with Josh and Chuck into this illuminating topic. | Science has a handle on fireflies and glowworms, but most bioluminescent animals live in the ocean and are tough to study. Today, researchers are still figuring out why some animals produce light. Dive with Josh and Chuck into this illuminating topic. | Thu, 06 Sep 2012 18:48:51 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=18, tm_min=48, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=250, tm_isdst=0) | 35233215 | 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. Two Chuck Bryant. And you put us together, and you get a little something called Stuff You Should Know. And that's what this is, whether you like it or not. You have to listen to it. That's right. Actually, no one has to listen to this. No, it's mandated. Oh, okay. It's part of both Obama's and Romney's platform. Yeah, it's part of Obamacare. You got to listen to Stuff You Should Know, and you got to get an RFD chip in your hand, and you have to give poor people all your money. None of that is true. That you have to listen to the podcast and the Porpo part. Chuck? Yes. How's it going? It's great. Are you feeling sick? Do you need any kind of care, Obama or otherwise? No. Are you feeling sick? I'm fine. No, I'm tense. Like, my shoulder muscles are going to pop right out of my skin. I went to that foot massage place on Beaufort Highway the other day. You ever been there? Treat your feet? Is that what it's called? Yeah, that's a great name. They'll do an hour on your feet for $25, if that's what you desire. Yeah. Now, about a little bit into it, they'll ask you, like, you want to go half and half, like half body, half foot, because basically they get you in there, they're going at your feet, and you're like, I don't know if I could do an hour on my feet. Got you. Each toe has gotten their own massage at this point, right? Like, they're just jelly cracked your toes. Yeah. So they think, yeah, I'll pay another $20 for the body. Right. They give you tea. It's really nice. You should go. It does sound nice, but it's not, like, private. Like, you're in a big room with, like, 15 recliners, everyone's sitting around. Oh, we've gotten back rubs at the mall before. That's true. You remember. I don't know how I got on this. Treat your feet. Beaufort highway. Go eat some FA and then go get your foot massage. Where's good FA around here? We're trying to figure that out. Beaufort highway? Yeah. Where are we going to do this now? Yeah. Okay. I like FUD number two, which is Pass Claremont. It's in a little shopping center. Okay. Just look it up. Okay. I mean, it's all good. OK. All good. FA good. Yeah. I don't know how we got on there, but some places on Beaufort Highway owe you some money. Seriously? At least some free fu. This has nothing to do with bioluminescence. No, it doesn't. Although sometimes if you stir your foot around, Chuck, you're going to see some fungus, possibly rise to the top or maybe shrimp a couple of times, right? Yeah, that's a good one, too. And were those things still alive and not cooked, they possibly might glow. And where they glow, you would say, look at those things. They're bioluminescing. That's right. Because that's what they do. Yeah. It is a life form that generates their own glow inside their body, their own light. Yeah. Pretty awesome. I read a different study. It was like, what's the deal with this? Because this is still very much a mystery. We have an idea of how this goes down, but not in every case. We also don't understand why in a lot of cases, and in some cases, we don't understand how. Yeah. And the thing is, I don't think it's that it's out of the grasp of science to understand it. I think that when researchers are looking into this, they just become so transfixed on the beautiful glow that they forget what they're doing and waste tons of time, and then all of a sudden, they're like, I got to publish or perish. And then it's just like they just write why? On a piece of paper and send it in. As Tracy Wilson of Pop stuff. Great podcast points out. And Tracy's articles are always awesome. Yeah. Oh, man, they're comprehensive. I never have to worry about it. Sadly, sometimes scientists can either harm the light making magic when they try to study them this makes it hard to study. Or the animal will exhaust its light making glow capabilities out of, like, fear or defense or spite, which will also make it hard to study. Right. So those are a couple of reasons and the whole just why. Right. So we do have a pretty good handle to some extent, but let's talk about what Luminescence itself is right. With this light bulb right here in this Ikea brand lamp. Yes, it's incandescent. It's an incandescent light bulb truck. I think this is an Edison bulb, too. Oh, is it like the real timeylooking one? That's sort of so that is pretty simple. It has electricity that passes through a filament, so a thin metal piece of something metal, and that heats up. And it heats up so much that it gives off light, which is incredibly inefficient. And if, say, a jellyfish were to do this, it would catch fire even though it's underwater. Right. So what living organisms do when they want to give off light is something called cold light or bioluminescence, which is the combination of chemicals that produce light. It's like a glow stick, but no heat. But it is just like a glow stick. You're combining two things that will make a glow. Exactly. Except you don't have to shake up the jellyfish. They do not like that. Or it's like the glow sticks that I used to sell very often at Stone Mountain Laser Show. It's like the Glossary Summer that I used to dance with at Race. You were raised and I was selling these things during, like, lee Greenwood. Lee Greenwood, yeah. Proud to be an American. Sure. Yeah. Boy, I heard that song 5000 times. I'll bet anyone who's never been to Stone Mountain, Georgia, they have a big rock there, and they have a laser show on it during the summer. It's a big rock that has, basically, the Confederate heroes carved into the side of it by the guy who did Mount Rushmore. Oh, is that the same guy? Yeah, and they show a very corny laser show every summer since, like, the early 1980s. And not just once this summer. Like, every night during the summer night. Yeah, that's why I've heard it 10,000 times. It's something. And Chuck used to work there. I think you left that out selling glove sticks. I sold the glow sticks full circle. Yes. All right, let's quit stalling. Let's talk about bioluminescence. Okay? It's all over the place, like you said. We don't know exactly how it works in all cases, but we do know that these animals do mix together different substances, just like a glow stick would. And to turn their little glow on and off right here on the planet, not in the ocean, because that's where most of this stuff takes place, here on planet Earth, on the dry land, you can have things glowing like fox fire, which is this fungus that feeds on rotting wood. You look up pictures of foxfire. Pretty cool. Yeah, it's eerie. Doesn't look real, but it's real. It's very real. The Jacob lantern mushroom. You can Google that as well. I love that. That's my favorite bioluminescent organism. Why? Just because it's the single thing on land on Terraforma, because it's a perfectly named thing, the jacko lantern mushroom. It has that glow coming through the gills and just the gills. So it looks like there's, like, this glow coming. There's, like, holes where it's coming out of it's. So neat. My favorite on Terraforma is the lightning bug, aka. The firefly here in the south. And I guess I'm not sure where else they call them lightning bugs, but definitely in the south. Yes, you'll see them come out every summer, and if you're a little kid, you can go around and catch them and put them in a jar and then release them. And then release them. And in fact, you may be harming them just by catching them. But what you don't want to do if you're a kid is like, smash these things. Right? Because that means you're going to end up being a serial killer one day, probably. So the firefly, you generally think of them as the adults flying around, but the little lava can glow as well on the ground. Right. A lot of people call firefly lava glow worms, but glow worms are apparently another kind of fly lava. Yeah, fireflies are fireflies or lightning bugs. That's right. Centipedes millipedes. There's all kinds of little things that can glow worms. Yeah, there's some worms that give off a bioluminescent sludge. No one has any idea why? Is it their poop? I don't think so. Remember the secretion they produce when they're mating and all that? Yeah, it's probably like that. It probably comes from the ring. I can't remember the name of the ring. So that's on earth. But if you really want to get down to some cool glowing creatures right. You need to dive down into the ocean to the twilight zone, which I think we've talked about that. No, we talked about it in biosphere in caves. Yeah. There's different zones of light penetration in caves and in the ocean, too. That's right. The twilight zone is generally about 660 to 3300ft deep, 201,006 meters. It depends because obviously different kinds of ocean water are going to allow different amounts of light in. It depends on what the ocean floor looks like. But it is the dysphotic, or poorly lit zone, deeper than the Euphotic sunlit zone or good lit zone or shallower than the Aphotic midnight zone, which is like, scary. No light. That's a scary time down there. Right. Those are the things down there that have, like, no eyes. Right? Because no reason. Like with the case. Yeah. Remember what was the prometheus salamander? Just 3ft long and doesn't have eyes. The scariest thing ever. Except for the cigar shark, which we'll actually get to in here. Okay, so is that the cookie cutter shark? Yeah. Man, this thing's frightening. So in this twilight zone, the Dysphotic zone or mesopoplagic zone? Mesopologic zone. Stop laughing at me. This is where most of the bioluminescent organisms on earth can be found. And the light that penetrates this area is a blue green color because the red, yellow, orange. Yeah. The red, yellow and orange are absorbed by the sea water above, and the violet is scattered, so the blue and the green are the ones that get through. So everything's just kind of color blue green. That's what the sunlight is. So most of the bioluminescent organisms in this Dysphotic zone dysphoric zone have evolved to produce light at the same wavelength from something like 440 to 479 nm, which is like the blue green spectrum. That's right. Matches that sunlight. Yes. Which is pretty cool. Yeah. Well, we'll get to it, but it can lead to some cool things, like camouflage. But it also means that it travels farther. That type of light travels the farthest in water because it has a shorter wavelength than the other types. So an animal producing this could really cook down there. Basically, yeah. We're talking jellyfish, shrimp, grill squid, other kinds of fish, marine worms, whatever the heck that is. They're exactly what you think it is. Yeah. What are those one worms called? It like, come up out of the little tubes. Tube worms. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I believe that's what they're called. Either that or I just made some terrible 6th grade joke. But they are like, on the ocean bottom and they just come out of these tubes. Wow. And grab stuff and go back in. They're like, 3ft long. You've not seen this sea snake? To me, no. Yeah, but it's a worm. I think they're attached. They may be attached to their tubes. Okay. Or they just never come all the way out. I have to look into that. Yeah. So you talked about the blue green light is what they generally produce. There is something called the loose jaw fish, which actually can make red light very deep in the ocean. But that's really unusual. That can make red light. And a lot of species can't even see the color red down there because I don't know if their brains aren't used to it because they never see it. So the loose jaw uses this thing to basically sneak up on people. It's like Jane Gum at the end of Silence of the Lamb. And the fish are like Jody Foster and Jane Gum is the least jaw fish coming up behind her. Like, I can see you can't see me. So like we said earlier, we don't know for sure why all these bioluminescent forms of life are down there doing their thing. You did mention the Earthworm that has the secretion. They don't know why they do that. The mushroom spores. They think that maybe it's to attract insects to spread the spores. That's why the mushroom glows. Makes sense sometimes. And this one is kind of cute. Sometimes animals will light up when something nearby them lights up, which I think might just be a little like, hey, how are you doing? I can glow too well. That's what fireflies are doing. Yeah. They're attracting mates, right? Yeah. With a very specific pattern. Right. They use it to communicate, like, hey, you're looking pretty good. Meet you by the fence post. Yeah. Let's go get some fur. So should we talk about the Dinoflagellates? The Dinoflagellates? Dinoflagellates. Am I pronouncing it wrong? No, I think I was wrong. Okay. Well, yeah. So have you ever seen Apollo 13? Yeah. Do you remember the part where they had a problem? Houston, is it? Tom level? Jim level? Yeah. Where Jim Level and is hanging out with Bill Paxton, and then they're talking about how they're just shooting the breeze while they're trying to stay alive. And he talks about how he was flying a mission, coming in on an aircraft carrier, and there was a blackout and he couldn't see where he was going. He couldn't find an aircraft carrier to land, and he was running low on fuel. And all of a sudden he looks and he notices that there's a bunch of he calls it like glowing algae or whatever. Yeah, but what he's talking about were dinoflagellates that were kicked up by the wake of the aircraft carrier, and he used them as, like, a runway to guide them in. I don't remember that part. That's a great part. The whole movie from start to finish. Ron Howard. But these dinoflage let's create what's called a milky sea. When you get enough of them together, when they're disturbed, physically, they start to glow. And if you have a bunch of them, you can see them from space. Actually, in this article, there's a picture of a pretty substantial milky sea off the coast of Africa. Yeah. Pretty cool stuff. Yeah. If you Google milky sea, too, you can see some, like, that's cool looking. But I like the shots from low flying planes, helicopters. Very cool looking and a little eerie. Yeah. If that makes sense. They have no idea, again, why dinoflagellates would glow when they're disturbed. Obviously, they're, like, trying to register their complaint. They can't talk, they can't flip anyone off, so they glow out of anger. Apparently. There's a theory called the burglar alarm theory. I like this one, where basically they think that when dinoflagellates start to glow, it's because there's little fish eating on them. Right. Which is disturbing. They think that maybe they glow to basically alert larger fish that will come eat the smaller fish, so they'll stop eating the dinoflagellates. That there's little fish in the area. Pretty awesome. Like, hey, help. Come eat this guy. Because you're bigger. Right? Here's some other and these are the ones that are the most understood because there is a lot of uncertainty, like, we said, like, ten times. But here are some of the reasons that they think they're doing this communication, which we've mentioned with the firefly or the lightning bug, to locate food, maybe to use it as an actual light to see in the dark. Right. Pretty cool. Or a spotlight to catch prey. Sure. Like, temporarily blind something. Got you. Or no. To go find it. It's very dark in here. I need to see what fish are around to attract prey. Like the angler fish. Like, look at this bright glow. Come here, chomp. Yeah, I love that one. What was it in? Finding Nemo. That thing was scary. I didn't see that. Moon. How is it going? Yeah. Camouflage. I don't watch any of those anymore because Emily doesn't like them. Oh, yeah. She doesn't like Disney movies. She doesn't like any of those Pixar movies because it's always, like, some tragedy. Like, someone dies and it's heartbreaking. Keep her away from Toy Story Three. I can't even watch that movie. I made her watch up, and she was just, like, a little blob of pleasure on the floor. The first ten minutes are just so sad. Yeah. My God. But I always explained to her, like, this is why they make these movies, so kids can learn how to cope with death. And then they see, like, it's all happy afterward. Right. All right. Camouflage. This is the coolest one. Yeah, it makes sense, too. If you're in the ocean, if you ever, like, swam down ten or 15ft and looked up, open your eyes in the ocean. I've done it. It's hard to see stuff below you. But it's easy to look up because the sunlight's penetrating down and see like the silhouette or in the case of Jaws, you see the silhouette of the lady's legs on the raft. Right. That's good. Eaten. Like in the case of what's it called counter elimination, you can actually produce spots on your underside to make it more difficult for a fish beneath you, a predator beneath you, to look up and make out what's going on. You won't have the perfect little silhouette outline of a yummy fish. It will confuse it, basically. Right. Because you're cutting down on the contrast pretty cool. Like you're creating light that blends in with that same blue green light. And all of a sudden you disappear. Well, or it just breaks up your shape so you don't look like you should. Right. And then there's the opposite, the cookie cutter or cigar shark, which is the name I think you made up no, that's real, which basically has the reverse of that, where the bottom, the underside of the cookie cutter shark glows, except for this one spot in the middle that is dark. That looks like a small fish. So a shark or some other animal looking up will be like, I'm going to go eat that fish. And then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, God, it's a cookie cutter slash cigar shark. And then the cookie cutter shark takes a bite out of them. Well, really round bite. Yeah, that's why they call it the cookie cutter. It's like a little plug of flesh. And if you've ever seen Google these dudes in their face. It's like the most frightening little thing you've ever seen in your life. Yeah, they're pretty terrifying. And you'll see pictures of like, a shark or a whale washed up on the shore with hundreds of these little bite plugs taken out of them. Yeah, it's pretty awful. It's a terrible way to go. Yeah. But good for you, cigarshark, because you're small and you're doing what you can. It's a tough world down there. It's Wiley diphotic. And then self defense is the last reason. And basically, like, a squid may release ink to cloud your vision. Some of these things can release a glowing cloud to basically make you sit back and put on Pink Floyd and chill out for a little while. Yes, I looked it up. There's a shrimp. There's a type of shrimp that releases a bioluminescent clown. And I couldn't get the name. I saw both fire breathing and vomiting shrimp for the common names, but yeah, it just spits it out. That's not what you would want to order on a menu. The fried vomiting shirt. Right. And make sure there's extra poop in the main vein. So what's going on here? How is this magic happening? Well, just like we mentioned with the light stick, it involves two different substances mixed together to produce this reaction. And there can be all different kinds of chemicals. But depending on the fish or the being, the being, the life form being works. Yeah. God's gift. One is a luciferin and that's the light producer and the other is a lucifer phrase and that is the enzyme that catalyzes it. And those aren't specific things. Like you wouldn't look at the chemical composition of something and be like, oh, that's luciferin. Yeah, something can be a luciferin. It's a generic term for something that produces light or something that catalyzes the production of light. The luciferase. That is correct. Okay. And they will mix together. And a lot of times the luciferin is something called a photo protein and it needs an ion, a charged ion to get things going. That would be the luciferase. That's right. But in all cases there is some sort of trigger. It could be mechanical, could be chemical, could be neurological startle. Yeah. It could be something they don't understand yet, but something triggers these two things to get together and make this reaction. And one thing that I didn't realize was the word lucifer means lightbringer. Yeah. I never knew that. You mean I went on a little side tear last night trying to figure out why the Devil would be named the lightbringer. Yeah. Did you find out? No, it's a mystery. It's Latin and it came years like centuries after the Old Testament was originally written. And I can't remember what version, but it was basically added on by I guess the Romans maybe added it on, but it's because it's Latin and the original version was not written in Latin. Lightbringer the light bringer the morning star. That's another way to put it. Yeah, they said maybe it had to do with Venus because Venus is like a false star and so maybe lucifer is a false angel, is what they're saying. That makes sense because the Devil would always come into skies. Maybe, yeah, I think that's weak light bringer, that's pretty specific. Like what is that? I bet there's some theologian that has the answer here. I want to hear it. Yeah, I would love to find out about that one podcast@discovery.com, if you know that answer. So you've got luciferin, you've got luciferate. Some of these chemical reactions require another substance and a lot of times it's oxygen. Right. So luciferin will come in, in contact with an oxygen molecule and then the loose phrase comes along and then you've got a bioluminescent glow, which is pretty cool. Yeah. But they also think that's one of the reasons I should say that's one of the reasons why they think that bioluminescence is an accidental byproduct of regular old evolution and that originally there's a luciferring called sealantera zine, I believe is how you pronounce it. And it's an antioxidant. It goes around and tries to find like rogue harmful free radicals oxygen derivatives. Right, yes. And get rid of them. And they think that this happened, this was a process that was way older than bioluminescence, and then along came some substance that became a luciferase, and then light was created, and then it was just a byproduct, like heats, a byproduct of metabolism. Right, right. But they think also that over time this happened. Maybe it's going on inside of us right now. Right. We're producing light, but we just don't know it. Or it's just so weak that we wouldn't even possibly be able to detect it. But this happened enough times in animals in the ocean, where suddenly one could catch prey more easily because they could see better than other animals that weren't bioluminescent. And so it was selected in these guys, and now bioluminescence is its own trait rather than a byproduct of the antioxidant process. I bet you're right. That's not me, man. No, I think you just cooked us up. I wish that's better than y, as far as research papers go. Yeah. Throw a theory out there, see if it sticks. That's what I say. So the deal with these animals is they either have all this stuff in their body as part of them, or they have a little relationship with the bacteria, like producing bacteria that live in a light organ. And this is pretty cool. Like, some of these animals can pull this organ back into their body. Like it's always on. Right. Sometimes they don't want the light to be on, so they'll pull it back in the body. Or they have a little something like an eyelid that they can just kind of close over the light. Right. Which is pretty amazing. Yeah. But it's always going. Yeah. The other thing with evolution is they think that because they don't see this as often in lakes, because lakes are younger than they think, it may be happened independently at different parts in the ocean. I talked to Tracy about this, and it was a little hanky. She wrote this a long time ago. She couldn't quite remember right. What the point was. But the point was that they think that because the process of antioxidation is a normal thing, that the conditions were right for bioluminescence to be selected naturally in some places, but it wouldn't in, like, a lake. So the idea that this happened independently and spontaneously when needed, through evolution is kind of backed up by the idea that you don't really see bioluminescence at the bottom of lakes because you don't need it. Yeah. It all makes sense when you just peel the little curtain back, doesn't it? Yeah. When you peel the glowing skin back. What else you got? Anything else in glowing? Cats. No other cats that glow. Yeah. The Mayo Clinic likes to put jellyfish jeans in animals. The biggest one so far is a cat and make it glow because they're tracking disease. They're using it to mark the progression of diseases. But they made a glowing cat. It's pretty cool. Now I got to look this up. It glows under a blue light, but it glows green, and it's like the cat glows green. I guess it's the hair. The hair ten it produces has some sort of fluorescent property to it, but it's not bioluminescent in fluorescent. And fluorescent is where you take light of one color and reflect it back, absorb it and reflect it back of it as a different color. You're not actually producing light. All right. I just looked it up. Wow. It's a glowing cat. And I double checked the day. I double checked the day. I'm like. This better not be an April Fools article. But it's not. Wow. Yeah, I want one of those. Dysphotic yeah. Okay. So are you done? I'm done. Yeah. There's glowing rats, too. No, these are baby cats, I think, which are called kittens in some countries. If you want to learn more about bioluminescence, you should type that in to the search bar. And you want to type B-I-O-L-U-M-I-N-E-S-C-E-N-C-E? That's a mouthful. In the search bar@housedefworks.com. And it'll bring up this very cool article with some pretty glowing pictures. And I said, search bar somewhere in there, which means it's time for listing or mail. No, it's not. Josh today is part two of You Want to Say it. For those of you who don't know, this is the point at the show where we thank people for little tokens and gifts and chocolatey and things that they have sent us food, sometimes foods. And it's a good chance to hear your name on the show as a thank you. And it's a good chance for some of you to find out where you can get some of these things, because a lot of times they're like really great creative, crafty things. Books. People write books. Yeah. We want to support crafters and writers and bakers of cookies. And we want to support Bill Wagoner, who sent us a bumper sticker on how to pronounce Nevada. Nevada. I'll never get used to that. It's not right. It is right, but I tell everyone that writes in. Only people from Nevada say it that way. Nevada. Nevada. That's Nevada. All right. Lily, her sister Toby and brother in law Danny started a company called please Be Good Human. Oh, yeah. They sent us some shirts. I think they sent some to the sentence stickers. No, everybody has stickers. We passed them out. Oh, well, Kristen, conger. I think that's a short, too, though. Oh, she did? I think so. Oh, that's great. And basically everything has the PBGH logo on it, which is like, Be good to each other. And 15% of everything they sell goes to the charity of your choice. So if you go there, please be good humans on the Internet, you can actually get some of this stuff and choose your own charity that 15% will go to. Very nice message. Very nice. How about some Randy carbononi action? Yeah. He sent us this pirate gag booklet, which is a tailor made for pirate day. Pirate Day. If you want to learn more about that, you could go to pirateday. Cirateaday blogspot.com and hook up with Randycarbnoni. Action. Christopher M. Roth, with an E at the end, sent us a kindle version of his book, dirk Danger Loves life. I don't have a kindle yet, and I'm dying to read this thing just sitting there waving. You Susanna from Archie. The Archie comics. Yay. She sent us a bunch of stuff. She sends us stuff and, like, waves, I guess you could put it. But most recently, she sent us an Archie meets Kiss hardcover book, a Kevin Keller book. That's the first gay character. That's right. First gay comic book character. This whole Green Lantern hubbub. I haven't heard that. Yeah, there's apparently two green Lanterns, and one of them came out as gay. It was just a man in the comic. Wow. That he came out and that's forward thinking. Yeah, but Archie's got a beat because of Kevin Keller's first gay character in the Jinx comics. That Susanna. Is she draw, write, produce those. What does she yeah, I mean, that's her baby. So support the Jinx comics. And Archie is a whole she sent his shirts, and we were supposed to meet at ComicCon, but she said they were slammed in the booth and she was unable to get away. I met Uncle John's. Reader people. Reader people. They gave us shirts and hats. Very nice. So thank you for that as well. We heard from Mad magazine, too. Did you write that guy back? I totally did. Did you? Yeah, I finally did. Daniel Mackenzie from Oakland, California, sent us an LP from his band shut eye unison. Awesome music. Indie rock. A little noisy, little melodic. Right up my alley. Shuttle unison. I didn't see that one. It's good stuff. Andy Parson edition of games magazines. World of Puzzles. Is that the one that had us as a clue? I believe so, yeah. Stuff you should know was a clue in a word search. I believe nobody got it. I don't get this one. That's cool. But it was very nice that he went to that trouble. Suki S-U-K-I design laboratory sent us some hankies. And this was the lady who designed the baby head t shirt. The fly. Yeah. Our favorite t shirt of the submission, the most disturbing one. It was one of my five favorites. It was my favorite, I think. Yeah, but she designed that, and she sent us some hankies with, like these hankies have, like, sleeping sickness and hepatitis and, like, the chemical combinations of these on the hanky. Yeah. That's what's contained within. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Yeah. Thank you for those death Manson. It's the Springfield Isotopes cozy from Duffman himself. Yeah, we appreciate that, sir. Silver Fox broadband is silver Fox t shirts. And at first I was all, what is this? Broadband company sending his shirts. Then I looked up they supply Internet for senior homes. Yeah. So I was all of a sudden wore it with pride. Everyone at my gym thinks that I'm a silver fox because I wear that shirt a lot. It's very comfortable. Let's see the guys from Rocktail Hour send us a T shirt. They podcast about rock music that's rock. And then tail tale hour. Check them out. Bike rapperscom with W-R-A-P-B-E-R not rapping like music. They send us some reflective bike wrappers and dog collars. Basically just these little velcro things. Such an easy invention, but necessary. And you wrap them on the frame of your bike to make your bike more reflective? Yes. And they have little reflective dog collars, too. It's pretty cool. We've got Christmas cards from a bunch of people. Thank you very much. This is how far behind we are. I know it's Christmas and July, everybody. Nick and Lindsey, devon B, becca Evans andrew and Janelle Thomas. So thank you very much. Merry Christmas, all you people, and happy Halloween. M oh, and I've got one more. M. So it's a Halloween card. Oh, thanks. Happy Halloween. M. And then again from Nick and Lindsay. They sent us Valentine's Day cards. Yeah, they're pretty sweet. They send us stuff. Are you done? Because I got two more on this one. Go ahead. Let's go for it, dude. David Beaver's family has been making a magnetic calendar for 50 years. And not just one. They've been making the magnetic calendars for 50 years. The magneticcalendar.com owned, operated, made, and sourced in the Midwest, selling point, family business. They've been doing this for how long? 50 years. 50 years. Awesome. And then Jill Swingson is a twinkie. The kid T shirt. So thank you very much. Yeah, I believe it was homemade design, too, right? I don't know. I think it is. Well, thank you, everybody. That was very kind of you. Yeah, we have one more installment here soon, and then I have to do it because these are all the ones that Chuck compiled. I think it's most of them. Do you have a lot? I've got a decent amount. Well, then they'll be a part four, and then we'll start all over. All right. If you want to send us something, even something as innocuous as just a hello, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstepyshow and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more onto this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | ||
c3c5155e-5460-11e8-b38c-af41474a9c4a | SYSK Selects: Have all the good ideas already been discovered? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-have-all-the-good-ideas-already-been | It's no secret that human beings have an obsession with innovation -- but has our species already found every good idea? As Josh and Chuck break down the continuing search for the next great idea, they touch on everything from hand tools to cancer cures. | It's no secret that human beings have an obsession with innovation -- but has our species already found every good idea? As Josh and Chuck break down the continuing search for the next great idea, they touch on everything from hand tools to cancer cures. | Sat, 23 Nov 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=327, tm_isdst=0) | 32775219 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, its me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen an episode from 2010. Have all the good ideas been discovered? It's an interesting one. In a strange way, it ties into the planned object solescence episode we released recently, even though it was recorded almost ten years before. And I want to make a note. It's possible that the listener male person who wrote in in this episode actually predicted the coming of the wildly popular site. Damn you, auto correct. Prove me wrong. 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. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes the stuff you should know that's right? Yes, it is. Not other imitators. I wonder how many times I said that. That makes the stuff you should know no, just the whole spiel, the whole opening. Hey, you. Welcome to the podcast. Well, you said it about 270 something times, I think. Luckily, we have them all saved and we could count. We do. I don't know if it's lucky, though, Chuck. That's a lot of shows. Dude, we should do something special for $300. That's a lot of shows. It is. That makes me proud. Okay, well, do you think maybe we could get some cake around here or something? A shrimp cocktail with the love of Pete. No, I'm allergic to shrimp now, remember? I know, but I still like to throw it out there. Actually, I ate a shrimp wonton the other day, and nothing happened. Really? I ate a wonton with shrimp and nothing happened. So it was just like tiny little bits of shrimp, and I don't know, either that or I'm getting stronger, maybe. So superhuman, you might say transhuman. Speaking of human. Yes, Chuck. There is a recent study that came out in part from one of our universities here in the city, Emery, right down the street. Great school. There's been this problem that has been plaguing researchers for a really long time, and that is at the beginning of the Lower Paleolithic period, which is about 2.7 million years ago, we started using sharp rocks as bashing and cutting tools. Okay. So we figured that out. Okay. You can take a rock. That's technology. Sure. That's not horse. That's technology. Yes. Okay. You can take this rock and you can use it to open a coconut or the head of someone who's wronged you using an implement to complete a task well, specifically sharp rocks. Okay. It took 2 million years, the end of the Lower Paleolithic period, before we figured out that we could actually attach handles to these things and turn them into how long it took. Yes. Wow. And this is baffled scientists. Like, how could it possibly have taken 2 million years to go from using your hand to attaching a stick? Sure. This doesn't make any sense. Well, they were dumb back then. A dumb is close to it. They would literally were lacking the region of the brain needed, apparently, according to this new study, basically, we developed a region in the right hemisphere, specifically the supramarginal gyrus wow. Which allowed us to go, okay, let's put a handle on this. And after we did that, we moved out of Africa and started colonizing the rest of the world. So they pinpointed the region of the brain that is specific to innovation, specific to stone tool making. Okay, I thought you meant innovation in general. No, like, that's where your ideas come from. No. Okay, give me a second. I'll rant, I'll tell you. Shoot. Did I ruin it? It's okay. Okay. So we go from can't figure out how to attach a handle to a sharp rock, 2 million years. We figure that out, we leave Africa, and we start colonizing the rest of the world, and all of a sudden, things start entering light speed. Right. And it seems like over the last couple of hundred years, especially since the Industrial Revolution, our ability to innovate, to grasp new ideas, to understand the world around us, sure has just been hitting this hyper speed, and a lot of people wonder if we've reached a point where all the ideas, all the good ones at least, have already been discovered. We understand how everything works, and there's really just figuring out how to dot the I's and cross the T's. Right? Right. There was actually a guy who famously said in 1899, a guy named Charles Buell I love this quote. He was the commissioner of the patent's office. It's attributed to him, I should say. Yes, but he said something like, everything that can be invented has already been invented. And he said this in a memo, basically saying that you should go ahead and shut down the patent office. He clearly had never considered the snuggie nice or anything that's been invented since 1900. So here's what I'm going to say. I'm going to go ahead and give you my summation early on, okay? I think people think at various times in history that they've plateaued, and then I think things happen. People come along, innovators, and then they reach new heights, and they go, oh, well, we didn't know that. Right. And there are new ideas. Right. It almost displays a shameful lack of historic awareness to say we've reached the end of all of our good ideas. It's just silly. It's just asking to be made a fool of. Yeah. Or for people that maybe people do that on purpose, to go the innovators and say, oh, yeah, using reverse psychology. That's how innovation works. Yeah. You might as well just give up. Reverse psychology drives innovation. That's a good one. There are people, though, that say that real technological innovation has been stalled for quite a while. Yes. After the 90s computer revolution. Everything else since then has kind of been like, packaging it in better looking cases and sleeker designs. And it's all like design oriented. It is. Or marketing oriented. Oriented. These guys. Cedric Laguere and Eric Virtue. We're both with Schema Business School. Right. Basically, say smartphones. Yes. They seem incredibly new and cutting edge, but really they're just the packaging of several already extant technologies into a really sharp looking handheld device. But that's still a new idea. I would argue it is still a new idea. But I think what their point is saying, like, before the late 90s, before the 80s, let's say, with computers, but especially the tech boom of the telecom boom of the late 90s, this stuff wasn't around. So it's not true innovation. Right? Yeah. It's kind of repurposing. And what you were saying, like the cosmetic changes to a computer, one of the reasons why they believe that this is going on is because we've come to a point in the computer revolution, I think, Chuck, where not you can still make tons of cash just by changing the casing of a CPU. Yeah. There's like, no money in innovation, basically, is what I got from this one article. Right. Is that innovation cost more than it's worth when you can just repackage what you've got in a sleeker design and people buy it up. Exactly. These two authors of this article predict that we're going to have two trends that will drive innovation, I guess, currently. Right? Yes. That consolidation, where basically, like, especially with I think they're talking just about computers. Are they? Yeah, because they're saying the big hardware firms are going to all consolidate all of the smaller hardware firms to where they'll just basically be like the big three or five. And that will leave it to the software firms to compete and innovate. So we'll see more innovation in the software side rather than the hardware side. Right. And they're also saying that the green boom is going to drive innovation. That makes sense. Like coming up with sustainable packages or sustainable solutions. Totally makes sense. One of the other things I pointed out, I thought was interesting was the tech, they call it the tech refresh cycle is too small right now. Yeah. So what's happening is they'll say you like your CD, well, you're going to love the Super Audio CD, or Bluray. You like your DVD, you're going to love Bluray. But guess what's? Coming up after Bluray, it's going to be like super Bluray, right. And it's happening so fast, people aren't abandoning their current systems, they're just like, you know what, I'm going to hold on because I don't want to be the guy stuck with the laser disc player in a couple of years. Right. So all of a sudden, the same thing happens. No one's buying it, so it's not worth as much money, which means that nobody's putting any effort into it and money into it. So innovation ceases. Right. And there's a guy named Edmund phelps, who's a professor of political economy at Columbia University. Right? Yes. And he's basically kind of saying the same thing. He's saying that there's not enough money going toward innovation, but rather than the onus being put on consumers not buying blurays out of fear of looking like laser disc jerk, it's actually government and big business that's not pouring money into small innovators. Yeah. He said that the innovation is the only thing not subsidized by the United States government, which he says is actually a tax in a way, because it's not being subsidized. Sort of a reach. You could definitely yeah, I think a lot of these guys points are reached. But what he's suggesting is if the government isn't pouring money into big business so that they can pour money into, I guess, small venture firms yeah. These people who are in their garages aren't going to take risks. They're not going to innovate. There's no incentive. Right. I disagree with this. I dispute this because he's saying, like, the people who do work in their garages and are the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the 70s, that they were driven by this lust for money. Exactly. And I think that's wrong. I think that people innovate first and foremost to get this idea out of their head and burn into reality. Right. I'm glad you said this, because I completely agreed. Regardless of what you think of the Facebook, mark Zuckerberg didn't invent Facebook to make gobs of money. No. He invented it to make real friends. Yeah. To innovate. And that's my point that you made, is that these people in the garage, the true innovators, they don't care if they have two pennies to rub together, they're still going to be trying to innovate and make a name for themselves and come up with something awesome. Right now, there are people out there who are trying to innovate for the Riches Snuggie. I'm sure the guy who invented the Snuggie wasn't in his garage and just wanted to get this out or else I'm never going to sleep. Yeah. That's the people that are looking for the next getrich quick thing. But I think you can also make a point that when you introduce money to innovation, it leads to actual stagnation, because when you introduce money, there's now something to lose and people are less willing to take risks. And risk is one of the driving the willingness to take risk is one of the driving forces of innovation. A good idea. And this will never happen, of course, because it's a good idea to create the first national bank of Innovation, all capitalized to capitalize. Not all caps, but each word is capitalized. He should do it all in all caps with exclamation points. But basically it would be a bank that you could go and partner as a start up company and partner with this bank for financing and I would guess some sort of low interest loans to spur innovation. Right. That was a great idea. So it is a good idea. And this does happen in the real world, and the government does pour money into innovation. He's not exactly correct in that sense. And I also kind of resented that he placed big business in between people in their garage, innovating and government subsidies. We have to have big business give them the money and then skim a little off the top and give it to this guy in the garage. He's drawn broad strokes here, for sure. There are government programs, and we'll talk about one from the National Institutes of Health where the government says, hey, you have a really good idea, mr. Or Ms. Research Scientist, and we're going to give you enough money to survive for three years. Yeah, because the deal is you can always get grants if you put together a nice package. But this program with the NIH, what's it called? The New Innovator Award. Directors new Innovator Award. Yeah. This is intended for people who have such a good idea, but it's so new that they don't have the data to write a grant where people would say, it looks like you're onto something here. So they're sort of throwing money at stuff that's like, you know, you're the dude in the garage and we believe in this idea. Go see what you can find out. Right. And we're keeping big business out of the way. Yes, but now that NIH owns you for the rest of your career, probably. So, yeah. So let's talk about there's three people at UCLA that got these grants recently, and they're up to some kind of some interesting, one could say innovative stuff. Right. They have some good ideas, hugely innovative about how to approach problems like the Professor Dino de Carlo. I think these people are younger than us, by the way. I'm sure they are. Dino de Carlo is working on ways to basically apply heat or pressure or chemicals to very specific sites and cells using nanoparticles and magnets, which is tough. Sounds like a winning idea to me. It is basically one of the big problems we have with getting cells, engineering cells, to do specific things like, I don't know, attack other cells for fun. Tell me that wouldn't be like a big Christmas gift this year. If you could make cells fight with one another under a microscope, then you have to basically try to engineer the cell time after time after time and basically program it to do what you want it to do. Yeah. What DeCarlo is coming up with is a way to use very tiny magnets and even tinier nanoparticles that can basically my brain is so small, when you move the magnet with a joystick, it attracts the nanoparticles in a certain direction or whatever. And you can have the nanoparticles apply heat or pressure or a specific chemical to a specific site on a cell and direct it to go attack another cell for your pleasure. That's awesome. Your amusement. So 1.5 million goes to Carlo, and for a good reason. For a good reason. The other winner, one of the other winners was Hugh Huang. And you came up with basically, I'm going to break this down easy. Instead of saying, let me come up with a cure for cancer, hugh Wang said, let me come up with a way to detect cancer so early, like way earlier than we've ever detected it before, that we can stop it in his track, essentially curing cancer. Yes. And he's doing this actually, I don't know. I think it's a she's doing this through nanomaterial called graphene that is just one atom thick. Yes. Graphene is like the super clearly not of this world material. It's literally a carbon atom thick. That's it. It ends up incredible. A biological sensor to tell you when cells aren't doing the things they should be doing. So did you know a gram of this stuff flattened covers a football field? A gram? Wow. It's ultralight. That is thin, my friend. It's one atom thin. So 15 Milton hung. Right? Well, did you explain how oh, no, let me try my hand at this. So basically what you do is you put a graphene conductor, a transistor in a cell, and when these biological markers, say, histones or something like that, start to accumulate, they're attracted to the graphene. And by the way, these biological markers we found are correlated with the growth of cancer. The origin of cancer. Yes, that's where they're starting. And when some of these markers are attracted to the graphene, they create an electrical charge that we can sense. And the graphene is so thin but so highly conductive, that with just a couple of these molecules attaching to the graphene, we would be able to detect it and be like, right. We'd be like, oh, crap, you have cancer, and we cure it right then. Wow. Yeah. That's awesome. And it's a good way to approach a cure for cancer, if you ask me. Did I explain that well? I think so. I think so, too. The last winter this year was Jin Hyung Li, and Jin is trying to debug the brain circuit using we have the wonder machine, which is our favorite thing in the world, the fMRI, which measures it measures blood and oxygen levels in the brain. So it tells you these areas light up. They're called bold signals, blood and oxygen level dependent. They light up to correspond to certain brain areas. Right. And we've talked about this before. You're seeing that there's more oxygen that's going to that part of the brain. So we've assumed this is the basis of the fMRI. If it has more oxygen being delivered to it, that must mean that that region of the brain is active. When you show somebody a picture of their kid, like being carried away into a van. Right. That's the fear region right there. That doesn't really say anything, though. And it doesn't showing. Okay, well, there's more oxygen in this region, right? Right. What Jin Hyung Lee is looking at is what specifically on the neuronal level is being activated. Right. He's using optogenetics. So it's going to be called the of MRI, and that's beyond even what we thought was the wonder machine. So this is the super duper wonder machine. Right. And basically it's using light to allow genetically specified neurons to be activated. Right. Do you know one of our listeners that Emery has been harping on us doing one on optogenetics for a while. Really? We should get this person in here. This is probably as close as we're going to come out. Well, it's a great idea, though, obviously, because Jin Young Lee won one of the Innovator awards as well. Yes. And they give these out every year, so they clearly believe that we're not out of good ideas. No, excellent point. Chuck the NIH now. And we're not out of good ideas, so yes, chuck, you picked those out. You found those guys. All right. But I didn't personally find them. You're like, these guys should get the NIH. Found them. There are very good ideas out there, right? Oh, yeah. But there is a debate that's raging in science about whether these ideas like optogenetics or using graphene or nanoparticles to cure detect cancer. Are these variations on the theme, are they applying cosmetic changes to a computer rather than really creating new parts to it? Right. And basically the question is, are there any more major discoveries for us to make, or are these really just basically associations? Remember, I've always said we have the pieces on the table. Now we just have to put them together. Is that the point that we're at? Right. You said we were. I did. And then we started researching this, and I'm like, I wonder. Right? I think I still do believe that. Sure. But within that, though, there's so much that it's to me a little bit like splitting hair. Well, you're absolutely right. Especially when you throw in the word discovered. Right? Yeah. Discovery indicates something that's already out there. We just figure it out or stumble upon it. Sure. And an idea necessarily kind of an invention. Yeah, it leads to an invention. It's something we've created, like technology. Let's talk about discovery. Right. We have a lot of problems that are still facing us and how we understand the universe, like human consciousness. Right. How do brain cells create our understanding of the world, like what we see as reality. Right. How is that possible, and can we figure everything out? Well, that's the big question. Like I said, there's a lot of debate about whether or not we'll ever be able to figure everything out or if the human brain just simply isn't programmed to understand the world fully. There's a guy who's a physicist. His name is russell Standard, and he's written this book called The End of Discovery. And basically he says that we're in, quote, a transient age of human development. Right? Right. Where we're past the point where we figured out you can put a handle on a rock and make it an axe, but we're right before the point where we can no longer make discoveries, not because we've understood everything right. Or figured everything out, but because we've reached the limits of what is knowable through the human brain. Sure. But even that, look at that part of the right hemisphere that developed and allowed us to put the axe handle on. Right. Who's to say that our brain, that we won't reach that point? That's what I said. Where we can't know anything any longer, we can't know everything, and then we evolve even further and all of a sudden we're even better at understanding our world. Right. But will we end up eventually coming to a point where humans understand everything and there is no more discovery to make? I say no, because he points out in here and this is, I think, very valid from the mid 9th century, 19th century I'm sorry, they said that a lot of people in science said we've kind of debunked religion and philosophy and all these things with scientific discovery. But he points out, and I agree that even if you figure out all the problems of science which will never happen right. There's still human life and consciousness and the subjectivity of what goes on inside a person's head, you're never going to solve. That's not solvable. Right. That's what I argue, that's subjectivism. Yeah. I think I believe in that. I agree with you. There's this aspect of the universe that can't call the new Ameno, okay, that was specifically tailored for my thick tone. Good. But basically the new Omanon is the thing itself. Right? Yeah. Where it's just the objective universe and we don't interact with that. Everything we know and understand is subjective. Yes. And this is where subjectivism is based that basically we can never fully know anything and we certainly won't ever know everything because one thing that will always be elusive is what you see. My reality is different than your reality. Exactly. And there's no difference. There's an extreme version of it called solipsism. Right? Yes. And solipsism is this extreme version of subjectivism that basically says everything is so subjective that I can't fully verify that you exist. The only thing I know that exists is my reality. But all of you may be made up. I may be totally, completely out of my mind and actually in a padded cell right now. And none of you are really real. Well, that sort of touches on the whole quantum mechanics thing, right. Don't you think? Please. Well, I mean, I don't have a whole lot to say about it because we've covered it, but it definitely is along the same line. Well, yeah. There's an interpretation of quantum mechanics that basically says everything we know about the universe, we know through observation. Right. But once you observe it, it changes that's part of it. And when we observe, we gain information. Right. But we can't observe everything at once, so all we know exists in our reality for sure is what we're observing. Right. So everything else, like what's going on out there in the office right now, doesn't exist because we're not there to observe. It mind blowing. Once again, it is mind blowing. But also we say all this not just to rock out to Floyd, because this is what science is up against. This isn't just gibberish. This isn't just philosophical gibberish, as much as science would like it to be. There is a true problem with the fact that subjectivity, not objectivity, is how we interact with our universe, even though science is supposed to be based exclusively on objectivity. Right. Well, Stephen Hawking, you might have heard of him and another dude named Leonard Loadanow. Is that how I'm going to pronounce that? Sure. There's a silent image there somewhere. They have a new book called The Grand Design, and they are now saying that I think scientists used to say, you're going to find the theory of everything. Now they're saying, you know what? We're probably not going to find the Theory of Everything, but it's probably going to be more like what they call, quote, a family of interconnected theories which describe your reality under very specific conditions. And this is kind of huge for Stephen Hawking because he's long been a big supporter of the Theory of Everything, which takes the standard model of physics, includes gravity, which has always been elusive right. And then marries it with quantum mechanics to explain everything. That's the theory of everything. It's one theory that explains everything. Right. Like that surfer guy. Exactly. Garrett. Lisa, I think his name is A long time ago it was. And it's going to be years before he's shown to be correct or incorrect. Right, but Hawking saying it's probably not going to be the case. There's too many different variables that don't fit together. Right. But the thing that really scares a physicist, that will scare any physicist, is this sports. Are those models that we've come up with, are they how the universe actually works or how we look at the universe and see how it works? Do you see what I'm saying? There's that subjectivism again. It can't be whipped. Well, and all the things that we've said over the years that we have formed to be true, are those even true? Or the conclusions we're reaching just based on years of thought compiled that may not have been true to begin with? Like, we arrive at reality by consensus. Yeah, but is that consensus? Was that even accurate along the way? Not necessarily. It's been shown time and time again that it hasn't been accurate through these five revolutions, as VM rama Chandra puts them. Copernicus was the first one who said that Earth is not the center of the universe. Darwinism. Very good, Chuck. Darwin says, like, hey, we're actually just a bunch of apes. DNA. Freud. Freud, yeah, before Dwyd, saying, like, we actually are driven by desires that we can't control and aren't really aware of. DNA. DNA, which is saying I think James Watson, who found DNA along with Francis Crick, said, there are only molecules. Everything else is sociology. I love that quote, man. It's one of my favorites. And then the fifth revolution, the neuroscience revolution, that everything, all of our understanding of movements and experiences are nothing but neuronal transmissions, electrochemical impulses. Right. So there's not even sociology that even is just based on firing neurons. Right. That's where we're at right now. That's why I say I think we have everything on the table. We just haven't put it together. But it's entirely possible, historically speaking, to say, well, we thought that before. Right. And we didn't. And what revolution is next? Will the next revolution get us over the wall of subjectivism? Or will that be the wall that we always run into? This is a good one. I was worried about this one. It came out pretty good, didn't it? I think so, yeah. Don't you like it when we pat ourselves on the back of the end of the show? I think this one deserves it, man. Well, we went from blue rays to neurons. At the end of the day, Josh and Chuck say we are not out of new ideas. Can I speak for you? Go ahead. We are not out of new ideas. And just when you think you're out of new ideas, just when you think you've plateaued, comes a wang along to say, no, there are new ideas. And here's one. Give me the cash if you want to learn more about innovation and new ideas. We have tons of stuff all over the site. Just type in innovation, type in discovery. I'm sure that will bring up a ton of stuff. And type in neurons. That will bring up some pretty cool stuff, too. You can type all those words into the handysearch bar@howstofworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Yes, Josh, I'm going to follow this very heady podcast with the opposite an email form. This is from our 13 year old fan Peyton in California. Well, hello. I'm sending this from my eye touch while laying in bed. I'm supposed to be asleep. So, anyway, I just started listening to your podcast after my friend Claire yes, that's the Claire from California whose email you read on the air, who thinks Jerry looks like Tina Fey. Claire is Peyton's friend. Okay. So she said, oh, you got in the air, so I'm going to start listening to you. Actually, I'm saying Payton is a girl. Payton may be a boy. You never know. I assume boy. Oh, Really? Yeah, it's Androgynous, right? Yeah. Ambivalent. At least Claire posted on her Facebook page, and I said, listen to the most recent podcast because you guys read her letter or something. I thought it was so cool. Claire and I are really good friends. Anyways, I love this podcast. Gosh, I feel so boring because I keep saying podcast. Is there, like, another word for that? Anyways, and she does that thing like the kids do now where they put, like, eight S's at the end of a word. Have you seen that? Yeah, I don't get that either. We're getting old, I guess. So I most definitely enjoyed the podcast on the Octopi and stuff. I thought it was Octopi. I thought it was informational and funny. By the way, this email doesn't make any sense. It's because my eye touch is dumb and autocorrects words that I've already spelled right. ERG moving on. Your iPhone does that, too, and mine does. That what's the email written with one of those pens that has, like, four different color ink. You can select from what it feels like. But the reason I brought that up is I have an idea to start a website called My iPhone spelled What.com? Because you ever look at some of them you send and you're like, can you please make sure you take the sofa out of the oven when you get home? Yeah, when you meant to say sturgeon. Sturgeon is so fun, I would probably not. Surgeon. Okay. Take the surgeon out of the oven. I think. So much better. I wish you would have planned this. It's okay, buddy. Anyway, it can make for a lot of fun. So that's my new idea. Okay? And that's lots of love from Payton H, 13 and Cali. Thanks a lot. Peyton, age 13. And Kelly? Boy or girl? We're not exactly sure, but either way, we appreciate you taking the time to write in. And if you have a movie that Chuck and I have not seen you assume we haven't seen that you think we should see. Best overlooked movie of all time. We're always looking for good suggestions. Wrap it up in an email and send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.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. A 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 charttopping 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." | |
Can you vacation in Antarctica? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-you-vacation-in-antarctica | The answer is yes, but there's a lot more to traveling to the southernmost continent. Learn why emperor penguins don't make eye contact with humans, which country has the best research station and why the chances of your ship sinking are alarmingly high. | The answer is yes, but there's a lot more to traveling to the southernmost continent. Learn why emperor penguins don't make eye contact with humans, which country has the best research station and why the chances of your ship sinking are alarmingly high. | Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:20:32 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=18, tm_min=20, tm_sec=32, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=10, tm_isdst=0) | 34989953 | 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is a man named Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He's a little under the weather right now. Yes. You're sick. Yes. And that should come through in this show. I'm not going to get you sick. I got my own little Might cover with my name on it. I'm going to take it. Probably burn it. Actually. I'm not going to burn it because it's pricey. Didn't the company get it for you, though? Yeah, but no one waste the company money. That's good thinking. Yeah, I'm a little ill, so all apologies, people, but we like to soldier on here at SYSK. We meet our deadline. Remember when we often talk about when you were sick for eight months? It was a long time. Yeah. I'm hoping this is no more than a few shows. Maybe even just these two. That's what I'm hoping, because we're recording two today. Yeah, but I feel bad for you because both of them are kind of chilly. Yes. Especially this one. Wintry topics. Yeah. Well, it's almost always winter in Antarctica. Even when it's summer. Tis the season. Chuck? Yes. Have you ever heard of a guy named Captain Robert Scott? Bobby Scott? Bob Scott? Oh, cappy. I think he went by Rob instead of Bobby. I don't know. He was one of the first two people or led one of the first two expeditions to make it to the South Pole. Antarctica. And he was beaten by just four weeks by a Norwegian rival. I thought he was going to say he was beaten by a polar bear or something like that. No. Well, he did die. Oh, really? A five man team made it to the South Pole and started making their way back and just hit some real freak weather. And the guy, the team meteorologist was in that five man team and just felt awful that he'd missed this prediction and they were just buffeted by, I think, negative 40, negative 90. Just ridiculously cold temperatures. So freak weather, or as they call it in Antarctica, weather or Tuesday. Yeah, Tuesday. So these guys died, but they were found. And among them were found some of the finds, some of the things. This is a scientific expedition, obviously. Some of the notes they made, some of the weather notes, a trio of penguin eggs. Emperor penguin eggs. Nice. So this was kind of the crown jewel of the stuff that they accumulated during the scientific expedition. And here's why. Apparently, back in this era, this is I think people thought that emperor penguins, because they couldn't fly, were the most primitive birds on the planet, so they hadn't evolved. And people were really keen on proving or disproving. Darwin's new theory got you about evolution through natural selection. So they figured if you go find the eggs of this very primitive bird, you're going to find the link to dinosaurs and birds. The reason why is because the Eduardians also believed that an animal went through all the stages of evolution during its gestation. Okay. So they figured, hey, it takes a member of penguin eggs, crack them open, you're going to find a dinosaur. Right. It didn't work out like that, but they found a very cute emperor penguin. They did. Dead inside, of course, frozen to death. And now that I've seen the March of the Penguins, I realize just how mean that expedition kind of was. I didn't see that. Oh, man. I know you don't mess with an emperor penguin egg. They go through a lot to keep those things safe and warm and hatched, and you just don't steal three of them. Agreed. Captain Roberts. Gutted and you can't today, either. I imagine you can't, but you can pay someone to take you as close as you like. And if you're a jerk, you could conceivably do it. Sneak one out in your own purse. Yeah. Let's talk about vacationing in Antarctica. Did you know you can do that? Well, I do now. Yeah, me, too. Let's talk about the body of land itself, because it's pretty remarkable. It's South Pole, like you said, 99.5% of the land masses ice. And I think the other .5 is a small putting green, I'm not mistaken. It's nice, Zoeya growing there. During the winter, the ice gets bigger, obviously making it the fifth largest continent. Five point million square miles of largely ice. And that's a lot of ice. It is. Even though it's shrinking, which will talk about a little bit. Yeah. But naturally, during the seasons, it expands and contracts slightly. Sure. As ISIS want to do. When it's warm, which is November to February, it's going to be below freezing almost all the time. In the winter, it can drop to 90 deg below Fahrenheit. And I got a world record here of 128 below zero. Wow. And 1983 at the Bostock station. Well, very dry, which is awesome because it's like pristine powdery snow, blustery winds actually, that's not the good part. Well, the winds are almost constant and they get up to like 200 miles an hour you ever seen the thing. Yeah. By the way, 200 miles an hour is 321 km/hour for everybody else. Sure. And you know what 90 degrees below fahrenheit is -68 celsius yeah like to convert for our friends in other weird places. Yeah it's you on that Canada. Not a lot of people live there. In fact the only people that live there are people that have set up research stations there. Yeah, I guess some of them are manned year round, which is pretty crazy. Sure. That's awesome. Yeah so if you go to a research station during the time from February to November, you're going to find maybe 50 people there. And then when it's bustling from November to February summertime, summertime, it's going to be maybe 150 people there. But all of these are temporary residents. No one lives on Antarctica. Well, temporary in living sense, but they're permanent structures. Right. They're not living in tents. The residents are temporary. Yeah, not the structures. But there have been people who were born on Antarctica. Yeah, that was a cool fact of the show, I thought. Yeah. Have you heard of Emilio Marcus De Palma? I have indeed you have. He's Antarctica. He is. He's the first Antarctican ever. He was born in January 1978, and it was a bit of a ploy, actually. His father worked at a research station in Antarctica and the Argentinian government found out that this guy's wife was pregnant and hustled her down to Antarctica to give birth there in an attempt to lay claim to sovereignty of Antarctica. Yeah. And that's because no one is generally born there. There's a lot of nations over the years that have tried to claim it as their own, including Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, Great Britain, New Zealand and Norway. I'm surprised the US. Isn't on there. Don't we know that there's land out there that we don't have our name on? Chile did pull the same stunt as Argentina, I think, six years after Emilio Marcos de Palma was born, and a kid named Juan Pablo Camacho was the second Antarctican ever born there. But you can have as many babies as you want there. You're not going to establish sovereignty because there's a treaty from 1959 called the Antarctic Treaty, appropriately enough, and basically it says the Antarctic doesn't belong to anybody. It's like the oceans. It belongs to everyone. And no one no one can lay claim there. And because it doesn't belong to anybody and because it belongs to everybody, it's protected from war and it's a nuclear free zone. Wage war in war, anybody. Yeah, exactly. In other people or in the case of the thing, you would be fighting some horrific shapeshifting beast. Right. And by the way, we should probably point out, I think it's still commonly overlooked. Antarctica is the only place where you can find penguins. Right. Except for using aquariums. They're not in the Arctic. Okay. I didn't know that. Yeah. Penguins. Antarctic. Got you. And also, I know you love HP. Lovecraft here and there. Sure. If you are into Antarctic. And you want to be scared out of your wits by an emperor penguin reed at the Mountains of Madness. I love Crash. Yeah, I want to read that one, dude. That's probably the best one. Really? And it's set entirely in Antarctica. I think they're making a movie. I think they have before. Jackson is looking into it. I think that would be good. Yeah. He's probably the only person who can pull it off, but he'll probably fail like everybody else. What about Eugene Levy? You don't think he could do it? He could, but it'd be too charming, you know? Like it wouldn't exist in the Cannon or Christopher guest movie. I just saw a Spinal Tap for the first time the other day. First time ever. Ever. Shut up. You move like, what do you mean? You haven't seen Spinal Tap since we watched it, right? I loved it. I had no idea what I was missing. I tweeted to Michael McKee in and said, are you aware that you're in Spinal Tap? And he tweeted back, Shut up. Wait, what? Really? That's what he said? Yeah. A favorite. It was that, personally. Or that was S-Y-S KSK. So we're on his radar in a small way, apparently. Wow. At the very least, we thought it was a funny tweet. That's pretty funny. Yes. And I can't believe you never saw that. Never. I literally watched that movie over 50 times in college. I can recite it almost by heart. I can totally see that. Yeah. I mean, I love best in show a lot, so I knew I'd like final tap. Yeah. Well, that was the original. I know. Wow. Yeah. It was strange seeing Harry Shearer, because I just associate him with The Simpsons almost entirely. Oh, yeah. He's great in that, too. I could talk about this stuff all day. Let's get back to Antarctica. Yeah. Or we should do a Christopher Guest final Tap podcast. Okay. So if you want a vacation there, which you can do, you got to get there. And in this case, getting there. I don't know if it's half the fun, but it's half the challenge, because you're not going to find any I 20s zooming into Antarctica or any Delta airline flights landing there. Right. Most of the action when you're traveling to Antarctica takes place on the Antarctic Peninsula, which is a sweep of land that juts out toward southern South America. I imagine almost all of Antarctica is still very much not trot upon. Right. Yeah. It was just explored, like, at the beginning of the last century, basically. Yeah. People are like, Why do I want to go down there? Took us off. Right, exactly. So, like you were saying, it's not easy to get to, and you're going to get to the point that the easiest to get to from southern South America. So most likely you're going to take a ship, a cruise ship, probably from Argentina or Chile, and show up. Which seems weird that they're that close. Very close. Isn't it? Isn't it weird? Yeah. Like you think of hot temperatures. You do, but then you're like, oh, wait, that's Olivia I'm thinking of. Chile is actually right by Antarctica, the first commercial cruise liners. Because you're going to get there by ship is how you're going to get there. And cruise ship is one of the most popular ways to do that these days. The first one came in 69, and that was the Lindblad Explorer. Oh, really? Yeah. Just to give you an idea of the increase in tourism over the years, in the early 90s, only about 9000 people per year. And just a couple of years ago, in 2008, 2007 to 846 thousand. Which doesn't sound like a lot of people, but it's a lot for an Arctic. Right. Especially when you consider the proportion that we're wearing. Mickey Mousiers at the time, they were cruising around the glaciers drinking Chilean wine. Yes. There is a tourist association, the IAATO International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators, formed in the early ninety s. And their mission basically is to keep everything safe and keep everything above board and ethical on an environmental scale. Yeah, because they want it to be ruined. Antarctica is supposedly pristine. It is. We found out it isn't, though, that same Scott expedition. Also, I don't know how, I don't want to think how, but came by some emperor penguin skins and they're still to this day used as a control sample when you're comparing tainted emperor penguin skins today. And they found out that DDT actually made its way down there to Amber. So it's not really pristine. Jeez, it's pretty pristine. Right. Well, now that you have all these ships and people running all over the place exactly like the Everest deal. Exactly. November to March is, like we said, this quote unquote, summertime. So that's when tourists are most likely going to be there. A little bit smaller than ice sheet, which means boats are going to be able to get around easier because you got to be able to navigate through the ice sheets. And not a whole lot of boats have the kind of hole that it can withstand bumping into icebergs. No, this is very alarming to me. It looks to me, too. There are people who are going on cruises on cruise ships, and these cruise ships can't withstand an iceberg. Linblood Explorer. Yes. The first one, yes. That was also the one that sank in 2007. It was the same exact ship. It was ironic. Yeah. They changed the name to the Ms Explorer, but it was the same exact ship. The first one, the first cruise ship to go to Antarctica was also, I believe, the first one to sink in 2007. That's a nostalgia tour. It was actually outfitted to withstand an iceberg and it still sunk. So when you consider that there's plenty of cruise lines down there that aren't in any way equipped to take an iceberg, apparently they're very worried that this is a disaster waiting to happen. Well, let's go ahead and go there then. Since 2007, there have been four ships that have run aground, which is not a good place to run the ground. And no, plus it's not good for Antarctica because it's like, hey, have you met our refined fuel yet? Yeah, that's true. But if you do run the ground and you're in a cruise ship incident, you're going to be stuck there for a little while because it's not like any other place where they can just send out a SAR team and all of a sudden you're getting rescued 6 hours later. So in 2007, with the Ms Explorer, these passengers were in life boats, it says, for hours. I wonder how long. I don't know. I can imagine. A while. And they got picked up by another cruise ship. Right. So it wasn't even a sartin that came to rescue them? No, it was Norwegian Cruise Lines, I think they came and got them. So they're like, thank you. And that same year, actually, Anne Curry from what is she? From the Today show? She's from a show in the morning. She was doing a piece called End of the Earth and she went down to Antarctica and she and her crew ended up getting stuck there for days and they just hung around the research station, which we'll get to in a second because the freak weather though, right? Not like an accident. No, but the freak weather is apparently fairly common. So you just call it, again, weather down there, or Tuesday weather. But apparently if you book an Antarctic vacation, the tour operator says don't make any big plans on two weeks of either side of your trip because there's no telling, really, when you're going to go down there. They're shooting for this window, but it might not be that window that might put me off. Not from a schedule standpoint, but just from beer. Right. And then I have a story for you. Let's hear it. So this is all in summer. Like, you might get stuck there during the summer. If you're in winter, there's no way for you to get out. You're absolutely stuck there. Nobody is coming in and you're not coming out. You have to hunker down for the winter. Yeah, they shut it all down. Right. All travel, yes. And I think beginning in 1959, the Russians built the Novo Lazarovskia. That's my Russian. Nice. They're Antarctic base. The Russian Antarctic base is built and two years later there was a surgeon there named Leonid Roguezov and he was stuck there for the winter himself? No, he was with some other people, but he was the only physician. And he just happened to figure out that he had acute pancreatitis. Oh, man. And that he was about to die. And that he had two choices. He could either allow himself to die or he could perform an epidemy on himself. I'm sorry, he had appendicitis. Okay. What did he do? He performed an epidemic to me on himself. Wow. When you're doing this, you can't knock yourself out. So he had no anesthesia whatsoever. Oh, my God. And he stayed awake the whole time. He would work for four or five minutes as he was carving. There's a famous picture of him carving himself and he just stained with blood. And he'd worked for 45 minutes, rest for about 20, 30 seconds, trying to keep from passing out. And he finally did it. He successfully performed surgery on himself and lived to 2000, I think is when he died. He lived another 2000 minutes. Could you be better than that? He's pretty bad. He's up there with Oneota. And who is the White Death? Seam? Ohio. Yeah. I'd like to see those guys sit down and have a tough off. Yeah, like an arm wrestling competition. Yeah. So anyway, you're stuck there in the winter for sure, but you can frequently get stuck there in the summer, too. Which way? It's only like 15 below in the summer. You're golden. 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But they call it that obviously because they should call it the Digital Impecc Gap now, I guess. Sure. But it's extremely photogenic. It's where you see like those just like ice, blue ice caves that you can go through on your boat and stuff like that. Nice. I guess not caves but tunnels. Cool. It's pretty amazing. And I hope you don't strike either side. Exactly. So they're going to take you on these cruises. They're going to get you Close. Some of these Tours will take you actually on the land from a smaller boat or a helicopter for a little while, but you're not going to be spending a whole lot of time on land if you're doing one of the cruise ships. Right. There are some expeditions you can undertake like there's some that you can cross country, ski through the South Pole and you camp along the way. It's like a two week tour, I think. Yeah, I'll bet it's pretty cool too. But I think you have to be kind of strong of mind. Probably anybody you'll go nuts, I would imagine. Well, It depends. I'm sure there are conditions to where it's like quote, unquote, warm and just lovely and blue, but there's also going to be the whiteouts where you can't see your hand in front of your face and the wind is blowing your headgear off and yeah, that's no good. Well, plus also I think plenty of it's barren. It's just the same view 360 Deg. It has to drive you a little nutty too. It's lovely though. You can also, if you're insane already run a Marathon In Antarctica. I'm going to tell my friend James about this. He's a trail runner and does, like, these trail marathons and these crazy things. And I think he's doing one in Ireland soon. So he likes to travel. I'm going to turn him onto this. All he needs is about 16 grand and he can join in the Adventure Network International full or half marathon. I would imagine it's 15. Five for the half marathon and then 16 for the full marathon. But you're running in the interior of Antarctica at about -20 degrees fahrenheit and you're going to have to deal with the Temperature, the wind changes in elevation and Burn penguins Trying To Trip you because they got money on somebody else. And let's be honest, running a marathon, let's not forget that part. That's challenging in July keeps me at home. Right there. I want to know what they run in, though, shoe wise. Yes. I wonder too. Obviously they're not wearing snows or Anything Like that. Or spikes. I guess there's areas where just heavy tread would work. I would think so. It's got to be, or else what are you going to do? You can't run a marathon and snowshoe. Ridiculous. So once you're there, you want to pass a little time. You want to see some things that are awesome besides the Kodak Gap. You can go check out the mountain there, and you can even climb it, and it's really not I didn't get a height on that, did you? No, but it's a four mile climb, which isn't that much. No, I mean, it's nothing to sneeze at, but it's noeverest, but I imagine there's probably a lot of ice to it. Ice climbing as well as just rock climbing. Mount Vincent is what we're talking about. Vincent. What did I say? Vincent. Vincent? Yeah. Not Vincent. Right, okay. It's the Son of Vincent. Got you. Sorry about that. You can go get your picture made in a bikini in front of the little South Pole marker at the Ammonson Scott South Pole Station. It's a very famous American research center at the South Pole, and they have a little candy cane pole with a little silver ball on top of it and seen a lot of pictures of ladies in bikinis taking their picture there. So the Americans never said, this is our land, but they're the ones who built the research station, like, virtually on top of the South Pole. Yes. And Ammonson Scott, that's named after the two guys who made it to the South Pole, including Robert Scott and rolled Amnesty. Yeah. When was this? The early 1900. It was 1911 and 1912, which makes it seem like Amneston beat the tar out of Scott, but it was really four weeks of summary of January. Really? Yeah. And when you go, you're going to find that there are very friendly people at this facility, that their tour is already set up. It's kind of a routine thing to go to the American South Pole Station because if you like the outdoors, you're going to love Antarctica. But there's not that much to do, really. No, there really isn't. There's a lot of wildlife. Well, yes, and apparently one of the cool things about emperor penguins and penguins in general is they are not at all afraid of humans. That's because we've never killed them with reckless abandon. I know. Or at least as far as they know. Right. And apparently they'll just ignore us and hang out with us and pose for pictures. Yeah, they'll do close ups, but any naturalist or biologist will tell you just hanging around an animal and watching it like some slack jaw goon sure is going to produce stress in the animal. Most likely. Because even though it's not scared of you as a predator, it doesn't know what you're going to do or what you're doing or what you want. And you just probably should keep that in mind when you're observing penguins. Don't chase the penguins. When I said a lot of wildlife, let me clear that up. It's not like Yosemite National Park wildlife, but it is a very hospitable place for certain kinds of animals, especially animals that live in the water, because there are just tons of protein. You got whales, you got penguins, you got polar bears, and you have to see March of the Penguins. It was just one of those movies that just got by me. I think it went in Oscar. Yeah, sure. Morgan Freeman yeah, buddy. Yeah. But yeah, it's a really great movie. Have you ever been to the aquariums penguin exhibit? Yes. You can stick your head up, you can crawl into the tunnel, right. And you stick your head up into a clear plexi hole for your head, basically. And the penguins are right there, right in front of your face. Like, what are you doing? Yeah, you're stressing me out, observing me. So, chuck the water is generally or the sea is good for the wildlife around it because they've adapted to it. Yeah. If you're one of those polar bear guys, though, you can conceivably jump in during the winter. You should do so at your own risk. Oh, that the humans that do that stuff. Yeah, because the water gets down to about 32 degrees Fahrenheit, I should say up to 32 degrees Fahrenheit. And you're going to freeze because it's zero Celsius. Yes. It's very dangerous. And if you do that and you hurt yourself, you're going to find yourself on a long, arduous journey back to Chile or Argentina at your own expense. Yes. There's a little bit of medical help at these stations and maybe a passing cruise ship will have the good doctor from The Love Boat on board. But you're not going to be able to get serious medical attention and you could be in trouble unless you get either toot sweet or you're going to be performing self surgery. Right, exactly. PDD style. So how much is it going to run you? I don't know. Do you know? I don't know. I've heard you can expect to spend upwards of ten grand. I mean, the marathon was 16 grand. I mean, getting there is going to be pricey, period. Sure. But like a really probably full on great stateroom kind of cruise down there, including airfare to South America, it's going to run you ten grand or probably less. I'm sure you can get deals for less, but you need to have a little bit of cash to make it down to Antarctica. It's not a poor man's vacation. No, is what you're saying. Yes. Environmental safety concerns, josh, we talked about obviously, would you say was there now, DDT? Yeah. They found traces of it. No, they found it in penguin jeez. In April 2009, there was a joint session of the Antarctic Treaty Panel and the Arctic Council, and they met in Baltimore, Maryland, which I'm sure that's. Nice in April, but for some reason I thought they would say, like, let's go to Phoenix in July and hold our meeting and thaw but they had a lot on the agenda, including global warming talks, shipping routes, stuff like that. But they did talk about tourism. And not coincidentally, or coincidentally, around that same time, a 25 miles ice shelf broke off, shattered into the sea, which kind of was like symbolic of, hey, we really need to talk about tourism. 25 miles, that's huge. And I guess the tourism and the loss of ice has this sort of self reinforcing thing going on because you lose ice, you actually get more tourism, which is ostensibly responsible for even further climate change in the area. And so you lose more ice and you get even more tours. And the reason why is because you lose 25 miles. Piece of ice cream. Ships go, oh, we can go in here now. Right. We have a passage. Exactly. Jerks. So they're coming up with, I guess, an idea of how they can they want to ban the construction of any kind of hotels or anything like that. Any permanent not even accommodations? No, not even which you're pretty although that would probably no, that would be permanent down there, I'm sure. Yeah, it wouldn't be permanent, but yeah, they usually melt in our summer. Right. They want to do a limitation to the number of ships that can come in every year. Restrictions on how close ships can come to shore. Yeah. Are you going to drop people off here at the shoreline? Yes. Just to see those little penguins. But here's the problem. They can't just say, like, okay, we're going to have 50 shifts a year, or 20 or whatever. If you touch the penguins, you'll be executed by the International Criminal Court at The Hague. They can't say these things because no one has any sovereign right to issue any kind of decree over Antarctica. So what can they do to establish guidelines and recommend that signatory countries and travel agencies follow them and highly suggest that. But right now there's only 47 signatory countries on the Antarctic Treaty. Yeah. I wonder who's on there. I was going to look that up, but I didn't get a chance. And the reason why they don't ban people outright, not only can they not, but one of the most important parts of the treaty is that it does allow freedom of access. They're like, you know what, you can come here. Yeah. They can't stop anybody from coming there. I feel like they want to allow it just to a degree. I might be wrong there, but I'm sure that the tour operators association's like, no, we want to tread lightly here. Exactly. And then speaking of getting stuck in Antarctica, one last thing you know about this. A couple of years ago, a case of eleven bottles of scotch, McKinley Scotch, which isn't made any longer and was originally produced in 1896 or 97 and was part of the Ernest Shackleton Nimrod Expedition of was left beneath his hut and forgotten for like, 100 years. And they found it in 2006. When did we talk about this? We saw it on the webcast, the good old webcast, and they got it out of there. Remember, you and I were like, what's going to happen to this? Because of that treaty, antarctica is there for scientific expedition. You're supposedly not supposed to touch anything that has any sort of historical or scientific significance. It's not supposed to come out, right? So they're like, you can't really remove this. Guess what? I have to drink it down there. Well, it turns out that Canterbury Museum in Christchurch, New Zealand, now has this Scotch in its exhibit. I can't remember. Did they sample it? Someone did, didn't they? No one will probably ever taste the Scotch. Instead, they've allowed some Scotch makers to take samples and see if they can recreate it because no one has the original recipe anymore. I bet someone's taking a nip. That's what I'm thinking too. Somebody, surely some rich guy, was like, get me that Scotch. Here's as much money as you need. And it didn't go into the hands of some rich Scotch lover. It went to a relatively unknown museum in New Zealand, which is pretty cool. I bet the night guard I bet there's some Kiwi security guard that's taken the tiniest of nips, right? And then filled it back up with, like, T. Yes. They'll never know. It's like the minibar. 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. 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 take off into Adventure. The hard part is deciding where you'll go first, because when you are in 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 cityadvantage Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. You got anything else? I don't. So that concludes our episode on alcoholism among night watchmen. And if you want to learn more about that or Antarctica, you want to type in A-N-T-A-R-C-T-I-C-A in the handystarch bar@housekeeppers.com, which means it's time for a listing or mail. Josh, I'm going to call this exchange email exchange because I'm actually going to read my response to sort of an upset Canadian. This is about daylight saving, which, by the way, we misspoke. Go ahead and say that we're getting beat up by the people south of the equator when we said that they spring back and fall forward. Yeah, but it's not so they spring forward and fall back. It's just at opposite times, as usual. They spring forward, they fall back, but their spring is opposite of our spring. You haven't seen the Facebook and emails. They've been killing it with their spring. Okay, I got you. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. It was very North Hemisphere centric. And so I need to explain myself here because I got an email from Marie from Canada, and she was a little mad at me. Just finished listening to the podcast on Daylight Saving Time. You mentioned that in the civilized world, time makes no difference and only the rising and setting of the sun is really important. I wanted to offer you a different perspective on that. I live in Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, and the sun is currently rising at 953 sets at 351, and that's a whole 5 hours and 57 minutes of light in the dead of winter. I assure you that we are a fully functioning part of the civilized world here, and setting the time is very important to us. We do observe daylight saving time in the Yukon and in the summer month when we get our, on average, 18 hours of daylight. Having the clocks change makes a huge difference in my daily life after the long dark. It's a relief that the clocks now allow for a little more vitamin D. I just found your comments callous. Perhaps you should rely less on these skeptic pages, as it seems to put you in a sour mood. Makes me skepticaly. Yeah. Please remember that you have a very wide range of listeners, and we are not savages out in the wastelands. We are intelligent people who enjoy learning and see. You and your colleagues is valuable and often entertaining source of information. She's talking to you, right? Because it sounds like one of your quotes. It was one of mine. Okay, so I wrote Marie back, and I was like, Marie, you either misunderstood or I didn't get it across clearly. I wasn't saying that at all. What I'm saying is the civilized world is the only reason clocks matter to me is because man invented clocks and time, quote unquote, to get on schedule in a commerce way so businesses could be open and you could reference schedules and work schedules and shopping and things like that. If man had never invented a clock, it wouldn't change anything about the rising and setting of the sun. We would just operate on the rising and the setting in the sun. It's like I'm watching you set us up for a future. Yeah. So it very much matters, obviously, in the civilized world, because that's the only place at time matters, I imagine in third world countries where they don't have clocks, they just operate with a rising in the setting of the sun like we did before we invented clocks. All right, give me a shovel. Does that make sense? Sure. I certainly wasn't trying to say that people in Canada were uncivilized. People of Canada, attention. Chuck Bryant means you no harm. He's a very nice guy. None. I can't canadian anthem. He is never out to hurt anybody's feelings, even when he does it's accidental. Please accept his apologies. I either misspoke or it was misunderstood or something got garbled up. But sorry, Marie. So thank you to all of our friends in Canada for listening. Man, I got to tell you, they tick off easily, especially if you call their Thanksgiving fake Thanksgiving. They're sensitive people. They do not like that. But it's because Americans are arrogant and they're like, you know what? Yeah. But they don't necessarily pick up on when we're poking fun at our own arrogance. Yes. Which is surprised me, because they gave us Dan Ackroyd wittier Men Alive. So if you have a great story about Dan Ackroyd, we want to hear about it, okay? Heck, yeah. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can go on to Facebook and let us know about it at facebook. Comstuffyshotknow. And you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The housetop works. 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 four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. 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Archaeology in a Nutshell | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/archaeology-in-a-nutshell | If you thought Indiana Jones was the model archaeologist, you're pretty much right. Archaeologists are one part scientist, one part scholar, and one part adventurer. In this episode, learn all you need to know this fascinating field. | If you thought Indiana Jones was the model archaeologist, you're pretty much right. Archaeologists are one part scientist, one part scholar, and one part adventurer. In this episode, learn all you need to know this fascinating field. | Thu, 29 May 2014 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=149, tm_isdst=0) | 46849121 | 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 Knowles with us again. And it's Morning Edition. Upwork. That's right. The Indiana Jones Chronicles. He's in this article. Man, you can't do archeology without talking about Indiana Jones because you can't spell it without Indiana Jones. And do you know why? Because as his article points out, archaeologists are one part explorer, one part scholar, one part PT. Barnum, one part BF. Skinner, one part scientist, and one part historian, which is true, and that is exactly who Indiana Jones was. Oh, yeah. Plus, he knew his way around a whipping. A gun. Wow. If you're going to get the Ark of the Covenant, you're going to have to whip a couple of dudes. Right? That's what Steven Spielberg says. At least I know he got that across quite plainly. Yeah, the whipping was a good idea. That was neat. Yeah. Throwback. Sure. Although he never whipped a cigarette out of somebody's mouth, which I was waiting for, like, the whole movie. That's a parlor trick. Yeah. Well, that's pretty cool. That's very cool. Did you have an intro to spoil it? No. As good an intro as any. Great. You know me in archaeology, that was the first word I could spell. Was it really? Let me take that back. That was the first big word I could spell. I'm sure I had, like, dog and cat and all that down first, but I remember being in second or third grade and spelling it and the teacher being like, wow. I was like, yeah, I'll bet you're impressed because I'm young and I can spell archeology correctly. And she said to sit in the corner. The reason why I could spell it is because I had already been studying it for years. I've always been fascinated by archaeology. Yeah, I could have seen you doing this for a living. My buddy Jerry out in Portland jerry is both of our buddy no, different Jerry. Oh, okay. Jerry in Portland. Male Jerry. I got you. Is Jerry Purvis is a there you go. That's why we have last name. He was a history and I think anthropology major, too, and wanted to get into archeology. So all those disciplines, like, it's a science that is heavily butted up against the humanities. It's pretty neat. Well, it's kind of absorbed them, kind of like some early bacteria absorbed mitochondria and used it for itself. The power. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, it's very much in that vein. Like, archeology started out as a very straightforward, simplistic discipline, and at one point, finally, the archaeologists got bored, and they said this could be so much more, and they expanded, which we'll talk about when we get into the history of archaeology. But just the word itself, it does definitely conjure Indiana Jones. Yeah. And he was one part this, one part that, and yes, archaeologists are that, but the entire pursuit of archeology is so unwieldy. There's so much to it documenting all human industry, from the very recent past to the furthest reaches into human history that the field is broken into a lot of different disciplines, and even those are broken further into sub disciplines. So much so that if you take a forensic archeologist and put it up against a glacial archeologist, you'll be like, are these two really in the same field? Are they? They are, but they definitely you might not have a lot to talk about. Like, how about that ice forensics going? How about that grave site? Like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Time is crazy. They're also broken into geographical areas sometimes or, like, time periods. Yeah. You are a Mesopotamian archeologist. Like, that's your specialty. Right. And that makes sense. There's underwater archeologist, which I think I wrote a few of these articles back then. I think I did one on underwater archaeology, too. It's so interesting that we didn't touch on. But that's super interesting because the trick with all archaeology is preservation. You don't just dig in there with a shovel and pick up the vase, like in the movie, and shake it, see what's inside. It's a lot more technical than that. And with underwater archeology, that stuff is so fragile, you have to transport it in the exact state that it was in. So, like, if you find a book down there, you have to put that book in a tank of salt water at the right temperature. A book? Well, yeah, sure. Okay. I'm not saying it's been down there a thousand years. How about this? A stopwatch from the Titanic pocket watch. Sure. You have to transport it in a tank of salt water at that temperature with the right amount of sand to wherever you're going to take it to your laboratory, essentially, and then put on an expensive exhibit. Yes, exactly. And underwater archeology isn't necessarily just stuff that sunk, although that part is so fascinating. Like, things that are supposed to be above water that are now submerged just take on a whole different attitude to me. Oh, yeah. Waterlogged. Yeah. There's other underwater archeology, too, that goes beyond shipwrecks. Like, they recently found a 9000 year old hunting blind in Lake Huron. What? Yeah, it used to be above water, and then after the ice Age, the water levels rose and covered it up. And they recently discovered it under 121ft of water. And it basically consists of some lanes of stone with a cul de sac. Wow. Yeah. That they would kind of use to shoot caribou through. And then at the end, they're like the caribou like, oh, cul de sac. And then death. Wow. Yeah. But they recognized this and then documented it under 120ft of water in Lake Huron. That sounds like it perhaps could have been an accidental find. Do you know? I don't know how they look for that. I don't know. Yes, but the idea that you could look at some rocks and be like, oh, well, this is a hunting blind from 9000 years ago. Used to hunt caribou underwater, that just seems really special to me. That is very cool. But I mentioned accidental finds because that's one of the neat things about archeology. If you're an archeologist, clearly you are going to have been your bonnet to go find whatever it is, ark of the Covenant. But there's things found all the time just by people who stumble upon them. Accidental fines. Yeah. Because there's junk everywhere. Like the cave paintings at Lescoe. Yeah, I want to say junk. I mean, that in the stuff way, in the academic sense. Yeah. Not worthless. It's all great stuff. But the last Go Cave in France was discovered accidentally by some local teens. Apparently there was a storm and a tree fell over, and it exposed this cave entrance that had been covered for thousands and thousands of years. Yet. The Dead Sea Scrolls. That was an accident. A Bedouin shepherd found them and said, hey, these will support it. What else? The 1944 little French schoolboys that's let's go. Oh, is that Lesco? Yeah. Okay. I don't know why she didn't put it in the article. Yeah, that is weird. She left out that one word. All right, so let's go back a little bit and talk about how this stuff all started. Because in the 12th, 13th, 14th centuries, people really weren't too concerned about the past. Well, that's not true. They weren't looking for artifacts, not necessarily. Or if they were looking for artifacts, they were just looting it and selling it and maybe melting it down for its gold. Sure. Like the artifact itself didn't necessarily have any value simply because it was old. Yeah, that's a good way to say it. That came about as a result of the rise of humanism, which gave rise to the humanities, which basically prized art for art's sake, and gave birth to the concept that antiquities have value because of their age. And then the Renaissance, basically, it was birthed from the Renaissance. There's a dude named Flavio beyond, though. That was my clumsy that was great. Say it again. Flavio beyond. It's so easy. Wow, that's good energy into it. And then you're Italian. Yeah, I think that's my problem because I'm fairly low key. Yeah, sure. Anyway, Flaviobiando was the first person to create a guide to the ruins of ancient Rome in the early 15th century, and a lot of people say that is the first person you can point to who gave rise to archeology, potentially. And so basically, these things that we find, maybe we shouldn't just melt down. Maybe we should preserve them, and this is sort of an important thing for the future. Exactly right. So he was one of the first, and then from that point on, the idea of collecting things kind of took hold, and it was a little nuts, though, for a while. Like, people would just go into it. There was no aim to preserve the site itself. Right. You just wanted all the artifacts from the site so you could fill your palace with them. Yeah. And I get the sense that there was definitely a boom in the Renaissance and among royalty of wanting things from ancient Greece and Rome. And I know that Queen of Naples wanted ancient statues and things to fill her palace and trying to find out what happened with Pompeii and Herculeanium. Yeah. That's why they were excavated in 1748, was after their stuff. And Pompeii is really neat, by the way, but all of the artifacts, it's totally deserted. Everything that's there is a permanent structure. Really? All the artifacts have been removed, and they're still in Naples, where they were taken in 1748. Yeah. And we'll get a little bit later on into, like, who owns the stuff? That's pretty interesting. Yeah. But Napoleon was a big proponent of archeology, and I know we talked during the King Touch Tomb episode about Egyptology, and he formed the Institute of Egypt, basically a think tank in the late 1700 of 175 scholars. And it was just that fascination with Egypt. And Napoleon was all over it, formed this think tank and said, Go find stuff. Right. And collect it for me. And they published a book, too, that really kind of loosed archaeology and the idea of archeology on the world is called Description of Egypt that they published in 1809. Such a bland title. It was. But it created Egypt fever. Yeah. And so that came out in a British guy named Richard Colt Hore. H-O-A-R-E. He wrote a book called Ancient History of Wiltshire in 1812, and basically, he described methods for excavating methodically. He also was the first to identify what are called tales, which are mounds, ancient mounds. Basically, a city being built on a city on a city and a city and a city that they've been continuously occupied for thousands and thousands of years. And then, you know who else was an early archaeologist? Harrison Ford. Earlier than him? I don't know. Thomas Jefferson. Oh, really? Yeah. That's surprising. In the 18th century, late 18th, early 19th century, he was methodically excavating burial mounds on Monticello. On his land at Monticello. Cool. In between rewriting the Bible. Yeah, he did a lot of stuff, but yeah, he was one of the early ones to methodically do it. So there's, like, all of this enthusiasm for antiquities and basically what amounts to looting and grave robbing, but simultaneously, there's these independent gentlemen, scholars who are amateurs because there is no academic field yet, who are creating basically, the body of experimental archeology, how to do it, the methodology, the best practices. Yeah. In the 19th century, a guy named Charles Lyell basically started they called it uniformitarian stratigraphy, which is actually a pretty big hornet fest. Is it? Well, I looked into the uniformitarianism period, and the whole thing is but what does it have to do with dating? It was a dating system. Yeah. Basically before then, there's this thing called Catastrophism, where basically it was like, the Earth is static and it changes only in the face of major catastrophes. Right. Like a comet striker or something. It's the only thing that changes. The Earth itself, uniformitarian Strategy basically says, no, that's not the case. And it gave us what we now understand as geological processes. Geological timescales. Right. It basically said, the Earth changes constantly, but our lifespan is so short we can't possibly witness it. Right. But if you look at this, the processes that take place now are the processes that the Earth has always been subjected to. Interesting. So one of those processes is sediment deposits. And you can date things thanks to sediment deposits because they're actually a predictable thing. So when you're digging in to sediment, you're digging into the past, and you can date something you find in that sediment. That's basically what it gave archaeology digging into history. Yeah, that sounds like it. The idea that you can date from layers of ground. Yeah, it sounds easy now or not easy, but it makes sense now. But back then, it was pretty that's our worldview now. But this is one of the guys who introduced it. Charles Lyell. Yeah. Our hats are off to you, sir. And he didn't come up with it, but he was a huge proponent of it, who gained a lot of traction with it. You're talking about methods in Flinders Petri. Boy, what a great name. Wrote a book called Methods and Aims and Archeology. And that was one of the first ones to sort of break down how to responsibly excavate the site and not just to go in there and loot it. And that was a big turning point. The 20th century, the turn of the century. The Finn Dietical, I think, is what it's called. Oh, really? Yeah, that was a huge turning point in archeology. It really represented when methodology took hold. Like, there was a guy named Heinrich Schleeman who discovered Troy, basically. And he just basically went in and started tearing through the sediment. And he identified a bunch of different layers of occupation, but he didn't really document them like he should. Fortunately, he had an assistant named Wilhelm Dorpfeld. Yeah. And he kind of took a different approach to it, a much more methodical approach. And all of this took place at around the same time. So even on the site of Troy, this change from pillaging to methodology took place. Yeah, they probably got tired of hearing their workers say broke. Right. They're like, all right, well, maybe we should slow down. And it broke. Be a little more judicious with the shovel. Right. Dating old things is a big part of archeology. It's no good just to find something you want to know exactly where it came from? Well, one reason is because it has more value if it's older. That was probably what led the dating charge. But there's a bunch of different ways they can date and they have dated over the years. Something can be selfdated. If you find treasure that's stamped with the date, then it's done the work for you. Relative dating. If you find something that's with a bunch of other stuff that you can date, then you can probably say this stuff from King Touch Tomb is probably all around the same time period. Right. Clay VARs counting. And that is counting bars, which are little laminated sediments that accumulate. And that can help you out for about 5000 years back. No, it can go even further than that. Really? Yeah. How far? I mean, as far as you want to go in the sediment. Oh, really? That's part of the uniformitarian strategy. Oh, I was misreading that. I'm sorry. Our written chronology only goes back $5,000. Right. So you can get the same thing. And then the idea we didn't pay proper homage to Darwin because we did a whole show on him. Right. But in this one okay. On the Origin of Species, that presented the idea that mankind had a history that went back way further than a few thousand years. And that kind of inspired archaeology to look around for it more. And then some of the more recent ones, which we could probably do, shows on a couple of these carbon dating, radioactive carbon dating, potassium argon dating. And thermoluminescence that measures light energy, the intensity of light energy. Amazing. You can calculate the last time an object was exposed to sunlight through thermaluminescence dating. And with potassium argon dating, you can date things back 2 million years if you believe the Earth's been around that long. So just a little more about the history of archaeology. If you'll indulge me, please. So methodology took place in the early 20th century. It became about that time in academic discipline. Funny enough, they didn't start applying the scientific method to archeology necessarily until, like, the 50s or 60s. What? Yeah. That's weird. But it had its own method. And the method among archeologists was you find an artifact, you date it and you catalog it. The archaeologist's job was to date and catalog and ultimately contribute to this growing body of knowledge that was the timeline of human history and preserve, obviously. Right. But it was like, these tools are older than this tool. Which means that the people who made these tools were the predecessors of the people who made these tools. That was it. Archaeologists got bored in the they said, we're explaining how these tools have progressed or human industry has progressed, but not why. Right. When they decided to start answering why, archeology became a far more interesting field. It became a multidisciplinary field. And all of a sudden, they're bringing in experts in ceramics, experts in metallurgy. Right. And grabbing all these people from different fields and saying, how can we answer why this changed? What led to what changed? And archeology at that point in about the became the very far flung, widespread, all encompassing discipline that it is today. That's awesome. Yeah. So with help. Yeah, with a little help from their friends. From their expert friends. Yeah. All right, I guess we can talk right after this message. Break a little bit about how things start off, if you want to go pick something up. Okay, buddy, we're back. Okay. Fieldwork is a word that you're going to hear in archaeology a lot, and depending on who you talk to, it might entail the whole process or just out on the field, like at the actual excavation. But I think most folks nowadays consider fieldwork the excavation and all the pre work. I mean, there's a lot of research that goes into it beforehand right. In offices and school rooms and libraries and what have you. Yeah. And I think it's everything, including excavation, or it's all the stuff that leads up to excavation is considered fieldwork. Right. Yeah. I would call it predict activity. That's what I would go with. That's what you go with. So excavation and fieldwork are two different things for you. Sure. Okay. If I was opening up my own archaeological firm, that would be my model. Yeah. It seems to be really not a big problem with it either way. Okay, good. So when you do find something, like you said, there's a couple of different ways things can be found. They can be determined, doggedly sought after, which can be part of the field work. Going through the stacks in a library, looking for references in ancient literature sure. And just kind of trying to figure out where something might be. That's what Schleman did with Troy. He read The Elliott, I believe, which describes the Trojan War. Right. And said, look for clues. Yes. And that's when he was like, I'm pretty sure this is where Troy is. Yeah. You're like a sort of a history detective at that point. Exactly. Which is Indiana Jones. After that, you have to go get some permits for permits. And you're also going to want to go get a grant because you're probably not going to fund this out of your own pocket unless you're somebody like James Cameron or whatever, you know what I mean? No, but grants can come from rich people who may want some of this stuff. Or maybe a museum wants to pony up some money if they really want a certain exhibit in their museum. Right. Or your university that you work for should underwrite some of it. Yeah. But you get your funding, you got your grad student assistance, maybe it's going to be a really big dig. You put a flyer up at the local senior center, see if anybody wants to come help during the day. I know that the elderly would be good diggers. No, they would be awesome diggers. And here's why. Okay? It takes a lot of patience to excavate a site. When you excavate a site, you're basically cordoning it off. And by the way, we've left out a really important point here. There's something called Geophysical Prospecting, which basically uses some pretty incredible devices that measure differences in electromagnetism or electric conductivity in the ground and then basically gives you a pretty picture back saying, here's something that's not rock. It's like an advanced, super advanced metal detector, basically. Yeah, but it can also detect other really nuanced stuff like paint and everything. Detector. Yeah, it's just good stuff. So you may have read a book that says, I think that this ancient site is here. Right. But then you don't just start cordoning off and digging. You do a survey of the site to look for stuff and see if it's likely that it might still be right. That's a huge step that if you missed, you're a terrible archaeologist. Right. So I'm sorry we left that part out. Now that you've got basically a subterranean map of the site, you cordon it off and you start digging, usually by meter. Right. And when you're digging by meter, you literally remove just one thin layer of that square meter at a time. Yeah, because we said earlier, preservation is key and they were breaking things early on. And one way to not break things is to go super, super slow. Super slow. Just a little bit at a time. Yeah. And I know everyone has seen the footage of archaeologists on their hands and knees blowing things with little brushes. And it is that meticulous? Yes. Might drive some people crazy. It certainly would. Like, construction worker guy probably doesn't want to be on an archeological dig. No, but it's funny you bring that up because construction worker guys often find themselves in the midst of an archeological dig. Sure. Construction yields a lot of archaeological evidence. Like for instance, in Miami recently, they came across a 2000 year old Indian settlement. Oh, wow. Yeah. The Tequesta Indians had a little spot in the middle of what's going to be downtown Miami. Like their newest development. Really? And the developers are like, fine, just take some pictures and let's get on with it. And the locals are like, no, we need to preserve this better. So they're trying to figure it out, but it happens a lot. Remember when we talked about the huge tunnel, the underwater tunnel they dug in Turkey? Oh, yeah. During construction of that, they ran into an ancient site. So they had to bring in archaeologists. That's what's called a rescue excavation, where it's going to be totally destroyed by a group of people who really could care less one way or another what happens to these artifacts in the name of continued industry. So the archaeologist comes in, documents everything, the placement, all that stuff, dates it, and then that is documented from the excavation that becomes the primary source for everybody else to follow. By excavating, you're destroying inherently. Yes. And each state in the United States has their own state archeologist. If you go to do a construction project in Rome, let's say get ready for patients, because when you're trying to build something in Rome, I think they give out about 13,000 building permits a year. But they require an archeological evaluation of each one, and some say it can cripple progress in Rome. Yeah, but if you've ever been to Rome, it's easy to appreciate the fact that they're doing that. Yeah, sure. I mean, it's just the city built up against ancient ruins. Yeah. It's really wonderful how they preserved everything. Yeah, it's neat. That's the only place in Italy I've been, but that's a neat town. Yeah, it was awesome. I think someone else was complaining about how dirty it was, and I was like, it's been here a long time, right? Yeah. No, it does have the funk of age over the whole thing, but yeah, it's still kind of it's not going to smell like Montreal. Does Montreal smell good? I think Montreal is noted for being pretty clean. The first city you can see that it's a fastidious city. That's what I've heard. You've never been to Canada? You haven't? No, I grew up near the border, so I've been plenty of times. Yes. And hey, early spoiler. We may be going out to Canada this fall. Crazy. To Vancouver? Yeah, Vancouverites. Listen up. In the near future, we may be coming to do some live show there this fall. Man, they're going to go nuts if we don't actually go through with this. No, they won't. Remember? Okay. We're going to go though. Okay. All right. So we talked a little bit about the transition from grave robbing to archeology. Looting archaeological sites is still a thing. It didn't go away completely. So each country in each state in the United States, everyone has their own way to deal with this stuff. There are a lot of archeological acts that have been passed throughout the world to preserve things and to make sure there's not looting going on. But despite all their best efforts, it still happens. And trying things like putting up a big sign, this is don't dig here, do not enter. Sometimes more of a welcome invitation. Yeah. So sometimes they get tricky. In New York, they do things like environmentally sensitive do not enter. So they'll try and trick folks into thinking that all you enter will die. Right. But people pay money for artifacts still, and there is a black market. People pay money for artifacts. And those people are very frequently called museums. Well, and private collectors a lot of times, apparently, like, dinosaur bones are super hot right now. Nicholas Cage has one that's contested. It was known to have been removed illegally from a site that was never officially recognized by basically this couple that goes in, and they're really good at finding really dinosaur bones, and then they sell them on the black market. Well, and apparently he's got a really awesome skull. Of course he does. He also has a house in New Orleans that was like a torture murder house in the 19th century that this really priestess owned. And that's his house in New Orleans, like the site of just blood bath. Wow. Yeah. He's a weird guy, man. I know. When he married Patricia Arquette, he did some crazy list of things, or maybe she came up with a crazy list of things that he had to do to marry her, and he did them all, and it was like a big, stupid, rich person treasure hunt. Like, buy me a scavenger hunt. No, it was more creative than that. Like what? Oh, I can't remember. Like, find me a black rose. All these things that are hard to come by. I got you. And he did it, and he married her, and then he divorced her. So it's a happy ending. But the black market sorry, back to it. If you're in Peru, they estimate they have lost about $18 million worth of artifacts and goods on the smugglers market. And so their institute of culture, they register their historic sites, and they require that all the collections are registered. They've partnered with the international council of museums. And basically all these international museums, they're trying to get together to thwart the thriving underground archeological goods, market goods, collectible goods. Sure. All right. But that brings us that brings us to the interesting point on who owns the stuff. That's a great question. For a very long time, it was museums, because they were the ones who sent in professional looters archeologists at the time to go in and basically rob a developing country of its antiquities and riches in history and culture. Basically, in a lot of cases, the government in charge of the time was totally complicit. Like, for example, when Yale sent in Hiram Bingham to matchup picchu, and he came out with a lot of artifacts from it. The Peruvian government was totally in on it at the time. I'm sure that the high officials were getting tons of kickbacks from Yale for it. But nowadays, 100 years later, yale is giving back its machu picchu artifacts. Yeah, there's been a big move toward trying to get back thing exactly. Because the Peruvian government has said, wait a minute, we're less corrupt than we were before, and this is our cultural heritage, and that belongs to us. Yeah, you've had it for 100 years, but there was ours for thousands of years, so give it back. Not necessarily Machu picchu for thousands of years, but there are plenty of antiquities that museums have had for a very long time, but really belong to the source country. Yeah, and that's a big sticking point. Every country. Like, if you want to know who. Owns an artifact. If you find something, let's say it's going to depend on where you are. Every municipality, every state, every country has their own laws. As far as finders keepers laws, they call them. If you're in New Zealand, a lot of them are dated by time. Like, if it's newer than a certain age, go ahead and keep it. If it's older than a certain age, you got to talk to us about it found, not older. When it was found. Well, it depends on what country. Some countries have a date on how old it is. I think the date is when it was found. Yes. Certain countries for sure when it's found. Certain it's the age of the object. It just depends on where you are. And the date of when it was found is usually the date that comes after whatever act was passed. Yeah, exactly. So in New Zealand, for example, if you found something prior to 1976, which is when the Antiquities Act of 1975 came into effect, you get to keep whatever you find. Right. If you found it after 1976, then you have to alert the local authority. Right. If you're in Sweden, that has some pretty interesting laws. They say if there's more than one object at a site, then you have to report it to the government. If it's just one thing that you find, you can keep it. And they have a finder's reward to encourage people to be honest about it. And if it's only the single object, you'd still have to report it if it's partially made of a precious metal or copper alloy. But if you're in Sweden, you find an old wooden bowl. Right. I love this example. If that's the only thing you find, then you get to keep it. Yeah. It's really interesting, though. The United States has the National Historic Preservation Act and the Archeological Resource Protection Act, and they claim, I think the site must be at least 100 years old and remains must be related to past human life or activity. That means you have to report it to the government. So it's really granular, depending on where you are and what the law is. That's just two countries. There's something called Treasure Trove Law, which is basically it's this, but it has to do with finding a bunch of riches that are old enough that the owner is clearly now dead, no one can lay claim to it, and that they were placed in a place where it shows intent for them to be retrieved. Right. Like they were buried next to a tree or something like that, rather than buried in a grave, because the grave would indicate that they were meant to stay there with a dead body. So if you find a treasure trove, all sorts of laws kick in. Like in the UK, in England, the Romans were all over that place, so people find, like, hordes of Roman coins when they're killing the ground in their farms. Right. And it used to be like, well, that was yours. That's not the case any longer. Yeah. Sunken treasure. That's a big controversial area, too, because a lot of those are private companies going after what they think is a lot of dough. Do you know? A lot of gold. That's where the concept of the camping going down with the ship came from. How's that? So I was listening about the ferry disaster and whether or not the captain was supposed to stay on or the Costa Concordia. The tradition of the captain staying with the ship isn't that the captain while the ship is going down? So I'm supposed to die. Right. The captain is supposed to stay on until the ship is basically totally underwater, and then he can get off. It has nothing to do with him dying. Right. He's supposed to stay on because under maritime law, as long as the captain is on the ship, it's not up for salvage. But the moment the captain leaves the ship, it's anybody who wants to go salvage the thing. Like, that boat has been abandoned once the captain is off the ship. So the captain is supposed to stay on until it's basically not salvageable anymore. Then he can leave. Got you. So if a ship were just a partially sink and it's still salvageable right. And there's no captain yes. Then you can claim it, apparently, that the captain is still on top of the front of the boat. If he's anywhere on the boat, barely sticking out of the water, he's like, I'm staying, so you have to stay, too. Bartender that's interesting. Hit me up with a Ballini. UNESCO. In 1970, the UNESCO convention established try to establish some international standards for cultural property. But here's the deal with all those international organizations, they can't demand that countries join, right. But they can encourage it. And more than 100 countries have ratified it so far. Yeah. The thing is, even if you join and ratify it, you can still violate it. Yeah, sure. International law is so toothless, it's ridiculous. But under that convention, though, like you said, they usually side with the source country of the object as far as ownership goes, which is good. And that seems to be the prevailing wind now. Like, if the source country wants to lay claim to something, you should give it back. It's part of a cultural heritage that got scattered to the wind in the 19th century, when museums were again employing basically professional grave robbers to go get them a bunch of stuff for the museum's collections. And now the tides being reversed in a process called repatriation. Remember we talked about that in the shrunken heads episode, right? Like the shrunken heads are being repatriated back to the QR. Yeah. Part of is something that worked for a long time up until the early 20th century. And that is basically when you dig up let's say, excavate a site, and you find a bunch of great artifacts. The country itself keeps most of the stuff, but the digger can keep a couple of things, and they don't spell out exactly how many things, because it wasn't like a law, but for a long time, if you, like, excavated site and, like, hey, I want to keep these three things, you can have the rest. And the country is like, Great. That works great. It's like sharing almost. Yeah, almost. It's exactly sharing. And so we're talking about the black market being pretty hot for antiquities and artifacts. There's this group called the International Council of Museums that basically created a list, it's called the Red List that they put out, I think, on a regular basis, but then they'll put out emergency ones, too, when suddenly, like, a black market in a certain area heats up. Right. And it's pictures of specific items and descriptions saying this item and things like it are most likely to be smuggled and illegally sold on the black market because there's a big market for them right now. It's really interesting to go check out on the almost like a most wanted list for artifacts. Yeah. But all the different artifacts that they have are really cool to just kind of browse through, and they have it by region and country and stuff like that. Cool. What's it called? The International Council of Museums. You go to their website and look for the Red List. Those guys party, too. You ever been to one of those conventions accidentally? Man, they are wild. Yes. If you remember an International Council of Museums convention, you weren't there, you didn't do it. Right. Yeah. All right. I think we should finish up with an interesting little bit about the Nazi party. Because Hitler and the gang were way into archaeology. Because they believed if they could find proof that Germans were the original Aryan peoples. Along with Thor and Odin. The Nordic gods. If they could prove that we were the original people and we ran the Earth. Then that would give them the right to go in and take your country. Right. So they weren't just interested in things. They were interested in trying to prove that they owned the world. Pretty much, yeah. That they were descended from the Aryan race, which was the protoindoeuropean group. Yeah. The mythical. Yes. I was not 100% clear on that. Like, did the Aryan race definitely exist? Well, I think the Nordic gods yeah, I don't know about that. They would be mythical, but the people who worshiped them, they were the Aryan race, right? I don't know. That's a good question. So I think that there was an Aryan race, which we would call the Nordic or Germanic peoples. So I think whether or not what makes it mythical is the idea of whether it was some pure white race okay. That made it some master race in the eyes of the nazis, so they may have been a mythical people. We'd love to hear from you if you're an expert on early proto Indo European cultures. It was there a group called the Aryans as far as the Nazis were concerned? Yes, there was. And that the Nazis were the new version of that. Okay, right. Yeah, for sure. And this started even pre war in Himler actually founded something called the and this is German, of course. Anenobie is what I'm going to call it. A-H-N-E-N-E-R-B-E. Don't you speak German? Yeah, but it doesn't look like a German word. It's weird. Okay, yeah, it does look a little French. And it was known as the Ancestral Heritage Research and Teaching Society. And one of Hitler's big plans was when he took control of Germany, he took control of the education system and everything, and he wanted to flood that education system with Nazi propaganda. And so they formed this they call it a think tank, but what they really did was a lot of archaeological digs all over the world, like I said, trying to prove I mean, we're talking Croatia, Greece, Russia, Iceland, North Africa. They're going everywhere trying to find traces of what they believe were ancient Germans and the original master race. Right. And one of the places they went was Iceland, because apparently that's where Tool, T-H-U-L-E was, which was the seat of the Nordic gods. Right, yeah. And they looked for something called the HOF, which was a place where they were supposedly worshiped by the Aryans. And they said, we found this cave, this mystical place of worship, and somebody else came along and said, no, this cave wasn't inhabited until the 18th century. So not the HOF Nazis. And then the British and the Americans came in, occupied Iceland, and the Nazis were not able to come back. No. That's just one example of their failed expeditions. Right? Yeah. They had 18 archaeological expeditions total, and none of them bore fruit. Proving fruitless. They were fruitless. They didn't provide any information that the Nazis were the original master race, because they were not. That's right. They were just a bunch of terrible people. All right, I think you can say that, yes. I'm taking a stand on Nazis. I dare someone to write in and defend the Nazis. Yeah, I dare you. Do you have anything else? No, you beat me to the punch. Okay. No, I don't. Man and if you want to learn more about archaeology, how Stuff Works is a veritable library of articles on archeology, everything you could possibly need to know. Basically, you probably would get a degree if you read everything on archaeology. Not true. You could okay, possibly. And just type archeology into the search bar. How Stuff Works. Allow me to spell that for you. Archaeology. Is that one of those you have to sound out in your head? No, remember, that was the first I was able to spell that word earlier. I remember, but I just no, I see it in my head. Okay. I see the letters. I think everyone has those words. Still, though, as adults, you sound out that were difficult. One of mine, for some reason, is because I always in my head. And I still do that in my head. Mine is pretty much anything with the CEI. Yeah. Spread. Man, those are obnoxious words. And it's even got that accompanying rhyme, I before E except after C. But anytime I see a C and there's I's and he's involved, I have to go back and correct myself. Basically, that's called putting learning into practice. That's a dumb. I'm a dummy now. Okay. Speaking of dumb, I haven't yet, which means I can still go on forever. Go ahead. There are new T shirts available for people who like don't be dumb. Yes. Josh's Tony award winning web series. Let me confuse with Neil Patrick Harris again. I think it's great. I think anytime, if you're getting feedback where people are saying, this is the best thing I've ever seen, and other people are saying, I don't get it at all or I hate you for making this, that means you're doing something genius. Yeah, I guess so. If you aren't familiar with Don't Be Dumb, you can check it out on our website or on our YouTube channel. If you are familiar and you want a T shirt, you can go to our store. If you go to stuffyshaw.com, you can get to our store in the top navigation. And there are josh sent me T shirts. Yeah, that's great. Thanks. That's a good one. But anyway, since I said all that, I imagine Chuck finally. It's a time, a long last for listener and mail. I'm going to call this Thieving mailman. I think this is the loser. Sorry, thieving garbage man. Okay. Hey, guys, listen to how tipping works. And I have a funny story. A couple of years ago at Christmas, my mom wanted to leave our garbage man a nice tip. She says, Garbage man. By the way, we're not saying that because I know sanitation workers. You're right. Proper terms. Nicely done. These are Emily Crawford tours. I should preface this by saying that our garbage man isn't like the typical city pickup guys. He has a small business and he comes to collect people's trash at their garages with his pickup truck. And we slip into sticks. My parents have a long driveway and don't want to drag the trash can to the end of the driveway. So they hired this guy. My mom put some money and a card in a white envelope as the tip. And she didn't want to tape the envelope to the trash bags for fear of it being thrown away by accident. Yeah. And it was windy, so she decided to tape it to this iron horsehead that we have sitting by planter next to our garage doors. She attached an image, but I don't have it. Just imagine. Sure, I see that. The little ring through his nose? Yeah. Later that day, when my mom was full no, the horse heads. Because they have it, like, on the side. Yeah, they do it's on the side from their bridal. I'm talking about this picture I saw. Trust me. It had a ring through its nose. Yeah, it was like a knocker. Okay. I see that kind of thing. So later that day, when my mom I love that. I looked at this picture like, no, you're wrong. Are you going to believe me or you're lying? Eyes. Later that day, when my mom was coming back home from running errands, she saw that the trash had been picked up and the horse head was gone. The garbage man must have assumed it was a gift for him as well. And he took the envelope in the horse hat. It wasn't valuable, but we also didn't want to give it away. We never got it back and never brought it up to the garbage man. Wow. But I laugh when I think about his reaction, was probably, what the heck? They gave me this envelope and a horse head, and I just hope he put it in his house somewhere. So I hope you get a little laugh out of this. We did. From Emily Crawford. Nice. Thanks a lot. Emily Crawford. That's good stuff. Somewhere that sanitation worker has your family heirloom. Yeah, that's a good story. Agreed. You know what it reminded me of? What? The Greatest Movie, starring Emilia Westovez and Charlie Sheen ever made. Men at Work. I never saw that. What? I did not see it. That is a good movie. You need to see that. I know. They're sanitation guys and they find something valuable, probably, that someone else wants, and so they're in trouble for it. You just wrote the script. Yeah, but all the hijinks that ensue in the meantime are hilarious. Great supporting casts, too, including Chainsaws in Summer School. Oh, man. I love your taste in movies. It runs the gamut. So, is that it? That's it. If you want to tell us a cute story about your family, we'd love to hear those. You can tweet to us at xyskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyturno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and join us at our home on the web, our place forgot to shirts stuffyyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.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 in 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." | ||
How Jackhammers Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-jackhammers-work | It's likely that without the invention of the pneumatic jackhammer, the Industrial Revolution wouldn't have hummed along quite so smoothly. Certainly a lot more trains would go around mountains than through them. Learn about this essential tool here. | It's likely that without the invention of the pneumatic jackhammer, the Industrial Revolution wouldn't have hummed along quite so smoothly. Certainly a lot more trains would go around mountains than through them. Learn about this essential tool here. | Tue, 16 Feb 2016 19:58:14 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=19, tm_min=58, tm_sec=14, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=47, tm_isdst=0) | 29011872 | 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. Know from houseoffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there, which means time for stuff you should know. The Jackhammer edition coming at you. That's right. Annoying. One of the most annoying sounds. I know. You hate the leaf blower. Yeah. Established, I think the leaf Jack camera up there. Sure, yeah. But we don't live in New York. If we lived in New York, Jackhammer would be number one. I feel like I've never stayed in a hotel in New York where there wasn't a Jack. No way below me. No, not even a chance. Every single time. Yeah. Leaf blower. It's a lot more frequent down here in Atlanta than Jack Cameron. Not a lot of leaf blowers in New York City. No. Not a lot of leaves. Well, that's not necessarily true. No. It depends on where you are. So we don't usually shout out a thank you at the beginning of an episode, but we got a couple of gifts that are so special we want to do that. We do. So Peter O'Donnell and the gang at Belt sharp Knives B-I-L tsharp out of Philly. Sent me a chef's knife. Sent you a filet knife. Beautiful. And it's one of the most gorgeous pieces of, like, handmade craftsmanship I've ever seen. Yeah, it's amazing. I cannot wait to catch a fish. Oh, dude, I can't wait for that for you. Cut that thing open. Yeah. After it's dead. Oh, really? You can't block the head off while it's still alive. No, I think you're supposed to you're supposed to hit it with a hammer. I think some people do. I do not. These things are gorgeous. I mean, the blade itself, they handmake. These, the handle, the weight, it's a piece of art. And not only that, it is the sharpest thing I've ever seen in my life. I know. It's, like, dangerous. They're knives. They're supposed to be sharp. Yeah, but wield it with respect. Yeah, well, they're respectable knives. You can actually go into tumblr. You can just search hashtag knives. You should know for one word, and it chronicles in pictures and short captions or brief captions. The process of them making our knives is awesome. Yes. It's just really neat. I just love handcrafting and forging steel. Those are lost arts in a lot of ways, and they're doing it right, man. They're really beautiful. Cool, man. So, anyway, thank you for indulging. Yeah, thank you, guys. Yeah, thanks, Peter. That was really cool. So, Jackhammers yeah, Jackhammers. If they were as sharp as built sharp knives, they'd be onto something. I don't know if it would work quite the same. Probably not. So, yes, it's true. We are actually talking about Jackhammers. And, yes, it's true that jackhammers are about what you think they are, but they're also kind of interesting when you start to look into them, right? Oh, yeah. Well, yes. Think about I didn't realize this. This article points it out. A jack hammer is a hammer and a chisel. That's right. But it's a hardcore hammer and chisel. Yeah. And it takes out of the equation largely the human whose back and shoulder muscles have to be involved in every single strike of that hammer and chisel. You're talking john Henry and the sledgehammer. Yes, exactly. Because prior to the advent of the jackhammers, 1850s, by the turn of the last century, we had jackhammers kind of down pat. It was sledgehammers and pickaxes to remove rock. It was a real deal. It killed people. It literally could kill you with that kind of work. Yeah. I mean, mining is still a very dangerous job, but pre industrial revolution mining was no fun. Dangerous, deadly. And even if you didn't die, it's just brutal. Brutal. Back baking work, making work, slinging a sledgehammer. Yeah. You ever swing a sledge? Sure. It's the worst. It's hard work. You ever use the jackhammer? No, I haven't. It's awful. Well, that's the thing. It's better than the sledgehammer. Yeah. Well, in some ways. But it's brutally difficult. It is. It is probably one of the most brutal tools you can use on any kind of site for any kind of project. There aren't that many tools out there that are going to take as much out of you as the jackhammer. It's tough on your body. Yeah. Because they weigh about \u00a3100, like a normal heavy duty jackhammer weighs about 100 lbs. You have to hold it in place upright because you don't want to jumping around. Although it's probably not going to anyway. It's designed not to jump around. Right. But you want to kind of keep it in a fairly confined area, which means you're using your muscles to steady it while it's going up and down at a very fast rate. Some of those things impact with the ground 1000 to 4500 times a minute. Yeah, it's tough. It's the only tool that and the hardwood floor skimmer, like the orbital floor cleaner. You can use that. Like put a sanding pad on a hardwood floor and that thing and the sledgehammer. The only time I've ever used tools that I felt like were controlling me and not me not controlling the tool I got you until you get it. Once you get it, it's a little better. But at first when you first start to use it, you can rent a jackhammer. If you want to bust up your driveway, you can go do it yourself. If you're a fool, make sure that you don't need the driveway anymore before you do that. Yeah, but once you get the hang of it, you kind of can wield it a little bit, but it's tough. It feels like I have no power or control over this thing. Right. I can imagine. So it is a very difficult tool. But again, the alternative is early death. And the other alternative, which is to call someone to do it for you, is the best option of the three. So say that you are King Carlo Alberto of Sardinia, and the year is about 1830 something 1840, and you want a train tunnel built through a mountain. And the tunnel is going to need to be 12 km long. You do call somebody else, but that somebody else you call goes, I don't know what to tell you, buddy. We could try pickaxes or whatever, but you're not still going to be alive by the time we finish. Yeah. What can we do? And actually this call for a twelve kilometer long tunnel through a mountain in Sardinia prompted the early forays into developing pneumatic tools like a jackhammer. Yeah. In 1848, a guy named Jonathan Couch built what he called a percussion drill. And this had a bit that went through the piston of a steam engine. So it was piston driven. Then contemporary Joseph Fowle actually attached it to the piston, and then he started in 1851 using air, which is pneumatic, to power it. Yeah, but these were still attached to a piston. And it wasn't until 1895 with Charles Brady King when he actually is given credit for inventing the traditional looking, handheld modern jackhammer. Modern pneumatic powered jackhammer. Right. And he gets a lot of credit for stuff that was already built. Like a lot of people say he was actually the inventor of the automobile. No, he wasn't. Well, he was the inventor of the gasoline powered automobile. No, he wasn't. He was the first guy in Detroit to build and drive one around. And he did end up inspiring and mentoring Ransom Olds and Henry Ford and some other early car manufacturers, and is almost single handedly responsible for making Detroit Motor City this guy. But he also Stanley. Right. And what's wrong with Ace Fraserie? I like that guy's stuff. What do you mean? Didn't he get kicked out of Kiss? Oh, I think he was sort of not invited back. Yeah. I think it's a money move. They don't have to pay the nameless other guitar player nearly as well. He was the founder of the band. Right? Yeah. How do you get kicked out like that for money? I think Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons probably own Kiss Incorporated. I know. Anyway, Charles Brady King, he put Detroit on the map as far as auto manufacturer goes, and he did do a lot of refining of pneumatic tools, including the jackhammer. And he does hold the patent, or he did hold the patent for it. Yeah. And he invented a lot of stuff. He was a sharp guy. And the fact that it's pneumatic, which means air powered, compressed air powered, is the reason why most jackhammers today are still compressed air powered. It's because of the mining application of it. Yeah. Like when you mine, you're releasing a lot of potentially explosive gasses. And you can't have something like a steam engine that's combustion power down there. Yeah. Or you can't have an engine in there releasing exhaust, and you can't have a jackhammer that will spark a rock. Well, that might happen no matter what. Right. Well, no, that's what I'm saying. You can't have that among volatile gasses. Right. So you're air driven is the perfect key because it doesn't matter if that hose is 1000ft long. You're not going to lose power because it's going to be compressed. Yeah, it's going to be compressed air up against compressed air and up on the surface, you've got a diesel engine that's powering a piston, just like in your car. And the piston moves up and down the cylinder. As it moves down, it compresses the air in the cylinder and pushes it down into a storage tank where it sits as compressed air. And that's released out the other end through the hose, and it ends up into the jackhammer. And yet, no matter how far away it is, it's still going to be just as powerful. And that compressed air is inflammable. So you can be a happy miner. All to live. Long day. Well, buddy, you're getting excited, so that means we need to take a break and put this pillow under your tongue and we'll come back right after this. How are you feeling now? Relaxed. Good. I love the title of this next section, airpowered Destruction. Yeah. You can get an electric jackhammer. If you've ever gone to a hardware store, they have these kind of smaller handheld jackhammers that you can take up. Like your bathroom floor tile pretty well with it, plug it into the wall, has a little chisel bit on the end of it, but that's small beans. You can't do a driveway. No way. Or concrete or asphalt with something like that. Or a twelve kilometer tunnel through a mountain in Sardinia. No. You need the big T shaped jackhammer. And here's one of the things that didn't really occur to me. One of the reasons it works so well is because it's so heavy. Right. It's not like they say, well, let's make this thing weigh \u00a315 or \u00a320 to make it easier to run. Which they probably could. Yeah, maybe could do that. But it would jump all over the place. Yeah. You want that thing super heavy because that's part of the power and force behind it. That's right. So these things are pneumatic. Right. And just like on the compressed air compressor up on the surface, when you're down in the mine, they actually have a jackhammer has a piston and a cylinder in it. Right. Okay. And it's actually a really kind of simple when you cut the thing open and draw a cross section of it, which we did. Yeah. On our hands for crib sheets. You can see that really, the whole mechanism comes down to a trigger valve, right? That's right. So what you have here is you got the pressure chamber. The compressed air enters that chamber, activates the trigger valve, and it just because of the compressed air, it opens and shuts really fast. Right. And so the trigger valve moves the air either above the piston or when it closes, the air goes down below the piston, which means chisel goes up. Chisel goes down. Right. Because the piston is striking the top of that chisel bit, driving it downward when the compressed air comes in and pushes the piston down. And then when the valve closes and the air goes underneath the piston, there's also a spring in there that brings the drill bit back up because it wouldn't work very well if they knock it down. They had to go down and reset it. And apparently the earliest jackhammer had that very design, that feature that was it like they'd go, bam, and then you'd have to reset it. Bam. And then reset it. And they're like, this isn't going to work. Yeah, that's sort of like the pneumatic cattle punch what's his face used and no country for Old Men. Yes, it's exactly like that. Not very good if you're trying to bust up concrete, but good if you want to put a lot on a cow. That's right. It doesn't stun them. It does the eternal stun. I think it stuns a cow and then they kill them. Oh, I thought they put it into the brain to kill the cow. No, I think it can and probably does sometimes. But I think the main purpose of it is to stun the cow so it's just days and out of it when they kill it. Hydraulic jack cameras. It's the same a jackhammer would kill a cow. Hydraulics use fluid, same principle, but it doesn't use air. If you've ever seen the, they have jackhammers you can that are really large that you can't handle as a person, but it's like attached to a backhoe or something. That's for big, big jobs. And those are usually hydraulic and not pneumatic. Right. But probably not every time. I'm sure someone in the construction industry will correct me on that. Well, I went and looked, and if you go on Alibaba, that site has everything, and they have hydraulic jack cameras for sale. What's Alibaba? Is that like Sky Mall? It's like China's, Amazon, but they sell everything on it. It's nothing like SkyWall. You think everything's like SkyWall because you want Sky Mall to come back. I sure do. But it did seem like all of the backhoe attached jackhammers were hydraulic that I saw. Okay, all right. Well, here's what happens. At 1000 to 4500 hits per minute, that chisel bit. And if you're breaking up rock, there are different kinds of bits. A pointy bit, if you're breaking up like a driveway or something is really good. Or you can use a flat bit for other applications. So, yes, if you're breaking up a driveway and all you want is for the driveway to go bye bye yeah. The pointy bits, the one you want, because it's not a controlled cut, right. Like a flat head screwdriver style bit is the kind where you can really kind of control where the cracking goes. Right. Or if you want to, like I said, if you're taking up your floor tile and you have the handheld version, that's what you want to disguise underneath the tile and chip it up. And there's actually some insane mathematicians have actually tried to figure out how you can predict how cracks propagate. Oh, really? Yeah, there's like, for the most efficient jackhammering, pretty much. Wow. Like, what bit will work best and where to place it and how to use it. But one of the things that I didn't understand before is that when you are jack hammering, you are creating different types of flaws, basically, in this solid, say, concrete structure, right? Yeah. And when you're doing that, the first flaw you're doing and the first flaw you're creating is this kind of surface powder that the initial chips you're making are actually powderizing and congealing around the drill bit. Right. And that powder actually transmits the impact of the jackhammer throughout the rest of the concrete pad in that immediate area, and that actually starts to create cracks. So you think, well, it's just a drill bit creating crack, it gets in there enough. Actually. No, it's generating these different materials from the very concrete itself, and it's using those materials to distribute the force and create cracks that ultimately start to spread and propagate. And as they spread and propagate, they get bigger and bigger, and then a chip comes off. And when the chip comes off, the amount of force that's generated in there goes down again and you have to build it back up by more jack hammering. But eventually, these larger cracks that you're making come together and the big chunks break off. And then when a big chunk breaks off, you want somebody to come in and clear the chunks away while you move the jackhammer, because you're just going to be breaking up those chunks. And that's not the point of a jackhammer anymore. Now. The point is you're trying to remove whatever material in as big a pieces as can be removed, like by a backhoe with a bucket or something. Sure. Obviously it can't be too big because you might have to break up into smaller bits. Right. But you don't want 3 million little tiny rocks at the end of it, right. You're not breaking it into gravel. No, they have machines to do that. Some of these things actually, when you create a crater that's good, but you don't want your crater full of junk. So some of them actually have air or water that blasts the stuff clear as you're going, which is pretty neat, too. Yeah, that's an issue, because the stuff that dust that accumulates, that forms what's called the crush zone, that powder that distributes the force throughout, can be a health hazard. And there's actually a lot of health hazards with jackhammers, and we'll talk about them right after this. All right, Josh. Health hazards of jack hammering dust is no joke. Well, before we go to health hazards, let me say this actually can be a health hazard. It can be dangerous when you get your bit stuck. And the general rule of thumb is you don't want to put the bit farther down. You don't want to keep going down farther than the length of the bit, because if you get your bit stuck, it's really tough to get back out. Yeah. And while it may give you a little break, your boss isn't going to be happy. Or if you're renting that thing by the hour at your house, you're not going to be happy. Yeah. Because you just used all of the force of that compressed air to jam that chisel bit several inches into concrete. You need, like, King Arthur to get that out. Yeah. So move it around inches at a time so it doesn't go straight down into one spot. And you want a sharp bit as well. Obviously, a Dell bit is going to get stuck easier and it's not going to break up the material as well. Exactly. And like you said at the beginning, a jet camera is one of the noisiest tools around it's the worst it might be the noisiest tool jackhammers create a noise at about 130 decibels from what this article says. Yeah. That is the sound of a jet engine taking off. That's how loud those things are. And driving here, no joke. I passed the dude using a jack camera and he wasn't wearing ear protection. You know, I was just about to say is, I bet you've never seen a jack camera operator not use ear protection. I have until today. That's nuts. Isn't that a weird coincidence, though? It is totally weird and just dumb. He's like, screwed. I got health insurance. Construction headphones are a must. Yes. And because we were talking about how much it wears you out, if you're on a road crew, you're probably going to be rotating out jackhammer duty. It's not like chuck you're on the jackhammer for 10 hours today for the rest of your life. Yeah. And it's a real thing. Like, people who use jackhammers as their profession, they do face a lot of problems. That dust is I already mentioned that. But no good concrete has a silica in it that's been proven to cause lung cancer. And so a lot of these jet cameras will have, like, a water sprayer at the end of them that just constantly is introducing water that keeps the dust on the ground and, like, a puddle. All right. And what's the difference or the deal with this? I know I didn't get a chance to look at it, but you sent a pretty interesting thing on the negative effects of vibration on the human body. Yeah, it's weird. What's the deal there? So vibrations are very odd. They used to belong in the realm of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. They did a lot of research and the effects of vibration on the body. Right. And it does everything from causing insomnia to digestive issues to motion sickness. And this is bad vibration. I mean, there's also like good vibration. There's also good vibration. There's vibrations that vibrate at a certain frequency, certain hurts, and I don't remember what it is, but it's like a low frequency vibration. And there's something called whole body vibration, which apparently GM is dealing with a problem right now. They have like their largest, I guess maybe their Tahoe or something, but they're large SUVs. They had to really strengthen the cage so that if it rolled over, the bottom of the truck wouldn't crush the roof. But the thing is so rigid that when it goes at like highway speeds, it vibrates at this frequency. That's perfect. And is giving the driver's motion sickness. Oh, really? So yeah, there's all this weird stuff that happens from vibrations and exposure to vibrations. Wow. And so that's whole body there's also hand arm vibration, and there's something called ray nodes phenomenon. And it's basically like your hands being exposed to vibrations for that many hours out of a day. And this can happen too if you're working with like a gas powered weed whacker all the time. But especially a jackhammer operator is going to run into this. The circulation gets basically cut off from all the exposure vibration in your fingers. And it can get so bad, especially when it's cold out there. They just turn white. It's called blanching. Wow. They lose sensation if you're lucky. If you're not lucky, there's a tremendous amount of pain in them. You can't grip things. And if you're a jackhammer operator, that's a big problem because you need to be able to grip the jackhammer. Yeah. And I mean, weird psychological issues brought on from fatigue, that constant noise, headaches, and the insomnia that can all lead to you kind of losing it a little bit. Yeah, I never really thought about that. All of it put together is called vibration sickness, and we're only now just starting to really understand it. Shrapnel is also a danger, of course. And if you're on a construction site, you know all this stuff. But since you can go out and rent a full fledged jackhammer because you want to take out your driveway this weekend right. I think a lot of people go into it lightly. Like, I've seen those things on the road. I can do that. Sure. Be careful. Like don't do it in flip flops or tennis shoes. Oh man. Get your big heavy hob nail boot. The great Larry Muntson said, put those on, get your ear protection, wear eye protection, wear long pants, and don't be a dummy. Right. It all seems like basic safety issues, but I bet you there's been a dude with short pants and a flip flop that tried to jackhammer something jackhammered right through his foot. It will happen. Oh, the also important thing, too, if you're doing this at home and you don't like your sidewalk that leads to your house, get the electrical and gas companies out there. And I don't even think they charge for it, or they might, but they'll come out there with a little spray can and they will show you and draw paint on the ground where your gas lines and your power lines are. Yeah. Because you do not want to jackhammer into either of those. No, not fun. Be careful. Don't be a dummy. That's our PSA. Yeah. Jackhammer is the most interesting tool on the planet. Well, I actually got one more thing, believe it or not. What? In 2000, because these things are so loud, the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory released a helium jackhammer called the Raptor. And some of these things come with rubber boots to try and soften the noise, but I don't think they do a great job. This thing actually lessened the noise to 87 decibels. It's like nothing. Nothing. It's like how loud I'm talking right now. But apparently it never caught on. Then in 2011, another equipment maker had an electric model that said it's faster than Pneumatic and there's only 100 decibels, and they have sold a few. But apparently breaking into the construction industry with a new type of tool is super hard to do. I think in New York especially, they were very resistant. The unions were like, they won't work. We're not using those. That seems like where they should do it, because I looked it up. Apparently, 62% of noise complaints from 2014 to 2015 in New York City were jackhammers. Yeah, that's almost 34,000 complaints in the year jackhammer. And supposedly you're not supposed to do it after six or before 07:00 a.m., but they allow it in certain cases. And I feel like that is like all the cases is chuck in a hotel right nearby. Well, then do it. Start at five. That's all I got. If you want to know more about jackhammers, you can type that one word into the search bar@householdworks.com. And since I said Jack Cameron, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this cool program for kids in Austin, Texas. Oh, yeah. I hope you guys are doing well. I've been listening to the show for some time. I'd like to thank you for giving me the edge on many debates and discussions. I live in Austin, Texas, and I'm writing today to let you know about a program I recently started working for that I think you'll appreciate. It's called Totally cool. Totally Art TCTA. It is a free after school program designed to reach out to youth youth and give them some exposure to the arts. The class I teach is called The Art of Machines, and we build various contraptions. We have sent you an example project which we call Bugs that the students build on our class. Did we get this? We haven't got it yet. I don't think. I don't think I've seen this. Brian. So he sent it a while ago. Oh, he did? If you did, I don't know if we got it. No, we haven't gotten it yet. All right, so if it's recent Brian, then it's on the way. If not, then send it again. That was one of a kind. See what you think about it. The prototype? I hope not. He said my dogs go crazy for these things. This is the actual 20th anniversary of the program. We're trying to let people know about it so it can be around for another 20 years. We also have other classes painting, film, fiber, arts and photography. Anyway, I was just hoping maybe you'd give a quick shout out for Totally Cool, Totally Art in Austin. It's so totally cool. And you can just look that up on Google or go to https austin texas Govtcta. That's nice. That's a secure site. Yeah, that's from Brian Frytag. And good work, buddy. And we're going to be in Austin for south by Southwest this year. Yeah. Do you know if we're going to be selling tickets or if there's like a registry or what? I don't know. We'll find out and let everyone know. But I believe it's going to our Deal live podcast going down Sunday night, but we're going to be around town. Cool. Look out for us Sunday night. Okay. Indeed. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com STUFFYou know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast athousedthefirst.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." | ||
6505158c-3381-11e8-b1f2-4f17ae8343a3 | Why Landmines Are The Deadliest Legacy Of War | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-landmines-are-the-deadliest-legacy-of-war | One of the worst legacies of war are the millions of landmines left behind. They hide for decades after a conflict is over, exploding beneath unsuspecting civilians and children. To many, removing mines and banning new ones is of paramount importance. | One of the worst legacies of war are the millions of landmines left behind. They hide for decades after a conflict is over, exploding beneath unsuspecting civilians and children. To many, removing mines and banning new ones is of paramount importance. | Tue, 10 Apr 2018 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=100, tm_isdst=0) | 49420008 | 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstoughforkworkscom hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry Rowland. Back together again at last. Just like last week, I was about to say, what are you talking about? You know what I'm talking about, Willis. What you're talking about? Oh, that's a pretty good one. Subtle understated. So, Chuck, how are you feeling today? I'm kind of tired of this weather. Yeah, it's pretty nasty, huh? Yeah. It's almost April in Atlanta, and it's still cold at night and during the day for that day, usually the way that Atlanta is. For those who don't know, it'll be cold, cold, cold, like really cold. Down in the freezing. Sometimes it'll snow and then it'll start to warm up. And then at the end of February, boom, one more snow out of nowhere. And then spring. That's not how it's going this time. No? No. It's been, like real gloomy and dismal, huh? Yeah, I got the SADS. It's okay. It'll clear up soon enough. Easter is on its way. Peter Rabbit's going to bring us some sunshine in springtime. Good. And poison eggs. Poison eggs. You're thinking of Halloween candy. All right. So today, Chuck, we're not talking about Halloween or Easter or even the weather. We're talking about something that has become kind of an international global issue, rightfully so, in the best way possible. Because in this case, the international community, the global community has kind of come together to try to alleviate a really overlooked problem, literally and figuratively. Overlooked problem? Landmines. Yeah, it has been. This isn't like a brand new effort. No, but it's a little daunting, to say the least. And depressing it is something like I saw there's all these really, like you said, depressing statistics all over the place when you look into landmines, fortunately, although they are daunting, they're not so daunting that people are just like, forget it, we're not even going to do this. But I saw something like it would take 10 00, 10 00 years at the current pace of progress, to remove all the landmines on Earth right now that are buried on Earth, if not another single one is laid. Yeah, well, part of the problem, though, was the number. They're laying landmines 25 times faster. Yes. Then we're gathering up old landmines. Yes. Yeah, that's the issue. Between two and a half million and 5 million landmines are laid every year, new ones. And more than 100 million in over 70 countries around the world. Yeah, that's a lot in places where there's no war or conflict going on any longer. That's the big problem with landmines. Well, there's a couple of problems. One, they're indiscriminate. They don't recognize whether you're a civilian or a soldier. They stick around long after the conflict is over, and they still manage to kill and maim thousands of people every year around the world. And apparently it's on an upswing thanks to the conflicts in Yemen and Syria and some of the work of ISIS as well. Just so depressing. It really is. There's nothing really more that kind of embodies, just a mute killing, maiming aspect of war than a landmine. It's just a dumb lump of explosive that you step on and it blows you up. You know what I mean? Yeah. And especially the years later effect, which is maybe there hasn't been war for two decades and a little kid can still come along and say, oh, what's this thing? And then they don't have legs. Yeah. And the kids thing is real. So apparently landmines disproportionately kill civilians way more than soldiers because of their ability to be left over after a war. And the most recent statistics from 2016, the majority of the civilians killed were children. Yeah, I was actually talking to Yuumi about it. She grew up on Okinawa, and there's a lot of World War II unexploded ordinance around there. And she was telling me that they used to watch, like, educational films, saying, like, if you see something metal in the woods, stay away. Go tell an adult. Yeah. The movies they were taught, I'm sure. Yeah. When you're raised in an area where and we're talking about landmines specifically, but in a lot of cases, they're just unexploded bombs and things like that, too. Yeah, I know. Like, they find something like 100 tons of it in Belgium alone every year, most of it from World War I. Still. Wow. But we are talking specifically about landmines, which seem to kind of bear the focus of the international efforts to get rid of them because they are probably the biggest problem of unexploded ordinance today. Yeah. Well, should we go back in time here and talk about the history? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. This one was interesting because I don't think a lot of people, when they hear about landmines, know that they started during the American Civil War. No, I thought World War II at the earliest. Yeah. So in the American Civil War, they were called torpedoes or subterrashells. There was a man, a North Carolinian named Gabriel Reigns, who initially fought for the Union, but then said, Wait a minute, I'm from North Carolina. I'm not actually sure how that switch happened. He's like, North Carolina is with the south, but he was the first person to sort of play around with these and eventually get a patent called the Reigns Patent on what essentially was a very sort of early, crude, but effective landmine. Yeah. And so this is at a time when pitched battles are still the norm sure. Where your infantry meets my infantry in a field, and, like, you do a bunch of shooting, and then we do a bunch of shooting, and then there's advancement and retreats and cannons and stuff like that. Is it our turn to shoot or their turn? I forgot. I mean, pretty much right there's people like picnicking watching the battle. That's how staged they were. And the confederacy didn't necessarily play by those rules. They did in many battles, for sure, but they also definitely had a guerrilla facet to them as well. And this definitely screams guerrilla warfare, because the Union army was taken totally off guard by the early landmines that they encountered. Yeah. And it was not something that was readily accepted into warfare. While everyone was scared, first of all, once they got wind of what these things were, they're all of a sudden like, what, we're literally just walking through the woods, and now we can just die? Right, with no enemy nearby? And apparently, Gabriel Reigns himself was one of the first to lay a bunch of these from the road to Richmond after the defeat of a battle. And that's when the Union army first encountered these things. Well, yeah. So not only were they scared, but then the hierarchy, the generals were pretty ticked off. They were like this is one of the quotes is the rebels have been guilty of the most murderous and barbarous conduct, so they were not welcomed into warfare. They thought it was sort of a cheap trick and a dirty, rotten thing to do. Yeah. And like you said, it scared the troops. It upset the generals. And these were not just like landmines like we think of them now. They were, like, booby trapped. Like, they put them in flower sacks. So when you reached into a flower sack boom that blew up, they put them around. Like, if the confederates abandoned, like, an outpost, they would put them around the well, around the water, like places they knew the Union troops were going to go. And you could either set them off by stepping on them like a modern landmine, or they would attach things like tools to them with, like, a string. So you would bend down and pick up the tool and set off this landmine that was buried nearby. And at first, the Confederates, too, some of the Confederate hire ups were like, I don't know if this is okay. Even in a civil war. And the Confederacy, we're in some ways a guerrilla army. I'm not sure we should be using these. And then finally, after a while, they're like, okay, we kind of need every tool we can get into toolbox. And they acquiesced and started using them. And they spread them all over the south, apparently. Yeah. And they don't have any figures on the soldiers that were killed, but they do know that total between the Union and the Confederate is 35. Well, actually, that's not true. 35 Union ships went down one Confederate ship went down, which I'm taking was an accident. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah. But remarkably, it says here in this article, you said, that they found them, they were still finding them in the 1960s in Alabama. Yeah. Which makes you wonder how many are there still out there, like around Atlanta? I don't know. Surely none. Right. Well, you would hope also that after this time, the explosives would have decayed enough after being exposed to the weather for this long. One of the articles that we used said that landmines, modern landmines, have a useful life of over 50 years. Surely by now, whatever they had attached to the Confederate landmines are no longer useful, even if you did find them in the woods. I would think so. Which is not to say you should do, like, a belly flop on it to test it out. If you find something that even vaguely resembles a landmine in the woods of the southeastern United States, run and tell somebody. Yeah. That is the worst way to test out whether or not a landmine is still capable of working. Agreed. Is the belly flop method? Yes. So the Civil War is where they got their start, and they came into use pretty quickly after they were invented. But it was World War I and then really World War II where they really came into focus. And our article from How Stuff Works says that the landmines for World War One and Two were invented to prevent people from picking up the landmines that were originally invented to blow up tanks. Yeah. They realized that there were a few uses. They could either lay a minefield to keep a group of troops or tanks from going to a certain place. Sometimes it was to reroute a group of people in tanks to a different area because they're like, oh, well, we know that's minefield, so we got to go this way, which might play right into the plans of the opposition, and then sometimes it's just to slow everybody down until they can get reinforcements. Right. So, I mean, there is a use for this besides just blowing somebody up. There's a larger strategic use for me I hadn't really thought about. I always thought it was just a nasty way of blowing somebody up by chance. But it really does send a message, too, which is don't keep going straight. You're going to have to go one way or another, because obviously this place is mine. And really, there's only one way to find out whether a place is mine, too, especially during warfare. It's not like the enemy post sign that says, we've mined this field suckers. Like you find out because one of them goes off either on a tank or one of your soldiers. Well, yeah, and if one of them goes off, I don't think they were using, like, random rogue landmines. It was more likely a minefield. Right. So World War II is where they really kind of came into play. One of the things I saw is that one of so I guess by the numbers, the most mind place in the world as far as countries go, is Egypt. Really? I was like, what? I mean by a long shot, egypt has something like, I think 230,000,000 no, sorry, 23 million minds unexploded around Egypt. Egypt's not that big, right? Holy cow. I think they have like 60, something like that. So they've got 23 million mile. And I was like, Why Egypt? And it was the Nazis. During the North African theater fighting in World War II, the Nazis mined all over around there, but apparently Egypt got the brunt of it. And there's still 23 million unexploded mines they estimate in Egypt from World War II. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, we'll take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about the two main types of landmines that we're going to cover today. 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. 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IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation. All right, so for the purposes of this and there are more than 350 types of mine, so that would be exhaustive to go through all those. But the way our article breaks it down, which makes sense to me, the two main groups, which are anti personnel mines and anti tank mines, they both do about the same thing, which is explode after pressure is put on them. But in the cases of a tank, of course, they're going to be bigger with more boom and require more weight in order to make it go boom. Right? More pressure. Yeah. Anti personnel mines, those are much lighter, much smaller, much cheaper. And I think found in much greater abundance around the world, for sure. There's one that this article covers called the M 14 blast mine. And we should say there's actually a few different types of mines, especially as far as anti personnel mines go, right? Yeah. So there's the standard blast mind, which is you step on it, it goes boom, and bad things happen to you as a result. There's the bounding mind or bouncing mind. Basically, it means the same thing where you step on the mind, a fuses lit that ignites a propeller charge, which shoots the mind upward from under the ground, just barely covered over by the ground up to about Chester head height, which then the mine explodes. So it's designed to do even worse damage. Yeah. Those are called Bouncing Betty or German S mines, either for spring or shrapnel. And I think I've seen those in movies before. That stuff is just nuts, man. You step on something and all of a sudden it bounces up in the air to about your chest and makes a horrible whizzing sound, too, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I mean, talk about just sheer intimidation factor, too. Sure. And so the bouncing mind or the bounding mind is meant clearly to kill. The blast mine is meant to maim. It may not kill you, although you could die of your injuries later on from an infection or something like that, or you could bleed out if it got enough of your formal artery, you would be in big trouble there. But it's designed mainly just to maim you, take you out of commission, whereas a bounding mine is meant to blow you up and kill you. Then there's a fragmentation mine. That's the third type of anti personnel mine. For those of you out here. You can't see me in Chuck, but our fingers are kind of like digging into the tabletop right now. It's all unnerving. This is just so grim and gruesome. We're not even talking about shooting somebody. It's talking about these things designed to blow somebody up or blow their leg off. Yeah. And I think what's most disconcerting about a minefield of blast mines is the purpose to lay minefield of blast mines is to almost certainly reroute somebody or to keep somebody from going somewhere. So it's not like they're saying, we're going to put down 300 miles here because we want to blow off 300ft of soldiers. They just have to scatter them. So a couple of people get their feet blown off and they go, holy cow, we're in a minefield, we got to go a different direction. Right. But the residual effect is there's still 298 of those things out there. It's like a numbers game. So it's like the lowest common denominator of strategy, almost. Yeah, but it's effective, which is why they keep using them. And I think also, if the army that was retreating laying those mines in their wake, if they got 300ft blown off, they'd be fine with that. Even though, like you say, that's not the ultimate aim of it. It's to redirect people or to stall them until reinforcements can come for you. Oh, yeah. And you don't keep going, like after it happens a couple of times or maybe even once, you don't think, well, let's just press on and see what happens. Right. Maybe that was a fluke. Maybe that was a geothermal spring. Right. And you talked about someone's foot being blown off, supposedly the nickname for the M 14 blast mine, which we'll talk about in a second. Those are called toe poppers, which kind of undersells it to me, I think. Yeah. So the last type of anti personnel mine is a fragmentation mine, and that's meant to get a bunch of guys all at once, all around you. And it may not take off their leg, it may not kill anybody, but it's certainly going to slow down several soldiers at once because these blow up and they shoot fragments everywhere. Yeah, like a pretty long way. Right. So the claymore mine is an example of a fragmentation grenade or a fragmentation mine. And then so, too are cluster mines, which kind of fall into a different category because they're dropped out of bombs, typically dropped from aircraft. They fall out of cylinders, hundreds of them, and then when they hit the ground, they blow up and shoot hundreds of fragments. So each of those hundreds of small mines shoots out hundreds of fragments. The reason they become de facto landmines is because not all of them blow up, and so they can be found later and then blow up when they're being handled by a kid or a curious civilian or something. Claymore with claymore. Remember that from The Simpsons. No, I think it was a long time ago, but I think that was like a poster in the shop of, like, an Army Navy store or something like that. The guy missing an arm. Oh, maybe so. Yeah, I remember. That was, like one of the first season ones. I'll bet it was old, for sure. I forgot about him. Oh, and by the way, our buddy Kevin Pollock just guessed it on The Simpsons. After that many years, I would have thought he would have been on by now, but he did it, like two or three voices this past week. I did not know that. I got to see that one. Yeah, that's good. How did he do? Did he crack under pressure? Yeah, he did a great job. I'm sure he did. All right, so the M 14 is these are small, like it fits in the palm of your hand. It's about an inch and a half, 1.6 inches tall and about 2.2 inches in diameter. And we developed this here in the US. In the 1950s, and it has been sort of a go to around the world since then. This one is not a very big boom. But it does cause damage with these little silver BB's that it shoots out. That's the toe popper one. Yeah, it does have BB's that it shoots out. I thought it was just a straight up blast mine. I thought this one had BB's. Maybe not. I don't know that. I don't know. Possibly it could be modified. But it is small and it looks like a mean little hockey puck, basically. Yeah, the meanest. And one of the things that you're going to find in minds throughout the world is something that's called a Belleville spring and it's basically like a washer that you put on a bolt. You know what else you're going to put a washer on? Your weirdo. So it's a washer, but it's kind of popped upward on one side. So the Belleville spring holds up the firing pin, but when you put enough pressure on it and you overcome the pressure, the upward pressure being exerted by the belleville spring, it kind of pops downward. And when it does that, it taps that firing pin, which shoots down into the detonator. It's really cheap, really easy to use and really effective. And it's found through in mind of all different types and varieties. It's usually the thing holding everything in place and then that's what pressure overcomes, is a Belleville spring. And they're found in the M 14 mines as well. Yeah, it's sort of like the hand grenade. It's not a very sophisticated piece of gear. It's very kind of rudimentary. And on all of them there's some sort of safety clip, just like a grenade. You remove the clip and usually there's some sort of switch that either says it doesn't say this, but basically it says either boom or no boom. And you switch it to boom and set it down and walk away. Yeah. Backwards, I assume. Yes. Slowly and yeah, you cover it up, maybe with some leaves, a little bit of dirt, just enough so that it can't be seen, but not enough that you would dampen the blast at all or make it so that any of the pressure is dampened and all it takes is like \u00a320 or 9 pressure from, say, somebody stepping on it. And that sets off the I think it's got something like how many grams of Tetrala? 31 grams in the M 14. So, again, that's not very much, but it's enough that you will, say, lose your foot, or if you're stepping directly on it, you may lose part of your leg. And not necessarily right then, but you may have to have it amputated later on, which makes it even nastier. I understand the point of this. It's like there's one soldier who's not fighting anymore. He's over there sapping the health care resources of the Medical Corps. That's a lifelong entry. That's a nasty thing to put down as a three dollar weapon that's just left behind under the dirt by the hundreds, by the thousands, by the millions, apparently, every year. Yes. I imagine that setting this is a little unnerving, too. I know that technically, even for these small ones, it takes however many pounds of pressure, but it's still probably a little bit unnerving when you flip that thing to on and keep a little dirt on top of it. Yeah. I mean, you don't want to throw a dirt chunk on it or anything like that. Or what about being the guy who drives the truck that has crates full of those things in the back? Yeah. You're just hoping that all of them have the safety in. Yeah. So that's the M 14. That's the one that's probably the most common throughout the world, mostly because it's the cheapest. Like I said, it costs about $3 to make one of those things. Although supposedly it costs about $1,000 to remove one man not well, that's part of the problem, too. Yeah, for sure. So the M 16 is another kind. This is one of the bounding fragmentation lines that we're talking about that pop up from the ground, and that has three main components the mine fuse, propelling charge to lift it out, like you said, and then this cast iron housing. And it is bigger. It's about almost eight inches tall and about five inches in diameter. And it has about a little over one pounds of TNT inside. So that's quite a bit of boom going on. Yes. And again, when you either step on the thing and you overcome the upward pressure from the Belville spring, or I think these things can also be booby trap. So, like, a wire can be attached to the firing pin. Either way, the firing pin shoots down, ignites that percussion cap, which sends the thing upward, and then a second detonator that's been on a delay fuse explodes once it reaches about 3ft or a meter into the air. Yeah. I think one of the scariest parts of this one, too, is at least in the movies, there's like that split second where you're a soldier and you see that thing pop up in the air and you know what's coming, right? Yeah. With a regular old blast mine. It's like step, boom. You probably don't have much of a chance to register that you just stepped on something, whereas that fragmentation might. And again, the sound that it makes is just horrifically unnerving. Yeah. I should say, at least from the movies. Yeah, movies are always right. Yeah. Speaking of movies, though. Like in The Hurt Locker. I know, Anne. I've seen in other movies, I think, generally step on it, and once that pressure is released is when the boom happens. So I remember episodes of maybe Mash and other, like, war movies I've seen, there have been, like, soldiers would step on one and hear the click and then be like, well, I got to stand on this thing now until we figure it out. Right. I was under that impression, too, but nowhere in my research did I find that to be the case. Oh, really? Yeah. For me, everything I saw was once you step on it and that pressure overcomes the Belleville spring, the firing pin is shot downward into the detonation cap. And then once that happens, or the detonator, I should say, once that happens, the whole thing explodes there's not like once you lift up, then the pressure or the firing pin is dropped. My guess is that they did not completely create that out of Hulkloth, and out of the 350 types of landmines that some of them probably do that. Yeah, you're probably right. I'm just saying I didn't run across any that had that, and I noticed that as well. So next up we have the tank mines that we were talking about with the arrival of tanks, basically, is when we started getting these anti tank mines and they're much, much larger and they require at least like 300 plus pounds of pressure. So unless you're a big boy soldier, then you're not going to detonate them by stepping on them. It's still probably again, I don't think you would give that a try and say, only way, 275, let me see what happens. Yeah, but those are built to disable a tank. Sometimes they can have so much boom that it can kill people around it, but generally it's to blow the tracks off of the tank. Right. Yeah. So once the tank is disabled, that's a big win. Yeah, that's a big win. So again, they started making those. From what I can understand, as far as World War One goes, they made those first and then they made the anti personnel ones to keep people from just going up and picking up the mines and removing them. Yeah. So they'll surround an antitank mine with several anti personnel mines. Right. And you said it has a big boom to it. This thing has almost \u00a323 over 10 composition B, which is TNT and RDX. Yeah. That's a lot of boom. It is a lot of boom. And if you have ever seen anybody removing antitank mine, you get the impression that, yes, it would tear a tank up pretty well. Yeah. And you want to take another break and then come back and talk about removing some of these things. Yeah, we'll see. 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. 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 up their own sleep. IBM, let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comit automation. Okay, Chuck, so we talked about what's out there and how many are out there. There are people who are dedicated to removing these things. Yes, as a matter of fact, a group formed an international landmine treaty ban treaty to basically outlaw those things. And there's 164 countries that have signed it. Most of those, I think 163 have ratified it. And it basically says that we are not going to produce, stockpile, or transfer any mines any longer, land mines of any kind any longer. And we're also going to work toward removing old mines and getting rid of them and then financially and medically assisting the survivors or victims of landmines, casualties of landmines, specifically, I think civilians who have undergone who've been blown up by a landmine, and I think they formed in like 1995 and within two years they won the Nobel Prize. Yeah, this is an interesting one because the US. And Cuba are one of the only two Western countries that have not signed onto this. However, the US. Is also probably the leading country in the world at pouring money into landmine eradication and support. And for their money, they say, listen, this is what they say, at least they say the only reason that we're not signing onto this is because of the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea. We need that line of defense so North Korea cannot march in there and attack our ally in South Korea. I don't know whether to believe that. I know the Obama administration came close to signing on, but he never did. It's virtually guaranteed that the Trump administration won't sign on. There's like a 0% chance of that happening. But the more and more nuclear capable North Korea gets, the less and less reason that you're going to have to have those landmines scattered throughout the DMZ there. Right. So I don't know whether to buy that or not, but they say that that's the reason. And to their credit, they do spend more money and time and efforts trying to clear the world of landmines in any other country. I think. Yeah, they're definitely a leader in reality, but they're still criticized, the US. Is still criticized for not having signed on to this treaty. Sure. Because there's a lot of other states that may actually follow suit if the United States did. Yeah. They're in the company of Iran, Israel, Azerbaijan, a lot of Russia, a lot of former Soviet satellite states, china, some pretty big players as far as global militaries go. Right. Or militaries around the world go. Yeah. So if the United States did that, it would exert some pressure on some of the other ones. But like you said, the Trump administration is not huge on international treaties. And I think it was the New York Times editorial board that said there's a 0% chance of assigning it. Right. Yeah. But we are still one of the leaders in actually removing mines. The United States military stockpile is pretty small. I think it's around 3 million right now. And as far as I know, we're not deploying anymore. And we really haven't since, I think, 2003 in Iraq, when we invaded Iraq, that was the last time we laid landmines as far as the US. Goes. Right. Yeah. And 3 million sounds like a lot. And it is. But compared to, like, a Russia, which has between 20 and 30 million, it's not as many. So one thing that I thought that was pretty odd, too, I was like the DMZ, that's why we're not signing onto this landmine treaty. That's weird. And then I started looking up cluster bombs, and there's another treaty, kind of like a corollary treaty to the International Landmine Treaty to ban cluster bombs as well. And that has some it's much newer, but it has, I think, a pretty decent amount, like 120 countries already signed onto it, but with cluster bombs. I was looking up the Pentagon's reasoning for not signing onto this treaty. So back in, I think, 2008, the Bush administration said the US. Will sign this cluster bomb ban treaty if we have not developed cluster bombs that have a failure rate of 1% or less. Meaning only one out of every hundred of those little bomb lits that comes out of the cluster bomb cylinder doesn't explode upon contact. Right. And apparently just within the last few days, the Pentagon said, well, the deadline is 2019. We haven't developed cluster bombs that have that low of a failure rate. So we're just going to ignore that and keep using cluster bombs. And the report said it's because they want to reserve the right to use them in case of a ground war with North Korea. So I'm like, what do you guys know that we don't know? Yeah. Is it really that eminent a ground war with Korea that we need to reserve the right to use cluster bombs and landmines still? Are we that close to the nice edge? And if so, then the whole nuclear thing makes me even more nervous than it did before. Yeah, it should all make you nervous. It does. So I'll tell you one thing that makes everybody nervous, Chuck, and that's being out in a minefield, removing land mines. Yeah, this has many problems to root out. First of all, finding the mines, like you said earlier, they're not marked. They don't say, here's a minefield and here's where they're all located. So finding these things, millions of them, around the world is really tough. And even when you find the minefield, it's tough. The first thing is to find the minefield. Then it depends on how you do it. And we're going to talk about all the ways that they're trying to do this, some of which are very rudimentary, which the very first one you can do is called probing the ground. That means walking around with a stick or a bayonet and poking around lightly, very lightly. Also lightly. Yeah. I get the feeling that this is I'm sure it's still done in some parts of the world, but it's certainly not one of the more advanced operations any longer. I get the impression that that's what soldiers do when they're like, no, we can't go around. We have to keep going straight. Probably so, because they use sticks or bayonets, typically, and they're trained to kind of do it very lightly. So I think that's who does that? All right, so you've also got trained dogs. This is horrifying when you think about a dog getting blown up, but they are trained to sniff out these explosive vapors and the bomb ingredients. I also saw rats have been trained by a company called APOPO. Yeah, rats and bees. Oh, I didn't see bees. That makes sense, though. Yeah, bees are trained and that was one of the things you sent over to me. The bees were how did I miss that? I don't know, because you're all about bees. I love bees. Yes. The bees apparently said the hard part is not training them to find these things, but tracking them once you release the honeybees. Makes sense. So they're trained with sugar coated TNT, and then, of course, they can find that's how they find the TNT. But it has no sugar on it. Right. That, to me, is a big step up from poking with a stick. Yes. In between those two is using a good old fashioned metal detector. Yeah, it works. But the problem is twofold one metal detectors send a signal back for anything that has any metal to it whatsoever. So you get a hit and you are very gingerly searching the area to see if there is a mine there. No, it's an old Roman coin or it's like an old butterfly top to a Miller beer can. It's anything metal. Right. So that's one part of the problem. And then the second part of the problem is that you actually may miss metal, because some types of the 350 different varieties of mines use very little metal. Some of them are almost entirely plastic. Not only are you picking up stuff that's not a landmine and then wasting time seeing if it is a landmine, you're actually potentially missing landmines as well. Yeah. So that's a problem because that was my first thought, is like, I remember when I was a kid, my dad was all over that metal detector on the beach. Oh, yeah. So just get a lot of my dads out there or dudes like my dad, and just tell them to go wild. Yeah. They can coordinate over CB while they're driving their Jeeps out of the minefield. They totally would. Some more promising newer technology, specifically being developed at Ohio State University, and I think they're actually using this now is called GPR, or Ground Penetrating radar. This uses magic leprechauns inside a machine to exert no pressure to tell you where these things are underground. Yeah, it's actually pretty sweet. It's like a metal detector ground penetrating radar combo. So the ground penetrating radar can show you if it's an anomaly. But then the radar also interacts with explosives and the electrical properties unique to explosives. So it can actually tell you there's something weird down there. And the amazing cresk in here thinks that it's TNT. Yes. And this is crazy. Once they find these landmines with the GPR device, it shoots chemical agents, two of them, into the ground. That actually solidifies the triggering mechanism at first, along with the soil, and then a second chemical agent that solidifies all of the mine in the soil so they can just be scooped up. Right. I don't understand that. What is it? I don't know. Is it cement? I don't know if it was proprietary or what, but I couldn't find what those chemical agents were. But they sound pretty awesome and not something you want to get on your hands. No hands, flush eyes. So, like you said, that's in use. That's a huge innovation because it shows you you get, like, the hits that you get from a metal detector, but you also don't get the misses. And then it also shows you if something is roughly the size or shape of a landmine. So you don't waste time digging up old butterfly bottle caps. Right? Yeah. I like it. That's my favorite. And it came from the Ohio State University. This article gets it wrong. It calls it scientists at Ohio State University. The Shame. Yeah. My favorite are these big heavy machines. And I didn't ever think I was a kid who liked I never played with Tonka trucks and stuff much. I was obviously we talked about the evil caneval and stuff like that, model cars. But for some reason, as an adult, heavy machinery really turns my crank. So go look up on your Google Images, the Panther and the Ardvark tank or mine removal machines, and just delight in these huge things that are part Bobcatch, part Humvee, and they're just so rudimentary. Like, literally one of them, the artwork, it has like a spinning thing that sits out in front of it that just spins chains and whips the ground with big metal chains. I mean, it's so brain dead and rudimentary. They said, let's just get a big heavy thing out there that smashes the ground with chains. And the point is to just set off a landmine encounters, right. And the artwork just takes it huge anti tank mines just blowing up right underneath these chains that are whipping up the ground, the front part of the artwork. And I saw a video of a guy in one who I guess hit a mine and they show him in the cab and he barely is jostled by the explosion, this huge explosion that they show like 80 times because I think on the military channel or something like that. And it's like, why don't you just make everything out of whatever you're making the artwork out? Why isn't the tank made of that? It's the same joke. It's like, why don't you make the whole plane out of the black box? Right? Black box is the one thing that's always bad. But it's true. And I'm sure I think with MRAPs like mine, I can't remember what it stands for, but you remember the IEDs that were killing so many American soldiers at the beginning of the Iraq War, and then they figured out a way to armor plate Humvees so that they were kind of impervious to IED. I think it's basically the same technology on the artwork. Yeah. So that one, like you said, has a dude in it. Then there's the panther. And that is a 60 ton remote controlled thing. So this has somebody on the side with a joystick operating this thing through a minefield. This has big metal rollers to set off the mines. And then there are regular tanks that you can sort of retrofit with a plow that sort of plows along and gently pushes these mines out of the dirt in the path. Then someone can come along and I guess collect them in a pink basket. Yeah, there's another machine called a Berm processing assembly that just goes down through these mounds of dirt that have mines in them and shakes the mines out of the dirt and sets them off to the side so they're exposed so they can be picked up and detonated. We mentioned bees and rats and dogs. Very sadly, elephants can sniff out mines. They're pretty good at it. They don't use elephants to do this because that just doesn't make much sense. But they have killed and injured a bunch of elephants. Yeah. My favorite new machine that they're using and this makes total sense are drones. The mine kafon drone. K-A-F-O-N. This is a drone, basically, that was developed by a guy named Masud Hasani. And it's a drone that does the work of the human. It's a drone with metal detectors attached to it so it just flies really low over the ground and detects these landmines with nobody walking on the ground. Or no machine on the ground. Right. Makes total sense. It really does. It's great. And then what does it do? Is it mark it on a GPS or something like that? Yeah, it marks it on a GPS and then can even come back and place a detonator. Drop a detonator on it, basically fly away and it explodes itself. That's pretty awesome. And they're only, like, five grand compared to robots and stuff like that. Can go from 80 to half a million bucks. Yeah. The artwork looks extremely expensive, for sure. I imagine it's not cheap. So we talked about the International Ban Treaty, the campaign to ban landmines that won the Nobel Prize in 1997. Their work actually had a huge impact in I think there's a peak of casualties worldwide from landmines of 9228. By 2013, they've gotten that down to $3,450. And it really looked like the work of this group. And like, the international treaty that it created and all these countries signed was having a real, genuine impact on landmine casualties. Apparently, the tide turned in 2016 and the numbers have started to go back up. So the low is 34 50 in 2013. In 2016, it was up to 8605 kwh, which has got to be really demoralizing. Yeah. And I think you said very early on, a lot of this is because of what's going on in Yemen and Syria right now. Right, right. So sad. Also remember I said Egypt has a lot of old mines from World War II? Apparently, ISIS is taken to digging those up and replanting them. We should say landmines and IEDs are virtually one and the same. It's just landmines are mass produced, whereas IEDs are made by insurgent bomb makers. They're usually not commercially produced. Right. There's no contract that ISIS has out with somebody. Did you ever see The Hurt Locker? No, I haven't seen that one. Man, that's a good movie. Talk about tents. I can imagine. I mean, that's what they do, right? They go and remove mines. Right, or bombs. Yeah, any IEDs bombs, anything like any unexploded thing. Jeremy Renters in it, and it's just amazing. They just wear these big heavy suits, basically, like anti blast suits, and then work very carefully and slowly. Yeah. Oh, one other thing, Chuck. Yes? Princess Diana. Yeah, we have to mention her. I mean, probably her most important work she did as princess was, in the final years of her life, working to try and raise awareness to eradicate landmines around the world. Just amazing stuff. And she took a lot of heat, sometimes from within her own country. Sometimes they thought she was just not being super helpful. Some people would bag on her for just doing, like, photo ops and stuff like that. But by all accounts, she did what she could. She had a lot of things that happen off the cameras. She would go and visit these hospitals where these children were affected, and it was a humanitarian effort to really kind of shine a light and raise awareness more than like, hey, I can create policy as the princess. She knew she couldn't do that, but she did a lot of great work to raise awareness. And when she died, it was a very sad day. And they obviously for many reasons, but Nobel prize winning winner Jody Williams said the death of Princess Diana meant that the anti landmine activists lost their most visible advocate. So that was very sad. She did great work. Yeah. I mean, it takes a certain kind of person to say, well, the global spotlight is on me right now. I'm going to walk over here to this underserved population of people who are being blown up by leftover landmines that people don't really know about and now the spotlight is on them. Yeah, that says quite a bit about somebody to do that pretty amazing. So you got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about landmines, you can type those words in the search bar@howtofworks.com. And since I said landmine, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this brother and sister listening pair. I was never a good headline writer on newspaper staff, by the way. It's tough. Hey, guys. I finally feel like I have something to write about. My brother introduced me to your show over Christmas just this year and I've been slowly working my way through from DB. Cooper to Exmurders to Winchester mystery house to Jellyfish. I love them all. So first of all, thanks to my brother Michael, who lives in Savannah for the introduction. He actually plays a role in why I'm writing. I just finished listening to the vampire Panic episode and at the beginning you talked about coming upon dead bodies. Well, growing up, a dead body was discovered in the ravine behind our neighbors house. They had to pull it up the hill. So my brother and I got out our spy gear and took pictures of the policemen and paramedics pulling up the dead body and carrying it away. It's a lot of excitement and at the time we didn't really think about it, but when the photos came back developed, it really finally hit home how creepy it was that we had seen a dead body. Anyway, thanks for providing interesting and entertaining episodes. I teach kindergarten. It's funny, she talked about being drawn to the darker episodes. As a kindergarten teacher, she says sometimes you just need a break from boogers and paw patrol. And here grown ups talk about cool and interesting stuff. That is from Melissa. She's going to be at our DC show and Michael and Savannah is upset because he can't go. Yeah, well, he should fly up to DC. There are such things as airplanes. It's greater chances of that happening than us going to Savannah for a show. And there is always room for boogers. Melissa, don't be mistaken. There is room for Boogers by Josh Clark. Thanks for writing in. Hey to you both, and thanks for listening and send us those pictures. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at joshmclark and S-Y-S Kpodcast on Facebook@facebook.com Charleswchuckbryantandstaffuschannell. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, hang out with us at our homeonthewabyouro.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 Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this charttopping 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." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-03-16-sysk-hookworms-final.mp3 | Southerners Aren’t Lazy and Dumb, They Just Had Hookworm | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/southerners-aren-t-lazy-and-dumb-they-just-had-hoo | There was a time when the lower classes of the American South were considered lazy and dimwitted, a stereotype that still somewhat survives today. But this stereotype was rooted in fact. Hookworms, it turns out, were sapping Southerners’ life force. | There was a time when the lower classes of the American South were considered lazy and dimwitted, a stereotype that still somewhat survives today. But this stereotype was rooted in fact. Hookworms, it turns out, were sapping Southerners’ life force. | Thu, 16 Mar 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=75, tm_isdst=0) | 46200064 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School 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. 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 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. Hey, March is tripod month, my friend, and you know what that means. Yes. That means it's time to let people know about your favorite podcast just to share the sheer joy of podcast listening. That's right. It's tr y pod still innacent industry. A lot of people don't know what podcasts are, right? And it helps everybody out if you would go out and just say, hey, family member who I see at Thanksgiving once a year, you should try out this thing called a podcast. Here's what they are. Here's a cool show you should try, and here's how to get it. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be our show, just any podcast you like in general that you think someone else would like. Just share it. Yeah. So get on board the tripod train. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Rowland. Good stuff. You shouldn't there she goes. She just ran away after nine years. I knew that would happen eventually. Yes. She had her little bendle sack over her shoulder and she's barefoot, which is dangerous. Jerry, that was a nice little set up. You might get what do you call it? The do itch. Yeah. Or well, that's the best one. The ground. Itch do it is way better than ground. Sure. Get a little discomfort in the webbing between your toes, a little scratchy, maybe a few days later you're like, Is this athlete's foot? No, that doesn't make you cough. Yeah. Plus, you're no athlete. Don't flatter yourself. That's what they would say. And then you start coughing a little bit, and a few weeks after that, you're just a big dope that can't lift an arm to go stand up and do anything. You have hookworm. Yeah. Well, there you have it. Were you told as a child, like, you'll get worms? I know you're going to ask me that because I grew up in the south. Well, no, I mean, I was told that, too. I don't remember hearing this really stuff. I remember being scared about scoliosis and I remember being scared about nuclear annihilation, and so is I, and that's about it. That's good. Razors and apples at Halloween. Yeah. Which is, as we've covered, not true. Any incidents that happened of that happened because of the urban legend not giving rise to it. Yeah. No, I never really heard of this. And what made you think of this, by the way? I don't know. You like the parasites. I love parasites. They're interesting, especially this particular parasite, because it turns out the hook worm might be the most interesting of all of the parasitic worms here on planet Earth, if you ask me. Well, agreed, because as you will see, the social context in the southern United States of what the hookworm meant over centuries, never knew about it. And it's pretty astounding. And as someone who has long had to defend the south as not just a backward place with a bunch of dumb yokeles, from now on, I'm just going to say hookworm, look it up, listen to our episode, and people right now are going, what in the world? Well, let's get into it. Let's remove the fog of curiosity and maybe irritation a little bit and start talking about hookworms. Right. So we said it starts with your foot. Yeah. These are roundworms. Yes. They're a type of roundworm. A nematode, right? Yeah. Nematode film. They're pretty young, about 400 million years old, and they have been described in this article you sent most commonly as far as the way they look as a tube within a tube. Yeah. Like a pair of socks. And then at one end, they have cutting plates, also called fangs or teeth. Yes. Mouth parts. Yeah, mouth parts. And as Tracy Wilson would put it yes. And they use those things for sucking blood. That's what they want. It's your blood, because they get nutrients from your blood. And that makes them parasites. Yeah. We sourced a few really great articles on this, but as one of them points out, too, that a good parasite or a good hook worm doesn't want to kill you, because, as it says in this article, that means the ride is over. You're right, exactly. They want to keep you alive and lazy so they can just keep reproducing and keep sucking on your blood forever and ever and ever. Right. In a very large part, hookworms have co evolved with humans, and they've done so in a way that they get the maximum benefit out of infecting a human without the pitfall of killing the human and ending the ride for themselves. Right. Yes. And they've had 400 million years to do it. And there's two kinds of hookworms, mainly, there's tons of hookworms, from what I understand, just about every animal or every mammal has its own type of hookworm. Right. But they don't infect cross animal, typically. And there's two types of hookworms that infect humans specifically. There's the new world hookworm. Nicater Americanis. Very open minded. And then there's the Old World hookworm anselostoma dua denale. A little less open minded. Right. Both of them thrive in warmer tropicalish climates. And the an Americana in particular, loves sandy, Loami soil. And it just so happens that in the American South, it has just the kind of climate to host an Americans. And it's around. Yeah. So here's what happens. We were kind of kidding around about Jerry walking around barefoot. But Jerry's old, like me, and she grew up in the south. We all come from sharecroppers. Sure. And had outhouses. So here's what would happen. All the way up until, like, 1985, which is kind of distressing. Yes, I thought so too. You could walk around barefoot, as Southern children were wanting to do. Yeah. Apparently the chances of being a kid with shoes, especially in the rural south, is like, next to nothing up until maybe the. Really? Yeah. So like we talked about the do it. You would walk around barefoot. These little guys would get between your toes, root into your body, through the feet, make their way to the blood vessels and start the voyage to the lungs. It's a fantastic voyage. Well, for them it is. It's like inner space. Yeah. Up through the lungs, finally through the circulatory system to the lungs where eventually, like you said, then you cough it up with a dry cough and then you swallow it into your gut and the intestine. And that's when it's like, this is where I wanted to be all along. In the the nuts. They go up through the foot circulatory system to the lungs, make you cough, then you swallow them. And then they finally get to the place where they're supposed to be, the small intestine, and they latch on and they start sucking blood. Yeah. And hookworms are interesting. Tapeworms are hermaphroditic, but hookworms like a lot of roundworms. They need to do it. Yeah. I was about to say they'd like to who knows, maybe a little bit of both, depending on the mood. They have to in order to reproduce. So what you do is they get into that intestine, they find a lover. They take a lover excuse me, Robert Lamb in here. They take a lover and then they attach themselves to the intestinal wall and say, I'm here forever. I've seen up to 30,000 eggs a day. Right. The female will lay 30,000 fertilized eggs a day. Right. And that's on the highest end. But let's say the low end is 10,000. Right. Let's say the low end is 1000. It's still a lot of eggs. Yeah. And that's just one female worm. Right. You can have dozens, hundreds of these things. They found that a human can host up to about 500 worms and survive you're not living a very fulfilling life, as we'll see. But you could have a number of these worms all pumping out eggs. And a worm typically lives between one and five years in the comforts of your gut. And then you can also be reinfected. And here's how. Right. So when the females are spreading out 10 to 300 eggs, take your pick on a daily basis, you're pooping those eggs out. And if you're pooping by the bushes or in some sort of, like, outhouse yeah, it's 1875 in West Virginia. You don't have indoor plumbing. Right. And let's say your outhouse isn't all that great, or you're just, again, pooping in the bushes. You are probably not wearing shoes. Those two things usually go hand in hand. And so you're stepping in your old fecal material that still had eggs in it before. Those eggs have since hatched into larva going through the first two larval stages, entered the third infective larval stage, and now it's crawling up into your foot again. And your what's called worm burden is expanded even further from one or two to ten to 20 to up to hundreds. Yeah. And that's if you just accidentally step in old poo. Whether it's like, spread around by animals walking around or by the rain, the chances are exponentially more. If you have a good old fashioned poop slinging fight, sure. You don't want to get hit in the mouth. The other problem that was part of the problem was that was the second version of that even, was that people were using poop as fertilizer. Yeah. Now, it's one thing again, you can't really catch. I'm sure you can catch some words. I know trichnosis is a problem for humans, and that's a pork worm. Correct. But using, say, horse manure is relatively safe compared to using human manure as fertilizer in your field. That's a relatively recent discovery. People were using human manure as fertilizer for very a long time. And it was called night soil because at night, the guys would come out and clean your privy out and walk the muck, your poop, your fecal material down the street and collect more and collect more. And then they would turn it into fertilizer. They would say, release the night soil right before they dumped it. Exactly. And it would be fertilizer, and they'd be great to make your crops grow. But it also just contaminate your entire field with hookworms. And then little kids would go out and work the field shoeless and they would become infected from that, too. So there are all these really great opportunities for people to become infected by hookworms. By great, you mean awful, right? Yeah. But the hookworm habitat followed a certain line from about West Virginia down to, I think, East Texas. And beneath that line that was the hookworm belt. Yeah, they called it that. And above it, they used human manure for fertilizer, too, but they didn't have hookworm. It was in the south that the hookworm was a problem. And it was a big problem, it turned out. Yeah, it just occurred to me, we walked right past maybe the best banding of all time in here. What, worm Burden? Oh, yeah, worm Burden is pretty good. All right, well, that's the set up before we hit you with the social context. So let's take a little break here and we'll talk a little bit more about my old Ken folk right after this. 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 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. 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. Yes. 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. 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 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. All right, so before we broke, we talked about what the hookworm is and all the different myriad ways which it could spread, from accidentally walking in poop to poop slang in fights. Night soil released the night soil, rolling in it to ultimately erotically increase your worm burden. So you found this great article called how a worm gave the south a bad name by a woman named Rachel Newer. It's a nova. Yeah, it was really good. And she is from the south and kind of wrote it from that point of view. And I get the feeling like, me, she kind of has long had to defend the American South as, hey, we're not a bunch of dumb, lazy yokeles, because that was for a long time and still continuing today to a certain degree astoundingly, yeah. That notion kind of exists that if you're from the south, you're kind of slow, you may be a little dimwitted, you may be lazy. Sure. And this was for white folks, black folks, Native Americans. Just something about the south made you lazy and dumb, especially among the lower socioeconomic classes. And this wasn't just like off the cuff stereotyping. It was rooted in fact, in reality. There was something different about people of the lower socioeconomic classes in the South Pacific. If you put them side by side among the same socioeconomic classes of the north, the ones in the north would be like, let's shovel some coal, baby. And the ones in the south would be like, I'm just going to lay here down next to my wheelbarrow because I can't get up. And so Southerners came to be seen as lazy, shiftless, couldn't be trusted to do an honest day's work, and they just thought it was part of the Southern character. Yeah. And this wasn't just a perception. Like they literally lagged behind the north in terms of productivity, economic development, and we'll talk about some of these statistics as we go. Well, plus, the Civil War didn't help anything either. Well, no, that was obviously a big setback right. In the south, and it would have been for any region. Right. That level of devastation and death. But coupled with the already predisposition to what came to be called the lazy germ, it just set it back even further. Yeah. And at one point in the American South, up to 40%, amazingly, 40% of the population, like you said, from southeastern Texas to West Virginia and all the way down was infected with hookworm. Yeah, that's a lot of people. I mean, obviously not a majority. Almost a majority. You got the hookworm, but 40%, I mean, that's a lot of folks. It is a lot of folks. And that was the culprit behind this lazy shiftlessness among the poverty stricken Southern poor and the rural Southern poor was apparently the majority of the south from the end of the Civil War up until the, I believe, the mid 20th century. If you were a Southerner, it was likely that you were poor and did not live in the city. What do you feel about the there's a pretty clear demarcation line if you did if you were wealthy in the south or you lived in the city in the south in the 19th and early 20th century, you wore shoes you had bed pans and you could probably avoid this, but if you didn't like, those are the 40%. It says in this article that it was almost impossible to avoid if you were poor and lived in the south. Right. Because you also didn't have very good sanitation. No, it was just perfectly set up for you to keep getting reinfected. Every couple of years you'd shed a dead hookworm, but in that time you probably would have taken on several more. Alright, so what does this mean? If you get hookworm like we said, it's likely not going to directly kill you. You might die from a common cold, you might die from malaria or typhoid fever or something else may ultimately take you out because your body is so weakened. But what it does in large part is it causes an iron deficiency. If you're a pregnant woman or a kid, iron deficiency is really bad. If you're a child, you need that iron for your brain development. So not only would you get like physical symptoms like stomach bloat, what was the eye thing like this? The dull fishy stare. Fishy eyed stare? Yeah, just sort of like they're basically described these kids as sort of vacant. Right. Just staring off into space. Some of those are physical symptoms, but others were literally like a lower IQ. Right. And so they believe that an Americanis came over as a result of the Atlantic slave trade, that it was imported from Africa. So for centuries, generations of kids were being born in the south who had they were physically and developmentally stunted by hookworm infections. Yeah. Sometimes girls wouldn't begin menstruation. Boys a lot of times would not even hit their growth spurt. So not only where they had lower IQs and learning development disabilities, but they were smaller and weaker. Yeah. And then you combine this loss of blood so apparently about 100 worms in a normal adult will drink about a teaspoon a day, which doesn't sound like that much, but if you couple it that level of iron deficiency with preexisting malnourishment due to poverty or the lack of availability of good food, then it really becomes a huge problem. It goes from like, this is a problem, to this is a catastrophic problem that can keep an entire region of a country down productively. Yeah. And like a lot of disease we've talked about, whether it's like famine or lack of clean water, it's cyclical in nature. So it would occur where there was poverty and then it would keep people from working to work their way out of poverty and it just kind of compounded on each other. Right. And then think about slavery as well. Right. So not only have you been brought over to the US as a slave, you're being forced to work against your will in these horrific conditions, you're also being forced to work and live in the same conditions that promotes hookworm. So you're feeling lazy and shiftless TS for you. You're a slave. Add that to your toil and misery. Right. It just keeps getting worse. All right, so I think we've made it clear. Big problem in the south. But again, no one had any idea why. Yeah, it was just the lazy south. And people have said that it literally set the south back, like, decades and decades from the rest of the country. Right. No one knows what's going on until 19 two, this dude came along, and it would be kind of a weird movie to market, but this would be a good movie, I think. Oh, I think so, too. The story of Charles and Hookworm, the big roller coaster. Right? All right, so this guy named Charles Styles comes along. He's a zoologist from New York City. Educated. In Europe, no less. So he played real well in the south. Yes. Which, as you'll see, is a bit of part of the problem. And the Department of Agriculture said, hey, we need you to help these farmers down there keep their animals healthy. So go down there and check things out. And he started to notice. He's like something's going on. These people are physically stunted. They're a little off. Yeah, they're mentally stunted. And I don't think they're just dumb and lazy. So he started apparently he sounds like one of these guys that had to get to the bottom of something. Right. Like, he wouldn't just say, oh, well, everyone's right about how it is down here. Right. So he really stuck to his instinct and realized that it was Hookworm. He literally was the guy who discovered that that was the problem. Exactly. I think he did that by analyzing stool samples. So he basically just hung around men's rooms. You're going to use that? And they'd say, no, have at it. I was educated in Europe, by the way. Right, exactly. And the people would just walk away. All right. Is that how it went down? I don't know how it went down. I looked actually, this guy is not the most celebrated person to ever save an entire region from an infection. I didn't find a lot of background information on him in particular, so I have no idea how it happened. I saw somewhere that said that he became accidentally infected, and that's how he understood. Didn't see it backed up anywhere else. I have no idea how this man came to say the AHA moment. Right, yeah. Because, again, you have to be trading in fecal material here. So this guy had his hands on human poop at some point, right. Or thought to look there. I'm not sure. Maybe he was in a good old fashioned poop slang invite. It makes the most sense that he's like, something's wrong. It's a worm. The point is, though, he was not well received. The local doctors didn't want to hear it. They wouldn't listen. They dismissed him as this carpet bagging Yankee from europe, who educated in Europe, who's down here telling us he's an animal expert and he's telling us about our poop making us lazy. Yeah, go back, Europe. Animal expert. Yeah. They really didn't listen to him much, so he was like, fine, I'll just go to John D. Rockefeller and tell him I'm going to tell on you. That's basically what happened. Yeah. Rockefeller was this was at the time when income inequality was about at the levels it was now. And the wealthy industrialists of the age were really worried that they were going to have the social order overthrown by angry people. So they invented philanthropy. Right? Yeah. This is back when they worried about that kind of thing. Right. And Rockefeller said, well, we can't do anything to actually support the problems that capitalism creates, because then we'll just be drawing attention to the fact that there are major problems with capitalist system. What else can I support? And he heard about Styles, and Styles took a meeting with Rockefeller and some of his higher up friends, and apparently at that meeting, they closed the deal, like, we're funding this thing with the million bucks right out of the gate, which is about 26 million today. And they set up the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the eradication of Hookworm disease. That's right. But despite the fact that they were trying to help Southerners not only with a medical issue, but to advance themselves as a people. Right. Again, the Southerners a, they didn't want a light being shown on this problem, right. Because it's gross and it has stigma. But again, they didn't want these Yankees coming down there and saying they can fix you. Right. And Rockefeller said, TS. He said, I've got an oyster dish named after me, maybe the best oyster dish besides raw. I'm glad you said that. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we're going to come back and talk a little bit about the road to eradication right after this. 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. 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. 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 Afflac 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 Affleck'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 Afflac.com. That's Aflac.com. And we're back in Chuck. We had not just a jingle. That was a real blues song. Yeah, people are like, man, somebody really made an authentic old flu sounding jingle just for this episode. No, that was the legendary Blind Blake with his song Hookworm Blues, which was a real song about the Hookworm blues. Right. And I think Blind Blake came up with that song in 1926, I believe. And the fact that he is singing about hookworms starting in the 1920s represents, or just goes to show, like, how much progress was made between the time the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was set up and Blind Blake had his number one hit. And in between that time for promoting this idea that there was such a thing as hookworm, and that it was a real problem, because when the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission was set up in 19 nine, the south was still in basically the grips of reconstruction. It wasn't the reconstruction era anymore. It's the Jim Crow south. But it was still really far behind as a result of the war, and there were not a lot of public services available. So one thing the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission had going for it was money in that it was going to be money invested in public health. All right, so this is how they went about it. It's like you said, the Rockefeller donated million bucks. Just how much? Today, 26 million is pretty good. And they realize, well, I assume this was kind of a purposeful move, that they got a Southerner on board to kind of lead the charge. Definitely. This person named Wickliff Rose. Great name. If there's a hero of this story, it's him, if you ask me. You think so? Not what's his face. No. Styles yeah. No, I mean, he did some great work. It. Was good, but Wycliffe Rose was the one who wyclef. That's how I pronounced it. He was the one who made it happen. Because Styles could have discovered hookworm all day long, but if he didn't have the personality to cure people, then it doesn't really help. So this would be Matthew McConaughey, then, right, in the movie? Yeah, that would be Paul Giamatti. And this is McConaughey coming in now. So they get this Southerner he's from Nashville on board to run the organization. And they had this approach where they would go to a town in the south with these doctors. But before they did that, they would start this campaign, like an awareness campaign in schools to get and I think we talked about in other things, you get the kids on board in schools, and they kind of help get the parents on board. And they started this campaign to tell children about what's going on. And the kids would intern, hopefully go home and tell their parents, like, Mapa ain't dumb. I got the hook worm. Right? Look, my poop is wiggling away. Exactly. And they had a challenge in front of them because you got to poop in a bag or something and give it to your teacher. Your teacher. And entire schools, these one room schoolhouses were infected. And this one kid they talked to later on said he was kid at the time. Well, yeah, he was scared. Like, he said he had constipation for a week. He didn't want to have hookworm. I don't want my teacher to know me in this way. Yeah. Pretty much give my teachers sample, boy. Never mind. But that was the whole setup, right? Yeah. I mean, there was a public information campaign that was part of it. There was community involvement. That was a really big thing that y, Cliff Rose started. He said, we can't do this without the support of the local community. So they built networks with, like, doctors and local health boards. They got the schools involved, and it became a community thing, right? Yeah. So once you have the public on board, they would set up these clinics not permanent, these kind of temporary clinics. And it was kind of a big deal in the town. It said that they would treat it like an event and people would bring picnics. I don't know if that's a wise thing to do at a hook worm clinic, but they would bring picnics. And it says in here that some people even wanted to get married in the hook worm tent. And I was like, that seems weird and kind of like, kitschy. But then I also was like, I bet a lot of these people have never seen the tent before. So they were like, this was our one chance to just stay in the hook. 10th. Yeah. Can we get married in the hookworm tent? And so there'd be this public information campaign leading up to the day of the hookworm day, you can just call it. And a young doctor would ride into town on horseback, and he had a microscope and everything. There was a couple of parts to it. There was the sanitation lecture, which was, here's how you guys are getting cook worm. Here's how you build what's called a sanitary privy. Yeah. Like, they couldn't give them indoor plumbing, but they could at least teach them how to have a nice enough out house. Right. And there's some very simple principles. One is like, don't dig your latrine down until you hit groundwater. Don't let it go out into the stream. Make sure animals can't get into it and spread it around. Have a good door, make sure your feet aren't standing in the same pit that you're pooping in. It's really basic stuff. But that was a big part of it. Right. Yeah. And then also explaining how the infection process worked. Right. Because they understood very early on that, yes, you can get rid of hookworms fairly easily, but you can also get reinfected fairly easily. So they had to get that part across as well. Yeah. And again, you can't buy everyone's shoes, but you can say, maybe don't play near the outhouse. You got to stop the poop slinging fights altogether. Yeah. They just have to be gone. Thing of the past. That's the number one thing. They're part of the salad days. And then the sample analysis would begin and the poor doctor would just look with his microscope at each poop sample and say, pass fail. Pass fail. If the bag was vibrating, they didn't even have to look. Yeah. Like that cheese in Sardinia, I think. Oh, yeah. With the maggots. The maggot cheese. Didn't we talk about a maggot episode? Surely we did. Or both. So if you were found to be infected with worms, you would get very simple pharmaceutical treatment. Really simple. Yeah. There's this extraordinarily toxic stuff called thymol. Yeah. Thymol. Yeah. And it would kill your worms. Yeah. And it could also kill you if you took it with the wrong combination of foods and or alcoholic beverages. Yeah. You wanted to avoid alcohol and fats and oils on the day you took it. And then you would follow your dose of thymal with Epsom salt, which would remove the thymol from your body. Yeah. And they said, at some point, you know what, that stuff is super toxic, so why don't we replace that with something called carbon tetrachloride? That must be much better. No, it was also very lethal. I guess it just at the time, didn't have anything that wasn't also dangerous to take. Right. And that's the trick. And the fact that the Epsom salt would get rid of it, I think, helped quite a bit. Yeah. So the great end of this story would be if the Rockefeller's money was well spent and five to ten years later, they eradicated hookworm in the south TADA. But that didn't happen. It was successful in a lot of ways. Awareness kind of being the cheap way. But as we said a few times, reinfection is kind of the biggest problem. They might have gotten rid of a lot of hookworm only to have these kids who couldn't help but have their poop slinging fights and then get hookworm all over again. Exactly. But if you go and read the Rockefeller Foundation's rundown of that program, they basically say it was this one guy who lobbied hard to just move on. Whatever. It was somebody from the Rockefeller Foundation that said, we're done with this. We've done our work. I got you. And like you said, in a certain way, they had set up some of the earliest public health networks in the south. They had convinced the south that there was such thing as hookworm and that it was a big problem and that if they were able to get rid of it, they could catch up to the rest of the country. And they said, now the local doctors, now the local health clinics can take over from here. But again, yeah, it wasn't until the hookworm really started to be eradicated and it had very little to do with the pharmaceutical treatments. It was the fact that indoor plumbing became prevalent. Yeah. I mean, it was literally like better food, better plumbing, more shoes. The end of share cropping, which was a type of agricultural system that kept people poor and kept people in the fields. So it kept the same unsanitary conditions for hookworm infection right there. Yeah. What did you call it when they would dump the poop? Night soil. Yeah, no more night soil. Dumping mechanization started and it was kind of a combination of all these just the modernization of the American South really what ended it. And the proof is kind of in the putting in that today in conditions similar to the American South 100 years ago, plus in other parts of the world, it's still a really big problem. It is a really big problem. Apparently something like I saw up to in this article, the War on Hookworms by Andy Boroitz. He says that up to something like 740,000,000 people around the world are thought to have hookworm infections. Right? Yeah. About 40 to 50 million of which are pregnant women, which is obviously one of the worst. Like we said, kids and pregnant women is one of the worst kind of people to get it and the status. Right. And mainly because it increases your chances of dying during childbirth because of anemia. Right. So it is a huge problem. Around the world, there's this kind of moniker for hookworm infection. Along with certain other infections, they are lumped together under the umbrella of neglected tropical diseases. And the reason they're called that is because this is stuff that you can easily get rid of if you alleviate poverty in the developing world. But we're not doing that and it's out of neglect, basically. Yeah. It's not the kind of thing where you can just invent the vaccine and it's gone again because of the reinfection, because these people are still poor and still in those conditions. We're talking at some of the highest rates are Sierra Leone, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Ethiopia, India, Venezuela, Indonesia also interestingly, China and Brazil, which kind of surprised me. Yeah. Well, it's the same thing as, like, the south back in the day, where you have very well off urban areas and very poor rural areas. Same thing in parts of China and Brazil today. Yeah. And I think another reason at least this article you sent makes the argument that it's still a problem. In fact, since 1090, it's declined globally by just 5%. Yes. This is really sad, despite the fact that something like 450,000,000 people have been treated for hookworm. But that decline, it's only gone down 5%. And what that's saying is, as long as there's the unsanitary conditions, there's going to be hookworm. Right. So we have to alleviate the unsanitary conditions. And you do that by alleviating poverty. And there's a group of foundations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, world Health Organization, they've gotten together to create this End Seven program, and they're trying to end seven of the neglected tropical diseases by 2020. And hookworm is one of them. And there are treatments, it's really easy to get rid of hookworm. There's actually a couple of ironic treatments for hookworm. One medication for getting rid of hookworm prevents the hookworms from creating ATP, which is like an energy source. So they become lethargic and die, just like they make you lethargic. The other medication attaches to the hookworms intestines and prevents the hookworm from absorbing nutrients. So they die of malnourishment, just like they make people malnourished. I don't know if it's ironic or if they're like, we're going to get these things back. Right. So like I was saying a minute ago, part of the big problem with eradicating this is that it's not a big news item. Like a lot like Ebola comes along, it grabs all the news, and all of a sudden you have a lot of funding. Hookworm isn't I don't want to say a sexy disease because it's gross, but it's kind of just off forgotten and so they don't have a lot of funding. I'm glad that Gates are involved because that makes it much more high profile. Right. But it's still a big issue, and hopefully this will help raise a little bit of awareness. Sure. Well, if hookworm is eradicated by 2020, we'll have played a rather large role in that. But now we have a final twist. Right? Yeah. There is this really great quote from the Rockefeller parasitic worm specialist who said that we needed the eventual helmetic defaultation of man, saying, getting rid of worms from the human race entirely. Right, right. And he said that for only in a society made up of parasite free individuals. Well, we know of what the human being is capable basically saying, like, we have no idea how much we're being held back as an entire race by worms, so we need to get rid of them. But there's this growing body of research check that's showing that we actually need to be infected by hookworms. It looks like well, it can potentially treat a few types of disease. I wouldn't say that humans need it, but right now there's some experimental research going on and specific to hook worms, it seems that it might help asthma. Okay. There are other worms that they're using that could help with everything from ulcerative colitis to Crohn's disease to multiple sclerosis. But when it comes to the little hookworm, they think it might help asthma. They're not experimenting on humans yet in the United States, I don't think. I think only in the United Kingdom right now are they using in humans. But because it's hookworm, the side effects are basically all the things we've been talking about. Right. Everything bad about the hookworm is going to happen to you. Right. The thinking behind it, though, because that makes zero sense. Like, why would that help? Is that for some reason, worm, parasitic worms prevent the human immune system from going overboard somehow. Right. And that the reason why we have autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis or Crohn's disease are because of a lack of parasitic worms in our bodies, because we've eradicated them. So now these other diseases that are autoimmune diseases have been able to rise. So it kind of is, like you said, a weird little twist. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, right now they're mainly working in mice and rats, but anytime you're working with mice and rats, it can exactly extrapolate that on the human. So we shall see. There's only one way to find out for you and I to volunteer. I did see some experiments, not for this, but when they were doing hookworm experiments, period, they would infect people with hookworm. Right. And volunteers. Yeah. And again, it's not like a hookworm is going to kill you. And if you are not going to get reinfected because you wear shoes and use, like, a toilet with running water, sure, why not? You do it for science and money. Yeah. You got anything else? I do not. Well, we want to recommend the articles how a worm gave the south bad Name by Rachel Newer and war on hookworms from Andy Boroitz. They're both well worth reading, and since I said they're well worth reading, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this follow up from a very sweet couple I met at the airport. I think I talked about them after our, I think the Midwestern tour. No, it was Louisiana. New Orleans show. Okay. I met this very nice couple who had been to the show. They were, I think, one of our more veteran and wise listeners and show attendees. Okay. They were wonderful. And they stopped me in the airport and we talked for a little bit and this is from them. Hey, Chuck. I wanted to follow up after the show in New Orleans. We talked to you at the airport while we were waiting for our flight back to Minneapolis. You were very gracious talking to us when we clearly interrupted you on your way to do or get something. Probably had to poop. We told you our new hobby was going and following you guys around the country and making vacations out of your shows on tour. Remember that? But we haven't made it to a live show since. We haven't done a lot of shows since then. Oh, that's true. Well, we've done a handful. We've both been slacking, both parties. Yes. But we're going to hit the road for some shows later this year, by the way. Sure. Stay tuned for that. So you and Josh did, however, inspire us in our new venture. We started a podcast. Nice. Just before we left the drive to Alaska in May, joyce, who was the lady in the couple, downloaded a bunch of podcasts on how to make podcasts. By the time we got back to Minnesota, we were well on our way to starting Tall Tales in Travel, our podcast about adventures in the outdoors. Nice. Lair. And I don't know if it's Larre and I can't remember if it was Lair or Larry. Lair is probably short for Larry maybe, which is short for Lawrence, so it's doubly short. I'm going to call him Lair or just L. He has decades worth of stories which have mostly taken place in Alaska. He's been a bush pilot, charter boat captain, a police officer and general outdoorsman, to name a few. Adventure settings. Yeah, that's a Lair if I've ever heard one. Lair does most of the talking and Joyce does most of the behind the scenes tasks. It's a division of labor that we've mastered over the last 30 odd years. Together. We have a website, Talltailsandtravel.com, where we post photos and videos from layer's. Huge archive. Now that we're up and running, we'll be putting more work into sorting and sharing the collection more regularly. By the way, we used squarespace. Thanks for the tip. Nice. Anyway, guys, we're just writing in to thank you for the inspiration to let you know that we haven't given up on seeing you live again. We're going to keep our ears open and here we're stuff you should know will be up next. Plan and adventure to see you there. All the best. That is Joyce Olsen and Laird Broward. And again, check it out@talltailsandtravel.com or at Talltailsandtravel. Libson. libsyn.com. And they were just really sweet and nice and supportive. And the notion that these people in their retirement would follow us around the country just kind of knock my socks off. Yeah. So I haven't listened to the show yet because this just came in, but I'm going to give it a whirl. Yeah. Thanks, you guys. And congratulations. It's pretty awesome. And I guess if we've inspired you, like Joyce and Lair to do something neat, let us know about it. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comsteno. You could 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 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. 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. You know you're the best pet mom. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-06-27-sysk-stonewall-riots-final.mp3 | Remembering Stonewall | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/remembering-stonewall | One of American history's darker moments, the Stonewall Riots were also the event that galvanized the gay rights movement in the United States. Today there's a monument in NYC to memorialize this important time. Learn all about this often overlooked story | One of American history's darker moments, the Stonewall Riots were also the event that galvanized the gay rights movement in the United States. Today there's a monument in NYC to memorialize this important time. Learn all about this often overlooked story | Tue, 27 Jun 2017 15:56:39 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=15, tm_min=56, tm_sec=39, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=178, tm_isdst=0) | 53212964 | audio/mpeg | "This July, don't miss an entire summer of surprises on Disney Plus with Disney's High School 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. Hey, everybody. It's us, Josh and Chuck. And we want you to know we are coming somewhere near you. We're sure if you live in North America this year. That's right, we're going on tour. And why don't we just rattle through these dates, okay? Toronto, August 8 at the Danforth Music Hall. Chicago, August 9. The next day at Harris Theater. Then we are taking some time off to recover. After that two day grind, we're hitting Vancouver, the Vogue Theater, September 26, followed by Minneapolis. We're going to be at the Pentagon Theater again on September 27. That is correct. Yes. And then Austin Chuck on October 10 at the Paramount Theater yes. And very special show in Lawrence, Kansas, at Liberty Hall on October 11. Yes. And then we're going to do a three night stand, october 22, 23rd and 24th at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn, New York. And then Chuck ticket home. Well, take it home, literally, because we are finishing up November 4 right here in Atlanta, the Bucket Theater. And this is a very special benefit show, and all the proceeds will be going to lifeline Animal Project of Atlanta and the National Down Syndrome Society. Yes, and for more information and to buy tickets, just go to sysklive.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. That's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and there's Jerry. This is Stephanie Chanel. Stephanie Chanel, hi. I was talking to everyone else. I was looking at you, though. Sure. It's made it weird. I know it's a little disarming. So, this episode on the Stonewall riots or did you watch that documentary Stonewall Uprising, by chance? Yes, I did. Yeah. I think one of the people interviewed in there said they preferred, or at least he preferred to be called an uprising and not a riot. I kind of like that. Yeah, I agree. Because it lends it definitely a much more, like, credible tone, for sure. A riot is just like, we're going crazy. We're going to steal stuff. We're going to bust stuff. An uprising is like, we've had enough, and we're going to throw off this oppression. Yeah. So this is being released, I believe, if my math is correct, 48 years and a day. It depends on when you count the beginnings of the Stonewall uprising, because we'll get to it. But it started at 01:00 a.m.. So technically, some people, when you go from night and today still count that as the previous night. You know what I mean? Those are people who are on drugs. You know what I mean? I was about to say I used to do that, but then you said that. No, but anyway, the 48 year anniversary, I thought about maybe holding off till the 50th because I wanted to do this for a long time. But I thought, you know what? Who knows what's going to happen? Exactly. We could get hit by a bus. Yeah. And then we never would have done this podcast. Right? There's no time like the present, Charles. Yes. Especially since we finally got a great article from the Grabster on that. Yeah, man, that guy is so good. I read this article that he wrote how the Stonewall riots work. He called it the riots? Yeah. I sent him an email just to say, like, dude, it is so nice to have you back. Yeah, I felt the same way. In fact, I need to get his email so I can echo that. Because you read it and it's just like the old days. Good quality stuff. Yeah. You want to talk about Stonewall? Yeah, let's do it. Have you ever been there? No, I haven't. I even stayed at Washington Park Inn. Washington Square Inn, which is nice. And I had no idea Stonewall was right around the corner. I didn't know very much about it. I mainly just like I had a rough idea, but I think I knew about the same as I know about, say, Attica. So I know sometimes people chant stonewall. Sometimes people chanted Attica. So there you go. That was about as much as I knew you wouldn't have to drink at Attica, though, right? Some radiator hooch. Next time, go there and grab a drink at the Stone. I highly recommend it. Oh, yeah, I definitely intend to. For sure. Because I love that part of New York, too. It's the best the village. So I had to go and look this up, right? Because I was like, wait, I'm starting to see people say West Village. They're also saying Greenwich Village. It's the west part of Greenwichville Village. It is. Okay, so it's both. It's Greenwich Village and West Village. Technically, it is in the West Village of Greenwich Village. Which is between Houston and 14th and Broadway. You know, Houston. Houston. And I've been in New York enough Times, my friend. Yeah. Just don't ever say Avenue of the Americas. I have, plenty of times. Oh, no. Yeah. And I've gotten yelled at. Yeah. And then I think the Hudson is the other side of the village. It's just my favorite part of town. Is it? Yes. The village in the West Village. It's the best. It just feels a little bit more like old New York. It's quaint. It's still kind of quiet. All those tiny little treeline streets that aren't just on a perfect grid. You can get lost down there. You can find yourself down there. You can you can pay a million dollars a square feet for real estate. Yeah, it's nice. It's great. I like the lower east Side a lot, too, though, I have to say. Yeah. And you know what? Last time I was in New York, emily and I spent and I used to hang out some in the East Village. In fact, that's kind of where I used to go, mostly because that's where my friends were back in the went there. And it is still nice and grimy. What, the village? The east. But it's been I don't want to say modernized, but it's been what's the word? Not gentrified, maybe gentrified. Updated. Yeah, it's been updated a little bit, but it's still kind of scummy, which is great. And it definitely has a feel to it still, for sure. And a smell. Okay, chuck, you said you've been to the Stonewall before. Did you know much of the history? Yeah. I mean, that's why I went. And oddly enough, I just happened to be there in the days following the nightclub shooting in Florida. Oh, man. So there were, like, armed guards at the Stonewall Inn because it's a national monument now. Well, I know a lot of people flock to Stonewall in after the Pulse nightclub shootings just to show solidarity and comfort one another. So the stonewall has become this hub, the center of gay life in the United States, not just in New York and then the United States. I would even say probably globally. Yeah, sure. It had that much of a significance. But what's interesting about the Stonewall Inn is that it also had that same significance just for a much smaller community of gays prior to June of 1969. But it has, for decades and decades been a center of gay life. It's just there was pre stone wall and post stone wall, and what that club meant to people really just changed by how many people knew about it. We're pulled to it. Yeah. Good way to say it. Thanks, man. So I think we should start, as Ed suggests, as the grabs suggest, by talking about before Stonewall and a little bit about the sad state of life as a gay person, as a trans person. The whole LGBTQ community which, of course, they didn't call it that back then, but to be in that community in the 1950s and 60s was I mean, it's interesting to talk about this stuff because there's still a long way to go, but you can't help but look at the progress when you look at the way things were in the fifties and sixties. S well, what's crazy is that the were a low point. Yeah. I don't know if gay rights is the right word, but gay acceptance of the gay community by society at large, the were a real low in that, because prior to that, people were a little cooler with it. Like, straights were a little cooler with the idea of people being gay than they were in the it's thanks to our friend McCarthy. Yeah. I got the feeling that there was a little bit of just like, don't ask, don't tell philosophy going on and not like the hammer coming down, which is what happened in the it was a big pushback. And you're right, McCarthy had a lot to do with it. He was like, not only am I going to tackle McCarthyism, but while we're at it, let's castigate the gay community as well. Right. I don't know if you remember or not, but we talked about Joe McCarthy being gay himself. Most likely. Oh, definitely. I can't remember. But in the midst of that, he spent time persecuting gays even though he was gay himself, which is pretty I mean, if the guy wasn't despicable before, that really does it 100% puts him over the fence. Yeah. And it's something that happens still. I don't want to say single handedly, but his drive that whatever he embodied in the McCarthyism trials or hearings or whatever, he helped turn the tide back against gay people. It was going like, okay, for a little while, and then this guy comes along and just screws everything up. And then the next thing, the it's really bad to be gay. As a matter of fact, in the United States, outside of Illinois, every other state in the union, if you were gay, you were illegal just by being you. Yeah. You're basically breaking the law through a web of laws that essentially criminalized it, whether it was antisocomy laws or saying you can't dance in public with a same sex partner, or you can't wear they actually had laws on what was called gender appropriate clothing, where you had to wear a minimum of three pieces of clothing deemed appropriate for your gender. And because they saw a big threat with they call people back then they call it people dressing in drag. But we're talking about well. We're talking about different kinds of people. But a lot of times they were transgender people dressing like they dressed like dressing according to the gender they identified with. And they would find someone. They would bring in a female officer. And they would take them into a bathroom and either feel for parts or make them undress and check out their clothing and arrest them. Yeah. And it didn't always even necessarily end in arrest. Like, these laws were used as tools of intimidation and just general oppression. And the cops were acting in large part as this extension, the action extension of that part of America that just found gay people odious, the whole concept. So everybody was just totally cool with the gay community being harassed and arrested and brutalized. There was a lot of violent crime and murders against gay people at the time. The newspapers didn't report virtually anything that had anything to do with the gay community. They were just complete open targets for exploitation and abuse. And it was just a terrible way to live. And as a result, a lot of gay people at the time just opted to act straight. They got married, they had kids. They just pretended in order to survive in the society they were born into. Yeah, it was classified until 1973, and the DSM is a mental illness. Aversion therapy was going on. I had never heard of this place until I saw the documentary atheoder state hospital in California. Yeah, I hadn't heard of it either. Oh, man. They called it the DoCAU for queers, where they would engage in shock treatment. They would show gay men pictures of naked men and then shock them. And they would give them there was one drug that they gave that supposedly yes, have you heard of this? No. A drug that simulated the experience of drowning. They would give lobotomies. It's just unbelievable that this is happening in our country, like, 50 something years ago. Right? And so it's bad enough if your family is sending you off for treatment or whatever to basically be treated for being gay, because, again, the field of psychology and psychiatry said, this is a mental illness and we cure mental illnesses so you can cure gayness. Let's just figure out how to do it in the most brutal means possible. So it's bad enough if your family sends you off, commits you for being gay, but I think what strikes me is even worse was some gay people at the time buying into the idea that they were mentally ill, that there was something profoundly wrong with them that made them so different that they would submit to this kind of treatment as well. That clip in the stonewall uprising up with the I don't know who that guy was that came to the school to talk to the kids, just, oh, man, it's hard to watch, to be honest. It really is. So the lavender scare is what it was kind of called under McCarthy in the 1950s. This is all pre stonewall. And as ed points out in the article, it was a dark time, but it was also a time where kind of underground the gay community was setting. When I say gay community and we say it. We're talking about LGBTQ as a whole. It doesn't roll off the tongue. We're going to say different things along the way. But really what they were doing kind of quietly with setting the stage and laying a foundation for progress later on with these kind of underground societies. It was called the homophile movement and gay rights groups basically being founded. Right. The homophob movement was basically if Bob Newhart had been a gay activist, it was like buttoned down penny loafers, getting along with everybody. Sure. Being very quiet and pleasant, being an upstanding neighbor, like really taking care of your lawn, like that kind of stuff. Basically, the point of the homophob movement was to point out to straight society that gay people were totally normal. Right. And the approach that they took was, we're going to kill them with kindness. We're going to win them over by being nice and by being quiet and by not causing a fuss. Yeah. Being good citizens. Yeah, for sure. And one of the things that came out of this, the homophile movement was a society called the Madison Society, which is basically an underground gay, I guess, gay liberation movement. But like a very slow, preppy gay liberation movement, right? Yeah. I like the preppy part. But it founded a network. For the first time, gay people could communicate with one another through, like, newsletters that were set up by the Medishine Society and other small groups like them. It was a big deal. They showed footage of them in the Stonewall Uprising documentary, and they're all wearing suits and their hair is very nice. And it's all very well thought out. This is an accidental but they're acting not gay at all, but they're holding signs saying that proclaim that they're gay and that they deserve rights. That was an extraordinarily brave thing to do back then, because if you were out as gay, and Ed, I think, very wisely points out in this article back then, you could be fired for being gay. Sure. And Ed points out today you could still be fired for being gay. There's no federal protection against that. Right. It has gotten better. It's horrible that that's still not protected, right? Yeah. But back in the day, if you had the wrong kind of boss and they caught when you were gay, they could not only fire you, they could make it so you would never work again. Like, your life would be ruined. So to stand there in a suit and tie in the middle of New York with a sign that proclaimed you were gay and being like 2021 years old or something like that and have your whole life ahead of you, that was a very brave act to do. Even though the Madischine Society, I get the impression that they're fairly criticized in the gay community for being really slow and kind of plotting and not doing enough and not being radical at all at the time. Not really pushing gay rights forward as much as what would come after. Yeah, but like we said, very importantly, they were laying a foundation for what would follow the Stonewall Riots. Should we take a break? All right, let's take a break, and we'll talk a little bit about the refuge that was the Stonewall Inn. 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 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. 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 Kilgarif and Georgia Hard stark 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. All right, so we set the stage for what life was like back then in the LGBTQ community and kind of more than anything. And the irony to me is just inescapable, there was no meeting place. There was no way to normalize. So what happens is you couldn't just go be gay and have a coffee with your gay friend out in public and be affectionate and just be a normal human being. So what happens is they ended up being driven underground and meeting in public bathrooms and in porn theaters, and in New York City, they were meeting in the backs of meat trucks for hookups. And so this further stigmatize them as taking part in, quote, perverted behavior because they had nowhere else to go. So it was sort of like this feedback loop. Like, had they had a place to go to begin with, they might not have been meeting in bath houses and might not have had the stigma attached to them. Well, I don't know if they wouldn't have still been meeting in bath houses, but I think they would have enjoyed having more places to not just hook up. I think that's all that was available to them was just hooking up and that was it. Well, exactly. And there was one gentleman in that documentary that was just like, I just wanted to go place where I could fall in love with somebody and talk to somebody. Yeah. That guy, I can't remember his name, but he struck me as well, he was describing the stonewall. He was saying, like, that was that place. It was one of those few places where you could just feel relatively safe being gay. It was like one of the few places you could slow dance. And the way that he said it, Chuck, was it was a place where you could find love. Right. It wasn't just about sex, although I'm sure there's plenty of hookups and apparently there's prostitution ring running out of the stonewall, but it was a place where you could find there was just a vibe of love. There supposedly, is what the guy was saying, I think. And there weren't very many places like that in the world at the time. Yeah. So the stonewall in itself, it was a pair of brick buildings originally that were horse stables way back in the day, and then later on, it was a bakery and then eventually opened the stonewall in restaurant in 1934. And this is a pretty fascinating part of this whole story to me, because I had no idea, but the mafia had a business idea where they saw an opportunity for gay people to meet and buy booze and buy cigarettes and load money into the jukebox. And so the mafia kind of had this underground gay bars all over New York city that they ran, right. They'd be like, hey, we just hijacked the truck that was full of cigarettes and booze. We should just sell it to the gay people at illegal saloons. Yeah. Since nobody else will. And the reason no one else would was because since it was illegal to be gay, if you were a known gay person and you were at a bar, that bar could be shut down. So bars are like, you can't come in here. We're not gay bars. There's no gays allowed, basically. Right. And not only was this legal, it was encouraged by the law. So the mafia was like, well, there's a huge market that's just needing to be satisfied here, and we'll step up, no problem. Yeah. And before you go thinking the mafia was some benevolent group giving an outlet to the LGBTQ community. They did do that. But they were. A. Trying to make money. And b. There were instances of blackmailing that would go on that they would get. Like. Maybe a straight acting. Well heeled gay man as a target and say. All right. Well. This guy's definitely got a good job and a family. So let's get his information and then hit him up for money or will out him. So they weren't just benevolent mafiosos. There was some untorched stuff going on on their end. For sure. For sure. Yeah. One of them, like, I said was the prostitution ring at the Stonewall Inn. They were dealing drugs at the Stonewall Inn? Again, the entire bar. The Stonewall in as a bar was an illegal bar. And they weren't doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They were exploiting, like, a vulnerable population. But still, regardless of the mob's intentions, gay people took the place and made it their own spot and enjoyed it as a result. It was also, by all accounts, not only a dive bar with watered down drinks, but from the sounds of it, it was unsanitary. Yeah, like, just gross. And not because of the clientele, because the Mafia, they just didn't care. They weren't keeping it clean. The one guy in the document was like, I never bought a drink there. He's like, that's the last place I was going to actually get a drink. I would go to meet people and make friends, but no way was I going to be ordering and paying for whatever they were serving. He said they were serving, like, the beer out of pitchers and water buckets and stuff, and there's no telling what was in that beer. He said that there was a rumor that some infectious disease had spread because of the beer at the Stone Hall. It was a dirty place, but again, it was a place where gay people could feel loved. Yeah. And one of the reasons it was kind of allowed to run to a certain degree was the Mafia was paying bribes and giving kickbacks to the cops of the Six Precinct, which is where it was. So, Chuck, they sort of had a deal worked out. I'm sorry to interrupt you, ma'am, but have you seen the documentary the 75? I've seen it twice. How amazingly good is that? Yeah, it's one of the best documentaries I've seen in a long time. I agree. And Adam Diaz. Man come on. Yeah, that's it. That guy is, like a real person. I know. That's amazing. Yeah. If you're interested at all in bribes and dirty cops and kickbacks in New York City in the 80s, definitely watch that one. Yeah, it was amazing. The 75, which was the 75th Precinct, correct? Yes. But in top talk, it's 75. Yeah, I think it's like Jamaica, Queens, maybe. Yeah. I can't remember. But I guarantee you they're making a feature film about that at some point, surely. It's too good. It's like you can't write anything better. So sorry, man. I interrupted. You were talking about how the Six was taking kickbacks from the owners of the Stone Wall. Yeah. So they were taking kickbacks. So it was allowed to a certain degree because they were getting paid off. Right. And the place would still get rated. Apparently it got rated fairly frequently, but when it got rated, the owners would be tipped off. It would be rated on, like, a week night when the place is pretty much dead and a lot of people aren't going to get hassled. And when it was rated, maybe there would be another bribe taken at the time, the patrons would basically be let go. But the whole process was just a process of intimidation. Right? Like, you had to show your ID on your way out the door, and if you were gay and your life could be ruined for being outed, you didn't want to show any copyright. So the whole thing was just a bad jam. And the idea that it didn't do anything, really, except maybe increase the kickbacks for the cops just made the whole thing even worse. Yeah. And so this kind of went along for a while. But everything changed on the night of June 27 and into the early morning of the 28th, when Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine of not the 6th Precinct, which is notable, but Manhattan's first division of Public Morals, he led a different kind of raid with some undercover cops at about 01:00 a.m.. And everything changed that night? Yeah, that night something was different. Like, everything just kind of came together and just went a certain way. Do you watch basketball? Sure. So it's astounding when one team can just be killing the other team and then all of a sudden somebody on the losing team steals a pass and takes it back and just dunks it or passes it to somebody else for like three points and they sync it and the momentum just completely turns and it can happen just like that. I have the impression that in the course of the gay rights movement, this is one of those instances where a pass was stolen and taken to the other basket and just dunked. Yeah, it's a nice sports analogy. Thanks. You're right. There's something about that kind of momentum that can't be manufactured. It all just has to come together in an organic way. And it's funny, Ed did put in here there were some people throughout the years that have said that the death of Chewy Garland earlier on June 22 had riled up the gay community because she was so big in the gay community, they're all upset over Judy Garland. And that is what kind of helped kick off the Stonewall riots. By all accounts, that's probably not true, but maybe they were grumpier than normal. Who knows? Maybe it just strikes me such, like a demeaning, dismissive explanation, like, oh, you guys were just mad because Judy Garland died, so you acted up and it just happened to work out in your favor. Right. So what happened is Pine comes in, he's got these cops, and their intention was to not only shut down a gay bar, but to shut down a Mafia bar for selling liquor without a license. And like you said before, it was just a part of a series of raids that summer all over Manhattan for these underground gay bars. Yeah, the checkerboard had gone under on its own, but the rumor. Was that the cops had shut it down. The telestar, the snake pit, the sewer, they all went down either on their own or because of police raids. But either way, the idea in the gay community was that they were in the midst of a major persecution. All of their places were getting shut down. Sure. And supposedly among the police, they were shutting down mafia bars. But the gay community wasn't getting that. They were seeing that their gay bars are being shut down. So there was definitely a sense of persecution that summer in New York among gays who went to gay bars. Yeah. Things were kind of simmering at this point. Yeah. And one more thing. I want to give a shout out to David Carter, I believe his name is. He literally wrote the book on stonewall that the stonewall uprising documentary was based on. He's an historian of the stonewall uprising. So most of the stuff that we have that's legitimate comes from this guy's research. Yeah, for sure. So what happens is these cops come in there, they start the routine like you were talking about, of exit the bar one at a time. We need your ID. They didn't just hurt everyone out in one big rush because they wanted that identification, which is part of the intimidation. And so what happens is, one by one, these people are filing out and they don't go home because they're hanging out outside, waiting for their friends inside to get let out. And this crowd starts gathering. Then the crowd starts building, not only for the people inside, but as Ed points out in this article, other people in the community in the village was a gay part of New York, still is. And the street kids start coming up and these transgender people and cross dressers and basically everyone in that community with something to gain and nothing to lose start kind of hanging around as this kind of a more intimidating, it feels like raid went on. Right. A lot of them, they weren't necessarily coming from down the street. A lot of them have been inside, like the stone wall. Yet another thing about the stone wall is it was one of the few places where transgender people were welcome, and it was actually kind of their bar. And like you said, as people were filing out, showing their ID and waiting for their friends, that crowd was growing bigger and bigger, and they're growing on the other side of the cops. So now there's this crowd developing, and the cops are between the crowd and the outside of the stone wall. Right. So they're kind of trapped. Yeah. It's a pretty tight area anyway, if you've ever been over there. The whole west village is like that. But where the stonewall is in particular, it doesn't face some big, wide open Manhattan street scene. Yeah. And so this crowd is getting bigger and bigger. It's hot. They're getting a little restless. They're starting to shout some stuff at the cops. I think there's a number of things that Ed says contributed as triggers or flashpoints from what should have been a routine police raid to harass gay bars or shut down a mafia owned bar, turning into this uprising. And there were several things. One of the things in the context it was in was this is a time in the United States as a whole when social unrest was pretty prominent. Yeah. There are a lot of groups that were organizing and agitating just against the status quo and the establishment. And so the idea of pushing back against police brutality was definitely in the air in the United States more than, say, five or ten years earlier. Yeah. I mean, this was the time of war protests of the Black Panthers, if you listen to that episode. And in fact, as you'll see in the days following, not even following the rides, but as the rides extended into days 2345 and six, the Black Panthers actually showed up in support, which was great. So another thing that happened was there was no backup. There were not enough cops. They were calling for backup from the Six, but the Six had been getting kickbacks. And kind of the story goes that they didn't so much appreciate this other group, the Division of Public Morals, coming into their zone and kind of taking charge of this raid. So they were like, we're not going to send you one right now. At least that's how the story goes. Yeah. Steve Moore Pine is actually interviewed in the uprising documentary, and he's saying, like, the radio kept cutting out every time he called for back up. And he's like, that had never happened before. So the insinuation is that, yes, the Six Precinct was like, you're on your own, pal. This will teach you a lesson. But you could kind of understand from the Six Precinct point of view, it was fine. Like, three or four straight cops could handle any number of gay people coming out of a gay bar during a raid because gay people were viewed as docile of feminine. It's basically everything that the white male establishment viewed women as in all of the repugnant ways. They also viewed gay people in exactly the same way. Right. So the idea that the Six Precinct didn't send any backup wasn't like, these guys are going to get killed, and we don't care. It was, let those guys handle the administrative part of this rate or whatever. They bet this off. Now they can chew it. Right? Yeah. What's going to happen? They're not going to fight back. Exactly. That will never happen. That was the idea. So all this is going on. They're being filed out. This crowd is growing, tensions are brewing, and here's where it gets murky. And apparently there's a lot of versions of the story and even some infighting within the LGBTQ community on who actually started it. Some people say that someone named Marcia Johnson yelled from the bar, I got my civil rights and threw a shot glass through the bar mirror. It's called the shot glass heard around the world. Other people say someone named Jackie Hormona started it. And other people say this one lesbian woman being stuffed in a cop car was battling so fiercely that she kind of got things going. Yes. Supposedly, she shouted, Why don't you guys do something to the crowd? As she's, like, fighting a bunch of cops. Yeah. To me, it doesn't matter who maybe lit the fuse, so to speak. It could have been any number of people, as far as I'm concerned. Sure, yeah. I mean, it could have been that. It could have been the people started throwing pennies at the cops and then pennies turned into bricks, and then somebody set some garbage on fire outside of the Stone Wall, and essentially something changed. Right. The tone changed if you were a cop. It turned ugly real quick, and whatever started it, it started to move fairly quickly. And Seymour Pine, deputy Inspector Seymour Pine of Manhattan's First Division of Public Morals, said, we need to get into the safety of the bar, which is really saying something about what the mood of the crowd was like. If all of a sudden the inside of the Stone Wall Inn was now the safest place to be. Right. It became their refuge, ironically. So they locked themselves in and did not stay in there for too long. I mean, there were still some patrons in there. There was a reporter in there, supposedly. Yeah, he was from the Village Voice. Yeah. And then the people outside ripped up a parking meter, knocked down the door, and by all accounts, the cops were in a bit of a state of shock because they didn't see this coming. I think a lot of the protesters were surprised at themselves that they were standing up as one and being physical with these police officers. Yeah. And one of the people who was there who was interviewed in the documentary was saying the crowd saw it. They saw that the police were scared, and the crowd was feeding on that. It was just feeding the crowd to see the cops, who had always been in control, who are the ones who had abused this community for so long, were now suddenly scared for their lives. This crowd was just eating it up, and it was feeding the energy that they were working off of. And Chuck, apparently, one of the cops is so scared that he threw his gun at the crowd. And from what I understand, no shots. That's what I'm saying. From what I understand, no shots were fired, which means that it would have been full with bullets. So basically, that cop was like, Here. Here's my loaded gun. Yeah. That's what you're supposed to do in an old Western when you run out of bullets, right? Or with Superman, right? You shoot at him and then all the bones bounce off his chest, and then you throw your gun at him and he ducks. So weird. All right, let's take another break. The riot is in full swing at this point, and we'll come back and finish up and tell you the end of the story right after this. 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. 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. Hosts Selena Erkhart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this charttopping 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, Chuck, I feel like what we're describing, the rest of the riot, we should be playing Yakity Sachs just to give it a light touch. So it was one of the accounts that I saw, apparently compiled by David Carter, was that it was a gay riot. There were a lot of transgender people dressed up, women dressed up doing a kick line at the police. Yeah, like a rocket's kick line and singing. Right. One transgender woman hit one of the police with her purse. There was definitely that element going on. The cops were apparently really caught off guard by this time. I think the 6th had gotten the word and we're starting to send back up because they had heard that these cops were now holed up inside the stonewall and there was a riot going on outside, so they were sending backup. But even the backup and trained riot police were, like, powerless in the face of this completely bizarre riot. Right. They were used to a certain kind of riot. They were not used to a gay riot. And it was throwing them off big time. Well, it's funny, too. One of the guys in the documentary said the next day he was talking about all the fake jewelry and the sequins on the street. And he was like it looked like just like a field of shimmery diamonds and things. So you're right, this is unlike any riot they had experienced. And I guess this was precursor to SWAT was new York's Tactical Patrol Force. Yeah, it might have been. What wouldn't it? Contemporary SWAT was like called out against the Black Panthers in La for the first time. It would have been like maybe that year or the year before, but New York wouldn't have had a SWAT team by then. Yeah, we did an episode on SWAT, so you can go listen to that and correct us at will. They call in the Tactical Patrol force. Things are definitely serious at this point. And there were probably between 601,000 people. People started calling people on the phone, get down here, it's going down. And the crowd swelled. And when you got 1000 angry people from the LGBTQ community that had had enough after years and years of mistreatment, it was pretty serious affair. Yeah, for sure. I mean, anytime people are throwing bricks at cops, it turns serious pretty quick, right? Yeah. So because you said before, like, the layout of the streets in the West Village are not like in a neat grid, the cops would chase the rioters or the protesters, whatever you want to call them at this point, down one street. And then the crowd, rather than running and dispersing, would just turn as a hole down another street and come back around and then they'd be chasing the cops. So there was this whole chase changes in momentum like we were talking about earlier, and it just went on for hours and hours and hours, basically until daylight, from what I understand. Yeah. So eventually this crowd dispersed, but it did not end there. This went on for about six days. And another guy in the documentary said that he felt like people were even more angry on day two, kind of, once word got around. But on day 2345 and six, it was a little bit different. Things actually. They got a little more organized and not in a violent way, like, here's how we're going to take them down strategically. But like we said, people started coming out. Black Panthers came out, hippies came out, civil rights processors, tourists came out. It became, like, Ed says, a counterculture event. And before you knew it, it was kind of the first big major gay protest was going on. Right. Basically anybody who wanted to fight the cops was like, let's go do this. And they did for, like you said, 23456 days. Yeah, it was coalescing. It feels like day two, though. Day two seems to be like the day when everything really came together because there were still more protesters than cops, apparently. Although the cops changed tactics. They were no longer like, hitting people with clubs in the legs, they were hitting them in the head. Right. There were like a lot of people with head injuries laying around. It was pretty grisly and brutal, but the protesters were still like, fighting pretty hard. Sure. But in the midst of all this, there were also people giving speeches. They were chaining gay power. There was a political tone to it that hadn't been there the night before. Right. And that wouldn't be there necessarily for the following nights, because at night, I guess, three, there were more cops than protesters from that moment on. But one of the other things that really kind of egged this whole thing along as well was that the next night, after this riot and protest and following the raid, the Stonewall Inn opened again on Saturday. So they opened up on Saturday and they just put out a welcome sign for all of the protesters saying, come on back, it's not done yet. Yeah, so eventually everything quieted down after those six days, by that next Sunday. But this would not be the end. It was really just kind of the beginning of what was to come. A few months after that, they had a commemorative march in New York and across the United States, and then that was just 1 march. And then a year later, on the first anniversary of the riots, they had what would become the first Gay Pride march. They didn't call it that at the time. And the documentaries, it's really moving when they're talking about. At first they said they didn't know if it was supposed to be from Christopher Street to Central Park, and they said, we didn't know if we were going to make it that far. We didn't know if there would be ten of us or twelve of us. It was just sort of uncertain. It was obviously way before internet, and so there wasn't communication like you have today. Right. But what they had were leaflets and they handed out thousands of them and there were a few hundred people at first, but all these people from the LGBTQ community were apparently lined the streets in support and as they marched, they joined in. I think there was a lot of fear to hold up a sign and join a march until they saw other people doing the same thing. And so they kind of joined in. By the time they got to Central Park, there were thousands and thousands of people I know in what would be the first pride parade in the United States. And apparently the time that was scheduled, like, the parade finished in about half the time they had allotted for it because everybody was moving so quickly, because they were so excited and so nervous about what was going to happen. But yeah, it turned out to be the first Gay Pride parade. The guy called it they called it a run, which I thought was pretty funny. Yeah. But it's pretty amazing that as it went, it just attracted support. Like, that's a heck of a parade when the bystanders get sucked into the parade. That's a good parade right there. Yeah. So out of this group, the gay activist alliance, the gay liberation front, ed pointed out an irony that really never occurred to me, but one of the reasons it's considered sort of the birth of the modern gay rights movement, he said, is because it was not the start of the gay rights movement. Like we said earlier, that foundation was already there. This was just sort of the catalyst. They weren't starting from scratch. They had these groups that were together, and they were kind of just, I think, waiting for something to happen to really bring them attention. And even though there were some uprisings in 65 and 66 and 67 in San Francisco and ladder, the New York times didn't cover this like they should have either. But those weren't covered by major newspapers at all, just underground newspapers. So they never really kind of got the coverage. And they weren't as noteworthy as stonewall ended up being. I was reading about that, too. The Compton's Cafeteria riot in San Francisco. And I think 1967 was a pretty big riot, actually. It was a transgender riot where transgender women who were working the tenderloin as sex workers because they couldn't get work anywhere else. They were just sick of being brutalized by cops, and one of them was being arrested for being transgender, and she threw a cup of coffee in the cops face, and the whole riot, the place just rioted. It was just an explosion of violence in the face of brutality. And none of the papers mentioned it didn't even get mentioned. Yeah, like the mainstream media would not touch anything that gay people were doing, including rioting in the streets of San Francisco. They just wouldn't talk about it. Well, yeah, like I said, the times, while they did cover it, it wasn't a back pages thing, but it definitely didn't get the attention that any other kind of violence against police would have gotten at the time. Right. But the LGBTQ community, they just didn't stop. Basically, they said, we're going to turn these into groups and marches and rallies and parades and protests. And that was really the significance and the legacy that stonewall had today, is that it really just was sort of a pardon the pun kind of a coming out party for the entire movement. Yeah, it was a debutante. Paul for the gay community, it was. Yeah. That's pretty cool. I think that was the key, was organizing, like taking that momentum and organizing it and turning it into something big. I think that's probably the key with anything like that. Yeah. And I think it brought together the community in a way that it hadn't before. It seems like they always sort of supported one another, but there are in our divisions of kind of straight acting, masculine gay men and lesbians and the trans community, but this seemed to bring everyone together of all races, and just apparently the entire riot and protest scene was just incredibly diverse. Right. Don't watch the movies. Yeah, they're bad. Yes. One of the heroes in one turns straight and marries a police woman in the end. I mean, the documentaries are good, but there's been two movies, 95 in 2015. The one in 2015, Roland Emerick made this movie. Why is that name familiar? I know that name. He did independence Day and Godzilla. Oh, okay. I have no idea what he was doing with this thing. I don't know. Maybe he's gay. Maybe his heart was in the right place. I have no idea. I don't know anything about the guy, but all I know is he was roundly criticized for whitewashing what happened? And he said it was fictionalized. But why fictionalize it? Why just cast a bunch of handsome white dudes when you can tell the real story, right? Yeah. And it's like you said, you already kind of touched upon, but I think it bears repeating. Like, there's a lot of discussion about who did what and who played what role in the Stonewall uprising, and I think the transgender community in particular feels like, yet again, they're being put in the backseat behind masculine white gay males right. When, in fact, they may not have played as big a role or may have played an equally significant role to the transgender community that was there at Stonewall. But historically speaking, the transgender community or subcommittee or subculture of the gay community has usually taken a backseat to the I guess what you would just call that? White, masculine male community. Yeah, and I can understand being upset about that if you're transgender. So in 2016, and I guess I was there right after this, because it was already a monument, the Stonewall Inn and the cute little tiny Christopher Park right there next door out front was designated a national monument by President Obama, the very first such dedicated to gay rights. And the Pride March still ends on Christopher Street every year. And I say, go and have a drink there. It's a truly historic place, and it's a landmark. I would guess now they've cleaned it up enough so you won't catch anything from the house. Beer? Yeah, they don't have buckets of beer. Well, they might have buckets of beer, but it's Coronas in a bucket of ice. I got you. Yeah. Find your beach. You got anything else? No, man. Go watch the Stonewall Uprising american experience documentary, everybody, especially the footage of that first Pride parade when it ends in the park. It'll just do your heart good. Agreed. If you want to know more about the Stonewall Uprising, you can type Stonewall in the search barhouseofworks.com, and it will bring up this excellent article by The Grabster. And since I said the grabster, it's time for listener mail. You know what? We're going to forgo listener mail this week in favor of our annual call for itunes reviews. Awesome. How about that? So one thing that always helps the podcast out, people are always asking what they can do besides spreading the word is if you go and leave a review on itunes or I guess it's now Apple podcasts, right? It helps us out. And even if it's bad, well, that didn't help us. But no, that doesn't help. Don't listen to Chuck. Everybody. Listen to the first part, but not the second part. Just leave your honest review and assessment and all that helps us out. And it's been very effective over the years at keeping us viable and vital, vim and vigor. Yeah, we'll be back next week with listener mail, but we would very much appreciate that. Well, thanks. And if you want to let us know that you left us a nice review so we can say thank you, you can tweet to us at syskast, and I'm at Josh Clark on Twitter as well. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook at charleswchuckbryant or at facebook. Comstuffynow. You can send us an email. The stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. As always, join us at home on the Web stuffyouw.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.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 rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | |
How the Underground Railroad Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-underground-railroad-worked | As early as 1786, groups assembled to help slaves escape lives of bondage. And, as the 19th century progressed, the emergent Underground Railroad grew more sophisticated in aiding escaped slaves. But how did it work? Join Josh and Chuck to learn more. | As early as 1786, groups assembled to help slaves escape lives of bondage. And, as the 19th century progressed, the emergent Underground Railroad grew more sophisticated in aiding escaped slaves. But how did it work? Join Josh and Chuck to learn more. | Tue, 07 Jun 2011 18:48:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=18, tm_min=48, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=158, tm_isdst=0) | 33664609 | 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 podcast. The Neogen Device, developed by Rst Synthesis, is a well established, advanced quantum based 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 Neogenreliefspain.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenrelievespane.com. Your patience will thank you. 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 and with me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, which makes this Stuff You Should Know, the podcast because Chuck and I are the host of that hostesses no hostess. Chuck? Yes. How are you? I'm great, man. How are you? I'm fine. It's you and I and Matt, our guest producer. Yea, mattie alone in this entire building. Yeah, it's the Friday before Memorial Day. Friday afternoon, even. And it's pretty empty in here. Yes, it is. There's lots of echoes that we're going to have to adjust for and post. Right. Do we do post anymore or is this like basically just live to tape? Just live to tape. At least we're not getting hateful stairs as we walk through the office. Yeah, it's refreshing. So, Chuck, as you know, I grew up in Ohio. I was hoping you would mentioned this. Well, I grew up in Ohio. Your hopes are fulfilled. Another reason why well, it turns out I recently learned from this article on how the underground railroad worked. We talked about how this is going to be problematic, that an estimated half of all underground railroad workers were from Ohio or lived in Ohio or part of Ohio. I had no idea. But reading that, it makes sense because that was such a part of my upbringing as a child. Everybody's house that was built in like the 19th or 18th century had like, oh, this is where they kept the freed slaves in the underground. Everybody's house had like a little spot that supposedly was part of the underground rover just to have that heritage or some real some were more believable than others. Right. But normally it was like a public building or like a national historic register building that they gave tours to that was part of the underground Railroad, but everybody's house had a little spot in the basement where yes. Conceivably human beings could stand here and hide out. Yeah. See, I grew up in Georgia, so that we didn't have those talks. No. And apparently in this article, the author points out, and I don't know where she got this, but that there are still blemishes on families who are known to have helped slaves on the Underground Railroad in the south still today. I totally don't know what she's talking about. I thought that was completely out of left field. It was. I grew up in this state, and I've never heard anybody be like the guy that lives down the street. Their family used to hide slaves 200 years. That's not true. But you were familiar with the Underground Railroad before this article. I was, but it's a good time to point out that not nearly enough, because black history is so glossed over in American schools, except in February, and it's still even in February that I went through all my schooling with just knowing, like, there was an Underground Railroad and Harriet Tubman ran it. That's it. Period. Never learned about Malcolm X. I think dred. Scott may have been mentioned briefly, but yeah, it's very sad. Yeah. And hopefully that's changed some since then. Well, for the listeners who had similar experiences, we're about to remedy that, because we're going to tell you not only how it works, we're going to tell you in so much detail that you could conceivably go start your own right now. Right. And there are some still around today. Yeah. Human trafficking. Yes. Human trafficking is the new word for slavery, basically, where it usually is forced into sex work. Right. And there are groups who are dedicated to freeing sex workers from forced labor. They're called Polaris, which is renaming of the North Star. Yeah. And then others. We should do a podcast on human trafficking. I think we have a good article on that. Okay. That Molly wrote, if I'm not mistaken. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Are you ready? Yeah, let's do it. All right. So, Chuck, basically, the origins of the Underground Railroad, which was the network by which escaped slaves ran along to freedom, almost always to Canada if they were going north, as it turns out, probably started before the 1820s, but it couldn't possibly be called the Underground Railroad until after the 1820s, because the actual railroad system wasn't invented until then. Either that or they were, like, way ahead of their time. Right. But it may have had some sort of name. And we know that there were groups of people who were formed for the common purpose of aiding escape slaves to go secure freedom to get out of the south or get out of a slave state into protection in a non slave state, because George Washington complained about it in a letter in 1786 that he suspected some Quakers that helped some of his slaves escape. He was probably right on the money, too. Yeah. Because Quakers were one of the earliest members of the Underground Railroad, and they were the most trusted because they were so recognizable and everybody knew, hey, Quakers will help you out. Definitely the most trusted white people, for sure. Right. But we should probably point out the reason everybody went to Canada was because there was a Federal law in the US. Right? That's right. What was it called? It was called the Fugitive Slave Act of 1093, and it was around since 1793, but it really got its teeth in 1850 when it strengthened the fines and basically made helping a slave escape a Federal crime. And then in nonslave states as well. Yeah. And pretty much meant if you were caught as a slave, you were going to be put to death and likely tortured in a public place. And maybe even your slave family or friends that you were with on the plantation were also punished even though they didn't try to escape. So anyone involved in this, and even not being involved, but being involved by a relationship or something like that, really had a lot to lose from this one person making it to freedom, which really it's just very heartening when you look back on what these people did. They risked a lot in the 1850 stiffening of the Slave Act. Right. If you armed a slave, which is routinely done because this is dangerous, then you were subject to execution no matter who you were. White, black, whatever, that was punishable by being executed. So people who are helping escape slaves were putting a lot on the line. Right? Yeah. And one of the myths there's a few myths that even this article kind of perpetuates a bit. Not rarely, but more often than not, they were other black people or former slaves or current slaves helping the other slaves on the Underground Railroad. It was not a big, happy group of white Northern abolitionists risking their life to help out the slaves. They did that some, but it was usually Quakers or like I said before, slaves or former slaves. Okay, so that's one myth. There's a few others. Well, let's go through this. What did an escape look like right along the Underground Railroad during its height in the mid 19th century? What would happen was free black people would send a field agent, what they called a field agent, a lot of times a minister or doctor posing as, like, a census taker, anybody who could move throughout the community undetected. Yeah. So they would make contact with a current slave who supposedly wanted to escape, and they had to gain their trust, because this whole thing was about trust. You really had to trust because people would sell out their own kind to gain favor with the master sometimes. So sometimes you couldn't even trust your fellow slave. So you really had to gain their trust as the field agent, and then they would eventually, once that trust was gained, arrange for the escape from the plantation to travel to the first safe house to a conductor actually I'm sorry, they pass along to the conductor who would take you to your first station. Yes. And that was the beginning of the journey. Right. And the station was basically somebody's house, usually. Yeah. And the head of the household was the station master, and there was somebody who was putting his life and the life of his families on the line, feed and house and hide this person for a little while, possibly set them up with the disguise, which they got fairly elaborate. Yeah. There's a story of one, and apparently with a seminal work on the underground Railroad, appropriately titled The Underground Railroad written by Wilbur Seabird. Right. And he talks about how a black woman was basically made up to look like a wealthy white woman and to complete this disguise, was given a white baby for her journey. It's crazy. Yeah. So people were fanatic about this. I read another one, a couple from Savannah. The woman was the daughter of her slave owner, and her mother was a slave, a house servant, I believe. So she was light skinned, so they had her pose as a frail, aging white man, and her husband posed as, like, a loyal servant slave on their journey. All the way from Spain, I think, Philadelphia or Boston, but yeah, that was kind of harrowing. Apparently, they were almost found out a bunch of times. Really? Yeah. So I can imagine, like, just trying to escape through the woods is scary enough. Trying to escape disguised in plain sight has to just be nerve wracking. Yeah. Especially the lady with a white baby, because I imagine that whoever might have found her out would not have been too happy about that. No. At the time, at least along the way, if you did maybe encounter a train conductor who found you out but was willing to keep his mouth shut for money, you needed money. Most slaves didn't have money because they were not paid. Right. And I guess at the station, the station master might also hook you up with some money that came from what are called stockholders. Right. And stockholders were probably wealthy abolitionists who didn't really want to get their hands dirty, but were happy to support the cause financially. True. Right. Yeah. And I didn't get I mean, were they just people who supported the cause basically financially? Yeah. But obviously in their hearts as well. Sure. Now I know what you mean, though. They didn't risk walking people through the woods. No. And abolitionists, despite their desire to end slavery, were frequently accused, and rightfully so, in a lot of cases of saying, we think slavery is abominable, but you're freed, and that's great, but go live over there. We still want to just have our very little white parties and lives and all that. Right. And there were a lot of abolitions like that. So I would imagine that just giving money to people to use for bribes or for travel or to support these station houses probably really hit home. It's the same thing today. Yeah. Like, people don't go help, say, the homeless, you're absolving your guilt. They give money to organizations that actually deal with the homeless. Right. I think that this is very similar to that. 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About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenrelievespane.com. Your patience will thank you. Runaways usually didn't travel alone, although, again, I read somewhere else on one of the websites that a lot of times they were alone, but when they weren't, they would have a conductor guide them to the next station, usually about a day away. They didn't want to make it like a three day journey because you probably don't have tons of food and water, and it's just more dangerous the further you're going. Right. Not between station houses. The journey itself to freedom. Last days, weeks, months, each station was about a day away, ideally. Right. They would follow the North Star. Yeah. That's why that one modern polaris. Yeah, that's why it's called that full circle. Yes. When the clouds were out, there's the old trick of looking at where the moss grows, because on tree trunks, moss usually grows on the north side and you wanted to be headed north. There were instances where, because they made it a very zigzagging route, usually they didn't want to make it a straight line, so it made it easier to track, but it also made it easier to get lost as a slave. It did. And actually, there's a sidebar toward the end of this talking about quilt patterns. Right. And there are codes embedded within that may be a myth. I found a substantial amount of it. Really? See, I found stuff saying that was, like, mythical, that in the songs. Check out Osblackhistory.com. They have this list, this key, of what all these different quilt patterns are and what they meant to slaves who came upon a quilt. And one of them was this kind of zigzag x. It's called the drunken path. And basically it's saying like, go in a zigzag pattern because there's guys out there's, slave hunters around. And if you started walking south, they would be less likely to suspect that you were an escaped slave if you looked like you were purposefully walking south. Because what, slave would walk south? That's where the south is, right? Yeah, that's good point. But I mean, if it is made up, the schedule a good job of perpetuating it, because it's very interesting. Well, even in here it says it's one of the well known legends or not. They just don't know because a lot of this stuff and it's good that you bring that up. A lot we don't know about because the Underground Railroad was secret, so we don't know about a lot of the places, we don't know a lot of the routes or the people who work there or who actually started it. Josh also, I mentioned the moss on the trees. Clear nights were better to see the stars, but traveling in the rain was pretty good, too, because fat white plantation owner probably wanted to be inside by the fire when it was raining and not chasing after his slaves. So let's talk about the laws. We mentioned it kind of specifically earlier about some of the, I guess the punishment that could befall anyone helping somebody, right? Yeah. And in 1793, the Fugitive Slave Act basically created the first laws that said an escaped slave can be gone and gotten legally. Right. But there were slave states and there were non slave states, and the non slave states said that's a great law and you do whatever you want down in the south, but we're not really going to enforce it. And when we do, it's going to be very light. Right. Well, in 1850, this thing got a lot of teeth, like you were saying, and the fines were stepped up, the penalties were harsher, execution was a lot more doable, I guess. And then it also became legal for slave hunters to walk into a free state, a non slave state, and be like, hey, that black guy right there, I think he's an escaped slave. He should come with me to anybody. He could legally claim it without having to justify, even if they were free men. Yes. And apparently there were rumors of slave traders like luring young black kids in free states on the boats and then taking them off to the Deep South. It's like, what are you going to do? How are you going to find these people? There's no documentation like this. So basically the north came to really resent this change in the law in 1850 because people who are complacent living in non slave states, suddenly we're kind of having slavery imposed upon them a little more. Right. And then the Dred Scott case, like you mentioned, earlier that really sealed the deal and really got abolitionists, I guess their roles expanded tremendously after that, and then as a result, also, the underground railroad became much more organized. Yeah. That is Dred. Scott V. Sanford. And it was famous because Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom, for himself and his wife and his two daughters, and on the grounds that they lived quite a bit of their lives in places like Wisconsin and Minnesota and these outlying northwest territories or northern territories that had where it was illegal. Slavery was actually illegal. So he sued on those grounds, and in one of probably the worst supreme court decisions in the history of this country, they decided because the panel was full of southerners. The panel supreme court justices were a lot of southerners, and they ruled that black people were not or people of African descent, were not citizens of the United States. Free or not, they are not citizens. Therefore they cannot sue for their freedom. Right. They don't have any rights. So they can be basically captured and taken to a life of slavery again. But if it hadn't been for the dread Scott case, we may never have well, we may have, but it really sped up the process of the 13th amendment, the emancipation proclamation, and hence the civil war, and hence the civil war. And some of his descendants still live in St. Louis today. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, shout out to the Scotts of St. Louis if you're listening. Yes. And Chuck, we said that this precipitated the civil war. The underground railroad helped move it along. The dread Scott case, basically, these things, northerners actively subverting federal law, and the south economic clout really took the south off the south, imposing its views on slavery on the north through this 1850 strengthening. In the dred Scott case, it really ticked off the north. So this division is very much part of what led up to the civil war. Yeah. Pennsylvania even thought about nullifying the fugitive slave act. They didn't like it so much, but then they decided, you know what a better way to do this is probably to be subversive and to support things like the underground railroad on the down low rather than cause some big political stink. Write a check. Exactly right. So we say that because the civil war, whenever you ask a kid, why did the civil war happened? Slavery. I mean, that's a big part of it. But that's why it's not just slavery. It wasn't like the north was like, slavery is wrong, and we're going to go to war with you over it, or the south was like, we love slavery. We're not part of you any longer. Right. Although the latter I've heard recently was much closer to the point that the south was perfectly happy with seceding, creating its own country and basically creating an economic empire based on free labor that took over the entire Caribbean. In the southern US. Yes. I wish I was more of a Civil War buff. I'm glad you're not Chuck. Really? Yeah. They're obnoxious. I wouldn't say obnoxious, but, man, do they know a lot about Civil War. Yeah. And they like correcting people, too. Yeah. And we're going to hear from them. Yes. So, Chuck, when you did finally make it out along this route up to the extreme Northern states, the northern part of the extreme Northern states and Canada, it could take days, weeks, months. It could take 24 hours if you happen to have the money and the gall to ride a train or if you live in a border state. Yeah. Which apparently is why a lot of slaves never escape from the Deep South. Longer to go. It was longer to go. And they wouldn't have taken the Underground Railroad, which went exclusively north, I believe. Right. They would have gone to Florida or to Mexico. Never knew that. So Mexico in 1829 outlawed slavery and became active in protecting slaves who escape to Mexico. Yeah. Native American Indians, go figure, were very empathetic. They were probably like, Join the club, my man. Come on in. Almost literally. Chuck. So in Florida, in 1693, Spain said, we're issuing a decree here that says any slave or Native American who leads an English colony and makes it to Florida is a free floridian, a free member of the Spanish Crown. Right. All we want from you is that you convert to a Catholic, convert to Catholicism, and become a member of the military for a prescribed amount of time. Right. And in return, you're a citizen here. Right. So that's why Florida attracted a bunch of people. And the reason they did it was specifically to attract people from the English territories, like Georgia, South Carolina, because they wanted to jumpstart the economic engine, but they weren't going to do it on slavery. Right. I wonder what impact that has today. I wonder if there are more African American Catholics in Florida proportionately because of that. Well, one of the impacts that still around a day are the Seminoles. The Seminoles were a recent tribe that started in about the 18th century based on displaced Creek Indians who made it to Florida to take Spain up on their offer and escape slaves. Really? And now there's a division in the Seminole tribe between Black Seminoles and red Seminoles. They don't always get along, but during this time, the seminal Indians came up because in a lot of cases, black slaves, freed slaves, or escaped slaves would come up to an Indian sentiment, live near it or be absorbed into it. And that's where the Seminoles came from. That's pretty cool. There's really one jerk in this whole thing, and that's white. Yeah, our ancestors check they were white Northerners, too. It's not all in the south. White Northerners, sure. Probably. Yeah. Anyway, I'm just always stick up for the south as well. Well, think about it. There were an estimated 2000 to 3000 Underground Railroad workers. There were a lot more people in the US in the north and the south than that at the time, buddy. Yeah, that's a good point. It is interesting, though, to me that you said Canada because that was where many of them ended up and I never knew that. And it made sense because why go to Pennsylvania even though they're sympathetic to a certain degree when the Fugitive Slave Act still is hanging over my head and somebody could turn me in for some dough if they wanted to. Yeah, let's just go to Canada where they don't care and they don't have those laws. Plus, it's not like you're going to just stop in Detroit. You're going to be like, oh, no, I'm going to keep moving to Canada. So we were saying that there was some involvement by some people. There was separate involvement, disconnected involvement, whatever. But some of the people, some of these abolitionists and freed slaves and escaped slaves who have made lives for themselves, formed in these northern non slave states and enclaves where an escaped slave can feel very free. Like Boston, philadelphia, I think. New York. They formed these things called vigilance committees, right? Yeah, it's very nice. They provided some protection for them, tried to get them work, trying to get them a place to live. And it's just sort of like, hey, now, you're safe now, and we're going to help you set up life as an American and get something that everyone in this country should be born with, which is freedom. Right. And here's a credit card to enslave you in a different way that came later and that touched all races. It did, yes. So, Chuck, there's one person who kind of rose above all others as far as the Underground Railroad went, and her name was Harriet Tubman is still referred to as the Moses of her people. Yeah. It is not a cliche to bring up Harriet Tubman. Of course you're going to bring up Harry Tubman. Of course we are, because she was the Moses of her people. She was an escape slave from Maryland. And very sadly, I went back to get her family and help them escape. Found her husband, had a new wife and he was like, yeah, to stay here. Yeah. And she wasn't too happy with that, clearly. So she reportedly books a kind of hardened her a little bit, which in the end helped her because you sort of needed a bit of a hard heart to lead people on the Underground Railroad. You didn't need whiners and criers and people that would draw attention and make noise. Yeah. Apparently she would threaten to kill people if they didn't. Shut up. Yeah. Like, quiet down, I'm trying to get you to freedom. Just shut up about it was her motto, officially, I think. And she was individually probably the most successful conductor on the Underground railroad, right? Yeah, I think at least 70 slaves that she led to freedom, to New York and Canada personally, 13 journeys. And these are long trips. Well, think about it. Also, she's an escaped slave. She goes back into slave states 13 times to guide people out. Very bad. She's a big bad mama. She went on to serve as a spy, as a scout and a nurse for the Union army and received no military wartime pension for that, even though she was Harriet Tubman and went on to sell fruits and vegetables door to door. You're joking. And wrote a book and lived off profits from her book. She actually made money off of it, which is good. 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. 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 neogenreliefspane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's neogenrelievespane.com. Your patience will thank you. Yes. So, Chuck, you're to talk about how many people were let out. We mentioned Harriet Tubman let at least 70 out personally, and estimates vary wildly as to how many people escaped. As we said, the heyday of the Underground railroad was 1820s to the 1860s. Yeah. Some people maintain about 100,000 people escape, which is huge. Yes. On the other end, the Journal of Black studies estimates between 1830 and 60, only about 2000 people escaped via the underground railroad. The National Park Service settles somewhere in the middle and says 1000 per year. Yeah, it's a lot, but again, it's very secretive. People have no idea whether a house really was a stop. There are some places that are most decidedly parts of the underground Railroad that are still around today, like the Dobbin Horse Tavern in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania has movable bookcase that people used to hide in. It was a house at the time, but because of the secrecy and because of the success of it, we have no idea who is a part of it, who wasn't. And that's pretty neat, I think. But the National Park Service has really spent a lot of time and effort and money so far figuring out where the underground Railroad ran and who was a part of it and what feelings were and to preserve the buildings. And there's actually. A bike trail that you can ride, I think, 2200 miles or something like that, along established, identified Underground Railroad routes. Yeah, pretty cool. I just wanted to point out, when you said, America's, checkered history, I still feel England stank on this. Yes. It was early enough to wear it wasn't, like, rednecks from the south. These are still, like, English fox doing this stuff. So I blame England. All right? You blame England. I'm trying to figure out when my line is drawn and when I'm saying this was America, because even after the Revolutionary, were still just people from England living here. Okay, so England is your fault. Take that, England. And is Canada the big hero to you in this? Yeah, of course, man. You know, that's still a territory of the English crown. Oh, really? Yeah. Chew on that one, pal. I don't know what to think. So wait, before we go, we have to mention John Brown. We talked about how a lot of people were like, here's some money. I'll be a stockholder in the Underground Rover and impress my friends. John Brown walked the walk. He lived in free black colonies. If he didn't do it himself. He oversaw the murder of five unarmed proslavery settlers in Kansas, which was up for grabs between slavery and a non slavery state. Right. And he basically turned into a gorilla and staged raids on pro slave resettlements and killed lots of people. And then he staged the raid on Harper's Ferry and was eventually caught and hanged for it. But he was as far as the abolitionists go, he was, I guess you could say, equal to Harriet Tubman as far as in the abolitionist camp, where she was in the freed slaves camp. He was hands on and did it. Did you hear the Box Car guy who packed himself up in a box and had himself shipped to Philadelphia? No. Did it work? Yeah. Awesome. He had some biscuits and a little bit of water and some air holes, and I think his nickname is Box Car. I can't remember his full name, but they opened up the crate in Philadelphia and he climbed out and they were like, Congratulations, you're free, man. Holy cow. So the bravery, I mean, not just the slaves themselves, people who helped the bravery of these people at the time cannot be understated. Agreed. Because you were getting tortured and killed if you were caught, and all for your freedom. That's all you were looking for. Pretty heavy stuff. Yes. So, Chuck, if they want to learn more about the Underground Railroad, they should type in Underground Railroad in the search bar. Howstep works.com. Right. And that, of course, brings up listener mail. And, you know, I bet the ladies from Stuff you missed in history class have probably done one on this already. I believe so. And so I would seek that out for another angle, because sometimes we double up, and it's always good to hear different angles on these things. Yeah, and they're a great choice too. And you can compare it word for word eventually by comparing the transcripts on the blogs. Right. They're like they were a lot more factual than Chuck and Josh. All right, Josh. I'm going to call this a critical email from Katie. We don't read a lot of criticism as much, but this was very specific, so I thought we would hi, Chuck and Josh. I'm a new listener, but I recently listened to about 60 of your shows. I am 31 years old and worked as a film producer. You guys have really grown on me slowly. The concept of the show is the best part. I think there are a few things that are keeping you guys from really going big and would like to share my thoughts. First, I think the podcasts are a bit slow and have a few too many personal jokes every time Chuck has a personal story to go along with the topic. This is the least entertaining and interesting. Your personal relationships to the topic are mundane. Sorry, this should be cut. The banter is good. You are clearly smart and witty and that is enough to keep the listener engaged. Josh, your intros are so boring. Why not mix it up and or cut the small talk? I fast forward past it every time and I think your listener mail is the worst part of the podcast. I think you lose at least half, if not more of your listeners at this part. Save that stuff for the blog. The podcasts themselves need to be solid and tight. The production value fails in comparison to this American life for Planet money. For these reasons, I would highly suggest getting a new producer taking hot Chinese at Jerry. This is so wrong. You need a makeover big time. You need new music in your intros and throughout the show, perhaps sound effects and more out of studio commentary. Some of my favorite podcasts are saunas, Hangovers, Cremation, sherpas, Reincarnation, Mummies and altitude. Basically go be radio lab. I listened to your Guatemala pieces while I was traveling Guatemala last week. Pretty cool. In hopes of supplementing my education about the country while traveling there. But you failed miserably. Actually, she says it failed miserable. I get the point though. They were my least favorite podcasts you guys have done, and I think you genuinely wasted your listeners time with your personal pointless stories about your free vacation. I was shocked to learn how small your perspective of the world is, considering how often you both write and research about the world. Your impressions of Guatemala sounded like you've never left the south. They were naive and not worthy of 2 hours of my time. On the other hand, it was fantastic to listen how volcanoes work while climbing volcanoes in Antigua. This is what you guys are best at and you need to stick to this, but it needs to be better. Seriously, you have mastered the podcast medium, but there is so much potential yet to be tapped. She says taped, but I guess she needs tapped. I hope you guys continue to make great podcasts and that you really up the production value. Thank you, Katie. MPs. I happen to own a house in Turkey and have spent much time in Turkish baths. You define them incorrectly in your sono podcast. Who is that? Katie? Yes. Katie M thank you, Katie, for the tips. We appreciate the insight, and thanks for listening. I don't know why, but thank you for listening. Right. Well, we've mastered the medium okay. Except for the 60 points. Well, if you have any pointers for us or tips, we want to hear them. We're always open to that kind of thing, so shoot us an email at stuffpodcast@houseteports.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House Deforc 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. 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 play time, give epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | ||
2103427a-121b-11eb-85ed-279eb867c48b | Short Stuff: Garter Snakes | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-garter-snakes | Garter snakes aren’t scary, they’re pretty great! Learn all the reasons why in this episode! | Garter snakes aren’t scary, they’re pretty great! Learn all the reasons why in this episode! | Wed, 12 May 2021 12:16:40 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=12, tm_min=16, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=132, tm_isdst=0) | 10958513 | 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 hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's over there sent in for Dave, who's editing this. Hey, Dave. Hey, Dave. And this means say, hey, Dave, everybody. Now Dave is not allowed to talk either. We can't play favorites. No, I'm telling the listeners to say hi to Dave. No don't even know. Okay, well, let's just forget all that and just start with the short stuff about the harmless garter snake, who is not only harmless is actually helpful, especially if you garden. That's right. I love garter snakes. I love it when I happened upon them. I love to pick them up and hold them for a second before I release them back into the wild very gently. Do you nuzzle them? Sure. I had one bite me once. Really? Where? Just, like on the finger. It's cute. It's an adorable little attempt at a bite. This one was really little. And I was just like, look at you. You think you're all tough, right? And I acted like I was scared. I was like, oh. And I put it down just so it felt good about itself. Well, that was really kind of you. What a benevolent human you are. They will a little harmless garter snake will try and bite you because a snake is going to snake. But for many years, they thought they had no toxicity whatsoever, but they actually do have toxic neurotoxic venom. It's adorable because it's so little of it and it's so mild that it doesn't even harm a human. Right now, if you're like a little tiny field mouse, you probably don't find it very adorable because it will mess you up. But yeah, as far as humans are concerned, unless you have a very rare and specific allergy to garters snake venom, even then, from what I saw, I think the worst you're going to face is a skin irritation at the bite site, but for the most part, up, too. You did you're like, oh, my gosh, this allergy my hand is ten times the normal size. Yeah, the snake was like, pucked his little chest out. He's very happy. So, yeah, for the most part, they're just not going to hurt you if you're a human. But even more than that, garter snakes are notoriously shy. They don't want to have anything to do with you. They don't want to try to get near you. They don't want to try and hurt your pet or your kid or anything. They just want to kind of coexist peacefully and remotely from you in your yard, in your garden, and again, to kind of help you out. Yeah, and it says in here and we'll talk about where they got their name, but it says that there are sometimes erroneously called garden snakes. I don't think that's erroneous I think that can just be a sort of a common name for them since you find them in the garden. I don't think anyone thinks that's the official scientific name, do they? I will tell you who thinks it's wrong. Yeah, wildlife biologist who says, who gives the most improbable explanation for the name garter snake I've ever heard, actually. Which one is improbable to you? The fact that the stripes resemble the garters that men used to wear as sock garters used to. I've got sock garters on right now. It's like Crusty the Clown. He's trying to be relatable. He's like, yeah, when your butler doesn't get all the schmutz off of your socks. Carters and Jay Leno said, no, not quite that. Yeah, I guess it does seem a little improbable. I think the other one makes a little more sense is that the German word for garden is garten. And it might have been just a different corruption, I guess, with that German version. Yeah, which would make sense, because, again, these are like a gardener's best friend in the United States. Sometimes they're called gardener snakes. Anyway, so I would find that more likely than the sock garter story that Weckler's pedaling. Agreed. And it's not like he wrote a book called Garter Snakes. Oh, wait a minute. He did. He did. I feel bad. If this gets back to him. I'm sure it's a great book, Doug, and well done. Yeah, you can get it. It's published by Power Kids back in 2001, and it's probably basically Evergreen plus, it's not like he's just a slouch, too. He's with the Academy of Natural Sciences at Drexel University in Philly. So he's not just some guy. He's just promoting a terrible explanation for where the garden snakes should we take a break? I think so. All right, let's do it. 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 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 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. Great, man. We got an urgent locate and destroy Sierra six stone asset of considerable value to the agency. That could be fine. The man's got some street cred. Something they really want. What you got? It's going to be my funeral. You're going to next. I'm about to put a hit so big on your boys 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 is a little bruised. Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana De Armas and Billy Bob Thornton. Want to make an omelet, you got to kill some people. The uncatchable meets the unstoppable. They 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, here's what surprised me about the garter snake is that it is the state reptile in Massachusetts. That is very surprising. Did not know that. And they're all over North America, from Canada to Florida. Probably one of the most abundant and common snakes in North America. Yeah, and it's particularly abundant in the eastern US. But it goes all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It's just everywhere, america's snake. And they're very frequently in places that you have no idea. Again, they kind of try to stay away as much as possible. They're fairly small. They usually are about anywhere from 18 inches to 54 inches, which is under 5ft. They're very light. They weigh less than half a pound. Typically they're just tiny little snakes. And then they've got these three stripes that if you see it, you're like, gosh, that looks just like a sock garter. Yeah. They have, I think, one stripe down the back and then a couple on each side of the belly. But there are 35 species, so they're different kinds. There can be spots on some and the colors can range from kind of olive to brown to black to gray. The fact of the show for me, I don't know how I got to 50 years old and never knew that Alaska didn't have snakes. Right. Did you know that? I did not. For some reason, it's snakes. It's ringing like the most minute bell in my head that we've covered it before somewhere. I was shocked by that because I just figured, like any huge natural woodland paradise, there would be snakes everywhere. But there are no snakes in Alaska. Yeah, I think it's just generally too cold up there. But it's amazing. In 2005, somebody found a garter snake that had been killed on the road and the Journal of Herpetology published a study by researchers who studied this thing, tried to figure out where it came from. So they studied its DNA and they said that it's either from a relic or remnant population or it was a recent natural colonization or a fresh introduction. And if you take all these explanations together, you see that they say, we have no idea how the snake got here, is what we're saying. Take your pick. Yeah. It's funny, I was like, is there literally one other possibility of how the snake got there? Unless you talk about like it fell from outer space. Right. Dropped by the hand of God himself. Or herself. Exactly. Or herself, yes, that's right. So these snakes are very active. They are active during the day, they're active during the night. If you are a gardener at your house, that's where you're probably going to find them. If you're doing some weeding or something, all of a sudden one will just go yeah. And you'll see them slithering away as fast as possible. That's exactly what they do, too. But they are good for your garden. They'll eat pests, they late little rodents. They'll eat insects. Slugs. Sure, get rid of the slugs. Snails. Yeah. Grasshoppers. Like all these things are things that like eat your garden and the garden snake sorry, garter snake eats these things for you. So it's like a natural pest. Clearer. That, again, doesn't want to hurt your dog. It doesn't want to hurt your dog or your kid or whatever. And in fact, it can be a really fun way to introduce your kid to snakes and let them hold a guard or snake because they're kind of fun to hold. And you can get rid of some of that fear of snakes that we tried so hard to dispel in our snakes episode. Right. It's a good starter to teach your kid how to create their own freaky thing that's like their thing that they're known for throughout high school. It's a starter snake. I love it. Sure, you can't have them as pets, but they say if you find one in your garden, just let it go. Don't take that thing inside. It's a wild animal. It may even be against the law, depending on where you live, but also they actually do breed garter snakes as pets. And I would guess it's probably better for the garter snake to be born in captivity and kept in captivity than raised in the wild and brought into a 30 gallon aquarium. Right. The other thing about garter snakes that you'll notice, too, is, again, they're venomous, but they're harmless to humans. And one of the reasons people thought they were non venomous for so long is because their head is about the same size as, like, the rest of their body. And that's usually a big differentiator, just as a rule of thumb, a thumb that you want to keep away from whatever snake you're sizing up at that moment, that if the head is about the same size as the body, it's probably not venomous. Yeah, here in the United States, for sure. I've seen a lot of, erroneous, hard and fast rules that aren't really always hard and fast, but definitely if you see a snake that has a big sort of diamond shaped head, give it some space. It would just be my advice. It might be fine, but give it space anyway. Especially if it's making a rattling sound with its tail. Yeah, that's a dead giveaway. There's one other thing about garter snakes, too, that you should know that if you are going to get curious and pick it up, which is mean, again, they're very shy, they don't want to have anything to do with you and they certainly don't want to be picked up. It may not only bite you on the finger, like the one bit chuck, but it also could emit a foul smell. They're very well known, snakes generally do this, but garter snakes are well known for basically spraying poop, pea and musk combo out. And that makes you want to drop it because you're just like, yeah, and you should play that up too, because they like getting props for that, too. Like, oh my God, the smell. I can't take it. It's a very nice chuck. I love it. You got anything else? I have nothing else, sir. Well, then, that's it for short stuff, everybody. Hope you enjoyed. Be kind to garter snakes. I think that's the big takeaway from this one, which means 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." | |
Will computers replace doctors? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/will-computers-replace-doctors | With savvy and health-conscious people taking control of their wellbeing through apps and sites, technology is meeting the desire for individuals' responsibility for their health. But is the day coming soon when doctors will be obsolete, replaced by compu | With savvy and health-conscious people taking control of their wellbeing through apps and sites, technology is meeting the desire for individuals' responsibility for their health. But is the day coming soon when doctors will be obsolete, replaced by compu | Tue, 04 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=35, tm_isdst=0) | 33796262 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun 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. 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant, our guest producer. Noel is here. Yes. Jerry needs a buffer day from her Christmas break. You can't say that. Sure I can't. No, she's at home on her buffer day in the freezing cold. Because we recorded these somewhat in advance. We are in the midst of the polar vortex. Yeah. Everyone's just talking about how cold it is. We're back. It is our first recording after the holidays. It's literally freezing cold out. So welcome back, buddy. Thanks. Welcome back to you, too. Even though this will be, what, like, late January, it'll be a balmy 16 Atlanta. I think the end of January is when this one comes out. All right. Well, happy New Year. Happy New Year. To you too. And happy holidays to you. Thanks. Chuck. Yes, sir. You're feeling good? You lose? You ready? I'm loose. So you see this? You've seen this before? Yeah. Your Fitbit. My Fitbit? Is that buzz marketing? Not really. It's just a really good example. I like Fitbit. I'm not necessarily loyal to it or anything like that. They don't pay me money to mention to get bites with podcast. Sometimes I'll just be like, stop staring at me. Fixed it. But no, I like it. I'm happy with it. I pointed out, though, because it's part of this to me, and I don't think it's over. Confirmation bias. It seems like there really is a growing desire among just average, ordinary people to be able to track their health, their wellbeing, their activity, and to do it easily. Yeah, we have tools now that make it like, that thing super convenient. Yeah. And Fitbit is not the only one. There's, like, Nike Fuel band. There's. Jawbone is another really good one. There's others that track your galvanic response, so they're able to put that together with respiration and heartbeat and come up with a pretty good assessment of how many calories you're burning at any given time, which is like, kind of a Holy grail with this kind of thing right now. There's others that track your sleep. There's apps out there that let you track your mood. There are sites like Quantified Self which are basically like people trying to push wearable technology like this further into the future. There's entire websites like Sharecare.com that are dedicated to health information and health support. Self advocacy. Yeah. It seems to me, this desire to kind of say, hey, this is my health. This is my body. I want to know more about it. Totally. I don't want to necessarily cut out doctors, but I want to decide if I should go to the doctor if it's time or not, and I want to use data to do that. Yeah, I imagine I frustrate a lot of doctors because I'm one of those obnoxious people that goes in and is like, well, here's what I think I have based off my research. There's nothing wrong with that. That is what you're an informed patient that's sure exactly what you're supposed to do. And if you're getting on your doctor's nerves, then go see another doctor. Yeah, I agree. I actually am in search of a new GP right now for those because and others you got on his nerves. Other reasons too. Oh, really? Cold hand? No, like poor bedside man or never seen the doctor. Like, here's my intern from Emery, which is great. I love them getting experience, but I would like them both to be in there, not just like, smell you later, and the doctor leaves. Well, that's another thing, too. It's kind of like, okay, let's just lay it out on the table here. Yeah. What you've just mentioned and what I was talking about, if you put it all together, the medical field physicians in particular are currently in the beginning of what's possibly a really pickle of a state for them, I think a transition period. Yes. But they may be transitioned right out of existence? In large part, yes. Some may, for sure, depending on who you talk to. There's, like, this whole question now, like, what is the future of medicine? And more specifically, in the case of this episode that we're talking about, do human physicians factor largely into that future? Yeah. And the answer is, I don't know. Yeah, depending on who you ask. As I said, there's this one guy, Dr. Kent Bottles, who he feels that GPS might go the way of the Dodo and be replaced by diagnostic computers, maybe with avatars. Then there are other people, like Farhad Manju. He's a technical writer. His wife is a pathologist. He thinks. No, the GPS are the ones that are going to be in business. The specialists are going to be out of business because computers are really good at specializing on one single thing, not maybe so good at a general practitioner thing. Right. So there's lots of opinions out there on how much they'll be replaced and who might be replaced. Right. As Recline wrote a column, he basically said, no, we will still need humans. Sure. But we mainly need humans to communicate to the other humans and facilitate the interaction between the robots and the humans. And we already have those are called nurses or nurse practitioners. Yeah. Ezra Klein is the one that thought that a computer avatar might have a better bedside manner than a doctor. Well, let's give that one example. There's an example I kept finding while we were doing research for this, actually. In the article on how stuff works. There was a kiosk, a medical kiosk, during a panel called Manmade Minds Colon Living with Thinking Machines. When there's a colon in there, you know, it's serious stuff. Yeah. And it was at the World Science Festival in 2011. And basically this computerized avatar interacted with a woman whose baby had diarrhea. Right. And the woman said, hey, avatar, my baby has diarrhea, what are you going to do about it? Yeah. And the avatar said, well, tell me all the symptoms and all this stuff. And avatar decided that the baby's diarrhea, while present, wasn't severe enough to warrant immediate medical attention. So I went ahead and made an appointment with a human doctor for later on that week. And the mother said that she preferred the treatment by the avatar to the real life nurses at the hospitals where she lived in New York. Yes. So it is possible to create computers with better bedside manner than, say, your GP? Well, at the very least, it will be consistent. And that's one of the things that I'm not poopooing doctors or nurses. There are many great ones. But I've also had some pretty bad experiences in emergency rooms and with doctors and nurses. With a computer, at least it's a consistent they're programmed to display empathy no matter what. They're not too busy and they're not having a bad day. Exactly. They don't have any prejudices against you personally or anything like that. They're a computer. They don't hate diarrhea. But humans respond to even programmed empathy, even synthetic empathy from a computer. I could see that a little bit. I've dove into the gaming world enough to know that the realism of an avatar can be convincing. And it's not like you think, oh, it's a real person, but it helps to put a human face on it. Exactly. Literally. Yeah. I saw a reference to a study that found people who are being treated for anxiety disorders tended to share more about their experiences and themselves with an avatar than with a human psychiatrist. Oh, that's interesting. Because they're not embarrassed to tell a real person. Yeah, that makes sense. I might open up more to a computer. Right. So we've got that part like bedside manner. It is possible that we can create machines now and are creating machines now that have at least equal, if not better, bedside manner than some physicians. Yeah. Okay. So bedside manner one of the big things that doctors bring to the table. Check. Computers have that. Yeah. It's different now than it was in the old days. I feel like just the whole quality of personal care has gone down. It's not necessarily the doctor's fault. There's a lot of reasons to place the blame, but it's not like when you were a kid and you feel like you had your family doctor who knew you maybe even gave birth, not gave birth to yourself. You're my son. Exactly. Just invested. Like, you got to stick with the same doctor if you want that kind of care, I think. Right. And there's another benefit besides bedside banner that comes with that kind of care. That kind of personal care is an awareness of your medical history. Yeah, sure. Not just that, but, oh, well, your dad died of congenital heart disorder or something like that, so you may be at higher risk of it. Totally just that kind of awareness has been typically lost, too. Even though we have medical histories and they're in our charts and they're in our files, an intimate knowledge of a patient's medical history is pretty much lost in today's modern practice of medicine. That's another thing that computers could conceivably top doctors on, which basically falls under the umbrella of diagnosis or diagnostics. Yeah. I mean, there's two sides to this. There's diagnosis and treatment and some programs. A little bit of the history this goes back to the 1970s at the University of Pittsburgh. They develop software to diagnose problems. Mass General, since the 80s, has been working on their DX plan, which provides ranked list of diagnoses, whereas what's, the computer the watson. Watson, who won at Jeopardy. Yeah. That's more based, it looks like, on treatment options than diagnosis at this point. Well, yeah, but they said I don't think they want to leave it alone with diagnosis yet. No. And to do its thing. There's already something out there for diagnosis that's meant to support physicians. From what I understand with Watson, if there is a doctor of the future, it's Watson. Yeah. He has a lot of advantages over not just human doctors, but other artificial intelligence healthcare machines, I guess you could clumsily call it. He has a knack for natural language. So let's say there's, like, a structured formula or formulaic type of language that the medical field is supposed to use, right? Yes. Okay. Health records don't always necessarily contain that language. They might contain natural language, which is really confusing for computers to take in and absorb. Yeah. Humans can pick up on meanings of things that robots and software cannot. Right. Like inferences. And we might be using sarcasm, although there's probably not going to be any sarcasm in your medical records. Yeah, but like figurative language and stuff like that. Computers a language is a big part of the problem, or more to the point, with the diagnosis patient says he feels like he has a hive of bees in his stomach, that might mean something to you or me, but to a computer, it's like, followed a bunch of bees or something. Right. Watson has the advantage of saying, okay, well, there's a sensation of bees in the stomach. There's not actually bees in the stomach. So let's figure this out. Right. Then Watson or anything that he eventually becomes will be able to go through medical records, current medical research, the patient's medical history, diagnostic tests that were done, blood work, instrument tests, and put it all together and then spit out a list of diagnoses with different confidence levels. So the one at the top is the one that Watson says is he is 98.97% sure is what's wrong with this patient. And as a diagnostician, that's pretty impressive. And that's using all the available data that's available also to human physicians, but they simply don't have the time to take it all in. Yeah, I think some research said that 80% of doctors spend less than 5 hours a week reading medical journals a month. A month? Yeah. Yeah. So these things can read thousands in seconds. So it's sort of a matter of efficiency, really. And if doctors don't have time to read all this stuff I know we looked into this one, sort of a savant diagnosis. Is that a word? Diagnostician. Diagnostician, yeah. Dr. Daliwal in San Francisco, he's sort of legendary for diagnosing things to the point where he does it on stage as almost like a parlor trick. I would love to see it. I would, too. They give him 45 minutes and a bunch of symptoms, basically, like, really confusing because they're trying to stump them. Right. And generally he comes out on top. But he even uses a program, a diagnostic program called Isabelle. Right. That's the one I said earlier that's already here. Yeah. So doctors are using these to help themselves out. But he says that he's never had Isabelle offer diagnosis that he has missed. Right, but he's like the dude, though. Yes. And he also admits that he's like, I'm a freak of nature. Right. Go ahead, quiz me. Exactly. He also reads case histories, like, for fun, that kind of stuff. He's not a normal physician. He's a complete and total outlier. If every physician were like this guy, then there probably wouldn't be this conversation going on right now. Yeah, you're right. But most physicians aren't. And it's not just with current medical research that they're just not aware of because they haven't had time to pick up the lancet the last few months. But it's also their training, too. Like, if a doctor is in practice for 20 years, the human brain tends to create habits because it likes to expend as little energy as possible. It's trying to be as efficient as possible. And I think the same thing happens with medical practice. You're trained, you understand, you come out of medical school with a lot of book learning, and then you put it to practice and you kind of find your niche, and along the way, you forget a lot of the stuff that you haven't done in 20 years or haven't learned about in 20 years. So it's not just current stuff, it's old stuff, too. And if you feed the Physician's Desk Reference in the Watts and one of his compatriots, all of that knowledge can be quickly indexed and researched to try to spit out a more accurate diagnosis. Yeah, I think that's a great idea. It's like partnering up with computers. It is replacing. But what they're doing with Watson is very much moving toward replacing doctors in that sense. Well, here's a scary stat. One in five diagnoses in the United States are incorrect or incomplete. One in five. And a lot of times it's not that the doctor is a jerk or not any good, but like you said, they just maybe haven't seen these cases that were written about in some obscure medical journal that the computer has scanned and indexed. Right. And Dollywall doctor Dollywell himself at freak diagnostician. Dollywood, yeah, Freak Plus, which is a wonderful place, by the way. I know you love Dollywood. Dr. Dollywal himself says a lot, even with me, a lot of it is intuition, and intuition can be wrong. That's a criticism, though, of computers as doctors. They lack intuition. There's kind of even larger than this computer's replacing doctor's conversation going on. It's kind of a conversation or a debate over whether intuition or data trumps one or the other, which one is the right way to go. Yeah, this one set, too. It says, according to an expert. I'm not sure what that means. It sounds kinky, but they said only 20% of the knowledge of physicians use to diagnose is evidence based. So that means 80% is intuition. Yeah, which also jibes and dovetails with that one in five being wrong or one in five being right. I like the idea of intuition to a certain degree, for sure. Yeah. But there's also got to be like, data backing it up. Sure. Right. So in your perfect world, and it sounds like we still have physicians, but they go back and double check themselves using a program. Yeah, but I could also be down with simple what do they call it in here? Something based diseases. Rules based chronic diseases. Yeah. Like minor things that are pretty easy to diagnose. Well, they're not even necessarily minor. We just understand them so fully sure that we say type two diabetes is going to behave and present itself like this. Yeah, but I wouldn't mind going like, it seems like once a year I get like, an upper respiratory infection. It's been three or four years in a row, and I know what the treatment is. I know how it feels. It would be great to go into a machine and have them take some stats and blow into it and hear my wheezing and give me a steroid shot and a z pack and a breathing treatment and send me on my way. That's always what clears it up. Would you care if it was a robot no. That gave you that shot? Not at all. Yeah, but I definitely would want more personal care if it was something what if it was a robot with a nice avatar, sexy avatar, maybe just a friendly one? Yeah, that was a little it would touch your forearm here or there. Yeah. Well, that might be a little creepy. Oh, really? Yeah. It was an old timey doctor who gave you some Epicac if you had diarrhea, send you on your way. Right. Drink a Coke, but it wouldn't send you on your way, give you Ipicac, and then it wouldn't let go of your forearm. Yeah. So strong. Well, surgical robots, that's a thing. I mean, we're kidding around, but they've been performing they've been performing robotic surgery since the early eighty s doctor assisted until 2010, when they were in Montreal. They performed the first fully robotic surgeries when they removed a prostate with a fully robotic surgeon and a fully robotic anesthesiologist. Yeah. And that's the real name. The robot surgeon was DaVinci, which is like the basically gold standard for robotic surgical surgical robots. Yeah. They had 2013 350,000 robotic surgeries performed in the US. So it's big. It is. But the DA Vinci is a doctor, basically sitting in a little looks like an arcade game, and using robotic arms to mimic his or her movements on more microscopic levels. Right. So the robot has more precise movements and make smaller movements than the Doctor. What's the opposite of telescoping? Like going downward in scale, whatever that is? It's taking the movements of the Doctor and reducing them in scale. Let's call it reverse telescoping. Reverse telescoping. Those movements, which is a pretty awesome achievement in and of itself. The Doctor is being fed 3D graphics of what the robot is seeing and just kind of working from there. What we're moving towards, apparently, is fully roboticized surgeries. I was talking to Joe McCormick from forward Thinking, and he was saying that there's something called the Raven Four, I believe, and basically you just say, this is going to be a gallbladder surgery on a six foot six male age, whatever. Here's the Cat scan of his abdomen. So go remove the gallbladder and you press Enter and the thing goes in there and removes the guy's gallbladder and Susan up. Yeah. That's fully robotic, like fully autonomous robotic surgery. If you press a button and it does it, you're not actually controlling a machine that does it. Exactly. Yeah. The machine is doing it at your behest, but you're not controlling it. And we're right on the cusp of that, and apparently it's already happening. Yeah. But there are some issues. I looked into it and found that a lot of injury reporting and robotic surgery is not being reported. It's substandard. And this woman, Sheena Wilson, had robotic surgery for Hysterectomy in 2013. And apparently this intuitive surgical system, there had been a bunch of injuries that she didn't know about, and she had her rectum burned badly and said, if I would have known that this system had these issues, I would not have elected to take part in it. So there's a lot of under reporting. The FDA, they have no authority to force a doctor to do this. And apparently there's every reason and every link in the chain not to report these things. Yeah. And the FDA not enforcing this kind of thing, not enforcing reporting is ridiculous. Yeah. The thing is, things like that happen, and there's under reporting with human surgeons as well, not just robotics. It's like, overall, apparently, surgical injury and accident reporting is not compulsory. Yeah. And here's a few points, though, counter points, I guess. One, it's not always the robotic component of the surgery that was the cause. Yeah, that's a good point. A lot of times they say they don't know about this until, like, a lawsuit is filed. So it could be weeks or months later. What the physician doesn't know about it or is the patient, the FDA might not get a report on it, and like, six months later, you file a lawsuit. And that's how it comes to light. But the FDA is definitely concerned and are supposedly working to improve this. Very concerned. They're very concerned. And another problem too, in that same article, a lot of these robotic surgical systems, you still have to have the correct amount of training. And the feeling of some experts is that for at least this one guy, Enrico Benadetti, he's a head of surgery at the University of Illinois, Chicago, says a lot of it just comes back to training. Some of these doctors aren't getting adequately trained in these machines enough to perform the surgery. Yeah, like, what happens when I do this? Oh, that happens. It's not good. I've got another alarming stat for you, too. Before that, let's do a message break real quick. 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 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.com podcast and start taking charge of your future today. Okay, tell me your alarming set. All right. John Top considered a study that found as many as 40,000 patients die in intensive care each year in the US. Due to misdiagnosis. 40,000. Man and another study found that system related factors like lack of teamwork and communication or just poor processes were involved in 65% of diagnostic error and cognitive factors, and 75% with premature closure is the most common, which is basically just sticking to that initial diagnosis and not being open minded to other second opinions. Yeah. So there's this thing called anchoring bias that was in that New York Times article, Doctor Dollarwal, the guy who created this program that's now around to support diagnostics, where a physician will say, I think it's this, but let me put in the symptoms and ask Isabelle, which is the name of the program, and it's named after the guy who created the program's daughter. Oh, man, that's where it's rough. Yes. When she was three, took her to the hospital and the doctor said, well, she has chicken pox, and she did indeed have chicken pox, but that's all they looked at. They completely missed a pretty nasty case of necrotizing fasciitis, which we've talked about before flushing bacteria, and she almost died from it. It was disfigured from it as a result. So her father, who is a money manager, said, I'm going to take whatever computer programming skills I have and put it toward this program. Isabelle which is meant to say, yes, you're right with this diagnosis, I agree with you. Or have you considered these other diagnoses? Yeah, and he said had Isabel been around and his daughter's doctors consulted it, they would not have missed the necrotizing fasciitis. Well, it makes sense. As an assist, there's a company called Lifecom that said in clinical trials that if you use a medical diagnostic program as an assist, those engines were 91% accurate without using exams or imaging or labs even. Really just symptoms. Yeah. That's crazy. That's really good. Yes. Like that's an A. That's a low A. It's still an A, but as an assistant, I think it's kind of a no brainer, don't you think? Oh, yeah. I think so. I don't know why. All I can think of is possibly worrying about feeding the beast that will take your job. Sure. Or just having too much of a caseload to take the time to double check your work on a computer would be the only reason why doctors aren't using that. Well, the smartphone is becoming a potential self diagnosis. There's all these cool things on the horizon that you can use your phone for. There's one called Alive Core, which you can take your own ECG test. Yeah. And potentially for the cost of getting one ECG in a hospital, you could send a year's worth of daily ECGs. You took yourself to your doctor, right. And then you carry all that info and all of your other medical info from all of your apps that will eventually be integrated into one or two apps that will probably come preloaded on your iPhone in the next couple of years. And you've got your medical history right there. Yeah. Most of these require a little clip on, like something called self scope. That's like you clip it onto your little camera lens, essentially. And it's like, what are the little magnifiers with the lights that doctors use to look in your ears and eyes? Yeah. Looks like one of those clipped onto your iPhone. And it produces you can do imaging for skin molds and rashes and ear infections. They have one called Inetra that you could potentially get your own glasses prescription done. That's neat. And then you order it online, the information to some website, and they send you your glasses. And then there's one called Adamant that smells your breath. It smells gases in your breath. And it could detect lung cancer, even. Yeah. Apparently you have real metabolic changes to the smell of your breath when you have different types of cancer, not just lung like, bees can detect breast cancer. If you breathe into this special glass sphere with bees around it, they can be trained to detect lung cancer and they come back with the correct results a lot of the time. Well, so a lot of these are on the horizon. They're not like in heavy rotation yet. No, but it's pretty neat. All of them reveal this idea that no one cares about your particular health and well being more than you. Unless you're one of those dudes who doesn't really care than your wife does or your mom probably cares more about me than me. Right. But the point is, the doctor, the insurance company, the hospital, while they're all in the field, because they do care about your health, of course, they can't possibly care about it more than you or your loved one does. So the idea of giving you the ability to keep all of that information yourself and easily hand it over to them or potentially down the road, a computer version of them, I can't think of any better revolution in medicine right now than that. Agreed. I think it's pretty exciting. Yeah. I think we're going to live into the triple digits, buddy. Yeah. And I think there will always be a need for doctors and nurses. I don't think anyone will be wholly replaced, but a little robot. Assist. Yeah, not bad. Let me make one more point. All right. So you've heard of genomics? Yes. There's also this thing called protonomics, which is basically your protein version of your genome. And it's all of the proteins in your body that you have that you're manufacturing that you're losing, and all the changes and fluctuations in them. And the idea is that you can get a full workout of your protein and your genome, and eventually you can add that to your medical history as well. What your EKG readings been over the past year, any weight you may have gained or lost or anything like that, what your breath smells like, metabolically speaking. And not only have your current state of health, but personalized your version of that, personalized down to your genes and proteins in your body. So a treatment could be specifically tailored to you. Wow. That's going to be really tough for a human physician to do that on their own to top that. Yeah. The amount of data available already is overwhelming. Human doctors, when you add this other kind of stuff on it, it's just pulling away from them more and more. Yeah. And medical recordkeeping, I know there's been issues with that and digitizing that and keeping up with medical records. And if you could be yourself advocate and keep up with your own medical records, it might be kind of nice. Yeah. So I feel like we answered the question, which is, yes, no more doctors. I don't know. I think in the future, I will always have humans to interact between us, I think, because we're always going to want somebody to yell at or be like, what is this robot doing? Or can you help me? This robot gave me some if a capacity won't let go of my arm or burn my rectum. Yes, we're always going to need humans. It's just I don't know. Will we need physicians? And if we do, will they be super specialized, like just the Supreme Court of Physicians? Yeah. Who knows? It's pretty exciting. But we will see this change one way or another in the next 15 years under my prediction. It's happening. Yeah. Okay, good. Chuck? Yeah, man. If you take off the new year yeah. Really? If you want to learn more about computers possibly replacing doctors, you can type those words into the search bar@houseofworks.com. And since I said search bar, that means it's time for a message break. 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.com commercial 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.com podcast and start taking charge of your future today. Okay, so what do we have? Listen to mail time. Yeah, I have one called, I'm going to call it Fight Club. Okay. Hey guys, just finished the podcast on deep refrigerating. I think I'll keep my Energy Star certified refrigerator, thanks very much. But Josh had mentioned something about eating weeds and asked a somewhat rhetorical question. What are weeds anyway? Just plants we say are bad. It reminded me of some of today's common noxious weeds. How they got their reputation. Not so long ago, lawns were perfect blends of Bermuda, Ryan and Kentucky bluegrass. They also included many types of clover, dandelion, and other, quote, weeds. In fact, many seed mixture specifically included white clover, as it makes an excellent cover in soils where more common grasses won't grow in steps. The Scott Fertilizer Company postworld War II America housing tracks were popping up all over the US and new suburbia, and Scott was encouraging returning GIS to take pride in their new lawns and to buy their products to do so and to wear extremely high waisted pants. Right. They produce fertilizers, weed killers, and other lawn care products, some of which had a curious side effect, killing many leafy greens. That came up to the point that were not considered weeds at the time, including white clover. Instead of reformulating, what they did was what any red blooded American corporation would do. They redefined what was a weed. White clover made that list as the dandelions, when in fact both are still in use today in cooking and medicines. Would you call that a noxious weed? No. So thanks for that, guys, and thanks for all the knowledge I've learned. And have a great 2014. And that is from Robert Paulson. Oh yeah, Robert Paulson. He's a sharp dude. That's why I called it Fight Club. Remember that? Oh, yeah. I think I made a joke to him about that once on Twitter and he never responded. Yeah, he writes in a lot now. Every time I see his name, I think. And his name is Robert Paulson. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Robert. Paulson. We appreciate you. If you ever shot in the head in the commission of a robbery, we will dispose of your body. Yes. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, and you have a name that you would like us to poke fun at, bring it on. You can tweet to usysk podcast. You can post your name on Facebook. Comstuffyshonow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@discovery.com. You can check us out on YouTube, search Josh and Chuck. It'll bring up our YouTube channel, and you will kick your heels with glee. And then, of course, go visit our website. Make it your homepage. It's the coolest place on the web. It's stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit householdworks.com. Jack. Threads has quickly become the online shopping destination for guys. Here's why everything on the site is up to 80% off. As a listener of Stuff, you should know you can skip the membership wait list and get instant access at signup jackthreds. Comnostuff. 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. World's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com." | ||
872674a2-3b0e-11eb-9699-8f5ca7756d3e | Hot Dog!(s) | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/hot-dog-s | No, there aren’t snouts and anuses in your hot dogs, so go ahead and chow down. There are, however, plenty of other things that may give you pause so listen to this episode where we dissect the beloved hot dog and poke around inside. | No, there aren’t snouts and anuses in your hot dogs, so go ahead and chow down. There are, however, plenty of other things that may give you pause so listen to this episode where we dissect the beloved hot dog and poke around inside. | Tue, 16 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=320, tm_isdst=0) | 51206332 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and it's just the two of us, but that's okay, because we are hot dogging. It not poor Ricky Pigginet hot dog in it. On this episode of Stuff You Should Know, this could have been a two parter easy, easy peasy. Yeah. We're not even getting into and then dogs. No, there's so much here. But at the end of it, I was like, boy, we didn't talk about corn dogs. I got a little bit on chili dogs, but there wasn't anything in here on chili dogs. Right. Is a hot dog a sandwich? John Hodgeman's famous lifelong battle. Are we still talking about that? No, we're not, but that's the point, is there's a lot more to hot dogs? The foot long. Don't even mention it. We won't even talk about the foot long. I think the foot long is illegal now, and we're not allowed to talk about it. Come on. Sure. Nanny state. Thanks to Uncle Joe biden. All right, let's talk about hot dogs. Yeah, dude, this has been a long time coming. I'm surprised we haven't talked about it. And you're right, we're biting off a lot here. But we can chew it, pass it through our guts and out of our pooper, and that's what everybody's going to hear. Do you like hot dogs? Can we go ahead? And I got two questions. Sure. Do you like hot dogs? I like a good hot dog, yeah. And do you boil them or grill them? I try not to grill anything. I think grilling makes everything taste worse. What? Smoking a little bit is okay, but grilling I'm not a grilled person. That is very strange. Like, a hot dog that's been placed on a grill, blackened and split open, is preferable to one that retains all of its taste when it's just appropriately reheated and plumped up and, say boiled water, even just in the microwave. I am shocked that you don't like a char on meats. No, I don't. Not very you I don't. You know why? Because I'm a bitter, super taster. I can barely tolerate grapefruit. Certainly can't tolerate char on anything. Like barbecue chicken. I mean, what is the point of barbecued chicken? Because you burn that sauce onto it. It's great. Oh, it's awful. Oh, it's so bad. No, I don't look good. So I'm taking it you like them grilled most of all. Well, I mean, I'll eat a boiled hot dog, for sure, but oh, yeah, a grilled hot dog that has got some bubbly black that's split open the best. Not for me. But you do like hot dogs. Are you above, below, or about at the national average of hot dogs consume per year among Americans? Well, that is 70 hot dogs, and I am well above now. Well below that. I probably eat less than ten hot dogs a year. Oh, really? I was going to say I've got you beat by a mile. How many do you eat a year? I would guess anywhere between 40 or 50. I'm trying to think because I feel like they usually come in twos, like at a barbecue or something. A cookout. I'll have a couple of hot dogs and we're not counting, this is just hot dogs because they definitely love me some bratwurst, sure. Oh yeah. And stuff like that. But straight up hot dogs. I probably don't eat more than twelve or 15 a year, I would say. Hey, you know the key to beer brats. Everybody does it wrong. Everybody soaks the brats in beer beforehand. That does nothing to them because it boils. No. Soak some people soak them, presoak them or even boil them. Yeah, I've seen people boil them. Okay, now that would work if the broths were split open. What you want to do is grill them first. And I do think a grill broth is preferable to a microwave or boil brad. Okay. You grill it first so that it splits open, then you soak it or simmer it in beer and then it sucks the beer in. That's how you make a beer broth. You don't do beer first. It doesn't do anything. It's a waste of perfectly good beer. Even if it's bad beer, you're still wasting it. I can't wait for the emails on this one. I'm right. I don't care what anybody says. They're wrong. I'm right. I've tried it. All right, so hot dogs, 70 per year. Supposedly 20 billion hot dogs in the United States alone, annually a year. Isn't that insane? No, it's insane. That's an insane amount of hot dogs. Because think about it, if I'm eating 40, that means there's somebody out there eating their 70 plus my extra 30. Joey Chestnut will do that in 3 minutes. Yeah. Every time I see that I'm reminded of that HuffPost article that Ryan Reynolds wrote about how he's disgusted by competitive eating. Did he really? Just a great going back and reading it every year or two. It really stands up. It's funny, but it makes some really good points too. I love Ryan Reynolds. Well, you'll like them even more after this. So hot dogs are sausages, but that doesn't mean a sausage is a hot dog. It falls under that category of sausage, which is basically any product where you grind up meat and you put a bunch of spice and stuff in it and then you cook it in a casing. Usually like some sort of sheep skin, as we'll see with sheep intestine, not skin. That'd be really tough that you throw sheep skin. The hot dogs we know and love that you get at your regular old grocery store are not generally cooked in that sheep casing. It is a fake casing that goes away and they are cooked. That's why you can eat a hot dog right out of the old package. Yes. And you should once in a while. It keeps you human insane. I like a hot dog sandwich, like a raw okay. Not raw. Put it on some bread. Yeah. When I was a kid, I used to cut it lengthwise into, like, I guess, eight little thin strips and throw a couple of those on a sammy with some mayo and cheese. I would try that, for sure. It's good. My daughter eats hot dogs occasionally, and she loves them, but kids will eat them every day if you buy them. But we just don't buy them and keep them in the house. That's how I eat 40 or 50 hot dogs a year, is buying them at the store and keeping them in the house. They come and pack. Right. Yeah. So over the course of, like, a week or so, four or five times a year, I will eat a pack of hot dogs. That's how I'm hitting for you. If it were just me being out, I would eat zero, because I haven't left my house in two years. Right. But, Chuck, we've now reached to me the fact of the podcast, and I would love to take it if you would be so quick. Yeah. Because I have no idea what you're going to say. Are you ready for this? Yes. Bologna. You know bologna? Yeah. It's like a flat hot dog. It's a giant hot dog that's cut into slices. That's baloney. Thanks a lot for taking the fact of the podcast, but yes, I'm sorry you didn't know that baloney. It never occurred to you that the taste is identical? No, I hadn't I had no idea that bologna is a giant hot dog. And now I'm just like, I want to see a whole intact bologna before Oscar buyer slices it up, because that must be astounding. Just go to any deli on planet Earth. That's different. That's different. That looks different. That looks more like a traditional sausage. I'm saying, like, I want to see the hot dog, the giant hot dog that Oscar Meyer produces and then slices up into bologna and packages the portions of it into bologna packages. That's what I want to see. Well, again, they're right there in the deli case. A big, giant log of bologna. It's not the same. I guess I want to see it out of the package. I don't know what I want to see. Well, it's got that red packaging around it. You just want to strip its clothes off. That's right. And stare at it. Throw a sheep skin on it. Boy. I'm sorry I ruined that. I thought everyone knew that bologna was a hot dog. No, you're the only person besides the National Hot Dog Council president who knows that bologna is a giant hot dog. Well, don't you remember the song my Bologna has a first name? It's H-O-T-D-O-G. Yes, I know that song, but it never really sunk in the lyrics. All right. The USDA has a USDA has a definition for hot dog. Yeah. I love this. Should we read it? I guess. Yeah, I think it's very instructive. All right. Frankfurters, aka. Hot dogs, wieners, or bologna, are cooked and or smoked sausages according to federal standards of identity. The standard also requires that they be commenuted, which is reduced to tiny particles. Semi solid products made from one or more kinds of raw, skeletal muscle from livestock like beef or pork and may contain poultry meat. Smoking, and curing ingredients contribute to the flavor, color, and preservation of the product. They are link shaped and come in all sizes. Wait for short, long, thin, and chubby, chubby, chubby. Hot dog. It's probably too late for a content warning to our vet vegetarian friends. Hopefully, they know better than to listen to one on hot dog. Yeah, but technically, a hot dog does not have to be made of meat. It can be made of vegetable protein. Well, yeah, but, I mean, as far as the grossness that's to come, they may not want to tune it. I was just trying to toss them a bone. Yeah, the vegan is a bone. So the thing that differentiates hot dogs from other types of sausages is how finely ground the internal stuff is. Yeah, it's ground so much, every bit of it, from the spices, the flavorings, the meat, everything. It's grounded as such a granular constitution. That's not right, but still, that you can't differentiate one thing from another. It's all just particles, and that you kind of stick together into that casing, and they form a mass. They go from semi solid, maybe even almost liquid to a jiggly mass that tastes delicious. That's right. The USDA says your hot dogs can contain no more than 30% fat and 10% water and 3.5% non meat filler, which is generally a binder, like, they use cereals or dry milk, sometimes soy protein, isolated soy protein. And this is to bind it together. And 3.5% of your hot dog can be made up of this? Yeah, we'll get a little more into the weeds and what's in your hot dogs. I say we take a break first and then jump in. Okay, let's do it. All right. Our buddy, the great Dave Ruse. The rooster. Yeah, the rooster. Wow. I can't believe we missed that before. Oh, my gosh. It's just sitting right there, clock in. So the rooster helped us, and sorry, David, if you hate that nickname, I think that's it now. Just let us know. But he helps us with this one, and he basically said, okay, yes, we really should establish that there is actual meat in your hot dog. And, no, it's not mystery meat. Like, no, there can be the horrific stuff that you suspect is in your hot dog, like lips and noses and tails and all that stuff. Legally, it can be, but you will know if that's in there because those ingredients have to be listed individually on the packet. And then on the front, it has to say that it's a hot dog with byproducts or hot dog with my new favorite band name, variety Meats. Yeah, I saw that one coming. Yeah. What kind of band would that be? Variety meets Jeez. I don't know. I think they play, like, calliope music, like circus music or something insane. You know what that is? Yes. And sort of the takeaway from all of this, after we read you all of these ingredients and things, is read the package if you want to know what's in your hot dog. Don't just be like, oh, I don't know what's in these things. Sure you do. It's printed right there. So just read it. It'll tell you if there's lips in there or organ meat, even. They can't put hearts or kidneys or anything in there unless they list them. The other thing that Dave says is the major hot dog brands do not use that stuff. I think it's just bad for business. It's not worth it. Can we read what Dave wrote? Yeah. Is this really low quality meat? It's not filet mignon, if that's what you're asking, but it isn't nostrils and anuses either thing really gets it across. Yeah. So we should say that it can be. You can get your pork hot dogs, your beef hot dogs. You can get chicken dogs, turkey dogs, obviously your vegan dogs that they make these days. I'm sure there's beyond sausages. Yes. I have not tried them yet. I haven't either. I don't know if they make a hot dog hot dog, they make a sausage, but I'm sure they will at some point because they're covering all their bases, I think, for sure. And beyond. I know. I'm sorry. That was terrible. Talking about a beef hot dog. The main meat in there is going to be what's called trimmings, and this is the meat that is not used as far as, like, when they're I know. Please don't listen if you're vegetarian. Yeah. You want to stop listening to the rest of this episode now, when they're cutting the beef and the cow apart and making steaks and roasts and things like that, they're either doing it by hand or maybe there's a machine involved. The trimmings are the things that are sort of left over. It's still meat and it's still, like, fat and beef. Like, if you get ground beef, that's not super specific. That's also trimming. Yeah. And so with trimmings, it's just the stuff that's left over. There's nothing wrong with it. And as a matter of fact, it's like fat and meat, but there can only be X amount, I think, 30% of fat that can make it into meat products. So it would be extraordinarily wasteful to just throw that away because it's not filet mignon or it's not round roast. It's stupid to just get rid of it it's actually super disrespectful to the animal that you just slaughtered to throw away a significant portion of their edible carcass. If you're into eating their carcasses, you should probably be okay with meat trimmings being used in ground beef and hot dogs and stuff like that, right. Beef cannot legally be mechanically separated anymore because of mad cow disease. In 2004, the USDA says you can't mechanically separate beef, but you can mechanically separate poultry and pork, and you're getting trimming in poultry and pork as well. If you want to be presented with the full horror of eating meat, watch some trade videos of mechanical separators that like the producers who make those machines have on their sites. It's insane. It's like, this is what we're eating. It's nuts. But it also is super efficient. And that they take the pieces of the carcass that have just little bits of meat and edible muscle and tendons and stuff attached to them still and put them under different states of pressure through a sieve. And that actually forces that little bit left of meat and edible like muscle off of the bone. It separates them. It's mechanically separating them so that you can use that stuff and make things like hot dogs or ground pork or ground turkey and that kind of stuff. Again, it would be deeply wasteful to just throw that stuff away because, again, it's not a chicken breast or it's not a filet mignon, and it's actually very sensible, but it also kind of brings you full circle back to how horrific modern meat processing and agriculture really is. Yeah. And those mechanical separators are based on my grandmother Bryant's mouth. Oh, could she do that? Well, she legendarily would come around and get your fried chicken bones off your plate, be like, you're not going to eat that. Did she call you at work? And my brother and I would try because we knew what would happen, we would try and get every bit of meat off that thing, and she would find more meat. And like, when she was done with it, it looked like a cartoon bone, like when they pulled the fish out of a cat's mouth. Cliff nothing left. And she lived to be 101. Well, that's how she did all that cartilage. My sweet Grandmother Bryant. We talked about spices earlier. There's salt, sugar and spices and hot dogs and everything. There's a lot of sodium and a hot dog. You've got your regular old table salt. You've got liquid salt, sodium lactate. You've got sodium. Diacetate prevents Bacteria growth. You don't want Liberia, then you're going to want that diacetate in there. Yeah. A lot of these types of sodium are also used for curing, too. Sure. And there's a lot of laundry to unpack with the curing that we'll get into in a few minutes. But there is a lot of sodium, I think, of your daily sodium intake you can get from a single hot dog frank, which who just eats one hot dog. So let's just say it's 40% when you eat. And I don't call them franks, either. Do you? No, and I don't think I know anybody who does call them franks. I've only seen it or heard it on TV before. Yeah, and we'll get to the naming later on as well. You also can get high fructose corn syrup in your dog because of some people do it, some people don't. It's not a lot, but I saw how it's made. And by the way, if you really want to yes, that's a good one. You either do or don't want to eat hot dogs anymore. I don't know how you're going to come out of it, but just watch the how it's made on hot dogs. The part where the finished hot dogs are shooting out of that machine like they're being run up a salmon ladder or something. That's amazing. It's mesmerizing, but the goop that they put in the casing. Yeah. Again, though, it's edible meat. It's just edible meat. I know where you're coming from there it is. It is meat, and it is spices. It is garlic and pepper and coriander and maybe paprika, maybe some we'll get into the celery salt thing or celery powder thing, and it's water. It is all these things. But when it's made into a slurry and pumped out of a tube, it definitely looks like pretty gross. It's kind of gray. Yeah. And it's just watch the video. Yeah. Hot dogs, well worth it. Hot dogs, bologna, all that stuff would be a flat gray if it weren't for some of the curing agents that they put in there. And apparently they also use cherry powder sometimes, too, for its coloring to color them a pink. Okay. You might also find some MSG. You might find some yeast extract. You might find some beef stock. Smoke flavoring. Yeah, that liquid smoke. Do you know what that is? That's actual liquid smoke where they condense smoke from hardwoods and turn it into water vapor and collect that water vapor. That's what liquid smoke is. Isn't that nuts? Yes. I used to be a fan of that. I would keep some in the house, but I don't do that anymore. I mean, I thought it was like all science, just completely, like, isolated flavors and all that and actually, no, it is what it says on the tin. So should we get into sodium nitrite and the nitrites? Yeah, that sounds like a band spot featuring variety meat, because you're going to find some sodium nitrite and some hot dogs. You might also find hot dogs that are like, we don't use nitrites. No nitrites. We use celery powder or maybe cultured celery juice instead. And people might think, oh, well, that's got to be way better for you because I've heard nitrites, if you cook them at high heat, can give you cancer. Yeah. So, like, the whole thing is that under certain conditions, nitrites can turn into nitrosamines. And those starting back in the 70s were linked to, I think, bowel cancer and possibly stomach cancer. And so everybody started getting really worried about nitrites, and people stopped using nitrites. Well, they still use them, like in any of the classic hot dogs that you see for sale. They use regular old nitrates. But celery powder was offered up as an alternative, a natural alternative to nitrites, and that it did all of the same things, but it was a natural alternative because it's celery. And the problem is, to your body, a nitrite from celery and a nitrite that was isolated in the lab is the same exact thing, and it's going to have the same exact effects on you. And if those effects are to give you colon cancer, you're going to get it whether it's from celery powder or whether it's from the nitrates that were isolated in the lab. Yeah, if you start looking up articles on celery powder and nitrites and cancer, it's a rabbit hole. Like, there's a lot of information out there. At one point, just a couple of years ago, the National Organic Standards Board, it was up for a vote whether or not to keep celery powder on the list of acceptable organic ingredients, largely because of this. Not just because of hot dogs, but they use bacon and like any kind of cured meat, you might find a nitrite for celery powder. And they said they voted eleven to one, I think, or maybe it was ten to one, but it was super lopsided to keep celery powder on the list. It's so weird organics. There's this really great article by Jesse Hirsch on the site called The Counter.org worth checking out about that. But it doesn't make sense that they would keep it on there, like, unmolested, because it's just so misleading. Because if you use celery powder, you can say that your hot dogs are uncured, even though they would ostensibly have the same impact on your body as cured hot dogs. And then even worse because it's natural. Celery powder can be used in organic products and still be listed as organic, but the celery used doesn't have to be organic. That's nuts to me. Yeah. And celery, it turns out Jesse Hirsch pointed out in the article that celery is particularly adept of all the vegetables and really soaking in pesticides and herbicides into its little body and passing it along. Ostensibly passing it along. So it is really weird that they just kind of went whole hog, or continued to go whole hog on celery being some sort of natural ingredient, even though it does the exact same thing to your body that a lab isolated nitrite would. Yes, it is weird. At one point, we should do an episode on organic standards. I think we have, but we can revisit it for sure. Did we? I'm pretty sure we've talked about organics versus local. Yeah, we've talked about it, but let's do it again. Well, I know there's stuff we didn't cover because Emily always has a problem with it in her business selling natural body products. Because people will say, like, this is organic soap and stuff like that. People throw the word organic on something when it doesn't even apply. Sometimes just because people will buy something if it says organic on it or if it's not even certified organic. You can get away with it on a smaller level, like a small business. And then there was something else too. Maybe we could roll in like all the food sort of labeling, like free range chickens. I remember when I worked for that chicken company, and I know I mentioned this years ago, but I was at a free range farm and I was like, I thought these were free range. They're all in there. And he was like, free range just means the gate is open, basically. Yeah, I remember you saying that before like crazy. They can leave, but they don't because this is where the food is. Right. So you want to imagine chickens just roaming around the countryside. That's just not the case. I want my chickens forced out of there and made to walk around in the field for a while. I'm sure there are some local oh, yeah. And we try to go to farmers markets and get local meat that is like a genuine farm with chickens that are walking around and stuff like that. But anything you're getting like in a package at the grocery store, you're probably being misled in some way. We'll have to take on meat processing or like that whole thing. I know eventually. I've been avoiding it. Yeah. We're going to run out of topics one day and that's going to be left. Should we talk about how these things are made before we take our break? Yes. And then also just want to reshut out the how it's made video on it. It's great. 5 minutes. It is time well spent. And again, you'll either say I'm never eating a hot dog again or like, who cares? I love it. Give me a slurry tube. I feel like I'm in the middle. It didn't make me want to not eat a hot dog, but I wasn't like, I got to have a hot dog, right? Yeah, sure. So the whole thing starts with grinding the meat. If it was mechanically separated, it's already some sort of paste or goo or batter. But if it's not, if it's trimmed beef or even trimmed pork, then it has to be grounded to a slurry. Because remember, the thing that differentiates hot dogs from sausages or other types of sausages is that it's ground up so finely that you can't differentiate one bit from another. That's right. So you've grown this stuff up. Then you got to mix in all those ingredients and it goes into this huge industrial mixer. I love watching this stuff. Any industrial processes are fascinating to me. Even when it's meat goo? Yes, because it's worth it when you get to that hot dog shoot. Okay. There's a big pay off. So it's mixed together in these huge vats. And this is where your spices are dumping in these huge bags of salt and paprika and garlic powder and apparently, like, some mustard powder. Depends on where you are according to how it's made. Different regions have different flavors. They like yeah. Which makes me want to kind of do a cross country hot dog original tasting tour. Yeah. Well, if we ever get back out on the road again, maybe we should make a point to eat a hot dog in the city. It's a good idea, actually. I don't know if it's a good idea or not, but it is a fine idea. Okay. So this is mixing all that stuff together. Dave has it in here that ice is added because the blades generate heat. The video from how it's made it look like it was just cold water, that would work, too. But I imagine the water also mixes in the spices and keeps everything nice and juicy. Right. That was a lot of water, wasn't it? It seemed like a lot of water. I saw the reason that ballpark, Frank's Plump, when you cook them is because they add even more water that leftover water that they leave in that slurry, the hot dog slurry that gets kind of cooked in when you heat it up, it turns into steam or water vapor, which expands in volume, which makes the volume of the hot dog itself expand, too. Amazing. I don't know about that. What's up next, Chuck? Stuffing the casings, maybe? Yeah, you got to get that emulsion. And this is where you get not the hot beef injection. You get the cold beef injection. Yes. And this is probably cellulose casing. And then it's tied off. It looks like a regular sausage. It's in a big, long link. Long? Like it's all tied together with that casing, and they're twisted up every would it say, like, five and a quarter inches is, I think, standard for the bun? Lang sure. I do, too. But you know that they make them thinner. It's not the chubby version. It's the thin version. Yeah. I just like it to match the length of the bun. I don't see why you want to start off with just bread. I know, because I like bread, and I even tend to pinch the undogged parts of the bun off. You pinch it? Yeah, pinch it and leave it. And if I'm really hard up, I might dip it in some leftover ketchup and eat it afterward. My friend James from New Jersey would not eat the corners of his omelet. Is that weird? Yes. You might be the only person who ever felt that way. He would cut one off and cut the. Other one off and eat the rest. I never heard that one before. Never heard that. All right, so you got it stuffed, then you smoke it, and what they're probably doing is adding some of that liquid smoke. But you're also going to get some smoke as you're cooking it, and they're curing it, too. They're bathing it, and basically what amounts to a different type of brine that will cure it. And the difference between curing and cooking is they're both transforming meat into something that can be preserved or is preserved. It's just cooking uses temperature and curing uses chemicals. But they both arrive at virtually the same thing. That's right. You're almost done, right you are. Then the fun stuff comes because most hot dogs, I think you said way earlier, they don't sell them in casings any longer. They prepare them and cook them in casings, but then they take the casings off. So there's like a machine that kind of cuts them, and then another part of the machine that steams them off, and then they come shooting out of that last machine into these giant trolleys, like a huge laundry trolley, basically. It's amazing to watch. It really is. And if you're just grossed out, just fast forward to the last probably 40 seconds of that clip you'll see. Yeah. And pretend they're circus peanuts, which is way grosser than meat goo. Man. I haven't circus peanut in probably 45 years, and I still remember exactly the texture and taste. Yes. It hasn't changed, I'm sure. All right. So that's it. They get vacuum sealed and packaged, and you got a hot dog in your hands. You do. And then you put it in your mouth and you say, by God, that has some delicious colon cancer. Should we take a break? I think we should. And then we're going to talk about some of the history and where this name came from, because it's kind of weird if you stop and think about it. Want to learn about a terrace or an actual how to take a perfect boop and all about? All right, so we did a little bit of a flip flop. We usually will do this history stuff first, but we did it different today. I think it's nice. It feels like a new jacket that makes you feel cool. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, like a magician's jacket. That's right. So you've heard them called frankfurters, which we mentioned briefly. And of course, Weiner, we haven't said that word yet. They both come from Germany, which is where the sausage comes from. Frankfurt, Germany, they say, hey, way back in 1487, we invented this thing, the frankfurter sausage, and so call it a frankfurter. Vienna says, no, those American hot dogs are eating. They came from us. And Vienna is vein in Europe, and Veners or wieners is where that comes from. Right. I had no idea. Did you? Yes. Okay. Well, you just know everything about hot dogs and bologna and all that. I've traveled in Germany, and I have taste buds. Venus. I knew Bologna was a hot dog. I'm going to start calling them that. Veners and Franck fuzz a Venus, right? Franc Fuzzer. I love how Dave abandons that. He's like, that matters not. What really matters is that these things eventually made their way to New York, and that's where the whole thing really took off in earnest, because Frankfurt has been making hot dogs potentially since 1487. Vienna has been making something similar since who knows when, and that's great, but they never took off. Like, you would not call a veiner or a frankfurter, like, the national dish of Germany or Austria. Like, you would call it the national dish of America, which suddenly sounds really sad now that I'm saying it out loud. Yeah, you wouldn't walk, like, take your first visit to New York and go up to a cart and say, could I have one of your fine German style Veners? They said, what are you talking about? And then they punch on the yeah, you wouldn't say that. Instead you'd say hot dog, as you just said. But they did come from German push cart vendors in the 1860s in the Bowery. This sounds delicious. It says in the Bowery they were served on milk rolls with mustard and sauerkraut. Even though I don't like mustard or sauerkraut, that still sounds good to me. Oh, really? I know you don't like mustard sauerkraut, too. Although you don't like any vinegar based anything, do you? Not a lot of vinegar based things. Okay, fair enough. You don't like about sour crowd. It's too sour. It is very sour. It really lives up to its name. That's right. So that's where the whole thing started, I think. By the 1860s, there were push carts in New York. They eventually made their way to Coney Island. There's a guy named Charles Feltman who was the first Coney Island hot dog king in 1071, and then famous Nathan's famous so I got it backwards. Was established by a guy named Nathan Hanwoker. I think I said it right in Coney Island, which Coney Island became kind of like the capital of hot doggery in America, especially at the turn of the last century. Yeah. So here's where it gets a little weird, because when you think of a Coney, you think of a chilly dog. Yeah, but I did a little bit of digging because to me, you want to make a hot dog. Great. Put some chili and cheese on it. Yes. Just basically just go to the varsity. That's how you make a hot dog. Great. Like, I love a chili dog. I love a chili dog. A chili cheese dog, no less, with chili chili fritos on top. Some fritos happen to fall in there. I'm fine with it. How do you appeared onto the husband? I don't seek it out. So Chile appeared in San Antonio in the 18th, Coney Islands were the names of restaurants, not a specific chain or whatever, but these Greek immigrants in the Midwest, and specifically Michigan, would open up what they called Coney Islands. And there were these restaurants where they were Greek diners, but they also sold these chili dogs. It was like a chili sauce. No beans, supposedly. Although I love beans in my chili, so I don't care about that. But it's a little much with the bun, frankly. The beans and the chili? Yeah. Well, no, just the beans and the bun. It's just too much. It's much better with just meat based chili. No beans for me, in my opinion. But I'm not going to yuck anybody's hot dog. Yum. Do you like a Cincinnati chili? Doesn't have cinnamon in it. Yeah, we kind of do our sort of like that sometimes. Some chocolate and cinnamon. Yes. It's good stuff. Skyline chili. Yeah. I don't know that I've ever had Skyline crazy enough, but cinnamon and chili is good. I think in Toledo you would have had some Skyline chili. There was even a Skyline chili restaurant, and I didn't eat it. I don't know why I love it. It's good stuff. But all of this to say is that even though Nathan's and Coney Island is known for chili dogs, michigan and Detroit is very not abrasive, but defensive about the fact that they say, we started the chili dog. Yeah. And, like, it's verified it came from Michigan. Yeah. Which is a bit of a brain buster. But the Coney dog is a Michigan creation. Simple as that. That's right. What about baseball games? Apparently there is a guy in St. Louis who bought the St. Louis Brown's baseball team in the 1890s and also started selling hot dogs there, and it was just a match made in heaven from that time on. All right, all of this is great. We're having a good time. We know about Frankfurters and Weiners, but why are they called hot dogs, Josh? Oh, well, allow me to explain, Truck, because I just so happened to know this. So there's this idea that the German immigrants who brought hot dogs over with them and started selling them and became kind of celebrated in places like New York also brought over dachshund dogs with them. And supposedly anybody who knows anything about hot dog history knows that the association between dachshunds and hot dogs were made right off of the bath. Okay. That's kind of phase one of this legend. But that seems to be totally accurate. Right? It's possible that they called them hot dachshunds for a time. Yeah. Weird name. It is. But I mean, you can understand, like, a dachshund looks like a little sausage with legs and long ears. Well, we'll get to that. There was also a cartoonist going in a different direction from The New York Journal. Well, this is step two. Yeah, this is part two. His name was Tad Durgan. Great name. And he says, and this story is by all accounts not true, but he says, in 1900, I was at a baseball game at the old polo grounds in new york city, and there was a vendor saying, get your dachshund sausages while they're red hot. And he said he got a mental image of an actual dachshund dog in a bun. I thought, well, that's cute. And so he made a cartoon of it and drew that and called it hot dogs because he supposedly didn't know how to spell dachshund. And that is the apocryphal story that a lot of people you will see online have printed this stuff. But by all accounts, that is not true at all, because in the 1820, years before that at yale university, these students, little john Hodgman's, were calling them these push cards, dog wagons. One was called the kennel club, and it was even in print. The word hot dog was found in 1895 in the yale record, a good five years before ted dorgan story takes place. Right, yeah, ted dorgan, big fat liar. Yale students apparently the ones who coined the term hot dog. And there's this idea that it was a play on the hot dachshund, probably. But there also seems to be some evidence that it was a kind of a sly nod to the idea that there was potentially dog meat in the sausages because they were made by immigrants, after all, and this was yale, so there was a certain amount of xenophobia even though they were enjoying these delicious hot dogs. And so the yale student said, we're going to call these hot dogs because who knows, maybe there's dog meat in them, right? That is part three, I guess. So I would say two b. Okay. And then, of course, people are like, well, did they really eat dog in germany? And apparently at times in germany when things would get really bad, there are verified reports that they would eat dog meat. And a very bad slang term for german immigrants sometimes were dog eaters back in the day. And that probably did contribute to the name somewhat. But there is nothing on record or any truth whatsoever to hot dogs actually being made from dog. No, there was never like a trend or anything like that. It just seems to have been an unhappy coincidence between germany going through some hard times around the time that hot dogs were introduced to the larger public in america by the dachshund looking like a hot dog. Yes. So all those things kind of came together to form in yale students heads, the idea of hot dogs. No? Ted Dorgan. Yale students? Yeah. And apparently early on, hot dogs were like, people love them. But like you said, there was xenophobia. So there was also the notion that what is in this from the beginning? What kind of mystery meat could be in there? Are they dirty? Should we eat these upton Sinclair certainly didn't help later on with his book The Jungle, but apparently that's why Nathan Huntfocus of Nathan's famous early on would have signs that say, like, no horse meat. He made his employees wear white smocks early on. That was their early uniform, was because it made him look, he thought, more clean or more like a doctor, even. Right. And he also built his hot dogs as kosher style, which was not the same as kosher. It was just kind of a playoff on this idea that kosher meat was much cleaner because it was slaughtered and raised and slaughtered and packaged under the eagle eye of a kosher inspector, and so therefore, it had far less adulterents or contaminants in it. And so he kind of build his hot dogs as kosher style to kind of also further that idea that he had very clean meat. Clean hot dogs. Yeah. So you can't get kosher style. You can yeah. I feel like if we haven't done a whole episode on kosher, I'm surprised, but we should definitely do one on that. But, yeah, there are much stricter guidelines associated with it, and you're never going to find pork in a kosher hot dog. It's either going to be beef or it could be poultry, but never pork, because that ain't kosher. But yeah, it's separate. Like, Hebrew National has very famously kosher hot dogs, and people feel like they just kind of taste differently, but I think that's just because they're different brands. Yeah. When you say something like, let's, we should do something on Kosher one day, immediately, all I can think of is, like, sure, I'd love to get a bunch of stuff wrong. Right, exactly. That just seems like one of those that we would mess up in some way. Man, do you remember our episode on the Pope? I don't think we've ever gotten more pushback for an episode than that one. I wiped that one from my memory bank. Soccer. Yeah, it was worse than soccer, I think. I guess we should talk about a few of the famous kinds of hot dogs. You got your Chicago dog, got the poppy seed roll, got yellow mustard, relish, chopped onion, pickles tomato slices, little celery salt, got that Michigan coney. Yeah. The Mexican dog that you can get in Los Angeles is wrapped in bacon. Yeah. The Sonoran dog, which they might deep fry. Yeah, it looks lovely in a picture, but yeah, it's a lot they put crema on it. It does look pretty good. I didn't realize this, but Atlanta does kind of have its own version of a hot dog. Did you know that? I saw this from Dave. Is that a thing? It is. Now that I think about it. I never realized that it was an Atlanta thing, but it's a Southern thing in Atlanta, things that put coleslaw usually kind of sweet, very mayo heavy or mayo forward. Coleslaw on a dog. I love a slaw dog. That is delicious. But apparently I suspect it may have come from the scrambled dog. I found this on Mental floss. There's something called the scrambledog from Inglewood Pharmacy in Columbus, Georgia, and it's all kinds of messed up. It's cut up into pieces, bathed in a bowl of chili with pickles on top, oyster, crackers, cheese, and then coleslaw. So I suspect somebody from Atlanta went down to Columbus and said, this would be great if it was just coleslaw and the hot dog. And then that's where the Atlanta version of the hot dog came from. Wait, what else was on there? Chili, pickles, oyster, crackers, cheese, and then coleslaw. Some people even put ketchup on it, which I just can't even begin to imagine that yeah, that's almost a chuck special, but I just don't dig the pickles. But a perfect hot dog to me is the bun, the dog, mayonnaise, baby. And then put on the chili and then cheese, and then coleslaw on top of that. And I can just have one of those because that's a lot of stuff. Yeah, that's quite a bit. But I now want to make a pilgrimage to Inglewood Pharmacy and try their scrambled dog. So recently, a few weeks ago, in real time, an article came out on the news wire from a study at the University of Michigan that says a hot dog will shorten your life by 36 minutes. One single hot dog? Yeah, it was big, big news, because everyone was like, what? 36 minutes? They did a big study on all kinds of foods and quantified literally how many minutes they will add or subtract from your life. And they came up with 27 minutes just for just a naked hot dog. But 36 minutes, I think, with a hot dog with some trimmings on a bun. And that was the study. It was out of Michigan. They know they're hot dogs. I did some math, and it's not a big deal. Like if you're eating 20 hot dogs a year. Yeah, it still sounds like a big deal. It's not, because if you do the math, like, you're talking, like, eight or 10 hours a year, and if that's like ten years, you're talking 80 to 100 hours. Okay, so I just did a little bit of math, and if I eat 40 hot dogs a year, that's a day I shave off of my life 24 hours every year. Take in. But let's say you do that for over a 30 year period. You're talking about, like, a month of your life. Wouldn't you rather eat hot dogs and kick off a month sooner? No, because when I eat those hot dogs, I always feel guilty. They're usually cold out of the package. I'm just chomping them down to eat something. No. From now on, I vow before you and every step, you should know, listener, that if I eat a hot dog, it's going to be a damn good hot dog, like a scrambled dog or a slaw dog or something that's worth losing 36 minutes of my life over. Thank you. University of Michigan. Now I'm just picturing you, like, in the dark in the middle of the night, like, just cramming a raw hot dog in your mouth. You forgot naked. Except for my whitey tidy. But are hot dogs bad for you? Obviously a lot of sodium. It's like any kind of processed meat. It's not great for you, but in moderation, you're okay? Yes. Unless you're a vegetarian or vegan and you now have no hair attached to your head because you pulled it all out listening to this episode. Correct. You got anything else about hot dogs? Oh, boy. Nothing else. But I think I actually do have some hot dogs upstairs. Well, go shave 36 minutes off your life and see if you enjoyed it. I get those organic turkey dogs, though, for my kid. Yeah, they're not really organic. I'll bet they say uncured and organic, and they're not, I'll bet. Look, it says celery powder on there, and that's what? It's just a scam, chuck, you're being scammed. I know. How do they taste, though? Are they good? Well, they're great. I don't mind the turkey dog. I think they taste good. That's what I usually eat, too. Or turkey dogs, for sure. No, I mean the organic part of it being uncured. That's what I mean. Okay. Now I think I'll be for the worst of all. I do. Okay. I think they taste weird. I don't think a hot dog should be made of all beef. I think it either has to be a turkey dog or it should have pork in it. Okay, but I don't eat pork, so I just eat the turkey dogs. Hey, I respect your point of view. Okay? Well, since Chuck said he respects my point of view, that is going to roll us nicely into listener mail. I'm going to read parts of two listener mails. This is from both Liz McKeller and Jason Marcella after our Statue of Liberty episode, we were talking about going up there to that the Crown, and they were both like, if you want to have an experience straight from hell, do so. Okay. Does not sound like any kind of fun at all. Okay. I'll read some of Jason's here. He said I was one of the, quote, lucky ones who did that death march back in the late 80s when my family toured New York City. It was so horrible. I still remember it so vividly. You wait in line for the ferry from Manhattan. Then it gets you got to wait in line to get into the base. Eventually you're waiting on all these lines. You get to the elevator and make it to the top of the base. This is where the smart people stopped their tour. The rest of us cattle started the miserable climb up a narrow spiral staircase that rises through Liberty's body. Her body is essentially hollow, and it looks cool. For the first 2 minutes. The stairs are steep single file, you can't see where they end, and there are mirror inches between you and the people in front and back of you. There's no air conditioning. You are essentially inside a giant Easy Bake oven for an hour or so. Okay? To pay off for all that climbing, you walk across inside her crown and see that the windows are smaller than a sheet of paper and you don't even have time to look through them because the crush of people behind you is constantly in motion and soon you're going back down the stairs. Oh, man. That is from Jason. Liz also says this the show complimented the stuff you missed in history class episode on Emma Lazarus. Still listen to that. But Liz says she's been to the Statue of Liberty twice, and the second time they got tickets to go on the crown and said this I do not recommend doing this in winter because you need a heavy coat out on the walking area, but it still ends up being hot. So you've got that coat. Do you get to carry it around? Well, I guess so, but then you've got this huge code. It's like that New York City problem everywhere you go in the winter, once you get in the crown, it is tiny and hot, even in the winter. Very little room. And there's a park ranger there keeping everybody moving. They do keep some of those little windows open at all times for air circulation and have a stand up fan, but it did no good. And Liz actually said you can't stop. So she said, I managed to get some decent photos by sheer luck because I was just kind of clicking and walking. But the pictures actually turned out really great. There were some really cool artistic photos, like looking up through the body and in the crown itself. And that's just pointing out that to say that sometimes just dashing off quick photos, you can get some really great images if you're not overthinking it. That was the point of these two listener mails. That was the point of the end of that second part of the one listener mail. Got you. And that's it. I'm just encouraging amateur photography, basically. I see go there and snap stuff. Don't overthink it. I got you. Liz and Jason both say don't do it. Okay, that's great. Thanks, Liz. Thanks, Jason, for setting everybody straight. I may have ended up trying it one day, and I'm glad that I never will now. Exactly. If you want to get in touch with us, like Liz or Jason did, you can send us an email and we will be eternally grateful. Sent it 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." | |
Three Innovations We Need Right Now | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/three-innovations-we-need-right-now | The world's problems necessitate innovative solutions. Listen in as Josh and Chuck propose some innovations, from teleportation to an international language, that the world needs right now in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | The world's problems necessitate innovative solutions. Listen in as Josh and Chuck propose some innovations, from teleportation to an international language, that the world needs right now in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:12:33 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=15, tm_min=12, tm_sec=33, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=167, tm_isdst=0) | 25227761 | 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. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce, templates, inventory management, simple checkout process, 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. comSK, 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. Sharks. The most famous and majestic apex predators on Earth. Introducing Shark Week. The podcast. I'm Luke Tipple, the marine biologist and shark expert with over 20 years experience in the field. I'm going to take you on a dive. With me, you are going to learn a lot about sharks, and you'll also hear exclusive interviews with the stars of Shark Week. To get a behindthescenes look, listen to Shark Week, the podcast on Apple Podcasts spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, 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. With me is Chuck Bryant with his beautiful juke rug. Still beautiful. Yeah. So, Chuck, how are you doing? I'm well, sir. You? I'm pretty good into everyone out there listening. If I sound like I'm talking a little fast, that's because Chuck literally has a stopwatch here to keep me from talking to what's in this podcast, I kid you not, in a cat of mine sales. Yeah, we could very easily I shouldn't say we I could very easily take into I guess long windedness is a euphemism I should use, Chuck says. Yeah. And so to combat that, Chuck has the stopwatch. So, Chuck, let's talk about some innovations that we need and why. Look at you so proud, Josh. The world is in trouble in some ways, and big innovations and big innovators come along and correct things and change all that. And that's what we need, buddy. We've named three here. There are many more. Yeah. Agreed. And what do you think about blogging? Yeah. And thank you for reminding me. Especially, I would like to call out to the blog and get you folks on the Friday recap when this comes out, because we have only named three kind of pie in the sky innovations that could help the world, and there are many more, and I'd like to hear what people have to say. I would, too, Chuck. So that's the call out. Nice. Chuck, so you want to get started on this? Yes. You got your stopwatch going? Yes. Okay. All right, Chuck. Let's do teleportation. I wish we could. My goodness. So do I. Have you ever been on, like, a long road trip? Yes. I like road trips, though, on the way. Right. On the way back. On the way back is awful. Right. What if you could just drive to a place, say, like a subway station? Sure. Which is a good idea. And instead of getting on a subway, you just go through some sort of teleportation portal. So at the teleportation station. Nice. Yeah. They should call it that. I think they will, probably. Did you know this term has been around since 1931. Wow. You did some extra research in it. Yes. An American writer and paranormal investigator named Charles Fort wrote it in his book Low. Fort is one of my heroes. You know that? Really? Yeah, 40 in times. Well, he had a book called Low with an exclamation point in the end. Low or lo l o. Okay. And apparently that's where he first used the word teleportation. Fantastic. So, yeah, that would be awesome. And it's not exactly impossible. No, it's not. Thanks to the magic of quantum physics, we could conceivably teleport ourselves. Indeed. I guess the way that it's starting to look more and more is like we would be faxed. Yeah, exactly. That's a good way to say it. Instead of what you're doing is you're recreating you would be recreating every cell in your body and copying it. That first edition would have to be destroyed, though. That's one of the keys. Right. That is the key. I didn't quite get to the bottom of why, aside from very rapidly overpopulating the Earth. Right. But yeah, I get the impression that as far as quantum mechanics goes the original would have to be destroyed before transmission or as it was being scanned. Right. And then, basically, it takes these particles and atoms and everything. It doesn't actually transport the atoms. Right. This is the big distinction. Like all teleportation, as far as science fiction goes, generally has to do with actually physically moving the atoms through the air and then recreating them elsewhere. Much like images on television. As you see Willy Wonka in the Chocolate Factory. Right. Much like that. That's not the case. Instead, what we would need to do is basically scan us. What makes us all the information three dimensionally about where one of the cells in your liver is. Right. About your genetic makeup. Everything for absolutely every part of you, including stuff we haven't nailed down yet, would have to be analyzed and then sent. Yeah. And then it could be recreated. And the first one was destroyed. There's a big problem with this. Well, namely, we're too complex of beings to do that. Well, sure. But also, if you subscribe to any kind of JudeoChristian or any kind of religious ideal, you would have a big problem because, basically, you've just been destroyed and all the information about you has been transferred. And if you believe the soul is some sort of if it's extended and an externality that's not part of your body, that it's something beyond that cannot be recreated yeah, that's true. But let's say most people who are working on teleporting us don't subscribe to any ideas of the salt, right? Okay, so let's just go with that assumption. Let's just say, physiologically, what are some of the challenges? Well, they have actually teleported atoms in photons. Did you know that? You didn't know that. I did. They've sent Adams a distance of about half a meter, and they sent some photons over tens of kilometers. Yeah. Pretty impressive. It is. And I know that there's one really smart guy out there, Charles Bennett, who was a really smart scientist. He said that in principle, that teleporting humans does not actually violate any fundamental laws of physics. No, they used to think it violated Heisenberg's uncertainty principle because we were talking about scanning. Right. And once you get down to the subatomic quantum level, you're dealing with quarks little pieces of matter and other non material stuff, right. That when you analyze and when you observe them, when you measure them. The more accurately you measure them, the more likely you are to disrupt their behavior until you can't get an accurate measurement anymore. Right. They figured out a way around this, right? Were you talking about quantum entanglement? Yeah. Yes. Einstein actually called that spooky action at a distance. Except he said in German, and it probably sounds cooler in German. Yeah. Although spooky is pretty cool. Yeah, that's true. Basically, it's two separate particles. Behaving as if it's one particle, even though they are separated by a great distance. Right? Well, they were together at one point in time. They become entangled. Like their super positions, their states become entangled, and then yeah, after they're separated, the behavior of one is the same as the behavior of another, and they shouldn't be influencing one another anymore. Right. But Bennett says that that's not even necessary. If you were to figure out how to teleport an entire human, he said that, quote, the teleported person would end up slightly different, but not in a biologically important way. Well, Chuck, think about what you just said. You're reproducing something that's not biologically different. Think about your mood, the mood you're in right now. That's all a series of chemical reactions. So we have to analyze down to that level, or else you come out on the other end, like maybe insane or very depressed or ready to kill. Sure, there's a lot of information that would have to be scanned to accurately reproduce you as you were before the scanning started, but let's say we can do that, right? What are the benefits of teleportation? Why do we need this? Since this is all pie in the sky and pipe dream type of stuff? Let's say we can teleport. That would save time. Yes. Time is the money. How would you love to not commute? To beam yourself to work every day? That would be crazy. Work days would be shorter. That means you could save energy at the workplace. I know I get a lot more work done when I telecommute. Yeah, and teleporting. Imagine that. I know. You could save on you were talking about transportation of goods and jets and big barges. Maybe if you could teleport your goods, then you wouldn't have to fly things halfway around the world. Yeah, that might be a good thing. Yeah, I think there's a lot of benefits to teleportation. What else you got? That's all? You don't have some Brady Bunch zany plot line that you can dream up here? No, because the original is destroyed. That's where all the comedy lies. Yeah, you're right. When there's duplicity or multiplicity. Except there wasn't that much comedy there. Yeah. Michael Keaton. Yeah. So, Chuck pressure stopwatch. Let's clear it out again. Yeah, let's clear it out. Trust me, folks. We could do an hour on teleportation. We could. But we just stopped making sense after a little while. You couldn't understand us, but because we're dumb. So what's number two? Josh, you ready? Yes. Okay. Number two is universal language. Consider this. How much conflict, war, misunderstanding, and just general strife, nationalism, isolationism, fascism, all of this stuff. How much of it is the result of this unfistical border we call language? Right. They say that the devil's greatest creation was language. Really? Yeah. Miscommunication. Sure. Absolutely, dude. And you know what? You're right. If there was an international language, if everyone spoke the same language, I don't think it would make it so big. It would make us all the same. So lay this fears to rest, folks. No, most of the people I've read who are talking and thinking about universal language, saying like, this is not meant to supplant native languages. Yeah, exactly. It's just if you're at home, let's say you're in America, you're speaking English. Chuck and I speak English to one another. But if we want to give a seminar on podcasting in Norway, we would use the international language. Interesting you bring up Norway because some folks say that Norwegian might be a good start. Well, they used to think that's true. Yeah, go ahead. Some people have thought about this over the years, and they think that you should probably create a new language with another language as a basis. But it probably shouldn't be one of the big boys either, because it would give that nation too much of a leg up. Oh, yeah. She said from now on, English is the universal language. Right. Everyone who speaks English would be like, Damn straight. Yeah. You'd have to create your own language if you want a universal language. And I know you're dying to talk about Esperanto. Chuck. I had only vaguely heard of Esperanto before and didn't really know the nuts and bolts of it. Snow but actually, Ben Bolan, the creator of one of our soon to be released podcast, a conspiracy podcast called Stuff They Don't Want You to Know. Some have you seen it? Yes. Looking forward to it. He was telling me about Esperanto, and basically in the 19th century, a guy named Ll Zominhoff came up with this idea that we need a universal language that would promote tolerance, equality, that kind of thing. Avoid war again, specifically. I think he said that was one of his aims. Yeah, he was definitely a pacifist. He also tried to come up with a neutral religion. Yeah, I saw that. Called homoronismo. Homoroneismo. Maybe that's why I didn't take my guess. But he was 27. He was at the tender age of 27, and he created a universal language. He did. And basically, it sounds a lot like it's a romance language. Kind of. It's kind of like a broken romance language. Yes. It's independent in and of itself. So while he did borrow from others, they say they don't describe it as a mix, like a popouri of other languages just mixed together. Right. No, it's structurally similar to non European languages than European ones. It's very much phonetic and it's spelled the way it sounds supposed to be. Pretty easy. Very easy. They say 16 rules of grammar and pronunciation to it, and that's it. Because you think about English, you've got, like, good, better, best. Where the hell did better and best come from? We started out with good. Right. Where does that come from? And apparently English is one of the most difficult languages to learn that. Yeah, I would say so, because of all the little problems like that. So I think what Zamanov was on the trail of, and I think anybody has created a universal language, is to get away with all the get rid of all the foibles, the weird things that make a dialect or language so unique. Inconsistencies. 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, 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. One of the other problems is that's actually a structural approach. There's also a symbolic approach. Yeah, I like that one. The symbolic approach is like we call mother for no good reason. It's a symbolic word. It's not like the word cuckoo, where cuckoo is the sound that a cuckoo bird makes. Right. That's very structural. Right. But this symbolic words would probably have even more difficulties than a universal language that was built structurally. Because what? A language is a world view of a culture. Exactly. The people who share that language. Right. So how do you get the entire world to agree on the meaning of mother? Right? Well, mother is probably an easy one. Sure. But let's say the meaning of happiness. Let's pick on happiness. Right? Well, you can't. That's the problem. And that's probably why there never will be a universal language. That's not necessarily true. Also, I think every single universal language attempt, and there's been some sure. Did you read about idiom neutral the Russian one? That sounded like it got pretty close. Well, what do you mean by close, though? Closer than Esperanto. 2 million people speak Esperanto today. That is true. Have you been on lew? No, it's a website dedicated to teaching Esperanto. Oh, cool. It's got the tutorials and everything in there. So if you want to learn Esperanto chuck is right. There is actually a thriving little community of Esperanto speakers. And there's also two movies that have been shot entirely in Esperanto. Really? We're going to talk about one feeling. Johnny Depp did one of them. No. Bill Shatner. Yeah, that's right. There is a 1965 movie called Incubus, and the whole thing is filmed entirely in Esperanto. William Shatner speaks Esperanto, or at least he spoke the lines from that movie. No, it rang a bell there. I heard he learned it. Yeah, he knows Esperanto. You know, I worked with Shatner. Did I ever tell you that? Did he speak Esperanto to you? Like, oh, my God, that explains so much. I just thought he was having a stroke. He's a nice guy, though. Yeah. He's a little puffy, sure. But it was for a TV commercial. He was into it, I'm sure. Yeah. He really gave it all, bring everything he did. I was impressed because sometimes commercial actors are kind of like, go through the motions. Well, Chuck, let's talk about it. What are the benefits of universal language besides war avoidance or anything like that? I would say economically, it would be easier to communicate and negotiate contracts and broker deals and trade and stuff like that, wouldn't you? Oh, definitely. I think we need it. We're becoming more and more globalized. We're interacting with one another more and more. You basically can't be an isolated country any longer. If you want to stay afloat, it would save time. Plus, also think about science. I mean, why does science use Latin? It's an agreed upon universal language. What if there was a real universal language that scientists could more easily communicate their ideas with one another, their findings? Oh, yeah. And I saw that in one of the articles we read for this. Some of the old school Russian scientists used to not like to have to publish in German, which I think at the time was what most german and French. German and French for you. Russian, yeah. And a lot of students either today have to read these things in a translated form that may not be quite accurate or not read it at all. And time. So you want to go into number three? Yes. Did you clear out your stopwatch there? Okay. All right. You're ready? Yeah. And go. This one is Chuck's favorite one. He picked this one. Are we ready? Yeah. Okay. Chuck picked this one. I think it's a good idea to chuck, what is the third innovation that we need right now? Innovator is what we need responded? Yeah. We need a human. We need another Einstein. We need another Newton. We need another Tesla to come along. Just not another Edison. That lying rat. Yeah. And, Josh, some people might say when it comes to innovators, you're probably thinking in the world of science, which is appropriate, and a Renaissance scientist, maybe, where you need to start your search. Sure. Chuck, we found this article about Renaissance scientists and how actually in the United States, in the higher educational system, the cards are stacked against any of these people actually being produced very much. We have to just basically hope that one comes along, and if it does, it's going to be a total fluke. Right. Because the idea is that in order to be a true innovator, then you have to be a whole brain scientist. Definitely. And the graduate system that we have today, they said the undergraduate system does a pretty good job of it. Well, yeah. I mean, think about all the different kinds of classes, the core classes. And then I took biology for no good reason, for statistics. I hated stat, that it was awful. But the whole brain thinkers are the ones that have the more well rounded approach. So not only are they a brilliant physics mind, but they can understand the human side of maybe how to apply that. And that's what's missing a lot of times. Right. So Mills and Otino, I think, wrote this opinion piece we found in Forbes that basically are saying, like, yes, undergrad we have it. It's great. Same generally with high school, middle school, grade school kids are exposed to all these different fields of study. The problem is, it's geared generally towards funneling them one way or another. And this becomes most evident when you get to grad school. Big time where if you're a doctoral student and you need money, you better come up with an incredibly unique, specific idea or field of research that you're going to go into. It's all geared toward that. And like you said, as you go forward in education, the path gets narrower and narrower. Literally, you're going to pinpoint yeah. Where you may be researching one thing for your career. Yeah. And maybe you'll come up with an innovation that way to change the world. But my money is on a whole brain thinker. Well, yeah. Or at least somebody who can take all these various fields of research or all this various research data and put it all together. Right. What does it mean? Sure. Because research is just research until you apply it. So, Chuck, is there anybody on the horizon? Is there anybody we should be keeping an eye on, maybe who? There's a few I know. Some people might say the first answer that comes to mind might be a Stephen Hawking. But I did a little research, and while Hawking is no slouch, there are some in the physics community that think Hawking gets a lot of attention because he's generated a lot of attention through his books and maybe through his disability has garnered a lot of attention. So certainly not to knock anything he's done, but within the physics community, I don't know if he's as high on the list as some of these other guys and gals. Okay. Guys and gals. I love that. They're so much smarter than I am. I'm calling them guys and gals. Dudes and chicks. Ed Witten is one of them. Okay. You ever heard of Ed? I have not, no. He is a physicist, specifically a mathematical physicist and studies at Princeton. He's gotten the MacArthur genius grant. He's won the Fields Medal, which is the highest honor you can get in math. So he's been called the next Isaac Newton. But he works with string theory, which I know you're not a big fan of. I have one word about string theory. What's that? Boom. Yeah. So he's up there, and then there's a guy, a dude named Murray Gell. Man, have you heard of him? Sure. Tell us about him. No. Okay. MGM, as I like to call him. He's a prominent scientist, and once again, he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1969 for his work with the theory of elementary particles. And he is the one that came up with the quark. Yeah. So he's no slouch. No, he's not a slouch. I mean, to predict the existence of a theoretical particle and then have it confirmed not to you're a pretty smart guy. And then some people might say folks like Bill Gates, who he's not a physicist or a mathematician. No, but he has a high emotional intellect. A very high emotional intellect. Intellect. And a lot of money. And a true visionary. And a guy that likes to spread his money around to good causes nowadays. I don't know what got into him or if he was always his way and he was just really focused on Microsoft, but I got to tell you, I like this repackaged Bill Gates. Yeah, he's very generous guy. Apparently more than half his fortune he's invested outside of Microsoft. It's fantastic. So if you're talking about an innovator, I mean, you can only really do good if you're trying to help your fellow man, right? Oh, yeah. Or if it's a happy byproduct of your evil deeds, like Oppenheimer. Sure. No, that's the reverse of that. Okay. That's what we thought. So, Chuck, there's three innovations. You said we could do a lot more. I'm kind of glad we didn't. But I am interested as well. Thank you for turning off the stopwatch. I, too, am interested to see what our listeners who go to the blog speak to. There's certainly some I mean, we were talking if we were just on Pipe Dreamtime, like a food pill where you could just drop some water on it and create a meal. Sadly, that was one that we considered talking about. Right. And he said it's called a vitamin. Yes. And I felt kind of stupid. Yeah. So we're not talking about George Jetson type of stuff. I mean, real attainable things like teleportation. Sure, yeah. It's right there. Right there. It's faxing people who all speak the same language, esperanto. And, Chuck, I guess it's time for listener mail, right? Indeed, yes. Josh, we're going to call this a walk around the world listener mail. That's three quickies from different parts of the world, and we're going to read them right now. Okay. You're in a silly we don't actually have to walk, though, right? You're in a silly man, I hate you walking. First one is from Australia. G'day, my name is Nicola, and I'm a student from Melbourne. I am finally sending you an email after months of non stop listening. I just want to say thank you for putting metric conversions in your more recent shows. I've been confused by your measuring method. Imperial, is it called? Also, I must confess, I love how you guys say Australia. Yeah. Especially how you pronounce it. Would you say it again on the air for me, Chuck? Go ahead. Australia. Australia. Thanks a million. And that is from, I won't say your biggest fan, because that's what everyone says. I will call myself a committed fanatic. Actually, that sounds way better than fans. Slightly creepy if you ask me. Nicola. So. Nicola. This one is from Luca in Serbia. Lucas says I'm writing about Nicola Tesla. He said that he was Austrian. That is not true. He's an ethnic Serb. Wait a minute. Our last listener was Nicola from Australia. And now Luca from Serbia is writing about Nikola Tesla. How about that? This is crazy. It's crazy. So he says that is not true. He was an ethnic Serb who was born in today's Croatia, which was part of Austria, so he's not what you would consider today Austrian. Although I'm pretty sure Luke just said he was born in Austria. So Croatians like to say he was Croatian, but he's a Serb because his father was an Orthodox priest and Croatians are Catholics. So that is from Luca. And then my final favorite from China. Remember Yao Jian? This is great. I'm just going to read it as it stands here and we should go ahead and tell you we're not making fun. I love broken English. I think it's adorable. And when people make the effort, it really gives me a good feeling. There you go, Chuck. Well done with that. I'm a loyal fan of stuff. You should know. You guys always make me laugh. And when there have some weird words that I don't know, I will hear it repeatedly. So I am a hard working fan of your program. I got an interesting topic, I think why you guys don't talk about the Internet censorship and how to skip it. Because in my country, China, people can't access the YouTube. And interestingly, I even can't access your blog. So we're banned in China. I know, I blogged about it. This is the American Life podcast. Maybe also illegal because I can't download it. There has a defense system named Great Wall wish you can see it and read it in your program, but don't mock me. It's what he says. And I think what he means there is apologies for the broken English. Or he meant don't mock it. So that is from Yal Jan, and we appreciate you all listening. Yes, and thank you for the information because I actually did blog about Gentlemen Square, the anniversary, the 20th anniversary happen. I couldn't remember which listener told us that we were banned there, but I got to tell you, that's a point of pride for me. Yeah, that's awesome. And we love folks writing in and given their best attempt at speaking our weird language. Nicola. Thanks to all of you. And I just think it's cool that there's people on the other side of the world that think we're interesting. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. Well, if you want to tell us that we're interesting or correct us about where some guy was born or whatever, or mock us, sure. You can send an email to stuff. Podcasts@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blogs on the housedefworks.com homepage brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? 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. 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4149a1de-53a3-11e8-bdec-8fcadc6b8f06 | How Galaxies Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-galaxies-work | In the universe things tend to cluster. This means there’s a coherent structure to the universe and learning about clusters of stars – galaxies - helps us figure out what that structure is. Join Chuck and Josh on an amazing space voyage! | In the universe things tend to cluster. This means there’s a coherent structure to the universe and learning about clusters of stars – galaxies - helps us figure out what that structure is. Join Chuck and Josh on an amazing space voyage! | Thu, 21 Feb 2019 20:28:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=20, tm_min=28, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=52, tm_isdst=0) | 44644379 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Starchild. Chuck Bryant and there's Moon Rock. Jerry Rowland over there. And I'm just is plain old Josh Clark. Like I said. But this is the Galactic Federation of stuff. You should know episode of all time. There's my cowboy. Yeah. There you go. Chuck likes to get nice and loaded when he talks about space stuff. Here's something that I found helpful for me that I think might help. Other dumb dumps. I like that shirt, by the way. You look like a circus peanut. It is circus peanut color. Oh, my God. That is circus peanut orange 100%. Dude, I want to squeeze. You do not. All right, you can squeeze. You ready for this? So if our solar system, which is the sun, and it's orbiting planets, moons, dust, gas. Right. A lot of dust and gas rocks our solar system. Yeah, let's say if the sun was the size of a grain of sand, then relatively, our solar system would be like the size of our hand with that at the center. Wow. And then if you extrapolate that, then our hand in relation to the Milky Way galaxy would stretch the length width of the United States. Wow. And then stuff like that. Oh, keep going, chunk. Well, that's just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. Right. If you go solar system, galaxy, universe, and then so the universe would be like the United States and Canada. Well, I am a dummy, because I was like and so let's stand in Lebanon, Kansas, because that's the geographic center. Not as far as I recognize, but we're not at the geographic center of our solar system is not the geographic center of the galaxy, though. So I was wrong. No, there's a long history by the way, it was beautiful. I love that. Thank you. There's a long history of assuming that we are at the center of the universe, and then there's an almost equally long history of science proving that now we're absolutely not. And we finally figured out that we're about a quarter of the way between the galactic center and the edge of the Milky Way. Yeah. Checks out. So we're nowhere near the center of the Milky Way. Well, no, because the center of the Milky Way is a super massive black hole. The universe itself is expanding, and it's expanding faster than the speed of light. And galaxies are just caught up in the motion, going through the motions, and we're just here on this little rock called Earth trying to figure out what in the h is going on yeah. During our 80 to 90 years here yeah. We're so insignificant. Luckily, though, we figured out how to encapsulate knowledge in the form of writing, so earlier generations can or later generations can build on the work of earlier generations because we'd be toast. Sure. If it all just got reset after everybody's lifetime, and you couldn't say, oh, I've learned all this stuff. People just keep discovering the same things, which would be great for that sense of discovery, but it wouldn't really help move our species forward. No. And that's what we're all about here. That's right. Right. Yeah. US and the Hubs. So as far as what we know about galaxies now, compared to the very beginnings of this study, of course, the Greeks were looking up at the sky a long time before we were, and they came up with this name, galaxy's Ku Klux, and it means Milky circle. Yeah. And guess which word we kept to describe galaxy? The Milky, not cuclos. So when you're saying, like, look at that galaxy up there, you're saying, look at that Milky up there. Oh, right. Kuclose's Circle. Yeah. I looked it up. I'm like, Surely too close is the Milky one. But no surprising. But the Greeks were like, It looks like a Milky circle, so we'll just go with that. Yeah. And they were on to some kind of, like, everything they were doing back then. Some stuff they got wrong, and we're kind of ahead of their time, and they're thinking and other stuff they weren't quite right about because of technology. Right. But Galileo did. He looked up, and it's like, hey, there's a bunch of stars up there. It ain't milk. Congregating for a reason. Yes. And so we knew pretty early on that we were in the midst of some sort of group of stars. But for most of the era where we were looking up at the sky, at least in the West, I'm not sure about the Muslim world. I know that they kind of have their own track of astronomy and mathematics. Sure. It was many points in history far more advanced than what the west was at. But as far as the west is concerned, they didn't understand that this group was anything less than the universe itself. They just looked out and they were like, well, there's the universe. Everything we're seeing is the universe, and that's all that there is. Not that we possibly lived in what were later called by a guy named, I think, Charles Messier who called them island universes. Yeah. No, I'm sorry. It was Harlow. Shapley in the early 20th century, he started looking at some of these things and realized that they had the same structure that the Milky Way did. We kind of identified that we were in our own little galaxy, but that other stuff was beyond our own little galaxy and that they were their own galaxies. Right. And so these island universes came to be called Milkies. Yeah. And so did you pronounce them Shapley? Yeah, there's an e that's not supposed to be in there, really, because no one wants to be called Harlow Shapely, I'm sure. So he was actually right in this argument, right. This longstanding, sort of not disagreement but debate with Messier. No messiah was a couple of hundred years before him. Well, but no, the whole argument, though. I mean, they didn't literally argue with each other just because Messi was able to encapsulate his ideas in the form of writing. Yeah, but they had a long standing again, not personal beef, but debate, because we didn't have the technology to prove one or the other correct. Until Hubs came along. And in 1924, he basically said that Shapley was correct. Yeah. That these little island universes weren't in the Milky way. They were way far outside of the Milky Way. And the universe was astoundingly bigger than we thought we previously imagined. So we mentioned Hubs, the Hubs doctor Hubble, and his awesome telescope, which did you know that's being replaced? I mean, I don't think they're going to destroy it, but surely not it's being, I guess, sort of replaced by the James Webb space telescope. How do you mean being replaced? Like they're just going to shoot it out of the sky with a space? No, that's what I was saying. I doubt if they'll destroy it, but there's a new guy on the block, right? Oh, yeah. And everybody's hot and heavy and his name is the James Webb telescope. Yeah. Which will be, I think, now it's been pushed back to 2021. Yes. But this thing will supposedly be able to observe the formation of galaxies pretty much. The Hubble telescope as it stands right now, shows us, I think, back to like, 400 million years after the big bang. Not bad. Which is astoundingly early in the universe's development. And the whole point of astronomy is what they're doing is looking back in time. Right. The further away some object in the sky is, what you're seeing then is what that object looked like, say, a billion or 2 billion or 10 billion years ago. And so you can take the structure of the object and compare it to objects that are much younger that we know of today than closer, and you can see how the universe has evolved, and we can learn figuring out some of the mysteries of the universe, like where it came from, what it structures, how we're all going to die. Right. So if hubble that's great. End of the world reference, by the way. If Hubble can see back to 400 million years after the big Bang, supposedly James Webb telescope can see back to, like, 200 million years. Oh, really? That is hare's breadth from the origin of the universe. So close. Yeah. So it's the big guy in town, the new sheriff. Yeah, I just don't want Hubs to get kicked to the curb. The James Wood telescope is going to mush his face out of the way. Wait, you didn't say the James Woods telescope. You'd be like Trump forever. The telescope full of right wing rage. Yes, and very smart. I think he has the highest IQ of anyone in hollywood. Really? He's like, 160 something. Did you know that he supposedly tried to thwart the 911 hijacking? No. What? I need to look this up. I'm speaking from the top of my head, all right? But I'm pretty sure that it is fact that he was on a flight with one of the ringleaders and was like, this guy is on my flight and he's taking notes, and something's fishy here, and I'm going to report it. Really? And that ended up being, like, Mohammed Ata or something. Wow. I got to look that up because I'm truly like, wow, flying by the seat of my pants. But I think that's the true thing. He also made an appearance on The Simpsons. He was also the best part of the Stephen King anthology film cats Eye. I don't remember his the man who tried to quit smoking. Oh, quitter zinc. Is that what it was called? Yeah. You remember that? Sure. That was him. I don't remember. James woodsby, man. I think he was the guy that was trying to quit smoking under threat of violence to his family. Remember that? Yeah, that was a great one. I haven't seen that in a while, and I have to check that out. Okay, sure. It's being rebooted. Boy, we are solid. All right. That's because it's space. All right, so the various shapes 1936, Edwin the Hub's. Hubble classified these in his Hubble sequence as elliptical, spiral and irregular. Elliptical? We'll go into detail in these, but about 60% of all galaxies are elliptical, roughly 20% or so, or spiral, which is us, and then anywhere from one to 2020. 5% or irregular. Yes. But elliptical, there's a range of shape from circular, which is e zero all the way up to e seven, which is the most elliptical. Pretty much, yeah. And you're like, okay, great. So all you need is elliptical. It's all galaxies are. But now there's also something called spiral. And even though Hubble classified them by their shape, they're more differentiated by their features. Yeah. Spiral is bright. Right? They're bright. They have stars, bright stars. Lots of hot gas. Yeah. They tend to have arms that stretch out from them. Yeah. Like, if you looked at pictures of the Milky Way galaxy, it looks like what does it look like? Someone spinning an octopus. A bit of a whirlpool. Sure. Someone spinning an octopus. I love that. Yeah, that was perfect. I wish that's what the Greeks had come up with instead of a Milky Way. I'm surprised they didn't. All they saw was, like, a strip of white light. No one had any idea what the Milky Way looked like until the 20th century. Yeah, that's true. All right, I'll ease off the Greeks, everybody. I'm sorry. But spiral are the brightest, right? They're the brightest because they have the most bright stars. Elliptical tend to sometimes not have any bright stars at all. And then the other big difference between them is that elliptical are disordered and chaotic, whereas spiral are much more orderly where everything in the galaxy rotates in orbit around the galaxy center in the exact same way and for the exact same reasons that Earth rotates around the sun. Except in this rotation, our solar system takes about 230,000,000 years to make it all the way around the Milky Way rather than one year around the sun. Yeah. That's a big difference. Yes, it is. And again, with the size is illustrated at the onset. That might make a little more sense. Sure. The grain of sand in the palm in the middle of the United States. Yeah, actually, let's say United States was that would place us like, I don't know what? Kentucky. What the center of the US. No, the center of the US. Is Lebanon, Kansas. Not in my book. What is in your book? I'll tell you. Okay. I got my own opinions on that. Just no credit to live in on campus. I get it. I think it's actually a couple of miles from there. But I don't know where that would put us if we're in a third of the way between the edge. Oh, I see what you're saying. If Lebanon, Kansas, is the middle not, though, but let's just for the sake of our and the East Coast edge would be the outer edge, where would that put us in? Yes, I think Kentucky is probably a pretty good rough Kentucky. Or maybe East Tennessee. Okay. Or middle Tennessee. Something like that. Yeah, somewhere between. Just not Memphis. No. Then the spirals are broken down and subdivided into other categories. Normal spiral. That's sort of the classic disk shape that we're thinking of. Right? Yeah. That's the other feature that they have, is like a hump. They look like a UFO, a bulge. If you looked at a spiral galaxy from the side, especially, I guess, an A, I think an SA. Yeah, that's the largest nuclear bulge. Nuclear Bulges. Great band name. It is. But the bulge is like it's got a hump on the top and a hump on the bottom and then a disc of stuff in the middle, like a UFO. That's what it looks like. That's a classic spiral galaxy. Right. Which would be the normal. Then there's the barred spiral that has a disk shape as well, with a bright center as well. I don't get the difference then, visually. So I think the difference is the disk shape is with a barred spiral, the center of it is drawn out. Okay. So, like, in a normal spiral, it's just a nice circle in the center, a nice tidy sphere in the center. Whereas in a barred spiral, that sphere is pulled out into an elliptical itself. So it's like a bar of light going through the middle of the galaxy. And that's the galactic center nucleus. All right. And then we have our irregular as the third type of galaxy shape. And these are very faint, very small. No bright center, no spiral arms. Just losers. Yeah. Sort of the loser of the galaxy. So they used to think that this was the evolution of galaxies, that the different galaxies was like really? Yeah. Either it started as elliptical and then moved to spiral, or most likely vice versa. Now, we've found that's not the case at all. Interesting. They think probably galaxies tend to start out as spiral galaxies, the ordered kind, where everything is going around nice and easy. And the reason we have elliptical galaxies, the disordered kind, is because a spiral merged with another spiral, which we'll get into later. Yeah. The collisions of galaxies. Yeah. Which I honestly didn't know that much about until this episode. Yeah. And it sounds a lot scarier than it is. It's really not that scary. So don't be scared, everybody. You probably wouldn't even notice. We just have an extra sun 5 billion years from now. I feel like we should take a break. I think we should, too. We made it through page one. All right, we'll come back with page two right after this. All right, Chuck. So we're talking spiral galaxies because that's what we care about, because that's what the Milky Way is. That's right. It's a spiral bar galaxy, to be particular. And so it's got that center hump, the galactic disk. And the galactic disk is actually made up of a few different parts, too. You got the nucleus, which is the center. You've got the bulge, which you love. The nuclear bulge. He said bulge, like, nine times already. Yeah. And then the spiral arms, these are, like, accumulations of stars, gas, dust, all sorts of stuff. Planets, solar systems, all that. And that's where we are. Right. We're in a spiral arm. Yeah. The Milky Way has four spiral arms, two major and two minor. And we're in a minor one Orion, which is still fine. We're in a minor arm, but it's the Orion arm, which makes it pretty cool. Right. So I guess it would not have been occupying that would be eight arms. Well, maybe we haven't discovered the other four yet. Yes. Or maybe we're just a ceiling fan. Maybe so. I like the spinning octopus the most. We need to get some more arms then, you know, you shouldn't need octopus. They're extraordinarily intelligent. Just FYI. I think we've sung our octopus praises okay. Over the years. But are you eating them, though, still, is what I'm saying. No, I don't need octopus. Okay. They beat me, either. Yeah. Did you give them up after our episode on it? Yeah, around that time. Is it okay to eat squid ink pasta, though? Squid? They're stupid. Who cares about squid? I'll eat them all day long. Luckily. That's what most calamari is, is squid or not even. Right. What is it, then? Isn't there, like, a big calamari hoax going on? I can believe that some of this stuff is awfully rubbery. Yeah, I think that's the deal. All right, so back to the shape of the galactic disk. There's also the globular cluster. These are above and below that disk. And then the halo, which is hot gas, we think. And that is the sort of dim region that you see around the galaxy. Right. When you think of, like, the Milky Way, from all the pictures you've ever seen, what you're mostly thinking about is the galactic disk. The clusters, nobody really thinks much about, but they're actually old, super, burned out, ancient clumps of stars that formed in, like, the early galaxy that used up a bunch of stars, used up their fuel really quickly, and now they're just kind of like these dead balls that are in orbit around our galaxy, and we actually can use them. And the effect that our galaxy has on them, the title Effects of Gravity to figure out how much mass our galaxy has. Yeah. And gravity is what's holding all of this together. And you would think when you see something like the Milky Way galaxy and, you know, gravity is dependent upon mass, that center would be where all the mass is. But that's not the case. It's a little bit opposite of what you might think. Yeah. That outer halo has about as much mass as the intergalactic disk. Kind of counterintuitive. Yeah. And because that halo is made up mostly of gas and some dust, it's actually orbiting or rotating at a different rate or different velocity, I guess, than the galactic disk. Right. So there's actually torque that gets produced because the galactic disk is, like, dragging it along. Is that what makes the arms? No, we found out recently, like, within the last month or two, I believe, that the actual Milky Way galaxy is bent on the atmosphere in S. It looks like an S from the site. Kind of like a sombrero with the front up and the back down. Okay. That's what the Milky Way is. Not an octopus, not a ceiling fan. It's a crumpled sombrero. Maybe a nacho sombrero. Like the one Homer Simpson wore. Right. Or the guys that make just where the cowboy hat with the front and Brim turned up. Like the cook at the cowboy camp. Sure. Cookie. Cookie. Cookie the cook. Yeah. And galaxies are very far apart from one another. The closest one to us andromeda is 2.2 million light years away from us. And that's relatively close in the grand scheme. Right. But that's also pretty far apart. So there's this Professor Barbara Ryden from Ohio State whose lecture we came across, and she just nails this. Right. 2.2 million light years is an astoundingly large distance. Right. But it's actually really close for a galaxy because galaxies are so huge. And the way that she put it, like, if you took a pair of Ping pongs all right, here we go. And said one was ping pong balls. Ping pong balls. Yes. No games of Ping Pong. If you took two games, if you took two Ping pong balls and one was the sun and one was a neighboring star to the sun, alpha Centauri. Okay. And you put them relative to one another okay. The ping pong balls would be as far apart as Columbus, Ohio, and Jacksonville, Florida. Okay. If you use Ping pong balls to be andromeda, and the Milky Way here we go. The distance would be 3ft relative to one another. Interesting. It is interesting. Yeah. It's at least as interesting as your grain of sand in the palm of your less than one Big Mac. Maybe I didn't get it across. Let me try another take. Okay. No, I thought it was great. Okay, well, we should talk about parsecs a little bit just because of the Star Wars thing. Because a parsec is a unit of distance that is 3.26 light years. Okay. And you remember in Star Wars the famous line from Han Solo Remember? No. Then he made the Kestle Run in twelve parsecs. So as a young dumb kid, I thought that meant like a PARSC was like, whatever, 30 seconds. Right. So he did this thing in a matter of minutes. Right. And then when I learned that it was a unit of distance in that time, I think a lot of people's inclination would be that that would be a mistake on the part of the writer of Star Wars. But Star Wars nerds are quick to point out that, no, he did mean a unit of distance, but he actually skirted very close to a black hole on his Kessel Run, and he actually shortened the normally 18 parsec route to twelve parsecs. Wow, that's a big shortcut. So he basically took a shortcut, right? Yeah, not bad. Yeah. I'm just kind of wondering this is all after the fact and they were like, oh, called shoehorning. Yeah, I think so. I got a lot going for them. So as far as formation in the galaxy, again, we're talking about going back further than we can see with our current telescopes, even the web one upcoming. But we do have some pretty good guesses that after the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago, is when these galaxies formed from, again, just dust and gas. Right. There was lots of lots of hydrogen gas in the early universe and helium. Yes. So from this expansion that took place, there were parts of the universe that were less dense than other parts, and the denser parts slowed down the expansion enough for some of this dust and gas to accumulate into balls, which is one of two ways. Either those balls form the earliest stars, and then those stars started to accumulate into a galaxy, which to me doesn't make sense, because if stars are so far apart, how would they have any effect on one another to form a galaxy? Probably not that instead they think that the clouds of dust and gas formed like what's called a proto galaxy and then from that more and more density was created. More and more gravity pushed more and more dust and gas together to form stars within this accumulation which would be kind of like the gas disc that's flowing around the Milky Way. Yeah, and it's interesting, it just seems like so much happened because of things collapsing in on themselves. Gravity. Yeah, really interesting. It really is. And this is the whole reason why people study this stuff is like when you start to understand this you can start to understand the very structure of the universe and they've actually started to map this to where they can see where the dark matter is. Remember in that episode they started to map dark matter in the universe and then also physical matter and the map that they're created it looks like a cobweb. There's lots of spindly parts and thick clumps and then parts where there's voids. It looks unsettlingly like a close up of brain tissue of neurons in a brain what the universe looks like voids in between areas of matter. Really interesting stuff. So we were talking about the distance between galaxies being really large and that is true but also, like you said, at the same time, galaxies himself are so large that they do collide. I mean, should we go ahead and talk about that? I think it's inevitable. But when they do collide it's not like everything within that galaxy is so far apart. It's not like what you might picture in your head, which is planets and stars just smashing into each other all over the place. Right, which you would think so but the distances between stars are so colossal that entire galaxies can just merge with one another without any star collisions or virtually none. Now do they always merge or do sometimes they just kind of pass through one another and come out the other side? I think they can do both a little different. There's definitely types of universes that pass within galaxies. Yeah, that's all we're talking about right here, right now. The galaxies pass close enough to one another but don't necessarily merge but their gravity still has an effect on one another. Right. There's a pair of galaxies called the Mice where they've gotten close enough together that they've pulled stars toward one another and they each have tails. Now there's a galaxy called the Cartwheel Galaxy that a smaller galaxy passed through and apparently created ripples. So just like, as Professor Riden put it, just like you drop a stone into a pond, it creates ripples in the water. That other galaxy created ripples in this larger host universe. So there's other things that can happen besides just a straight up merger. But I think even in a merger sometimes some of the stars shake loose and end up just they're out in space. Yeah, that makes sense. And when they do come together or collide. They spiral galaxies generally, like, the shape can change, and they generally go to the elliptical side. So if you see a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way, then chances are it has never been in such a collision. Yeah. They think that the spiral galaxies used to dominate. I think you said, like, 60% of galaxies today are the elliptical ones. Right. The disordered ones. And they think that spiral galaxies used to be the majority, but so many of them merged to become elliptical galaxies. That's what we see the most of now. Yeah. About what do they say about 50% of all galaxies at some point have been involved in a collision? Yeah, I saw as high as 90% in one place. The Milky Way will at some point, right? Yeah. I mean, it's kind of inevitable, isn't it? We're going to merge with Andromeda in about 5 billion years. In about 3 billion years, we'll start affecting one another at the edges. We'll start pulling one another into each other, and then we'll eventually merge and become one called the Milk Omida Galaxy. Is that really what it's going to be called? Yeah. Hopefully within 5 billion years, it will come up with a better name. Interesting. Andromedic see andromedaway the andromedaway Andromedaway pretty good. Yeah, the Androay. It's definitely better than the milk ometer. Yeah, but, I mean, we're not going to be around. Our show will be I don't know. It's possible. What if this lived on billions of years from now? That's what we're doing. Right? That's what we're hoping for. So these galaxies throughout the universe do exist in galactic clusters. They are drawn to one another by gravity. And we are in what's called a pork cluster, which is less than 1000. Like way less. Yeah. Called the Local Group. And there's only 50 of us. That's a good local band name, too. I think so. It sounds like a sort of a union group. Yeah. Or like the Local 41 or whatever. If you're just playing for free beer, that's what you're doing with your band. Local Group. Local Group should be the name of your band. That's a great name for it. That's pretty good. And then there are rich clusters, and there are more than 1000 in the rich clusters. Right. And some have way more than 1000. There's one called the Virgo Super Cluster that has 2500 of these galaxies all clustered together. Wow. So think about it. You've got a planet's orbiting a star solar system. Solar system is orbiting the center of the galaxy. Galaxies can orbit one another or at least have effects on one another's orbits. Everything clusters together in larger and larger amounts, thanks to gravity. Once you pass a certain threshold and electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear force are not like the dominant forces, gravity takes over, and it does some interesting stuff to the structure, and it's driving astronomers batty, they're like, surely. There is some rhyme or reason to this. There's some pattern to this. There's got to be. They're like Jim Carrey in the number 23 or something. They think that if they can study the evolution of galaxies, they will be able to figure out the process that happens. Yeah. Or what the ultimate point will be. Are we done? Let's take a break. Oh, no, we got more. Yeah, we got more. All right. All right. So we've talked a lot about the distance between galaxies, but there's actually a name for that space in between galaxies and these clusters that we talked about called the intergalactic medium. And it is not empty. It's not just some void. And we don't know exactly what's going on in there, but we're studying it a lot. They think that there's probably some gas, because I think that's the default for everything in space. Right. There's gas in there. There's got to be some gas in there and probably some dust. And a lot of it is super cold, like you would expect. Yeah. This is what the strange thing is, though. But some of it is really hot. Right. Have they explained that yet? No, they're just taking a stab. It's a really neat age of discovery for astronomy. Like, we're getting better and better at looking out into the universe, so we're finding out more and more. But just because we get data back doesn't mean we can necessarily make heads or tails of it. Yeah, that's true. But yeah, there's hot sections of the interstellar void. What's it called? Intergalactic medium. The intergalactic medium, yes. Which is kind of an interstellar void. Sure. But I can't start making up astronomy terms. I need to use the real ones. But there's also, like, in these hot pockets, right? There's some pepperoni and cheese in there that will take the roof clean off of your mouth. There's hot metals which would also burn the roof of your mouth, too. A million degrees Kelvin. Yeah. I mean, that is the difference, too, from the cold and a galactic medium, about two degrees Kelvin all the way to millions of degrees. Yeah. That's quite a span. Right. And no idea why or what it's doing there, what's going to become of it, or if it used to be something else. We just don't understand if it follows the pattern. And it seems to. Yeah, for sure. And thanks to Hubble, too, we also have Hubble's law, which and it's so hard to believe he was doing all this in the 1920s. Dude, I know. He was a boss. Yeah, that's amazing. He also once beat up James Webb in a bar fight, which makes this whole telescope thing really ironic. But Hubble's law states this observation that he made way back when, and this is an actual graph of this relationship, but he basically was like, you know what? Everything is moving away from us. Like, every time I look at something through this telescope, everything is moving away. And not only that, but the further away it is, the faster it's moving away, which is mind boggling. Yeah. Because you can think like, all right, the universe is expanding, so that's fine. Everything's moving away from us. It also suggests that there is no center to the universe. This is where that comes from. Because everything, no matter what direction you look in, is moving away from us. You would think that, but does that mean we're the center? Bite your tongue. But that's the cosmological principle, that everything is expanding. The entire universe, not everything in the universe, is expanding within the universe. The very universe itself is expanding. Right. And since some things are moving away, the further they are away, the faster they're moving away from us. That means that there's plenty of the universe that we can never possibly detect, because even if we get up to the speed of light for travel, some parts of the universe, the furthest away parts, are actually spreading at faster than the speed of light. Yeah. We can't catch up to it. It is cosmically impossible for us to ever detect a large part of the universe. Which is why when we're talking about the universe that we're talking about and observing, that's called the visible universe. Right. But that's probably just a relatively small chunk of the universe itself, which might be infinite for all we know. And we may never know what the universe is really shaped like, what it's made of, how big it is because of this expansion that's actually speeding up and accelerating beyond our ability to detect. It amazing. Kind of sad in a way. Yes. And eventually, this is the most mind blowing thing I've ever heard. The expansion will accelerate so much that the Moon will no longer be visible to us. Like nothing will be visible to us. Right. And on a long enough time scale, I believe you wouldn't even be able to detect your hand in front of your face if you could if it was physically possible because of that expansion of light. Wow. Right? Yeah. So the universe expanding is actually pulling light out of the visible spectrum into a longer wavelength in what's called red shifting because the red is the longer wavelength end of the visible spectrum. Right. And so what Hubble detected is called the red shift. Everything's moving away from us. Yeah. Which we could observe because of X rays. Right. Because of infrared, I think. Oh, infrared. Yeah, man, I know. I love this stuff. I'm glad you do. I'm aroused. Oh, goodness. I guess if you're aroused, we should talk about active galaxies, because I'm still waiting on my squeeze, by the way. Oh, your peanut squeeze. All right, just hang on. That's your little treat if we finish that. Okay. So if you're looking at a normal galaxy. Let's say. Like the Milky Way. I guess all this light. Or most of it that you're seeing is pretty evenly distributed throughout that galaxy because it says those same galaxies that have the even distribution of light. They have looked at it through X ray and ultraviolet and infrared. And it seems like they are giving off that energy from the nucleus. And that is the active galaxy. Okay. Which is a very small percentage of the overall galaxy. Right. So the light and energy in a normal galaxy, a non active galaxy, it's distributed evenly throughout, whereas in an active galaxy, all of that light and energy is coming from the center. Yeah, but how many percent? I was going to say 1%. I don't know if that's I'm not sure. What the percentages? I know they're fairly rare from what we get. Yeah. Actually, I didn't have a percentage, but it just has a very small percentage. Yeah, I think they've discovered, like, a couple of thousand so far. Less than half a million, less than a million, which is a very small amount. But the distinction between them and a regular galaxy is, again, all of that energy is coming from a very small portion of the galaxy rather than the galaxy as a whole. Putting out all this light and energy. It's all concentrated in the middle. It's very weird. And upon closer inspection, these things that look as bright as galaxies that are relatively close to us, we're finding actually billions and billions and billions of miles light years away from us, but they seem just as bright, which makes them super energetic. So they started to try to figure out what's going on, and they think that the culprit are super massive black holes at the center of these galaxies. Well, and that's what it's at the center of our own I suspect there's a super massive black hole at the center of every galaxy. That's my big prediction for the second decade, the third decade of the 21st century. We're going to figure that out. Okay. If you're talking active galaxies, there are four classifications within that genre, and they say that basically it may not be structural. It might depend more on the angle that we're viewing these things. Yeah, like they're all probably the same thing. Right. But for that classification, it's the seafood galaxies. Radio galaxies, quasars and blazers. Yeah. In radio galaxy I only ran across here. Everybody else just says it's seafood, lasers and quasars. Yeah, radio galaxies. 1% of all galaxies. I think Freud Rich has made that up. I think he's stocking and radio galaxies or something, so he flipped it in. That's funny. Carl Seaford coined the obviously in the seaford galaxies. And what's the deal with these? So let's see. The seaford galaxy has no jets. All right, so this is the thing about an active galaxy, and this is why they think there's a super massive black hole center. They think that the accretion disk of gas and dust and everything that's just swirling, circling, the drain of the event horizon of the black hole. As this gas and dust circles, friction develops, speed develops, and it gets so hot that some of that material doesn't get sucked into the black hole, instead gets shot away above and below the black hole, right into jets that are so tall they're as tall as the galaxy is wide. There are just huge, energetic fountains of just basically pure energy, and that's what causes this brightness that can be seen from so far away. And depending on the angle of it relative to us, we've basically said it's a seafood galaxy, which means that we're probably seeing it from the side. And so we can't see the jets because they're not pointed to us. And then there's blazars and quasars, too. Yeah. In the case of the blazer, that's looking basically straight on that jet that you were talking about, coming right at you, right at your face, looking down the barrel of a blazer. And then the quasars, we discovered those in the 1960s. They've discovered what, like 13,000, but they think there could be up to 100,000. And these are billions of light years away from us. And these are the ones that are the most energetic of them all. Yeah. So if you look at a quasar, something like that, and the jets coming out of the quasar, what you're actually seeing is basically the most potent particle accelerator in the universe. Just shooting those energetic particles into space. It's amazing. I can't imagine what it would be like to be anywhere near something like that. You die. Yeah. But if you were just there in spirit or something sure. Or if you could see it with a space telescope, that'd be great, too. I'd settle for that. For the James Woods Space Tales code. What else you got? The starburst galaxy thing at the end was kind of interesting. Yeah. I just want to go on record as saying starburst is one of the most beautiful words ever. You like that? I love it. Yeah, I like that, too. Attach star or burst onto anything. Well, that's not true, because a Fecal burst, you're a Fecal star. That sounds prettier than Fecal bursts. A Fecal star, I sure about everything, sounds better than Fecal burst. Galaxies as we know them have a very low rate of new stars being formed, usually about one a year. But these starburst galaxies produce more than 100 a year, which is amazing. Yeah, it is. Compared to the rest, 100 times more amazing than a regular galaxy. That's true. They also think that they burn themselves out rather quickly and that those might actually be the globular clusters that end up just kind of hanging around a real galaxy. Well, they say the stars that burn the brightest yeah. Like Jimi Hendrix. Yes. The 27 Club all globular cluster starburst. That's it. That's it. If you want to know more about galaxies, friends, there is a whole universe out there for you to go check out and you can start on the Internet, so go check it out there. And since I said something weird like that, it's time for listener mail. So in lieu of listener mail, okay, we got a lot of feedback on our stalker episode, which kudos to you, that was your idea and it ended up being a really good episode, I think. But we got a lot of emails from both men and women who had been victims of stalking, some people who didn't even know they'd been stalking until they listened to the episode. Like, oh, okay, I was stalked. Yeah. And some really just heartbreaking, scary, scary, in depth, long stories that we heard, people who had to move, people who are still in the midst of it. It's just awful. It's tough stuff. So we're not going to read any of those because they are very personal stories. They're all anonymous. Yeah, rightfully so. Most of them were. But we just want to say thanks to everyone for being brave enough to share your story with us and just direct people to get help. If you're being stalked, it is serious stuff and I hope that podcast really got that across. Yeah. And that was one thing almost universally that we heard, was that thank you for saying, go find local help because it's out there and that's a huge first step. Yeah. And a lot of these people, just like we had talked about, kind of went through the verbatim steps of people at work thought I was just overreacting and even my family thought I was blowing it out of proportion. Why didn't you press charges the first time? You wait for blaming the victim, basically all that stuff. So you can reach out to the stalking resource center. The National Center for Victims of Crime. It's a good place to start. There are plenty of it, depending on what country you're from. There are different organizations. I see one from the UK where you can report a stalker. And in fact, one of our listeners from the UK had a really hard time over there being taken seriously. And then there's also Rain, R-A-I-N-N who is in the 25th year. And they have some good resources for you as well. Yeah, just check it out online. Nice work, Chuck. Nice work, Josh. All right, well, thank you, everybody who wrote in. And if you want to write in for any reason, you can go to our website@stuffysheatnow.com and check out the social links. I have a website too, the Joshclarkway.com, and you can send us all an email. Me, Chuck, Jerry, everybody to stuffpodcast@houseofworkscom. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.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 podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | |
0a841dd4-9f10-11ec-ae2c-fbee2043ff58 | Short Stuff: Great Smog of London | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-great-smog-of-london | In 1952 London was gripped by a acrid smog that settled throughout the city so thickly residents couldn’t see their own feet on the sidewalk. | In 1952 London was gripped by a acrid smog that settled throughout the city so thickly residents couldn’t see their own feet on the sidewalk. | Wed, 09 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=68, tm_isdst=0) | 11659438 | audio/mpeg | "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 Neogenreleasepane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system. Come chat with us. That's Neogenreleavespane.com. Your patience will thank you. Hi, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's hanging around, filling in for Dave, whose spirit permeates us all. The spirit of Dave be upon you. Peace, brothers and sisters and everybody. And that means this is short stuff. Yes, dave spirit who has settled upon us like the great stink of London. No, London did have a great stink. We talked about it was a great smog. That was a good episode, too, if I remember correctly. Sure, they got a stink and a smog and they were both great. Poor London. I mean, come on, there's a lot of terrible things happening in the air over there and technically it's their own fault, but still, you hate for that to happen to anybody. That's right. This was a smog in 1952, specifically December 5, when the day started off okay. But then, as it is, London, not surprising, a fog starts to roll in, as it often does. But then this fog combined with the smoke of London at the time, which we'll get into smoke plus fog, equals smog. It settled in and kind of parked it there for quite a few days. And it was bad. It was really bad. And it's really saying something, that it was so bad that London even named it because London was, like you said, very known for fog. It was also really well known for smog. Apparently complaints about the smog problems have been recorded as far back as the 13th century in London. So they've had smog for a long time and apparently it was somebody from London who coined the term smog to begin with. So they knew their fog, they knew their smog. And this one combined was so bad that they named it the Great Smog. It was just that bad. And it's hard, but also easy and kind of fun to get across how bad this smog was because it did all sorts of terrible stuff to the city and the people who live there. Yeah, I mean, you got factories pumping out smoke at the time. You got people's own chimneys pumping out smoke. This is December, so there were fires going all over the place. You had cars. I think they had gone from electric trams to diesel buses. That's a good move recently. So there was a ton of smoke combining with that fog to make it a very caustic situation to the point where, of course, it's England, so they're going to be like, it's all fine, cheerio go about our day, and they did their best. But even within that first day, it started to literally shut things down. It did. It shut things down. And that if you were driving at the time or you try to get your car out, you would just end up abandoned on the street. It was too dangerous to continue on. All of the shipping transportation on the Thames stopped. There were some bus service. I saw in a history.com article that some of the bobbies would walk slowly in front of the buses that were trying to operate with, like, a flashlight just to serve as, like, a beacon for them to follow through this. And even that proved to be too much. The only way to get around was the underground, which was brilliantly located underground and away from the smog. But even the indoors wasn't safe, right? Yeah, but first of all, you're talking about cars. Are you saying that someone might leave their flat and go down to their garage to get in the car and it would be so bad they might get scared and hide in their boot? Oh, man, that was beautiful. You just earned us a lot more British listeners, I think. A lot more pints. No, I think he's lost a few. Okay, yeah, things were bad indoors, I think. There were reports of movie theaters that couldn't show the movie because you couldn't see the screen. There were reports of people not being able to see their feet walking around, standing up, not being able to look down. I wish I knew the British word for feet. They couldn't see their schedule, but it smelled like worse, for sure. Okay, that's great. But imagine that. Imagine looking down and there's smog, not just fog smog that is making you choke and cough and wheeze. It's so thick that you cannot see your own feet. This is part of the problem. I did not see this. I couldn't find confirmation of this. Yummy told me about this, and she was reading me some stuff about it. One of the things she found was that people would accidentally walk into the Thames and they couldn't get out because they couldn't see the Thames from the smog and they were drowned. Like it was that bad. She worked as a research assistant? Pretty much, yeah. I got her on the payroll. How do I get that? You already have that, buddy. Who's that? You. Me? Oh, I thought you meant, like how do you get that role? Oh, how do I get it for myself? I don't know. I don't know. How about your daughter? She's getting to reading age it's she's not into this trainer young Chuck I'm trying to we get emails from people like, oh, my kid is six or seven, and they listen to the show. I'm like, really? Yeah. All right. I think it's not so much that she's not into it. That's what her dad does. And who finds whatever their dad does interesting? Nobody. She flipped out when we were on Jeopardy. Oh, did she really? What did she think about that? We watched Jeopardy, so she just thought it was the coolest thing ever. Oh, that's really cool. So it wasn't like a special, like, sit here and be quiet and watch this TV show that you've never heard of before, things. She watches Jeopardy. She watches it some with me, and every time I answer a question first, she's like she thinks of some kind of weird black magic. So that's the thing, though. I think that proves my point. She is into it and smart and curious. It's just that she's not into whatever her dad's job is. That's what I think it is. Yeah. I mean, she loves story pirates. That's her jam. Oh, yeah. Pete's thing, right? Yeah, it was made by a friend, in part by her friend Peter Mcderny. And I keep telling her, Peter and Beth and their family came to Georgia, and we all went to the lake together a few years ago. And I keep telling, you know, Peter, he went to the lake with us. She's like, really? And I'll show her pictures and she's like, that's him. I don't remember that. That's him. Hey, that's the guy from the Valveline commercial. That's the guy from the at and T commercial. He was in a Super Bowl spot. He's in tons of stuff. Yeah. All right, so enough of Peter McNaney. Let's take a break and we'll talk more about the smog 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 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 fast in your seatbelt and put away your tray table because there's so much world to see. And the city advantageplatinum. Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at city comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. 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 an industry. IBM. Let's create Learn More@ibm.com. So it's really fun to talk about all the stuff that just went awry during this fog. Like you said, people couldn't see movies anymore because there's so much smog that came in unless it was awful true. Like ambulances not being able to run or people walking into the Thames. Right. What about robberies and purse snatchings? Increasing. Sure. You're going to have an increase in crime when all those there's a good word, British word for criminal. I can't think of it, but I don't know. They would definitely personatch with that heavy fog. Yeah, whatever they call them either capper. Well, at any rate, one of the other things that happened to Chuck, reportedly, was that an entire herd of cattle in nearby Smithfield, I believe died, choked to death on it. And that really reveals just how bad this was. And I don't know if we've said it or not yet, but this didn't go on like just on December 5, 1952, this went on for five days and it kept getting worse. And the whole reason it kept getting worse is because remember our heat waves episode? Yes. So an anti cyclone, I believe, a high pressure system settled over London. It was 30 miles wide and settled over London and it basically kept any breeze and air at bay. So all of those smokestacks and emissions and all that stuff just kept building and building and building and they were trapped at roughly surface level. And over five days they just kept going because this high pressure system would not move. And finally went out to see on December 9. That's right. And in the meantime, exactly a very large health toll. There have been differing numbers on people that they can directly attribute to dying as a result of the great smog. I think back then they said it was about 4000 people. These days people say it might be more like 12,000 people. Yeah, that is an astounding number of people, too. And granted, some of these people were probably had breathing issues or asthmatic or COPD, but it would push them to death. I don't know about completely healthy people that died within those five days, but 12,000 people is a lot of people, no matter how you slice it. Yeah, over five days. The point is these people wouldn't have otherwise died. That's the guests like directly attributable to this. And it was so bad that the British government basically was forced to act. They came up four years later with the Clean Air Act and this is the they come up with a Clean Air Act. Like when you think about environmental policy and movements and stuff, you typically think of 1970 is like the beginning of that. That's how bad the smog was that they came out with a Clean Air Act in 1956 directly because of that smog event. Yeah, I mean, La. I remember when I was living there, people would say, oh, man, can you imagine living here in the 1950s and, like, when it was just so clean and beautiful? And the 1950s in La. Were awful. Yeah. Terrible. Terrible smog back then. And the smog, I think, got worse in La. Through the things started getting better. But it's way better now than it ever used to be, as well as in London, thanks to stuff like the Clean Air Act. And then I think later on, there was another small crisis in 62 where I think they added some more teeth to the Clean Air Act, but basically, they offered a lot of incentives. They offered a lot of restrictions on industry and people, but they also said, hey, why don't we try things like electricity or natural gas or oil instead of burning this coal all over the place? And it worked. I don't believe there's been a great smog since 1962. So. Way to go, London. Way to pull it out. Go, London. You got anything else? Got nothing else, except to say that we want to one day come back to London and do more live shows. Yeah, totally agreed. In the meantime, thank you for listening, London. Thank you for listening to the rest of the world. And thank you most of all, Chuck. I think we can say to Yuumi for coming up with this one, too. Oh, it was her idea. Yes. She's the one who told me about it. We got to get her on the payroll. I got her covered. Okay, everybody, 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." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-12-01-sysk-flea-circuses-final.mp3 | How a Flea Circus Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-a-flea-circus-works | If you've ever seen a flea circus, then count yourself among the few. It's a dying art, but back in the day they thrilled and delighted young and old alike. Learn all about the tiny big tops in today's episode. | If you've ever seen a flea circus, then count yourself among the few. It's a dying art, but back in the day they thrilled and delighted young and old alike. Learn all about the tiny big tops in today's episode. | Thu, 01 Dec 2016 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=336, tm_isdst=0) | 43561870 | 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 squarespace.com google to start your free trial and use our offer code Works W-O-R-K-S for 10% off your first purchase. Google and Squarespace make it professional. Make it beautiful. Hey, everybody in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. We're also looking at you, Oakland. We are coming out to sketchfest this year again for the second year in a row, and we are doing a rare Sunday afternoon jam. So that is Sunday, January 15, at 01:00 P.m.. You can come see us live. And tickets are going to go fast, so go to sfsketchfest.com and just click on the little ticket links or look at the line up and follow us there. And we can't wait to see everyone. It's one of our favorite cities to perform in. And go to Sfcatchfestcom. Oakland, san Francisco. We will see you soon. 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 Rowland. And that makes this stuff? You should know the podcast. Yes. Who would have ever thought that we could do more than one podcast on fleas? Had I thought about flea circuses, I would have thought that, yeah, we covered it a tiny little bit. I went back and looked just to make sure we weren't being too redundant. Right. And we just sort of mentioned it briefly. But how delightful to dig in even further. Yeah, I mean, there's no way that we really got into it because it's one of the least documented aspects of popular culture I've ever come across. Man, and there's so much misinformation. And you run across people who act like they know exactly what they're talking about, and then you do more research and you find out they really are wrong in a lot of it. It was crazy. It was a crazy research. Yeah. And you go to web pages that are solid green with white letters. Seriously turned back the clock to punctuation. What's that? Yeah, it was a little weird, but people take us to task on the accuracy of this one. Then we'll be like, you go do better. So I think we kind of gave it away. The cat out of the bag. And so it's fleas. We're doing flea circuses. We're talking about flea circuses. And they actually like I think of flea circus is fairly old timing, but I usually think of them as like the 20s or thirty s, maybe even the 40s from that old tech savory flea circus cartoon. Sure. But they go way further back than that. Or even the concept of training fleas in some way, shape or form goes even further back than that. Yeah, which we'll get to it. But training them is a bit of a misnomer. Yeah, that's a stretch, for sure. It's sort of like tying and gluing things to fleas and just let them be fleas. Yeah. Basically, as you will probably come to the same conclusion, flea circuses are really mean. Yeah. They're cruel. No matter how you feel about fleas. Yeah, they're cruel. Cruel acts of barbarity. I think that's how they used to bill it, actually. Yeah. Tiny, cruel acts of barbarity. Come see Professor Long Hair and his fleece circus witchy torment. But they're small, so who cares? Right. So 1570s is if this is accurate, we're all going to go all the way back to a man named Mark Scaliatt, who did not have a flea circus, but he was supposedly in London, one of the first people, or perhaps the first person to use a flee as a prop of some sort. Yeah. To basically show off his skills as what? He was a blacksmith. Yeah, he was a smithy. And he made, like, this really tiny, intricate caller that he put her onto flee. And he said, check this out. Yeah. Because apparently other people, like watchmakers and stuff, would make little tiny watches as well as gimmicks. But I guess the thing they were trying to show is the only thing I can think of is if I can make something this tiny that works, imagine what a real size human watch would look like. It would work even better. But he got kind of famous from it, from what I understand. And the idea of using fleas called on well, it took a couple of hundred years, sure. But if you look into fleas and flea circuses, like, I just took them for granted. I never stopped and thought, why fleas? But there's actually really good reasons why fleas. And it has to do with for one, fleece used to be everywhere. No matter where you lived in the world, you shared your living space with fleas. Yes. Which must have been pretty awful, but apparently it was just a fact of life. So that's one thing. They're ubiquitous, they're easy to come by. The other one is that fleas are really good at jumping, and that actually makes them, under the right circumstances, really good for this flea circus idea. Yeah. And if you really want to itch yourself, go to listen to the flea episode. But they come in a couple of thousand varieties, and the ones apparently for circuses are the little flat, reddish brown ones, about 2.5 length. And they can jump, though. 2.5 mm. They can jump sometimes as high as eight or nine inches in the air. I saw up to ten. Where are you getting your fleas? That was from the Royal Air Force Experimental Station. They apparently set up some equipment in the we're photographing fleas jumping. Oh, yeah. I see here that they said that at the start of a jump, a flea jump, they experience forces greater than 140 times out of gravity. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. They have these little what are called elastic cuticles in their legs, and they can store a tremendous amount of potential energy in it. And when they release them and they jump, that potential energy turns into kinetic energy. And since it's basically this elastic connector that's really storing the energy, they're not having to use up a lot of their own. So they can jump like this, like, thousands of times in an hour. And apparently, when they jump I'm sure we said something somewhat contradictory in the actual fleas episode, but the relation of their jumps to their body size compared to humans, it'd be like us jumping over the Statue of Liberty or something along those lines. Yes. Which is very hard to do. Getting harder every day. Man. I was kind of thinking about these fleas jumping and, like, evolutionarily speaking why? And I guess they're just so small that when a dog goes to scratch or bite at it or whatever animal tries to get the flea off, they can't just be like, well, let me run away as fast as I can because the dog's bite will still get it. So they learned, I think, quite literally, how to jump and get the heck out of there very quickly in order to survive. And the coolest fleas make the bionic man sound when they jump. Yeah. If you listen really close, all the hipster fleas. Right. So I guess we should talk about the main dude, though, right, who we owe all of us owe a great debt to. I'm not saying his name. You know, you got to say his name. This is the 18th. He was an Italian impresario in London named Louis Burtolotto. Nice. Bertolotto. Yes. There's so many o's and t's. I thought I messed it up. No, I know. It's an unusual name. Yeah. So he's the guy in London who said, I want to be really famous one day, and my big idea is to take fleas and put them in shows. Yeah. And it worked. It did work. I saw somewhere that the origination of flea circuses was due largely to him, but I didn't really see anybody else cited earlier than him. The watchmaker, the Smithy, mark, the blacksmith. He wasn't doing any kind of shows or tricks. Louis Bertolotto said you know what? The fleas aren't props. The fleas are going to be the stars in my show. That's right. I think he may have been the one who had the original idea to do this. Yeah. I love our own article said his show was part action, part humor, part social commentary, but I think that was the case. Well, we might as well talk about what these things did. They would do everything from high wire acts to sword fighting to political and historical reenactments. Yes. They re enacted the Battle of Waterloo dressed in, like, military garb. Yes. They would play soccer or football. They would do high diving, pretty amazing stuff. Little pools of water. They would pull little chariots and carriages. Yeah, that was one of the first ones, because I think especially back in the early 19th century, people didn't know everything there is to know about fleas like we do today. Right. So the idea of watching a little, tiny, tiny flee, like a three millimeter long flea pulling, like a hearse or a chariot or a cart that was hundreds of times its own weight, does it get any better? It's going to impress you, especially if you're a five year old chimney sweep who's owned by the guy who bought you from your parents. Yeah. Or I actually looked up some flea circuses on YouTube. There were these little kids. There was one in, I think, Denmark in the 1950s that I looked at. I saw that in Telfaire. Yeah. People were just delighted. Oh, yeah. I mean, I watched some of the videos, too, and I noticed that my hands were clasped together beneath my chin. I think it might have been the perfect post election YouTubing that I could have done, actually. Yeah, it worked pretty well. So Bertolotto, his act was not small, if you think. Well, sure. He did this at some county fairs and sideshows, and then his wife made him stop. Yeah, not true at all. He actually got really famous for this. I don't know. I mean, they liken him to Elvis Presley. I don't know if he was that big. I think the point the author is making is this guy wasn't he wasn't Internet famous. He was like, famous famous. Yeah. Like, he traveled the world doing this. Right. It's good for him. Right? Yeah. And he did. And as he traveled the world, people were like, I can do that, too. Sure. Tired of working. I want to do this. But it turns out that, from what I can tell, as far as showbiz goes, running your own flea circus has got to be one of the more demanding side shows there are. Well, sure. Part of the problem is your performers. Well, first of all, it says in here, and this is like again, with this research, you just sort of have to take some of these people at their word. But they say that about one in ten fleas can even make the cut. Right. Once you find your champion team of the 10%, they're going to die, and they need to be cared for. Right. And traveling all over the world with your prized fleas is precarious. Well, yeah, especially if you're traveling to do shows and colder climbs. There aren't fleas, and fleas don't do very well there. Your whole troop may die the night before a show. Can you imagine? No, but apparently it happened a lot. There was a guy I read, and I'm not quite sure who it was, but he had a standing gig in, I think, Switzerland, maybe, or somewhere somewhat northern Europe. And he had to send down no, she I'm sorry. She had to send down to Majorca to get fresh shipments of fleas, like every two weeks. Yeah, because she couldn't keep them alive any longer, though. Yes, I have offers from all over the world to take my show. But you're afraid of one thing. When you get out of the country, can you get fleas? I went to Sweden, and I had to send to Mallorca in Spain to get fleas. Fortnight. Every fortnight. Who was that? It was a woman of sword swallowing. Right. Was that Professor Tomlin? No, I can't remember her name, but she's like a legendary sword swallower. Professor Testos? No, Professor Chester. None of the professors. And that was another thing I noticed from this, too, but I couldn't really find the origin. Apparently, if you had a flea circus from the 19th century to the early 20th century, you the flea master. Build yourself as professor or whatever. Yeah, it's so weird. There's just all these really weird trends, but in the history of flea circuses, it was like one person would come up with an idea, and then they go and show it, and for some reason, it would attract a bunch of other imitators. And that's basically the history of it. I would have build myself as a count. Oh, man. That would have broken new ground. But they would have to pay money. And it says in the 1950s, Professor Testo said, we paid six shillings a dozen, although there have been times of shortage when a single fleet has cost as much as two shillings. Well, you know, also, if you look around today, which I did, I couldn't find anywhere to buy fleas. Apparently, you have to send off from overseas. But I thought, surely there's some weirdo somewhere who is selling fleas to flea circuses, and there are none. None whatsoever. Well, there is a flea circus in Germany still. Yeah. At the Munich, October 1. Yeah. Where else would you have one? Oh, it's Mimi Gano. That was her name. The fleece circus woman. Okay. Yeah. All right, so you want to take a little break here? Yeah. All right, well, let's break. Let's go pick the fleece from our own bodies. I know, I'm itching or scratching. Then maybe we can train them to finish this episode for us. Okay, so, Chuck, we kind of made it as far as Bertolotto, and there's actually a lot of mystery surrounding that guy. Here's the weird thing. Okay, I'm going to confess something to you. When I first read this article, I was like, here's a stinker. Yeah. Then I dug in a little further, and I was like, I'm being tortured with research to do a stinker. And then the more I did and the more I did, the more I dug in, I'd find these weird little things that kept popping up that combined create the history or the culture of flea circuses. And the more I came upon these little things and putting them together, the more I was just totally delighted. But then I think, like, you when I finally hit YouTube and was like, okay, I need to see some of these, then I was like, I love flea circuses. I could sit here and talk about them all day. Well, we'll try and keep this to 30 to 40 minutes all day. So I just realized I didn't finish my thought. The weird little thing that I found out about Professor Berlottolo berloto. There you go. Thanks, man. He just vanished. He disappeared. He was, like, as famous as an astronaut. And then all of a sudden, he's gone. And there's a guy who is I think his name is Andy Rich. He's, like, basically the foremost flea circus researcher working today. And he found Professor Bertolotto. Apparently, he moved to Canada and lived out the rest of his life in anonymity. Wow. Yeah. I have a question. Okay. Why do you always use astronaut as the same indicator? It's a Simpsons reference. Okay. Homer is saying somebody is richer than an astronaut. I was going to challenge you and say, name an astronaut. Oh, dude, jim Lovell. No, name a current astronaut. Oh, a current astronaut. We got Mark Kelly and Scott Kelly. Okay. All right. The twins back off. Then their parents called them Project Gemini. That's cute. But they didn't. I just made that up. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, man. That would have been surely someone thought of that. If not, I'm going to trademark it. Yeah, and then you could blackmail them. Feel like you want this nickname. I know you're richer than an astronaut. All right, so early 1009 hundreds, if you're talking imitators. Over here in the United States, we had a man named William Heckler, and he was one of the first dudes over here to be a successful flea master. And he did the usual things, made them box and race and juggle. And we're going to tell you some of these secrets, by the way, if you're wondering how these things are accomplished, just hang in there. And he said at one point he was bringing in $250 a day or performance in a day of performances a day. Yeah, so many performances. And here's the thing. I kind of wondered because I didn't find it until later in the research, like, how do you see this stuff? But you wouldn't have very many people in there. You'd have, like, ten or 15 people crowded around a little table for six to ten minutes. You would shuffle them out and bring in the next group. Yes. I saw somewhere that if you were really dedicated to it, I think Cecil Adams wrote it on the street note that if you were, like, a really dedicated performer, you could conceivably do 50 ten minute performances a day. So that's basically like 10 hours with a ten minute break every hour. And if you're not a really dedicated fleemaster, then just get out of my face. Why do you even bother? Seriously, though, when we talk about how to do this, it will become clear just how much work this must be. Yes. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about that. Every flea is different. And like I said, if you believe the research, about 10% of the fleece are fit for the job. Right? And as we mentioned, you don't really train them. What you do is back in the day, you would take either some silken thread or some really thin gold wire. Hopefully you can't even see it. That's sort of the idea. And you tie a little tiny noose of sorts around this flea's neck, and apparently that was really hard to do. Oh, yeah. Because when a flea eats the blood of their master, which is true, yeah, we'll get to that again later. But they're neck swells, so you can't tight, too tight, or else they're going to die, and your price flee could die. Or if it's too loose, then the flea goes away and the chariot stays behind, and that's no good now. And you just hear a tiny bionic man sound. That's right. So that's very hard, number one. Number two, the idea that you have to do that with new fleas every I would guess probably every few weeks, if you're on average, because fleas, they live mainly maybe a year. Most fleas live about three or four months. That's an old flea. So you got like, some star performers, and they're performing for a few months or whatever. So you're having to basically constantly harness fleas all the time. And again, before you even harness them, you have to sort them. So you have to study and observe the adult fleas, see which ones like to jump. There's an old legend that apparently came from Professor Heckler's son, if not Professor Heckler himself, who said, you put a lid over a jar and you can train them not to jump too high because they'll hit their head on the jar, and they don't like to do that. So they learned not to jump. Then they passed their first test. It's not clear whether that's actually hokum or not, but for a very long time, that's been part of the lore of training fleece. The problem is, I think you said it, fleas can't actually learn anything. They're not really being trained. They're actually being physically restrained in lots of ways, including that harness, and starting with the harness. Well, I don't know, though heckler, professor Heckler, that is, also said, and this was fascinating to me as far as whether or not these fleas can learn anything. He said that he would, to get the best fleas, put them in a glass jar that is too tall for them to jump out. And he said that he would notice the really good fleas would jump up on the side, fart out a little bit of sticky stuff, whatever that is, and then spend the rest of the time trying and trying to hit that identical spot again to grab hold of the sticky stuff, basically a foothold to be close enough to the top to leap out. Right. Amazing. Don't know if I believe it. Well, yeah, I mean, he was a showman, a consummate showman. Like, he didn't just basically point and be like, look at the fleas. Give me your money. Please leave now. You were carrying the show on, right? You had to tell the performance along your professor, for God's sake, right. When this guy is being interviewed over the years, I can't imagine he didn't ham it up in the interviews. So I don't know. Like, a lot of it's lost to time what was true and what wasn't, as far as these old guys go. Yeah, but Professor Heckler also said when he was picking them out, he said stodgy ones are broken to the Marygo round harness flighty fleas make good dancers. Those with especially strong legs will become kickers, jugglers, and chariot racers. Yes. So you've got fleas harness. That's, like, the first initial thing. But there are other things you need to do to them, too, right. You can take that harness, and the most basic thing you could do is take that harness and actually hook it up to, like you said, a chariot or a merrygor round or something like that. And, yeah, people will be like, that's pretty neat. That's cool, but I could do that. But you could do other stuff, too. And a lot of it involves glue, unfortunately. So, say, like, you take a tiny piece of wood or a tiny piece of metal, and you glue it to the fleece arms, right? Yes. And we should say once that happens, that's it. That's never coming off for the rest of the Fleas life. Yeah. I mean, do you think they even survived that day? I think so. Yeah. I think that they typically survive a few weeks of performing. Okay, so even if they have a little sword glued to their body yeah. I just think they live with horrible lives. I mean, basically, we as a species should know more about this because if the fleas ever rise up and become intelligent, like, our backs are against the wall for what the flea circus fleamasters have done to them. Yeah. Glued to the wall, they'll be like, oh, I guess whose turn it is? All right, go ahead. You glue a piece of stick or something to their arms, and remember, already they're harnessed. And then you do the same thing to another flee, and then you tie their harnesses down, and you just kind of tickle them or do something to stimulate them, and they start waving their arms, and it looks like they're sword fighting. So that's a really good example of a flea circuit. Like you're having them do things, and then the flea master is like, well, look at this. This is a sword fight. Everybody see they're doing or fencing or something like that. Right. And I've trained them to do so. Exactly. So these things really it's the interaction between restrained flee, usually with the prop glued to it defending itself or responding to some sort of noxious or threatening stimuli, and then the fleetmaster coming in saying, oh, they're fencing, or they're walking the high wire. This is Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. Yes. They would play soccer, like I said. So what they would do there is they would get a little piece of cotton wool. They would soak it in something that the fleet doesn't. Like some mal oeris thing. Yeah, I looked it up. Like, lavender works really well. Citronella, cedar oil, those are all lovely. That's a shame. But come to think of it, when you see natural flea sprays, that's what's in natural flea spray. Exactly. So they would soak it in that stuff, and then the flea would literally just kick at it to get it away. Like a little soccer ball. Right. They're either kicking at it to get it away or because they're restrained, when they kick, instead of it propelling the flee away, it's repelling the ball away from them. So if you have them just kind of do that back and forth, then yeah, they're playing soccer. What about juggling? Josh love it. What you do there is you glue a flea on its back, basically, and then put another little tiny piece of cotton on their legs, and they would kick at it trying to get it off, and apparently it would just kind of go up and down and spin around like it was juggling. Amazing. Yes. And this is thanks to Heckler in particular in the United States, he really started hitting the county fairs and the carnivals. So it became basically part and parcel with sideshows. The fleece circus. Basically, any time you went to a decent carnival, there's a flea circus there. Yeah. And I get the feeling that these professors, they would try and innovate, they would try and come up with new tricks and new things that would delight people because you want to keep people coming back. Right. So that's where you come up with things like the high wire act and the flea walls, when it would appear as if a fleet orchestra was playing and fleas were dancing. Yeah, because there's other things that fleas respond to, too, besides citronella. They respond very well to heat. They consent heat very well. And if it gets too hot, they want to get out of there. So if you apply heat from beneath on, say, like just a drum head or something like that, they'll all start hopping around. But if they can't get away, if they're harnessed in, then it looks like they're dancing if you put a little flea orchestra to the side with instruments glued to their arms at a nice backbeat exactly. Then you have fleas playing music and fleas dancing to it a flea ball. So this all is delightful and well and good, but what fun is a naked little flea doing these things if you could have a flea dressed up as Napoleon? Right. And that's what they did. Apparently, historical figures were lampooned. They would supposedly get Mexican nuns who had, quote, nimble fingers tired and eyes deteriorated. I don't see how that makes any sense. So their nimble fingers grew tired and their eyes deteriorated as they were making these things. Okay. That was a good quality they look for in a Mexican nun seamstress. How are your nimble fingers feeling? They're kind of tired. They're tired. That's sad, actually, then. Sure. So they would get, apparently, these Mexican nuns to make these tiny little costumes, and they're still on display today. If you go to how do you pronounce that in England? I mispronounced everything in England. It's spelled Hertfordshire. Show cambridge. All right. Cambridge, England, I think, is where that is. At the Rothschild Zoological Museum, there are two fleas dressed as Mexican fleas on display, and right. In our lovely Edinburgh, Scotland, that we adored so much. Have I know. I adopted home. Had I known that there was a museum of childhood there with a flea wedding party dressed up on display, I would have gone in a second, for sure. But, yeah, it was a thing. I think it was already a thing in Mexico. And the flea circus master said, hey, I need to get some of those. So, Chuck, if you have a bunch of fleas and they're making you money, you want to keep them alive, right? Yeah. How would you do that? Well, as we all know, fleas are parasitic blood suckers. And so they would just go down to the blood bank and get a bag of blood right. And let the police swim around in it. Yeah. And they loved it. No, what they would do is and this is like, give me chills thinking about it, they would roll up their sleeves, stick their arm down there, and let the fleas feed on their bodies. Yes. A couple of times a day. But apparently, though, it was part of every single show that you would end the show with. And now, since these fleet performers have done so great, I shall let them, based on my blood. And the crowd would be like, EW, gross, I didn't know it out. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah. It was part of stage patter, but apparently, at least heckler. But I'm sure others actually did let the fleas feed on them. Yeah. I mean, what's a good flea master to do? Well, feed your fleas blood. Either that or have, like, again, a chimney sweep that you bought from a chimney sweeper to let the fleas feed. On. I hope that episode has come out. People get to be really confused. Yeah. Or it'll be really delightful when it does come out. And they'll be like, oh, that makes sense now. Hey, one more thing about Heckler. So there was a Heckler senior and a junior. Apparently Junior kept it going in Times Square until, like, the late 50s had a flea circus going, and Heckler's Flea Circus shows up in a scene in Easy Rider. No way. Yes. I couldn't figure out what scene. I didn't have time to go check. But there's a scene in Easy Rider. Where? In the background, there's. Heckler's Flea Circus. And then they were pushed out of Times Square by peep shows, and then the peep shows were pushed out by Walt Disney and Giuliani. Yeah. Heckler tried at first to do Pantless Flea Circus. It didn't work very well. Yeah, no one wants that. No, I finally just packed it up. All right, well, let's take one final break here, and we will talk about another kind of flea circus right after this. So, Chuck, one thing that I found I'm pretty sure you found it, too, was that when you start looking into flea circuses, some people think that there is never such a thing as flea circuses that used real fleas. Yes. I thought you were going to say, when you start looking into flea circus, there's no going back. You'll never be the same again. That's definitely true, too. Like, I've changed forever. Yes. I always thought that flea circuses were a complete ruse and that there were never any real fleas performing, right? Apparently, no, that's not the case. There have been, and indeed ours recently as the have been flea circus that used real fleas following these traditions that we just mentioned. But if you believe that there are plenty of flea circuses out there that don't use any fleas whatsoever, you're right, too, because there's both. The type of flea circus that doesn't use fleas is called a humbug flea circus. It's all stage magic, it's all illusion, and it's pretty awesome, actually. Yeah. There was a man, a magician named George Tollerton in the 1930s, and he wrote a booklet, actually outlining fake flea circuses and skits that you can do while the carnival barking was going on in the real flea circuses. You really want to take center stage if you have a fake flea circus, not only introducing the death defying feats, but then you are following these fleas, jumping around with mimicking it with your eyes, and following it around by moving your head around as if the audience is looking at some invisible thing, which they are. Right. They are. And you're basically just using your powers of suggestion to get them to think they're seeing what you're saying, right? Yeah. That's the most basic humbug flea circus there are, right? Sure. But there's one that started, like, I guess, the genuine stage craft, stage magic, humbug flea circus came about from Michael Bentine, who is a goon, actually. Right. Remember? Explain that what it is. The goon showed up in the Monty Python episode. They were the direct predecessor of Monty Python. Right. Spike Milligan and his goons. Yes. He wasn't a hockey playing goon. No, that's a different thing. Or a goon on Scuba do or a goonie. Right. Never say that. Just a regular old goon. Yeah. Michael Bentine, he was a British performer and entertainer, and he in 1950 performed called the Royal Variety Show, I guess. I think so. And it was a little fake flea circus, apparently. Pretty elaborate one. Yeah. Because rather than just using his power suggestion, he was using things like magnets and remote controlled pumps and mechanical devices to really kind of do this exaggerated simulation of a flea doing stuff going through the circuit of his flea circus. Right. So he would say, have a magnet or a piece of string or something pushing a ball, or rather pulling a ball up a hill, an incline. And he would say that this is the Flee sisyphus. And he's pushing this ball up a hill. Right. This is my favorite. This gets me every time. A flea going up on the high dive board. And then so as it's going up the rungs of the ladder, each one gets depressed. Right. So you can see the fleas progress up the ladder, gets up to the end of the board, jumps a couple of times, so the springboard goes up and down, and then it makes a springing sound as he jumps off. Oh, yeah, right, exactly. Dives into the water, and there's like this huge splash, which a fleet could never make a splash to begin with, but a huge one. It's just hilarious. I like the one the sand table. They would have a little sandbox and the fake flea would invisibly jump around, but it would create a little splash of sand everywhere. He dropped all over the place. Right. And again, all with magnets. All fakery. Yeah. But really clever. I get the impression he was not terribly old at the time when he first debuted it on TV. And in the grand tradition of flea circuses, some other people saw it and said, I want to do that, too. So the Humbug Flea Circus took off and became pretty popular in the second half of the 20th century. I should say popular as far as flea circuses go, which is to say, not very popular. Right. Popular among weirdos. Yes. I'm really kind of wondering about this Bertolotto and his fame. Like, he might not have been, I don't know, just because you travel the world I mean, he could have been traveling the world performing in front of 60 people a day. That's not exactly Elvis. True. This whole thing is under a cloud of suspicion. Yeah, man. It's really tough to figure out the what's from the who's and the Wins and the why and the fleas from the magnets. Yeah, because once you introduce that humbug hurry into it, everything comes into question. Actually, though, there is a book that I want to get. It's a pamphlet, basically turned into a book from 1975 that a guy named Tom Palmer wrote. It's called The Famous Flea Act, and it teaches you everything you need to know to do a humbug flea circus. I just want to read it just for fungi. You know, Christmas is coming up. I bet you someone out there. I'll send that to you. I was talking to you. That just someone else out there, Will. Okay, my call to you. The public listening stuff you should know, public is I know they're doing this in October 1, but somebody needs to bring this back in a big way. Well, a woman did in the 90s, but it didn't take for very long. But, I mean, it was pretty big in the 90s. Her name was what is it? Chuck Maria Fernande Cardoso. Okay. Did you read about her? No. You should check out her act. You didn't see the video of it? No. There's like a seven, eight minute video of her act, and apparently it's just the highlights, I guess. Her act was longer, and she's a performance artist, so she did it at different places, like she did at the New Museum in New York and San Francisco and just kind of some pretty neat places, places you wouldn't expect to see a flea circus is what I'm saying, I guess. But she used live fleas in the grand tradition of flea circuses and made a very beautiful, neat, almost circus flea circus in the 90s. Wow. Yeah, but there's a video of it, or there's plenty of videos. I'm sure of it out there. Just look her up and look for the flea circus video with our thumbs up on it. Yeah. And we kind of joked about this being cruel. It's easy to say this is a fleet. Who cares? But I'm sure there are people that get up in arms about using any sort of mistreating an animal for any kind of insects, animals, let's just say for this argument, for sure, for the entertainment of humans. There's probably at least one person out there that thinks this is a very cruel thing to do. No, there's apparently societies that are dedicated to preventing cruelty to insects in particular. There you have it. And they have called specifically for flea circuses to be banned outright. And they make a pretty convincing case, especially if you don't allow yourself to stop and remind yourself that these are fleas we're talking about. But they're held in captivity their whole lives. They are connected by a harness that keeps them held down their entire lives. The tricks that they're performing are actually like stress behaviors, and they die probably prematurely. Yeah, well, that's what went off on fleas in the flea episode. So I can't really say anything about that. Sure. I've had bad infestations, and I've had no problem grabbing them between my hands and holding them underwater until they slowly drown. They're like, Please just crush me. And you say, Never. You'll drown. You can't crush them. You can crush a flea. It's hard. You need fingernails. That's your problem. You bite your fingernails too much. Yeah. But you try to smash a flea, and he just goes, yeah, anything else? You can buy flea circuses. Ready made flea circuses if you want. Well, that's fun. Yeah, like an ant farm. Good luck. Finding fleas is the thing, right? And I think that's it, man, that's flea circuses. Just go watch some flea circus videos on TV or on the computer TV. You're going to love it. Yeah, it's a good way to just dumb it down and check out. Yes. It's delightful, though, too, since I said it's delightful, if you want to know. That's right. I got all that order. I was thinking about flea circuses. If you want to know more about flea circuses, do what I just said. And you can also type those words in the search bar, how stuff works. And since I said it's delightful before it's time for listener mail, I'm going to call this what the writer called it, which is pick me for listener mail. Thanks. From a teacher. Okay. It's hard to resist. Sure. Josh, Chuck, and Jerry, I'm finally writing to you all. I've been listening to stuff you should know for years. I think I've listened to nearly every episode, even the ones from the dark days when the discussion lasted fewer than ten minutes and Josh was still looking for his perfect podcasting partner. My sister introduced me to you, so if you pick this for listener mail, please do be extremely cool if you give my sister Laura a shout. Well, that is really nice if you chuck it is. You're feeling very generous. Regardless, I've been meaning to email my thanks and praise for your work. I was a high school English teacher in Illinois, but recently relocated to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where I moved on to become a community college professor. Oh, nice. A professor. Maybe she could train fleas. Your podcast has been a great supplemental teaching tool, not to mention a guaranteed way to keep my mind occupied during long road trips to and from undergraduate and graduate school or while running with my dog. These see the episode on book banning several times while teaching To Kill a Mockingbird or informing students about banned BookWeek. I've also used the episode about police interrogation during a unit featuring Walter Dean Myers novel Monster, about a boy who was on trial for a crime he may not have committed. That sounds good. It does. And more recently, I use a listener mail about the benefits of hunting as an example of how to structure an argument. Okay, let's hear that. I want to hear that. Argument, we'll shoot you right back in. Okay? The students got a laugh out of Josh's comments about waiting for the deer to fall over and collecting the dead bodies instead of actually killing the animals. Anyway, really enjoy the show. Look forward to new episodes every week. If teaching doesn't work out for some reason, I think podcasting would be a pretty great career. And that is from Sarah Amado. Professor Amado. And shout out to Laura yes, her sister Laura Amato, or whatever her name is. Shout out. I'm presuming they have the same last name, huh? My modern guy. Yeah, you are. Anyway, you have a beard. Thanks for teaching and doing what you do, professor. Yeah, and thanks for writing in. Smart thinking with the subject line. Good work. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark at Twitter. And you can also follow the official SYSK podcast on Twitter. Can hang out with Chuck at Charlesw. Chuck Bryan on Facebook or facebookcom stuffychnow. You can send us an email to stuff. Podcast@housestuffworks.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." | |
42da642a-53a3-11e8-bdec-c7cfb7508e61 | The Disappearance of Flight MH370, Part I | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-disappearance-of-flight-mh370-part-i | In 2014, a Boeing 777 airliner disappeared. Despite two full years of searching an area of ocean covering more than 120,000 square kilometers, it has never been found. It is the only unexplained missing vessel in modern aviation history. | In 2014, a Boeing 777 airliner disappeared. Despite two full years of searching an area of ocean covering more than 120,000 square kilometers, it has never been found. It is the only unexplained missing vessel in modern aviation history. | Tue, 07 Jan 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=7, tm_isdst=0) | 39495146 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, Seattle. We'll see you Thursday, January at the More Theater in San Francisco. We're going to be at the Castro on January 18. When else? Chuck? That is it, man. January 18 at the Castro, our annual trip to Sketchfest. We love performing there. We have great crowds there. Go get a ticket if you want to come see me at Movie Crush the next night on Sunday. And a small venue where you can shake my hand and hug my neck. I would welcome that as well. Well, that's what I was setting you up for when I said, what else? I appreciate that. We'll see you guys. You can get all the info and tickets you need on Sysklive.com or sfsketchfest.com. 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 about. One of the most interesting mysteries in modern times. Yeah. Like, it's really tough to get across what a mystery the missing airliner MH 370 is. Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. Yes. And this is going to be a two parter because it's pretty robust. And, boy, hats off to the grabster. He really put together a lot of great research for this one. He did. I also want to give a huge shout out to one of my journalistic heroes, william Lang Wash. He wrote something he writes in The Atlantic, but he's not just an Atlantic writer. He wrote what really happened to Malaysia's missing airplane. Big old long article on it. Those are great. And this guy is an aviation expert to begin with, but he's also read a Tom Wolfe book or article or whatever. He has a really great knack for making you feel like you're there in the action. Yeah, but then he also has a knack for making you step back and think, how does Tom Wolf know all this? Was he there? William language is the same way. And I will go ahead and recommend that you not, unless you are a very courageous person, read any of his work, especially the stuff about airline disasters anytime around when you're flying, because he puts you in that plane when it's going down or whatever. He's really good at it. So I recommend basically anything Langwich has written, go read it's. Worth it, for sure. Yeah. And I think this, coupled with the brief times that we've touched on this kind of thing in the past, whether it was DB. Cooper or Bermuda Triangle, there's something about aviation disasters and mysteries that are really intriguing to me. And for airline forensics, it's all rick, just super, super interesting. It is. So you talked about airline forensics and that kind of stuff. This is lousy with it. Yes, but the reason I was saying why it's tough to overstate, like, what a mystery MH 370 is. It's the only airliner that is considered disappeared, vanished. They know where all the other ones are. They know what happened to all the other ones. It's the only major one. That is just where the official investigation said we don't know. Yes. In part two, we'll get to a pretty good well, actually, I think the leading theory comes in this episode, but we kind of think we know. But it's that thing where you can't definitively say yeah, you can't say where and you can't say why. Right? Yes. Then the why and the where are both really confounding. Yes. And the reason why air travel in the 21st century is way safer than auto travel is because anytime an airliner goes down, everyone in the international community comes together, investigates it. They do so openly. The airline, the airplane manufacturer, everyone involved is expected to tell the truth. And you get it out there and you figure out what went wrong, and then you make things safer. And then that makes air travel safer for everybody. They couldn't do this for all sorts of reasons with MH 370. And so it's a huge failing among the international community. Not for lack of trying, but because it's just an asterisk out there. It's the only one. Yeah. And that's why airplanes don't crash as much anymore. I mean, growing up, it's not like it was every other week or anything. But you used to hear about airline crashes enough to where it gave you pause. Right. And you just don't hear about it much anymore. It's true. It's still out there for sure. Yeah. But they seem much more rare than they used to be. Kind of like skyjackings. So we'll do our best to put you in the plane in the passenger seat. Yeah. Can we at least be in business class? Buckle sure. Okay. Sure. You're about to say Buckle up? Yeah. Okay. Buckle up. Because we're going to take off on March 8, 2014 in Kuala Lumpur. It's the very beginning of March 8. The takeoff scheduled for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was scheduled for 12:35 am. That's right. We're in a Boeing Seven Seven 7200? Er, yes. And there are 227 fellow passengers aboard. Twelve flight crew. It's a lot of people. Almost about two thirds of the passengers are Chinese nationals. I believe there's a bunch of other people from other countries, but for the bulk of the people on the plane were from China. That's right. And it's a late night flight. It's expected to arrive in Beijing at about 06:00 636 30 in Beijing time. And it's going to fly over the South China Sea, over the Gulf of Thailand, through Laos, Vietnam, and then into China to arrive at Beijing. It didn't actually take off at 1235. They took off at 1242. Not too shabby. 7 minutes. I'm not like, sitting there rocking in my seat like, let's go. Yeah. I might not have even noticed. And they take off and it flies up to 18 0ft. And the Air Traffic Control Center at Kuala Lumpur says, hey, you guys are cleared to go up to 35,000ft, which is cruising altitude for this flight. I think that's right. And at this point at 18,000, they switched from the airport's air traffic to Kuala Lumpur or Area Control Center. And the reason we're mentioning all these details is because it turns out they're very important. Very important. Yeah. These are all key. Keep rewinding 15, 30 seconds to get every single detail. Okay. Because you're going to need them for the big finish. So 4 minutes later, like you said, they were cleared to go to $35,000. Took me about 15 minutes. And it's here where Captain Zahari and there were two people on board flying this plane. Captain Zahari and what was the other gentleman's name? First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid. Right. And Captain Zahari Ahmad Shah is piloting the plane. First Officer Hamid, this is his last training flight. After this he'll be fully certified to fly Boeing 777s, which if you're a commercial airline pilot, that's pretty much the peak right there. Yeah, and that's important too, because one of them is a very experienced pilot in his fifty S. The other one is a brand new kind of greenhorn. And that's going to factor in for sure. Yeah. So like I said, it took about 15 minutes to get to 35,000ft. And this is when the lead pilot radios that Kuala Lumpur Control Center says, we're at 35 0ft. Then 7 minutes later, he radios again and says, by the way, this is not me doing him. I don't know what he sounded like. There you go. This is Captain Zahari. Everybody sounds like Chuck Yeager. Yeah, I guess so. He confirmed again that they were at 35,000ft. And this is where Ed points out that this wasn't some sort of big alarming thing. But what usually happens is you radio in when you leave an altitude, not when you arrive. And you also don't radio in 7 minutes later and say, by the way, we're still at 35,000ft, still here. Once you hit it, you're just sort of there that you're cruising altitude. Right. So it wasn't alarming or anything, but it was weird that he made those two radio transmissions, but it was nothing compared to the weirdness that was about to take place. That's right. Shortly after that, I think at 01:19, a.m. Kuala Lumpur Area Control Center, it's like 11 minutes later yes. Said, hey, MH 370, you're about to leave our jurisdiction and enter Ho Chi Minh's jurisdiction. Go ahead and contact Ho Chi Minh Air Traffic Control and let them know you are with them on this frequency. Yeah, I mean, if you remember our air Traffic control podcast, you're handed off, like you don't just stick with one air traffic control when you fly around the world. No, you're handed off all along the way whenever you enter the airspace of that whatever district precisely in the way that it's set up is there's not supposed to be any time where you're just flying alone and then you move into the other one. You're going right from one to the other you want to hand off. So Captain Zahari responded with goodnight. Malaysian three 70. Those are the last words anyone heard from Captain Zahari, as far as we know. And that in and of itself is kind of an odd transmission because typically any airline captain would have replied with the frequency, said the frequency back, and confirmed that that was the right one. But instead all they said was goodnight. Malaysian three 70. And very shortly after that, 2 minutes later, MH 370 disappeared from the radar. The moment it showed up on Ho Chi Minh air traffic controls, radar screens, it just vanished. Right. Without ever having made contact with them via radio frequency. This should have, like, set off alarms with Ho Chi Minh City. And apparently they did notice. Kuala Lumpur didn't notice. They had all this other air traffic to deal with. Yeah. They were out of their zone at this point. Yeah. And he said goodnight and everybody knows goodnight. You can't go back on that. You have to wait until tomorrow to make contact again. So Column poor is I don't know about blameless in this, but certainly less blameful than Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh. And Ho Chi Minh noticed that they just disappeared from the screen, but it took them a full 18 minutes before they called Kuala Lumpur and said, hey, do you know anything about where MH 370 is? Because they kind of vanished from our radar. Yeah, I don't know the exact process. In their defense, they were trying to get in touch. It's not like they just said, well, we'll see what happens. They got in touch with another pilot who was nearby in that airspace to contact them, and this pilot reported there was interference and static. I heard mumbling on the other end, but that's the last we heard and we lost connection. Right. We're not even sure that he was talking to the right people. Yeah. So, I mean, they were trying to get in touch, but you're right, I think sooner than 18 minutes, they should have said, by the way, this plane that just left your airspace has disappeared. Like, do you know what's going on? Right. International protocol is 5 minutes. Okay. They waited 13 minutes longer than protocol dictated. And it was so much beyond when they should have called that the controller in column actually said on the record, like, why didn't you call me sooner? How are you just calling me about this? Like, that may have been yesterday. Right. It's missing for 18 minutes, which, as we'll get to later on, stuff that came up in the investigation, that was just the first step in a series of missteps, right. That led to the reason why MH 370 may never be found. Yeah. So should we take a little break and talk about radar? Radar O'Reilly. We'll be back right after this. Radar O'Reilly. Not Radar O'Reilly. Radar used by air traffic control. It is different than radar O'Reilly. This is called secondary radar, and it sends out a little beam that it's very narrow and it sweeps the area. And onboard the aircraft, they have a transponder that detects this beam and sends their own signal back that says, this is how fast we're going. This is where we're headed. And a code that says, and this is who I am. Yeah. Maybe even MH 370. As simple as that. Something like that. That's right. That's what's supposed to show up on Air Traffic Controls radar screen. So they can see, oh, here's MH 370 coming toward DL 1722 or whatever at the speed. Right? Yeah. They have all this information that's called secondary radar. Primary radar is what you think, where it's like it's a blip on a screen that this big radar ray is bouncing off of and receiving information back from. But you see it's physically there. This has far more information. And that's what air traffic control around the world uses. Right. And this is very key because just a few seconds after it made that switch over to Ho Chi Minh's airspace, the transponder stopped sending information. That transponder that's supposed to say who you are, where you are, and how fast you're going just stopped. Right. It vanished. And this is when the ball was dropped by a little bit, by Kuala Lumpur not noticing and definitely by Ho Chi Minh not doing anything immediately in response to Kuala Lumpur. Right. So primary the radar that you typically think of when you think of radar, there are very few places in the world where you can't be tracked by someone on radar. It's fairly old technology. It's been around for a while. But the places where you can't be tracked can be vast. Over the ocean, in the desert, over extremely mountainous or wooded areas. There are places where you can't really put a radar tower and you can disappear from radar. Right. I think what I'm trying to say here is if you take your plane out of radar range and you turn off your transponder, you can make a modern airliner as big as a 777 vanish where people don't know where it is. And that's a really, I think, hallmark point or trait to this mystery that kind of gets people a little unnerved, is, wait a minute, this is the 21st century. This happened in 2014. Right. What do you mean? There's times and situations where an airliner can disappear and people don't know where it is. And that was the situation. And as Ho Chi Minh City and Kuala and Poor starting to scramble to try to figure out where this is, apparently they called Malaysian Airlines and said, hey, do you know anything about MH 370. Malaysian Airlines said, oh, yeah, they're flying over Cambodia right now. And they're like, Where? How are you seeing this? After an hour, finally, Malaysian Airlines is like, no, we're just referring to the flight plan. They should be over Cambodia right now. What do you mean you can't find them? What's going on? Yeah, but because of that primary radar, the secondary radar wasn't functioning like we said, because the transponder was off. But the primary radar did track them for about an hour after those communications dropped. Because of the Malaysian military was able to track it with the primary radar. Yeah, apparently it flew through the primary radar of five different countries, and the only one that bothered to track it was Malaysia's Air Force. But they didn't do anything about it. They didn't follow up to see who it was. They didn't scramble any jets to go see if everybody was okay, or they just knew that there was an unidentified plane flying through Malaysian airspace, and the Air Force didn't do anything about it. This is embarrassing enough that the Air Force didn't reveal this to anybody for a while, which is a really important point, because during this time, about an hour and a half after the takeoff and an hour after the thing disappeared from transponders, the Malaysian Air Force was tracking MH 370, and it saw that it seemed to have taken a turn. Yeah, I mean, they know what happened at this point. For a little while, it made a sharp turn. That was not part of the plan flight plan. No, not at all. This is where things definitely took a metaphorical and literal turn. Yeah, it headed southwest at that point, crossed over the Malay Peninsula, over Malaysia again, and then parts of Thailand. Then it made a right turn. This is very key. Near the island of Penang. Just put a pin in that. Then headed west by northwest toward the Andaman Sea. And then at 02:22, A.m. Vanished from that primary radar as well. Right. So the Malaysian Air Force saw this happen on this radar. It didn't tell anybody for a while. The flight plan had it leaving Malaysia, crossing over the Strait of Malacca into the Peninsula where Thailand is located, into China. Right. Just away from Malaysia. From what the Malaysian Air Force saw, this thing doubled back on itself and then went in some totally different directions, almost the opposite direction it was supposed to be going in. And like you said, it dropped off of the radar, and that was the last time anyone saw it on radar. But that's not the last time we were able to track MH 370. That's thanks to a satellite network that's run by an outfit called Inmarsat. Yeah. So, Inmarsat, if you've ever been on a plane and you've enjoyed the benefits of watching movies streaming or connected to your computer via WiFi, that is because of satellite communication. These airplanes are equipped with a system and it transfers data and all their voice communications via satellite. And some of this data from the plane is automatically shared with these ground tracking stations, which is a really big deal. So not only are they letting you watch movies and doing all that, but it's sending this automatic data on the reg basically from that satellite to these ground stations. Right. They think by this time actually, I believe they know by this time, MH 370s, navigational systems, entertainment systems, a bunch of its systems have been turned off. The only thing that was still operating was this satellite link, I guess beacon. Yeah. It's called a satellite data unit. Okay. So the satellite data unit, which was capable of contacting and receiving contact from the Marsat satellites now at the time, no one knows that this is happening, right? Like there's no sound being made, there's nobody tracking this. This all came out much later when in Marseille realized they were sitting on a bunch of data. But during different points over the next six, 7 hours, the satellite and the satellite data unit talk to each other under a few different circumstances. And because of this, this company, Mrsat, which is located and headquartered in Great Britain, but literally covers the globe, not just with airline stuff, but maritime thing, which I think where they were originally founded to do is to enable maritime communications. Okay. Like satellite phone. Sure. You're calling through Marsette, right? So they've got this whole constellation of satellites. And when NMar said, heard about MH 370, they were like, I'll bet our satellites were tracking this thing in some way, shape or form. And it turns out that they were, right? Yeah. This is important here. There are four different ways or circumstances where that satellite data unit on the plane is communicating with the satellite in space. Whenever you're making a data transmission or a voice transmission, whenever someone on the ground tries to contact the plane, there's something that happens every hour. If no one has made either one of these contacts for an hour, you get a check in called a handshake. It's just like you're still here. Shake hands, buddy. Yeah. Just want to make sure you're logged on. It's kind of like when you watch too much Netflix and Netflix sends a message saying you're still there? Yeah. Have you finished all the tub of cookie dough yet? Yeah. And then it has a thing that says, go outside. Right. Or actually it doesn't. It says, watch another one. Watch some more. Why not? Have some more cookie dough? It's the same thing. It's sending a message to the planes satellite data unit saying, are you still logged on? Right. And then the final thing, and this is super key, is whenever you first log on to the satellite system, that thing on the plane, whenever it kind of checks in and links up, that is very key because what can also happen if that thing goes down and then reboots. It treats that as a new login so it'll make another ping, basically, that it's logged onto the system. Right. So Marat goes back and looks at their data and says, okay, so here's a couple of things right now. This is, I think, within the first few days, everybody is looking in the South China Sea for MH 370 because that was what was along its flight plan. The Malaysian Air Force hasn't revealed yet that it tracked MH 370, turn around and go the opposite direction of what its flight plan was scheduled to carry it. Yeah. And Marseille is now saying, Wait a minute, this thing didn't crash like an hour and a half after takeoff. This thing turned around and flew into the Indian Ocean for six or seven more hours because our satellite was talking to the plane at various points during this time. Yeah, and we should point out, too, after Air France Flight Four Four Seven, which crashed in 2009, this is when Nmarsat really kind of beefed up their system. They added more ground stations and they added a lot more capability to add storage for this data because they know that this can really help out in situations like this. That was a big one, too. Do you remember that one? Yeah. So that one was the first one that really opened people's eyes, where it was like, wait a minute, when we're flying over the ocean, no one knows where we are? And they were like, no, actually, not really. And I think that's why Mmsett was like, we got to build more ground stations, we got to bulk up our data storage, all that stuff. We got to add more satellite capabilities. And in doing so, they made it so that you could be tracked when you're over the ocean, even if you didn't want to be, as seems to have been the case with MH 370. So it was a huge difference between 2004 was it 20 04 20 09 20 09 20 09 and 2014, just five years. The thing proved itself. These upgrades they made were substantial, but Air franchise Flight Four Four Seven in and of itself. Another Lang, Wash gem that just puts you in the seat of this terrifying plane crash. That one in particular. They knew where the plane was, and it still took two years to recover the black boxes and figure out what went wrong. Yes, which is terrifying. And if you know what happened to that one, basically the controls got ripped away from the pilot and it just went right into the ocean. And they're still down there. Apparently, there was a big debate over what to do with these people. When they started raising them, they were perfectly preserved because they're so deep in the pressure and the anaerobic situation. Yeah, the temperature just kept them perfectly preserved. But as they were raised up into warmer waters. The decomposition over two years just happened immediately. So I think the French government said they have to stay there. It's now a memorial. Do not try to raise anybody. And they're still down there strapped to their seats, which, when you just do not think about that the next time you get on a plane. I know it's a terrible thing to think about. I can tell you first hand. Yeah. You've gotten so much better over the years, but I'm sure this is going to be a setback now. I'm hanging in there. All right, good. Yeah. If it happens, it happens like that's the way I kind of view it. Well, there's certainly nothing you can do about it. This isn't something that you guys are going to play in my memorial, my funeral, my last words. But if I go down in a plane crash, my number was up. Right. And everyone else would be like, that's so weird. He always talked about it. Yeah, right. This was his worst there was actually. I had a tweet once. It said, if I ever go down in a plane crash, I'm going to shout, I wish I would have spent more time at work. I'm not sure I get that. Well, it's like no one ever says in their deathbed they wish they spent more time at work. Well, I got it, then. Ironic. Funny on the way. Yeah. I'll make people laugh. Good for you. Give them their last laugh. So where they're getting all this information was from a ground station in Perth, Australia, a place we've been to. It was quite lovely. Lovely town. That's right. It was great. Anyone ever tells you, don't go to Western Australia, you tell them that's BS, because Josh and Chuck said it's great. Yeah. All right. Very stupid. So BS stands for so they had a lot of data, like we said, because they had beefed up their storage capabilities over the past five or six years. And they have a couple of types of data, something called Burst timing Offset and burst frequency offset, BTO measures how long that a signal takes to reach a satellite, you know the speed of the signal, so you know exactly how far that plane is from the satellite at that exact moment. It's very easy to kind of understand. Right. First taken into account. Mrsat. Has, oh, here was a ping, here was a ping, here's a ping, here's a ping. Right. Now they're digging in to analyze these pings and just the quality of them, the timing of them, all this stuff, because they're like, I'm pretty sure we can figure out where this plane was and maybe where it went if we really drill in and do some incredible math and figure out just kind of the nature of these pings. Yeah. And what they're trying to do here is to narrow it down into an arc instead of a circle. Well, I think that's just naturally what happened. Oh, yeah, you're right. I'm sorry. Because Ed explained it in a very easy way. If you tell someone, hey, I'm 100 miles from Atlanta, then you draw a circle around Atlanta. That's 100 miles, and you could be at any point along that circle. Right. But if that phone call was from Athens, which is not 100 miles from Atlanta, but it's not too far, 65 or so. Okay, but if you said you're from some other city in Georgia, then you would know where you were. And if you knew how fast you were going, then you could really it doesn't become a circle. Then it becomes an arc. Right. The number of points on that circle where that person could possibly be yes. Is smaller. Yeah. Much smaller. Maybe by half, maybe by two thirds. And yet so the circle becomes an arc. And because of that burst timing offset, they could establish those arcs. And there were seven of them, I believe. Yes. No, they could establish the circles and then the circle, because of the other one, the BFO. The BFO. The burst frequency offset, those are more complicated. They involve the Doppler effect. And basically, the satellite data tells in Mars that we're going in this direction. Because the Doppler effect, when it's an ambulance sirens coming to you. Right. The changes in pitch because of the relative distance and the direction that it's traveling, they could tell from this ping, this satellite ping, not even a data transmission, just a ping, which direction the thing was headed and roughly how fast it was going. And so they were able to create seven arcs. And after the seven arcs, the 7th arc was created by a ping that took place at 08:19 A.m.. And after that, there was a log on request, a handshake request that the SDU failed to respond to. And they think that in between 08:19 A.m. And that last log on request at 09:15 A.m., the plane finally crashed, probably from running out of fuel. Yeah. And they think the 819 was from one of those reboots that I was talking about when that system comes back on, which will come under power failure. Right. Which will come into play pretty soon. All right, so let's take another break here. Okay. All right. We'll be back with the leading theory right after this. All right, so the leading theory and the more I read this, the more it was Occam's razor kind of staring you in the face. Because we'll get into some of the kind of cockamamie theories, and there are many of them, but this one is the simplest, and it's probably what happened. It's the one, I believe it is, that someone on board and should we tease this out? Yeah. Okay. Someone on board took control of the plane, disabled that transponder, and then started flying in the other direction back across Malaysia, then put it on autopilot until it ran out. Of gas, and it crashed into the ocean. Yeah. About the southern Indian ocean, which is where the southern 7th arc was. Right. One of the reasons this makes a lot of sense is because that transponder going off at the exact moment when the plane transitioned from Kuala Lumpur, pours airspace into Ho Chi Minh's. It would be an incredible coincidence if that was just an incredible coincidence that in and of itself says that there was a human factor involved. Like someone knew what that meant. Right. Exactly. So, somebody who knew how to do that, when to do it, and the timing of it was just too spectacular for it to have been an accident. Yeah. Because what they probably counted on is exactly what happened was there was a period of time they might have figured 5 minutes, which is what you said the standard was. But what they got was 18 minutes of confusion. Yeah. It tripled what they were counting on. Exactly. Best case scenario. The other thing was that the turn that the MH 370 made was so abrupt that an autopilot wouldn't have done that. No. If you put a plane on autopilot and and it have it turns, it would make a much wider turn. This is a hard kind of backtracking turn that it made to its left, to the southwest. From the north, traveling the northeast. The turn was to the southwest. So just the turn alone, which came after the transponder was turned off, shows that it was under human control. It was a person piloting the plane, making it turn. Right. And that rules out things like mechanical failure or fire, everything from meteor strike, squall line, pretty much any kind of weather. All that was ruled out by the fact that this turn took place clearly under human control. Right. That also rules out hypoxia. If you remember the very eerie crash with golfer Payne Stewart on that private jet. I don't really remember that. Can you kind of refresh my memory? That was in I think the post mortem on that one was that this private plane, essentially everyone on board, died of hypoxia, including the pilots, and it flew for a number of hours, really? On autopilot. It was a ghost plane, essentially. Wow. Yeah. So they don't think that hypoxia affected whoever was in control of the plane because it made that turn. Yeah. It was a very deliberate turn. And then it followed an even more deliberate flight pattern after that. This is not random movements of a plane where somebody who is suffering from hypoxia but still alive would make. These weren't confused decisions. They were difficult to understand decisions, but they weren't random and confused behavior. They were deliberate. That's right. One of the pilots or both of the pilots suffering from hypoxia is ruled out. And the fact that they were deliberate turns also rules out the idea that both of the pilots were dead. That, again, it was just the plane flying itself. Right. These log on requests by that SDU unit on the plane. It was another big clue there because there was a log on request made at 01:43 A.m., and that basically says that the power on the plane's electrical system was shut off for a period of time in between that transponder disappearing and the time of that log on request. Right. So someone, like, purposefully disabled these systems. Right. So 01:43 A.m. Would have been about an hour after take off, just over an hour after takeoff, after the transponder was turned off, with perfect timing between Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh, but also before the turn that the Malaysian Air Force tracked. That's right. Or at about the same time. Right. The other thing that could have happened when the transponder and the SDU were shut off, it could have depressurized the plane. If that happens, then hypoxia is the fear those oxygen masks are going to drop down. But you only get about 10 minutes of oxygen as a passenger. The cockpit is going to have a lot more oxygen than that. But we do know for a fact from that log on request that the systems were offer an hour. So even if that were the case, then the masks run out 10 minutes later and the people die of hypoxia the passengers shortly after that. The thing is, they believe that not only was MH 370 still at cruising altitude, it probably actually climbed to 40,000, maybe a little over 40,000ft. It's basically the maximum that a 777 could stay aloft at. So the drop down masks would have been totally useless to begin with. There's not enough oxygen coming through them to offset that kind of height into this pressurized cabin. That's meant for a much lower altitude. And the reason why I found it very disconcerting to learn that there's only, like, ten or 15 minutes worth of oxygen coming out of those masks. I mean, is the idea there that the plane crash doesn't take longer than that? The idea is that it's used for an emergency transition down to a much lower altitude where you could breathe without a pressurized cabin, and that takes less than ten or 15 minutes. You can do that much more quickly, a few minutes. So basically, you're going to start flying with your own oxygen tank. Basically. Okay, I'll be like, try to take it away from it. You can't do it here's. Another thing is that that SDU log on request at the end, it suggests that it was turned back on. And the thinking here is that whoever did this probably didn't care at that point because it was too late, because everyone on board was dead. Right. So the idea behind all this is that the power was shut off. And they know that the power was turned off because the log on request came at a certain point. Right. So that means that the power had been shut off and it was coming back on. And they think that it was to depressurize the cabin and be a very easy way to depressurize the cabin, just turn off all of the power and then maybe whoever did this and we'll get to that was like, I want to get back down to normal cruising altitude here so I can fly this plane without wearing a mask, maybe, or just in a less stressful environment. Right, exactly. Maybe go get a bite to eat or something like that. There's a lot that can be done in a pressurized cabin. And then there was that final arc, the 7th one, that log on request was probably the plane running out of fuel. And this, I thought, was super interesting. So the plane runs out of fuel, those engines shut down, but there's still air pumping through those turbines, and that's going to spin the turbine. And that's certainly not going to be enough to fly your plane, but it could be enough to act as a generator and power up the auxiliary power system. That's right. Super interesting. Yeah. So in the running out of fuel, electrical goes down, those air ram jets come on and the auxiliary power system comes on, the thing logs back on just enough to get that going again. Right, exactly. So let's just before we stop for this episode, Chuck, let's just kind of recap what Mr. Said has been able to figure out from seven pings between its satellite and the satellite data unit. Seven pings. They dove into these things so deeply that they were able to figure out that the flight did not crash, that there was probably a hypoxia event among the cabin, that it was deliberate and that the plane kept flying. Not that it did not crash, but that it kept flying for at least six more hours and finally did probably crash in the Southern Indian Ocean. All from seven little pings between the plane and the satellite? That's right. And then the final little clue here from the satellite is the ELT emergency transmitter failed. It's Emergency Location Transmitter. And that's linked to a different satellite system. And one person, if you're conspiracy minded, might say, well, you know what this means it didn't actually crash into the ocean, but these ELTs apparently have a pretty low success rate. And when you dive into the ocean with no power, it's a tremendous speed. And that would have been enough probably to destroy the plane instantly. And this ELT. So there's four, I think, on the plane. Did you say that? I didn't say four. I believe there was four on the plane. One of them, they can be disabled. It's not a black box, by the way. No, this is just a beacon that pings a satellite, but isn't even A-T-A different satellite from Emrsat. So it's like an extra fail safe. And this means that all four of them failed. Which, again, some people think that's evidence right there that this thing didn't actually crash. We'll talk about that in the next episode. About that. All right. I think we don't do list or mails on a part one. No. So just strap in and I hope you can hold off from researching for a couple of days on this one. Maybe have a Bloody Mary while you're waiting. Agreed. Well, anyway, in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to Stuffyouw.com and check out our social links. And you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast. Diehardradio.com. Stuffyhhtoe 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. A 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/2017-06-24-sysk-scooby.mp3 | SYSK Selects: Scooby Dooby Doo, Where Are You? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-scooby-dooby-doo-where-are-you | In this week's SYSK Select episode, for decades, Scooby Doo has captivated children across the world. It's been translated to multiple languages and remains as popular as newer programs. But why? Join Chuck and Josh as they shed light on the seemingly end | In this week's SYSK Select episode, for decades, Scooby Doo has captivated children across the world. It's been translated to multiple languages and remains as popular as newer programs. But why? Join Chuck and Josh as they shed light on the seemingly end | Sat, 24 Jun 2017 17:37:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=17, tm_min=37, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=175, tm_isdst=0) | 39404453 | 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. 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, chuck here with this week's Saturday Select Pick of the week. I'm going for Scooby Doo this week. Scooby Doo, where are you? We enjoy doing our pop culture episodes and some classic TV shows here and there, and ScoobyDoo certainly falls into that category. So I think everyone should enjoy this one. If you haven't heard it, and maybe if you have, give it another listen because there might be a secret code embedded. I'm just kidding. There really isn't. But enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He is no longer older than me. We are both seven years old at this moment. Right. I knew you catch up eventually. I just came home from elementary school, my backpack is just made of thud on the floor, and your windstones have just gone off, and thank God, and on comes Scooby Doo. I'm not here, though. It doesn't matter. What do you mean, you're not here? I'm making out with some girl. No, we're both seven. I know. That's what I'm saying. Everyone knows I was a late bloomer. That's not true. You were quite the casinova, Chuck. No. Okay. And it didn't matter. Although I could have told you within the first half of a second of hearing the theme song. What? Scooby Doo is about to come on. Which episode? What version? Because, remember, there's 10.7 million incarnations of ScoobyDoo. Yeah, there's a lot of them. What you just heard was, of course, the Russian version of the Scooby Doo theme. Those of you who grew up in Vladivostok in Moscow, they're probably rocking out to it. Sure. Scooby Doo. Yeah. That's pretty good, wasn't it? Yeah, that's great. That was from, again, the Russian version of the new Scooby Doo movies. But, I mean, the ones that I was used to were scooby Doo, where are you? Which is, of course, the first one. Yeah. To me, that is those 25 episodes, that was ScoobyDoo. See, I think it extends a little bit, but it's more encompassing than that. I'm a little older, though, but it only runs up to the limits of my nostalgia. I don't watch it these days. I have to say, though, I'm heartened to know that ScoobyDoo is still in the world. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I read a study, Chuck, from 2010, where they were trying to figure out if cartoon characters have an effect on children's decisions with food. So they gave kids, like, some boxes that had gummy bears granola with snack food. Right. Was there a Scooby Snack in there? No. And then they gave them boxes of the exact same stuff, but rather than, like, plain, non cartoony boxes, they had cartoon characters on the boxes. This is a 2010 study. So they had shrek door of the explorer and Scuba Doo. No way. Guess which one of those three cartoon characters was 40 years old at the time. No. The Explorer. No. Scuba do. 40 years. 40 years. The other two are, like, ten years old at the time, and they're using this on four to six year olds, and ScoobyDoo is still making them eat gummy bears. Well, I breeze through that Slate article you sent. That really sums it up nicely. And that's the reason we're doing ScoobyDoo and we're not doing I'm trying to think of some fly by night cartoons. Yeah, the Jetsons or no fly by night shirt tails, but awesome. Love the shirt tails. Scooby Doo. The reason we're doing this is because it has persevered through the years, like muppets and becomes so iconic that it's more than a cartoon. Yeah. In that Slate article, they quote, the guy who created Clarissa explains it all, and he's like, no one can explain why Scooby Doo is so iconic, so popular. Because he's like, It's not the best. It's not the worst. Right. So why has it been around for 40 years? And he's like, Every cartoon creator is like, why can't my crappy cartoon become iconic? Right. There's no answer, is there? There isn't. And that's part of the allure. They're proposals. Like, everybody loves a dog. Sure. Everybody loves a mystery. Sure. One of the reasons it's enduring to kids, this author supposes, is because they don't do the ironic, like, double entendres to where adults get it and kids get it. But really all for kids. It was all for kids plus kids. Like, the reason, probably for the same reason that things like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys have persevered is because kids doing adult, like, things, like solving mysteries and getting the best of adults, kids love that stuff. I was a three investigators fan. Did you read them? No. It was Alfred Hitchcock's nephew and his two friends. Oh, really? It was awesome. I was big into an encyclopedia brown. I loved him too. Yes. Remember when he busted the kid who is faking crying because the tears are coming out of the wrong ends of the eyes? I could never figure him out, though. I always felt dumb. I don't know if I ever figured any out either. You shouldn't feel dumb. They were purposely made to obfuscate the truth. All right, so Dictionary Brown was great encyclopedia. Right. Scooby Doo. Let's go to the history. How about that? The birth of Scooby. Yeah. Because it wasn't immediate. No, it was not. It was an immediate hit, but it wasn't an immediate it took a while to get on the air. Some incarnations happened. Josh, first one, Scooby Doo, where are you? Originally? Well, let's go back a little bit before. Originally it was called Who Scared? And then they had another name that kind of stuck for a while called Mysteries Five. Yeah. And originally it was based on what was the radio show? I love a mystery. I love a mystery. Dobie Gillis, the TV show, which is what she's is based on. He's like a Beatnik. He's based on Mannergy krebs fred is based on Dobie. Yeah. Or other stuff. The other way to look at it is that they were based in large part on the Archie gang. And Shaggy takes after Jughead. I didn't see that. Yeah. Interesting. And I'm an Archie guy. There wasn't even a dog in the original version. Well, not in the very original version. There was no dog at all. The streets. Five comes along. Right. There is Jeff G off of all things Mike Kelly. Linda. Linda's brother. WW. This is just unsettling the unfamiliarity. And a dog called too Much. Yeah. Who is Shaggy wore like, he was a shaggy dog, wore sunglasses and played the bongos. Yeah. Because they were banned. That was the original concept, that they were banned. Right. So the dog played the bongos, and they were worried. They had a Great Dane idea at first. Then they were worried that the makers of Marmadu are going to be like, you ripped us off. Of course. And they tried too much, and we're like, Too much sucks. Well, and Archie had a sheepdog. So they steered away from that to the great Dana. That's why. And then Jeff and Mike, they merged, became Ronnie. And then Ronnie eventually became Fred. Kelly became Daphne. Linda became Velma. WW became Shaggy, but was no longer Daphne's brother. Right. But it seems like I've heard of some sort of distant relation that they made reference to in Scooby Doo. They were some daddy and Shaggy. Yeah. They were somehow related, but not brother and sister. Interesting. I could just be making that up, though, maybe. Yeah. All right. So that's how it was for a little while. Then it eventually became the Scooby Doo as we know. And love became the Great Dane, as we said. Right. And we let somebody out there is a studio exec who was totally instrumental in this creation. He ordered the show from Hannah Barbera. His name is Fred Silverman. As far as I know, Fred's named after him. Right. Oh, really? And the whole reason there was a dog in there was because Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, the writers and developers of Scooby Doo two young guns at the time, right. They knew that Fred Silverman loved dogs. He's a dog guy. So that's the whole reason they inserted a dog in there. Two young writers like, you put a dog in there and the executive love it. Right. And they asked Joe Barbera of Hannah Barbara if they could do that. And Barbara's response is, do whatever you want. And so they put the need of care. Right. But Fred Silverman also had an even bigger impact on Scooby Doo, didn't they? The name Scuba Doo. Yeah. He got that supposedly from Frank Sinatra. Strangers in the dark night Same thing. Nail is dark. The night is dark. Let's see. It's in Alaska. The banner is exceptionally quick today. Thank you. So, Fred, this is kind of a landmark show at the time because he wanted a half hour show. And cartoons weren't half hour shows at the time. No, they were like Yogi Bear. It was like 8 minutes and then 8 minutes and 8 minutes. Or in the case of The Flintstone, that was a primetime thing. So this was geared towards Saturday morning programming and he wanted to have a full half hour plot line and a little more substance going on. He also wanted to steer away from violence. Scooby Doo came onto the scene at a time when cartoon networks were well, networks that show cartoons were increasingly under pressure from parents groups, family groups, church groups to stop showing as much violence in cartoons. Like Johnny Quest. There's a lot of Rockham sockham action in that. And so they decided that Scuba Do and his buddies would outwit villains rather than beat them up. Yeah, they were never even, like, punches thrown in Scooby Doo, much less mock gun violence. Right, exactly. Yeah. Those guns and Johnnyquest were cool, though. The two handled guns, of course. But think about it. We wouldn't have had all the contraptions that Fred came up with or any of them came up with the net that you tripped and it just pulled you up or whatever. Well, I think that was a thing. Right? It was. But you don't need that if you just punch the guy. Yeah, sure. So this whole aspect, these elaborate traps that they always ended up setting that Scooby and Shaggy had debate the bad guy into was a result of this movement toward nonviolence. Yeah, well, at first, cartoons, they pointed out in this article, which I didn't realize cartoons at the time before this, no one really cared about the violent thing because they weren't really geared towards kids. They were shown before movies to general audiences in the theaters. And then when it jumped to TV, kids started watching them, clearly, because they're cartoons and they do studies like that. Why are kids inherently dislike drawn? To draw an image. They're dumb, stupid kids. And then people started saying, Wait a minute. Kids are watching these things now we have something nonviolent. Right. And now Australia is outlawing direct marketing to kids. So. Good for you, Australia. Indeed, Josh. Indeed. We should mention September 13, 1969, when Skiweed finally appeared, and it was a big hit right off the bat. Yeah. Here's a bit of trivia for you. The first episode ever showed was titled I didn't even Know this. What a night for a night. The second night is knight. And was it a ghost night? Probably. Yeah. You've seen it before a million times. It's in the intro montage. Yes. The night with the red plume. Yeah, absolutely. That was it. And that, Josh, is a staple of Scooby Doo. There was many times they were fighting zombies and ghosts and demons. But to take a little bit of the scare out of it, because that's what they were. Originally, the only time they were really worried was the fact that there was so many scary elements, but they were always humans projecting a ghost on the wall of the cave. Right. There was never, obviously, any real ghost because even though cartoon was rooted in reality, it was always a criminal. Yeah. And there's a couple of things at play here which I didn't think about until I started researching this. But Junior Skeptic magazine has this issue dedicated to Scooby Doo because it's based on a completely skeptical view of the universe, especially Fred. There's not ghosts. It's very empirical. There's a ghost right there. But it can't be a ghost because there's no such thing as ghost. So let's get to the bottom of it. And there is some sort of human explanation of it. And like I said, that was Fred. Let's get into the characters. Fred, they all had their roles. Fred was the skeptic. He was the leader of Mystery Inc. And he was usually the one saying nine times out of ten, he was like, no, that can't be that. It is this. And then we'll get to the bottom of it. That was Fried Roll. He was a very dapper, dandy guy with his scarf on his neck. It's called a cravat, Chuck. It's perfectly normal. People wear cravat. Okay, see, you've got one. You don't. He was very handsome, little square. He was a prep. He was a prep. And he was a little aloof. Maybe he was the leader because he was the one that was always trying to keep everyone on task and get the mystery solved. And he was voiced by Frank Welker. Right. And still is today, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know. I think he is. 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. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com Podcast and start taking charge of your future today. Today's episode of Stuff You Should Know 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, SimpliSafes 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 simplyafe 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. Stuff I can tell you who has been doing voices from the get go. Is that Casey? Casey well known. More, actually. When did he stop? Couple of years ago. OK, so when did his top 40 run stop? Because he started scuba diving and his top 40 hosting duties the same year. No, he did ScoobyDoo longer. Because he did scooby. Do you? All the way up until the latest incarnation and Matthew Lillard took over, actually. Really? He's doing it now. He does the voice well because he did such an awesome job. Yes, I'm no huge Matthew Lillard guy, but when I didn't even see the Scooby Doo movies, I should point out you didn't I didn't see them all, but I saw parts and I remember thinking, wow, that dude is shaggy. I remember thinking like, wow, my eyes are bleeding. I don't think they're the best movies. Are they? Good casting, though. They raked in some dough. Good casting. Austin Roberts was responsible for the famous theme song that they used in the original. And then many times there was also another pop song played while they montage. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of them. On YouTube. Yeah. And that was generally Austin Roberts as well. And apparently, if you go onto YouTube and start searching Scooby Doo songs, you're going to find that if you're not familiar with ScoobyDoo and you just came across this, you would assume that Fred and Daphne were in love and dating. I always assumed that as a kid. Yes. But if you watch it again, fred's not paying that much attention to Daphne. Daphne, she could have taken or left Fred. Yeah. I think that was all just like I was a kid, and I thought, well, they're clearly the two most attractive. It's projecting our own hormones on Fred. That's what it was. So they should be hooking up. Yeah. Josh, I'm going to ask the listeners a question here. Okay. Listeners, are we going to sit around for a week or two? No, it's just rhetorical. Okay, listeners, if someone came this is a Fred Newman style question. If someone came up to you and introduced themselves as Norville Rogers, how many people do you think would have any kind of reaction to that other than, It's nice to meet you, Norville? I say nine out of ten would have no idea that that is Shaggy's name. Yeah. Did you know? I knew at some point, but no, I don't think I ever had you walked up to me asking me that. I would have been like, Get out of my face. Norwegian, normal. Shaggy Roberts was Scooby Doo's best bud. Casey Casein has the voice, as you said, forever. Well, no, it was a finite amount of time, of course. One of my favorites, I think probably the unsung hero, the real overlooked one was Velma. Velma Dinkley. Yes. She had a last name, too. Yeah, that I didn't know. All of them did. I mean, Ruby and Spears, they went to the mattresses. Maybe you could say over the mat. Sure. Yeah. Valmie, is she your faith in that? I wrote for Underdogs. Sure. I tend to she lost her glasses all the time. She was a little bookish. She was pretty ugly, little square as well. But she got things done. She was very smart. She was suspicious. A lot of times. She was like a crooked real estate like anybody else. A lot of times she was the one that kind of put it all together. Yeah. Fred kind of took the credit many times, but because it was the course. She was voiced by Nicole Jaffe at first and later Pat Stephens. And then do you know who does her voice now on the new one? Mindy cone with the facts of life no way. She's home and Dinkley now. Wow. On the new Scooby Doo show, I've got to check out the new Scooby Do it's like a Star studied cast. I know I haven't seen it, so I need to do so as well. So we got to talk about well, Jinkies is her little catchphrase. Yes. And zoinks. Clearly is Shaggy's. Yes. Everyone knows that. Yeah. What was Daphne's catchphrase? Help. I'm stuck somewhere. She used to get in trouble quite a bit. If somebody was going to fall into a pit or be pulled back into a trap door or a sliding bookcase or something like that. Be separated from the gang. Yes, it was Daphne. It was Daphne. They portrayed her as fairly helpless for many, many years until now. She's evolved a little bit. The newest incarnation. She knows karate. Cool. A little bit more self sufficient. Doesn't realize she's not like the oh, goodness. The damsel and distress type. Right. Well, the reason everybody always made sure to rescue Daphne instead of just leaving her behind because she's hot. Well, that was one. She was also very rich. And her dad bankrolled Mystery Inc. I did not know that either. He purchased the Mystery Machine. I assume that he probably kept in Scooby Snacks. Maybe gassed up the Mystery Machine new tires when he needed it, that kind of thing. I don't know what else they needed. Food, money. They slept in the Mystery Machine a lot. Yeah. Well, it's assumed. So I guess you don't really see them sleeping. They didn't have a house that I know of. No, they roamed around. Yeah. Solving mysteries. Daphne was voiced by endira Stephania Kristoffersson then later Heather North. Then later Gray de Leeslie de Leslie De Leslie, where are you getting this information? Well, I did a little digging around. Jesus. And then we got to cover the man himself. And by man, I mean dog. Yes. Scoob. Yeah. Don missik the great don missik voiced Scooby. And if you think he sounds like Astro from The Jetsons, it's because he voiced Astro from The Jetsons, too. Which one is Astro? Oh, the dog. Rastro. Yeah. Sounds like Scooby. Yes. It's because it was the same guy. Yeah. Okay. Who else was there? Was it Iowa Tacomodo? Yeah. I think he's still the VP at Hannah Barbera. Yeah. But did he create ScoobyDoo? I thought Ruby and Spears did. What was role? I think he was just on the early development executive development team and remains there today. If she had a big hand in it. He also created let's see, the Great Gazoo. Oh, really? Yeah. Man and what is the great gorilla. Miguel gorilla. No, the Grape. Yes. He created those two. Really? Yeah. That's a nice track record there. Yeah. So the Gang most of the shows are sort of similar. The Gang encounters some mystery and they usually uncovered at the end. These meddling kids. If it wasn't for you, I would have made off with the Loot. It's very by the numbers, which is sort of funny that it's this iconic cartoon that persevered for this many years because it was all the same. And that show description you just gave that was geared towards the children who were raised by wolves over the last 40 years right. Who's never seen it, right? Yeah, he's like, really? Scooby and Shaggy were always hungry. They love the Scooby Snacks. They were always scared. And usually they would tempt them with food and to get them to act brave at the last minute right. That kind of thing. You want to talk about it now? About what? You know what I'm talking about. Yeah, go ahead. Shaggy and Scooby, we're always hungry. Yeah, that's factor fiction here, I hear. Fiction. So go ahead and spill it. Well, supposedly around the bush. Okay, so of course there's the rumor that Shaggy and Scooby were stoners. Yeah, right. Long standing rumor. Well, yeah, and it makes a lot of sense. They're always hungry. They talk kind of slow and sluggish and shaggy, just look at them. Yeah, exactly. Look at the Mystery Machine. Sure. Yeah. And it's 1969 when it premiered. Right, exactly. I mean, like, got Flowers on the Side. They originally a band, so they just assumed that it was, like, ruby and Spears or some of the development guys in Joke that they made Shaggy and Scooby a stoners. Right. And not just assume, but people say that, like, oh, no, dude, it was just a big inside joke. Right. Like, this is almost a conspiracy bent to it. But the people who were there creating these characters swear up and down that they're not. And apparently you could be like, well, of course I'm not going to say that now. Why would you want to say that now? Exactly. Sure, I can't come out and say that, but Fred Silverman, the guy who's the studio exec who had his fingers all involved in this, apparently he would never have gone along with that kind of thing. He was so involved that he just would have known. Well, Takamoto said the same thing, right? He said this came out years after the show premiered. It was not a thing. I get it, guys, but it's not true. But the beauty of it is, it doesn't matter. Tucker Motors can say that all day long. No one's going to believe them. They're still going to be some 16 year old that says exactly, man. Did you ever notice blank? I think that's like a coming of age. First the hormones and then the stoner epiphany. Well, there was also the rumor that Velma was gay, and that's not true either, of course, because in the new incarnation, they're hinting Mindy Cohen is taking a really sexual direction. Well, they're hinting at Shaggy and Velma having a relationship. I don't think they've gone full blown with it, but wow, they're kind of poking around that area. Well, they always like, if the gang split up, it was no, velma and Daphne went off with Fred, didn't they? Well, it was usually Fred and Daphne. So that was another rumor, was that Fred and Daphne are off doing their thing. But that's not true either, okay? Because Fred or is it? Isn't it up to the imagination of the individual. Maybe so. Rather than the intention of the creators. Yes. We don't want to kill anything. No, you just be a sicko. As much as you want, dear stuff You Should Know listener Joshua, 1972. And I don't know if you like these, but the full hour long, the new Scooby Doo movies started coming out, the ones with the guest stars all of a sudden with Don Knots and philosophy, not Don Knotts playing someone. Don Knotts is Don Knotts. Right. He was in Two. Yeah. Phyllis Diller. Who else? Harlem Globetrotters. Obviously, they were in I think Batman and Robin were in Two three. Two who were actually mostly dead at the time, but their voices done by impersonators. I wondered about that, actually. Don Adams from Get Smart. Oh, is he on there? Jerry Reed. Little Mary Sunshine. Really? All right with me. Remember? Yeah. He's thinking about something. They found him. Wow. It was a haunted opera, I think. Sonny and Cher, mama Cass working at a candy factory. Or she owned a candy factory. Just mean. Yes. Back in the days when obesity was funny. Well, they took the show to an hour. It was a good one. They took the show to an hour and just in a slightly odd direction, but it worked for me. I enjoyed those shows very much. Sure. And no one seemed to you could suspend the disbelief that sure. The Harlem Glowtrotters surf there in the cave all of a sudden. And they're in their uniforms with a basketball. Sure. Doing tricks. Yeah. It was good press for all them, I'm sure. Although if you're really having to rethink suspending belief, disbelief when it's a cartoon, it's time to check in somewhere. Side characters. Josh got to mention Scrappy Dew, who annoyed me a bit. Oh, yeah. There are a lot of people out there that hate Scrappy. Do I mean hate him like he's Hitler's dog. Scrappy was actually Scooby's nephew, and as everyone knows, he was the counter to Scooby. He was very brave and brash. You could even say, yeah, brash. Very much brash. And then kind of a jerk. He was a little bit of a jerk. Yeah, he was a troublemaker. And then my favorite, which was Scooby Dumb. Was he your favorite? Yeah. I love Scooby Dumb. He was the exploitation character. He had, like, that hat and a pork pie hat. He was just dumb looking. He had a huge Southern drawl and clearly a hillbilly. He was voiced, my friend, by the legendary Daws Butler. And if you're a cartoon fan, if you're a cartoon aficionado, you're like, of course, Doz Butler. If you're not, you still are a fan because he did Yogi Bear. Okay. Quick drama brawl. Nice. Snagglepuss and Huckleberry Hound. That's quite a range. Well, huckleberry Hound, quick draw McGraw and Scooby. Dumb or not a range, but Snagglepuss thrown in there Yogi Bear. Just a shining moment. Yogi Bear. Too. And he has actually a really great long list. I think he did Fred Flintstone for one year or one episode, maybe the pilot. And then he did Barney for a little while. You go to his IMD page, DP page, and it's like cartoon all star. God, dude. Did you go to Hannah Barbara's corporate page? Now what's? It like they have a page that has a listing of all their cartoons, and it's alphabetical. They have everything. They did everything. The only one that I watched that I loved that was not a part of my late youth that they didn't do was Thunder the Barbarian. Yes. I didn't watch that one. It was good. I was speaking to Hong Kong Fui, though. I think that was the one that everything was they did the Super Friends. They did Yogi Bear. They did Adamant, like, all those cats that hung out with Yogi Bear. Just seeing the Pussy cats, probably. Yeah, the hair bear bunch. What's, the bears? Teen Wolf. Did you watch the Teen Wolf cartoon? No, there's like four or five episodes. It's pretty cool. Was this after the movie? Yeah. See, I was beyond cartoon. No, the movie was based on the four episode run cartoon. Like, you know what this means? It needs Michael J. Fox. Right. That'll bring it back to life. They did everything. That was pretty cool. It's like this nice trip down memory lane to go on Hannah Barber's page of cartoons that they've done well, and that's why Fred Silverman went with them, because they were at the time, I think they said they did at least more than half of the cartoons on the air. I can't believe it yet. It's probably more like 80%. It's my guess. Hong Kong. Fui was great. Number one super guy. Let's talk about the animation a little bit. Get into the tech. Yeah, because Hannah Barbera was responsible for about 50% of the cartoons in existence when Scuba Do came out, because they figured out how to make cartoons cheap enough for TV budget. Right. It's pretty brilliant. It's called limited or planned animation. And for ten years before, I guess, in the late 50s is when they devised this. And it's very simple concept, but if a body part doesn't have to move, then you don't have to draw it over and over for each frame, for each cell. Right. So that's why when you look at Scooby Doo now, sort of clear, you'd be like, Why did Shaggy walk? He looked like the upper half of his body never moved. He just had those loopy legs because they didn't want to draw it over and over again. Yeah, they just drew one leg. One leg. One leg. And they did that using cells, like clear sheets of celluloid. Remember the overhead projector in high school? Yeah. Like, those sheets acetate or celluloid. Right. And the bottom sheet would have Shaggy's upper body, and then there'd be another sheet with his right leg, another sheet with his left leg, and they only had to animate the two upper sheets rather than the whole sheet. And that just changed everything. You can buy those cells at this great place in Hollywood that sells like framed original cells. Cartoons. No, you should get a Simpson sell. I should. Maybe I should get you one one day. Okay. You got me that can and generic beer from Los Angeles. I did. Empty Canon generic beer. It's nice. It's the best gift. 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. 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. 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 at SimpliSafe. comStuff. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera. Plus, with interactive monitoring, just go to SimpliSafe. comStuff. What else, Chuck? Oh, the cravat you were making fun of about Fred wearing was actually kind of an old animators trick. I thought they did not do that. They did with Fred. Okay. That's the reason why he was wearing a karate, I think. Got you. But you can change facial expressions very easily. You can animate the whole rest of the body and just change the head and the face, right, if you have separation, right? Yes. But you can't have separation. There's not supposed to be a line between the neck and the sternum. But there can be if there's a cravat there. Yeah. And they say if you pay attention to these older cartoons, you see a lot of neckties and collars like Think called Berryhound had a neck tie and a collar. Yeah. Remember that? He dressed like a Chipendale, didn't he had the cough offs and like the tuxedo. Second time we mentioned that on the show, the chippendale thing. But they did not have and this was apparently a Takamoto decision. They did not have what are called muzzle lines. Right. Do you remember that animated show that's in Pulp Fiction that Bruce Willis when he was a kid, he was walking to Cargo okay. Yeah. Where it's like an animated face and then just like the lips are moving. Well, they used to animate just the lips moving and the rest of the face wouldn't. But Takamoto apparently wanted more expression than that. We made it so the animators couldn't just draw the mouth and leave anything else. He drew too many extra lines that gave expression to the face. Yeah. And the result was they forwarded the whole animation process. Yeah. Forwarded. Fast forwarded. Yes. Josh, the rest of the show is a little bit like a regular show. They script it like a regular show. They storyboard it. They do the voice recording just like you would imagine. They lay it out and break it down on paper, and then it is sent to animation at that point where they lip sync at all to the mouths. And that largely has been done in Korea and other places overseas for many years. Have you seen the Banksy intro to that Simpsons? Yeah, man, it's awesome. Man. That is so awesome. Did you hear that there was some guy on ebay auctioning off Banksy's identity? Oh, really? He had come up with it over the past few years. He was researching the sale price of some of Banksy pieces and tax records that showed the same amounts, and he put it together and was auctioning off for one dollars and was about to get it and apparently got paid off by Banksy. That's what they think. Or knowing Banksy. The whole thing was banksy. Good point. Yeah. What a guy. So when they animated back in the day, Josh, they traced with ink and then painted onto the back of the acetate. And today, of course, with computers, the drawings are generally scanned, although they do say that there's still a lot of drawing done and most of the coloring and details and things like that are added with computers. Right. So there's still security to that process. Most cartoons are not live because there's a terrible strain on the animator's wrist. Exactly. And here's the other thing, too. There is some editing that goes on in postproduction, but because it's animation, you want to plan it out such that it sort of just runs in a linear fashion and you don't have to worry about it. So a lot of the editing is sound effects editing, other sound editing, adding props and just things to enhance it and stuff like that. Got you. So that's the deal there. That is quite a deal. It's a free deal. It takes about six months for one half hour, shall they say. Yeah, it's a long time. Yeah. I mean, think about that. Imagine if they hadn't come up with limited animation, how much that would take. How much longer? It would take six months for a show. Is that possible? Well, I don't know if that was now. I think it's now. That's how long it takes. What? I don't know if that's then or now. You know what? We've had some animators and stuff right in. We need to find out in the industry. Half hour show. Yeah. How long does it take to make a half hour cartoon? Yeah. Everybody we know makes like, 15 minutes shows. Yeah, that's kind of true. We had some myths and facts that we've already busted. But one of them we didn't get to was there was a myth that the shows characters were based on the five Boston colleges. Yeah. I've not heard this one. I had neither. Fred was Amherst. Daphne was holyoke mount. Holyoke. Velma was Smith College. Shaggy was obviously Hampshire. And the party animal, Scooby was clearly UMass and they said that that's not true either. In fact, Hampshire College came about a year after Scooby Doo premiered. That one kind of kills that. Yeah. I think Takamoto said these are Bostonians trying to kind of get a little regional pride going. But I didn't get if they were from Boston, they were supposed to be from Boston. I've never heard that. I don't know if Boston people just made it up or if there was some sort of reference to Boston. And here's the other thing I couldn't find that hopefully someone will know is I seem to remember as a child learning something about them being on a track team at some point. Like, Shaggy was on the track team. I think I remember some episode where they referenced that. So I couldn't find that. And hopefully there's like, some Scooby aficionados that'll say, oh, yeah, of course he's a pole vaulter because he pull vaulted in episode number 24 to get away from the Wax Phantom. Exactly. You got anything else? I do, actually. Remember we talked about Fred Silverman? If you look at the list of Scuba Doo incarnations in those from CBS, which are originally ran Scubby Do to ABC. Yeah. And it did that because Fred Silverman went to ABC. I loved the show this much. He just took it wherever he went. Yeah. I got one more little fact toy too. I saw that Casey caseum agreed to come back and not the latest one because Matthew Lillard does it, but I think it was the previous if he could make Shaggy a vegetarian because he's a big vegetarian and they're like, yeah, sure, who cares? Do whatever you want if you want. It doesn't matter. So Matthew Lillard is the Casey case. Ryan C. Krista's dick Clark. Huh? Yeah, sure, in a way. Although Dick Clarke still does the rock and eve. He just has help. Yeah, he's a co host now. I know. So it's sort of the same. All right, now I've got a little more. Okay. If just trolling the Internet, you get bored, search Scooby Doo. Among some of the other stuff, you'll find some gems. Mental Floss actually has a quiz where you have to guess whether it's an actual real life event or a ScoobyDoo plot. Is it hard? Yeah, kind of. Some of them. It's pretty neat. Awesome. Just the concept alone means you should take that quiz. Well, that means that they found a few things that were so close that they decided to base an article. People do crazy stuff. Real estate developers, they do nuts. Their list verse has a very cool top ten of odd villains, including the Wax Phantom. And then Google. Did you notice last Halloween had five different logos for Halloween? And all the Scuba Doo themed oh, yeah. So true. After all these years, man, all these shows have come and gone that were huge. And ScoobyDoo has persevered. Yeah. And continues to that's right. That's pretty awesome. Hats off to you, Scooby Doo. Really? You got anything else? I think that's the limits of my bad impression. If you want to learn more about Scuba Doo, and I mean, like, everything, especially if you're interested in television show development, you should read this very unique article on the site. Just type in ScoobyDoo and the search bar@howstuffworks.com, which means now it's time for listener mail. Josh, a while ago, we talked about puncture. We did, yes. I don't recall. You recall we got hammered by people because a lot of people don't like acupuncture. But at the end of that show, we called for surgery horror stories. And we got quite a few, actually. And this is one of them. Okay. And here it is. All right, guys and Jerry Hope all as well. A friend of a friend went in to have a cancerous testicle removed, and they took out the wrong one. Oh, no. It was a basic mistake. When you go in for no, that's not a basic mistake. Frank in La described it as a basic mistake. Forgiven. It wasn't Frank's testicle either. It was a basic mistake. When you go in for that operation, a nurse puts an X on the inside of the thigh that corresponds with the testicle that is to be removed. And she marked the wrong leg. Oh, my God. Pretty easy. Someone caught it after it was too late, and they ended up taking both of them out. When they told him, he started crying, I'll bet, with laughter. But his wife was the one that was furious. I know they received a settlement, but I don't know those details. This is a true story, and I'm more than happy to have my buddy verify it. Really enjoy the podcast, Frank. In La. Well, Frank's, friend of a friend sorry, bud. It sounds like you got a good sense of humor about it. His friend knows, at least. Well, friend of a friend, so yeah, nurses watch out with that sharpie. Yeah, you want to be, like, fully awake and aware and paying attention when they come in tomorrow. It doesn't matter what it is. He's, like, checking your cell phone at the time. Yeah. Wow. That's all I got. That's quite enough, Chuck. Thank you for that. And thank you for joining us with us, talking about Scooby Doo. We'll see you next time. In the meantime, go check us out on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. We're on fire. And we're S-Y-S-K podcast on Twitter, by the way. Indeed. And you can email us the old fashioned way at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.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. 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. 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@halopeet.com." | |
422c3cba-53a3-11e8-bdec-5bf113d630ad | How Ventriloquism Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ventriloquism-works | Ventriloquism – where a skilled performer “throws” their voice, making it seem like a dummy on their knee is talking – has taken a long, circuitous road from early prophets, to witches, then finally to the stage. Get to the bottom of this uncanny trick. | Ventriloquism – where a skilled performer “throws” their voice, making it seem like a dummy on their knee is talking – has taken a long, circuitous road from early prophets, to witches, then finally to the stage. Get to the bottom of this uncanny trick. | Thu, 22 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=234, tm_isdst=0) | 47047232 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, Maine in Greater New England. Hello. We're coming to see you guys in Portland and we can't wait. We would love to see you there. Yep. We'll be at the State Theater on August thirtyTH and if you're interested, you can get tickets and information@sysklive.com.com. Throw some lobster at us. 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 over there. And there's Jerry, which, by the way, we should say jerry. Say hi to everybody. That's right. Jerry's back. I think we scared everyone. I like joked on short stuff or one of the recent episodes that she was gone. She's gone for a couple of episodes. I know, but people took it to me like Jerry was just gone. Really? Yeah. So some people were a little freaked out by that. So Jerry is not going anywhere, anyone. She doesn't want to, as far as we know. And we're not going to let her, even if she does. That's right. Jerry's here. You're here too. How are you doing? I'm great. Neither one of us are moving our lips. No, that's how good we are. We've done this whole conversation without any I mean it's astounding what we can do. Just a couple of vents. We're basically like Edgar Bergen. Yeah, that's a deep cut vent, by the way, everyone. We're probably going to say a lot. That is short for ventriloquist. Yes. And ventriloquism can be a mouthful. So I'm going to try and say it as little as possible. Ventriloquism can be as it can a mouthful and bellyful and a mouthful. I had very mixed feelings about all of this. Why? Well, first of all, was it just that I talked about practicing ventriloquism when I was a kid? I don't recall that. I feel like it may have been movie crush then, but I definitely at one point on one of the shows mentioned that at one point when I was a child, I had a record, a ventral. Aquism record. Really? Train yourself. Oh, cool. And very briefly I thought it was something I wanted to do. Right. And I practiced it. Did you have your little bow tie? No, didn't have a costume. But I had a dummy and I got a record. You had like a ventilaquist dummy? Yeah. Wow. Not an advanced one that looks like a cyborg when you turn it around. Sure. But I mean, like you had a dummy. You could sit on your knee and make the mouth open. Wow. I always wanted one of those. You have my dummy. It didn't last long. Why not? No, I don't know. I think I have a history in my childhood of starting things like that and then being like that. Plus the instructor on the record was really mean. I can't remember which one it was. I think it was from the 60s or something. Probably mean 60s record instructor. Yeah, but then I also watched the movie Dumb Trucks. I love that movie. And it just filled me with a lot of mixed feelings because it was sad. But also uplifting. Sure. But also sad. Yes, but also uplifting. Yeah. If you haven't seen the documentary Dumb Struck, you are missing out. It is a good, nice, low fi documentary that's really easy to underestimate. Yeah. And I think what I appreciated about it is they took five stories of five and trilogy was and each of them were at different points in their careers, from the kid just starting out to the lady who wants nothing more than to be on the cruise ship, to the guy who was actively on the cruise ship to the point where it killed his marriage. Yeah. Well, you just spoiled to the lady. The other lady, she had all kinds of problems in life. Yes. But it was also very uplifting in that her community rallied around her and helped her out. To the big guy. Terry Fader. Terry Fader, whose net worth, if you believe those sites, of like, $150,000,000. Well, he signed 100 million dollar deal eight years ago with the Mirage. Yeah, that was for five years. So he's still there. Right. Okay. He hopefully negotiated an even better deal four years ago. So I just want to make sure for people who aren't aware of Terry Fader in that deal, if you'll go back to the beginning, we said we were talking about ventriloquists. Ventriloquism. Terry Fader is a ventriloquist. And he signed the largest dollar deal in the history of Las Vegas as a ventriloquist. Yes, at the time, but yeah, they captured that perfectly in that documentary dumpstruck. Yeah, just all the various components and then my whole I don't want to yuck someone's young, but many times I don't find them funny. You're crazy. And that's at the root of it. It's like the jokes weren't funny to me. Well, they kind of stick to that vaudeville tradition in a lot of ways. Yeah. Bad jokes. Yes. But then you see the people in the audience just eating it up, these old cruisers. Sure. Just like it's the best thing in these old Vegas types that they'd ever seen. Right. So far be it for me to yuckyum, but my emotions were all over the map while I was okay, well, I half regret suggesting this article. I'm sorry. But at the same time, I find this delicious. So let's talk about ancient Greece in Egypt. So just to make sure everybody understands what we're talking about, Chuck, ventriloquism is where you make it appear like a dummy is sitting on your knee and the words are coming out of that dummy's mouth. Right. But it doesn't have to be on your knee. No. And it doesn't necessarily even have to be a dummy. In fact, the earliest ones in Greece, like you were saying even before that, ancient Egypt around the Middle East, there were accounts of ventriloquism, but they didn't say, you should have seen this ventriloquist I saw last night. He was great. They said, you need to go see this medicine man or this soothsayer or the spiritualist, because this guy can talk to the spirits in the tree or in a rock right. Or in his stomach. And that's how ventriloquism originally got its start. It was a spiritual practice that was essentially scam artists. Yeah. I guess it's a way to put it. But, I mean, they were prophets and religious figures, and this is one of the things they did. Yeah. And I don't even think we broke down, really. At its root, what we're talking about in its simplest terms, is speaking without moving your lips, basically. But there's a little more mustard to it. Right. But if you're speaking while moving your lips, then you are a puppeteer. That's the distinction. I see what you're saying. Yes. You're trying to make it appear as if something else is speaking instead of you. Right. Whereas a puppeteer will just stand behind a curtain sure, they don't care. And move their mouth. There's no tomorrow. Yes, but the extra mustard I mentioned is that and this is frequently the case when somebody is not using a dummy, a ventriloquist not only doesn't move their mouth, they can adjust their voice to make it sound like their voice is coming from some other place away from them. What's commonly called is throwing their voice. And we'll talk about that later. Right, but isn't that just I mean, they're really not throwing their voice. That's just a mental trick. Yes. Okay. Well yes. It's not like they can do something with their voice to make it sound like it's coming from a different place. No, they can't. That's not the way I read it was. It was just a mental trick of believing that's happening. No. Like you can't literally make your voice sound like it's coming from a different place. So this is it. We'll just talk about it now. Okay, fine. If you are talking to a ventriloquist and they make it they throw their voice to make it sound like somebody is under the bridge that you two are standing on. If you went under the bridge, you would not hear that voice coming from under the bridge. They can't that's right. Throw their voice it's a terrible term for it. But they can adjust their voice. They can modulate the volume. They can make it sound muffled. They can make it sound echoey. They can make it sound like it's underwater. They can make it sound like it's close or far away. So that's one component of the illusion of ventriloquism, is they can make it sound like you would expect it to sound if it were a voice under water, under a bridge or something like that. I thought you were talking about space and time, where it's really just a vocal quality it is. And then combined with some other magic that they do, some other sleight of hand and misdirection and all that. Which again, we'll talk about later. Yeah, but the thing is too, though, when you see a ventriloquist quote throwing their voice, they're generally throwing it to a dummy that's about nine inches from their own voice. Yeah, typically. So it's not something no, but the original ventriloquists, we didn't use dummies. Right. So they were much more adept at throwing their voice. Got you. See? So when you went to see one of these belly profits or whatever, and they made it seem like they were speaking with a tree. They were talking to a tree and the tree was talking back, it sounded to the person standing by them that the tree was talking for a number of reasons. Got you. Which we'll talk about later. That's very interesting. I think so too. So BCE we keep talking about belly profits, I guess we should explain what that is. It was literally like sometimes they would talk to something inside their own stomach and their stomach was talking back. And that's where the name actually comes from. If you talk about the latin of the greek words for belly prophet or belly talker, it's ventriloquism Ventura's belly speaking from the belly. That's where it comes from. Isn't that bizarre? Yes, but obviously it wasn't an act at this point, like an entertainment act. In fact, it was disparaged of the devil. And of course, when christianity came through town and the Spanish inquisition, it was not a good time to be a voice thrower. No. Even from the earliest days of christianity, it was considered a form of necromancy, which was fostered and enabled by the devil. So if you were a ventriloquist or that kind of spiritualist, you were basically satan's minion. That's how ventriloquism was originally seen. And there were probably a lot of people who were killed over the centuries because in part they were ventriloquist. That's right. But it eventually would become entertainment once everyone kind of got a little more rational. It was like, it's not the devil, it's not satan, and it really transitioned to performance. But they still weren't using the dummies at this point. No, they weren't. But I want to hit on that rational thing. Ventriloquism was kind of rooted out as something that could be explained through rationalism during the enlightenment that enlightenment thinkers kind of pounced on and said, here's how this works. So remember that superstitious belief that you had that somebody could commune with the spirits? This is how they did that, so stop believing that. So that was kind of a tool of enlightenment thinkers explaining ventriloquism, skipping away all the magic tricks. Basically that's what they did. In fact, there was a guy named Johann Baptista chappelle who wrote a 572 page book exploring venturaquism and explaining how it worked. Yeah, but as far as the entertainment aspect, pretty dummy. The kind of the first person named as a 16th century ballot to French King Francis. I named Louis Bravant, and he would entertain the court there. And the way it sort of came across to me was much like a jester could poke fun at people that they normally wouldn't allow to poke fun of, this is what this guy would do, but he would just do it without moving his lips. And everyone thought it was hysterical. That's the whole comic tradition of ventriloquism. The dummy or the imaginary character, if there wasn't a dummy, can say things that the ventriloquist himself or herself could never get away with. But somehow society has been like, it's fine if this inanimate object says it, even though it's really this guy saying it. We've all decided it's fine that they say it. Yeah. I haven't I'm not clearly not. I wish you guys could see Chuck right now. He's just been scowling like this whole episode. Scowling. But that guy with a big racist act. I'm not one of those people that's going, It's really just the dummy. I'm going, now, that guy is a terrible comedian. Is that what all this is about? Jeff Dunham as a ventriloquist. No. Okay. But I'm certainly not a part of society thinking like, that cute little dummy saying terrible things. Sure, okay. But that is the longstanding tradition of the comedy behind ventriloquism. Yeah. Not necessarily like racist stuff or anything like that, but just zingers and stinging comments that normally the ventriloquist would not be able to get away with. Well, and not only that, I got the feeling from watching that documentary that it's a little bit of a therapy for people, I would guess, who don't feel like they can say the things they really want to say, so they'll say them through the dummy. Yeah. It was remarkable. In Dumbstruck, they say most ventriloquists, or at least the people who go to this convention that is covered in the documentary, are shy people. Yeah. Don't surprise me. And it's like the dummies, their alter ego. It's interesting. A little deep, for sure. Yeah. That's just the kind of way I can say it again. I'm not yuck. And the yum because people are getting a lot out of it. It looks like anytime you have conventions like that, it's just an interesting slice of life there, hanging out together. Yes. Any and all conventions, for sure. Yeah. Ventriloquist convention in particular. Yeah. And it's good because I feel like a lot of times these are people that may feel like they're outsiders and that they have a family when they hook up with these communities. I see. There's something great about ventriloquizing. Sure. I'm the one who tried it as a kid. I was certainly into it. Do you remember the name of your dummy? I don't think I named him, and I didn't go by him. I think it just happened upon my house at some point. Oh, he just showed up at your house. That didn't creep you out at all? Well, it must have been my brother that bought it, but hope it was enough for me to get a used record and give it a shot for two weeks. Got you. It really seared into your memory too. Yeah, I tried pretty hard for a couple of weeks and just couldn't get it. And now you hate all vents. I got it enough. I don't hate vents at all. I'm just not someone going, there's a dummy saying those things. Not a person, I got you. But this is how it went on for a while in Europe, at least people talked like that. Well, there were people in courts all over Europe basically transitioning from the Jester to a ventriloquist. Right, because the Enlightenment said, look at this weird trick that all these spiritual soothsayers have used over the centuries, over the millennia. You can do it too. Here's how they did it, let's all stop believing in it. And somehow astoundingly it ended up becoming a performance art, it went from a spiritual trick to performance art that people came to appreciate. But it wasn't until the 1715s that I guess they call them dummies. You could also call them puppets. I've seen other people call them dolls. Yeah. But it seems like dummy is the proper term. But an Austrian dude named Baron Dominguen started using a little doll with a little nutcracker mouth and he could move that jaw, that lower jaw, and all of a sudden it started to catch on. At first though, they were using tons and tons of these dolls lined up in a row. Yeah, they went from using none to tons of them. Yeah, and it got pretty unwieldy. And then I think everyone sort of realized what you should really do is get a dummy, give that dummy a personality, and then let that be your act. Right. And it was one guy in particular who kind of started that event named Fred Russell, who was British in the late 19th century. And I mean, the fashion was to have as many as 30 dummies on stage and you would act out like a scene, like a courtroom scene or something. And the vent would use their feet to control everything with pneumatics and they would jump from character to character. It must have been amazing to see, but Fred Russell was like, I don't feel like carding all these people around, I'm just going to stick to one dummy. Which was innovative. But even more innovative was that he created a character for that dummy. Rather than just like having the dummy say whatever was needed for the sketch, he would write sketches around the character. His dummy coster Joe, and so he basically is known as the father of modern ventriloquism. Yeah, and that really established the thing where you sell the audience and the fact that there are two people performing, and it's a buddy comedy act, but one of them has his hand in the butt of another. Yeah. And the guy who has his hand in the butt of the other is the straight man, and the guy who has the hand in his butt is the wisecracker. That's right. That's the way. I don't think any ventriloquist has ever done it. The opposite. Someone should try that, surely. I can't believe no one has. I'm sure someone has. I hope so. I want to hear about them. Should we take a break? I think we should. Man all right, let's take a break, and we'll talk about Murphy Brown right after this. Chuck, I want to say for me and everybody who listens to stuff you should know, we're very proud of you for going through this experience talking about ventriloquism and your past with it. The fact that I never got very far in my ventriloquism career. Yeah, that's right. It's just a small, painful moment in my time. But you're working it out, man. It's worth it. The other thing I did was I got a record that taught my bird how to talk. Oh, yeah? Did it work? Yeah. She could go. Hello, Dolly. No, she could say hello, obviously. And I told her to do a jungle call. What is that? Got you. And then she would whistle. Do a wolf whistle. Like a cat call. So you'd walk into the room and go, Nice. And then what else? I think it Whistled. Dixie. Maybe should have done a ventriloquism routine with your bird, Dolly. She was pretty great. Cockatiel nice. Not Cockatoo. No, Cockatiel is the one with the big head. Yeah. The little smaller things that fly around your house and poop on everything. Oh, cockatoo is bigger. Yeah. Okay. That's the big white guy that I think Barretta had. The Fruit Loops guy? No, that's a tucan. So Candice Bergen is Murphy Brown. Right. She is also the daughter of Edgar Bergen, who was totally insane. He was not insane. He was one of the most popular entertainers in the country. Yes. For decades. For a long, long time. Not just one of the most popular ventriloquists, like you said. One of the most popular entertainers. That's right. And he did something that one would think is not even possible, which is to have a ventriloquism act on the radio. Yeah, but that's a good point. Tom she wrote this article for us, and he says that really points out, like, the sea change that Fred Russell brought about, where he was writing jokes based around this character that Edgar Bergen created, this character of Charlie McCarthy and also Mortimer Snurd. Sure. And the characters and the jokes and the dialogue and the fact that he could jump back and forth between himself and these characters. That's what people cared about, because Edgar Birken was actually not very good at not moving his lips. Well, radio is perfect for him. Exactly. But he was huge on the radio for, like, 20 years from this ventriloquism routine. He was a ventriloquist on the radio for 20 years? That's right. And I don't think he began the tradition, but he certainly reinforced the tradition of going deep with the fact that these are little people to them. He's certainly not the first or last to give them their own bedrooms, their own beds to be sometimes they're buried with their dummy. He left $10,000 to Charlie McCarthy and his will. He left zero to Candice. Yeah. I mean, what do you do with that? Yes, she did a lot with it. What is the dull literally do with that? Oh, I see what you mean. I thought you meant, what Candice Bergen do with that? Where's the ten grand today? I don't know. Who knows where that money went? I know Kenneth Bergen didn't get it. Yeah. But she grew up sitting on her father's knee, and Charlie McCarthy would be on the other knee, and he'd make them talk to each other like he'd squeeze the back of her neck when he wanted her to talk or whatever, or open her mouth because he would talk for her. She had a strange childhood, for sure. Was there resentment and stuff? Do you know? I think a little, yeah. If not a lot. Well, you were talking about the fact that the strength of the jokes, though, had to be why he was so popular on the radio. And that's what one of them makes in that dumb struck video, is like, it's got to be funny no matter how good you are with the lips, if it's not funny. And I kept thinking, like, all right, when is one of these people going to be funny? Even the big famous ones, even almost to a ventriloquist, even the blue ones, the not as family friendly ones, sure. Are still pretty family friendly. Really? Yeah. Except for a few people that really just want to shock. Really? One just comes to mind. As far as I could tell, auto Peterson, I believe, is his name, and his dummy George, had just absolutely filthy ventriloquist routine, and Auto was the straight man, and George the dummy was just a total foul mouthed, basically, guy from Jersey is what he was doing. But he apparently those two hosted the Adult Video Awards two years in a row, and after the second year, they're like, you can't come back. You've offended all of the porn actors, and they don't want you to come back. Well, and then the Jeff Dunham guy you mentioned, we might as well say that this guy sells out arenas doing characters like Ahmed the dead terrorist and Mexican immigrants and all these stereotypes, but he does it through a puppet, so it's fine. So, you know, he has the Guinness record for the stand up comedian who sold the most tickets ever. Is that just mind boggling? Yeah, I think he should be reclassified, though, because some real stand up comedian in second place probably deserves that award. I'm sure Kevin Hart's like WTF. Yeah, it's probably him. Right? So you've got Jeff Dunham in the world Record book. You got Terry Fader with $100 million Mirage deal selling out every single day. And then there's a show called America's Got Talent. One, two, three. Including Terry Fader ventriloquist have won that show. Yes. Three ventriloquist. So there's like a weird ventriloquism renaissance going on right now. Yes. And Fader and I think who is the other one? Darcy Lynn. Yes. Darcy Lynn Farmer are notable. She was just twelve years old. Yeah, she's good. They are notable for being good singers. And they will have their dummy sing songs. And I think that's generally what seems to knock people out is when this beautiful voice comes out of that felt mouth. Yeah. Like Terry Faders. Dummy does a rendition of Edit James. That last. Yeah. It's really something to hear and see. It's amazing. Yeah. So it's weird because you've got Edgar Bergen from the late 50s. It was a huge heyday of ventriloquism. And then you've got this kind of resurgence in the 2000, 2010s. But in between, it's not like it ever really went away. Some of the most recognizable ventriloquism dummies, like Lamb Chop, Lester the Dummy, Jerry Mahoney, Madam, all those came in between those two times. Yeah. And they existed on The Gong Show and The Sunny and Cher Show, and they would make these appearances in the boom of the 70s variety show. Sure. So it's not like it ever went away. And it makes you wonder if ventriloquism ever really will go away, because I don't think it will. For one, as everyone to a person can agree, it's astoundingly hilarious the jokes are. And then secondly, to see a truly good ventriloquist perform, it's something to see. It is thrilling. Is it? To an extent, yes. I think that the one thing I can say that impresses me is when it's really fast back and forth between the two, because that is just physically impressive to me to be able to do that and to do the hand movements and sync it out and time it out really well. Right, exactly. Or if you're like the great Lester Drink while your vent dummy is talking. Yes. I looked into that trick. It's really making a sound. It's not talking. The dummy isn't. But what they're doing is they're not drinking. They have tricked glasses. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. They fooled me. So we talked about the ventriloquism museum because we were talking about dumb struck, but there is a museum. It's a converted house in the suburbs in a subdivision, I think, in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, right across from Cincinnati. And there are, I think, 1000 dummies where this is like where they live now. It's a nightmare room is what it is. Have you seen it? Oh, it's in that documentary. Right, okay. And there's pictures of it all over, but it's a bit of a nightmare room. Yeah, but it's really cool, especially if you're a ventriloquist. Because as part of this saying, like, here, please take care of my dummy after I die, the dummies will be kept in good condition. They will be kept clean, wash behind the ears, all that stuff lined up. But no one will animate them. It's just part of it. Not even the curator of the museum can touch these things. You can handle them. The curator can. But to animate them, make them talk, is a gross violation of the dummy vent relationship that was created over the years. Yeah. No other hand, she'll be up the butt, right. Except for its original owner. But I think that's fantastic. Yeah. You don't want to disrespect someone's dummy like that now. And the Smithsonian article kind of put it in perspective. They said nobody's just going to come along and pick up Chuck Berry's guitar Lucille and start strumming on it or whatever. Where was that from? Smithsonian. Because BB. King has Lucille. Oh, well, they got it wrong. I got it wrong, too. There was a Smithsonian magazine article. That's weird. That Smithsonian. Thanks again, Smithsonian. What was it? Wrong again, gay guy to Springfield. When I said earlier that room is a nightmare, I wasn't disparaging dummies or ventrilo triloquism. There is a longstanding sort of thing in pop culture that dummies will come alive at night and kill you. Sure, everybody knows decidedly creepy when they're just laying there on a couch or something. It doesn't help that when they're not being animated, that they're referred to as dead. Yeah, there's some laying there, floppy eyes open, mouth agape, and it's just creepy looking. We got to read this quote from the writer who wrote this, lauren Canter. That's here. When draped across a table or chair away from the performer, the doll's floppy limbs resembled that of a dead body. But the eyes remain open and the mouth is fixed with a terrifying smile, as if the body is a poorly embalmed child corpse. Yeah, it's decidedly creepy. So much so that it's been I mean, most recently in Toy Story Four. Have you seen that yet? No. There's benson is a dummy that every time played up. Like every time he appears, it's like a horror movie gives a horror movie sting and he's in the dramatic lighting. And that movie magic. I remember when I was a kid with Anthony Hopkins in 1978. Did you ever see Dead Silence? No, but I just remember seeing that magic trailer when I was seven and thinking it was the scariest looking thing I'd ever seen. It was a pretty scary one, although I'll bet you dollars to donuts it's probably not scary at all, is it? I saw it recently. Fairly scary. Okay. The scariest ventriloquism TV show or movie of all time is an Alfred Hitchcock. Presents episode called The Glass Eye Good one. Just go watch it. Go find it on Netflix, on prime, on Hulu, I don't care. Just go find the glass. I think it's season three of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. And thank me later. It will give you chills. I'm getting chills right now. I was talking about it was genuinely scary. I have to check that out. Just beautifully done. Well, and it sort of sets itself up that way and that you have inanimate things that you bring to life, and all you have to do in the story is cross it in some way, either by forgetting about it, leaving it behind, or getting a new one. Right. Jealousy is a big thing, jealousy. And then that thing comes to life and kills you in your sleep. It's all waiting to be. But first it starts by killing your friends and loved ones. Oh, sure, you're the only one, right? Exactly. You just wake up and your wife's gone. Your dummy's in there smiling. Right. The windows open. That's right. Oh, man, I got to see that. Now. The glass eye. I think we should take a break, and then we'll come back and finally talk about throwing your voice. Are you okay with that? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. All right. We've kind of hinted at it a little bit. We've given a lot of it away. But we're going to talk about throwing your voice. And again, to just come right out and say it. No matter what you read on the Internet, no matter what you've heard from your friend Jimmy, from the dummy that talks to you at night while you're trying to sleep, who cares? You cannot throw your voice. It's impossible to make your voice come from a different location, but you can make your voice sound like it's coming from a different location if you're really good at it. And that's growing your voice. Yeah. And part of the trick is a visual illusion that happens when someone is standing there watching a human being with a puppet, and the puppet is talking, and you see that with your eyeballs, your brain is tricked into just believing. But again, that's when the dummy is only a foot away. Anyway, if you're an audience member 200ft away, it's not much of a leap. So it's actually your brain doing something. It's not you saying, I decided I'm going to just go all in with this ventriloquist. Your brain actually helps. It does. Your brain is actually being tripped because there's something appropriately called the ventriloquist effect, where if your eyes and your ears are telling you two slightly different things, your brain overrides your ears and goes with your eyes. Eyes win, always. So if your eyes are telling your brain, hey, I think that voice is coming from that dummy because the dummy's lips are moving in time with the sound, the brain is going to be like, okay, it's coming out. Of the dummy. Even though your ears are like, no, it's coming a little to the right of the dummy. Your brain says, shut up, ears and actually overrides what your ears are sending it and merges it with what your eyes are sending it so that you subjectively experience the sound coming out of the dummy. Right. And it sounds bizarre, but if you stop and think about it, if you're watching TV and you've just got that little speaker built into the bottom of the TV, it's not like the sound of people talking appears to be coming out of the speaker in the bottom of the TV. It seems like it's coming out of people's lips. Same exact thing. That's the ventriloquist effect. Yeah, slightly different with movies because they actually put speakers behind the movie screen to help with that effect. The movie screen so large. Right. But even if you're just using some janky TV that just has that terrible speaker built into the bottom of the right side or something, it's not like you're like, I can't even follow that. What other TVs what else is out there that I don't know about? Don't the eldest have speakers? No, you could have home speakers connected to your TV. Oh, right. Some speakers might have some TV might have the speaker in the top left rather than the bottom right. It's all over the place. It's a free for all. Got you. Another thing that really helps us effect too. And this is what you want to do anyway. If you want to get act as you want to really give that dummy a distinct personality from your own right, it should sound very different. A lot of times it's a different accent. You just really want to put a distance between who you are and how you talk and who that dummy is and how they talk. Yeah, because when you talk like that, the first couple of times the dummy speaks, not only is it delivering some of the funniest jokes you'll ever hear in your life, it's also simultaneously training the audience that this is what the dummy sounds like. Right. So when you combine the ventriloquist effect that your brain is overriding what your ears are telling it with the ventriloquist looking at the dummy while the dummy is talking like, look, everybody, this is where our attention should be focused because this is who's talking. And then the dummy has its own personality. Those things together are the magic of ventriloquism. That's what makes ventriloquism work. That's how we come to see an inanimate object like a dummy speaking like a hilarious Yoko. I'm wondering what the deal is with why they're not funny to me. I don't know, man. I think that dummy may have killed like your family dog or something and you just block that out. I think I'm a discerning comedy fan. What the deal is, is there's never been a great comedian that was like man, I am a smoking hot comedian. So let me get a dummy up here. It's like prop comedy, I guess, in its most basic form. Speaking of prop comedy, shout out to Carry Top, who is still around. He's got his own Vegas residences. Do you know that? I didn't, but it doesn't surprise me. I saw him one day on the street. In Vegas? No, down in Florida. Oh. Just walking around. I shouted, Caretop. Now he's on his moped. I shouted, Caretop. And he turned around and sped off. Of course he did, because he threw a rubber chicken at him. No, I just shot a career. I said, what could you do with this? So I kind of take offense to that because I like to consider myself pretty discerning comedy wise. You are. That's why I'm shocked that do you sit around and watch this and you're legitimately laughing at how funny it is? No, never. But I am impressed with the skill and the stagecraft been saying it's very funny. No, I don't know if I've ever had a venture, cause dummy make me laugh. Okay, I guess I see what you're saying now. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of how you really feel about the joke, you know? Also, shout out to shade out. Yeah, it is, isn't it? But it works. Shout out to what is it? Nate Burgatsy. Oh, sure. I finally saw that guy special. You've been talking him up because he lived up to the hype. Man, he is hilarious. He's coming to Atlanta in December again. Let's go. You want to go? Yeah, let's go. All right. We can go backstage maybe. Oh, that'd be great. He might remember me. That'd be really cool. Give me backstage, Chuck. I'll try. We'll both bring our Vincillo with dummy and we'll heckle him with the dummies. Yeah, well, we would never say. Here's the thing. I love puppets and puppeteering. I'm like a kid in a candy store when it comes to stuff like that. Have you been to the center for Puppetry Yards? I'm a member. Oh, yeah, we had our TV show premiere there. Yeah, I love it. So I don't know, something happens between puppets, comedy and the weird Venn diagram that is ventriloquism where I just can't go there. Maybe. Do you not like zingers and one liners, Henny Youngman type stuff? Because that's what a lot of introduction it is. Very old school. Yes. I'd like to maybe see something a little more modern, like a Jeff Dunham, like an Evening With type of comedy. I see. You want to see storytelling. Oh, what's the guy's name? Oh, my God, what is his name? This is not making for good podcasts to edit it out. Is it a comedian? Oh, you want to see Neil Hamburger doing ventriloquism, don't you? That would be pretty great. That would be astounding. Is he still around? I don't know. I mean, he had that movie a couple of years back. I'm sure he's still around. All right, so let's talk about how to do this, because this is the stuff that really as a kid, I would sit around in the mirror with that dumb record on practicing my B's, F, M, PS and WS. Yeah. Because you can't really say those letters with your mouth closed. Because when you're talking as, eventually, because your mouth is closed, your teeth are shut, and it's just the tip of your tongue moving back and forth, your tongue is actually retracted to the back of your mouth. Yeah. So astounding that just that small handful of letters are the ones that are hard to pronounce. It is. But if you look at that other long list, I mean, anyone with no training whatsoever can probably get in front of a mirror and not move their lips and go, A-C-D-E-G-H-I-J-K-L-N-O-O-Q-R-S-T-U-X-Z. So your training paid off. This was the moment you were training for each other. But when it comes to those other ones and the one I really remember was BS and N's. So you swap out DS for BS. Yeah. So instead of saying the word boy, B-O-Y you say doy. Right. But you don't say doyou. Say doy. Boy. Yeah. You try and girls. Yeah, exactly. And that's the trick, is context. When you hear boys and girls, your brain wants to hear boys and girls. Yeah. And your brain wants to hear, what's another one here? Boy. That one part when the guy did Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Yeah, he did it. These are the ones that are really good at it. Right. You just can't see. Right. That's the thing. You and I are I should say I'm not very good at it. I'm not either. But ventriloquists are. And if this sounds really weird, all you have to do is say, well, I've seen ventriloquist before and I've never noticed. And they would say exactly. Yeah, that's how good we are. Start listening a little bit for P's and T's. Instead of saying the word Peter, you would say teeter. Take the tech of tickled Teppers. Which sounds ridiculous. Right. But the practice, practice, practice part, and even in that documentary, some of them were better than others, even within that movie. So you could see a master at work, like Dan Horn, right. Or the Vegas guy. Terry fader. Terry Fader and Dan Horn. I do need to shout out everyone remarked about his articulation. What do they call it, though? Just like how you move the puppet, basically. Not even the mouth stuff. The hand work. Yeah, the hand work. And the manipulation is just off the charts. Sure. For him. He really brings it to life. He was the cruise ship one, right? Yeah, he was really good. But then you would see someone else like the beauty contestant who kimberly. Who really wanted to be on the cruise ship performing. And she was okay. But you could hear those TS sometimes. Oh, yeah. And you could hear those DS for BS. I didn't notice. Well, I was really the headphones in, and I was really picking it apart. I got you. I was studying it's like a magician. Some people go there and watch the magic act, and some people sit there and try and figure out what they're doing. Right. I think some people go and they just check out, and they're like, this is the funniest, dang thing I've ever seen. And other people just stare at the lips with their arms crossed waiting to catch them. Right. It's a weird thing. There's actually a scene like that in Dead Silence, that horror movie where really I could see your lips move, and that boy did for it. Who's in that? Who's the lead? No one you've heard of. Okay. Although Donnie Wahlberg is in it. He plays a cop, almost a hapless cop, who kind of alternates between, like, a tough guy and a guy who can get pushed the floor easily by a man who's \u00a350 lighter than him. I thought this was an old movie. 2007. Okay. Semi recently. It's worth seeing. Yes, it actually is super scary in a few parts. Dead Silence. Dead Silence. It's a little hokey, but it's a cult. I want to say a cult classic. Not yet. It's a cult favorite. How about that? Give it a few years. It's got a cold already. It's got a cult following. I don't know if it's a cult classic. We should read the rest of these, though, just in case people do want to practice. Sure. D for bees. For f. You use ETH as your substitution. Ms. Become NS. Like I said nothing's. Instead of muffins. Right. T's. Like we said. Become P's vs. Become T-H-E-E like V for victory. Yeah, again, it sounds ridiculous coming out of our mouths, right? But we're talking. Imagine if you played up, like, an accent or it's a little kid who has, like, buck teeth or something like that. Then it's explained. Those are all tricks of the trade. Exactly. And another trick of the trade is to not use those words much. Right. Rewrite the sentence. Yeah, rewrite it. So instead of B for boy doy, just say kid. Sure. Like the Elmer Fudd rule. Which was well, remember, Elmerfud could, like, I guess, stuttered, I guess. And then we just abandon whatever word he was trying to say. Oh, it was Porky Pig. You're right. Porky Pig. There's another thing about Porky Pig. Remember when we were talking about Donald Duck? How Donald Duck wore a shirt with no pants? Right. That's actually called Porky Pig in it. A shirt with no pants. Yeah. Somebody walking around with just a shirt on, which I've said before I know this because I mentioned in an episode before. It's the most horrific look a man could ever die. And somebody wrote in and said it's actually called Porky Pig in it. And I'm like that's. Classic and disturbing. People do that if you're getting dressed, maybe. Right. But who puts on their shirt before their underwear? There's some weirdos out there who do. Or I guess a lot of people don't wear underwear. There you go. You just figured it out. I just remember the scene in Animal House when Donald Sutherland has on that cardigan sweater. Yes. And he goes and gets, like, a box of cereal off of the shelf, porky Pig in it. His sweater raises up and you see his butt. Yeah, it's disturbing. Oh, man. Not a good look. There's one other thing I want to say. We need to get technical here because we've been real silly, but ventureliques when they are speaking, they talk in a resident voice, so it's got a real to it, and there's a lot of air involved that they push through their nose and their closed teeth at the same time. The breathing is very important, so they get a real resonant voice, which is one way that they can project it. They can make it sound like it's further away by modulating their voice. And there's the ventriloquist called Paul Zerdin. He won America's Got Talent, too, and he's taking it old school where he goes out like some of the old ventriloquists who worked before Dummies did, and fools hapless bystanders into thinking somebody's crying out from a dumpster and needs help or something like that. He's also the guy, I think, that was on America's Got Talent that does a mask on a real human. Right. He got Howie Mandel up there, and the lady came out, and we put a mask on Howie Mandel. And knowing how Howie Mandel is about germs, I could see him just like this person's putting a mask on his face with their hands, and he was kind of like, okay. But then there's either a remote controller or something behind him where he moves the mouth. So Howie Mandel just has to sit there, right. He does the ventriloquist bit with Howie Mandel's moving mouth. Yeah, it's pretty hilarious. It is. Well, if you want to know more about ventriloquism, go practice. Go figure it out. You can do it. We know you can. And since I said you can do it, it's time for listener mail. Hey, guys. My name is Nathan. I'm 28 years old. I'm a systems engineer in Waukeshaw, Wisconsin. Here's how you pronounce it. You did? Did you see that? Yes. He has a fiance named Abby. You get married? Next August. Oh, congratulations. He's been listening to us for six months, and he's hooked. So he says this I just finished the eyewitness testimony episode, and I finally have something to write in about the movie Twelve Angry Men. That's a good one. Yeah, it was made in the 1950s about a jury comprised of twelve angry men. The movie covers a lot about prejudice, morality, and everything else that goes along with courtroom dramas. But one of the penultimate scenes regarding eyewitness test is regarding eyewitness testimony. Don't want to give anything away, but it really shows how someone can be completely confident in something they've seen but what might not be really what happened. When you look at the details without knowing it, the movie challenges memory versus reality and how we're all victims to emotion. Pretty good for a movie about a bunch of white dudes in the 1950s. I totally suggest it is a must watch, especially with the current climate of political affairs. Oh, don't mention that. Keep up the good work, guys. Welcome back, Jerry. Hey, how's that guy now? And that's from Nathan. Did you have that? No. Wow. Welcome back, Jerry. Guy is good. He's heard this episode before. Well, she'd been back before this, so you're late, Nathan. Okay. It was Nathan. Nathan. Nathan. Thanks a lot. And thank you for teaching us how to pronounce wakeshi. And hello to Abbey. Good luck on that wedding. Yeah, mazel tov. Send us the extra bread maker or whatever you get that you don't want. Okay, I'll take your breadmaker. All right, let's do it. Split custody. All right. If you want to get in touch with Chuck Me or Jerry or Frank the chair, too, even you can go to stuffieshadow.com and follow our social links under the social medias and find us there. You can also send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio App, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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 Kilgara 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." | |
120e73f8-361f-11ea-91d6-ffb64d85d9c0 | Short Stuff: The @ Symbol | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-symbol | You know the at symbol? This thing: @? There’s a name for it, just not in English. We just call it the at symbol. But other countries – stand back! | You know the at symbol? This thing: @? There’s a name for it, just not in English. We just call it the at symbol. But other countries – stand back! | Wed, 08 Jul 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=190, tm_isdst=0) | 14069800 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Go, go. Let's go. This is Josh, man, I just did it again. Do you want to start over? Sure. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Chuck. I did it again. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Let's get started. Perfect. No one will ever know. Thank you. So this is put together by our buddy Dave Ruse forhousedupworks.com and this is a great one about the at symbol. And I love this stuff. These are the ones that are those nice little dinner party nuggets that you can whip out in 2021, right. When you can eat dinner with humans again, this is not obnoxious. It's not one of those that makes people roll their eyes. It's a little one where people go, oh, that's a really cool little nugget. Thank you for that. Give me an example of an obnoxious one. Kind of nice. I know what you mean. But like, what is it? Give me an example, because I know what you mean by I can't put my finger on it. Do we have time? I know this is a short story. I can't think of a specific example. But it's also in the delivery, too. Yeah, for sure. And the one way you're guaranteed to be obnoxious is if someone says something kind of cool and you go, well, actually, and then say anything else. There's a life lesson from Chuck. Right there never say well, actually to any human. So that's true. Or push your glasses up while you're saying that. Right, right. That's another two word combination. That's awful. Like root canal. Yes. Well, actually well, actually, what we're talking about is the at symbol. And in America, we have the most boring name for a symbol that's basically everywhere in the world that has a better name for it than in America, we just call it the Ad symbol. It's really functional and functionary, I think. So let's go around the world. Shall we start off in Germany? Yes. If you go to Germany, you would call it the clamorafa spider monkey. Sure. Well, you have to say spider monkey in a German accent, too. Spider monkey. Yeah. In Israel, it's called a strudle. Yeah, sure. Because it does kind of look like a strudel a little bit. What about in Hungary? Well, in Hungary, you're going to go with a kukak or I don't know if it's a cukoch. Let's go with that. It's a worm. Sounds way more Hungarian. What about in Norway? Norway, it's a Pigs tale, which is a grizz hall or grizzalla. Yes. And then it's a ghoul or rose in Turkey. So everywhere. And in Spain, it's called an aruba. And the reason that Spain is worth calling out, it's actually in the title of this House of Works article from Ruse is because they think that Aeroba is actually the oldest name for that symbol. That we call the At Symbol in the entire world. That's right. If you go to Spain or any kind of Spanish speaking country now and you go to a market, let's say, you will see the sign called the Aruba. And depending on where you are, what Spanishspeaking country you're in, it's a quantity. So if you go to Bolivia, let's say, and you want potatoes, you could get one. A roba of potatoes, it's about a bushel. Or an aerobic of oil is about three gallons. Okay, so now that you know that you can translate an aerobic into absolutely anything you find in the market, right? I guess no, the answer is no, because for some weird reason, an aerobic of oil is about three gallons or so. 11.3 liters in a roba of wine is over. Four gallons is 15.1. This makes zero sense at all. Yeah, I think you just have to know what product you're getting, what an aerobic is equivalent to. Yes, you do. And that's weird, because measurements are meant to standardize things and you standardize liquid or you standardize mass. But the Spanish said, no, we're not doing that. We're going our own way. Why don't you just have some of our delightful tapas and stop complaining? That's right. But Rusdo then got his hands on a book from Keith Houston. Or HouseDon shady characters. The secret life of punctuation symbols and other typographical marks. And in that is a two part history of the At Symbol. Where Mr. Houston or Houston? I'm not sure which one it is. I'm going it's Houston. I think George is the only place in the world that pronounces it Houston. Really? Oh, wait, no. That's what they call that street in New York, too, don't they? Halston street? Yeah. You say houston street in New York, they're like, Get a rope. Hey, is that at the corner of Houston and Avenue of the Americas? You know, I was referencing the famous Paispicante commercial. Oh, yeah. New York City. Get a rope. Anyway, Greeks and Romans, Mr. Halston points out, were the first people that were trading these commodities in markets and using something called M foray as the measurement. It was the ceramic sort of long neck ceramic jar with two handles. Yeah, with the two handles called an M. fourAY. Yeah, that's plural. Right. That was about seven gallons. So that was Greece and Rome. Then the Spanish and Portuguese picked it up for their commodities, but they called it the aruba. They did, but not at first. Apparently aruba comes from the Arabic for al rub, which means one fourth or a quarter. And the ancient Portuguese and Spanish traders worked pretty closely with some of the Moors who lived in the area as well and actually ran the place for about 700 years or more. Get it? Or more. And so that Arabic rubbed off. Al rub rubbed off onto the Spanish and Portuguese. I don't know where all this word plays coming from it's making me panic a little bit. But the point is, an aroba did not necessarily stand in for M four. It meant a quarter of something, or about \u00a325. And then eventually it somehow made the switch over to be the same thing as an amphora, which, again, is that vessel that's used for storage, but also a unit of measurement, usually a liquid measurement. And a researcher figured out that somewhere between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, amphora and auroba became synonymous with one another. That's right. And we're going to take a little break and we'll tell you what all of this has to do with the at symbol 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 stuff you should know. All right, so we've been talking a lot about these words that are units of measurement, but what is this all got to do with the at sign? What we call the at sign. An Italian historian found this out in 2000. A man named Giorgio Stabille. He's a professor of history in science, or history of science at La SapiensA University in Rome. And he found a letter from 1536 that showed the at symbol as used as a shorthand for M fourAY. Here it is. The first one. Yeah. The guy who wrote the letter back in Franchesco Lopi, he was describing an amphora of wine, but rather than use the word amphora, he used the at symbol. Like you're saying, as far as anybody can tell, that's it. That's the first use of that ever. And then the fact that in Spain that this was the same thing as emphora, it shows that since Th, we know that amphora and aruba became interchangeable, then we know that aeroba is the oldest known descriptor of what we call the at symbol here in the States. That's right. And then here in the States. And we're getting to how it became a Twitter handle. Yeah. Just wait, everybody. We'll get you in part three of this episode. This is sort of a long one for a shorty, but that's all right. Here in the States, it became known as just shorthand for at the rate of something. So if you worked at a warehouse or whatever and you're filling out your order form, you would say, I need 100 tons of whatever at this price per ton. And you would use that little at symbol, and then it'll say, Nice try. We'll be telling you what price you're going to be paying. And that's sort of the way it was used in America in our commerce. It was just like, this is at the rate of this. And that's what this little symbol means. And, I mean, that's basically what it's always meant in English, at least, or in the United States, and it still is. Use that one. Yeah, for sure. We never used it to equate in for four or any kind of unit of measurement. It was just like you said, at the rate of but we typically tend to think of that as symbol, as a keyboard key. But it didn't make it onto keyboards, at least in the form of typewriters, until, I think, around the turn of the 19th century. And typewriters have been around for a while before them, but they were not like the kind of keyboards that we understand now. They only had the letters or the numbers two through nine on them, all the letters of the alphabet. So they didn't have any room for any kind of fancy at symbol or anything like that. Yeah, the dollar sign in the at symbol came about, like you said, the end of the 19th century. And then in the 19th fifties, the at sign was made or added to the Binary Code Decimal Interchange Code, the BCD IC, which were these 48 characters that were printed on those punch cards, those early computer punch cards. Yeah, they used the word code twice in that I know. Binary coded decimal interchange code. So that kind of made its entree into computing all the way back in the then by IBM used it in its programming code and it's one of its early supercomputers, the stretch. So from that moment on, the at sign has always kind of been there, hanging around. But it wasn't until 1971 when a guy named Ray Tomlinson, who is working with the advanced Research project agencies, first stab at what would become the Internet ARPANET, that it became the symbol that we know and love today, which is the thing, the fulcrum that an email address moves up and down on. Oh, man, I love that word. Up and down on fulcrum. Fulcrum is pretty great. So great. So his job there was to write programs that were going to run on this ARPANET network. And he was connecting 19 computers in 1971. And the electronic mail at the time, it was very cute. It was basically a message that you could save on a computer and then opened later by a different person, but on that same computer. No one was sending anything at the time. It was like a digital Post it, basically. Yeah, exactly. It would have probably been more efficient to just leave a Postit it was. But they were trying to electrify or I guess digitize everything. Right. It's electrifying. So he said, you know what? What would be really cool is if I could take this little digital Post It note and actually send it across the room to that computer that I'm connected to. How can I do this? He figured out that there was I don't know if an easy way to do it is the right way to put it, but one of the things that he had to establish was how to identify one computer from another. As far as the protocol was concerned. And so he came up with email addresses, basically what we would call email addresses today. And he inserted the at symbol basically for a couple of reasons. One, it already made sense as at, because it was at the rate of so at right there in the thing the symbol stands for. It's not like some big stretch of the imagination when you see that. Yeah, he just meant this computer to go to that one at that one over there, this user at this computer, something like that. And so the other thing was that it hadn't really been used in any of the coding language that ARPANET was based on. So it was kind of like a free symbol just hanging out there. And that's how I got drafted into becoming one of the most used symbols in computer programming today. Yeah, he sent that very first test message to what we think is the very first email address. Tomlinson at BBN tenexafolstop you're waiting for something. But they didn't need it at the time, I guess. No. So that's it. That's how the ad symbol became so great. So, so great. Love it. I guess since Chuck said love it, that's it for short stuff. Which means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, you." | |
How Weather Modification Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-weather-modification-works | It began with old-timey guys dropping dry ice on clouds. Since then weather modification was used to keep the 2008 opening ceremonies dry and flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but does it work? Learn about weather control plans, diabolical or otherwise. | It began with old-timey guys dropping dry ice on clouds. Since then weather modification was used to keep the 2008 opening ceremonies dry and flood the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but does it work? Learn about weather control plans, diabolical or otherwise. | Sat, 09 Feb 2013 23:09:10 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=23, tm_min=9, tm_sec=10, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=40, tm_isdst=0) | 31112545 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to stuff you should know from housekeepers.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. This is Charles W, Chuck Bryant and and it's Duck. You should know rainy edition. Is it rainy? How appropriate that we're doing this one today because it has been raining in Atlanta for 40 days and 40 nights. It seems like it really has been. I've been breaking out the duck boots, man. I almost never wear those because it's not that rainy. Sure it is, dude. We're in the midst of, like, a ten year drought. We're still in drought level conditions. Yeah. And then tomorrow it says maybe even snow in the northern suburbs. I know. That'd be nice if I turn down here. 100% chance of rain or snow. Despite all this rain, we still are in a drought condition, and we haven't for a while. You remember back in 2007 oh, yeah. When Sonny Purdue was the governor, they held an official state prayer for rain, where governor Purdue led a prayer for rain, saying, like, god, please rain. Yes. For the love of God, for the love of you, please make it rain. Yeah. And it rained. I think a lot of that had to do with the fact that he held that prayer on the night before. It was calling for 100% chance of rain. Is that right? I don't remember it raining the next day. Yeah, it rained the next day, and people said, oh, my goodness. God made it rain. Sunny Purdue magic rain. Yeah. Mother nature at work. So you got people praying for rain. You have the rain dance, which is really hard to find any information on these days. But apparently the pueblo had pretty cool rain dance because they lived in the southwest, where it was very dry, so they knew what they were doing. Sure. And then there was something that I discovered today called the Paparuda, which is from Romania, and basically a girl from a village would run around wearing, like, a skirt with made of vines and branches, and she would go dancing through the streets of the village and then go house to house. And then when she was greeted at the door of each house, people would pour water on her, and she would just continue dancing, and people would be playing music, and eventually, it would hopefully rain. Eventually, that would evolve into the wet t shirt contest. The Panama city beach. I guess that's probably where it came from. Yeah. Wow. Who knew? Yeah. Which, of course, you referenced the fact that Panama City beach was settled by Romanian. Yeah. For a change, we're talking about the weather, and it's not some little boring chit chat. You know what I'm saying? You don't think this is boring chit chat? No, it's legit. Because usually when you're like, oh, it's raining here. It's just a very boring way to say, I have not much to say, oh, got you. You know what I'm saying? I see. This is actually topical. Yeah, it is. We're saying that because we're talking about weather modification. You could say that Rain Dance was an early attempt at it. Yeah. And then in the early 20th century, people started to try to apply science to it. And there were some pretty cool attempts early on by very smart guys from, like, Harvard and MIT and a Dutch guy to basically either make it rain to make it stop raining, or to deter some other kind of weather phenomenon. Yes. Like fog or hurricanes or tornadoes. Yeah, actually, those came along a little later, but fog like you have down in 1938, they were trying to dissipate fog. Yeah. A guy named Professor Henry G. Howton of MIT? Yeah. I think my favorite is the Harvard guy. Professor Emery. Leon Chaffe. Sounds like he should be from the University of the south. Yes. Well, he was flying around in a plane in 1924 with charged sand, whatever the heck that is. Well, I think it's sand that you apply an electrical current to. Yeah, I think so. He did something to his ions. Right? Yeah. And he was dumping it into the clouds. And actually he was definitely on to something. I don't know where he figured that out, but he was, I guess you could say, the grandfather of cloud seeding then. Yeah. Grandpa Chaffee. And things were kind of humming along a little bit until Kurt Bonnegut's older brother, Bernie Bernard, dr. Bernard really took it by the horns and made some headway as far as cloud seeding and actually controlling the weather in the mid 1940s. Right. I guess he was researching that for GE, and he figured out that silver iodide has virtually the same distance between points in its crystal lattice structure as ice. So he said, you know what? I'll bet this would be a really good stand in for ice formation. So if you put it into clouds, maybe it would make ice form. Yeah. And he even figured out how to generate it. Right. Yeah. He's like, not only that, this is not theoretical. I'm a vonnegut, so I'm going to just go the extra mile. You don't know my little brother yet, but you're going to be knocked out by his book. You're going to love him. People are going to try to ban T shirts with his quotes on it during Banned Books Week. The irony is going to be lousy. That's right. So what's the process? While the process of creating it, he dissolves a mixture of are we going to call it AGI? Yeah. Of AGI and acetone, which is also iodide. Is that right? Oh, another iodide with acetone. Yeah. The acetone is flammable. You can spray that through a nozzle, make the tiny little droplets, and burn those droplets up, and then that really makes it more efficient. 1 gram of AGI can then produce 100 quadrillion nuclei for these ice crystals. Yeah. So you take that stuff, you put it up in the clouds, it goes up. That's right. And it actually, according to Vonnegut's theory, has a number of effects. And here's how it works. Yeah. This is where I get a little confused. Okay. This is what the segments we like to call Josh teaches Chuck in addition to the world. Okay, you're ready? So you think that zero degrees Celsius or 32 degrees Fahrenheit is where ice freezes it is. That's what they always say. This is actually the melting point of ice. I need that part. Ice freezes between zero and negative 39 degrees Celsius. Right. And it depends on the number of impurities, which we'll call nuclei. Okay. And when we're talking nuclei, when you're talking about cloud seeding, you're talking about any particle that can attract water to become a raindrop, that can attract water vapor and turn into ice through sublimation. Yeah. And become snow or sleet or anything like that. So a nuclei is anything that you introduce into a cloud that becomes the center of this precipitation. Right. Okay. So that already makes more sense. Okay. So there's two types of clouds as far as Vonnegut is concerned or his technique is concerned. There is a super cool cloud, which has water that is less than zero degrees Celsius present. And that's the ideal cloud for cloud seeding. Correct. For one type of cloud seeding for using silver iodide. Okay. Because what you're trying to do there is create ice. Right. And if you're using silver iodide, which has a similar structure to ice crystals, you're going to use that in the super cool one, because if you use it in the other type, the warm cloud, it's not going to do anything because it's not going to form ice, no matter what the temperature is too high. But you can still see the warm cloud correctly. You can't. So you use a silver iodide. Vonnegut's method is still in use today, where you're burning silver iodide, mixin acetone to create quadrillions of nuclei that float up into the cloud. Create an updraft, because check this out. This is even more beautiful. When the silver iodide nuclei enter the cloud, they start to attract the water vapor. And as the water vapor converts from vapor, not turning back into liquid because it's sublimation that's right. Converts from liquid or vapor into ice, it creates heat energy as a result. Or it doesn't create it heat energy. It comes about. It's magic. Right. And as that happens, that creates a convective current going up in the cloud, which creates a swirl and updraft, which makes the cloud bigger, which means that the stuff, the particles that happen at the top have longer to fall through to create more ice, accumulate more ice, and have a better chance of becoming snow. So that's the super cool cloud using silver iodide. The cloud is literally pregnant with precipitation. Yeah. That not only creates snow and ice, but actually makes the cloud bigger to increase the likelihood that it will produce snow and ice. Wow. Just by introducing silver iodine. That's great. Bonnie was a genius. The other way is to use a warm cloud, which is a cloud where the water temperature the air temperature is over zero degrees Celsius. That's right. And then that is pretty simple. You just use table salt, really? Or sand charged or otherwise. But you want to dump that into the top of the cloud. Right. And it requires dumping a lot of it, too. Right. Is that one of the problems with it? Yeah. I mean, there's more to it. If you're using Vonnegut's method, you can use the seating station on the ground. Right. If you're using static cloud seating, where you're flying overhead and dropping stuff into the clouds, you have to have a plane. You have to have a lot more of it. But what you're using is called a hydroscopic solution, which attracts water, create raindrops, which fall through the cloud, becoming bigger and bigger on the way. And then, bam, you have rain. You just see the cloud. That's amazing. So GE did have a plane in 1946, or at least articles, as they rented an airplane because we didn't know they're on, and they said, we should try this out. And they released dry ice into these clouds for four days in November, december 46. And on the last day, they received the heaviest snowfall of that winter in the area of New York. Skinneckety New York. But there's been a lot of well, we'll get to whether or not this stuff works at the very end. Right. But it seems like every time it happens, people are saying, I think we might have caused that. And other people think, yeah, but did we really? Right. Were you guys just clouds hitting enough so that over enough days that it was bound to rain anyway? Like the governor of Georgia praying for rain the night before it's supposed to rain. Exactly. So GE was convinced enough that this was working, that it was like, we can't do this anymore. And the army said, hey, we have a bunch of money. Why don't you let us in on this? And we have a bunch of money in low scruples because we're about to start testing acid on people whether they like it or not. So cloud seeding is like, nothing. And she said, okay, as long as you guys are totally liable, sure we'll do it with you. Yeah. So they partnered up for Project Cirrus. Right. And in 1947, in October 47, they dumped \u00a3180 of dry ice into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean and possibly change the direction of that hurricane to make landfall right here in Georgia and end up killing several people. Yeah. So that was sort of an oops. Although, again, they're like, did we really cause that? Well, the guy who was Bernard Vonnegut's boss, irving Langmere. He was a Nobel winning chemist. He was totally convinced, according to him, there was a 99% probability that they had caused this hurricane to change direction. I think he felt a lot about himself, didn't he? He did. He's always like, no, that was us. And he would publish papers like that and the government would step in and be like, this paper doesn't exist anymore. Do you want us to grease you? Are you trying to push our buttons? But there was another scientist who pointed out that a hurricane followed the exact same path, caused about the same amount of damage in was it the dry ice? Was it not? Who knows? So you just compared it to an older hurricane, said this could have happened naturally. Right. They did the same thing in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1948 and July 1949. And apparently it rained all over the state of New Mexico and as far away as Kansas, causing actually, that was later on, but the same deal from New Mexico. They think they made it rain in Kansas to the point where, like the great floods of Kansas and adjacent states, they thought, man could have traveled that far. Well, that was another thing Langmir was convinced about. That they had impregnated clouds that traveled 1000 km away. Yeah. And enough that he was like, we have to stop doing this. And Bernard Vonnegut testified to Congress like, nobody should be doing this except maybe a federal government. Right. But then other expert meteorologists came out and said, you know what? This whole thing in Kansas, if there was any effect at all, it might have been just slightly enhanced. So it's really not all your fault. So the US government is very much interested in this. They're very much entrenched in this even as they're not sure whether or not it's working, or the scientific community is at odds over whether or not it was working. But the US government was convinced enough that they were basically weaponizing the weather. They're doing all this to figure out how to screw with other countries, troops, economies, the whole shebang. And as the US. Were carrying out tests, so were the Brits, right? Yeah, the Royal Air Force, of course. We had our Project Cirrus. They had Operation Cumulus. Very clever to think of all these cloud names. And this was going on recently in 2001. The BBC investigated these rumors and apparently actually, were they investigating the old rumors? Yeah. Okay, I guess that makes more sense. I thought they did it recently too, though. I don't know. The brits? I don't know. All right, so in 1952, the Royal Air Force did fly above the cloud line, dropped a bunch of this stuff, and 30 minutes later it started to rain. And it rained and rained and rained. And by the end of the month, north Devon and north of England basically got 250 times the amount of rain they ever get, which is a pretty spectacularly convincing 250 times. Yeah. It's like flood time. There was actually a huge flood, too, in a village, linmoth. Linmoth, where basically 90 million tons of water converged on the village at once. Unbelievable. On the day that they started seeding, when it started raining and 35 people lost their lives, they were carried out to sea. They were crushed by boulders. Entire houses were taken out by boulders that were brought down by the water. But of course, they said, this wasn't us. Right. And the Royal Air Force pretended it never happened. Yeah. So who knows? We did our own little experiments here in the US. And as far as weaponization goes, in Vietnam, we tried to extend the monsoon season on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and apparently it worked by 30 to 45 days. Supposedly, we extended monsoonsis in that year, 71, at a cost of, like, $21 million and over the course of 2600 missions. Yeah. And they said it like they look at it now as a semi successful mission, whatever that means. It was good enough. Yeah. They're like, things are slippery. And that was actually called Operation Popeye. Yeah. No cloud names. And the whole reason we have an awareness of Operation Popeye is because a reporter named Jack Anderson, he got his hands on a secret memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to President Johnson that made reference to weather modification techniques in Laos. And he started digging around and found out that the government had done that. And when this article came out, I was at a really good time because the US government was or Congress was not in a mood to weaponize weather. Right. And so they kind of took this article, they took the publicity from it. They took a Senate committee's recommendation that this is way too big for us to be messing with, and went and had a summit with the Soviets about banning weather modification. Yeah. They said it was a lousy idea. Did you practice that? Well, I thought too much time had gone by, and I was like, you know what? I'm going to say it anyway. It was good timing. It doesn't matter. When you throw the pun down, it's always bad timing. It was a lousy idea. And they did they got together with the Soviets and they said the big deal breaker, I guess, between them making a deal right then was they couldn't decide between the distinctions of tactical versus strategic. They thought, hey, if it's tactical, that's cool, because we're just trying to benefit from the weather and make stuff harder on you to get around. Right. Strategic uses would try and flood a major city. Ruin crops. Yeah. Ruin crops. Destroy the economy. Yeah. And so the summit dissolved. But the fact that they were even talking about the strategic ones suggest that the US. And the Soviets both thought that one or both were on the verge of being able to do weather modification at that level. So the talks fell apart, but the UN basically stepped in and said, hey, we'll take over from here. And they created Enmad, which is the Environmental Modification Convention, which basically bans weaponizing weather. And the US. And the Soviets ratified it, came into effect in 1978. So you can't weaponize weather, but you can still do weather modification as long as it's not what's called geophysical warfare. Like you're trying to dissipate a storm or change the course of a hurricane for good, that kind of stuff. Yeah. For instance, China, they've been at this for a long time, since the late 1950s. And they have a program that employs between 30 and 35,000 people called the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. And they have a department, the Weather Modification Department, and they use that. And you probably remember in the news, even seeing this at the Beijing Olympics, they busted clouds to try and prevent rain from happening because they didn't want to rain out their opening ceremony in their games. Yeah. So any clouds that they saw, they would shoot with rocket propelled grenades filled with silver iodine, or anti aircraft artillery filled with silver. I die. They were just shooting clouds. And those, like 30,000 people, a lot of them are farmers who are armed with government issue rocket launchers. Yeah. Because they're out in the right place. Yeah. To shoot at clouds. Get that cloud. Yeah. Like a Southern redneck. That was weird. Get that cloud, man. Which I sound like in China. Jerry just laughed at that one. So then hail is the next thing that we've tried to conquer. The National Hail Research Experiment was started and basically to suppress hail along what's known as Hail Alley in Colorado, some state called Kansas, northwest Kansas, southeast Wyoming in northwest Nebraska. Right. And it was scheduled to last five years, but it did not I think it was shut down in 1009 seven three yeah. Two years ahead of time. Not necessarily through any fault of its own. The 70s, not to be like the driest decade ever in Hale Alley, no hail. But their whole goal was to seed clouds, to basically hurry up the process of them precipitating so that it wouldn't have a chance to become hail, to keep them warm. Clouds, too. And just to see if it is going to hail, there would be smaller pieces of hail and it would just accelerate the process. Right. But there was some funny things that came out of it. Like, we learned that farmers don't like cloud seeding. Yeah. They tried it in Maryland and Virginia, and there were farmers, like, shooting at the aircraft. And then in the San Luis Valley, somebody blew up with dynamite, a radar truck for a private weather modification company. All in the 70s. So the 70s weather mod is not very popular. And in some states now because of farmers concerns, whether modification is banned. Really? Yeah. People are afraid that you're going to take the cloud that was destined for their field and use it over your field. That was my cloud. Well, we might as well talk about it then. That's a big issue. As far as our next topic, thwarting hurricanes seems like a great idea, but one leading scientist, what's his name? Moshe Alamaro. He's from MIT. He says only a handful of hurricanes ever developed out of like 100 tropical storms, let's say, and very few of those hurricanes cause landfall that do like, lots of damage. Right. So this rainfall is vital to South America. And what are we going to start just trying to fart every tropical storm we see? We're playing God here. A little too much stuff happens for a reason. Right, exactly. Despite the fact that hurricanes can be very dangerous and costly take lives, I get the feeling he's like we might just want to live with that every couple of years rather than try to mess with the thermodynamics of an ocean current. Exactly. And that's kind of what some of the ideas for dissipating or moving hurricanes. A couple of ideas are dropping hydrogen bombs on a hurricane dissipated, which I don't know what effect that would have. I don't either, but Bill Gates is in on a patent for dissipating hurricanes, which apparently uses fleets of vehicles to pump cold water from lower depths of the ocean to the surface to mix with the warm surface temperatures, or comparatively warmer surface temperatures, so that the convective currents that those warm surface temperatures create in hurricanes that make them more and more powerful are dissipated. So the hurricanes force is reduced. Yeah. Because hurricanes draw their strength from that heat. And if you can cool it down, the idea is that you might can dissipate it again. That's what the thermodynamics is. That a good thing, playing God. And then there's one that's really routine. You've probably looked right past it at your local airport, which is fog dissipation. Yeah, they do this regularly with below freezing temperature fog. Right. Not too hard. They can do it from the ground. Yeah, but aren't they trying to do it above temperature as well? Yeah, they try cloud seeding to dissipate it as well, but they also will heat the landing areas, which dissipates fog, but it is weather modification. And then they'll also inject a propane gas which apparently dissipates below freezing fog as well at airports. Have you ever been on a plane that had to be deiced before takeoff? Yeah, that happened to me for the first time this Christmas in Akron. It takes a really long time. It took a long time and I was right there by the window, by the wing and I watched the whole thing. It was fascinating, but also a little bit terrifying. Did you get it all? Yeah, exactly. Did you miss a spot? Did you see that? We should go over it again. Yeah. I wish I knew exactly what they were doing. I'll have to look into that because I always like to know that stuff. Well, I'm sure we could just go ahead and suggest it ourselves with plain Dee, I think. Yeah, we should actually. They're spraying the wings. I know that, but I don't think it was just like, hot water. No, it's not. It's some sort of crazy solution. Yeah, that's what I figured. Crazy cuckoo solution. The icing. Yeah. So this is stuff where Josh? That is a great question, Chuckers. No one really knows. We said Irving Langmuir and Bernard Vonnegut were definite true believers. Right? But then there are plenty of other people who are like, you don't know that that happened. It could have just been coincidence. And there's actually a split among American scientific groups over whether it has any effect or not. Here's what I think. Okay. Here's my amateur opinion. I think it possibly works, but it's such a haphazard result and not easily so difficult to control that. Does that really work? Like, you may have an effect, but unless you can really pinpoint control it, I don't know if you can say that works. And part of the problem is carrying out rigorous scientific experiments, right? So if you can't control where the wind is going to take the silver iodide so if you're trying to impregnate one cloud and keep another as a control cloud, how do you know that the control cloud is not infected with silver iodide? That it's going to rain as well as a result of your experiment? So it's a very tough thing to experiment on. Well, and didn't they find out when they tried to do the ice crystals in the hurricane, didn't they find out that there are already ice crystals there? Yeah, that didn't have much in effect, right. Noah, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, they carried something out which was pretty cool. It's called Project Storm Fury for like, 30 years trying to feed hurricanes. And yeah, they found that, oh, there's ice already, isn't going to have an effect. Well, they learned more about hurricanes that way. At least they sure did by being crazy and flying into it. So the National Academy of Sciences said, 30 years of study has produced no solid evidence that this stuff works. The American Meteorological Society said, we think there's probably about a 10% effect that this has. It increases precipitation by 10%. Got you. And everybody else is who knows? Does it hurt? This cloud seeding hurt. I can understand trying to mess with a hurricane, but I mean, just shooting silver I died in the air. If the Chinese want to do that with the rocket propelled grenades, go ahead and have they're fine. I think you and I should get these biplanes here in Atlanta. I think we should get some dry ice. We should chop it up, and we should go take one of these biplane rides on a cloudy day, dump it out and see what happens. That's a great idea. Let's do it. Okay. Let's try it. Can we charge that on the company card? We probably could. Okay, good. As long as we documented it somehow. That's right. If you want to know more about things like driving aye, spy planes, weather modification, flying into hurricanes, people have actually done that. I wrote a cool article on it. Bill Gates. Bill Gates. You can type all those things into the search bar howstep works.com? And it will bring up some pretty cool articles. And we also worked out with some neat articles that we found online all over the place. So just search weather modification and have a great time with it. Since I said have a great time, that means it's time for the listener. Before we do, listen to mail, a couple of quick shout outs. One, we want to shout out our Kiva team with a new goal. Yes. If you don't know if you go to kiba. Orgteamstepyshow. We set up a micro lending team. How long ago now? October 2008. Yes. And it took 2009. It began with a little Steven Colbert challenge, but we quickly dusted him. It was 2009. Yeah. We wanted to see who could get to 100,001st. I'm not sure his team is even there yet. Are they? They didn't pay attention to us. But it doesn't matter. The point is, our team is doing great, and we have a new goal, thanks to our de facto captain Splint and Sonia. They put together the numbers for us. And our goal as of June 21 of this year is $2 million loan yes. By the summer solstice. Summer solstice. $2 million is our goal for our team. We are well on our way and jump on board. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. And loan $25. And if it gets paid back, and you said, you know what? That's the only loan ever want to make. You can actually get that money back. Yeah. If it feels dirty to you, just wait about a month, maybe a little longer. I don't know. Once it's paid back, you can take it out. Yeah. And Josh has written some great blog posts on micro lending and the controversies around it and why we still support it. Yeah. So we're well aware. And we also want to shout out our buddy Bill Wadman. We met Bill in Brooklyn, and he's a very talented portrait photographer. And he said, you know what? I'd love to shoot you guys. Here on my list of people I'd like to work with. Came out to the bellhouse, took some great pictures. One of them is now our avatar on our Facebook page. And it was a good experience for us for two guys who really don't like having their pictures made. Yeah, he was very gentle. He was very gentle, and they turned out great. And you can see his. Work@billboardman.com or he has a podcast about photography that is not about this is what lens you should get. It's called on taking pictures. It's more about the philosophy and science of taking pictures. Did you see the post on us? He's like, I think it was titled, like, look at these two Schmo's. I got to sit for me. You can find that at www.ontakingpictures.com. And imagine itunes. I didn't look, but it's a podcast. It's probably an itunes, right? Probably. I hope so. Anyway, thanks, Bill Wadman, and good luck to you. So we'll see you soon. Yeah, thanks, everybody. All right, and now on to listener mail. This is a nice little Christmas homeless shout out to our good friend Martin. Loves his female. We love our Scottish friends. You asked for a Christmas story while I was listening to your homelessness podcast. Anyway, last year, a friend of mine was going to catch a bus and saw a homeless man outside the bus station. Freezing night and in Scotland, you know that it's cold, so he decided to give the guy 20 panels. The homeless man began to cry, thanked my friends and explained that he was on the street due to a drug problem after running away from his family. However, that day, he had been thinking of going home to his family for Christmas and cleaning up his life. Now that he had the money, he was going to do just that, took my friend's address. He insisted on paying him back, so my friend gave him the address and caught a bus. This summer, he received a letter from the man explaining that he did in fact go home. He went to rehab and he is now working for his father. The family is extremely happy and he not only included the \u00a320 as payback, but a picture of him and his dad's workshop with his dad and his two brothers. This just goes to show what a little can do for some people, especially around the holidays. Love the show, guys. How about a show on the Scottish wars? Independence. That is from Martin. That's pretty good. And then an awesome letter. Yeah, that was great. I just love that one. I did, too. Thanks a lot, Martin. Thanks a lot to all of our people in Scotland. How's it going? It gets worse whenever you try. You sound like Truman Capotee on the line. Yes, you could do a bit of a Scottish accent. It left me. Don't do a Scottish accent. Do Sean Connery. Try Sean Connery Modeston. See, there it is right there. If you want to hear Chuck do a certain kind of accent, send us a suggestion. He takes all comers. Right, Chuck? Sure. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffynow. You can send us an email at stuffpodcast@discovery.com or you can join us at our home on the web stuffyshadow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com brought to you by Toyota. Let's go. Places." | ||
10 Medieval Torture Devices | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/10-medieval-torture-devices | Warning: This episode on instruments designed solely to produce extreme human suffering during the Middle Ages in Europe is very graphic in nature. Seriously, if you're squeamish, maybe pass on this one. | Warning: This episode on instruments designed solely to produce extreme human suffering during the Middle Ages in Europe is very graphic in nature. Seriously, if you're squeamish, maybe pass on this one. | Tue, 09 Jul 2013 19:12:31 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=19, tm_min=12, tm_sec=31, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=190, tm_isdst=0) | 33098266 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And I'm Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Chuck thinks we should include a warning on this one. Think we probably should. This is going to be pretty gruesome at times, warning. Kids maybe ask your parents if you should play this. Parents maybe don't play this for your kids. Don't. Pretty good one. Talk about COA. And this is history. It's pretty gruesome history, though. Yeah. So the Middle Ages are the medieval period in Europe? Man yeah. They were very gruesome times. Starting about the fifth century, after the fall of the Roman Empire and lasting until the Renaissance, the 15th century. That's many English years. Thousand years of nasty brutish and short life. Yeah. So that the average life expectancy during the medieval period. And historians don't like to call it the Middle Ages because that implies that it's just basically this little bit of time in between two really important ages, the Middle Period, like the Jam Brady of history. And they're saying, like, no, there's some really great things came about during this time, and you can't just call it that. So they call it the medieval period. I still think it's the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages is another great way to put it. Yeah. Brutish behavior. There was a what was the life expectancy? You didn't say. About 40 somewhere in the didn't see specifically, but that's old. Yeah. Wow. At the very least, that's average age. You could live longer than that. If you're a woman, the chances of you dying in childbirth were pretty high. If you were a man, the chances of you being killed by getting kicked by your horse were probably pretty high. If you were a child making it, I think you had a 33% chance to not make it past five. Wow. It was not good. Yeah. It was a violent time. Nutrition was not very good. It was a dirty time, and it was a bad time to be alive. I think we can agree on that. If you're time traveling, skip the Middle Ages. One of the hallmarks of the Middle Ages was that after the fall of the Roman Empire, rome, like, owned Europe, owned it outright. And under this control also came things like roads, currency, government, plumbing, justice. Yeah. Like, to the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire. It was under control generally, and these areas had public service. Public services. After the Roman Empire fell, there was a power vacuum, and for 300 years, the Franks and the Saxons and the Anglo Saxons all were fighting. And finally, in about 800, charlemagne was crowned the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. And the Church took over, basically. Which is good news, right? You would think. The Church, however, had a hatred of women and the fondness of torture. And the Middle Ages was also characterized by a period of really inventive thinking in how to produce human suffering. Yeah. I think this is a great quote from La Perry's 1975 book, a History of Torture in England. The first part of this really hits home. It hit home, but it brings up bad memories. What strikes us most in considering the medieval tortures is not so much their diabolical barbarity as the extraordinary variety in what may be termed the artistic skill they displayed. So they definitely delighted, and especially reading these torture devices and being very inventive and probably trying to outdo one another and how awful it was and the different mechanisms, because mechanics was new, so they were probably like, look, this has five gears that will rip your toes off. Right. How cool. Yeah. So it was a very perversely inventive period. Yeah. Perry says that they basically ruminated and considered how suffering occurs to figure out how to produce it, that it was like basically an art form by the end. Yeah. They would in court sometimes they would just do things like, hey, let me put your arm in boiling water, and we're going to base our verdict on how long it takes it to heal. I know the old thing about this, the witch float, throwing in the lake, and let's see if she drowns. Hey, she was not a witch. That's sad. But if she lives, then burn her at the same. Exactly. Yeah. So either way, the lady dies, which is very sad. Right. And they even had a thing when they would torture people for confessions, but they would say, basically that confession doesn't count. So they would say, you know what? Within that 24 hours period, we won't torture you. See, if you still confess and if you don't, then we'll just torture you again. Right. That was to corroborate your own confession that was extracted under torture. So even back then, they realized, like, yeah, you can't really rely on a confession under torture because people say anything to get you to stop doing the things that we're about to describe they were doing to them. Right. Or they would torture you very publicly. That's a very common thing with most of these, to dissuade criminal activity. Yeah. Humiliation, gaming, scarlet letters. Sure. That kind of thing. Permanent scarlet letters. Right. Even so, we're talking about the torture devices, some of the more famous, more diabolical ones that came out of the Middle Ages. Yes. And this is a surprise for you. I told you I had a little game we're going to play. Okay. As we go, we will also find out, because I've done this research, which of these torture devices are also the names of heavy metal bands. Oh, yeah, that's a great one. Because the very first one I saw, the Brazen Bull, I was like, Surely that's a band. Yeah. When I was researching this, I was thinking like, I wonder how many times Chuck's going to be like, that's a great band name. Well, the brazen Bull is, in fact a band in Chicago. Yeah. Three piece grind core metal band. Nice. Give me another example of Grind corps. So I know I don't even know. I think it's just the stuff that's so, like, fast and heavy. I like that. Yeah. So I tweeted out this picture of the different characters from Lord of the Rings, and then, based on their looks, what kind of metal they were into. Really? Yeah. Like Gollum was in a new metal. Metal. Yeah. And then I can't remember. Viggo Mortensen was into, like I can't remember. It's worth checking out. Going to our Twitter feed. Looks like three weeks, four weeks back. Yeah. I'll find it. You'll love it. I'm sure I didn't describe Grindcourt correctly. That's cool. I'm not hip on the metal scene. Chuck, the Brazen Bull. The Brazen bull is old indeed. They think that an ancient Greek named Parliament invented it yeah. For a tyrant named Falleras of Agrencientin. And so basically like, hey, let me build you this torture device. You're going to love it. And the guy was like, I love it. Get in it. Yeah, it works. What? And apparently that's how it went down. Right. So what is the brazen bowl? Well, it's a brass bowl, which is why it's brazen and a bowl. It's a large one, big enough for a human to fit in. And there is a locking mechanism on the outside once the human is in because the fires around the Brazen Bowl lit them and then waited for the Brazen Bull to heat up with the person inside, who would then scream and move around. And the muted sound. Because it was brass. Yeah. And because their tongue was often cut off. Right. Yeah. Made it look and sound like the bull was alive and making noise. Yeah. And we found through all of these grabster, wrote this, of course, at Grabanowski, it was usually followed to the delight and entertainment of the crowd. Right. So apparently if the bull started rocking and making noises, people were just like, oh, I love it. Right. It's great someone's getting seared alive inside that hollow bowl. Yeah. Because this thing, you're not being like, charred, you're being seared to death. Ultimately, I imagine you would pass out and die from the heat. Yeah. Probably. Hopefully. But I mean, being seared to death, that's pretty bad. Or even being seared in the meantime, before you pass out from the heat yes. I think with most of these, your best hope is to pass out as soon as possible from pain. So thumbscrews is one that they're interesting in that they aren't designed to kill you. Right. Like, a lot of these tortures are designed to either kill you or you could die from them. And if you do whatever with thumb screws, it's like, no, this is just for inflicting pain on you. Yeah. Band or not a band. A band. Band off thumb screw out of austin, Texas. Awesome metal band. So, yeah, like you said, you're not going to die. It's basically these upright metal bars, three upright metal bars that you put your thumbs in, and then a wooden bar slides down and presses your thumbs down, and then it has screws, and they just crank it down, like squeezing your thumbs until they're crushed and broken, I would imagine. Yeah. If you want to start to get even the slightest bit of idea of it, just press down on your thumb a little bit about within the top third of your thumb, above the quick. Jerry's not doing it. She's just watching us. And it starts as, like, a little throbbing pain. Yeah. Now imagine, like, somebody screwing a vice down on top of that while you're screaming. That's what a thumb screws meant for. Apparently there was a ten finger version called a pillywink. That's a cute name. Is that a metal band name? No. I looked it up, though, and it supposedly originated in the Russian army as punishment for bad soldiers. And then a Scotsman said, this is great, let's bring it back home to the UK. Yeah. A guy named, quote, bloody Tam Delio, who was a 17th century minister of Parliament. Who like to use them himself. Not on himself, no, but he likes to use them on people. Okay. Number eight, the Rack. Band. Not a band band. No, I couldn't find it. Got to be. I think it's just a little too, like, vague. That was my explanation. But it is a workout device. Someone's actually named their little workout machine The Rack. No way. Yeah, it looks like a walker. Like, if you can't walk so great, but you can do, like, dips and push ups and sit ups and stuff with it. Yeah. So do you think they were making a joke? I have no idea. I hope so. The Rack is pretty self explanatory, and you've all seen this before as many different forms, but generally it is a person tied to a table with each limb tied to a corner, and then it is cranked and you are pulled apart or at least dislocated. Right. Like the wheel is cranked or like an axle is cranked or something that winds, that coils the rope that your limbs are tied to up and yeah, it's either dislocated or if you really want to get down, you can just keep going and pull the limbs right off of the body. Yeah. I imagine there was about a four second period where it was great. Your back just cracked just right. And they were like, oh, that's fantastic. And then it was like, no, can we stop there? Oh, no. Yeah, I don't like this anymore. And they called you it would be called Broken on the Rack or Racked or Stretched on the Rack. Right. And there was one type that apparently looked like a horse, even. Yeah. I get the impression that it was a little bit like a sawhorse looking kind of yeah, just a beam with legs and Torquemada, who was the head of the Spanish Inquisition. He preferred one called the Portoro. Right. But again, the Inventiveness, like, they would make one look like a horse, or they would apply little artistry to it, which is even more perverse, I think. And there's another one that's kind of related to the rack. It's called the wheel. It's virtually the same principle. No. Van yeah, that's generic. Again, it's basically the same principle as the wreck. Your limbs are tied to the wheel, or they're broken ahead of time in two places with an iron bar and then threaded through the spokes in the wheel. And then once you're secured this wheel, they can do all sorts of stuff. They can swing it like a pendulum and spikes that you're grazed over or fire below you and just swing you slowly over that. Or they can use the wheel as it was meant to be used and tie you to it and send you down a rocky hillside. It tie you on the outside of it. Yeah. It's not to make you dizzy. Yeah, I just didn't catch myself. Almost said that was my favorite, the wheels. Your favorite? Well, tying them on the outside and rolling them down the hill. When I read that, I was, like, very inventive. Yes. That's off to you. What else are you going to do with the wheel? Using as a pendant? That's stupid. Yeah. The one where they would break your arms was akin to crucifixion because, like you said, basically, they would thread you through it and then put it high on a stake and just let you bake out in the sun until you died with four broken limbs. All right. The rack in the wheel, the stake, burning at the stake. Not a band name. No. And it was usually a form of execution, but it was so painful that it's also considered a form of torture. How long would it take? Josh so it's just a pole that somebody is tied to with some dry kindling around it? You like the lots of kindling. And depending on the conditions, it could take 30 minutes for you to finally go unconscious from the pain of the fire. 30 minutes of being burned before you finally fainted. Now, if it was windy out and the fire is blowing away from you a little bit, you could be enduring that for up to 2 hours. Unbelievable. Being burned to death. 2 hours of being burned to death at the stake. Yeah. And the Netherlands, they got a little more creative with it. A lot of times they would remove the tongue or do something to the tongue, I think, to just muffle the screams and make it a little more palatable. And in the Netherlands, they would apparently sandwich your tongue between two hot iron plates. And of course, you couldn't do a lot with that except make weird muffled screaming noises. Right. I don't know if it was to make it more palatable or people during the Dark Ages thought it was hilarious when people couldn't talk. Yeah, maybe so. You're right. There was like the Jerry Lewis of periods. The Jan Brady and the Jerry Lewis of periods. Wow. That's a pretty exciting time. Are we on to the Pillory? Well, we should say probably that there was a modicum of mercy with the stake where the Church would strangle you if you confess to being a heretic. They would strangle you to death first before burning you at the stake. And then it was just a symbolic burning. Yeah. Right. You were being consumed by fire. That's a very nice thing to do. Sure. So, Pillory banned or not a band? I would say band. They are banned out of Boston and they're a hardcore band and actually listen to one of their songs. You know the name of it is what? Hangnail and a that's a metal band song title. It sure is. Wow. So the pillar you've all seen, it's basically the two parallel wooden boards that are clasped together around your neck and arms and you're bent over, hanging through them, your hands in your head, stick through these things. Yeah. I always thought that was the stocks. Stocks, yeah. It's just like to restrain your ankles. But the point is, you're immobile and you're put on a platform in a very public area to be shamed and humiliated and have rotten fruit thrown at you. And more than that, feces. And I imagine the worst case scenario for this would be a group of, like, twelve year old boys in the Middle Ages when you're in the Pillory. Yeah. Twelve year old boys are like families and kids by that's true. But I bet they were the meanest of all. Some people would die in the pillar because they would be beaten to death. Some people would be lauded, though, if they were, like, thumbing their nose at the government and saying, I didn't pay my taxes. Some people would bring them flowers and like, food and stuff. Yeah. Basically, the pillar was meant to just be left up to the crowd what was to be done with you. At the very least, you were shamed publicly just for being up there for an hour or two. But if the crowd decided that you needed more justice, like, there was four Englishmen who had wrongfully accused some people and sent them to the gallows right. In order to get the reward money. Those guys were beaten to death when they were put into the pillar. That's no good. That's what they call English justice. Yeah. And can you imagine not being able to move and just have someone beating you about the head? That brings up a might be able to bring your hands up. At least guard your face. That still goes on today. But as public execution. There are some countries out there that use stoning. Iran is a very prominent one, where you are sentenced to death by stoning. They still do that. They bury you up to your neck and your head is just exposed so you can't move and people throw rocks at you until you die. Usually they cover you with the sheet so they can't see you, but they judge that you're done when you stop moaning and you're bleeding through the sheet. But there's a really interesting article that I think you should read. I wrote this blog post, Chuck. It's called five Most Entertaining Academic Papers of all time. And one of them entertaining I use this in a strange way, but one of them is called The Possible Pain Experience During Execution by Different Methods. It was by Harold Hillman. It was written in the, I think the early ninety s. And one of the ones, he covers the stoning, but he goes through and takes all of this. There's no body of work on how much pain stoning causes. So he compares it to pain reported from like a car crash or something like that, and then make assumptions that are pretty good educated guesses of what pain a person experiences, and basically rates methods of execution from hanging to stoning to the gas chamber in so far as how much pain and suffering they produce. Entertaining. Fascinating might be the word. Yes. The other ones are much more entertaining. Right. That one had to be in there. Originally, I called the five greatest academic papers of all time. But you know SEO. Yeah. Okay, so we're done with the pillar and the stocks, correct? Yeah. Were the stocks a band name? No. Next we have the Iron Maiden band. Or not a band? They have their own beer. Iron Maiden beer. Trooper Ale. Really? Yeah, it's got Eddie on the cover and everything. Oh, wow. It's pretty neat. I'd try that around the label, I should say. Can you get it, like, here in the state? No, you can only get it in the EU. I tried. It's probably 60oz, too. It looks good. Like it's well made. It's not just like I'll put our name on this crap. It's clearly like a kind of craft beer. That's awesome. Yeah. You know Bruce Dickinson is like a full on pilot, like 747 pilot. I know. He flies their big jumbo jet that the band travels on. That's cool. Yeah. Wow. So the Iron Maiden, at one point they didn't even believe this was real because it sounded so diabolical. But then they found one in Nuremberg, Germany, and sometimes it's called the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg for that reason. But it's a sarcophagus. You've seen it before, like King Tutt was buried in. But it's got little double doors and very strategically placed spikes on the inside. Yeah, done. Well, when you shut these double doors, including one over the door got you including one over the face that has two spikes that are designed to take your eyes out. Yeah. These spikes go into your vital organs. They're arranged in such a way so that your heart gets it, your kidneys, your liver. Just a bit, though, right? Yeah. The spikes aren't so long that they just go right through you and kill you. Right. They're short enough that they're going to puncture these organs and you're going to die, but it's going to take many hours. And the Lord of the Castle in Nuremberg gets to sit there and listen to you moan and die. Wow. And they had one, apparently, that was even shaped like the Virgin Mary in her arms. So when you got in, she would hug you. Yeah. When you turn to crank, the arms would draw you closer into the spike. Again, very fiendish. Scavenger's Daughter band or not a band? I know that is a band. I ran across it during my research, too. Four bands from what I saw. Is that right? One in the UK, one in St. Louis, one in Shanghai and one in Poland. Cool. So they're really spread out. Maybe it's all the affiliates of the same band. They're all subsidiaries of Scavengers daughter Co well, LLC. The original name for the Scavenger's Daughter Skepington's, or geeves, I don't know how you would pronounce that. G-I-V-E-S. It's a band, too. Is it from Tallahassee? I can believe that. So it was named after the inventor Skelmington and Todd Scalington. The best way I'm going to describe this is it looks sort of like an arch. Imagine the St Louis arch shrunk down to about 2ft and attached to a base plate, and you would get down in, like, the tornado crouch position and get inside of this thing. And then they would crank it down on the back of your neck and back at the top of the arch. At the top of the center of the arch is like a screw that they can crank to crank the whole arch down on top of you, right? Yeah. So you're in, like, a crouched position and they just further crouch you until your spine cracks and your breast bone breaks. And it's the opposite of the rack, where the rack tears you apart. Kevin tons jaw is meant to compress you and, like, you will bleed out of your fingertips in your eyes and your ears because your body is being compressed into this tiny ball. It's like a car crusher and yeah, exactly. And there's actually one on display at the Tower of London. Yeah, I saw on the internet it was pretty cool looking. Yeah. And again, not delighting in this, but it's just insane. I was looking at it on the internet today, too, and I was thinking, like, human beings used to be placed in that a few hundred years ago. Like the suffering that this machine, this contraption produced at the hands of other people. If you just sit there and force perspective on yourself, it's really unnerving. Yeah. Well, some people might say that putting someone in a chair and sending electricity through their body until they die is the same thing for sure. Have you ever seen that the Arrow Morris documentary on the inventor of the electric chair? No. What's it called? Mr. Sparky? I think it's called Doctor Death. Okay. And then colon. What his name is? Lucca, maybe, or something, I don't know. Really fascinating, though, because just rent it and it's Erin Morris. It's all you need to know. Okay. These last two are really pretty brutal and brutal against women. Yeah. And it's pretty gross. So if you're not into hearing about that, maybe you should turn off the podcast. Yeah. This, to me is like, this is the worst. The other ones were gender neutral. Yeah. And I guess the last one we're going to talk about is technically gender neutral, but the idea of it being inflicted on women, as grabanowski points out, to destroy aspects of femininity. Yeah. It makes everything even more disturbing. Yes, agreed. And this is called The Breast Ripper. Not a band. And not to make light of this, but there was a Yahoo answer where a guy said, quote, I need a brutal band name. Something like diseases or disorders or something to do with babies being eaten. It needs to be killer. And one of the people said you should call yourself the Breast Ripper. Did he say awesome? No, I didn't like to follow up and look to see if that's what he chose, but the guy had listed it like a bunch of names that were mainly torture devices. I mean, if you're a metal band searching torture devices or medieval torture devices, it's going to yield an idea or two. Exactly. So extending back to the Roman times and probably before, females have had a rough time of things when it comes to torture. Being marched through the streets naked, public humiliation, forced rape, sexual mutilation, all like just terrible, terrible things specifically geared toward women. Right. And the Breast Ripper was probably the worst thing I've ever heard. Yeah. Basically you need the one that wants to describe it. Yeah, I thought it was very bad, too. Back to you. Go ahead. After you. A woman would be tied to a wall or basically forced to be a mobile, and then The Breast Ripper, which was basically a claw of spikes that could be opened and then placed on the breast and then shut clamp down onto the breast. But then we pull away, basically just mangling the breasts and like the thumb screws, it was not intended to kill. Right. As a matter of fact, I get the impression from this article that it was used very frequently to basically say, hey, everybody, look at this person. Right. Like The Scarlet Letter. Right, exactly. It was meant to label somebody yeah. In England. I know they were fond of branding women on the face to shame them. Yeah. And apparently, if you're in the stock or the pillar, one of the things that may also accompany that was to be branded by having your nose slit. Right. Or an ear cut off, maybe. Yeah. What was wrong with people back then? I don't know. And what changed, though, under that's, like, the most peaceful period in history. What? Right after the Middle Ages. Well, that's what we were talking about. Like member Steven Pink. Yeah. The Middle Ages were particularly bad. I don't know what it was that changed, but I think the idea that government came in and created a monopoly on violence, that's what we're talking about here. That doesn't really account for it, because the government had not necessarily a monopoly. It was supposed to, but it was pretty violent itself. Yeah. And it's not like things got great. Like you said, they're still stoning people, and they use the electric chair in this very country, but it definitely was in the Middle Ages now. And also, you could be tortured for all sorts of things. Like, your neighbor could be like, you're a witch, and all of a sudden you're tortured. Right. So I would be very curious to know exactly what accounts for that change. Because something changed. Yeah. And they also point out in the article I did, that a lot of times, these were used to also get you to sing about your accomplices, and basically, like, you just say whatever you want. Sure. Yeah. It was my neighbor there, and the neighbors like, huh. And then all of a sudden, he's an pillary, too. All right, our final one is the Pair of Anguish. Band or not a band. It's got to be a band. It's a band. Four piece metal band. Wow. From Roanoke, Virginia, man, not Roanoke, North Carolina. No. So the Pair of Anguish was I guess I'll do this one, since you had to do the breast ripper. It is a pear shaped device, and the pair is actually four metal leaves joined at the top by hinge with, like, a key crank. So just imagine a pair that if you crank, like, where the stem would be, the four leaves would open up, and they would use this on women in, like, the worst places and on homosexual men in the worst places. An orifice, basically. Yeah. And open it up. And I showed Emily this morning. She was like, so that looks like an early speculum to me. And that's kind of along those same lines. And that's the pair of anguish. Yeah. And you can get pictures of all these and look at them. Not in use, obviously, but actually, some of them are, like they have drawings of the rack and things like that, but luckily not of the Pair of Anguish. There's a spoon from, I think, the Nuremberg Castle that has a. Mini iron maiden on the top of it. Oh, really? Yeah, probably displayed wow. Yeah. There are photos of these and some of them are relics in museums around the world. Like the skeleton's jeeves in the Tower of London. There's probably a torture museum. I bet somewhere. There is. There's the London Dungeon. Oh, really? That one's awesome. I went with my dad, my sister, years and years ago. How old were you? I was like, 17, maybe. That's a good age. I was like, 13, maybe. Perfect, though. Yeah, anywhere from there. But it's like they really did it up because they use, like, wax dummies and it's like there's like a head in the basket on the Guillotine exhibit. Right. Plus, there's a great Misfit song named that too. Name what? London Dungeon. Yeah. Nice. One more thing I wanted to say. In 2003, after the US. Invaded Iraq. They found Uday Hussein, Saddam's oldest son. He's the Minister of sports, and he was very famous for torturing athletes that he didn't think were performing well enough. What a guy. They found an iron maiden at the Ministry of Sports. His iron maiden that he used on people. Wow. Yeah. That certainly doesn't encourage athleticism. No, it encourages defection and running away whenever you go somewhere to play somebody in another country. Wow. Yeah. That's very sad. So that's it for ten medieval torture devices? Yeah. Very bizarre time in this world's history, for sure. Yes. If you want to see pictures of these things, read more about them. You can type that in medieval M-E-D-I-E-V-A-L. Torture devices in the search bar. How stuff works. And I said, search bar. So it's time for Message brick. And now I listen to mail. Yes. All right. Thank you. So this for Matthew and Cook listened to the Living Off the Grid podcast and it reminded him of his friend Michael's aunt. He and his friend are very technically oriented. They've been wiring little doodads and things for years. His aunt bought a house some years back, which turned out to be a long term witness protection house for local authorities. She called us in because there were about 1000 little switches and project boxes all over the house, tucked into nooks and crannies. It automated everything from the window blinds to the lights to the door and window locks. It's very reminiscent of something we've seen an old James Bond movie. So this is not like a new thing. Right. Which is why it was weird. She had no idea how to operate any of them or even what half of them did. So we got to come and play in the house, basically for a while and figured out what we could. We found the house had many defense measures, including motion sensor alarms in the surrounding woods and driveway, and backup power and water supplies, which included rainwater collection, solar panels, a huge backup generator and a wind turbine on a telephone pole type thing. It could be raised or lowered and adjusted using a handwringe. Wow. What made the house really cool is while many of the home automation and power water conservation measures implemented are now things that can be purchased and installed professionally, this was all done well before this, as evidenced by all the project boxes and very retro toggle switches and such. For us, it was like seeing history as some clever guy or girl actually had to think up these pieces and then design and build them from scratch. I feel like I'm really not doing this house justice and the engineers justice, but that could be the overexcited geek in me. We're calling this? Find Matthew and Cook. Sounds pretty cool. That is very cool. Thanks, Matthew. Apparently the aunt wasn't too into it. Yeah, she's like, I got a good deal on this house. Yeah. Like, once they figured out how to do the lights and stuff, she's like, all right, get out. I would be very curious to see photos of this house. If you have them, send them along. We love cool photos of very cool places, whether they're abandoned or unusual or whatever. So if you have like a photo spread of a cool house or a cool old asylum or whatever, send us a link because we want to see it. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com Stuffyshno, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can join us at our home on the web stuffyoushaneo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. 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What is mountaintop removal mining? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-mountaintop-removal-mining | Mountaintop removal mining is (to say the least) a controversial practice. But what exactly is it, how does it work and -- most importantly -- why should you care? Listen in to learn more about the effects of mountaintop removal mining. | Mountaintop removal mining is (to say the least) a controversial practice. But what exactly is it, how does it work and -- most importantly -- why should you care? Listen in to learn more about the effects of mountaintop removal mining. | Tue, 10 May 2011 17:35:34 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=17, tm_min=35, tm_sec=34, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=130, tm_isdst=0) | 47057275 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun 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. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho 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. Fleece IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com It automation 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, Chuck Bryant. And that makes this stuff you should know, right? That's right. How are you doing? I am well, sir. How are you? I'm pretty good. It's lovely here in Atlanta. It is. It's like 75 deg beautiful. It's like San Diego, mostly. Yeah. Hey, you hear that music, Josh? Yeah. That's Ben Soli, who will meet later, right? That's right. I could listen to that stuff all day. Man, that show music. Awesome. Let's get into this one. All right, let's do it. This is the shortest intro ever. Okay. Okay. But it's telling. It's a good one. And you would think that I would have had it ready since it's the intro, you know? But I like to play things fast and loose, kind of by the seat of my pants. And I also like to see how much time I can fill up while I look for things. Right. Yeah. Like I've done. You got it. But, Chuck, I'm going to give you a shocking statistic. There are going to be a lot of those in this one, in the great state of West Virginia, which is next to Virginia. Just west of it, though. Okay. Since the number of employed miners in that state and mining is the number one industry in West Virginia. Yes. Coal mine country. The number of miners since 1979 in that state has declined from 60,000 to 22,000, according to the state's senator, Robert Byrd. But coal mining itself has dramatically increased over that time. So how do you explain that? Well, as a matter of fact, the whole podcast that we're about to do explains it very clearly. Yes. A type of mining process called mountaintop removal mining, or strip mining? Well, it's a type of strip mining, yeah. Apparently one person called it strip mining on steroids is very much responsible for the ability for coal mining to just go through the roof in Appalachia while requiring fewer and fewer people. So while coal has increased, unemployment has increased as well. And I guess let's just get right into it because this one is chock full of stats and stories. And this is an unusual podcast for us. And by the way, this one is officially yours. Why are you giving this one to me? You did the legwork for this one. Yeah. And we should add at the end of this podcast, we're going to have an interview in our first musical guest ever with singer songwriter and cello player Bensoli, who is an activist for against mountaintop removal coal mining. And it's on the Sub Pop label with his music and he's going to interview with us and play a song. And it's going to be pretty cool. So stick around. Yes. Don't go anywhere in the middle of the podcast. All right, so let's get into it. So, Chuck, traditionally when you think of mining, you think of basically a hole in the side of the mountain held up with timbers that men covered in coal dust or going into with pickaxes and headlamps. Right. Extremely dangerous job, but a job that's traditionally been able to support families. Yes. Long has its roots in Appalachia. Right. This is a totally different kind of mining. Mountain top removal mining is where traditional mining you bore into the mountain with mountain top removal mining. You blow the top off of the mountain to expose the coal seam rather than digging in to get it. Yeah. Coal seams run horizontally through a mountain. So what happens is and this is the how it works portion, and it's pretty amazing how they do this. And even Ben has told me it's pretty amazing. Even though he thinks it's an awful practice, it's pretty amazing nonetheless. Sure. They clear cut the forest, they scrape away the topsoil, lumber, herbs, all that stuff. Herbs? Herbs, yeah. Wildlife and habitat. The wildlife habitat is destroyed. Vegetation is destroyed. In their defense, usually customarily, they send a guy in with a machine gun. He just fires into the air for a full day and then he comes down the mountain. Then they start clear cutting. So they do all this. Once they've done all that, they blow up the top of the mountain as much as 800 to 1000ft I've seen. The mountain is just gone. That's why they call it removal. Yeah. And it's flattened out and it looks like a barren moonscape instead of a forest in a mountain. Yeah. That's the term that's used by just about anybody who has anything to do with either supporting or opposing coal mining. Mountaintop coal mining. Moonscape is the word that everyone always uses. Right. That's what I was trying to get out from that point, they have these big shovels that come and dig into the soil, haul that stuff away into the valleys nearby. Yeah. Because it's not like the stuff disintegrates. This thing that's called overburdened by the mining industry, which is rock, soil, dirt, trees, land. Yeah. It doesn't just evaporate. You have to get rid of it. Yeah, I got to put it somewhere. And then something called the dragline, which is one of the more impressive machines I've ever seen. Yeah, huge. How big are these things? They said somewhere 20 stories. Yeah. And they weigh up to \u00a38 million. Yeah. And apparently you saw that picture. Yeah. It looks like an oil rig on tracks. Yeah, pretty much. So the dragon comes in to expose the coil, digs into the rock. These machines scoop out the coal. The machines that scoop out the coal. Yes. Their buckets can hold up to 20 compact sized cars. Wow. That's large. These are massive operations. And the result of this is the narrow valleys have been filled. It's called valley filled. We got a bunch of stats here's. One, coal companies have buried more than 1200 miles of headwaters and streams, rivers and streams buried underneath. The stuff gone forever. Yeah. With the overburden. Remember the stuff that they blew the top of the mountain off of and they get rid of it? There's two ways to do it. One, you truck it off of the mountain and dump trucks, which is done, but it's also extremely expensive and time consuming. Correct. Or you move bulldozers up there and you push the overburden into the valley below. Right. Typically in a valley, there's going to be some sort of stream, water supply, people living there. Yeah. And if you have a permit, if you apply for a valley filled permit, you're usually granted one and you just push that stuff into the valley and then start getting to the coal. Right. There's a lot of problems with this, and we're going to try and hit on all of them, the myriad issues. Do you think we could just stop right here? We probably could. Another one of the issues is something when they wash the coal, it's called the result of the wash is what they end up with is called coal slurry. Right. And you wash coal because coal comes with a lot of other organic inorganic toxins, metals, compounds like nickel, cadmium, mercury, that keep it from burning as well. Right. Yeah. And there's no combustible. And there's chemicals added to the wash as well, which end up in the cold slurry ponds. Right. So you're washing it for market. But this water has got to go somewhere and it's extremely toxic. Mercury alone would make it extremely toxic. All the other heavy metals just make it even worse. So you either inject them into old mines, old abandoned mines is one thing that you do with cold slurry, or you wash them into holding ponds, which are basically earth and dams built into the side of the mountain, which can be precarious, as we'll find out. Yeah. And if you see colsalary, I mean, just type it into Google images. It looks like soupy. Black sludge is about the best comparison I can make sure. So these ponds, one of these actually busted the dambroke in 1972 in West Virginia at Buffalo Creek, and 132,000,000 gallons of the stuff rushed through the valley, killed 125 people, injured 1000, 104,000 people were left homeless. And these, by and large, are very poor people, which is one of the keys here that we're going to keep hitting on. Yeah. I think wise County, West Virginia, the average income is like 18,000 for a family, something like that. Yeah. Graduation rate is about 60%. And the poverty level is exactly what it was during the was it Eisenhower? I think so. Eisenhower administration, when he went there and said, we have to end poverty in West Virginia. It's the same. Or LBJ. Yeah. Johnson so once this whole operation is done, there may be more than one seam, and there's different ways to get into it. Like you can dig in from the side, high wall lining, or you can blow the top off the mountain, where you can do both. But once the mountains exhausted and these are massive sites. There's one in Virginia, I believe, that's like 350 acres, which that's one site. Yeah. That's just one mining operation. Or you could also call it one former mountain. And time was when you left, that was that you got your colon, you got out of there and the mining operation was abandoned. Right. Nowadays you are supposed to most mountain top removal permits come with an addendum that you have to do some sort of reclamation. The reclamation process typically is supposed to involve basically piling rock and stuff back up, regrowing this area and trying to basically simulate a mountain again. Yeah. And then was when that was first introduced, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act established standards. They said back then that the goal was just to get grass to grow, anything to grow. Right. And reclamation is a good thing in theory, but one of the knocks that activists like to point out is that what happens on paper isn't always what happens in reality. And there's been studies that show that the soil is still not the same decades later. It's just not the same. You can't make it what it was. Right. There is one sterling example of what can be done. It's called the Powell River Project. Yes. So the Powell River project is in Virginia, I believe. And it's 1100 acres. It's a former mining site that's just a leveled mountaintop, and some care was given to it. And now it is basically a wildlife preserve. It has strawberries and blueberries growing on it and sugar maples and cattle is grazing on the turf. The wildlife that's come back are screech and bard, owls, coyote, bear, turkey. Basically, this mountain is getting back to nature. Right? Yeah. Primarily financed by the coal industry. Yeah. Got to say that. And I think the deal is, if everything went down like it's going down at Powell River, there would be fewer issues. But that's not the case, unfortunately. Right. That's just a sterling example of what could be done. Well, this is what happens when you spend like, decades and lots of money on this one particular site for the most case. I think you told me that they just throw some grassy down over the old site and that's that. Right. I guess we should probably start now talking about the environmental impact. There's basically two ways you can classify the impacts that this has. Three ways. One, economic, which looks like it should be good. Right. But if you look at the rates of unemployment and the continuous poverty in Appalachia, you'll actually see that it's not so great. The economic impact, the environmental impact, and then the human impact. So let's talk about environment. We're talking about coal slurry, right? Yes. You have to put that cold slurry somewhere. The Earth and Dam, like you said, at Buffalo Creek in 1972, collapsed, spilled 132,000,000 gallons, and killed 125 people. Right? That's right. In 2000 in Kentucky, there was another damn break. 250,000,000 gallons of sludge flowed into the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River and affected streams and rivers up to 100 miles away. More than a million fish and other wildlife died. One of the biggest environmental disasters in this country's history, and a lot of people probably never heard of it. Yeah. Apparently the areas of exposure was 20 times that of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Yeah. And I believe it was either this one or the other one. One of the coal company heads called it because heavy rains is what eventually caused the dam to break on top of the slurry. Called it an act of God. Yeah. And I believe that's how it was left. So sort of washing our hands of it, it was because the heavy rains and that's what happened. So you also mentioned valley fill, where streams have been affected just by being buried, which means no more stream. I got that for you there. Okay. 6700 valley fill permits in the United States. Yes. 6700 times this has happened. Actually. I think it's more than I think it's like in the 7200s because it was between 85 and 2001. Okay. And we found another one, Chuck. There's been about 500 or so from 2001 to 2008. Yeah. Things have really ramped up here in the last decade. As far as Ntrgos back to the streams as well, apparently. There was this study in Science where twelve environmental science scientists got together in Science magazine Science in January, this past January of 2010, twelve environmental scientists got together and did a survey of the literature on the environmental impact of mountain top removal, mining and the valleys. You said? I think something like 1200 miles of valley, streams and headwaters have been affected. These guys sampled water in 73 of 78 streams. Or they did a study on this and found that 73 of the 78 streams they sampled had deformed fish carrying toxic levels of selenium, which is a heavy metal, which is not good. And if your fish is deformed, that's not good in general. Yeah, the Simpsons episode? Sure. How many eyes was it? Three eyes. Three eyes? Almost at four. We would have heard about that. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho 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. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. Stride career prep is helping change that. 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And just to recap real quick, though, on the reclamation, I did find that study from earlier. The study said that 15 years after mountaintop was leveled at this one site, trees had still not regrown because they just can't make the soil like it used to be. And the US. Army Corps of Engineers and that's for the land when it comes to the streams. The Army Corps of Engineers said under oath in their testimony that there is not a successful stream creation project in conjunction with this. Yes. Or they don't know of one. Yeah, basically. All right, we can try and reform the mountains to a rough assemblance of what it once was, but you can't just make new streams, and we haven't found out a way to do that. It's kind of like taking a sword and severing someone's head and then just kind of balancing it back on the neck again. Yes. It's there, but it's not really working any longer. Right. Yeah. So that's some of the environmental you're also talking about it's in the drinking water. It is. Which kind of straddles the environmental and the human impacts. There are people in this literature that we've been researching for this podcast whose families have lived in these areas for like 230 years or so. Right. Like, these are straight up Appalachian folk. Oh, yeah, right. Hillbillies. They call themselves hillbillies. And the hillbillies have been there for a while and before, I guess, it was probably a very quiet place. But as we've mentioned, with mountain top removal, mining explosives are a major part of it. So when you blow the top off of a mountain, first of all, it takes a lot of explosives. It's very loud. Apparently, in 2000 and 367 percent of all explosives produced in the US were consumed by the coal industry. And in West Virginia alone, that figure led to an estimated \u00a33 million of explosives being used a day. A day to blow up mountains. People live on these mountains still. Right. The same mountains that they're blowing up? Yeah. In the valley. So you've got the noise. You have a very dangerous condition called fly rock, which is exactly what it sounds like when you blow a mountain top up. Rock flies everywhere. And if somebody's living there, it can go into their house and kill them. Yeah. And that was the case in 2004. At 230 in the morning, bulldozer operating without a permit. Again, 230 in the morning, this bulldozer was working on mine site without a permit. It dislodged 1000 pound boulder, rolled 200ft down and crushed three year old Jeremy Davidson in his bed, who was sleeping at the time. Yeah. And the company was fined $15,000 for that. Yeah. For gross negligence. Yeah. So I don't even have a comment on that. We'll just leave that to the listeners. I have some more deaths here if you want to be dark for another moment. Sure. In West Virginia, 14 people drowned in the last three years because of floods and mudslides. In Kentucky, 50 people have been killed and 500 injured over the last five years by cold trucks that were illegally overloaded. And on the flooding thing, I think they said that in this one spot in West Virginia that there were three, what they call 1000 year flood or 100 year flood in ten days. 300 year floods in ten days in this one region. Yes. That's not supposed to happen. No. And you're talking about death that's just directly from drownings, injury, that kind of thing? If you take all of the public health hazards into account as a Public Health Reports Journal study did this year, I think last year, I'm sorry, anywhere between 1736 and 2889 people die in Appalachia each year as a result of the coal mining industry there. Right. So there is a lot of death, but there's also a lot of potential death, too. Sickness. Yes. We talked about Buffalo Creek, where the slurry pond dam broke and killed 125 people. That was 130,000,000 gallons of coleslury, right? Yeah. Killed 125 people. There is a place called Marsh Fork Elementary School. Yeah, I saw a documentary on the school. So March Fork has, I believe, 200 something students going there every day. And just above the elementary school, there is a cold slurry pond above it on the mountainside that holds 3 billion gallons of coal sludge. Yeah. And there's a whole operation there's a silo, 300ft from the school. Right. So rather than the 132,000,000 gallons, we're talking about 3 billion gallons poised behind an earthen dam right above an elementary school. So there's a lot of potential for disaster as well, right? Yeah. That's Massey Energy. That's one of the bigger coal companies in the United States. You might remember Matthew's name by the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that happened about a year ago from two days ago. It was April 5, 2010 that that explosion killed 29 miners and leaving three others trapped. So Massey is, like you said, big in traditional mining, surface mining, and regulation. Actually, one of their former executives was named a Deputy Energy Secretary for Fossil Fuels a couple of years back. That's right. President Bush named appointed what was his name? His name was Stanley Subaleski. He was appointed in 2007. December 2007. The Department of Energy. Yeah. Okay. Back to March Fork Elementary School. Actually, one of the documentaries I saw yesterday was on that school specifically, and West Virginia activist Boeb He's, one of the leading activists on this call, found that 80% of the parents are saying that their children are coming home from school with a variety of illnesses like nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, shortness of breath, wheezing, asthma, long term effects, kidney damage. There's been a lot of kidney damage in that area. Liver damage, spleen failure, bone damage, and cancer of the digestive tract. Actually, it wasn't Bow, but one of the other activists there, they were trying to raise money in this documentary to build a new school not 300ft away from a coal mining operation, and they were trying to raise it by donating pennies. And in the documentary, they marched and had a rally at the governor's office in West Virginia. And it was hardcore, man. It was hard to watch. Like, literally, the governor gave him a minute, and he's glad handing and talking to people, and they bring out this little girl from the school, and he's like, well, what are you interested in? And you sure are cute, and what do you want to be when you grow up? And basically the kids just like, I don't want to live under a coal mine, and I don't want to be sick anymore. And they call this guy out, the governor out big time. And it was really one of those uncomfortable scenes to watch when politics gets when it's clear that this guy has no answer and the big coal has their lobbyists that are on the side of big coal mining. And it was just very uncomfortable and disturbing to watch. Yeah, but you should watch it nonetheless. That was Marsh Creek elementary is in West Virginia, right? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's in Rock Creek. I see. Chuck, one of the reasons why the governor would have been embarrassed or felt awkward is because there is a ton of money at stake here. That one Public Health Reports Journal study that said between 1000, 702,900 people die each year from coal mining. It was an economics paper. Really? And it said that the coal industry generates about $8 billion in economic contribution to Appalachia every year. Right. Yeah. Which is a lot. Can ignore that. No, you can't. That's a lot of money spent on that area. The problem is this same paper, using the same model, figured out that it costs about $42 billion in health care costs and the cost of life. So that's a big picture. Yeah. So you're actually losing. And you can just look at the poverty in Appalachia and see, oh, well, these people who are literally next to these minds are not benefiting from this at all. Right. And there's another stat activist will point out that only about 4% of our nation's coal energy comes from mountaintop removal mining. So it's not like, oh, you know, like 80% of the coal that we use comes from this practice, so we really need it. They will tell you that conservation alone we could save an average of 20% of our energy demands, which far outweighs by what, four or five times the 5% that we're using. Right. I've seen up to 10% comes from strip mining or from mountaintop removal mining, really. But that's being used pretty grievously because the United States gets about 50% of its electricity. I think in 2009 it got 45% of its electricity from coal. So usually it's around 50%. Yeah. And we're exporting coal, too. Coal is an important part of our energy plan. Can't ignore that. Yeah. So where does that leave us, Chuck? Well, there's a couple of things, Josh. One reason that I wanted to do this show and that you got on board, and we're way behind it too, is because oh, no, I'm just doing this is because this is a problem that affects poor rural people for the most part. People in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee now, and they don't have the same voice that other folks do. One of the leading, I think it was bowed again, said if this wouldn't happen in New England, that biggest environmental disaster or east of the Mississippi River happened. And the New York Times didn't report about it for like four months. I guess a lot of the listeners out there probably looked at the title, what is Mountain Top Removal Coal Mining? And said, yeah, what is that I've never heard of it. But we've all heard of the Valdez. We heard about all these disasters obviously need attention. I'm not saying that we shouldn't pay attention to things like oil spills, but it gets a lot more attention when it's on the Gulf of Florida with Destin and Seaside right there than it does in the rural mountains of West Virginia. Yeah. So somebody needs to be talking about this. And a lot of people are. And another problem is the coal lobby and the fact that companies can donate money to political campaigns and get in the hip pockets of politicians and favors are paid back. And it's the same old story with big industry like this. It's just sad to see it happening. Well, it is. There's a big debate going on right now about just how much the EPA should have teeth in regards to mountaintop removal mining. Right? Yeah. And the EPA's new chief is pretty progressive and pretty hardcore and not a friend of big business. And she is making some waves. Coal miners are against these actions. You're talking about? Lisa Jackson. Yeah. Okay. And she's a bulldog. I read the Rolling Stone interview on her and she said her job is just to look out for the environment. That's the only thing she wants to do. And if you're in her way, she's going to try and knock you down. Well, we'll see. But that's still not enough for a lot of people. I think the general consensus among activists and probably people who live in school buses on the side of a mountain nearby, a mountain top removal operation, is that it should be banned outright. Yeah. That process is not mining those particular sites, but that type of mining, that method of mining should just be completely outlawed. Yeah. I mean, most of these permits were issued during the Clinton and Bush administrations. Second Bush, obviously. And there were certain key provisions to the Clean Water Act that were rewritten to reclassify waste associated with strip mining as benign fill material. Federal judge rejected that. But then that change was upheld in 2003 by Fourth Circuit Court judge. And then Obama comes in and people said, alright, dude, you're the environmental guy. Get rid of this altogether. In the first 100 days it didn't happen. But Obama has introduced stricter guidelines now and the EPA has on to curtail mountaintop mining hailed by certain environmentalists. But if you talk to Bow Web, he'll say, that ain't enough, brother. He's like, you got to outlaw mountain top removal mining, period. And anything less than that is just playing into the hands of big Coal. It's surprising that it has been allowed to go on. I mean, the idea of blowing the top of a mountain, then pushing it into the valley below, covering up the stream, and then introducing coal slurry to this local environment. In an age where there's such a thing as Earth Day and people. Are like, I will never use a paper or a plastic bag. I use my own that I bought and brought from home. That this is going on. It's startling. Yeah. Well, last I said that there are some efforts by the Obama administration to curtail this last Thursday. This is just over the wire. Today, two senators from Kentucky, mitch McConnell and Rand Paul, introduced the bill trying to restrict the EPA from clamping down on it, giving the EPA a 60 day deadline to veto clean water act permits issued by the court of engineers. And activists are saying this is tricky, so they put in that 60 day thing. Everyone knows nothing in the government can happen in 60 days. So it's sort of a facade. Red herring. Red herring. The bill would also prevent the EPA from retroactively vetoing permits. So that was Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. And Rand Paul from Kentucky. If you're from Kentucky, you know all about your senators in 2010 said, like, you don't need me to tell you about this guy. In 2010, he said in an interview, quote, I think they should name it something better. The top ends up flatter. But we're not talking about mount Everest. We're talking about these knobby little hills that are everywhere out here. I don't think anyone's going to be missing a hill or two here and there. And that was Rand Paul straight from the horse's mouth. And Chuck, I think that, you know as well as I, people are going to be like, you guys are getting political. Stop being political. And I'm trying to figure out how to frame a response to that because this is super political. It's above politics. It's basically incredibly well financed industrial interests and average people who have no money that kind of dying and getting sick. That's not political. That's not the right or the left. That's right or wrong, basically. Well said, sir. Thanks. We're talking about an EPA study. It's estimated 400,000 acres have been wiped out and like we said, between 701,000 miles of stream. And those are the 2001 numbers, so it's a lot higher by then. Well, do you want to talk to Ben Soley? I do. I'm looking to see if I have anything else. Oh, you know what? We should plug a couple of things. Jonathan Francis new novel freedom, it's a big subplot. Mountaintop removal mining. Yeah, I heard the TV show justified. Have you ever seen it? No. It's awesome. Timothy oliphante season two has a big subplot on mountaintop removal mining. And all these things raise awareness on certain levels. The wild, wonderful whites of west Virginia. What's that? It's a documentary. You know, the dancing outlaw. Oh, yeah. So it's a follow up to that. It's his family and they are crazy. It's actually produced by Johnny Knoxville's production company. Really? It's worth seeing. So Ben will be in here in a second to give us some more organizations, but if you want to just look into this a little more. There are three places I can recommend you go. One is iLoveMountains.org. Great place to start. There's a group called the Mountain Justicesummer. They are well organized. I think they're the oldest one. Yeah, that's mountainjusticeummerorg and then Appalachianvoicesappvoicesorg. Go to any of those websites, look up some pictures, do your own research, see if it matters to you. Or summer is coming up, and if you want to go join a protest, they have them all over Appalachia. Yeah. If you've ever wanted to see a person with dreadlocks in working in conjunction with the Hillbilly, this is the place to go. So, Chuck, let's pause a second here while we bring Bentley in, okay. 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. 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 handson, 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. So we are back. It seemed like a brief second to you, but it was about ten minutes to us, at least something like that. And in the studio for our first ever musical guests, we have Mr. Ben Soli. Welcome, Ben. Hello, fellows. Ben is a singer, a songwriter, and a cellist Czech. He is a Kentucky native, right. And he is a mountaintop removal coal mining activist. And in 2010, Ben, you put out an album on Sub Pop label produced by Mr. Jim James of My Morning Jacket. That's true. With Daniel Martin Moore called dear companion. And it was a do you call it a concept album or just a theme album? That's a good question. Some folks referred to as a protest album. Okay. Some folks referred to it as an album of an issues based album. And we just kind of looked at it as a tribute album to a really beautiful part of the country. Okay. And bringing that part of the country and that sound and kind of our heritage is Kentucky musicians into the urban context and mixing all that stuff. Well, since that was one of my questions anyway, just tell us a little bit more about that project. I know did 100% of the proceeds went to Ilove Mountains.org? Yeah, well, I mean all of the proceeds that we would have gotten as artists, right, sure. Yeah. And in the record world you get a portion of it from record sales. There's nothing 1% went to Isleofmountains.org. No, actually it was like I mean, to be specific, it was 13 point something percent the portion that we would have gotten as artists. So we just donated that. That's great. To app voices, mostly because they run an amazing website called iLoveMountains.org and the goal of the record was not to protest anything or necessarily pick aside. It was more to raise awareness, be catalyst for conversation. That's what we just did. Exactly. So in that way we wanted to support the thing that we felt like was one of the best things for a national conversation, which was the website where people can go and find out how they're involved and what to do. How did you get into where did your desire to raise awareness about MTR come from? It's a good question. I think it all started with an author that read a story. This guy's name is Silas House. He's a well known author there in Kentucky, central part of America region. He's an amazing writer and he came and read on a show that I was doing this beautiful entry about a lady who had posted herself up on this mountain site and she was not going to allow the machines to kind of rip up the land, which had been in her family for years and years. I had a lot of emotion and energy in the writing that kind of spawned the thought of it. And then more and more research. I was like, wow, how can this actually be going on, America? How can people actually have to live without basically a lot of their civil rights, to have clean water, to be protected by their police, all these things. And so I wanted to help raise awareness for it. But I'm a musician. What do you do? How much can a song really change anything? Is always one of these big dilemmas, especially a song of protest. Have you heard? Europe's final countdown. That changed everything for me. Yeah. You know the song? We're going to play it for you. I'm going to buy you that MP3, as a matter of fact. That's sweet. Thank you. Yeah. So tell us a little bit more about Dear Companion and your work with Daniel Martin Moore and Jim James and Sub Pop and how those packaged. I know that was very unique. It is unique, and Sub Pop is a really amazing record label. For even taking the time to look at putting this thing out, right? And I think a big part of that is because they started as a label that was based in a community. Like, they started putting out punk rock music of Seattle, and they grew big, and they put out music and everything now. But this is their way of reaching into a different community and being part of a conversation. And a lot of ways, folk music kind of has that punk against the common thing, the establishment against the establishment, demand the man, whatever the industry. And so I think this really resonated with them. So they took the time and energy to put it out. Working with Daniel Martin Moore. He's a tall, handsome, kroner sort of fella. He is. He is. And he also lives in Kentucky. And before we even met, he was very active in raising awareness of mountain removal with a song called fly rock blues. And fly rock kind of describes the materials that fly off into the air when they blow them out. It's amazing stuff. I mean, sometimes boulders as big as houses go flying hundreds of yards. I mean, it's amazing. Powerful, explosive force and land in places way outside the digging zone, right? So that song inspired me to work with him on this project, and then Jim James came on board, also Kentucky native. Also Kentucky native. And he had done a lot of work with Kentuckians for the commonwealth and organization there in Kentucky, and he just was a great voice for being able to take these influences of appalachia, take our own songwriting, and also bring them in with kind of the relevant indie rock and this kind of sound that is associated with him and my morning jacket. And quickly on the packaging, too. Was there a map that was included, or there's a beautiful picture of appalachia. Okay. And what's unique about the picture and the reason that we chose it is it's not some long shot landscape of the rolling mountains, old appalachian fog. It's not this idealized thing. It's simply a valley. It's this beautiful, pristine valley. And that's really what the whole contention behind this is. It's not really the absence of the mountaintops that causes so much destruction. It's the filling in destruction of the valleys. These are the places that collect our water, the headwaters that come down not only to these appalachian communities, but also some of our major cities on the east coast. And those waters are being polluted. And the idea that we all live downstream from those is a really provocative and an idea that we're all in this together. This is one big community. From the groundwater being polluted to the electricity that runs these light bulbs, we're all kind of participating in this thing, and it's very easy when we're participating in it, turning on a light switch or charging our phone to miss the idea. Not that a mountain is blowing up. That's too abstract, that's too out there. The idea that people have to live with that. People make this power, right? People have to deal with the coal trucks tearing up the roads. People have to deal with the dust in the air and the shaking ground. People have to deal with the loss of land values. There are people that are living very hard lives to make sure that we have these things. And I think from a positive standpoint, we need to appreciate that more, right? Not just protest them, not point our fingers and look at them and say, look at those poor people, but say thank you in a lot of ways. And that's what we tried to do with your companion, was to say thank you. Celebrate appalachia as a landscape, as part of our American heritage. Everything from the man beside his cabin chopping wood or the fiddler playing by the guys dancing, like these American things that have been turned into musicals and shows, they all stem from those pioneers that settled in these mountains. And I just think it's such a huge part of our heritage as Americans, and it's just disappearing as these communities, they struggle to survive. Underneath the climate of things being exploded and land being devalued and water being polluted, it's hard for them to survive. It's hard for communities to even keep their footing when all that's happening. So we're losing part of our American heritage, and that's how it ties in with me as a musician. That's how I found it tied in with me as a musician. Awesome. And I want to point out Ben is a guy who walks the walk. He did an entire tour, was it last year, on your bicycle? Yeah, we've done three tours by bicycle now. I don't know how many people tried to carry a cello on a bicycle, but this guy does it from town to town. Believe it or not, there's four or five cellists out there in the world that are carrying their cellos on bicycle. Something about people say cellists are extreme people. I don't think that, but I just really got into this idea of not being sustainable or being green, slowing down the idea that I wanted to be more involved in these communities. I felt this unsettling feeling that I was coming to these places, putting on a show, asking people to buy the music, and then moving on to the next, driving eight to 10 hours the next day, sometimes to get to some distant community where promoters will put up money to put on a show. It felt like a little bit of a fleeting thing and somewhat dishonest in a lot of ways. It wasn't real, and people romanticized it, but it wasn't really real. The idea of getting on a bicycle, slowing down, not being able to roll up our windows or just stay on the interstate and zoom past the place we had to really ride through each community and be a part of their town for at least a little bit. Yeah. You noticed I've been riding my bike lately just for exercise. And it's amazing how much more you notice just by walking or riding a bike than when you're zipping past it in the car. The smells. The condition of the road is a big one. The habits and nature of other drivers out there. You've noticed how amazing it is that we have thousands and thousands of pounds of machinery that we can just hurt down the highway. I mean, for better or worse, you just kind of notice what an extreme action that is. We're so used to it. But the idea that we can hop on a highway and just push this machine, very heavy, big machine, float it down the highway. It's kind of like Arthur C. Clarke or something. It's just out there. You don't take things for granted, my friend. All right, well, before we get involved with the music, do you mind sticking around and playing as a song? I'd love to. Okay, good. I love mountains.org. Is that a good place for people to start? It's a great place for people to start, especially because they have a tool on there where you can plug in your zip code and see what portion of your power is coming from. Coal. Fantastic. And not only that, you can see where that coal is coming from. It's a great website. I love mountains.org. It's cool, not coal. So the song we're going to hear is called Electrified, and it is from Mr. Solis forthcoming album, which should be dropping right now, May 10, and it's called Inclusions. So let's hear the trees. Your mind is confused it will be clarified you're old fashioned you will be modernized everything is electrified everything is electrified you're lost in the jungle use the satellites you're broke in the city sneak on the bus line you lost your job because it was mechanized they said we have to compete when the markets go but I think the neck could find everything electrified touch the base of your spine feel you shuddering glory move like I swallow when I'm hitting the door some folks are heroes others may be vilified assess your losses learn to diversify finds your high calling in evangelist built a congregation on your televised everything electrified everything man. That was awesome. That was very cool. So cool. And you heard clapping. I had people all over the office here that wanted to come in. In here? Yeah. That's something else. So you can see Ben Soli on tour. He's on tour right now, and he is all over the place. I'm looking. Boston, New York, Philly, Chicago, St. Louis. I mean, back through Kentucky, down through the south. Go see Bensoliontor through the end of June. You can find that at his website. Yeah. You can also learn all about mining and energy by typing either one of those words in the search bar@households.com, which does not trigger listing or mail this time. Instead, you shoot us an email if you want to drop us a line. Yeah, and hey, if you go see Bensoli on to work, go up to him and talk to him. He's very nice guy. And tell him that your buddy's with us. He's a very good guy. Anyway, if you want to get in touch with us, send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The house that Forks iPhone app has arrived. Download it today on itunes. 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 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, science based nutrition guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leaving brands? Find Halo Elevate at petco, pet supplies plus, and select neighborhood pet stores." | ||
aa2c1d7e-8e8e-11ec-944d-3fb46eb10d4e | Short Stuff: Cassowary | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-cassowary | Australia is home to a kind of bird that is the second largest in the world and can kill a human being, making it the closest living version of a velociraptor? Of course it is! | Australia is home to a kind of bird that is the second largest in the world and can kill a human being, making it the closest living version of a velociraptor? Of course it is! | Wed, 16 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=47, tm_isdst=0) | 11584612 | 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. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Flightless Josh. There's Flightless Chuck. Flightless Jerry is with us, and we're speaking about the cassowary, a type of bird that is, you guessed it flight less. There's no less flight in a bird than the cassowary imo. Right? Flightless and dangerous. The most dangerous bird in the world. So where does it live? Of course, Australia. That's right. In this sucker. If you want to look up a picture, if you're not driving or something, you should check it out. They are sort of known as one of the closest relatives to dinosaurs, birdwise that we have, specifically the Velociraptor. Yeah. I love Jurassic Park truck. I do, too. You know what's funny is I hadn't actually looked up a picture of the cassowary until you said you should look it up. I was like, oh, yeah, I've never seen one of these. Now that I see it, I'm like, okay, I've seen this. But they're amazing animal videos. They look like across, not across, but you can tell they're definitely akin to emus ostriches. And they're huge. They're really big. There's three types. And one of the types, I think the Southern is the second biggest bird in the world next to the ostrich, or heaviest, I should say. At least. Yes, they are super big and super dangerous. They are listed as a class two animal in Florida, along with alligators and cats. If you're asking why would they be in Florida if they're native to Southeast Asia and Australia is because people can, if they jump through hoops, keep them as pets. Right. But they can kill you, which is what happened to a 75 year old man in Florida. In Florida whose pet cassowary killed him dead. And all this, Chuck, by the way, is a demonstration of how those in the know call Florida, Western Australia. Is that true? No, but it does line up. There's a lot of stuff that wants to kill you in Florida, too. All right. And a lot of people who like to keep that stuff that wants to kill you as pets both places. That's a bad combo. Yeah. And I believe Crocodile Dundee were tired to Naples, Florida. Oh, really? In the last one. Okay. It would have been pretty awesome, though. Back to the cassowary, though. It has these sort of bristly feathers that look like hair. If you see a video of them, if you're kind of from a distance, it looks like kind of a hairy thing. They have this blue face, a couple of red waddles on the neck, and then this big cask, a helmet on top of its head made of Keratin. That's really like a literal helmet. Yeah, that's probably what makes them seem the most dinosaur like. Although they got a lot of dinosaurs features. That helmet, like the hard helmet is made of the same stuff. Like you said, keratin. That's what their beaks made of, too. And same with their feathers, too, but it's really tough structural skin. I think there's dinosaurs that have that same exact thing. Yeah, it looks like a fin of triceratops. Yes. Just one of them, right? Yeah. So just the saratops, right? Well, no, not the horns. I'm talking about on the back. Are you okay? I've been better. All right. The thing that's so deadly about the cassowary, though, is you're not going to get headbutted by that cask, is you're going to get clawed by a three to five inch this is where the velociraptor thing comes in, this three to five inch claw that is super sharp. And all you have to do is look at a video of the guy on YouTube with basically a big shield and this cassowary coming at him and jumping and kicking both of his legs with these claws at this guy and literally knocking this grown man backwards to know how scary this thing can be. Yeah, those claws are super sharp, but their legs are also super powerful, too, so they pack a really big punch that's also a really sharp punch that's been known to basically gut people. Not only can it make you bleed pretty bad, it can reach your internal organs sometimes, too. And the reason they're flightless is, even though they're big, their little wings only fully extend about a foot from their body, so they have no chance of flying. They don't. One of the other things, too, by their feathers, you said it looks like hair. It's really good to protect them because they live in the forest with a lot of dense underbrush, a lot of thorns, a lot of branches and stuff. And one of the theories behind why they think they have that horn on their head what's it called again? I want to say cask. Yeah. One of the reasons they think they have the task is so that it can kind of run headlong through the forest without hurting its head. But then also those thick, heavy feathers also protect the body, too, from getting stabbed by thorns and things like that. That's right. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right. We'll talk more about the deadly cassowary 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 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 Citi comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. 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. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. comSK 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. Comssksksquarespace. Okay, Chuck, so we're talking about the deadly cassowary, which I mean, it is deadly, but I don't think it's any more deadly. It's much less deadly even, or you're much less likely to die by a cassowary than you are from saying, like, getting infection from a dog bite or something like that, right? Statistically speaking, yeah. I mean, we shouldn't disparage. The cassowary is deadly. Like, they can kill and they have those sharp claws, but they're not aggressive. Generally, they're not after you. Generally, if you come upon them while they have laid their eggs or something, you may be in trouble, but they generally want to stay away from people. There is another video that's a little frightening. If they would have put, like, scary music to it, it would have helped. But there was a woman on the beach in Australia, I guess, and she filmed the whole thing, but this cassowary was just walking toward her and she's walking backwards and it keeps coming and it's pecking at the phone. But after having seen that other video, I'm just like, on the edge, waiting for this thing to jump up and slice your stomach up. It's intimidating. And it's a very large bird. And when it's coming at you with those kind of crazy eyes and its heads ducking back and forth and it's kind of pecking at you, it seems like a velociraptor in that moment. Yeah, I can imagine. So, yeah, I think it's more just like it's remarkable that a bird can kill you and has before than it is actually like a super deadly bird. What's the deal with that bottle of they're not 100% sure, but one of the theories is that it's basically like a current mood indicator. Like current mood effervescent. Yeah, like a mood ring. It changes color, brightness with their mood. Yeah, that's not too bad. Or to maybe say, like, I'm robust and maybe like, sexually, perhaps. Sure. Like, check out my waddles, baby. Exactly. They're also known as a keystone species, because what they do is they eat fruit, tons of fruit, and they walk around and cover a great area and poop that seed out. It goes right through their digestive tracts and they deposit the seeds all over the place. So you get a much more diverse fruit habitat in areas where they are popular. Yeah, because they're not only spreading the seeds around, when they poop it out, it's got all sorts of nutrients to grow within it's. Just a great commensalist set up, I guess. They also are pretty stealth. They have this apparently their call is so low, it's just on the edge of human hearing, so you may not even hear them coming at you. Yeah. And apparently, though, like, you can feel it in your chest if you happen to be near one when they call, like, it rumbles in your chest. That's pretty sound ways, too. I love it. These things are great. Did we ever say how big they get, Chuck? Yeah, he said six. Six and 135 or so. Yeah. That's just so enormous. But what I thought was really interesting is, and at the very least, the southern cassowary species, the female is about \u00a3170, the males are \u00a3125. And even more interesting, the males are the ones that actually raise the hatchlings. Yes. Did you know that? Well, I didn't until I knew nothing about this thing until I looked into it. But, yeah, the female basically lays the eggs and it's like, my work here is done. It's on you, scruny. Yes. Raise the kids. And the males do. They raise these kids and the female goes off and mates with more males, other males. And it makes total sense from a natural selection standpoint, because that just means that more cassowary chicks can be born, the more female cassowary can go off and mate with more male cassowaries. As long as the males are the ones raising the chicks. That's pretty great. Great idea. And it's great because their numbers are dwindling. All three species are vulnerable or near threatened. Of course humans have a lot to do with this loss of habitat because we're growing into their territory or they're getting hit by cars, stuff like that. Dogs apparently. If it's a young dog or a small dog, the cassowary. Like there are dog attacks on record, but if the dog gets bigger, they can be a threat to the cassowary. Yeah, especially young cassowaries. Yeah, it's all size. It's like whoever shows up is the one threatened. The law of nature. That's right. So there are people working to keep the cassowaries around, make sure they don't go extinct. And like you said, it's typically human encroachment. So people are buying back some of their native habitats and just trying to set them off as preserves and building ways around roadways, which is another big thing. We should do a short stuff on that sometime. Basically like nature highways that are overpasses in the woods. Over roads that go through the woods? Yeah. That's pretty cool. Yeah. And maybe we just did the short stuff on it just now. I don't know if there's much more to say about it, but I just think it's amazing looking. I've seen pictures of them. They just look like grass covered overpasses. Almost like what our overpasses are going to look like in 2079 when there's no more people left. That's right. It looked like the last of us are Station Eleven. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, since we got nothing else everybody, this ode to Cassowaries is ours. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myheartradio radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
Three Gross Parasites | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/three-gross-parasites | There are some pretty disgusting parasites out there, but Josh and Chuck have settled on three particularly gross ones. Tune in to learn more about flesh-eating parasites, guinea worms and tapeworms in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | There are some pretty disgusting parasites out there, but Josh and Chuck have settled on three particularly gross ones. Tune in to learn more about flesh-eating parasites, guinea worms and tapeworms in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:12:26 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=16, tm_min=12, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=204, tm_isdst=0) | 27092605 | 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. 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 s YSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. 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. Here is Charles W. Draconkyliesis. Bryant Tikko. How are you doing? Drunk. That sounds like my player name. It is sort of playoffreache.com. I wish I could remember what that name was. So good. It was sweettastic. Bryant Trump. Is that it? Sugar Tastic. Brian Trump. Sugar Tastic. That's it. Brian Trump. Yeah. Chuck's Pint name as it appears on Playerappreciate.com. I love that you can generate a play a name. Yeah, it is pretty cool. God bless the Internet. Chuck, speaking of the Internet yes. Our parent company, Discoveries Channel, Animal Planet, has a cool website indeed that they launched for their show Monsters Inside of Me. Very cool. Which has inspired us to do a couple of parasite podcasts. This is two of two. Yeah. Number two we just did toxoplasmosis yeah. And I got to say we were excited about this stuff. Sure. Occasion. Occasionally we'll get requests to do things and we're like, oh, I don't know, should we do that? We'll turn them down and they'll threaten to fire us. And then we'll march into the office with a gas can and a lighter. It goes down like that. But this one is cool. Monsters Inside Me. Cool show. Yeah. Everybody on staff pretty much threw in for this thing, and happily, actually, because it is a cool show. That's a cool graphics. It's just gross. Yeah, it is. And if you're eating lunch or dinner right now, we might advise you to wait until later to listen to this. I actually was eating a sub while I was researching leash maniacs taper and sub. No, that's the flesh eating. I know. Was it a taper and sub? It was under cooked meat, so yeah, probably. Anyway, we're talking about parasites and apparently pimp names. And let's get into it. We're talking about three really gross ones, and technically we should say four because I want to give a shout out to my favorite and Chuck. Also, I should probably say anytime we do a segmented podcast, chuck likes to time me because he's a big fat jerk. I don't like to time you, but if we want to get to all three, we need only have a certain amount of time. And so I'm going to go ahead and hit start on my new iPhone. Okay. Well, Jacobiasis jerk, we're supposed to do lismaniasis. Oh, yeah. Leash maniacs. Sorry. That's what we're starting with. This is the flesh eating parasite. It is affectionately known tropics subtropics in southern Europe. Yeah. So we're safe for now. Well, unless we travel to one of these countries. True. Which you were prone to do. Yes, I want to go to certain places. Sometimes you are, but yeah, there's a lot of people who actually suffer from leash maniacs. Estimates are about 12 million infected worldwide and 350,000,000 at risk. Yeah, and about 2 million new cases each year. And they're expecting us to go up, Chuck, thanks to our friend climate change. Thank you, Al Gore. Right. Because as the temperatures increase, the area where the sand fly which areas increases as well. And yeah, it's a sand fly, which I wasn't familiar. I think I had sand fly and blackfly confused. But luckily blackflies don't spread leash Maniacs as sand flies do, and these are actually about a third of the size of mosquitoes. Yes, the bites are relatively painless if they're not pain free. Right. So, yeah, you don't know that you're being bitten, and you certainly don't know that the saliva from this fly has actually just transferred some larvae of this parasite into your bloodstream. Yeah. And I should point out, too, you said that global warming is one reason this is on the rise. Another reason is because of our shenanigans in the Middle East, because that place is lousy with sand flies in Afghanistan and Iraq and the like. So we think a lot of our personnel over there may be getting infected and bringing it back. So leash maniac. Mission accomplished. Chuck actually, the concentration of where these cases are popping up is concentrated in just a handful of countries, old World and New World. But places like Syria and Brazil have the vast majority of these cases because this is where the sampling lives. But like you said, traveling conquering tourism. These things can transfer to men conquering. Yeah. Leashmaniasis right. So there's actually two kinds and a subkind. The subkind is my favorite. The cutanis is my favorite. Is it? Because I want to describe the sore if you have the cutaneous leash Maniacs this is what's going to happen. You're going to get a sore on your skin. What happens is as follows, and this is so gross. They describe the sore as ending up looking like a volcano. So it's got a raised edge and then a central crater, a little meaty central crater right in the middle. Do you have least meniasis on your breast? That's gross. And some of the sores are indeed covered by a scab and they can be painless or painful. Painful? Your breast is yeah. Wow. Yeah. So my favorite, chuck, if you'll allow me to take over for a moment, please, is mucosal or mucotania. This is the stuff that you see photos of when you type in flesh eating parasite, right? Yeah. What happens is you get a cutaneous parasitic infection and it can spread to your mucous membranes, e, g, your lips, your nostrils, that kind of thing. Basically, the prominent features on your face get eaten away. Did you Google image any of these? Yeah. So were you eating at the time? No, I was not. I have no sense. It's amazing. Like people missing their noses. I saw one where it was a close up of this guy's nose and somebody had tweezers. It was just kind of pulling it and it was a still photo, but you could tell by the way it was being pulled. It was basically like jelly. Wow. It's gross stuff. But they actually clear up on their own eventually. That's the good news. We read an article from the CDC describing leash meniasis and I was just concerned to find under the how do I treat leash maniacs? They're basically like, well, it goes away on its own eventually. Basically, like there is no treatment. But it said it could take months or years. Do you want a volcano scab on your forearm for years? Or that thing on your breath? No, you don't. Gross. There's a really dangerous one, though, called Visceral. Yeah. So tell us about that, Chucker. Yes, Josh, this is the nasty one. This is the one that attacks your liver and spleen and I think it enlarges them. Yeah. Your spleen actually can become larger than your liver, which ain't supposed to happen. That ain't supposed to happen. And even your liver my liver is shrinking and hardening. Oh, is that what happens? Sure. Okay. So you live like a California raisin. Pretty much, yeah. Not the dancing kind, the dying kind. Yeah. It'll kill you. It will. And like you said, it is nasty in that it is dangerous. It's not as nasty as mucocutaneous leash maniacs, but it's still pretty dangerous stuff. Right. So you want to know how this parasite life cycle occurs? It's pretty interesting, actually. Yeah. Let's hear it. So you get bit by a sand fly, right. And the parasite actually is taken up. It enters the bloodstream and it's taken up by macrophages, which are a type of white blood cell. Right. So they're living happily and protected within the macrophages where they're reproducing and eventually they cause the cell to lice. It erupts and all of a sudden all these new parasites are released into your bloodstream, and then they're taken up by more white blood cells and so on and so on. So the process keeps continuing and they start multiplying exponentially. Wow. Yeah. Which is also how it's flesh eating. When it's attacking these cells, it's lies in the cells in your mucous membrane or on your forearm or something like that. Or in the case of visceral leash maniacs, your internal organs. Right. But like we said, don't worry about it. It'll just go away. According to the CDC. Yeah. All right, change your press the timer, man. We're done with this one. Okay. So that's leashmaniasis yes. On two. Number two dracunculiasis. That's a good one. Yeah, this one's pretty awful, too. This is really sad as the guinea worm. Yeah, this is really sad because it affects the poorest of the poor in the world. That's the bad news, because it comes from drinking unclean water. The good news is they have largely eradicated it. Well, there are five countries that are stubbornly hanging on a guinea worm infection, but, dude, we're talking. Let's go back in time to 10th grade. You're in elementary school. Yeah. You're drinking behind the elementary school. 86 out of ten. I was in the baseball cards. Yeah. I was into drinking behind the elementary I was into Defender in Van Halen. Awesome. So 3.5 million people were infected every year back then. And now let's go back a couple of years to 2007 when I was into Defender in Van Halen and I was drinking behind the elementary school. Yeah. That's scary. Only 9585 cases were reported, so that's awesome. And most of those were in the Sudan and Ghana. So clearly some work to be done there. Sure. So now we should talk about how gross this is. This is a very gross Paris. This is the worst one. I think what happens is it's generally taken up through a tainted water supply right. A year later. Yeah. That's what was so frightening. As you drink bad water on vacation in Ghana a year later, all of a sudden you say, what's that blister on my foot? Yeah. Well, the tourism board is going to be really mad at you there. The Greater Ghani Chamber of Commerce is going to be after you, Chuck. Right. So go ahead. 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. 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 teledoc 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 Tedoc. comStuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's teladoc.com stuff. For JD power 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS all right, so basically, what is it? Water fleas are easily infected with these parasites, and they show up in unsanitary water. You drink this water, you get a couple of water fleas in, or you can conceivably. Just drink the larvae, right? Yes. The larvae travel down to your intestine, where they lodge. They can pass through the intestine, which most parasites can. Right. And then they grow. Right. Well, the stomach acid, what I thought was interesting is it does not kill it, it kills the water fleet. Thank you. Stomach acid. Right. So the parasite sticks around and it grows and grows and grows to about two to 3ft long, or 60 to 100 CM long over the course of ten to 14 months. And it's just the females that grow to this adult stage. Yeah. And they said it's as wide as a cooked spaghetti noodle, 3ft long in your intestine. Yeah. And it's gross. That's not the worst part, though. Our guest producer, Lizzie is about to hurt. She is about to vomit. I think we should make that our mission today. We should. Okay, so you've got this three foot long live spaghetti noodle that you can clearly identify as a female detached from your intestine, and then it migrates to the skin. And here's where the beauty part is going on. Oil forms on the site where the worm is about to emerge, and pop goes the weasel. The worm starts to poke its head out, and basically, you look down and you have a worm coming out of your body. And here's the tricky part. What? Getting it out? No. Okay, so if you haven't picked up by now, parasites are arguably the most intelligent things on the planet, or at the very least, the most tenacious. The boil or the blister that occurs at the site where the worm is about to emerge. Actually, the pain associated with it is alleviated simply by dropping it in water. Yeah, this is contact with water triggers the guinea worm to release this milky white substance, which is actually millions of larvae, into the water supply. So the water supply is now tainted and the life cycle begins again. Right. So you're in Ghana, you're feeling bad, you get in the river because it makes it feel better. And then all of a sudden, everyone downstream is getting this milky secretion of eggs. They get infected just so gnarly it is. Okay. Again, CDC says. Yeah. Really the best way to do this is to have a clean, sanitary water supply. So the treatment for this is actually just preventative. You just make sure that population has a clean water supply. Right, right. Which is what the Carter Center has been working so hard for all these years. That's odd to mention. The Carter Center out of nowhere. Well, no, the Carter Center, they've been doing all this work. Oh, they have? Yeah. Since when? Trying to eradicate GWD. Oh, did they help with that? Drop from 3.5 million to less than 10,000 cases in about ten years. You got it, buddy. Right. Well, way to go, Jimmy. Carter mentioned no. All apologies. Okay, so the Carter Center is working on eradicating the guinea worm. Sure. Among other groups. Got you. World Health Organization. Yeah. Right. Okay. Yes, we've got it down. But let's say that you do have a polluted water source, and all of a sudden you have a three foot long cooked spaghetti noodle coming out of your leg yes. In a boil. What do you do, Chuck? What do you do? Well, one thing you can do, Josh, is you can pull it out. And you can only do this a few centimeters at a time on a daily basis. I'm glad I read this, because if I ever had this, I would yank that thing and pull it out from my intestine in one long piece of spaghetti. But apparently you can't do that. I imagine it would break off or something, cause an infection. You just make it mad. And you don't want to make a guinea where tough. So what you do is you wrap it around a piece of gall or a small stick, a little bit at a time, every day, every day for several weeks until it's out. That's one thing you do. Or it can be surgically removed, clearly, by a trained professional. But we're talking about the poorest of the poor in the world, and they don't have access to this. Or you can just blow your head off. Well, that's another option. Sure. The big problem with guinea worm disease, when it was a real problem, is that it's a disease of poverty, but it's also a cause of poverty. It is. Because if you have a three foot long cookbook spaghetti noodle coming out of your leg, you're pretty much temporarily disabled until that thing comes out, you can't farm no, you can't take care of your children. Right. It's very sad. So it does have an economic impact. That just it's a cycle, man. It makes everything even worse. It does. But luckily, again, we've largely eradicated it just for Ghana and Molly. Right. Asia is completely clear of it now, and they still have a problem with it. All right, Chuck. Well, then turn off your timer again, buddy. That was a good one. I thought so as well. Are we leaving this part in where you're actually manipulating the timer? Yes, we'll find out onto tapeworms. Tapeworms. This one is pretty common. The big finish, everybody knows tapeworms. There's the tapeworm diet, which actually is real. Is it really? We're not endorsing that, by the way. No, I'm just being on a calorie restricted diet. Sure. And knowledge. Even Chuck won't let me endorse that one. But still, we chose this one because it's actually really interesting. The study of tapers has revealed a change in understanding of human evolution. Big deal. Or at least the paraphytology. Yeah. We always thought humans always thought that we get tapeworms from animals. Thanks a lot, Cal and Pig, for giving us tapeworms. There's some research that's been done that actually turns the tables, Josh. And in a switcheroo, it looks like we may have started the whole thing and given it to the animals. So sorry, Pig. Not only did we domesticate you for slaughter, we also gave you the tapeworm. So tapeworms, known affectionately in the medical community as tania. There's tania sodium, which we'll talk about, that's distinct from Tania saginata and tania Asiatica. Nice job. Thank you. I worked on pronunciations, like, all day. Great Sageada and Asiatica, both actually, for their life cycle, require an herbivore in there as an intermediate host to get to their definitive host us, the carnivore. Carnivores, right. Does this mean a vegetarian or vegan wouldn't be infected? You would think so. But look out for tania Soleo, which will get anybody. Yeah, very broad range, including dogs, it said. That's very sad, right? Yeah. Once we domesticated dogs, cows, pigs again, we thought that that's when we started getting tapeworms. Right. Actually tapering to go back as far as about 2.7 million years, humans or hominids have had some sort of trouble with all of the wretching and the pooping and stuff like that, if you believe that kind of thing. Yeah, we've been around for 2.7 million years. You believe that, Hogwatch? Sorry. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalancho 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 sleeve. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com it automation. 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. Teledoc 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.com stuff to register or schedule a visit today. That's T-E-L-A-D-O-C comStuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. So, Chuck, let's talk about tapeworms. What they do, how they do it, what they look like. All right. We're talking about intestinal tapeworm infections. A lot of times they're not detected because it's pretty mild. Symptom wise, I assume that one or both of us has a tape room right now. Exactly. Can I tell you something? Yes. So I'm actually a big proponent of high colonics. Really? Yeah. I learned so much. They are mood changing. Really? And you have to get two. And also, anyone who goes out and gets a high colonic, make sure the place you go is ultra sanitize and insist on watching them sanitize the machine. So Jerry's house is colonic. Especially in our producers. Jerry's House is colonic. I mean, she's tidy, but I would accept a high colonic from her. Right, right. I got a high colonic. Two of them. The second one, it was like I was a brand new person. I literally felt reborn. Really? But the guy who was running the place was telling me about a customer. It's so perverse. They have this table set up, and it's like a doctor's exam table. And you have certain things sticking certain places, and then a tube dr. Frankenstein going out. Sure. You have a tube going out. Right. And then there's mirrors showing the whole thing. So you're seeing all the stuff. Okay. One guy had to call the owner in who was telling me the story, and he had stopped up the tube, and they went in and removed the tube, got it out. You know what it was? It was a fist size ball of worms. You're kidding. The guy had no symptoms, had no clue they were in there. And all of a sudden, a fist size ball of worms coming out. Well, it's pretty clear why the discovery show is called Monsters Inside Me. Yeah. Fists full of monsters inside of you. Yeah. So high colonics equal getting rid of worms sometimes. That's my little aside there. Yeah. I'm going to Jerry's House of Colonics right after this. You should. So, Chuck, how do we get these tapeworms that come out in fist size balls? Well, there's different ways, Josh. Usually you can get it through eating food, but there's a little disturbing asset to all this is fecal matter has to be involved. Yeah, I saw in this article that you could get it through intimate contact. But if fecal matter has to be present, what is that? I don't know. And you out there in podcasting, can make your own call there. But if, let's say you were preparing some food and you have poop on your hand, some poop or something involved. Poop involved, yeah. Then you could get it. And I know undercooked pork, I think, is one way that you can get the which one was it the solemn no. Is it? I thought so. No. Sole is the only one that doesn't require an herbivore peas. So he is often found in raw or undercooked pork, and it's therefore called the pork tapeworm. Got you. Well, that's pretty definitive. Sounds like it. Yeah. At least that's what Dr. Hoburg says. One of the things I found disturbing was this. You know how tapeworms are segmented? Yeah. First of all, they can grow up to 65ft or 20 meters long. That's disturbing. And they're heavily segmented. Each segment can contain up to 400 eggs. Larvae? Eggs. Unbelievable. Right. These eggs can actually live 25 years out in the open. So if you poop somewhere, like, in the desert at age 25 right. If you go back and visit your poop in the desert at age 50, if there were tapered eggs in there, you could conceivably eat them and start it over again. That's crazy. Isn't that gross? It is. And if you swallow these eggs, Josh, the larvae can actually penetrate your intestinal wall and lodge in an organ or form a cyst. Well, yeah, they can form brain cysts. They can attach to any organ, including your eye and brain, which can cause they said they've linked it to blindness and epilepsy and insanity and seizures. Seizures, yeah. What else is there? Paralysis. A lack of equilibrium, like vertigo, dizziness, that kind of thing. Right. It's bad stuff. It is. Stay away from dirty pigs. And don't cook. If you have poop on your hands, just get somebody else to cook. Maybe go out to eat. Yeah, that's a good call. Yeah. Is that it on tape farms? Yeah. We already covered the part about how it turns out we infected livestock. Right. Yeah. Sorry. Pigs. So that's three gross parasites. Again, I want to say I want to give a shout out to my favorite, which we didn't cover because there's actually a dearth of information out there on it. It's called the human botfly. Yeah, the bot fly. Did you read my blog post on it? I did. You watch the video? I did. Isn't that awesome? It is. So the bot fly actually doesn't sting or lay its eggs or spread its larvae directly into humans. It uses mosquitoes to do it for them. So these flies actually capture a mosquito mid flight, lay some eggs on it, and then the mosquito flies around with the eggs until they hatch into larva. Once the larvae hatch, the mosquito plunges its probosis into a human or any mammal, I believe into Me on me. So the larvae are actually transferred. They go under the skin, sit there and eat your fatty tissue for several weeks. And then finally a maggot emerges from your skin and falls off and goes into the soil, where it burrows until the pupa then that's the pupa stage, and then it emerges as an adult bot fly. That's the wrath of con. Yeah. And there is no treatment for it. Also, people who have these things, as they grow, they stay close to the surface. So it breathes through your skin, right through a hole in your skin. And if you cover it up, you can feel the maggot moving underneath your skin. People have reported Why was just not in the top three, because there's not that much information on it. But we're still talking about it anyway, buddy. True. And then the only way to get rid of it is to actually pop it out. So if you go to the blogs@howstepworks.com, I think you go through older posts, and you find one on the bot flights, probably a couple of weeks old by the time this podcast comes out. And if you're into parasites or that kind of thing, we definitely that's one thing. But while you're getting help, while you're filling out the requisite insurance forms, you should probably check out Monsters Inside Me on Animal Planet on Wednesdays at nine. And Chuck and I don't hawk this anything. Like, this is a cool show. Yeah, cool and gross. And just if you're into that kind of thing, and I know you are. And again, that website, you're abusing our listeners. Oh, they love it. That website for Monsters Inside Me has one of the great writers on staff here at House Upworks.com, robert Lamb. A bunch of work by him. Robert is one of my favorites. He rocked it out. So, yeah. So there you go. Three gross parasites plus the bot fly. And that means it's time for listener mail. So, Josh, I'm just going to call this listener mail from two dudes. Someone took you to task on Superman. Did you read those? We only get two. Well, we had a few people right in, but I'm going to read Thomas. Really? Ultimately, Chuck, it's gotten to the point where I'm not sure why I opened my mouth unless I'm definitively sure I know what I'm talking about. Because I tend to say the exact opposite of what's true. I know, but that's part of the show. People like finding little tidbits that we get wrong. It's becoming the crux of the show. No, these are little tidbits. This is not high science here. It's about Superman, for God's sake. Hi, guys. I've been listening to your great podcast for a while and I love them. I've never seen an email, but I felt I needed to correct something. In the earthquake podcast, you said Superman lied to Lex, Luther's girlfriend. I believe it. Was Ms. Tesla's. Not true. Superman did not lie. She made him a promise. She made him promise to save her mother before stopping the missile headed for California. He reluctantly agreed and she removed his Kryptonite necklace and flew to Hackensack, New Jersey to save Ms. Tess mocker's mom. After he pushed the missile to space, he turned around to see the second missile hit the San Andreas's Fault. So sorry. Superman did not lie. And he even says in his own words, lois, I never lie. That comes from Thomas from Harvard, Illinois. He's dogmatic and inflexible. He may have tactical plasma. I think he does. And this is from Anthony. Hey, Chuckers. Listen to the new podcast on Twinkies. He didn't address you? I thought that was rude. No one does. Well, because they think that you don't read the listener mirror, and in fact, you do. Yeah, I get the listener emails, too. You just don't respond and read them on the air. Right. Clear that up, Josh. Yeah, thanks. So. Hey, Chuckers and Josh. Oh, he did say that. I just missed it. Bell is a whole lot of unnecessary twinkies reminded me of a time in the early 90s when I worked at the State News, michigan State's University's independent student newspaper. We had a weekly junk food cookie day when we would all chip in a buck or two, multiplied by a staff of 50 or 60 and get heaps of sugary and salty snacks. While gorging ourselves on Twinkies, we had a debate about their shelf life. We took some gaffer tape one of your favorite things I love gaffer tape. And stuck a two pack up on the inside of a locker, intending to leave it for as long as possible. For over three years, we watched the Twinkies disintegrate into heaps of powder. But never during our experiment did we see any mold visible. We eventually threw away the package. And I have not even come from Anthony. Anthony? Yeah. What year did he say he didn't? Well, he said early 90s. So he was my age. Yeah, we were grunging it out. Old. You cried when Kurt Cobain died. No. Well, if like Chuck, you cried when Kurt Cobain died. You can send us an email about that to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. Want more? HowStuffWorks? 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. 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. 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4baec397-9cd1-486c-8210-ae9e012f45da | Short Stuff: Do people move in predictable directions? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-do-people-move-in-predictable-directio | Depending on where you are in the world, you either have an instinct to go left or right when entering a place. Learn all about this today.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Depending on where you are in the world, you either have an instinct to go left or right when entering a place. Learn all about this today.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Wed, 25 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=145, tm_isdst=0) | 12493287 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So it's short stuff. It is the short stuff. Why don't you like short stuff of you're bringing me down? Okay. I felt sure you were going Bill Murray there. I don't remember him saying you're bringing me down. Yeah, I think that was what he's saying in the Star Wars when he sang the words to Star Wars. You're bringing me down. We are not talking about that, though. We're talking about directional walking. And this is from our old colleagues@houseoffworks.com and not our old colleagues, but we used to use Cracked all the time. I used to love that site back in the Jack O'Brien days. Yeah. I guess Jack O'Brien is now our colleague and has been for a while. So we're one degree removed. Check out the Daily Zeitgeist, if you don't already. Great show. Yes. Jack and Miles in the game. That's right. What else? You've been on that show? I haven't. Twice, two times over. They're going to ask you a third time before they ask me. I would love that. I even had those guys in Movie Crush. Ouch. I know, right? Whoa. That's okay. I love them. This will get back to them somehow. Somehow. Some way. So, Chuck, we're not talking about daily zeitgeist today. We're not? No. We're talking about something entirely different, which is the direction that people tend to move in. That's right. And generally, if you walk into, like, an amusement park or a store and we'll talk about shopping kind of toward the end, in general, in the United States, people tend to go in and move to the right, to a place, and are indeed subtly, or not so subtly steered to go to the right. Yeah. But from what I understand, it's, like, amplifying our natural tendency to move to the right, at least in the United States and Great Britain, japan, we need to hear from you because we are being told that you guys tend to move to the left. Like, say, when you enter a grocery store, do you guys and this is a question to you in the UK. And in Japan, when you enter a grocery store, do you move to the left or do you move to the right? Really stop and think about it and then email and let us know. Okay. Because supposedly you guys move to the left, we move to the right. And there's some pretty interesting explanations for why. Yeah, I mean, I can say anecdotally and I think you can agree with this. If you go to London or something and you're from the United States, you're going to be bumping into people a lot because they also tend, I think, to walk down the left side of, like, a hallway as opposed to the right side. Isn't that correct? Like maniacs. Yeah. And when you look at sports fields, like, the way you run bases or race a car or a horse or raise your legs, that is done in a human right. I've just never heard it put like that. That is counterclockwise. And they found that when people walk up to a track to go running, they instinctively move to the right, which is counterclockwise and jibes with how sports are done right. But then put differently, that's when you're entering, like, a field of action from the outside. If you imagine the field of action being bounded by a circle, when you enter that field of action, you enter the circle, you move to the right, which takes you counterclockwise. But if you're already in the circle and you decide to start taking right turns, you're actually moving clockwise, which is brain busting if you think about it. Okay, I literally did not understand that until you just set it that way. That's because it was really poorly put. Yeah, I did not get it at all because I was like, doesn't matter which way you're facing to begin with, but if you continue to take rights is what the key is. Exactly. Because three wrongs don't make a right, but three rights make a left. Is that how it goes? Yeah, especially if you say it like that. They've done some studies over the years because they thought handedness might have something to do with it. And this was in the association for Psychological Science is where it was printed. It does. They did find, though, that lefties tend to prefer the left side and righties like the right. And they even studied stroke patients who lost use of their dominant hand and found that over time, they had to reverse a natural bias to favor what was their original dominant hand with which way they would go. And these studies were very important in helping later determine how to best share a Twix bar. I was wondering what was coming up there. You want to take a break real quick? Sure. Okay, we're going to come back and keep talking about the direction people tend to move. All right, Chuck, so you kind of said it. One thing that has been used to explain why people move in certain directions possibly has to do with the side of the road that you drive on. And yes. Anecdotally if you're in America and you're walking down a hallway, you're probably walking on the right side. Your right side? Yes. Not your left side, because then you would probably bump into a lot of people. That's just kind of how things are laid out. So it does make sense that we would kind of move to the right. And the reason why it would be significant if people in the UK go to the left in a store where in America they move to the right is because humans are animals. And it turns out there aren't any geographical differences in migration direction among wild animals, non human animals, they tend to just go the same way. Wherever every member of their species goes anywhere in the world, that's the direction they'll go. It's not like if one group of the species of Gophers lives in North America and they go to the left, and then the African family of Gophers move to the right when they migrate, that's not how it goes. All Gophers move, say, clockwise instead. Right. And these patterns that are generally based on aid from the wind, if you're a bird, any kind of weather pattern, like a solar pathway, maybe. The interesting thing as far as clockwise, I never really stopped to think why clockwise is clockwise and why the clock didn't go the other way. But it's based on the sun dial, and it's based on, specifically, the Northern Hemispheric sundial, because that's the way the sun will cast in the Northern Hemisphere. If it was based on a Southern Hemispheric sundial, then the clock would literally the one and the two and the three would be to the left of Noon. Yeah. And just calling it clockwise kind of begs the question. It's a human constructed direction, but it seems like the most natural thing in the world because not only is it called clockwise, it's counterclockwise, which makes it seem radical in opposition of the natural order of things to move leftward rather than rightward. Right. The only thing weirder than seeing a clock that would be laid out in reverse would be to see a baseball player hit a ball and run to third base. Yeah, that would be very, very strange to my brain. It would be. Especially if somebody was timing with a stopwatch that was running counterclockwise. I wish Japan did that because Japanese baseball is huge. That is huge. That would be so cool. As if they just ran in the opposite direction and that was kind of like their thing. Yeah, they could. I mean, intramural games between American MLB teams and Japanese teams would be a total mess. But it'd be super entertaining to watch. And then you've always got the one guy that just runs straight past the pitcher towards second. Right. Exactly. Depending on just going there and depending on whose rules you were playing, like, that person would always be out because you just have to throw the first place to throw the third base. They'd also be a double specialist. I guess one way this can come into play. Though. Is in architecture. Because architects like to have fun. And if they're designing something that they want to make you feel sort of either ill at ease or just sort of get your neurons firing in a different way. They can sort of drive you left in the United States out of the bat and put things of more interest on the left because it's pretty subtle. It's not like some radical shift. When you walk in, you're like, oh, my God, what's happening? But, you know, moving people in a different direction. Counter to what they usually move can make your brain do different things. Yeah, that's pretty neat. I love that, that's if you want to stimulate people in a weird way and make them slightly uncomfortable in grocery stores and retail stores where you want people to feel totally comfortable so they want to stay long and spend lots of money there, you want to do the opposite. You want to kind of go with the natural flow. And we've talked about this extensively in videos and other podcasts about how they lay out grocery stores to basically I hate to use the word manipulate you, but manipulate you into shelling out as much cash as possible. And a big part of that is funneling you to the right and then placing things strategically in that counterclockwise motion that they expect you to move through the store in. Yeah, I'd never think about it, even though we've talked about it a lot, but I can't think of a single grocery store I go to where the produce and stuff isn't on the right and eventually you wind your way around and on the left are like the frozen foods and ice cream and stuff like that. And the idea is that if you go in and go to the right and there's all the kind of junk food, you might just get that and leave and not spend as much money. I probably just use ergo wrong. But what they do is they wind you around to the right where you buy, like, your produce and the things that you need and then on your way, technically on your way out of that counter clockwise circle, that's when you're going to do the impulse buys and say like, oh, well, let me have those chips in that ice cream, or whatever. That whipped cream. That is Cool Whip. That ate straight out of the bucket. Right. Because it's so good. Remember the peanut butter Cool Whip combo? No. Oh, yeah, I got on that right after you told me. It's so dangerous, though. Well, I mean, we can't keep cool up in our house. It's gone in a matter of a day and a half. We just can't do it. We'll get it for Thanksgiving for like, pumpkin pie. And I always get an extra because I know that the pumpkin pie is not going to have any. That's hilarious because Emily and I are just sneaking in there like a spoonful at a time. No good, man. I'm totally and my daughter doesn't know yet. Once she's introduced to that, it's all over because the freezer is low enough. Right. And you have plenty of stools handy. Yeah. And fingers or spoons. So now the way you just described the grocery store, now they think about it. Every grocery store I've gone into, the pharmacy is the last thing to your left when you go in and there's basically no way to get directly to it. You have to go through other stuff, and then they give the opposite at my publix. Is that right? It's the first thing on the right when you walk in. I'm thinking publics, too. I guess I'm in a different design or a different dimension. Maybe there's a berenstain effect going on. Weird. Yeah. So you got anything else about the way people move? No. I mean, this last thing is kind of funny. They did a test in a store in Philadelphia where they tried to funnel people to the left by putting up, like, pallets and all these big things that block your way. And people were, like, literally crawling over palace so they could go to their right. Yeah, it is pretty funny. Philly Strong. That's right. So since Chuck said Philly Strong, everybody, of course, that means that 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." | |
02c1f862-3b0e-11eb-947e-fb84446229f4 | Night Trap: The Video Game Failure that Changed the Industry | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/night-trap-the-video-game-failure-that-changed-the | In the early 90s a video game was released that changed the industry, despite poor sales and bad game play. That game was Night Trap. This is that story.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | In the early 90s a video game was released that changed the industry, despite poor sales and bad game play. That game was Night Trap. This is that story.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 27 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=147, tm_isdst=0) | 39389839 | audio/mpeg | "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 Bryan over there. There's Jerry over there being silly. And this is stuff you should you should know. Video obscure lost video game episode. How did you hear about this? This is your request. Yeah. So NightTrap is the game that we're talking about. And I heard about this from watching the Netflix documentary series High Score. Did you Netflix and chill while you were watching that? No, I Netflix by myself and chilled because Emily wasn't watching this. That's a different thing. Yeah. This was a documentary series on Netflix, I think six parts that cover the history of video games. I can recommend it in one way and that it was a very light kind of fun watch. But it is by no means comprehensive and a little goofy at times. And how they handled some stuff on NightTrap specifically, or like the whole series, I Got You, but it was fine. If you're from a certain generation and in the mood for like five plus hours of a bit of a nostalgia kick, you could do worse things, but it's not great. Have you ever seen that documentary? I think it's King of Kong. Oh, sure. That is one of the best documentaries ever made. I haven't seen it in years. I got to see it again. It's great. I think our old buddy Josh Bearman might have written the original story that that was. Oh, I'm not surprised. It's something to do with that. But NightTrap I learned about because in episode five, they covered when video games started becoming violent. So Mortal Kombat obviously factored in heavily in that episode. And then this game called night trap. There's another game I do want to cover on a shorty, by the way, one of the first LGTBQ games ever that was really interesting and had a cool story. What the heck is it called? I can't remember now. I saw this a couple of months ago, so it's been a while. Oh, what was it? I can't remember, but it's great. And that'll make for a good shorty. Okay. But a really cool story behind it. But this is Night Trap, which figured in as the game that kind of brought about along with Mortal Kombat, but was really central informing what ended up being the ratings board for video games. I mean, that's almost like understanding. It like this one game paired with Mortal Kombat basically led directly to the creation of that. Yeah. So that's really why it's notable. The other thing that made it notable and we'll get into all this was that it was a live action, as in they shot a little movie right. That you controlled. Yeah. That you sort of control. You could conceivably theoretically, hypothetically control, because it wasn't a great game, but it lives in infamy because of every because it's a really cool story. I think in the end, it is a pretty cool story. And the whole thing starts actually with a play. I think it was written in 1981 by a playwright named John. What's his last name? Chris Anch. Okay. Or Crazank or Chris anch yeah. You don't think so? I don't know. Maybe. Well, regardless, he wrote a few episodes of Due South. What was that? It was like a show about a Canadian Mountie, I think. Oh, all right. Yeah, he wrote this. And if you've been to Sleep No More in New York, you may have the play Tamara to Think, because it is a lot like the concept of Sleep No More, as far as I know. This is the one that broke that ground. I think so. In the Ground they broke It, it's about the painter Tamara de Limpeka, who I've never heard of. She was a Polish painter who lived in Italy in the Roaring 20s when the Fascists were starting to take power, and she took no Guff from them. No Guff. Hedonistic amazing. Art Deco painter. Art Deco portraitist, basically. Interesting. So her works really interesting. I didn't know anything about her. I'd never heard of her until this, too. But I looked her up. She seemed pretty cool. But this is a play about her, where it is set on a multi floor building. There are scenes taking place at the same time in multiple rooms. And as an audience member, you can move from one room to the other, missing out on some stuff, seen some stuff interacting. I mean it's. Sleep no more. I don't know if they just totally ripped it off or if they said, hey, it's been 30 years. Who's going to remember Tamara, right? I think it was like they broke that ground. And once you break that ground, you're going to have people following your wake. There's probably been other stuff that did this, but Sleep No More, I think, just got so much attention in New York for its run. It might still be going or maybe coming back after the Pandemic. I would like to see that. I would love to see Tamara, too. But it ran in New York. But it started a Toronto art festival, I think. Oh, interesting. And then some producers set it up in La. And that's where it had its longest run, from about the mid eighty s to the ninety s they had. This just kept going and going and going. I was reading an La. Times article on it. But the reason that it factors into this is because it's basically the basis for this game night trap, where there are different things going on in different rooms, and you kind of cycle toggle between the different rooms through security cameras in these rooms to see what's going on. And while you're doing that, you're missing stuff that's happening in other rooms in this game. And if you miss too much stuff, you lose. If you catch enough stuff and you do everything right and press all the correct buttons, you win. But that's basically how it applies. It's like this almost an homage to this play in video game form, but it's full motion video, meaning it's like a film or TV show that you vaguely control or put better you interact with. Yeah. And the idea of the game, and we'll get a little bit more into the development of it in a minute. But it is basically like a party happening at this house. Young, like coed types, like sorority girls, maybe. It's very sort of titillating. And that was one of the big deals a little bit, I think, for the time. I wouldn't say I mean, you got married with children is like ten times more titillating. This is very tame, I think. Well, obviously part of the controversy comes from assaults on women in the game, understandably. But again, we'll get to that. It is even tame compared to a lot of the stuff that was out at the time. But what's going on in the game is they are these pseudo vampires called augers that are the bad people in this game. And Jim Riley, who conceived of this game when he had the idea of I think he was watching a security camera screen with all these different rooms, and it hit him like, what a great idea. And then he saw this play and he said, we can actually do something like this. What if a user and a game player could go into any of these views that they want? And if they're missing something, they're missing something. It might be important, but they're in control of the game. Right. Or the story, rather. Right. But again, I think you really pointed out something important. That was the concept in the actuality they kind of missed the mark a little bit. Yes. So with the game, it was originally designed as part of a platform called Control Vision. I think internally it was called Nemo nemo. And it was being created by a company called Axelon. And Axelon was actually a Nolan Such, an 80s video game company name, but it was a Nolan Bushnell company after Atari. He founded excellent. Among others. I think he created five companies at the same time in parallel, using this incubator that he had created. And the developers at Xfin started creating a full motion video, VHS based, we should point out. Yes. On VHS. And to get from one place to another, rather than this is the breakthrough thing, this is the thing that made this work. And they did get it to work. But using VHS tapes, you could toggle between stuff in virtually real time without the VHS player having to rewind or fast forward, which would have really just kind of put the kibosh for the whole thing. But instead, because of the interlacing that video uses, they could actually choose what field to show at what time, and basically switch between them. It looks archaic, but it's a remarkable technology at the time to be able to do that. Right. Yeah. It's still mind blowing. I'm, like, vaguely understand how this actually works, but the fact that they actually got this to work and had a proof of concept going enough that Hasbro was, like, sold, that was a big deal. Yeah. And this was 85. One of their designers was the legendary Tom Crane, who designed Pitfall, one of my favorite all time games on the Atari. That's a good one. But it was a good team. And they went, apparently, to these camera performances. They were also inspired by Dragonslayer. Do you remember that game? I do. I was never into it, but I remember watching it. It looked cool. It was an animation game where it was fully animated and used laser disk to project this animated footage. So it looked awesome, but it wasn't that great. The gameplay wasn't great. No, but it followed a story. There was a story that was happening, and then every once in a while, there's something you had to do to move the story along as part of the game. And if you didn't do it right, the dragon turned you into ash or something like that. Right? Yeah. But you're not actually controlling the player, which was the big difference in these games. For the regular games, you're creating a sequence like you're doing this and then sitting back, and then hopefully the thing you're hoping to happen happens. Now, the thing that differentiates that from Night Trap is that there was no coherent story while you were off doing something that you were supposed to be doing to win the game. The story kept going on over here. So you can't follow a storyline that way. No. Which is a big deal. It's a big differentiator between it and Dragons. Later. All right, well, let's take a little break here. That's a good set up, I think. And we'll come back and get more into Night Trap 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 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 homepage, and enter code stuff. All right, so I mentioned the augers. We need to explain a little bit about this game and what it was supposed to be and what it ended up being, because in the Netflix documentary, jim Riley basically is like, well, the first thing, they created a demo called Scene of the Crime, and it was a detective game. And hasbro liked it. Like I said. But they had a big problem because the original idea that Jim had was to have ninjas, and he's like, It'd be great. These ninjas come in, they got throwing stars, they got weapons, and they're doing all this stuff, and you can control it, and it's super cool. And hasbro is like, Wait a minute. We can't have what we call reproducible violence. So anything that kids love throwing stars, and we can't show ninja throwing throwing stars into people. No, because the kid will go and do that. You can't have a knife because the kid can go get a knife out of a drawer. It's got to be something that a kid cannot reproduce. So they said, okay, well, how about what if the ninjas turn out to be and I'm sorry, I know ninja is the plural of ninja. Sorry, everyone. Sure. What if they turn out to be vampires? Right? And Hasbro said, I kind of like where you're going with this, but kids can still bite people on the neck. I think it came the other way, though. I think that was a note from Hasbro. Was it? I'm pretty sure they were like, what if they were vampires? Okay. And Jim Riley was like, okay, I guess I can do that, biting people's necks. And then Hasbro was like, you can't do that because kids can bite necks, too. So what they found and this is a great metaphor for the night trap overall yeah. What the ninja originally, or what they turned out to be in the end, were loping vampires who used what looked like a ghostbusters proton pack, sort of yeah. With a collar of the kind that Arnold Schwarzenegger was wearing at the beginning of Running Man, like a clamp, sort of yes on the end. And that is what they use to draw the blood from the hapless teens who you were in charge of protecting as night trap. Yeah. So what Hasbro did was they noted it to death and neutered it to death because they said he even was like, all right, I can do vampires. They can run around and hurt people. And they said, no, they can't even run around. It's too scary if they're fast. Yeah. So they came up with Augers, who in the game, they are described as vampires who had been half bled and left to die. So they are not quite vampires, but they aren't human either. And that makes them lopey and lumbery instead of being able to move fast. And if you see them, they look like they're wearing garbage bags. They're lumbering around, they're drawing the blood using a Trow car is what the name of that thing was. Okay. Because it was definitely its own thing. It was its own thing. And it's funny. In the documentary, Jim Riley was like, in the end, he said this Trow car, which it didn't show it explicitly. It showed the clamp going around the neck and this little drill inside of a shaft start and then sort of moving and then blood being drawn. But it doesn't show, like, going in the neck or anything. No, but he said what they ended up with, he said to me, was something far creepier than a vampire biting someone's neck. Sure. But they were like, it's not reproducible, though, so it's fine. And also, it's weird that Hasbro is so fixated on not including reproducible violence because apparently they saw the Night Trap as a way to interested adults. Right. Because they had apparently found out during focus group testing of Scene of the Crime. I believe that the parents who were in the room or were part of the focus group were saying, like, I really kind of like this, like a TV show, but I get to control it because it looked like something that they understood. Right. And so Hasbro was like, oh, okay, this has been like a kid thing up to this point. Maybe we can finally crack into the adult market with this stuff. So it's weird that they kidified it to death if they were trying to use it to capture adults. But maybe they were like, it has to go both ways in case adults don't like it. Well, I think in the documentary they make the point that Hasbro was I think the adults were looming out there as a possibility, but they were like, adults will never play video games. So what they really wanted until they grow up and then continue to play video games. Sure. What they really were after was a teenage market which didn't fully exist at this point. Got you like an old 16 and 17 year old boys, which is why they put sorority girls in, like, a night at a slumber party was an all in an effort to sort of titillate people like me. Right. And it worked like a charm. I had never heard of it back then because you would play NightTrap and Netflix and chill by yourself. So they actually had to shoot this like a movie. They shot it in Culver City on a sound stage. And what they would do back then, there were more full motion games of the time. And you would try and cast one recognizable face among this cast. They called it the Anchor to like, all right, well, this has got so and so in it. And who did they cast for Night Trap? Dana Plato from Different Strokes. Kimberly. Yeah, kimberly, who passed away. Very tragically, man. I was reading about her life. She had a hard, sad life. Very tragic story. Yeah, it is. It's very sad. And they actually went back and ruled her death as suicide later. Did you know that? I don't know if I knew that. Yeah. She died by suicide ultimately because she overdose drugs, soma I believe, which is like a generic lower tab interesting, which I think you really have to try. I don't think that's an accidental thing, which is probably why they did that. But it was at a family reunion in Oklahoma. Wow. Which I'm like, oh, man, that's just a sad ending. And her son actually died by suicide as well, later on. I think I knew that not super long ago, right? In the 2010. Yes. Oh, man. Very sad. But yes. Dana playo was cast as that anchor. She played Kelly, who was a secret agent who had infiltrated the house. She was undercover. Yeah, she's undercover. And she would talk right to camera and say things like, you've got to get to the other room because the augers are after whoever. Mary, help her. Yeah. Go help her. Yeah. And we should say also, so the group of crimefighters that she was a part of is called Scat, the Special Control Attack Team. Scat. I don't know if we also said so. The people who own the house had invited this group of teens that included undercover Dana Plato Kelly, which I saw admittedly on Wikipedia. This is a great example of NightTrap being NightTrap. In the credits at the end, Kelly's name is spelled with a Y on the end. In the player's, the user's handguide it's an I. Yeah, that's Night Trap for you right there. But the family that invited the kids, the teenage girls out for a weekend at their house are actually themselves vampires with teeth and everything. Not augurs. They're actually they don't attack people. No, they brought them there for the August right. To source their blood, I guess. There is a pretty funny scene in it. When did you watch any of it? I watched the whole thing. I think Grumpy gamers did like a playthrough. Yeah, they have a full feature. I watch their stuff, too. I've watched a lot of Night Trap stuff. The best part is when they're explaining in the game what the augers are, and the woman says, it's a vampire who's been blah, blah, blah. And one of the Scat guys is in the background, and he goes, You've got to be driving me. I didn't see that. Oh, it was great. It was like, was this game made in 1989 or 1973? It was really confusing, like, what era it was. So you said it was shot on a sound stage in Culver city. Yeah. And it took like 30 days almost. They had to shoot a ton of stuff. Yes. Because it was like a 250 page script, which is incredibly long. Wow. Ed, who helped us out with this one, he points out that two hour movie might have 120 page script. It's about a minute per page, is the rule of thumb. This is 250 pages for a video game that was not very good. They didn't have a lot of dialogue, but there were a lot of different outcomes that happen in just one particular scene. So if you shot a scene, you had to shoot it multiple times to get what you wanted, and then you had to shoot those multiple times. Multiple times for each outcome. Yeah. And we should say that the violence in the game, like we said, is suggestive for the augurs. You don't really see anything. The only real violence is when the augers are dispatched of. But it is very much a wildly coyote Bugs Bunny sort of thing. Yeah. It's the definition of cartoonish bugs. Yeah. Like, there will be a Murphy bed will flip them out of a window, or they'll just fall through a trap door. The stairs like one of the things if they're coming down the stairs, you can trap them by collapsing the stairs like a flat when they fall into the trap. Like a smoke machine pours smoke out of it. It's impossible that they weren't going for cartoonish violence. There's no way. Of course, the producers and directors were trying to be, like, scary in any way, shape or form, but it was shot by Don Burgess, who was nominated for an Oscar less than a decade after NightTrap for Forest Gump. So they had a real team. It wasn't just they didn't say, all right, let's go out in the valley and use some like a porn crew. Sure. And just do this thing. Like they had a real crew. No. And apparently spent, depending on who you ask, at least a million dollars on this. Yeah. They said in the documentary. So they put some money into it. And it is not apparent on the screen. The sets look terrible. The doorways, I don't know if you noticed, but any doorway they didn't build the door down to the floor. They built the door down to like a 1ft tall step over. So anytime someone opens the door, they step over this, like 1ft tall, like, wooden set. That's awesome. I mean, the set is basically like they could have repurposed it for Growing Pains or family Ties or no. They probably would have said, like, this doesn't look good. Maybe small wonder. I think they used it for small wonder. How about that? There is no nudity, we should point out, but again, was never going to be kid friendly. But also when you when you will get to the court stuff, when you hear how it's described by these senators it's so over the top. It's so over the top. Yeah. Should we take a break? You don't want to take a break, do you? No, I'm excited and I'm ready to keep going. Let's take a break. All right, well, I guess we should take a break by saying that hasbro dumped the game. This is a nice cliffhanger. Okay, hasbro dumped the game. Wait, will hasbro dumped the game or not? Okay, we'll find out 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 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, chuck cliff hanger answer time. Hasbro dumped the game. Oh, my gosh. Because, a, it wasn't that great, but the big reason was because CDROM technology started up and they were like, we've got VHS technology, and we sunk a million five into this turkey. Like, let's just dump it. And that should have been the end of it. Not just NightTrap, but the whole control vision thing. The whole platform that NightTrap was just going to be a game on. Totally gone. CDROM killed it. Hasbro said, forget it. The thing is, the people who worked on designing this game said, no, hazra is being short sighted. It's too good. This game in particular, maybe control vision is that, granted, the VHS thing, we're going to just forget about that. But this game is too groundbreaking to just let die. So they actually went to hasbro and said, how much will you sell us? The footage, the code, the whole shebang for NightTrap for and the designers actually bought the game from hasbro and took it and founded their own company, digital pictures. Do you know how much they sold it for? No, I couldn't find it. I couldn't find it either. I would guess peanuts basically, right? They probably were like, I don't ever want to hear the words night or trapped together again to get it out of here. But these designers, developers, directors, writers, everybody got together, formed Digital Pictures and bought it and started developing Nighttrack, ironically, for CDROM, which is the very type of media that killed it in the first place. Yes. By Jim's telling on the documentary. I don't know if they were already going CDROM or if it was initiated by Sega, but he got a call, he said, out of the blue, from Sega, who had their gaming system at the time, Sega Genesis. And then Sega CD was an add on system featuring this new CDROM technology. And he said they got a call, they said, hey, you want to develop this for CDROM? And he probably got a good laugh out about that and the irony, and then said, sure, because NightTrap must live. Yes. This guy is dedicated to Night Trap living. If there's one thing that he wants to keep alive in the world, it is Night Trap. That's right. So they started developing it for CD Rom. It was a step up, for sure. From what I can tell. Like, the graphics worked a lot better. The problem is this is 1992 was when it was finally released as a CDROM game. Yeah. They had shot all this footage in the late 80s, but it looked like the late 70s. There was a big difference between, say, 1988 and 1992, style wise. It was for sure apparent, visually apparent, and immediately apparent to anybody, say, a video game playing age. Agreed. That was a big strike against Night Trap to begin with, but probably the biggest strike of all was that it wasn't a highly playable game, it was not a good game, and it probably would have just kind of faded away. Like, it sold, I guess, enough that it qualified as, like, not a disaster. They at least did more than break even. But it probably would have just fallen into the dustbin of history had it not been for Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Senator Herb Cole of Wisconsin, a couple of Democrats who created this crusade about violent video games. In, I think. Yeah. And so this very much mirrored if you listen to our Satanic Panic episodes and the PMRC and music labeling NPAA. Like, this was all the time when everyone was saying, hey, listen, we need to start at least labeling this stuff so parents know what their kids are doing and just watch a little bit. It was in the Netflix documentary, but there's all sorts of stuff on YouTube about these hearings where they're talking about the disgusting trash and the filth and the hyper violence, and it's like, it's really not that violent. So here's the thing. They went after Mortal Kombat. Yeah. Which was super violent. It really was. And they went after Night Trap, which was, again, cartoonish, not a drop of blood spills from a person's body. Right. But it had ladies and lingerie one. Yes. Okay. I'm not defending any kind of violence against women. Of course not. Defending objectifying women. But Night trap was unfairly. Railroaded. I think probably because it was film. It was people like the people were controlling people. That was the difference. Because there were 100 exploitation movies and horror movies by this point. Sure, 200, 300. It was 1000 times worse than this. But the fact that you were controlling, yet they never said and they make a big point about this in the documentary, like you weren't doing the violence. The whole point of the game was to stop the auger. You weren't the person doing the augering. You're preventing the violence. Yeah, I guess that's why they called them August, because it's kind of like an August. The tool was yeah, that's what I got Crowbar to bar. What was it called? Crowbar. Jim Ryan. They clearly never even played the game. Yeah. No, they were talking about the cover of the thing was Laurids. They didn't like the cover of the box. Yeah, they definitely hadn't played the game. It was just impossible from what they were saying happened in the game. And the big one was like you were saying that it let players carry out sexual violence against women. No, you do the opposite of that. Right. There's violence that is carried out by the August if you don't do it right. If you're not good at the game, if you lose. Yes, exactly. But even then, even in the most disturbing scene, which was the one with the lady and the niht looking in the mirror, the augers come in behind her and it's for sure creepy looking at first. But then they get out the crow car. I can't even remember Chokar, and she's like and it's like the worst B movie. And then they just sort of drag her over the threshold of one of those doors, I would say gently escorted through the door. Like you don't see any of the violence, even. It's all just suggested. Right, yes. But again nightcraft got lumped in with Mortal Kombat. And because of this, because it was very clear that the writing was on the wall, the media has a really great track record of saying, oh, God, if we don't come up with the rating system ourselves, congress is going to impose it on us. And so they came up with the ESRB, the Entertainment Software Rating board. That's right. It was an industry created, self imposed rating system that was brought about in large part because of nitro. Right. So Sega pulls the game. Eventually it became really popular because of these senatorial hearings. Right. Which is what always happens. Yes, exactly. Right. It was starting to fade away. It would have been lost to history. And then the senators came in and we're like, Go buy that game. Kids wanted to play it. Yeah, but Sega did eventually pull it. Digital Pictures rereleased it as their own distributor and rated it M for mature. And that should have also been the end of it, right? Yeah. I should have just kind of went away. Especially after Sega pulled it because it got pulled from KB Toys and Toys R US because of kids. But like you're saying, it was still around. And then when Sega pulled, it was like you couldn't find it anyway. Right. That should have been the end. And then in 2014, Tom Riley jim Riley jim jim Riley started a Kickstarter and said, we're going to resurrect Night Trap. All we need is $330,000. People are going to go crazy for this. It has the following. Yeah, it's going to be the greatest Kickstarter in the history of Kickstarter. And it was not the greatest Kickstarter ever. It was a really bad Kickstarter that had a lot of criticism, skepticism, and ultimately only garnered, I think, about $40,000 when they were after $330. And that was in 2014. Yeah. So that obviously was the end of NightTrap, right? That was not the end of NightTrap, the bad game that refused to die. In 2016, there was a video on YouTube that showed someone playing NightTrap on their telephone on their smartphone. And I don't know if it was Jim Riley or one of the original devs saw it and was like, what is going on? You can't play NightTrap on a smartphone because it was never developed at the technology unless that smartphone is playing a CD that I don't know about in the background. And they got in touch with the person. His name was Tyler Hogle, and he was a mobile game programmer who followed was a fan of the original, like an occult fan way. That's a deep cut at that time, super deep cut. And then basically said, I'm going to get a playable version hacked together for smartphones. And did it semi successfully. Yeah. So he basically created this just on his own. And then once the video surfaced and the original developers, Jim Riley and some of the others got in touch with them, they said, Here, man, we lost the code years ago. No one has any idea where it is. But we do have original 35 millimeter footage, which is time stamp, which is really critical because you have to wait, we'll talk about how to play in a second. The timing is everything between the video and the players controls. So with the timestamps, Tyler Hogle was able to basically create a new modern 25th Anniversary Edition that just is actually kind of as far as Night Trap goes. It's the best Night Trap that there could possibly be. Yeah. That was the 2017 25th edition, rated T for teens this time, still preposterous, which is funny. And apparently you said you lost the code. But he was like, that's really easy. Like, I've got all this footage that's time stamped. Yeah, I can code this thing in my sleep, basically. You basically did. So there is a 25th edition of NightTrap, which apparently Nintendo has a version of which is kind of funny, because at the time of those Senate hearings in 19 93, 94, nintendo famously said they would never allow NightTrap on their platform. And they did. Yeah. And Nintendo is still sort of known as the more family friendly unit. I think they even had a bloodless Mortal Kombat, if I'm not mistaken. Or maybe it was a setting. Oh, I think yes. It rings a bell. Did you see the new Mortal Kombat movie? Did you have any I have seen zero Mortal Kombat movies. The new one just came out on Hbmx. Is it good? It's pretty good. I mean, did you play the game? Do you have nostalgia for the game? Sure. Yeah. You should watch it. Okay. It's good enough. It looks good. And there's great fights and then some nice Easter eggs. And it's like the Mortal Kombat movie. That should have been because they made one previously that wasn't that great. Yes. From the 90s. Yes. But this one is pretty cool. Okay. You rip out spines and hearts. Okay, I'll go check it out. And the way they do the Blood, it looks just like the game. Is it rated T for team? No, it's rated R. Okay. Because it's amazing. But we mentioned that it wasn't that great of a game because of the gameplay. One of the biggest problems was that you've got all these stories going on in these different windows, but you can only kind of control one at a time. So when you're controlling one scene, other stuff is going on. And we mentioned that makes it impossible to follow the actual story. That's a big problem. So it suffers there. But there's also this thing where you have a red light, a green light, and a yellow light. And when these lights turn on, if it's the right color light, is when you engage the trap button. Right. And that's when the auger will flip out the window. But it has to be timed right. And apparently, while you're in these other rooms, if you want to follow the story for a couple of minutes, they will change the codes, the color codes. Right. So if you're in another room, they'll be like, the code is now green. And you don't know that because you're not watching it. So you go back and you think the code is red, and so you're losing the game. Yeah. Because you have to have the right security code activated to activate the traps, because this is the Martin family security cameras. The Martin family, the vampires are the ones who created the traps. You just hacked into it thanks to your Palsat Scat. Right. Basically freelancing for but when they change those codes, it doesn't show on screen. The character tells another character to go down to the basement and change the code screen that you may not be watching. Yeah. In a different room that you can't hear or see or anything like that. Because you're in the living room and this conversation is happening in the kitchen. That is not a thing. Where it's like, oh, that's a cool little feature. That's part of the gameplay. That is a maddening horse. Yes. Right. So that's a big problem with it as well. And then also, you don't have to play a perfect game to win. But if any of the augers get any of the characters, you lose. Right. If too many August start to accumulate, you lose. And you get yelled at by the leader of Scott. It's kind of funny. He gets really mad at you for screwing up. But to win, you're basically memorizing where to go when. And it happens, especially toward the end, really quick. So, like, you'll set off a trap in one room and you have to go remember what room you're supposed to go to to get the trap set for the next auger. And it's not really fun. It gets really intense toward the end, but not necessarily fun. Yeah, I mean, hats off to the grabster, because he actually played this thing and tried to play it, which was more than I was willing to do. But I did watch the walkthroughs. Did you see the NightTrap video? There's a lip sync video. I did not. There's actually a theme song, night Trap Look Out Behind You, or something like that, that one of the characters does the air guitar, tennis racket, lip sync dancing, while the other characters have to watch and pretend like they're not mortified with embarrassment at seeing this. It's really something. Oh, man. I kept waiting in the documentary for a big reveal that George Clooney was one of the August or something, but Dana Plato was about as A list as it got at the time, which was probably C list at the time. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Night Trap, go seek it out. Night Trap, look out behind you. That's right. If you want to know more about NightTrap, you don't even have to play. You can just go on YouTube and watch basically the movie. And even then, it's still generally incoherent. But since I said it's still generally incoherent, it's time for Listener Ma'am. I'm going to call this speed reading trauma. Hey, guys. I should start with the obligatory long time, first time, finally, reason to email, and here I am. So hello. I didn't think that a short stuff on speed reading, of all things, would trigger my first email, but here we go. Halfway through the show, I was flooded with a vivid memory of speed reading in my elementary school gifted class. Speaking of other scams, this is in the early 90s. My teacher would drag a transparency with a printed passage. I kind of remember this across an overhead projector at increasing speeds, and after each pass, we would take a comprehension test. I had no idea that this was a scam. I just thought it was a standard part of the curriculum that I wasn't very good at, and I felt terrible about it. Then again, in my Louisiana public school curriculum, we also had to get a hunting license and shoot clay pigeons as part of Louisiana history in middle school. I grew up shooting clay pigeon. Really? For school? No. Okay. I would like to try that. Just cool. Ski shooting. Yeah, that's another way to put it. Looks like fun. Just stand behind. That's the rule, right? Basically. Anyway, thanks so much for the entertainment and education. Entertainment especially. This past year, I've often had you in my ear while I work from home to feel a little less solitary. That is from Kate Ellis Jensen in Boulder, Colorado. Thanks a lot, Kate. That was a good email. Very sorry to set off the trauma, but I'm glad that it's passed. I'm presuming it passed. Yeah, I kind of remember that happening, but I certainly was not in a gifted class. It doesn't sound like a very fun procedure. It kind of sounds like Ray finds revealing himself to Philip Seymour Hoffman and Red Dragon. Boiler. Do you see? Yeah. You know what I'm talking about. Sure, we talked about that recently. Yeah, the wheelchair and fire scene. Mysterious, visceral, hilarious, but also really funny if you stop and think about it. Sure. That movie just danced on the line and sometimes it went over degrees. Well, if you want to know more about Red Dragon oh, wait, I already said that stuff. If you want to get in touch with us, like Kate did, then you can email us, like Kate did at 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 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 amazonandhalopets.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-01-19-sysk-soylent.mp3 | How Soylent Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-soylent-works | Soylent is a meal replacement drink, but not really. So what is it? Total sustenance in a glass? Some say so. Is it made from humans? No, that's just a movie. Learn all about this odd concoction in today's episode. | Soylent is a meal replacement drink, but not really. So what is it? Total sustenance in a glass? Some say so. Is it made from humans? No, that's just a movie. Learn all about this odd concoction in today's episode. | Thu, 19 Jan 2017 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=19, tm_isdst=0) | 39512258 | 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 Capital One's top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, time, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply. Capital One NA member FDIC 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. Amazonandhalopetscom welcome to Stuff You Should Know From Housetuffworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there, which means it's time for stuff you should know. He's the DJ. I'm the rapper. Who's the DJ? I don't remember that was the first or second DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince album. Everybody was totally confused as to who was who, so they actually named their album he's the DJ, I'm the Rapper, and Will Smith is pointing at himself and pointing it Jazzy Jeff. And then their newest album is called he's the Movie Star. I'm the one who asks you if you want fries with that soda. Oh, poor Jay's Jeff. That's so mean. I'll bet he's, like, a successful producer. I bet he is totally successful and probably way more successful than me. And I'm just a jerk. It's a little late now. I know. I thought it would be funny and also insulted fast food industry workers, too, everybody. It's like that one Simpsons, where somebody I think was calling home or a chicken and some giant chicken walks over and goes, he's insulting the both of us. That show just gave for decades, I think DJ Jazzy Jeff I'm looking right now, I think he's still a DJ record producer and still a DJ called, like, a DJ DJ. Yeah. I'm just mean. Sorry, Jazzy Jeff. You know who's not mean? You. I'm pretty mean. Okay. A kid named well, I don't want to call him a kid. I want to call him a kid because he's younger than me, but he's a dude now. His name is Rob Reinhardt. Yeah. Not Rob Reiner. No, Rob Reinehart. Although he had a movie called When Harry Met Silent. That's pretty good. That was good. And you know what? I'm ashamed to say I didn't even see that coming. Emily always laughs when I laugh. She really cracked yourself up, didn't you? Like, I'll just be walking down the hall laughing at myself. And that's a way to say, Chuck's drunk. Chuck's drunk. And you're not as funny as you think you are. Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, you really crack yourself up sometimes. You should say, somebody's got to. All right. Soylent. This is not a paid promotion for soilets. Let's go ahead and just get that out of the way. No, but it's going to pay off for them big time. We're going to talk a lot about a specific brand, but I think it's worthwhile because I think it's a genuine revolutionary product in a lot of ways. And it's not an endorsement. I'm just saying it's really super unique. Yeah. Not to endorse or whatever, but it's probably the single greatest thing humans have ever invented. Have you ever had it? No, I have not. Actually, I wanted to try it today, but you can't just go down to the corner store and get it. No, you can't. You have to order soylent from their website. Soylent.com? Yes. Or Amazon, of course. I didn't know you could get it on Amazon. Yeah, you can get it there now. That's good. The prices have come down, so we're working from an article, we should say from probably 2014. Yeah, I had to update one of those in tech industry years. That's like ten years ago. Yes. And this is definitely a cornerstone of the tech industry. What we're talking about is a food replacement called soylent. Yeah. Or not a food replacement. Well, yeah, originally it was intended to be a food replacement or a meal replacement. Or no, I guess it was originally intended to be a food replacement where you could just live off of this stuff. You didn't need other food. And then now it's intended to be a meal replacement where you would eat other food, but you could say, have this instead for lunch, or whatever. Yeah. Or you could eat it along with your meal. Let's just call it beige food. Semi liquid state. Yeah, pretty much entirely liquid. It's like pancake batter, is what I kept running across the consistency. I mean, doesn't everyone want to drink pancake batter? I've been known to take a sip of pancake batter. Well, thankfully, it sounds really gross. We haven't tried it, and I really wanted to, like I said, for this. But we may or may not get our colleague Jonathan Strickland here. It just depends on if we can find him. He was being tattooed by NASA the other day. Oh, that happened? Not by NASA, but sort of with NASA. For NASA? Under NASA supervision, maybe. I mean, he got a tattoo for work. Yeah, via NASA. So I haven't seen him since then. But if we can get him in here he did the silent thing for a while, and he loves to talk, so he would be good. As a matter of fact, let's just add a 30 minutes silent part here. We can insert what he'll say after we introduce him. But anyway, I did not get to taste it, but it has been likened to everything from pancake batter to Metamusal or Cream of Wheat or a tasteless milkshake. Although they do have flavors out now, which we'll get to, but the original intent of soylent, taste wise, was that it was just really just neutral and bland for the purposes of we don't want people to get sick of eating this. Yeah. And probably the best. Yeah, right, exactly. If you don't have a taste, you can't really get sick of a taste. Right, but I disagree. I'm sure you could totally get sick of this. Sure. But it also is something of a blank slate that people can add their own tastes and flavors to, like maple syrup or fruit or peanut butter or something. Yeah. Which I didn't think about. That's a great idea. Right. So they specifically wanted to create this product for a number of reasons. And like I said, that guy who I said was nice. He actually is nice. I read a New Yorker profile of him. His name is Rob Ryanhart and he went to Tech. He's in Atlanta. Boy oh, nice. Yeah. And he was in San Francisco working at a tech startup out of his house with some of his roommates, and he decided that eating was taking up way too much of his time and money. Time, money, effort. It was just something he wasn't very interested in. And he also was, I think, concerned with exactly what he was eating. I think he was just basically living off a ramen, he said, which is not the healthiest thing you can possibly eat. Sure. So he decided to take a little time and research nutrition and how it relates to human physiology. And he had this idea that if you could get rid of the unnecessary parts of food like, food is kind of a clunky inefficient vehicle for delivering nutrients. If you could get rid of the clunky part and just have the nutrients, you could live fairly healthily on just the raw materials of food that we need from food. Right. Just the nutrients. Yeah. I can save money. I can save time from going to the grocery store and cooking and cleaning, and I can get everything I really need to have a genuinely healthy diet right here in this I guess I'll call it a drink. It goes down like a drink, right? Yeah. Okay, so we'll call it a drink. But it's not to be confused with. I mean, there have been all kinds of meal replacement drinks over the years, from, like, Insurer to Slim Fast and Muscle Milk. Yeah. Protein shakes and stuff like that. This is not that. This is supposed to give you everything you need in your body for a meal. Nutritionally. The other meal replacement drinks are meant to be meal replacements. Right. Like, if you couldn't get enough nutrients from your food because you're recovering from surgery and you need an extra bit, your doctor may say, like, drink and insure every day. Whatever. Right. Or like you said, protein shakes, like Muscle Milk. If you're a weightlifter, you need to hit a protein. After you work out, you will probably drink some sort of protein shake afterward. Right. So there's very specific reasons for the meal replacements or supplements that have been invented up to soylent. What set Soil apart was that it was created intentionally to be a replacement for food. Like, this was all you needed. You never needed to eat food again. All you had to do was eat soil every day, drink soil every day. Ingeniously. And I don't think he intended to even he was just looking for something for himself. He wasn't looking to change the food industry or to start a company. I don't think none of the food company, but he very ingeniously. Started a blog in 2013 called How I Stopped Eating Food, which is super gravy on the internet, title wise. Sure. Like someone's going to see that and go, well, what in the world is this all about? And that's what happened. It went viral. It blew up. He detailed on there that he lost weight. He said his intellectual and athletic performance improved. He said he spent a lot less money on groceries, but he put athletic in scare quotes. He's like, if you know what I mean. Yeah, because he did go to tech and he was a software engineer. I meant sex, but yeah, got you. Either way, the joke worked. He said he spent a lot less money on groceries and he only spent about 5 minutes a day making this stuff. And he described it as a, quote, sweet, succulent, hearty meal and a glass, end quote. And people were all over it. He said, like, after a week, he would see ads for food and it would just be nauseated by him that he came to crave the soil. Right. Yeah. Which wasn't called soylent at that time. No, he did call it soilant. Oh, I thought he didn't call it until he got the kickstarter going. From what I saw, I actually saw that blog post, and I believe he calls it soylent in it. Okay, well, whenever he got it, he got it. Spoiler alerts, by the way. Upcoming. There was a movie in 1973 called Soylent Green, very famous kind of classic cult, classic Sci-Fi movie with Chuck Heston and the big reveal and soiled about this future world, this dystopian society where these people are fed these rations. And in the end, you realize that it's revealed that people are eating other people. Soylent Green is people. Right. And for that reason, because that was just such a famous ending. Like, if that actually spoiled the movie for you, let us know so Chuck can come hit you with a hammer. Because it was everybody knows the ending of the twist in Soil and Green. Yeah, I know. That was nice of you. See, you're not a mean person. You're nice. Okay. He was lobbied by investors, friends, family, everybody like, you got to change the name of Soil. But he would explain to him it's actually not based on the movie. He's based it on the book that was the source for the movie Soylent Green. The book was called Make Room. Make Room? And it was written by a guy named Harry Harrison, and it was basically about overpopulation. And in the book, the people are fed soylent, which is a food made of soy and lentils. And that's what he based it on, was that book not the food being made from people, which apparently the makers of the movie use some pretty deep artistic license to totally alter it at the end. Yes. So it started out nerdy, and it got nerdier because he was like, it's actually a deep cut. Right, exactly. From Make Room, make Room exclamation points he did detail in this blog post, and I'm pretty sure he did call it Soiling in it. I think it was very clever. I think it was a really kind of a funny wink to call it that. Sure. But he posted the recipe that he went by in a follow up post, and it's still up there. You can go see how to make soil yourself. And as a matter of fact, a lot of people do. There's this subculture of DIY soylent enthusiasts, people who are, like, so into it that they're creating their own blend for themselves from scratch. Self soil interest. Yes. Soylent preppers. So he started that. Kickstarter got about $3 million because people thought it was a cool idea. Submitted it to the FDA, right? Yeah. And the FDA went, whatever. But they classified it. Interestingly. Instead of a dietary supplement, they said, no, this is a food. Like, knock yourself out, nerd. Go get sued. We don't care. And then he got a copacker. Rosa labs in La. And they produce it for him still. And people started eating or drinking this stuff up. Yeah. I mean, especially other people who work 23 hours a day and didn't want to be bothered with having to eat because they didn't really care about food. Or they were like, All I'm eating is mac and cheese. What am I doing? If I'm going to care that little about food right, then I might as well eat something that's healthy that takes even less time to make. The mac and cheese and just the mentality behind soylent really tapped a nerve, and that stuff took off very quickly. They started selling, like, 30,000 units of it a month, like it's packets a month by 2014. And it debuted the first shipments sold or shipped in May of 2014. So within seven months, they were selling 30,000 units a month. Yeah. It went gold right away, like round and round. Iraq. We'll take a break here, and I'll see if I can go find Strickland, and we'll be right back. 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 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.com stuff. For JD power 2021 award information, visit JD power.com awards. Today's episode of Stuff you should Know 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's safety first. With 24/7 professional monitoring, SimpliSafes 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 Simply Safe 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. No strickland yet? Oh, yeah, he has not appeared since the new year. You know he's in Las Vegas right now, right? Oh, is he at CES? Well, that makes sense. Reading my company blog. Yeah, I did, actually. I did see that on our internal blog, right, that we all post our daily goings on and laugh at each other soylent. Again, we said that the taste isn't the big thing, but they really aim to just say, hey, it's convenient. You're going to save some money. And like you said, if you're someone who doesn't put so much care into what you're making for yourself, like, you said you could eat nothing but this, but even the owner said you could, but why do you want to? Food is great. Yeah. And they've walked that back tremendously. I think the more real capital money that's been invested yeah. The more they walk that back. So originally it was he would give interviews and just tell everybody, like, yeah, man, you can just live off of this indefinitely if you want. Now they say it's not intended to replace every meal, but it can replace any meal. Yeah, I think it's a really good I don't know if they've tapped into the doomsday prepper segment, but this seems to be the kind of thing that somebody could and should have, like in the trunk of their car or along with their canned goods. Roll of masking tape. Yeah. Literally, when I read this, I was like, I wouldn't mind having a case of this in my trunk. If you got a finger bender, it'd be a disaster. Yeah. Pickup truck that doesn't work. Well, you never know. I mean, I doubt if I'm ever going to be lost in the wilderness, but if I was, it'd be nice to have food for a week. Yeah, for food for a week. I mean, the sealed packets, unopened, apparently lasts for a year. All right, so on day 364 every year, I'd have to drink them and get some new ones. You have to drink nine months worth of food in one day? It would be a heck of a New Year's Eve. So we are officially on version 1.7. Yeah, I saw that, too. As of about two weeks from this recording ago, they issued 1.7. And as of a couple of days ago, they introduced two new flavors. Yeah. And that's soylent 2.0. Oh, is that officially 2.0? Yeah, that's like, technically a separate product. It's like pre mixed soylent drinks. They've had those in the natural flavor since the beginning, though. Oh, is that right? I thought they just started with powder and then came and added the drink. And then now they added those two flavors to the drink. I think the new flavors are new. They've had the drink for a while, and they also now have a toilet bar that's unavailable right now. And we'll talk about why in a little bit because it's quite interesting. I did not know that. Do they have the coffeet? Is that out? Yeah, that's out. So that's soylent in a bottle with caffeine. So that's your morning. Well, I guess whenever you want the caffeine jolt. Yeah, I would say morning, but you never know what your schedule is. That sounds dangerous because this is food, right. And people have a tendency to pound coffee. You don't want to pound the stuff. You'll gain weight. I guess if you're trying to gain weight, sure, do it. But this stuff is engineered to be just what you need to sustain you or maintain your weight or I guess if you wanted to gain weight, you would just drink more of it, not be pounded. Supposedly lose a little weight if you go like a soil. Only for a few weeks. But it's all anecdotal. I don't think they make any claims. No, I don't think so either. So they're on 1.7 now, and each version supposedly they're tweaking the recipe. They're listening to people, which sounds like the right thing to do. It sounds like they're really listening to people, and people are saying, oh, it's too thick. I don't like 1.6. So they'll say, all right, little Xanthum gum, take that out. They switch the primary source of fatty acids from fish oil to algae oil. But now I think the algae oil is out now, right? No. So the algae oil is in. Oh, that's in. And the reason why they switched out of fish oil, two reasons. It made it vegan when they changed from fish oil to algae oil. Smart. But they also, like, it has far less of an environmental impact. Algae farming does. Got you. But they even took it a step further. And they're not using oil from farmed algae. They're using oil from bioreactors, which take up even less space and use less energy for algae oil production than farming does. Right. So they're really, like, trying to narrow the impact environmentally that this stuff has. They took out algal flour. Yes. And the reason why is very much linked to our artificial sweetener episode. Somebody introduced Whole Algal Flower to the market as, I think, a thickener. I think it also is an emulsifier, and it just creates a pleasant mouth feel, I think. And it's also somewhat nutritious, supposedly, but it also can make people violently ill. And so all of Soylent 1.6 had to be suspended, including the bar. That's why the bar is not available any longer, because they all contain this whole algal flower. They had to basically stop selling it, and then they tinkered with it. And that's why 1.7 came out. Well, if you don't know much about soylent and you're literally screaming at your car radio right now or wherever you're listening, but what is it really? Then tell them what it's mainly derived from. It is soy protein. They replaced the brown rice and the oat flour and potato starch and rice starch with basically just soy protein and a couple of other carbohydrates. So it's mainly just a soy based meal. Soy Algel oil, something called isomaltulose, which they scent the size from beets. It's a carbohydrate, but also a bit of a sweetener. Yeah. Canola oil, I think rice starch. I think they took that out. And the reason is, as of today okay, so there is rice search in it. They definitely took the brown rice, the oat flour and the potato starch out because if you go to their website, it's so cool. At the very bottom of the bottom navigation, it will say release notes, and it'll bring up PDFs of the notes about what they changed and why for every single version of Soyland. So it'll say, we took this out because we found that this is actually better for the environment, or that this delivers the vitamin that we're trying to get better. Or for Whole Algal Flower, they said that they removed it to improve customer experience, which means not making you violently ill. Yeah, like I said, it sounds like they're continually striving to get it right. Yeah, but they're also, more than that, they're also sharing what they're doing because the whole thing was kind of based out of that open source tech ethos. And so they've kind of maintained that open source thing ever since they're just very transparent as a company. Yeah. Looking at the as of January, 3 nutritional facts and one bottle, 400 calories, 21 grams of total fat, 2 grams of saturated fat. And this is for the regular natural. Right. Do. I keep calling natural. Is that what they call it? Original? Let's just say non flavored. Yeah. Original origin. How's that? Cholesterol? No cholesterol, which they've had from the beginning. 300 milligrams of sodium, 36 grams total carbs, 3 grams of dietary fiber, 9 grams of total sugars, 9 grams of added sugars, and then 20 grams of protein and a whole host of vitamins and minerals. Yeah. And those vitamins and minerals are important, the essential nutrients, which are nutrients like vitamins and minerals that our bodies need but can't make. They apparently went to the NIH and the FDA and several other groups and said, what does the human body need to function and thrive? And that's what they put in there. They have this blend of vitamins and nutrients that they include as part of the recipe for soyant. One of the things that soylent, I guess, criticized for, I guess, but one of the concerns that people who are skeptical about it have is that it doesn't have any non essential nutrients, which are nutrients that your body can make itself, like cholesterol. It has zero cholesterol, but your body can make its own cholesterol. And that was a deliberate move on Reinhardt and his co founders parts that they decided that they didn't need nonessential nutrients, that it was something that our bodies already make. And so therefore, it was redundant, basically, to add this stuff in because this is just the basic bare minimum that you need to be healthy and thrive. But some people are saying, well, these things are also found in nature, in our food, and we take them in. And we don't really know enough about nutrition and how it affects the human body to say, you don't really need to take in from the outside any nonessential nutrients. So people are saying, we're going to have to see over the course of years what kind of effects this has on people who are just eating soil. If those people do exist 510 years from now. Yeah, especially if that's something that you kind of touted or not you, but he touted to begin with, which is, hey, man, theoretically you could just eat only this. Yeah, but I mean, he was like this 20 something dude who had a really great idea and didn't care about what the investors were saying, and he cared about people's health. He wasn't doing it to be like a huckster or a snake oil sales or anything like that. He was just not watching his PS and QS, like somebody who was from a PR department might ask him to. All right, well, let's take another break, and we're going to walk to Las Vegas. I'm going to see if Strickland's up for this. Go get that guy, and I'll be right back in about ten days. Hey, and put 20 on black for me, okay? 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 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. Teledoc is available through most major health plans and many employers. But even if you're not covered by insurance, everyone has access to use teledoc. 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 teldoc. comStuff. For JD power 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. Today's episode of Stuff You Should Know 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 safe 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 at SimpliSafe. comStuff. Go today and claim a free indoor security camera, plus 20% off with interactive monitoring. Just go to SimpliSafe. comStuff. All right, good news, bad news. I owe you $40, man. Oh, wait, no, that's good. Yeah. I thought you were paying me back with interest. No. Bad news is I couldn't find Strickland in Vegas. Actually, if we can't find Strickland, this is just hot off the presses. Our buddy Joe Randazzo, currently at midnight fame, right? He drank soylent for a little while. Yes. And asked him. I texted him for a description, and this just came in, and he said it tasted like the devil's chalk. But some reptilian part of me appreciated obtaining sustenance without having to worry about flavor or preparation. Basically, space station serial killers should like it and no one else. That's our Joe. That's our Joe. All right, so if you want to buy solar, like I said, you can get on Amazon now. I think it's only available in the USA and Canada. Still, though, unless that's changed. I did not see that. But what you can do is you can buy the pouches of powder. And mix it, or you can buy the bottles and you can get subscriptions that cut a little low. The price off depending on how much of this you want to drink. And that is up to you as a human being to decide how much of this kind of nasty stuff. And I've heard our buddy Joe Rendezvous had some of this too, and I tried to get a quote from him on what he would describe the taste, and he hasn't replied yet. But I've heard some people say, like, oh, it's really not that bad. And I've heard other people say it's disgusting and you'd really have to choke it down. So I guess there's a spectrum. I guess I saw a couple of quotes like that, but for the most part, it seemed like people were surprised by how either neutral or strangely alluring the taste was. Well, yeah, I didn't hear that. There's a great New Yorker article that profile I mentioned earlier. I think it's called the end of food. It's from 2014 when this is like at the peak of its buzz, and Lizzie Wincomb, who wrote the thing, tried soiling herself. And it's weird. I think she actually said she starts to crave the taste after a while. Interesting. But then some of her colleagues give these pivot quotes about what it actually tastes like, but they weren't actually trying it. You know what I mean? Right. She was actually trying to subsist on it for a little while. She apparently came to like it. Interesting. I'm curious about its longevity. Like, when something like this comes out, I definitely see the allure of it becoming the rage for a while. And I think one of the we'll talk about what dietitians think, but one of the allures of food is food and making it and sitting with friends and the wonderful taste that you get and the experience you get of breaking bread with one another. And this really throws all that out the window. You can't romanticize sitting down with a silent shake in your friends, even if they all have one on their plate. It's just not the same. Nor do they say it is the same. But it makes me wonder, like, once this initial fad wears off, what will it become? You know, it's bizarre. I just realized something while you were saying that. This is the opposite of what we're saying. One of the problems with artificial sweeteners is instead of exciting the Gustatory response of your reward pathway for eating food, all this does is create satiation. So you're full from it, but you're not enjoying tasting it or eating it or smelling it or looking at it or thinking about it. So it's the exact opposite where artificial sweeteners excite that Gustatory sensor but don't fill you up. This does the exact opposite. Well, then I wonder what kind of effect that can have on your body. Does it dull that and kill that gustatory response, or does it make it so that when you do eat something, it's just like, wow, I can't believe the taste of the strawberry. I don't know. I read about this guy. His name is Angus Barbieri and he's a Scotsman from 1966, I think he was in his early twenty s and he went 382 days without eating a thing. Wow. He was under the supervision of some mad scientist doctor who was giving him vitamin supplements and monitoring him, but he survived just on these vitamin supplements and coffee, tea and water wow. For more than a year. And the reason he did it was he weighed \u00a3456 and he was like, I'm tired of it, I want to get down to 180. And he did. But on the day he broke that 382 day fast, he had a boiled egg, I think a piece of buttered toast, and I think some coffee, and he said, I enjoy the egg very much. So I would guess that if you did eat soil, if you ate like a whole food, you would find it pretty rewarding. Whereas if you ate like a synthetic food, like junk food or whatever, you'd probably be like, oh my God, this is terrible. Right. But I bet that strawberry wood tastes pretty good. Well, if you ask a dietitian and we didn't do a poll, but I think this one Dr. Joy Dubost, spokesman for the Academy of Nutrition and Diet Technics. Not Dianetics. I saw her quotes from this article, but then I saw a lot of other ones and they have kind of all been in line, which is basically like, yeah, sure, this stuff is okay and you can use it to a certain degree, but there just aren't studies. Like no one's going to come out, no scientist is going to come out and say, yeah, you could live on this stuff for a year, because they just haven't done these peer reviewed studies and these long term risk and benefit analysis don't exist. So no scientist is going to come out and put their name behind it in that kind of way. Right, exactly. But it's like you said, even if they would, even if they were like, you know what, this is fine, go ahead and do it. Forget food. There's something missing. Like there's that communal experience, like you're saying, yeah, there's the relaxing act of cooking. I understand feeling like you're burdened with it sometimes when you're under the gun and you have to eat, but just getting everything ready and cooking it and then cleaning up afterwards, it can be a total pain. So I understand the sentiment behind it, but I also would never replace food entirely, ever. Yeah, well, of course not, because we're normal people. The other thing Doctor Dubo says, which I think is a very huge point, is that what they've done is I mean, there aren't a hundred different types of soil depending on what kind of person you are. They basically said, this is just your basic nutrition for your average person. It's one size fits all. And nutrition, she said, they're making nutrition a one size fits all approach, and nutrition just doesn't work that way. Yeah. So depending on your age, your lifestyle, how active you are, what kind of maladies you have in your life, and again, they're not claiming to do that. All they're claiming is to do what it is, which is, hey, we're going to make this thing. It might be good for some people to use sometimes. We'll probably keep you alive. I also remember I was talking about the nonessential nutrients that aren't in there. People are wondering what effect that might have. There's also another thing that's missing that's kind of subtle, but it might have an impact. This Japanese study found that it seems the art, not the art, but the act of chewing has some sort of benefit. So, like, it has a stress reduction. Interesting. And it also probably controls the amount of glucose entering your blood by just kind of unlocking food slowly by chewing it into smaller and smaller pieces. And you don't do that with drinks like soylent. You just get hit with it all at once. So it's a big flood of nutrients into your bloodstream. And fortunately, with that stuff, it's good stuff. But if they were saying the sugar probably has a greater impact on you than the same amount of sugar delivered through solid food, because it just hits you faster and so your levels increase quicker. I didn't think about that either. I'm going to get some. Are you going to? Yeah, I'm going to get some and just have it on hand and I mean, it beats driving to McDonald's if I don't have any food. Sure. You should hide it in the wheel well of your spare tire. Well, I do have a pickup truck, so I have no trunk. That's what I'm saying. Oh, yeah. Jeez. Where's my spare tire? I guess it's underneath. I gave away your hiding place. Now my hiding place is actually behind the rear seat. Oh, got you. That's a good one. No one will ever find anything there. And there you'll find it's pretty salacious, but you'll find bungee cords and jumper cables and John Strickland. Yes. With his toilet. Do you have anything else? No, unless we insert Strickland, which would go right here, but if not, we'll just end it. Well, let's find out right now. All right. No, we didn't. I should probably say Chuck, and we probably should have said this fairly early on, we have no financial interests in whatsoever. Oh, yeah. We even back it on Kickstarter. No, I got no interest other than wanting to taste this junk. Yeah. All right. If you want to know more about soylent, type that word into the search bar@houseofworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if Reinhardt listens to the show. Oh, well, if he does, what's up, dude? Yeah, so at the very least, we might get a case of this stuff at the office. Oh, boy. Hint, hint. Well, I'm going to call this one of what may be several breastfeeding email replies. Okay, first of all, we did a show two parter on feeding babies. First part was on breastfeeding, and we were both a little nervous, and I have to say it went great. And we've been getting great feedback, and I'm super proud of these episodes. Yeah, they're good. Based on the feedback we've been getting. Very supportive, which makes us feel good. Yeah, we were pretty tough. All right, so this is one of those. Hey, guys. Plus, she has a great name. I know you're worried about getting tons of attack emails for doing an episode of Breastfeeding, but I promise this isn't mean smiley face. I listened to the episode right after I got home from Breastfeeding class. I'm currently pregnant, due on February 20. So, man, this is going to come out probably about a month before that, and she does a big scream in anticipation. I took a class through my local hospital on breastfeeding to prepare. You had really great things to say about breastfeeding, and it pretty much lined up with what the lactation consultant running the class had to say. I'm so glad that you tackle the issue, especially because you are men, even though I know it scared you. The lactation consultant said the biggest barrier to women breastfeeding is not having a supportive partner, which I don't get that at all. Hopefully with your podcast, you reach some partners out there who will now be more informed and better able to support the new mother in their lives. I hope so, too. I was so glad that you mentioned the war over feeding currently going on as well. Formula is also a great option for feeding babies, no matter what militant moms have to say. Just feed your baby. Keep up the great podcasting. And her name is Claire. Victory. Nice. And boy, she's so close to being named Declare Victory. Oh, yeah. I hadn't thought about that. And she said, PS. I'm never offended. By the way, when you say guys, I hope others aren't either. I feel like you've really gotten to the point where guys is gender neutral. Sure. We're making that our mission in life. I hope so. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Claire. Yeah. You're a great guy. We appreciate a big time. And thanks to everybody who sent us notes of support for that one because they are very well received bias. And Claire, good luck. Yes. Best wishes to you. Yes, good luck. Hope it goes well. If you want to get in touch with us like Claire Victory did, you can tweet to us. I'm at Joshua Clark and there's also s YSK podcast where you can find both of us. You can also find us on Facebook@facebookcom STUFFYou know and Chuck is at Charlesw. Chuck Bryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyoushaneo.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 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." | |
42b82bb2-53a3-11e8-bdec-5b2d036fd989 | How Anorexia and Bulimia Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-anorexia-and-bulimia-work | Anorexia and bulimia - those twin eating disorders that seem so common and maybe even just a phase for a teenage girl – are actually the deadliest mental illnesses in America. Cultivating an eating disorder can create issues that can last a lifetime. | Anorexia and bulimia - those twin eating disorders that seem so common and maybe even just a phase for a teenage girl – are actually the deadliest mental illnesses in America. Cultivating an eating disorder can create issues that can last a lifetime. | Thu, 12 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=346, tm_isdst=0) | 57714392 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And it's just nice. Nice and pleasant, isn't it? Chuck and Jerry? I mean, it smells in here. Is that what you're referencing? Yeah. Gaming, I think. Yeah. How about this? We won't say who was in here, okay. Just before us, but it was three men from our office, and the room smells a little gamey, a little musky warm, and Jerry's headphones are hot and her chairs are hot, and she's so creeped out. Yeah, she's getting a little sweaty. Yeah. That's the last joke I'm going to tell for this episode, by the way. You know, every time we say that, we end up, like, making jokes. Oh, yeah. Let's say it. Yes. This is going to be a very serious episode, and there will be no jokes whatsoever. All right? Hopefully we can work in a funny or two that is clearly not at anyone's expense. Yeah. I mean, it's got to be organic. It's got to be good, right? It's going to be worth it, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. And about each other. Right. So we're talking today, Chuck, about anorexia and bulimia, known in the slang as Anna and mia. Did you know that? I did not know that. Yes. And they are actually very closely related eating disorders. So much so that if you went to the Big Book of Eating Disorders, the DSM Five, and you said DSM Five, tell me, what is the difference between Anna and Mia? The DSM Five would just kind of shrug me, like, I don't know, man. We're not 100% sure. There are some big differences, but they are clearly connected to some underlying degree. Yeah. They define anorexia as restrictive, as in really restrictive, severely limited intake of food and binging and purging, which is, if you don't know what the term is, that means eating and then vomiting afterward, or using laxatives to get that poop going really quickly. Sure, that is also under anorexia in the DSM Five, but that's also binging and purging, obviously characteristic of bulimia, which has its own categorization categorization. So it's a little I guess, confusing is the best way to say it. Right. So I looked into a little more, and it looks like anorexia, like you were saying, is the hallmark of it is calorie restriction. But apparently some people who suffer from anorexia every once in a while will binge and perhaps so it can't include that. Okay. Yes. But bulimia doesn't necessarily involve any sort of even, like, weight component. It doesn't include any kind of calorie restriction. It is strictly binging and purging. That's right. So you've got these two different things, but they're both related in that your relationship with food is just not healthy in any way, shape or form. And the other thing that really kind of ties the two things together is that they're based on a disturbed body image where you look in the mirror and what you see doesn't reflect reality at all. You might see yourself as maybe normal if it's on a good day, you probably more often than not see yourself as overweight, fat, gross, disgusting, any number of horrible things you could say about yourself where if someone else is looking at you, they would be like, wow, this person really needs to eat fast because they're emaciated their skin and bones. But the anorexia patient or bulimia patient does not see that at all. And so that kind of continues the cycle of either calorie restriction or binging and purging. But they're both after the same goal, essentially, right. And included. And we're going to talk a lot about the symptoms and behaviors of people that suffer from both of these. But a lot of scale work, weighing yourself a lot, sometimes multiple times during a day, obsessing over like half pounds. I saw where digital scales are really sort of a culprit and obsessing over like a 10th of a pound, an 8th of a pound, being really upset over the gaining of any weight, even if it's just a half a pound, let's say. And like you said, the language around food and body and self image is really important because this can often be one of the early indicators or just an indicator for friends and family, if you listen to how people talk, because most of the stuff is done behind closed doors. And one of the big components, one of the sad components is staying in a lot and not eating out with people and keeping all that very private. So the words are really important here. Yeah, because if you have anorexia and you're engaging in severe calorie restriction, that doesn't just stop when you go out with friends. It is a part of you. I've seen it describe the kin to a relationship, like a very intense, obsessive relationship where the patient and this disorder are super tight. It's like their life. Right. So if you're out and you're hanging out with friends and trying to appear normal, there's all sorts of stuff you have to do to make it look like you've eaten. Hiding food, offering other people food, trying to make a big deal about what you did eat, like really showing everybody, look, I ate this. Just engaging in kind of some obvious and bizarre behavior. And that's exhausting. So it's kind of like what you said that ultimately results in the person just withdrawing from social activities because it's not worth, like, keeping up appearances. Yeah. And as far as bulimia goes, intentionally vomiting after a meal, one of the hallmarks is excusing yourself very quickly after a meal. And that's if you are over the social component, you are actually eating out with friends or family. And then those laxatives, taking unhealthy doses of laxatives to induce diarrhea as quickly as possible. And some other stuff, trying to sweat off additional weight, wearing, like, a plastic suit and sitting in a sauna, like really extreme measures or just excessive exercise to try and get rid of the extra weight. Right. What you have then is somebody who is convinced that they're overweight, first of all, even when they're not, and secondly, is obsessed with the idea of getting rid of that additional weight. And they do it by engaging in unhealthy behaviors with food. And depending on how they do it, you've got anorexia or you have bulimia. And there's some symptoms, some of which we kind of just went over, but some are kind of obvious, some are red flags. Like, if somebody starts to become very thin to where you can see their bones, that's a big sign that they have anorexia. But you can have anorexia and not ever necessarily become emaciated. I think the diagnosis as far as the American Psychological Association is concerned is if a patient comes to you and they weigh 15% less than their normal weight for their height and age, you would be able to diagnose them with anorexia. Or at the very least, you should start asking them questions about whether or not they have anorexia. Yeah. And believe me, is very complex, too, because there's not one pattern. It's not always just binge and purge every day, although it can mean that sometimes if you suffer from bulimia, you won't bench. You'll just eat normal meals and then purge those. Sometimes you will restrict eating just sort of as a rule, but then occasionally you will binge and then purge, like eat a huge, enormous meal, which binge eating is a whole different eating disorder. That all of these are sort of related and have some overlap. But I think for this show, we're just going to kind of concentrate on anorexia and bulimia. Right, right. Yeah. Benjamin disorder, I think it deserves its own thing because it's so prevalent and so many people have it and don't even realize it. Yeah. Which I suspect has to do with the food supply. I think we've been inadvertently addicted to food. I told you about that book. The Dorito Effect, right? Yeah. Well, in the premise of it is that to feed this many people, we've had to basically create franken foods. Right. And to make them taste good, we've had to use these different additives and artificial flavors and colors and all this stuff. And the kind of idea behind it is that in doing this, we've accidentally created these things that are super addictive and people have become addicted to food. It's just a very common thing, whether it was intentional or unintentional, at this point, it doesn't really matter. People are just addicted to terrible food that's really bad for them. Yeah. So as far as the symptoms go, we talked about some of them, the obvious ones that you could, as a friend or family member, maybe notice as far as the exercise, not eating in public and stuff like that, the preoccupation with weight. But physically, you can lead to things like brittle hair, difficulty thinking, fainting and passing out, and that's stuff that people might notice in public, something that they may not see on the inside, is anemia, chronic fatigue, constipation, slowed pulse, and then I hadn't heard of this. The growth of fine hair on the body. That Lenu Go, that in newborn babies, is one of the most adorable little things. This little furry fuzz on a baby. Yeah. Supposedly there's some waxy substance that covers the baby in the womb and prevents them from getting chapped and chafed by the amniotic fluid. And that Lenu Go hair kind of grows in, like, this kind of downy fine fur that lets that waxy substance stick to the skin. And again, interesting, if you become malnourished, it triggers lanugo to grow, like, later on in life. That's a big sign. Another one is amenaria, which is the absence of menstruation or menstrual periods. Right. And that used to be like even I knew that as six grade boy or something back in the 80s. That was like a huge thing. If a girl didn't have her period, it meant she had anorexia. And apparently the DSM Five, the latest version, said, no, we're going to take that out because it's not the case with everybody. Like, yes, it definitely can lead to that. And if you have a minority, there's a possibility it's from anorexia. But if you have anorexia, it doesn't mean you're going to stop having your period. Yeah, absolutely. I wonder how many 14 year old girls listening to this we just lost because I said period twice, hopefully. Hang in there. This is exactly who should be listening to the show. Yes. And if we're talking about girls and women more, and we'll get to the stats, they suffer from anorexia and bulimia more than men do, but that is not to say that men don't suffer from it, and they absolutely do. I mean, I might as well go over a few of these. I have some other statistics I found, okay. At least 30 million people of all ages and gender suffer from eating disorder in the United States. And that's all eating disorders. Every 62 minutes, at least one person dies as a direct result from an eating disorder. A few of these are just so sad. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness period. So that, too 13% of women over the age of 50, 13% engage in eating disorder behaviors. I saw. Three and a half percent can have a diagnosable eating disorder. Three and a half over the age of 50 or 40. Over 40, yeah. And that midlife eating disorder thing is like a big and growing problem right now. Yeah. We talk about adolescents a lot in here, but it's not something restricted to young people. This one is super sad as well. 16% of transgender college students have reported an eating disorder. Boy, these are so sad to read out loud. 50% to 80% of the risk for either one is genetic and we'll talk about the genetics of it a little later too. And then more than half of bulimia patients have comorbid anxiety disorders. Yeah, I saw that, too. I saw something like 50% of people with anorexia have, I think, anxiety. And like 95% or something of people with bulimia have anxiety disorder. Yeah, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, substance abuse disorders. It says usually alcohol. It's one in 10 bulimia patients. So these are the worst kind of statistics to read off. But it's important to know that it's across the gender spectrum, across the age spectrum. If you think that it's just something teenage girls go through, that's just not the case. Yes, and not just teenage girls. For a long time it was a teenage white girl problem and they're starting to realize it was like you were saying, it spans ethnicities, genders, nationalities, ages. It's a much bigger problem than we used to think. And I don't know if it's become a bigger problem or if just under awareness and understanding of it has grown or something like that. But did you mentioned suicide? I don't think I did. So you were saying that this is one of the reasons we're talking about this. Anorexia and bulimia are one of the maybe the deadliest mental disorder there is, as far as statistics go, like you were saying. And one of the big reasons is because so many people with anorexia or bulimia died by suicide. Something like a 200 times greater rate than the general population. Yes. It says here one in five of anorexia deaths is by suicide. And then if it's not by suicide, there's a host of other ways that you can die from anorexia. You can simply starve to death where your heart can stop, your organs can shut down. And it's from this lack of energy that you're putting into your body. Your body's organs start to kind of slow down, to metabolize more slowly, to kind of conserve what little energy they do have. And eventually it just doesn't work any longer. Your body stops, basically. And you can die just from not eating. Not because there wasn't any food. There was plenty of food and everyone who was around you wanted you to eat. You just wouldn't do it because you felt fat. Yeah, and I don't even think it's a lot of times a matter of if I mean, if you don't get treated and you don't get help and it gets bad enough, then you will die from organ failure at some point. Yes, but we have to say we don't want to get all horribly grim because there are studies that are coming out now that are saying, actually, we've been studying these people for like 25 years. And we're finding that over the long haul, you can cure anorexia for good. It just takes a while. And it also, from what I've seen, takes a patient who wants to be cured, right? Absolutely. And then one more thing here, if we do need to talk about puberty and adolescents, because it can have really long lasting effects, if that's the time of your life where this is happening, long term effects on your development, on your growth, I think it says if you have anorexia beginning at age ten all the way through your twenty s, you can have permanent stunted growth. You can have reduced secondary sexual characteristics, like your pubic hair won't grow in your breast won't develop, and maybe a lack of menstruation from the beginning, not like the cessation of menstruation. You may never get your period. Right. And you may be infertile, as a matter of fact, as an adult. That's right. So, yeah, just because of the age that it sets on, I guess it's such an important time for the development of your body. It's like the last time, you should be like, I'm just not going to eat for a couple of days. It has some real sweeping effects, for sure. Yeah. And bulimia, too, for its part, is really rough on the teeth. Yellowing, decaying teeth, sensitive teeth, swollen sore throat, acid reflux, like all the time. And then electrolyte imbalances, being in the bathroom a lot because you're tricking your body, essentially into thinking of getting some nutrition and then getting rid of that food really quickly, and that nutrition really quickly. And that can lead to fainting, fatigue and eventually heart attacks and strokes. Serious stuff. Yeah, it is. Extraordinarily serious stuff. And a lot of people are like, well, it's just this is how my daughter, my sister, my friend, likes to look. She likes to be skinny. And this is a really persistent problem with dealing with anorexia, is that I've seen it multiple places. It's not a lifestyle, it's a mental health disorder. And it has to be treated because, again, it is, statistically speaking, the deadliest mental health disorder there is. Should we take a break? Yes, we're going to take a break and we're going to come back with a whole list of jokes. That's right, Chuck, lay the first joke on us. All right. I have no jokes, although I will say I think it's time for a great sidebar. Okay, we got one of those home I'm not going to buzz market anyone, but one of those home units that you'd speak to and it tells you the weather and stuff. Like one of those robots. Yeah, like a little robot. You put robot butler. I've been testing it out with my daughter lately. And those robots that talk to you can tell jokes. Did you know that? Yes, they did. And some of them are kind of funny and they're all kind of great for four year olds. Well, what, you got some Thanksgiving jokes around this time? And I think they try to be topical jokes. Sure. So there's like Christmas and Thanksgiving jokes going on right now, but you're not going to tell us one of the jokes now? I'm trying to remember some of them. I mean, trust me, they're not great jokes for adults, but four year olds eat it up. They're probably, like, deeply copyrighted, too, maybe. I don't know if you can copyright these kind of dumb jokes. A Thanksgiving joke? You're kidding me? It's like what our country has founded on. All right. Thanksgiving joke that's been going on at our house. There's a lot of joke telling, and they can make burp noises and toot noises. I'm trying to test the limits of how blue they can go. Remember that little handheld box we had that would make different, like, fart sounds and harding sounds? Basically, this is what this is. It's a high tech robot butler that makes fart sounds. Yeah, it's great. Is it on wheels? No, it's not on wheels. It sits on your nightstand or wherever you want it. I got you. All right, enough fun and games. Yeah. We should talk a little bit about the causes of anorexia because this is one of the more confounding. I mean, a lot of mental health disorders are confounding in this way, actually, but we don't know the cause of it. It is probably a lot of causes. Some of them may conflict with one another, but it is probably a very complex bag and mix of societal pressures, which we're going to talk about your environment and then genetics look like they do play a part. Yeah. They think that it's a get this man. This is what they call a grab bag. Catch all that there is a biopsychosocial mechanism underlying anorexia and bulimia. Yeah. That's biological, psychological and social. And they're probably right. I mean, there's probably components of all of them put together, which would explain why it's so hard to understand at this point and so hard to treat. It's very tough because it's not like you can point to one thing and say, correct this part of your life and do it. Yeah. And it'll be better. There's so many prongs. It's really tough. Yeah, absolutely. Because think about it. Like, if you have a person who has anorexia and they want to get better, but the reason that they developed anorexia in the first place is because they have a parent who's on them about their weight all the time. You have to correct the parents behavior in addition to possibly treating the patient in the hospital for malnourishment. It is a big, complex ball of stuff, but there are studies that have kind of turned up, like little bits here. They're like, oh, here's a matchbox car or something in a pile of rocks. I'm not sure what that means. What's something you want like a diamond in the rough, basically. Okay. Haven't you ever found a mess on a pile of rocks? I was really glad that I found this. I thought it was just some dumb, boring pile of rock. I have no idea where you're going there, but I'm glad we got a laugh out of this. I was being serious. Oh, sorry. Are you talking about the study, the twin study? I'm talking about all the studies. Okay. Well, they did do a twin study, and they found, as in studying human twins, not two different studies that look alike, but they found that and this sort of helps back up evidence of a genetic component. But if one twin has anorexia, then their identical twin, not fraternal, was 29% to 50% more likely to also have that same disorder. Right, but not, like you said, among fraternal twins, because you'd think like, you see identical twins and think like, what did your mother do to you to how could this be allowed to go on? But if that's not the case with fraternal twins, then that removes that environmental component. I strongly suggest that it's a genetic component. Yeah. And maybe to some degree a social component. I mean, not all the time, but I would imagine fraternal twins are generally subjected to similar social components. Yes. The only thing that would confound that is fraternal twins can also be like boy and girls. Sure. So if they tossed out the boy and girl and just had fraternal twin girls or fraternal twin boys in the study, I would say that would strongly suggest it's a genetic component. But I mean, in any home, a boy and a girl are going to be treated or a son and a daughter is going to be treated differently. It's just the way it is. True. Unless you live in a Skinner box. Oh, gosh, that should lighten the mood. Right? Unless your dad shocked you for studies at home. They did not have not found a gene they can pinpoint. They have found 43 genes that could potentially be of use when it comes to linking genetics to these disorders. But nothing is very clear cut at this point. Right. So that's about as far as they've gotten on the biological component. As far as the psychological component, like you were saying, they found there's a lot of comorbidity with other behavior disorders and personality disorders like depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder. They bear a lot of resemblance to one another. And that like with anorexia or bulimia, something called ritualized. Food behaviors develop where you cut food into small pieces first to make it seem like there's more or make it seem like you are eating more than you actually are. But what makes it ritualized is you couldn't eat food any other way. Right. Or you have to arrange food a certain way on the plate before you eat it. Or even like religiously counting and tracking calories is considered a ritualized food behavior. And it really kind of traps us into the realm of something like obsessive compulsive disorder or experience anxiety. If you're forced to eat food on a plate, that's not arranged in the way that you're used to. So the idea is that you eat one English peak at a time, you are taking a lot of bites, and therefore, hey, look, I'm eating a lot. Yeah, that's kind of more deceptive behavior. And that would probably be like a two for, I mean, self deceptive, even. Sure. But also deceptive like your parents who might be watching you. Like a hawk or something. You're like, no, that fork is moving a lot. Exactly. It's really interesting. But if you couldn't eat peas any other way but that, then that would be a ritualized food behavior. Right. This statistic, as far as meeting criteria for at least one other mental health disorder, it's 56% of anorexia patients and 95% for bulimia. Yeah, that is really high. Yeah. That's what makes it weird that the two are so overlapped because you've got anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, and again, they each have their own separate entries in the DSM. But then there's kind of a binge and purge bulimia component to anorexia. But the personality disorders or even the types of personalities that engage in each one are really, really different. Like with anorexia nervosa, the patients are usually low novelty seeking, so they're not, like, trying out new things. They have a low emotional responsiveness, decreased pleasure, and reduced social spontaneity. That's typically someone with anorexia nervosa. With bulimia and nervosa, it's like kind of the opposite. They tend to be impulsive. They look for new experiences, and they can have characteristics of a borderline personality disorder, from what I've read. So they're like two totally different types of people but engaged in the same behavior. And it's one of those things where it's like, okay, if you have two different types of people who are trying to do the same thing or trying to achieve the same end, what commonalities do they have? In exploring those commonalities, maybe we'll find the answers to what causes eating disorders like this. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, it does make a little bit of sense when you look at someone suffering from anorexia would avoid going out to eat spontaneously with friends, let's say, at all cost. Someone with bulimia might jump right in there because in their mind, they may think that they have a solve for that behavior, which is, I'll excuse myself to the bathroom right afterwards right. And I can still go out with my friends and eat a regular sized meal. I think that's a really good point. So either way, regardless of how that person is personality wise, they're going to engage in trying to maintain their weight. But depending on the type of personality, they're going to choose this route or that route. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're on to something. Doctor Chuck well, the other thing too is with these personality traits, they found correlation with things like perfectionism, irritability and like you were talking about this sometimes being impulse over, sometimes the opposite. But what they found too is if you're studying adolescence and puberty, a lot of these are normal traits of adolescence. So it's really hard to distinguish sometimes. And a lot of times these things, it's the chicken or the egg, these are caused by the eating disorder and not the other way around. Yeah. That also applies to differences in brain structure, too. Yeah. Like they found things like reduction in the gray matter and the white matter in the brain of people with one of the nervosas, or they have more cerebral spinal fluid and then other regions of the brain are smaller compared to people who don't have these disorders, but they clear up when the anorexia is successfully treated. So it really makes you wonder like did it cause it doesn't prove or disprove it either way. It's just the two are related and we're not sure which causes which. Yeah, I thought this fMRI stuff was interesting because our motto, when in doubt, go into the Wonder Machine and see what's lighting up. Be very instructive. This is the longest motto ever. Trademark you can fit on the front and back of a T shirt, but not a hat. It kind of peters out down the bottom. That's right. And then the script just like a pen. Like you fall asleep while writing. Right? Yeah. Right. So the fMRI Wonder Machine has found that it lights up those reward centers in the brain, show increased activity. If you have anorexia and you're shown photos of someone who is drastically underweight, so that's a pretty obvious sign right there. Another one is noticing fine details. When you are shown a picture of your own face, that reward response is just lighting up the reward center. So that that means that they are hyper aware of their appearance at all times. Yeah, for sure. And they noticed things that might not even be there. Right. And then finally you get to the social part of the biopsychosocial components and that's the environmental factors. And one of the big ones that has kind of emerged is the idea of sexual abuse in creating anorexia nervous or kickstarting it in people. I saw that. I think Johns Hopkins said sexual abuse has been reported in 20% to 50% of individuals with anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Right. And it doesn't necessarily have to just be sexual abuse, but there is a consistent reporting of some sort of trigger. Like the people who have bulimia and anorexia typically can point to the moment that it started or the thing that created this idea in their mind. It could be a parent being overly critical of their weight. It often times as a parent, I think. Yeah. It could be a coach who is. Overly critical of their weight. It can be a bully teasing them about their weight. It could be a friend making a joke about their weight. It just depends on the moment, you know, how something can bother you, but it doesn't seem to bother anybody else and vice versa. Something that bothers somebody else you're like, that's not that big of a deal. But it's all just based on the person and the context and the setting and maybe even just that perfect combination of neurotransmitters that happen to be active in their brain right then, and just something got them just right that has been found to kickstart anorexia and bulimia under a lot of circumstances. Yeah. And it's just for parents, it's so important how they talk about and not just to their kids, but any time your kid can hear you speaking words, how you talk about weight and how you talk about your own body and how you talk about health and having a kid now, it's made me realize how unkind I can be to my own self being overweight. And you can't say those things in front of a four year old. No, you have to talk about health and daddy's exercising because Daddy wants to be healthier and stuff like that, because you'd be surprised that these little ears, they hear it all. And the last thing that you want is for anything that you say to have an impact on your child in an unhealthy way about their body image. It's just super, super important. And I think it's gotten much, much better than the old days when I know a lot of women who talk about, you know, whether or not they suffered from anorexia or not struggling with their body image, because most of the time, mom talking about it growing up. Yeah, I'm sure dads play a part, too, but I've heard a lot of anecdotal examples of women talking about in the 70s, mom talking about, you can't eat this, you can't eat that, because you won't get a boyfriend or this won't happen, or that won't happen. Right. I've seen that a lot of places too for researching this. But one of the other things I saw is, like, what you're saying where you were talking about yourself. You have to watch what you say around your daughter when you say disparaging things about yourself. That's called fat talk. And it is like a pastime in the west, like getting together with friends or just having a conversation around the water cooler or something about how fat you are or how much you ate and how much you need to lose weight and that they found it can actually be a real driver for leading to eating disorders as well. Yeah, I make jokes all the time about that with you and everyone I know, but I don't use that word in my house. I have to stop myself from making jokes about myself. It's no good for anyone. One question I have, though, is, like, I was a pretty husky boy. You were robust. I was very like I had the Pillsbury Doughboy nickname. I was the fat kid in class, for sure, and it bothered me. It really set the tone of my childhood in a lot of ways. I had a really great childhood, and I loved it, but I also had a real bummer childhood in that sense, too. Yeah. What do you do when your kid is demonstrably overweight and needs to lose weight, or else they're going to spend the rest of their life struggling with their weight, which is not fun at all? What do you do? How do you approach the little fragile ego of a kid? We need to get some weight off here without leading them down this path to an eating disorder. That's got to be one of the trickiest things you would ever have to talk about with your kid in that situation. Yeah. And also, especially now, in a day where there is such a movement to be accepting of who you are, no matter how what size you are, it's just such a fine line to walk between good health and accepting who you are. I don't necessarily have a super poor self image, but I want to be alive in 30 years for my daughter. Right. Sure. The vanity is kind of gone at this point. I'm 48 years old, but I want to be healthy. And a healthy weight goes hand in hand with not having the stroke and the heart attack later on. Exactly. But I think a lot of people would say, like, okay, yes, there is health to be gained from eating better or from exercising or doing both, ideally. But one of the problems that we have is this ideal where it's like, well, keep going until you have washboard ABS and until you have these amazing biceps. Yeah, that's not me. Until you just want to do nothing but walk around in a speedo or something like that. And the fact that those are the models that we see on the billboards that drives even that idea of healthiness to this kind of perverted, weird place that can kind of develop eating disorders as well. Yeah. That's not me. I have no illusions about ever having a washboard stomach. I've given up on this. I don't want a washboard stomach. I want to see oh, yeah. Just to see what it's like. And then I'd be like, all right, give me a donut. I like a little softness to a body. It's nicer. I play around with I don't want I do too. Emily doesn't want to put her head down on a washboard stomach. Right. She doesn't want to bounce a nickel off of those. No. So I want to see what it would look like on me, and then that'd be fine. That's it. I don't really have, like, any it's not my ideal look or anything like that. I just want to see if I could ever do it. Yeah, I just need to get healthier and drop some weight and feel a little bit better day to day, like moving around the world, because it has an impact on that stuff, too. That's the key, is feeling better day to day, feeling good in your clothes, feeling to the point where you're not thinking about what you're eating or how much you're exercising because you're getting enough. Right. That's the key right there. That's the goal. Yeah. So let's talk about social pressure, because that's kind of we're right in the middle of it. Okay. Well, actually, let's take a break. Okay. I'm going to go do some crunches. All right. I'm going to hold your feet down. We're going to talk about social pressure right after this. So, Chuck, those were pretty good crunches. Not bad. Not bad at all. I'm going to go with a B plus. You know, I started seeing a trainer. Did you really? Yeah. Well, that's pretty cool, man. I didn't know that. About a month in, like, kind of cool and supportive or, like drill instructor type, like Bernie Army. Well, she is former army, funny enough, but she is cool and supportive, and more than anything, it's just like, I got to show up at her house three days a week and do it, and I can't not do it. And I am one person who will not do it if given any opportunity to not do it. Yeah, it's so easy to just shirk on that kind of stuff, and there's always reasons to not go or not do it or whatever. But if you have somebody there that is motivating you, that definitely helps. Yeah. Nice. Good for you, man. Thanks, dude. She's killing me. She's kicking my butt, but it's what I need right now. Yeah, I could use one of those two admittedly throwing it out there. I'll give you your number. Michelle. She's great. Thanks. So social pressures we're talking about, this is from a Western point of view here in the United States, Canada, some places in Europe, although that can vary pretty greatly on how they look at their bodies there. Right. But definitely in the United States. Our culture has demonstrably said loud and clear, thin is in. You've got to be skinny. Whether it's TV or advertising or Instagram now or YouTube, it's starting to change a little bit more because there's another whole wave that I was talking about, about accepting yourself and being happy with whatever size you are, but that still can't counter the onslaught that has happened for decades and decades in this country. No, but it is gratifying to see it changing over time. Like you see plus size models everywhere, for sure. There's not, like, some big write up in people about how this daring company, clothing company used a plus size model anymore. It's just become a normal thing. Yes, it's becoming normalized. I think that's a big component because a lot of people point to the mass media in the west as the main driver for eating disorders because they say this is the ideal weight, body mass index, body fat percentage go attain to this. Do whatever you need to do to get here, and if you don't, you're an UG face. Right. What I think is super interesting about this, because everyone knows that ads and models and instagram that's stuff, you should know chump change. Right. But what's really interesting is, I mean, we're not enlightening anyone. That's not breaking news. Oh, I got what you meant. But what's really interesting to me is to look at, all right, if it is media, what about pre television? Like, has this stuff increased? Or what about nonwestern cultures? What about if someone were to move over here from another country where anorexia isn't very prevalent? How would they change? And it appears that it does have an impact. It does, but not like a night and day kind of thing like you'd expect. Like the studies aren't just backing one another up left and right to where yes, it's the mass media. And that doesn't necessarily mean it's not the mass media. It just means that they haven't figured out how to control for all these confounding factors that also come along with something like moving to the US. As an immigrant and all the things that come along with it, in addition to being exposed to Western mass media. Or what else changed over time? Well, we got richer, food got cheaper, junk food became more abundant. Maybe that has something to do with it and not just this growing of mass media in the middle to late 20th century. So there's a lot of studies that do say, yes, there does seem to be a correlation. There's never been a smoking gun. It's like the same thing with violence in media or sex in media. The idea that the media just has no effect on us whatsoever is ridiculous to me. But I also suspect it doesn't have quite the pronounced effect on us that we like to think or just assume. Yeah, like you said, there are just so many factors, you can't control all of them. But there are a couple of interesting findings. This one study, they found a rate of eating disorders in places like Iran, Singapore, and Japan increased among women who were exposed to Western culture, either by being there for a little while or living there for a little while, even if it was just a vacation or through media. And another one found that women who are at least one generation removed from immigration into Canada thought about dieting more than women who were immigrants themselves. Yeah, and dieting behavior is a very Western thing, and it's starting to spread elsewhere. Like, there's countries like Egypt and Iran and Japan and China where they're starting to notice eating disorders. They're considered non Western cultures, but again, they're like, well, has the Western media kind of infiltrated those spaces more? Or is it people who've spent time in the west who are now coming back home and they've developed an eating disorder? What is it exactly? But there's a really big point to this that I think is easily overlooked. It is the Western media, and it is something like saying, here's this ideal body image. Get to it however you have to. A lot of people in the west engage in diets, and basically everybody in the west is exposed to that media. And yet less than 5% of people in the United States will ever develop an eating disorder in their lifetime. Right. Why isn't it more prevalent? If it's just the media or just trying to diet, what is it that makes that extra step? And that, I think, is where that biosycho component comes in to the biopsychosocial thing. I think it's just kind of like a triple whammy that gets some people just right who may be genetically predisposed, who may be psychologically predisposed, and then the right combination of social factors all converge to make somebody develop anorexia or bulimia. Yeah, if you're an athlete, this is interesting because you can have medical complications as an athlete who has to drop weight either. Some sports, you have to have a lower weight, like if you're a dancer or a jockey or a gymnast or something like that. Other times, if you're a wrestler, you have to make a certain weight or a boxer weight class. And this is not the same thing. It can be unhealthy weight loss. It's not the same thing necessarily as anorexia, but it looks like that could be a trigger for anorexia after you stop your athletic career. Yeah, it's like that part in what was that Channing Tatum Steve Carell movie set in the 80s where he was the wrestler. Oh, yeah, the Fox. Whatever. Yeah, Fox. Hawker Fox. Foxblad. Something like that. Anyway, where that part where he loses a match and he goes and just binges. And I think his brother comes up and makes him, like, throw up because he's got to keep wrestling and he needs to make that class, that weight class. So the idea that some people who engage in these sports kind of internalize that idea and that behavior and can become anorexic or bulimic, that just kind of makes utter incomplete sense. Yeah. Same with the army, too. Or not just the army, but the military. Sure. Where they have weigh ins and fitness benchmarks. If you miss those, you're in big trouble. So people will engage in this kind of eating disorder like behavior, but they don't necessarily develop an eating disorder, although some people go on to do just that. Yeah. It says there is one study that found enrolling in the military led to an increase in eating disorders. Yeah, it's interesting. And true stuff you should know fashion. We'll talk about history here at the end, because I think all the other stuff was probably more important than the history and who first named it, but we like to cover our bases. And anorexia nervosa was named by sir William Gull. He was queen Victoria's doctor, and he published a paper, and this was you're just walking right past, like, one of the most interesting facts of the podcast. You like that fact? Yes, sir. You take it, man. I was being so generous. Oh, thank you. Sir William Gold is one of the dudes who they all right. You think this is interesting? Fine. He may or may not have been jack the ripper. Yes. This guy who coined the term anorexia nervosa was one of the first to describe it in a scientific paper, is also one of the people that is liked for Jack the ripper. Yeah, you just said it again. So why did I even bother? Because you didn't enjoy it enough. You didn't relish it. Didn't. Okay. I got you. So Jack the ripper published a paper in 1873, and this is after treating young women who, by all appearances, had anorexia, what we now know is anorexia. Right. And you can tell he was Jack the ripper because the paper started dear boss. How long have you been sitting on that one, buddy? That just came up right now. Really? Yeah. Why does it say dear boss on your paper? So he had drawings in there. Eventually, he had photos in there of before and after treatments. And just like us today, he was uncertain about the nature of the disorder to begin with. Right. What we do know historically is the 1970s here in America is where it really kind of became a big thing. And thanks to a couple of things, in 1978, there was a very popular book published by Hilda Brooch, the golden cage colon the enigma of anorexia nervosa. And obviously and super sad, karen Carpenter was the face of anorexia in America, and America got to see her struggle off and on with this for years until she died. From complications from anorexia. Yeah, she died basically from organ failure, from drinking too much, I picked over the course of her life. It was a big deal in the United States. I mean, that really put it on the map in a big, big way. Yeah. So there is, like, if there's a silver lining to the death of Karen Carpenter, and there are very few of those, and if you're too young to know who Karen carpenters, do yourself a favor and go look up the carpenters right now later, and have fun listening to that. Yeah, but ippicak is in a medic, which means you drink it, and it makes you throw up. And for the 20th century, maybe even the 19th century, too, doctors recommended parents keep that stuff around their house. So if their dumb little kid ate rat poison under the sink. You give them some Epicac, they throw it up and their life would be saved. Well, they started to realize, especially after Karen Carpenter, that this IPA surveys being abused by anorexia patients and bulimia patients all over the US. And they apparently called for a ban on over the counter sales of Ipacc. And that directly came from Karen Carpenter's death, but I didn't see that it actually ever went through. Oh, really? Yeah. As recently as 2003, they were calling for a ban on non prescription Ipicax sales. And unless over the counter and non prescription are not the same thing, then no, they didn't get it pushed through. Can you buy it today? Do you know at all? Yeah, I believe at the very least you could get it from a pharmacist, but I think you might be able to still buy it in a drugstore. I'm not sure. Haven't tried. And this was 2003, but I didn't see anything about it actually being banned. Well, just really quickly, as you can see here, 2008 is an article called Epicac, the Most Dangerous Over the thecounter Drug. Right. Interesting. Yes. So they've basically tarnished. Karen Carpenters. Memory. Yeah. So treatment is tough because, like we said, there are so many prongs and we don't want to be down on it because you can overcome this. But obviously the end goal is multi pronged as well. What obviously you want just physically is to eat healthily again. But another big part of that is to feel better about yourself and to have a better self image and to overcome this mental illness. That's the underlying cause of these physical symptoms. Yeah. If you have a friend or a loved one or somebody you care about that has anorexia or bulimia, one of the things you can do is just be supportive and non judgmental in the hopes of, like you were saying, kind of help build their self esteem. Because there's definitely a crisis of self esteem is a big component of it, but what you don't want to do is make them feel bad or shameful for not eating. You don't want to focus on the food because it's really not the food. The food is almost like a convenient basically the food is the one thing that, say, a teenage girl can control in her life in some cases right. How much she eats or doesn't eat. And this becomes manifested in anorexia nervosa. So the idea that no, just eat the food. What's your problem with food? It really doesn't have much to do with the food. The food is just this kind of red herring in the whole thing. Yeah. The food is almost like the drug, except the idea is to not take the drug, if that makes any sense. It does not. I thought that was making sense as it was coming out of my mouth. I started to realize it didn't. Yeah, right up to the end. Treating it can be done on an outpatient basis. They have high calorie supplements, dietary recommendations. Obviously, if you have serious medical complications, you might have to have a hospital stay, but they have shown that just putting someone in the hospital has no improvement on the outcome of their mental health. You really have to attack it from all angles. Yeah, that's a big problem, too, is like when you have medical issues, like a low pulse and you are say, emaciated, they're going to take you to the hospital. And the doctors are not necessarily psychologists or psychiatrists, they're doctors who are going to try to treat your emaciation or treat your low pulse. And that's good, you need that kind of treatment, but it doesn't actually heal the anorexia at all. So there has to be a multipronged approach. And in particular. If you do need to be nourished like you're at death store because you haven't eaten in too long and your body has become malnourished and your organs are starting to fail. You have to go to a specialist in this. Because I think we talked about. In the Angus Barbieri short stuff. The idea of refeeding syndrome. Where if you introduce nutrients too quickly to somebody who hasn't eaten in too long. They can die basically from overdosing on nutrients. So you have to go to a specialist in repeating them. It's not just something that anybody can do. Ideally, you will catch this long before you could die from repeating the syndrome or anything like that, but it is a concern and an issue that you would want to go to a specialist physician for refeeding. Yeah, and we were talking about parents earlier, too. It's also interesting that early on, gull, and this continued for a while, felt that the parents could be a big part of the problem in this negative influence, especially if all of a sudden it is being treated. And parents like, you need to eat, you need to eat this, you need to eat that. And so they would move kids out of the home in order to treat them more successfully, because a lot of times the parents were contributing to the whole cause to begin with. Yeah, they would call that a parentectomy. Oh, really? Yeah, that's what Gold called it. That's like one theory of treatment, that the parents are the problem and you need to get the kids away from the parents. Not like get them into foster care or anything like that, but more that the kids are being oppressed in some way by the parents. And Hilda brooke. B-R-U-C-H. I'm going with Brooke in the book. Yes. The one who wrote The Golden Cage, she concluded that the reason for anorexia was that the teenagers were afraid of becoming teenagers, that they just pleased adults and their parents their whole life and they were afraid to kind of venture out on their own. And so this was some means of control? Maybe, I'm not sure. But it definitely goes in with that parent where if you take the kid out and teach them to take on this disorder on their own, it can really boost their self esteem quite a bit and potentially cure anorexia as it is that's one theory. Yeah. There's another that basically is the opposite. It says, hey, family, let's get together and help this. That's right. It's like a family therapy. It's the Modsley method. And this was based on the work of a psychiatrist named Salvador, not Modsley. Salvador Minuchin. Yes. It's not the Minuchin method, though. No one knows who Mockle is. Maybe that was his hotel pseudonym. Maybe. But this is like you said, this makes a lot of sense, too. Like getting the whole family in there. Because if you go to therapy as a family or as Metallica, it's going to bear fruit, most likely, because especially with something like anorexia and bulimia, there may be a lot of tendrils throughout your family that is potentially causing some of this to begin with. So get mom and dad in there, get brothers and sisters in there and I'll talk it out. It'll probably help everyone involved get weird Uncle Al in there. Oh, no. Whoever. Just keep him at Thanksgiving and keep them quiet. But one of the things I saw about that family method is one of the techniques that they use is called externalizing, where they basically say you have an interloper in your family known as this eating disorder. And you need to come together as a family to get this eating disorder out of your family. Like, you guys gang up as a family against the eating disorder, not against the person with the eating disorder or against one another. Gang up on the eating disorder and support the person with it to help them. Right. Which is great. And like we said, you can recover from an eating disorder. Yes. Johns Hopkins says that 50% to 75% of patients with anorexia or bulimia will eventually recover. That's a lot. 50% to 75%. That is a really great recovery rate for what is ultimately a chronic mental disorder. Yeah. Can we shout out a website here? Yeah, there is a website called Alsana.com and it is an eating disorder helpline of all stripes. So, anorexia, bulimia, I would imagine, binge eating any kind of eating disorders, you can call 888-22-8938 at any time and someone is going to be there and try and help you out. Nice. And we talk about it all the time. Just that first step. Super crucial. Yeah. Good job. Thanks. You too. Well, if you want to know more about eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia, you can go to where Truck just sent you or you can pick up the phone and call. And you can also just hold tight and wait for listener mail, which is coming right now. That's right. And, yeah, we should mention there are many helplines in many organizations, but again, everything I've seen is if you suspect that your friend or loved one or sister or son or daughter has an eating disorder, like, you need to confront it. They don't just clear up on their own, and it's not just a lifestyle choice. Yeah, that's right. The National Eating Disorder helpline is another 1809 31223 seven. Nice. We need to put that in our slogan, our motto on the T shirt. Well, how about this? I don't have a great listener mail today, so let's just encourage everyone to look out for their friends and family. And if you have someone in your family that you think may be suffering from one of these disorders, then reach out to them with compassion. And if you have one of these disorders, call one of those numbers and just take that first step towards getting some help. Yes. Very nice, Chuck. Thanks. I think that was even better than any listener mail. Of course, I've heard a lot of listener mail. Anything better than listening to mail, tops. We're just kidding. We love listening to mail. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can go on to Stuffyshito.com. And we've got all our social links hanging out around there. And you can also send us a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to Stuff podcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are 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 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." | |
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215463453460sysk-oil-shale.mp3 | How Oil Shale Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-oil-shale-works | Oil shale is a term for oil trapped in rock, rather than existing in liquid form. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the nature of oil shale. | Oil shale is a term for oil trapped in rock, rather than existing in liquid form. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the nature of oil shale. | Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:31:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=18, tm_min=31, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=176, tm_isdst=0) | 5295765 | 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. Hi, and welcome. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer. Here@housetepworks.com with me is the lovely and effervescent Charles Bryant, a fellow staff writer. How are you, Chuck? I'm great. I'm effervescent and it feels good. Good. I'm glad you're feeling good, Chuck. So, Chuck, have you heard of peak oil? I have. Josh, how can you not work in here? You're always running around the office screaming about it. Well, I feel pretty passionate about it. Tell everyone. Okay, well, let me tell you again what peak oil is. It's basically the point in time where we stop finding oil and start running out. And the inevitable decline begins because oil is, after all, a non renewable resource. Contrary to some of the heated opinions of a few of our readers who believe that it actually is renewable, I haven't figured out how, but most people believe that petroleum is finite. So we're eventually going to run out and what happens then is a mass chaos. Exactly. We're all in big, big trouble. Our global economy runs on oil, quite literally, and we need it to function. Luckily, there's all sorts of people who are working on alternative energy, whether it be biofuels, wind power, solar power, hydrogen. Who cares? We need to get off oil. Even Bush, the Texas oil man, takes America's addicted to oil. Yes, America. Exactly. So, Chuck, while we're looking for new forms of energy, in the meantime, the conventional oil reserves, which are like the stuff we pump out of the ground, I think Jack clamp it shooting at the rabbit and missing bumbling through us pulling up oil. Exactly. I will eat your ice cream. Right. It's not ice cream, actually. He'll drink your milkshake. I haven't seen it again. Overrated. Okay, but that's conventional oil, right? Yeah. All right. So there's also unconventional forms of oil, right. Which is pretty much anything but just conventionally pumped petroleum. One of them is oil shale. Yeah. Oil shell is actually kind of a cool thing. The simplest way to describe it is that it's oil and it's trapped in rock and it never had the chance, really, to become liquid petroleum. It's sort of cut short before that last step. It was stripped of its potential. It was, sadly. And so it lies underneath the Earth, just waiting for someone to go down and find a way to extract it, which is actually possible. There are people that are working on that now. One of the big problems with extracting oil shale, though, is you have to bring up this rock from the earth and the rock is the byproduct. So you're left with what was the statistic? How many tons of rock? Seven tons of rock to make one gallon of petroleum. And I'm not 100% sure that's the actual statistic, but there is a significant amount of rock left. Yeah, I was exaggerating, but it's a lot of rock and they don't know what to do with it. And that's one of the issues. I mean, the best you can do is use it under overpasses to discourage homeless people from setting up camp there, which is really about as cruel a use of rock as there is. It is. But I think you know about the Shell oil company. Different methods. They're onto something. It's called Insitu retorting. Retorting is basically the process of extracting the oil from the shale through heat. Right. They figured out that they can stick these rods down there and heat up these oil shale deposits in the ground so they don't have the rock byproduct. Right. The rocks never moved. So the kerogen, which is the oil that's found inside, is extracted and pumped out and the rock is left situated. So no mining. They don't have to mine the rock. And that's another step to the process. It cuts out like a really big expensive step. A Shell can crack this code, which it looks like they're going to be able to do. They have projects underway. It would make America the new Saudi Arabia as far as oilshell went. That's right. Because of the Green River Formation, which no one has probably heard of, that it sounds like some sort of neonazi environmental group. What it actually is is it's 17,000 sq mi of oil shale that's under the United States. Yeah, it's out west. It's near the four corner states just waiting to be tapped. Yeah, and we've known all about it for a while, but interest really began around 1973 with the oil embargo against the US by OPEC, when we realized how dependent we are in foreign oil. So with this interest in oil Shell generated and then it waned because oil prices went back down. And now with oil prices up as high as they are, interest is getting up again, right? Yeah. There's plenty more to talk about as far as oilshale goes, and you can find out more by reading What's Oilchell on Howysteps.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit How Stuff Works.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@houstonworks.com brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 Camry it's ready. Are you?" | |
How Land Diving Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-land-diving-works | On Pentacost Island the ritual that preceded bungee jumping is alive and well. Just why do these tribesmen risk life and limb? To ensure a hearty yam harvest. Great reason. | On Pentacost Island the ritual that preceded bungee jumping is alive and well. Just why do these tribesmen risk life and limb? To ensure a hearty yam harvest. Great reason. | Thu, 04 Feb 2016 17:23:27 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=17, tm_min=23, tm_sec=27, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=35, tm_isdst=0) | 36777555 | 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 stuff you should know. Hello from Housetepworks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and although we haven't been in the studio and Jerry's over there although we haven't been in the studio, chuck and I have been together on the road. Yeah. Doing stuff you should know. The podcast calling live exclamation. Leaving our Stank all over this great nation. Hoping to bring our Stank into other great nations. Yeah. We're looking at you, Great Britain. We have no idea whether you want us to come over or not. We're trying to fill you guys out. Let us know if you want us to come to a show there. Yeah. And that goes for other cities. Well, let's just recap. We had a great, fun time on the Warmer Climbs tour. Big thanks to Square Space, again for sponsoring the tour and allowing the free printing and giving out of posters. Yes. Which is always wonderful when people say, how much do these cost? And I say zero money because Uncle Squarespace pays for it. That's right. So we went to San Francisco. That was fantastic. You want to tell your San Francisco story? It's so wonderful. The little kid. Yeah, why not? So I was on Filmore Street, which is my new favorite street in San Francisco. That's great. And there's this little girl crying and pointing at a man. And I couldn't figure out what the girl's problem was until I overheard her mom say, no, honey, he's not throwing that away. That's a recycling. And he's putting that cup in. Swear to God that happened. Yeah. It could not be more San Francisco than that. I can top that. Yeah. That same street, later that day or the next day, I saw a woman crossing at about that point and she had her arm in a sling, and the sling was burberry. Wow. And the cast was probably made from recycled bandages from agents who didn't make it or ones who did. They just took them anyway. Right. Oh, very nice. Thank you. Monty Python reference. Then we went to San Diego, performed in a church. irenec yes. Which is a little weird, but cool and fun. It was the church from the Prince of Darkness. That's right. Or at least it was. After we left, I'm virtually convinced that's what it was. It might have been I have to go back and watch it again. But, I mean, it was very reminiscent of it. Dallas after that. Yeah. We played in the theater where Lee Harvey Oswald hit out. That's right. And the Dallas crowd was great in Raucous. And actually, there's a point in this show where I do a yeehaw and they yeehaw back. It was an involuntary spasm from the Dallas crowd and at least two or three people shot guns into the air. And you saw a ten gallon hat? Yes. In person? In person. Did it hold ten gallons? At least. Milk? At least. Maybe a baker's dozen of gallons. Then we went to Austin, Texas, which is a wonderful city. And by the way, we're going to be back in Austin for south by Southwest and performing at our very own we're getting like our own house. Not a stuff you should know, House. No, like the speakeasy. We're going to be there. Yeah. The city of Atlanta. Speak easy, house. I think like fifth in Congress or something like that. Yeah. So look for us again, austin, Texas, in March. Yeah. I don't know if you guys have heard of it or not. It's going to be south by southwest. Just look it up. Where do we go next? We went to New Orleans. Yes. That was a cool show. It was wonderful. And I want to shout out Ms. Kristen Bell and Mr. DAX shepherd, the lovely acting couple who we know listen to our show because they've been kind enough to tweet about us and support in the past. And I was at a bakery in New Orleans and Emily came out, she said, Kristen Bell's in there? Yeah. And I felt like I had to go say something and thank her. And she was delighted to meet me and relieved seconds after I said who I was that you weren't just some weirdo. Yeah, dude lumbering. Like this woodland beast comes lumbering up during a bakery and she was like literally shielding her children from right. Yeah. And she went just almost out you're Chuck. Thank God. And she couldn't have been nicer. And she met Ruby and insisted I changed Ruby's diaper. They're in her booth because there was no changing room. Nice. And so thanks for your support, Ms. Bell. Ms. Bell. Yeah. I can't call it Kristen, but I can call DAX DAX because he's just cool like that. And then we went to Atlanta. That was probably the most fun show I've ever done. That was a fun show. Hometown show. Sold it out, family and friends. It was just a wonderful, special night. And I stayed out till three in the morning drinking way too much. And I can attest to this because I saw Chuck the next day for the last show in Birmingham. That's right. And both of us took it easy that night because we both had to turn around and drive home after the show. Yes. 02:00 a.m. Back to Atlanta two exhausted little stuffers. I was impressed by the Birmingham crowd. They showed up and they were like, whatever impressions you may have of us, they're wrong. Entertain us. Smartly. Yeah, we did. We didn't know where the roof off that sucker. It was sort of a test of a smaller southeastern market. It was cool and they came through. Yes. It was a big problem in Birmingham. Too. And the venue was really neat, too. The workplace space is really neat. And they were very nice folks. All podcasters out there who go on tour, check out workplay in Birmingham. There were dogs running around after inside there, which is perfect for us. That's our tour. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. And if you're wondering what we did, you have to wait until we release the live show. That's right. Oh, one more quick announcement. If anyone in Atlanta wants to come see my mediocre old man band oh. Where we are playing February 26 at the Star Bar awesome. Which I'm super excited because it's just the age old great venue in Atlanta. Oh, sure. And they mistakenly let us on the bill. Nice. So come on out if you want to see us melt some faces. Is that what you guys do? We melt faces? Shredding, shredding, my friend. Nice. So that's it. You got any other announcements? No. Great. I don't have an old man band, so no. Well, you can dreams can come true. Starbar is one of mine and Yummy's places. Oh, yeah. Are we invited? No, you can't actually. You're on a list. Like do not let it I think he should have been like Atlanta minus Josh. My old man band is going to be playing. Yeah, you can come if you want. Nice. Great. Let's see what else? Chuck? Land diving. Yeah, we put it off long enough. That's right. All right, so land diving. It sounds weird, and it is a little weird, this ancient custom. We actually know the origin story, too. We know where it started. It never came across when specifically? Seems to have happened some point back in the distant past. Okay, but I'm not entirely certain if the distant past is like 2000 years ago. Right. Or 300 years ago. In which case it wouldn't be ancient. No, but this is still distant past is ancient. Is that Quantified? No, I never even thought to see surely it's not. Why don't you just continue? I might even look it up. Okay. Which we rarely do. So Chuck is going to look that up. I'll keep talking. There's an island called Vanuatu. It's in the South Pacific. Survivor did a season there. Sure. But even before Survivor, it was famous. And it was famous for this land diving thing. And back in there's actually a specific island in Vanuatu called Pentecost Island. Clearly the missionaries got their hands on that island and Pentecost Island is where the origin of land diving or something called it's called Nagal or Naghall. N-A-G-H-O-L. Yeah. Not the easiest word to pronounce. You did fine. Nag hall. Anyway, you say that a bunch of times. Man, I feel rusty. You're great. You're squeaky clean. So this land diving thing, it's not like these guys, like, climb up a couple of feet and jump onto the ground and do a somersault and then stick it with the y our hands in the air. Yes. Stick the landing. It's much more intricate than that. And primitive. And dangerous. Yes, extremely dangerous. So it bears a striking resemblance to bungie jumping. And the reason why is because the guy who invented bungee jumping, australian named AJ. Hackett, went to Pentecost Island at some point in the eighties, saw this stuff and said, I could totally do something like that, but with an elastic band. Yeah. That's the big difference between bungie and land diving. Yeah. He didn't invent it, but he popularized it. Who invented bungie jumping? I didn't get a name, but I saw that the first bungee jumping that anyone knows about was in England. Oh, yeah. Are you sure it wasn't this cat? Because he traveled the world? Bungee jumping? Yeah. 1979. The UK based Dangerous Sports Club. Okay. Left off a suspension bridge in San Francisco, though, I think. Clifton Suspension Bridge near Bristol. No, that's San Francisco. Everybody has the famous Clifton Suspension bridge. Gateway to Marin County. That's the Golden Gate Bridge, I believe. Oh, yeah. And I think they say marin. Trust me. Yeah. I don't think they didn't give a name, but it said and this is from a Time magazine article, because what's going on is at least a few years ago, people and the tribes people were trying to get some money out of A. J. Hackett and his partner. They're basically like, Wait a minute, you copied our age old. And I looked up ancient, by the way. What is it? It said it's more than 60 years belonging to the very distant past and no longer in existence. Well, then ancient wouldn't work in this case because there's still land diving in Vanuatu. It can also just mean, like, really old, like that ancient jacket you're wearing. I'm not wearing a jacket. Sweater. The ancient underwear you're wearing. This is very new from last quarter. Your underwear? Yeah. Okay, good. Do you buy your underwear quarterly? Do the taxes buy the underwear? I got to do that still. So anyway, he didn't invent it, but I might as well go ahead and finish that little story about them trying to get money. Apparently it's probably not going to happen. I couldn't see any recent it's always one of the most frustrating things when you see something from a few years ago and can't find a follow up. But from what I gathered, they're going to have a really hard time getting money out of them because there is no legal protection afforded to traditional rituals in or outside of Vanuatu, is what experts say. Like, basically you can't say this tribal ritual, like, we own it. Right. Westerners, just feel free to copy it and export it. Right, exactly. Our Western intellectual property laws don't apply to your tribal customs. All right, since we were long winded at first, why don't we take a break and then we'll get into exactly what goes on with these dives yeah, we haven't said all right, Josh, you said it wasn't a few feet off the ground. It's more like just under 100ft, where these towers are built. The towers are not made of rebar. And what do they call the scaffolding? It's made of stuff there in the jungle. Right. It's made of vines, and it's made of wood, and they build a new one each year during well, I call it yam season before the yam harvest. Yam time. I call it the bloodletting, but it cut open the earth and remove her yams from her breast. What in the world are you talking about? Yam time. I don't get it. We're talking about the same thing. We're talking differently. All right. Is what you said a real thing? No, it's very macabre. I know. Okay, where was I? Yam time. Yam time. So it's during yam season or just before yam harvest, and that's one of the reasons they take part in this ritual, is to ensure a bounce full yam harvest. I get the feeling it's yams are a pretty big deal for them if you're doing this to ensure a bountiful yam harvest. Yes, yams are very important, and it's also a good time to do it because that is when the vines are most full of SAP and less likely to be brittle and break, which is not what you want. And these are the linear vines, right? Yes. So the linear vines is extremely important. What kind of linear vines that you select? Because at any point in the linear vine that you select, if it's dry, it can snap. And since it's tied to somebody's ankle and they're jumping off at about 45 miles an hour, up to 30 meters, or almost 100ft below the air, you want to make sure that vine is not going to snap. Yeah. So if we haven't explicitly said it, they jump as if they are bungee jumping. But there's some elasticity because I watched it. But it's not like bungee cords. Right. They're not rubber bands. It's generally the idea is you want to fold your arms over your chest, make the leap, and then come as close to the ground as you can without having a hard impact. But you ideally do want to touch the ground with your shoulders, right. Barely. As you're coming up towards the ground, you want to tuck your head into your chest. So that what's hitting the ground is that like the tops of your shoulders, basically. And a really important point that just kind of gets glossed over in this article is that they till the ground below the platform. It's also a little sloppy, which helps, I think, right. So that it's cushioned, because when you watch this stuff, people hit the ground really hard. A lot, yeah, a lot. Yeah. And as a matter of fact, one guy died in 1974, and Queen Elizabeth happens to be there. He didn't die in front of her. He died later of his injuries, but one of the jumpers, while Queen Elizabeth was sitting there watching, he did die, and it turns out that a lot of people hit the ground, but this guy was the only person in recent memory that anybody alive could remember actually died. And I think it's mainly because they till that ground so much. Yeah. There was one fatality in 2006. Oh, really? But considering what they're doing, that's a pretty good track record here in modern times. That's right. Not too bad. So where did all this come from, Chuck? Well, years ago, here's the legend. And of course, this smacks of legend in every way. You never know, might have been had some truth to it early on. Sure. So many legends do. Including the Tom Cruise movie legend. Which one? Oh, that was the fantasy movie. Yes. I think I saw it. But not my favorite. No, I never saw it. Okay, don't bother. I always used to confuse her with labyrinth. Yeah, that was better. Yeah. Featuring David Bowie. The late, great David Bowie. All right, here's the legend. There was a woman named Tamalee. T-A-M-A-L-I-E. Not Tamale. She was a woman in the village. No. Tamale was the man. I thought Tamalee was a woman. No. Tamalee was her husband, I believe. All right, so it's the husband. Yeah. Maybe she was. Amelie, Emily and Tomalie, who have been the cutest guy, everyone knew they were going to get married on Pentecost island, so she apparently Tamale was abusive. Well, she had had an affair, and he found out about it, and it was in the process of abusing her. Yeah. I also read this is why it's legend, because there are many versions. I read he was forcing himself on her sexually. Oh, really? And she was like, this ain't happening anymore. Right. Tom Lee. Either way, it's abuse. He's abusing her. Yes. And so she flees, climbs up to a tall tree. He climbs up after her, intent on continuing his abusive behaviors. She, I guess, has enough time to tie these vines around her ankles and jumps. She's fast. And he says, I'm jumping after you, too. Okay, again, legend. Either out of he thinks that she just jumped to her death, and it's sad. So he's committing suicide. I don't buy that one. He's lunging at her and misses. I could buy that one more. Or he's like, I'm jumping after you because I'm Tom Lee and I'm dumb. Maybe so. One of those. But at any rate, as legend goes, I'm going to beat you up on the way down. As legend goes, she actually survived the jump, thanks to the vines on her ankles. He did not. So did she craft this ahead of time? I say there's a lot easier ways to kill your husband than this weird. Yeah. Like, maybe he'll follow me up the tree and jump after me. Well, if you're a thrillseeker, though. This is what you're going to come up with. She might have been. And then this is where it also goes off into different directions. Some people say that she continued that jump every year, and then men eventually said, no, we're doing the jumping. And then some say no, men immediately started jumping and said, Women can't jump. Right. The latter of those two legends is that men were like, well, we need to start practicing in case somebody else this ever happens to me. Because clearly this is going to be a trend that starts and you win. You're not allowed to practice. Only us. That's right. And so the husbands would get up on the platform, and they would basically make a speech about their wife's behavior and then make the jump. And the coffee she makes is terrible, so I'm going to jump. Watch this. You know, the wife is just down there like, I hate this stupid tradition. No, I don't think so. They embrace it now. Well, I mean, when the husband's sitting there griping his wife yeah. They're like, everybody, but I'm sure some piddling stuff just jump. You don't have to add that part. But what has remained true today is that women are not permitted to jump. It's only men. And aside from one white dude in the no outsider has ever been allowed to jump. No. Cat molar cow. Was it Cal? I thought it was cat molar. Yeah. Ended up, like, living with the Pentecost Islanders for at least seven months, if not longer, I think, over the course of a couple of years. But the last was seven straight months. And they speak a version of pigeon English, and he learned to speak it as well. And he gave a really heartfelt speech from the platform when they finally let them. And it was apparently, by all accounts not all accounts, by calmlyle's account, very touching experience. Well, and, you know, because he said in his article, land diving with the Pentecost Islanders, it was a very touching experience. Oh, did he really? I'm sure he did. Okay. I did read the article, actually. It's pretty good. He was for that Geo magazine. So he was the first to, or only outsider to jump because it's so dangerous, it's forbidden, but they've enshrined it in a taboo. It's like a cultural taboo for a non Vanuatuar to jump to do the knock off. Yeah. And I'm sure there have been plenty of Bungee Bros really trying to get in there, but by all accounts have been rebuffed every time they're like, does anybody jump? But anyway, calm. He was the only one to jump. He wasn't the first outsider to see this. There were a lot of early witnesses, obviously, the Pentecostals, who first came to the island as missionaries. It didn't occur to me that's why the island was called that. Sure. Like a dummy. I just glossed right over that. You're not a dummy, man. Yeah. I hate it when obvious things don't occur to me, though. It's just perspective. Like it could have been called Christian now island. What a weird name. Christian now? What's with the exclamation? But earlier than that, earlier than Cal Mueller, there was an adventurer couple named Irving and Electra Johnson, and they just traveled the world at a time when traveling the world was very difficult. Well, the they were correspondent for National Geographic for a while, and in 1953, they finally got to see it. They had a friend on Pentecost Island, probably a missionary, who was saying, like, you got to see this, man. It's crazy. Yeah. I'll see if I can arrange it. And they became some of the first outsiders to ever write about it. Well, in missionaries actually talked them in. Well, it says they banned the practice in the late 19th century, but after World War II, apparently there was a big revival in Vanuatu's independence and reclaiming their traditions. And so that's when it started coming back into favor. That's great. And also because they realize we'll get to this big amidst drunk inside. Maybe also because they could make some dough from people who wanted to travel and watch this. Right? Yeah. Because we mentioned Queen Elizabeth has seen this. It didn't go the Johnson's calmlar, queen Elizabeth. It became like a pretty big tourist attraction and still is today. And as a matter of fact, the original Nagal took place once one day out of the year. And as tourists started to come and tourist dollars started to come with them, the Pentecost Islander said, we'll do this more than once a year. How about that? Yeah, I think the one is their official special ceremony. Right. But then I think between, what, April and June, they do it weekly, like a matinee on Saturdays, even. Right. For the kiddies. The rest of them get a little blue. Yeah. So let's take a break, and then we'll describe the actual Nagal ceremony. All right. So, Chuck yes. Nagal begins with I think they kind of select a trusted elder of the tribe and say, this is your year. Hey, vagoda. You're the grand Marshall of Nagaau. Yeah. Here's your hat with the feather in the front. Do some good stuff. Here's your orange soda. And the elder said, I've been waiting for this my whole life. I'm going to do the best knock all ever. It's going to be an under the Sea theme, no. Okay. Well, everything but the last part. Right. Okay. So the elder is in charge of overseeing the construction of the platform, which is terrifying. These platforms are terrifying. Yeah. I mean, just when you look at these, climbing up to the top of that, to me, is too much. Right. Let alone jumping off. Right. I'm sure they're really good at it, though, and they seem very sturdy. Right. So over the course of a few weeks, they construct these platforms again, up to like 30 meters in height, which is about 100ft. And they'll have platforms of varying levels for people of varying levels of courage. Yeah. Like the high dives. Sure. And the platforms are basically like they select a strong, tall tree and that serves as like the spine of the platform. And then they use wood and vines to kind of create these platforms of varying height along the tree. Right. That's right. And so that's kind of phase one, the construction phase. And then finally the day of knock all comes. And the night before they jump, all the people who are going to jump sleep out at the foot of the platform. Yeah. They avoid sex. Yeah. That's a big super. They can't have sex for the night before they say, that it'll. Throw off your jump. Sure. And actually, the guy who jumped and died in front of Queen Elizabeth, he had a lucky charm on him. I thought you're about to say he had sex with Queen Elizabeth. Right. So that's another taboo. No sex with Queen Elizabeth. Yeah, he had a lucky charm on him. So now lucky charms are considered bad luck. That's right. So there's some superstitions considering the whole thing or surrounding the whole thing. But the night before, they will sleep out in front of the platform, and then when they wake up, they just immediately start drumming and cooking and it's a huge party. Like the moment they wake up. Yeah. And that same elder that supervises the construction is also the man who picks out all the vines for all the jumpers. And it says right here in the article, there's no maths involved. He basically works from experience and trial and error in selecting the appropriate length of buying. Right. So hopefully you apprentice as an elder. Sure. Yeah. And it's not just like, I've never done this before, but let's see what happens. Yeah, but like I said, only the 1974 and 2006 deaths in modern times, so they're doing it right. They are doing it right. I'm sure there are injuries, though. Yeah, tons. Broken shoulders and broken arms. Spleen bursts is a big problem. The old spleen bursts, especially if the vines too short and you slam into the platform. Yeah. That's what you would think is, no, just make it super short. Right. But because it's not a bungee, you jump out and you swing right back into that thing. Right. So there is a tremendous amount of skill and luck in selecting the vine length because you have to take into account what platform are you jumping from, how long are you or tall is another way to put it. Yeah. And again, you want to have a vine that's very supple, has a lot of staff and no dry spot in it because a vine is only as strong as it's weakest. Dry spot. That's the old saying. So the first jumper gets up there and every jumper to follow still traditionally will say a few words at the top. That could be his last words. You never know. And it ranges from let me get a few things off my chest here. Clear up a couple of issues I've had with people. Maybe any outstanding beasts. I've once stole a yam, maybe. It's really kind of up to them, timing some people mind, really. Like, some people really ham it up up there because the crowd is just wrapped by you. It is your moment. Yeah. It's a big moment. Like, you can have them eating out of your hand. Some people do. Some people sing a song. Really? Yeah, they're like, Whitey really loves this part. Right. So let me put on a good show, or they tell jokes or something like that. Yeah. And when I say wee, I mean, like, people like whitey Ford. People that pay $400 after spending thousands to travel here to witness this ancient custom. Well, not ancient custom. Yeah. I don't think clearing that up is going to help. I think you're still going to get a ton of emails for that one. If someone white writes in and takes task with me saying whitey, then come on, bring it. That's what I say. So when they make the jump, the crowd is silent initially right before the leap and then much rejoicing right afterwards, and it's all over in a second. Especially if the person is okay. There's a lot of rejoicing right after, but I guess everybody rushes over and unties the lines and are like, yeah, okay. Right. Suck it up. Here's a salt tablet. So we did mention the tourism, and I think I just dropped the $350 reference. Right. That's the low end. And that's just for the actual let me pay to witness this costs a lot more to get there. Yeah. If you can find a $350 package to get you from your house in the United States to Vanuatu, you take that package. No, because you have to fly in by seaplane. They don't have an airport. Right. That I know of. I wonder where you would fly into to get to Vanuatu. Surely there's an international airport in Vanuatu, South Pacific. Right? Yeah. Who knows? I'm sure they did the Survivor show there, so I'm sure there's they constructed an airport, but then they're also, like, nothing but sour grapes because they tore it down right after. They're like, well, we don't need this anymore. Did you ever watch that show? I saw, like, the first season? I think I did, too. I think it's still going miraculously. Is it really? Maybe not, but I know it went on far longer than I believed it did. I would guess what? Maybe in the 17 seasons, 20 seasons or something like that. Crazy. So we also should mention the Garb women on the island are in their traditional grass skirts and not much of anything else. Right. And the men where this. Is during Nagal. Typically, they dress, like, in Western clothing. Oh, really? Yeah, it's during Noggle, it's like yet another nod to, like, this is our tradition, this is our customs. So there were, like, 1990s bulls, NBA champion t shirt. Right. Always picture stuff like that. Yeah. There is, I think, a Planet Money series or something like that, about how our clothes end up elsewhere in other parts of the world. Yeah. Every Saturday, the women are like, See you next week, bra. Right. And top and everything. Sure. And the men say, See you, clothing, and let me just get out my penis sheath, which I keep in the pocket of my Levi's. And that's all they're wearing. They do wear some of them wear, like, boar tusks around their neck and things like that. And they're anointed with oil, coconut oil. But aside from that, they're not wearing many clothes. It's pretty neat, man. The whole thing. It is. And I think we didn't mention it's a two fold purpose these days. Not only are they insuring the yam harvest, but young boys, after they are circumcised at seven or eight years old, can participate as a way of showing their transcendence into manhood. Right. And they'll typically jump from a lower platform and work their way up the kitty pool. But their mom's watch, and apparently they hold some sort of item from their childhood, like their binky or something like that. Then after their son lands, they throw it away because he's not a boy anymore, he's a man. Kind of a neat ritual. It is very neat. Except for the eight year old getting circumcised part. Yeah. And also it said that sometimes these boys are just trying to impress a girl. Like, look at me jumping from the 15 foot platform, which is adorable. It is pretty cute. And one other thing I want to say, Chuck, I thought was pretty neat. There have been plenty of documentary companies that have been allowed on the island to film. Oh, yeah. It's become, like a big thing. But the government of Annuities said, you know what? This is getting too commercialized. Sure. So you guys can keep coming and see it tourists, but we're not going to let you shop on the way out. Right. Well, we're not going to let you guys film this anymore because we don't want to over exploit it. Yeah, I think was that 2006, the moratorium on filming? I thought that was very neat. Yes. You get caught up in this modern world as dumb Americans, and it's just amazing to think that there are still places in the world where it's unspoiled. Sure. To a certain degree. Yeah. Although they do this in Iowa, too. Did you like that? That's great. If you want to know more about land diving, you can type those words it's two words into the search barhouseofworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this timber episode one of my favorites of recent memory somehow. Are you out of your mind? I thought it was great. You didn't like it? No. You say that after every episode. No, this one in particular. I was like, what do you think it was? A trickle of blood came out of my ear. It was so boring. Well, we heard from the timber industry. They loved it. Oh, really? Yeah. The paper industry or the timber industry? Timber guy. Okay. Lumberjacks. I'm guessing the paper industry didn't like that one. Maybe not. Hey, guys. I'm a doctoral student in environmental economics in Oregon, and I'm close to the topic of forest, both personally and academically. Perhaps this is just a topic for another podcast, but one oversight and the timber discussion was that of non timber forest products. NTFPs, like mushrooms, berries and roots like ginseng. They're not a product. I wouldn't have thought of any of those things as a timber product. Yeah, that's neat. No, it's non timber. Oh, nontimber forest products. Yes. Well, yeah. Woodchuck stands. These are a major source of income and substance subsistence in many lower income countries and communities. A valuable driver tourism, and are often culturally important as well. Also, wild mushroom and berry harvest here in Pacific Northwest can have high yields and in some instances may have a higher economic value than that of the harvested timber on any given plot. Sure. Find some truffles. That's where we can go. Sure. These NTFP stocks, however, usually depend on the tree. The tree stand remaining in place, or at least not being completely depleted. Some species even depend on forest fires or rotting trees. Researchers just haven't spent a lot of time on the economics surrounding this topic yet. I guess because they're all just like timber, timber, timber. That's all the forest is. Exactly. This guy's got some he can see the forest from the trees. Exactly. Or the vice versa. Also, just to chime in on developed versus non industrialized semantics, I prefer to use the term low or lower income country. I feel like a lot of the terms like underdeveloped and developing in particular involve a lot of value judgments about the people and discussions on the topic of development of development. People also regularly get confused about what is meant by developer developing. It has developed a measure of capital accumulation, median income, poverty levels, happiness. I'm sure there are plenty of people development economics who would disagree with me in my terminology, but that's what I like to use. But Dude raises a really good point. Yeah. It's virtually impossible, though, to compare the economies of two different countries and not be like, oh, this one's better, that one's better. And it's almost all through this Western lens. They got more money, they have more access to handy technology. I know. And there's a lot of stuff that's not taken into account where no, that's not necessarily true. I like this guy's outlook. Well, I mean, at least it's good that we've gone from savages to third world to developing. I mean, who knows what the next phrase will be. Well, you know, third world was originally used to describe a country that wasn't aligned with the US. Or the USSR. Right. It was a neutral country during the cold war. Yeah. It didn't have an economic association. Right. Or military association. Right. So pretty interesting. Great email, Michael. For real, Michael. Thank you. I think I'm going to teach momo to root out truffles. You got a billion dollar dog on your hand, then. Yeah, that'd be wonderful. Billion and truffles are wonderful to eat. Sure. I'm going to teach her to root out both kinds of truffles, lint and the mushrooms. What are lent? Truffles. Oh, the chocolate. Yes, that would be wonderful. Be careful, though. She shouldn't eat chocolate. No. Well, that's part of the thing. Like if you teach a pig to root out truffles, one of the first things you have to teach them is not to eat the truffles themselves. I'm sure. Or you need to put a pig in a headlock really quick. Okay. So if you want to get in touch with us, like Michael did, you can tweet to us at fysk podcast. You can join us on facebook. Comwichenko, send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseofworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyouhe.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com." | ||
42624210-53a3-11e8-bdec-53ddd0819317 | What were the Freedom Schools? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-were-the-freedom-schools | Freedom Schools were set up in Mississippi in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, with the aim of giving young black school children agency and a future. They remain one of the more inspiring and progressive programs in American History, yet so few know about them. We're hoping to change that. | Freedom Schools were set up in Mississippi in the heart of the Civil Rights Movement, with the aim of giving young black school children agency and a future. They remain one of the more inspiring and progressive programs in American History, yet so few know about them. We're hoping to change that. | Thu, 03 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=276, tm_isdst=0) | 44041277 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun 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. 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 supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. 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. And I don't know if I say it or not, but I'm Josh Clark, and this is stuff you should know. And I'm pretty excited about this one. Freedom freedom Schools. Yeah. We would be the best singing duo ever. If that's how it works. I would just go big and you would just lou read it. Yeah, exactly. Is that what I'm doing, is lou reading I don't even know my own heritage sort of speak singing. Okay. Yeah, that's what Louie did. Yeah. Maybe go to the refrigerator, baby. Remember that great song he had about the fridge? Right. Give me one of those frozen Snicker bars. They're not the ice cream kind. The actual Snicker bar I put into the freezer. Bring it over here, baby. That's all. That's the one. And Nico would go, I am placing it in the freezer. Was she German? Yes. She had to be German. Was she German? I mean, she was, if not German Austrian or something. Well, I'm just saying. I didn't even know I knew nothing about her except Nico sat in with The Velvet Underground for a while and then my amazing vocal talents. Yes, that was good. That's what glued me to the idea that she was a gym. There's a movie about her later years that I want to see that came out this year or something. I think it's called taking. Liam Neeson played it. That's right. So, Chuck, we're talking about Freedom Schools, as we already said, and then we got silly. Now we're getting back to it. Okay. That's right. Because it's not a silly topic. No. And it has a COA at the beginning, so we talk about that. Yeah, I think we should. Yeah. So this is about the Freedom Schools, which, as you will very soon find out, we're in Mississippi during the civil rights movement. I mean, like in probably the most dangerous place in the country during the most dangerous point in the civil rights movement. That's where this story takes place. That's right. And freedom schools were great and they were a great thing, and we're happy to be talking about them. But in a lot of the quotes and a lot of the curriculum of the freedom schools themselves, they use the word negro and it's obviously not a word that people use anymore, but some of the curriculum class titles feature that word. And so just letting everyone know that that's coming. Right. And we're not going to say we're just going to read their curriculums and their clubs as it existed back then. Yeah, I think this heads up. And we were just kind of sticking to the vernacular of the times, right. Being used in context. Yes, within reason, of course. Sure, this takes place in the summer of 1964, but I want to go back a little further in that, the 1954 with the groundbreaking sea changing board, brown versus Board of Education ruling, where the Supreme Court said, do you know that separate but equal thing that we said back in 1896 was constitutional? Yeah, that's not true. Segregation is not constitutional. It's not legal anymore. Everybody needs to integrate schools at least. But they failed to say and do it by ITC or next year. They just said, I think something like in a deliberate and speedy manner or something like that. And so Mississippi said, oh, well, you didn't tell us when we had to do it by, so how about never? Yeah, let me just dig my heel in here and the other one in here, and we're just going to keep our schools segregated. And not only segregated, mississippi had some of the poorest excuses for schools for African American students in the country. The state average for Mississippi, I think, in 1960 was that they spent four times more on schools for white children than they did on schools for black children. That was just the state average. Sometimes it was way worse. You're talking about budget spending. Budget, yeah. In Tunica, they spent $172.80 per white pupil on average in 1962. That's per year. In that year, school year, 172.80, they spent $5.99 per black people. Wow. Yeah. And that's just kind of how it was. Like you went to school in sharecropper schools, or what they were called if you were a black kid and you got a terrible education. By comparison, white kids schools usually ran for about six months out of the year. If you were an African American kid in Mississippi, your school might run three if it was even open that year. The rest of the time you're expected to be out in the fields working and just knowing your place, basically. Yeah. And as you'll see throughout this podcast, the sharecropper schools, not only did they fail them fundamentally on things like literacy and maths and things like that, but they also failed them historically. I think things have gotten a lot better, but one could make the argument that history classes still fail historically in telling the true picture of some of these things. Absolutely. But back then, it was like at the sharecropper schools here, you're learning white history, and it's not just like, this is the important history, but this is the only history. Yours does not matter. Exactly. Yeah. And even worse than that, when they were taught about their heritage or whatever, it was usually in relation to slavery, and it was also in relation to how black people preferred to be slaves. Right. And that they were far worse off after the War of Northern Aggression freed them, and that they weren't interested in politics, they weren't really self starters, and they needed white people to guide them. That's right. That was the education you got as an African American kid in Mississippi around the time of the civil rights struggle. And by the time 1964 rolled around, there was a lot of agitation going on in the African American community. A lot of people saw, hey, there's no integration going on. Things haven't changed at all. We're being kept down by Jim Crow era laws and we're going to agitate for change. And in response to that, there was a lot of violence against that agitation for change from the KKK, from the state police, from local sheriffs, from the local sheriff's redneck brothers. You could get yourself killed just by going to register to vote yes. And if the police were not inciting or committing the violence themselves, they certainly would turn a blind eye to anything that was going on exactly. And not do police work. So it's in this context, around December of 1963, that guy named Robert Moses, who was one of the members of I believe he was with Core no, I'm sorry, he was with Snick, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Mississippi. And he said, I've got an idea. We're going to call it Freedom Summer. Yeah. And the Freedom Summer. And by the way, big shout out to Dave Ruse. Big shout out. One of our stable of writers these days from the Oldhouse Stuff Works.com website, dave is helping us out. And, boy, he does a great job. He does. It's always a pleasure. So thanks, Dave. But, yeah, the Freedom Summer was in 1964, and the whole goal of the Freedom Summer was really to get people registered to vote on Mass. Right. That was the stated goal of it. Yeah, for sure. The subtext of it. John Hale wrote a book on Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools, which are going to talk about and he actually helped Dave out with this article. So shout out to John Hale too. But he had a quote from John Lewis, the great John Lewis sure. Who said, basically, the point of Freedom Summer was to force a showdown between local authorities and federal authorities because the local authorities were abusively enforcing white supremacy and the federal authorities were turning a blind eye to it. And so they said, we need to put ourselves in visible harm's way and force a showdown between these two entities. Yeah, it wasn't just sort of picked randomly. It was key because the Civil Rights Act was going to be signed in July of that year, but it did not include black voting rights protection, and the Democratic National Convention was going to be at the end of August of that year in Atlantic City. And this is basically like, let's get black folks registered to vote so they can go in there and unseat these Dixiecrats, these Southern Democrats who were still very much segregationist in Mississippi for the Democratic Convention. Their delegation, the Mississippi delegation was all white. Yeah. And that was another big goal, was to create a separate black delegation for that National Convention. Right. So to get this to force the showdown between local authorities and federal authorities, the civil rights activists like Robert Moses working in Mississippi, had zero illusions that the federal government was going to come down and help them out no matter what they were doing. Instead, they would be forced to act if white Northern kids, the children of these federal authorities, came down to Mississippi and put themselves in harm's way too. Yeah, kids meaning college students. Right. Kids to old folks like us. Right, exactly. Youngsters. But they weren't sending down like twelve year olds. No, nothing like that, but like college students who wanted to come down and help people who truly believed in the cause of civil rights. Yeah. White liberal, progressive, Northern, oftentimes Jewish, but not always. But as far as getting the federal authorities to pay attention, that first descriptor is the most important one. White. Yes. Because again, they knew in Mississippi no federal authorities were going to pay attention to that. And I mean, they had good reason to think that Kennedy had the Civil Rights Act as far back as 1960, but agreed not to bring it up in Congress because they were still trying to figure out how to keep the Dixiecrats happy. Right. And maybe get some sort of integration going or civil rights going. And they've just been left hung out to dry by the federal authorities so many times that they were totally right in that assumption. Yeah. And they knew that in order to really affect change, like you said, they were going to get no assistance from the federal government, so they need to do it on the ground grassroots style. And what they're really looking toward was the future. And they knew that getting kids involved was the key and the only way to do that, or they figured the best way to do that, and I think they were right, was to devise what was called the Freedom Schools, right. In the summer of 1964, which ended up being 41 summer schools, community based summer schools where they had core curriculums, for sure. But what they really were trying to do is teach young black kids about their history and their self worth and give them a path forward in the United States with a voice like, give them an education that they couldn't find anywhere in those sharecropper schools where the sharecropper school's point was to keep them down uneducated and out of politics so that they couldn't vote. These Freedom Schools were meant to do the exact opposite, to teach them their self worth, but also to say, like, here's how you can actually enact change and to create the next generation of civil rights activists in Mississippi. That was the point of the Freedom School. Yeah. And it was hitting me as I was reading this how progressive that was for 1964, because that would be progressive now in places like even Georgia. Absolutely. And it's still going on now as we'll see. The Children's Defense Fund revived the Freedom Schools back in the think they still have them. And it does still have a tinge of subversion, sadly, teaching black kids in America their self worth. Yeah, that's sad. All right. That's a great preamble. Shall we take a break? We are going to take a break, and we're going to come back and really dig into the mission of the Freedom Schools right after this. 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. 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. Okay, so Freedom Schools again launched and proposed by SNCC snick SNCC leader Charlie Cobb in December 63, and they had three. The original idea was let's get 11th to 12th graders because they're just on the cusp of being in the real world, arguably already were in the real world. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Sure. And they had three stated purposes that they wanted to accomplish supplement what they aren't learning in high school. Simple enough. Number two, give them a broad intellectual and academic experience during the summertime to bring back to students in the classrooms, I guess, in the fall. And then form the basis for statewide student action. Like, here's how you can boycott something, here's how you can raise awareness. Teach them how to be grassroots activists. And also, one of the things that they wanted to teach them that we'll see is this is how things work. Like, here's the nuts and bolts of this power structure that we live in that holds us down. And here understanding how it works. You can start to poke around and figure out how to overcome that. That was a huge part of it. That's right. So it all starts with volunteers. Right. And these, like we said, are mainly college students. They saw this by way of ads in The New York Times and other groups and college campuses that basically said, hey, this is what we want to do. You've been watching this on TV every night. I know that you might live in Manhattan or Brooklyn or someplace, but if you are a young, white, liberal progressive and you really want to make a difference, get off your couch and come down to Mississippi for the summer. Sure. Endanger your life and help teach these kids. Yeah, I think something like a thousand. I saw like as much as 2500 a bunch of people answered this call. Like northern, mostly white college students came down to Mississippi for this Freedom Summer. Not just the Freedom schools. Yeah. I think 280 of them ended up being teachers out of about 700 or so who volunteered for the Freedom Summer. Yeah, and I've heard different stories on how the people who got selected to be teachers for the Freedom Schools were selected. This article makes it sound like the greener ones, the ones who really shouldn't be put in harm's way, were assigned to the Freedom Schools. But from what I've read, they were very much in harm's way as being teachers of these Freedom Schools. Yeah, but regardless of who got assigned to become a Freedom School teacher or why they were told you're going to have to pay your way to and from Mississippi, you're going to have to pay your own room and board. So expect to have to shell out over $200 or up to $200 over the course of the summer. Yeah. It also said they would live basically in the homes of local black families. I wonder if they paid them rent. I don't know if they paid them rent, but the black families who did put these white, northern college students up over the summer to teach Freedom Schools very much put their own families and homes in harm's way. For sure. Because the Freedom School. And actually the whole Freedom Summer volunteers who came down, they didn't take Mississippi by surprise. The white power establishment, Mississippi knew they were coming, and they were very unhappy about this. They said publicly that these people would be treated as invaders, that this was a second war of Northern aggression. They doubled the number of highway patrol officers and not to keep the peace. They knew they were coming down, and they were not happy about these Freedom Schools or the Freedom Summer in general. Yeah. And I guess we should go ahead and say right off the bat to add gravity to the situation, and there may be a short stuff in here. I've been wanting to do one on the disappearance of these three men. But the Core training crew, congress of Racial Equality was Core, and they were helping out with the Freedom Rides in the early 60s on the buses and Selma in the Deep South. And there were three gentlemen, andrew Goodman and Michael Schwarner, two white men, and another colleague, James Cheney, a young black man that worked with Core. They went missing in Longdale, Mississippi, and were basically taken and murdered. So this is before, a few months before the Freedom Schools were to launch. And you're going down there knowing that these men disappeared under mysterious circumstances. I'm pretty sure it was like a week before, basically, because it happened like they got the news during the orientation in Oxford, Ohio, that they held for the Freedom School teachers. The news came through that these three guys had gone missing and then were later found murdered. And some people did back out, and we're like, I can't take this risk. But it seems like most of them pressed on, right? Yeah, absolutely. And I think some people's resolve was doubled by that kind of thing, too. But their disappearance and ultimately their deaths proved that idea, that the civil rights activists in Mississippi needed these white Northern volunteers to come down, because James Cheney, he was a local Mississippi activist, he was a black guy, and Michael Schwarner and Goodman, Goodman, both of them were white. And because they went missing along with Cheney, 150 FBI agents and 200 sailors from the local naval station sure showed up to search for these guys. And Michael Schwarner's widow said, this never would have happened if my husband had been a black man and all this was happening because he was white. This is rife with a lot of quotes that a lot of them were not going to read, but I did want to read this one from Howard Zen. This is the message at this orientation that you talked about at the Western College for Women in Oxford. So you're showing up like, I want to volunteer. I want to do the right thing. They sit you down in an auditorium and say this. You'll arrive in Ruleville, which is a place in Ruleville in the Delta it will be a hundred degrees. You'll be sweaty and dirty. You won't be able to bathe often or sleep well or eat good food. I don't know about that. I bet there was some pretty decent food. That kind of stuck out to me, too. Howard Zinn might not have thought so. The first day of school, there may be four teachers and three students. And the local Negro minister will phone you to say you can't use his church basement after all because his life has been threatened. And the curriculum we've drawn up, negro history and American government, may be something you know only a little about yourself. Well, you'll knock on doors all day in the hot sun to find students you'll meet on someone's lawn under a tree. You'll tear up the curriculum and teach what you know. And it seems like that's really kind of what happened. It was very prescient. Yeah. I don't know if that quote was long after him describing it, but if that's what they told them at orientation before the Freedom School, then, yeah, that's exactly how it ended up. And how many, I think originally they were going to target, like I said, 11th and 12th graders, 20 schools, about 1000 students. Right. But when school day started, parents heard about this and brought everybody. Basically, they did something like, I've seen as much as 2500. But at least 20 students were enrolled in Freedom Schools in Mississippi this summer. Yeah. And they doubled the number of schools plus one to 41. To 41. I think Hattiesburg had six different schools. Meridian had a school with 200 students. That was the biggest one they originally intended, like you said, 11th and 12th graders, maybe as young as middle schoolers, possibly, but really that was it. And it ended up being elementary school kids, I believe there was an 80 year old enrolled at one of the Freedom Schools, and it just became a sensation in Mississippi among the African American community. And there was a New York Times article. They sent a reporter down to kind of cover this. And the reporter was in Holly Springs, and there was a schoolteacher from Chicago named Aviva Futurian. And she said they were probably like, Are you from outer space? Right. Kind of sounds like it. The silver jumpsuit she was wearing didn't help, but she said that they were teaching under a sweet gum tree. And this became kind of like that was another reason why that Oxford quote from Howard Zinn was so prescient. A lot of times they didn't have any place to actually meet. They had to meet outside or on somebody's front porch or something like that, because someone might say, like he said in the quote, like, hey, use my church basement. But then when the KKK found out, they may burn across it in the churchyard. And then that preacher has to say, I'm sorry, I can't take the risk. Well, so schwarner and Cheney and Goodman when they were murdered. Kidnapped and murdered. They were investigating the burning of the church that they were going to be holding their Freedom School. That's what they were doing down there. And they went to go find out what happened, and that's when they went missing. Yeah. So message sent loud and clear. So school is outside, which is every kid's favorite thing. Right. And then, as we'll see, there was at least one school that got firebombed and burned to the ground after school had already started. I don't think any it was like, after hours. Right. But the next day, the school met in the yard next to this burn down building that they've been meeting in the day before. Yes. Pretty amazing. This wasn't just going to school. There's a whole state full of white people who violently did not want you to be learning this stuff. Yeah. They were just as organized on the defense of this. Right. Or, I guess, the offense. Which would that be? They weren't defending it. No. To go on the offensive. Sure. I just got mixed up in my head. Yeah, you got it. Finally. All right. So in the spring of 1964, they met, and they were like, listen, we need to get a curriculum together because this is a real school. They're going to tear it up, but we're going to get it down, at least. And the final one had sections for, like I said, reading, writing, arithmetic, the three Rs, and science. But the bulk of it was what they called citizen curriculum, citizenship curriculum, which is basically like African American civics, which they had never heard of and never learned. I'm sure parents told them stories and stuff, but as far as going to school, they had never encountered anything like this before. Well, I mean, depending on the age of their parents, too, their parents might have never heard anything like that before, either. That's a good point. So the citizenship curriculum is broken into seven units, and each one built upon the last unit. Right. It was meant to basically say, here's the status quo. Here's what's wrong with the status quo? Here's how to change to the status quo. Or basically the three buckets you could put everything in. Right. And I haven't read all of them, but I went and read the fourth one called The Power Structure Unit Four, and I would strongly recommend, I think the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's digital archive has it, like, digitized. Yeah, that's the one you sent me. Right, but go read it. It's called uniform. Introducing the power structure. And it explains how and why white people are taught to be afraid of and hate black people. How black people are taught that they're inferior. And that the reason behind the whole thing is money and profits and that all of the racism and hatred and fear and crime and all of that stuff is all just window dressing around this power structure that's meant to keep people servile and available for cheap labor so that some people can profit more off of their work. It's the most disgusting thing I've ever read, but it's also one of the most eye opening, and it was designed for 11th and 12th graders back in the it still rings 100% true today. Yeah. The one that I'm going to dig in and read, I didn't have time. But number six, material things and soul things. So this is almost the last one on the citizenship curriculum units, and that is that black people will not achieve true freedom by trying to acquire more stuff, but by using their insights about oppression to create a new kind of society. And I think that's so important in this curriculum. It's like, we're not trying to teach you, like, hey, go out there and try and gain status in society so you can get a bigger house, or things that you see that these white people have, which I'm sure you covet things. That's what people do. So I'm sure that was a natural inclination. Like, I want the stuff that they have. But it's so important to say, like, that the stuff isn't what matters. Well, not only just stuff in general, but they kind of walk the students through it in this curriculum where they say, like, what are some things that white people have that you don't have, that you wish you had? What are some things white people have that you don't want? And the purpose of this curriculum wasn't to teach black kids to hate white kids. Now, as a matter of fact, it actually teaches them to understand white people more. Let me read you this quote from this unit four. We have learned that although it seems that white people have better schools, for instance, that they pay for it by learning lies and by learning to hate and be afraid, we have learned that we are misled by these lies, too, that the myths have taught us to believe that we are inferior and dumb and that we have made no contributions to society. Wow. So it's saying, like, don't hate white people. They're being duped by this, too. Right. But they're patsies in this power structure, too. They just happen to not be the group that's being stepped on. Right, but they're still being used and abused. Yeah. School children in particular for context. It's interesting, too, when you just talked about, like, they wanted the same things, not necessarily stuff as the white students, one of the most popular classes, because they would get in there and say, this is what I want to learn. And that's the whole part about tearing up the curriculum. One of the most popular subjects in one of these schools was French, and they wanted to learn French because they knew white kids had a French teacher, like something as innocuous as that. I want to learn. French, too. Right. That was the point of school is not just like, sit down and shut up and listen. This is what we're here to teach you. It was, what do you want to learn? What are you guys going to feel good about yourselves for knowing that you didn't know when you came in here? And so teaching in the Freedom Schools that summer was super improvisational and spontaneous and collaborative. They really did tear up the curriculum in a lot of cases. Sounds like a good model for schools, period. Yeah, it sounds like one of those, like, Waldorf schools or a Montessori school or something like that. It sounds very much like one of those childhood yeah, but the point was to not to drill them with what the adults thought they should learn, but to raise up their self worth and self esteem, and whatever that took is what they taught them. Yeah, and it's cool that they didn't. Not only were they concerned about civics and the core academics, but something that could have very easily been pushed to the side is creative pursuits. And they really embraced that because they found that these students were natural poets and really eager to get in there and read and write poetry. They read Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein and wrote a lot of poetry themselves. Some of it is just heartbreaking, some of it inspiring, some of it both. There was one school in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Freedom School. Students of St. John's Methodist Church. They wrote their own Declaration of Independence. And it's all in here in this article. We can't go through the whole thing, but I encourage you to read this thing in full. It's really heady, like, advanced stuff. It really is. There are also newspapers were really big at the Freedom Schools, and they qualified as alternative newspapers. That guy, John Hale, the professor from South Carolina who wrote the book on freedom schools. Literally. Literally. He says that in Mississippi that summer, the Freedom School student run newspapers were the biggest source of civil rights news. Can you believe that? In the entire state. Amazing. And that they were the state's first taste of alternative news ever. But almost all of the 41 schools have their own newspapers, and in some communities, that's how some adults were learning what they needed to do to go register to vote by reading it in the student run Freedom School newspaper. Yeah, I was a newspaper staffer. I think you were, too, probably, right, sure. Were you just starting your own papers? Sure. But I was a newspaper staffer in high school, and there's something about, like, putting together a publication that even I've seen little kids doing for fun, and I remember doing for fun. So it doesn't surprise me that the newspaper was every school had their own, and it seems like they were really into it. I could see your little family news here, like, extra, extra, mom puts too much hot sauce and eggs this morning. They ruined. Well, it's on my mind because I just got back from vacation, and we went with 1234 older girls, plus my younger daughter, and they did the beach blotter. They put together their own little magazine for the week. And I just remembered, I'm like, man, kids are just drawn to putting together newspapers and magazines. And these kids in the Freedom Schools leapt at the chance to interview people and to be little cub reporters and type this stuff up. They were really big on taking typing classes because that would lead to work, obviously, later on as well. I just thought it was really kind of a cool part of this whole thing. Yeah, no, it's super cool, as was the theater. There was a traveling group called the Free Southern Theater that would perform a play called Nwide America, and they would go around to Freedom Schools and perform this play. Right. And there were music groups. The great folk singer and activist Pete Seker went down there, of course, and toured the Freedom Schools. Like, here's how you play a G chord and sing about, like, things that matter. Pretty great. Why don't you go on over to the fridge? Give me a frozen Snicker bar. No, I don't even like frozen snickers. That's a big reveal at the end of the song, but, you know, Lou Reed does. Sure. Or did. Yup. All right, Be, should we take another break? Yeah. Okay. We're going to take a break, everybody, so sit tight and we'll be right back. 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 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. 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. So, like I said, Chuck, this experiment in pushing Mississippi into the civil rights era was not well received by the white power establishment. And I think it kind of varied from one community to another. But none of them were happy, from what I understand. And the ones that were unhappiest with the Freedom Schools were very, very violent in retaliation for these things. This one summer, this Freedom Summer lasted ten weeks. I think the Freedom Schools lasted six weeks, but the Freedom Summer itself lasted ten weeks. And in that ten week period, 30 homes of black residents, 37 black churches were firebombed in one summer in Mississippi, demonstrators were shot at 35 different times by the police. 80 volunteers were attacked or beaten by white mobs or police officers. There were six known murders that summer related to the Freedom Summer, and female volunteers were sexually assaulted. Yeah, it was a really violent, dangerous place to be doing what they were doing at the time. Yeah, there was one town. McComb, Mississippi. There were more than a dozen bombings in two months. More than twelve bombings in a two month period. Twelve and a half. They were called the bombing capital of the world at the time. Again, local police turning a blind eye. I get the impression that they actually qualified as the bombing capital of the world. Yeah, it wasn't just a thing written in the Freedom School paper. Right. It wasn't like an off handed comment, like, they may have qualified as the bombing capital of the world. Yeah, it's crazy. And even if there wasn't, like, direct violence, there was indirect violence. Intimidation. Intimidation. People would probably drive by and say the worst thing. Right, exactly. So it was a struggle to just make it through the summer. But they did, as a matter of fact. And one of the goals of this Freedom Schools was to create or help get the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, the antidote to the Dixiecrats in Mississippi, seated at the Democratic National Convention. And they attempted to do that and actually got a meeting at the Credentials Committee of the DNC. But we're ultimately turned down yeah, they had delegates. This is just amazing. They had delegates from all 41 of these schools, and they met at a statewide convention in Meridian, Mississippi, a place I have been through on a Greyhound bus. Wow, that's a country song in motion right there, for sure. That was a place where they stopped us and the drug dogs got on. Got you in meridian, huh? Yeah. And I was like, oh, interesting. I never thought about Greyhound buses is probably a great way to transport drugs. Sure. But probably not. Hey, speaking of country music, have you seen that Ken Burns documentary? Not yet. I've heard it's great. Oh, my, is it good? I'm in the country music now. Well, I saw your Dixie Chicks tattoo on your neck. I wonder what that was about. It's just pen right now. I haven't pulled the trigger all the way. Okay. Up. Yeah. I'm looking forward to seeing that it's good. So they wrote these kids these delegates went down there, they wrote their own political platform for the MFDP. And it's amazing, like, these are kids that in six weeks time went from just basically having no hope whatsoever to fully forming a delegation and writing their own political platform and presenting it in public, right? And it wasn't like, hey, let's get these kids sitting at the DNC. Like, the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party was made up of adult activists, but the kids from the Freedom Schools helped write their platform. They also formed from this delegation that met at the end of the summer, the Mississippi Student Union. And this actually brought to fruition one of the other stated goals of Freedom Schools, which was creating the next generation of activists. Right. Because when Freedom School was over and Sharecropper School started back again or even integrated schools around the state. All of a sudden there were kids wearing. Like. One man. One vote buttons which could get you expelled. And actually did get some kids expelled. But they were like little civil rights activists showing up to school. Aware now of the situation they were dealing with and ready to take it on. Yeah, 25 of them volunteered to be the first to desegregate their local high schools. So that call comes out like, we have to desegregate. Who's going to be the one? I know just the people to walk in there. And 25 of these graduates of the Freedom Schools did so. Yeah, so it was a big deal. They managed to create the next generation of activist leaders. But one of the other kind of the through lines of the civil rights struggle during this time and of the Freedom Schools themselves was the idea that if you had I think the quote was, if you have strong people or no, strong people don't need strong leaders. Right. And a civil rights activist named Ella Baker said that. And the point was, if you teach everybody how to struggle for themselves, how to fight for themselves, how to stand up for themselves, you don't have to wait around for a once in a handful of generations person like Martin Luther King, Jr. To come along and lead the way. The people can lead the way themselves. And that was one of the things that they were doing with the Freedom Schools, not just trying to come up with the next leaders. They needed leadership, but also to make everybody who came through the Freedom School, like, aware and ready for action. So one of the sad legacies was we said at the beginning that what they wanted to do was one of their big goals was to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at that 64 convention in August, and they won a public hearing, which was a big win in and of itself with the DNC committee that was broadcast on live TV. The widow of Michael Schwerner showed up to talk. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Showed up to talk. And the last one and this is just very sad and shameful, the last speaker and they said Dave describes her as the most dangerous to that Democratic establishment was a former sharecropper named Fanny Lou Hamer. Did you see her testimony? Yes. She was brave as they come. She was as brave as they come. She was brave and pissed. Yeah. But her testimony was interrupted on national TV by President Lyndon Johnson. He called an impromptu press conference in the middle of her testimony. So all the TV breaks away, of course, because the President has a press conference they need to get to. Right. And everyone was thinking, all right, this is big news. He's going to announce his VP pick for the 64 election or something like that. And he basically got on TV and sort of adlib had, today is the nine month anniversary of the assassination of JFK and black people all around the country, and white liberal progressives are going, what's? The nine month anniversary? Right. Like, are you kidding me? Not just liberals and civil rights activists, but the news, too, saw right through. Oh, sure. And it actually backfired because Johnson interrupting Fannie Lou Hamer became news itself. And so Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony stayed on the news for days afterward, got way more exposure because of Johnson's clumsy hamfisted attempt and the reason why her testimony and the idea of a Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party. It was a threat to the Democrats because if you got rid of the Dixiecrats, if you forced integration on the south, you're going to lose the solid south. The south had always voted Democrats because they hated the Republicans, because the Republicans were the party of Lincoln who forced Reconstruction on them. Right. So Reconstruction comes along and all of the Southerners went Democrats and they formed the Dixiecrats. Right. Right. Well, when Johnson signed the Civil Rights Amendment in 1965, he said to an aide, we just handed the south to the Republicans for a very long time and it's still the case. Still today, you are hard pressed to find a county in the south that's blue. They're all red. Yeah, well, that's not quite true, but no, it's 100% okay, let me put it this way. Atlanta is as blue as blue gets. How many Atlantis are there in the south? No, that's what I'm saying. Like anywhere else, the urban centers sure are where the blues are. But I mean, like the Northern and southern suburbs, they're all red. Atlanta is like a little island of blue and a thing of red. Yeah. It's just weird to think that that's the legacy of this time still. Yeah. So some of these students ended up to go on and do great things. I think, dare I say, many of them went on to do great things on a smaller scale, but some were sort of known nationally and were pioneers in the black community. One man. Eddie James Carthan. He was the first black mayor in the Mississippi Delta. Very, very big deal. He was elected mayor at the age of 28, which, I mean, back then, though, 28 was like, 50 today. Really? Sure. You know, aging has really regressed since then. And we talked earlier about the fact that these schools continue. They only operated in 1964, but a few of them were transformed into Freedom Centers, and they were meeting places for the Mississippi Student Union. They were community meeting places, educational resources. Kindergartens would go there during the day, they would have adult classes at night. And in the 1980s is when the Children's Defense Fund created its own version of the Freedom Schools all those years later. And they now operate in 87 cities across 28 states, with their main focus being literacy. Yeah, it's pretty great. But they still honor their African heritage because the school day begins with a harambee traditional African welcoming celebration with songs and chants that goes a little something like, go on over to the fridge. Have you noticed that it's kind of transformed into singing? It was talking before you're ditching your lou Reedness, I guess. So I've outgrown them. Well, if you want to know more about Freedom Schools, there's a lot of it archived out there on the Internet, and you could do a lot worse than starting out at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's digital archives. They got a lot of cool stuff on there. Just really well done. Nice short punchy articles that link to the next thing and the next thing and just make you want to keep reading. Well, since I said student Nonviolent Coordinating committee, it's time for a listener mate. So this is the gentleman who wrote in. We had a few people that wrote in trying to explain our confusion on due process. Oh, is this the guy? Yeah. Okay, good. Which one was that in? That was in. It was in peripheryus because we're talking about people going to prison for gay sex in their own home. Consenting in Texas in the 21st century. And this is from Keith from Philadelphia. Not a common law professor, guys, just a law student. But I thought I could help clear this up. In the Lawrence v. Texas due process point, due process is essentially broken up into two prongs procedural. Procedural and substantive. Did I say that right? Substantive procedural due process is exactly what Josh was talking about. Provides, you notice, an opportunity to be heard before rights are taken away from you. Substantive due process is what the court was referring to in Lawrence concept is somewhat complicated, but simply stated, substantive due process just means certain rights that are so fundamental that no amount of process or procedure could ever legitimately deprive you of them. In other words, consenting adults have such a fundamental right to privacy behind closed doors that to punish them for having consensual sex will violate their due process rights no matter how much procedure they are afforded. Got it. That is as clear as Bell teacher, law professor, I'm losing it here. Thank you. Keith from Philly. Thank you, Keith. I mean, I emailed him immediately. A lot of people have written in thanks to everybody, wrote in and gave it a shot. But I emailed them back and was like, Keith, this is the first one I've fully gotten. Yeah, Keith. And I think if you scroll on over to your refrigerator, you will find a frozen Snicker bar waiting on you. Yeah, because we snuck into your home in the middle of the night, whereas Chuck would say, a frozen one. If you want to get in touch with us, like Keith did, you can go on to Stephanie.com and check out our social links, or you can send us a good old fashioned email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, maybe send it along with the frozen Snicker bar to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts from my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. A 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 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 leading brands. Find Halo elevate at Pepco Pet Supplies plus and select Neighborhood Pet stores." | |
How Molecular Gastronomy Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-molecular-gastronomy-works | After botching a particularly tricky dish, molecular chemist Herve This decided to figure out why his recipe didn't work. He ended up creating a new field of cuisine: Molecular gastronomy. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore this new frontier of cooking. | After botching a particularly tricky dish, molecular chemist Herve This decided to figure out why his recipe didn't work. He ended up creating a new field of cuisine: Molecular gastronomy. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore this new frontier of cooking. | Tue, 12 Apr 2011 20:21:52 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=20, tm_min=21, tm_sec=52, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=102, tm_isdst=0) | 31747425 | 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. With me, as always, is Charlie is W Chuck Bryant. And that makes The Stuff You Should Know the podcast for now, what kind of intro was kind of curious. And to those of you out there, I often sit with bated breath not often, always, and think what's Josh got for me. How I wish you hadn't just built that up, because it's not really a particularly special it's. Okay, we've done 320 plus of these, and I'd say 300 or more of them have been very interesting. That many, huh? Sure. To heck with it. I'm just going to wrap on this one. Okay. All right. Chuck, you remember when we went to Flip Burger? Yeah. Okay. Richard Blaze. Yes. Richard Blaze, he is an excellent chef. He has not only flipped burger boutique here in Atlanta, I think he's got a second one that just opened or is about to open. Yeah. And Richard is a Top Chef guy. He's a winner, right? No, he's had a winning personality. Yeah. And he will admit that he choked on his season because he's clearly the best chef, and he just kind of choked at the end, which is not a very blazing thing to do because he's pretty money. Well, we know a lot about choking. People send us emails about them choking. Yeah. And he's now on which I'm watching now, the Top Chef All Stars. Yeah. Well, as of now, it will probably be resolved by the time it comes out, but now he's one of the top three. Okay. He's in the final three. Who else is on there? It's a lot of the second place finishers from all the years. Yeah. I mean, tough competition. Sweet. Okay, well, I should also say to anybody out there, whoever is thinking of coming to Atlanta, a lot of stuff you should know, listeners email us, right? Yeah. And they say, where should I go eat every single time? We recommend Flip. Yeah. It's a fun place. It's awesome. But the food is just amazing. I also strongly recommend the acobuco burger. Right? Yeah. Awesome. Anyway, chuck, you've had the Krispy Kreme milkshake. I know you have. I watched you drink it. Right. Did you notice when it came out, it was steaming? Yeah. Although it was piping cold, it was steaming. That's right. And the reason it was steaming is because Richard Blaze, as is his way, had just injected a bunch of nitrous oxide into it. And he did that to basically fluff it, and I believe to also chill it very quickly, which are both their hallmark in of molecular gastronomy, which, coincidentally, is what we're podcasting about today. That's right, Josh. Molecular gastronomy, which is let's go ahead and just give a quick history here. There was a guy named well, there's still a guy. His name is Herveyice. Yeah. He's very active still. He still has a blog and the website going. In the 1980s, he was a physical chemist, and he was working on a souffle in his kitchen. And it was a cheese souffle. And the recipe had very strict instructions. Said two yolks, egg yolks at a time. He said, we'll put in four egg yolks. I'm a chemist. I'm a chemist. And it failed big time, as the souffle is apt to do. And he said, you know what? This is really interesting. I didn't follow those instructions, even though the right ingredients were put in the recipe and it flopped. So let me start studying this. And he started doing this with more dishes. The scientific study of food preparation. Very systematic. He said, I think I'm on to something here. I partnered with a guy named Nicholas Kertie, who is an emeritus professor. Did that too, or is that a mistake? Emeritus professor emeritus. Is that a title? I could see it being a title at Oxford. Okay, so he was at Oxford and he was another physical scientist, and they launched together molecular gastronomy. They originally called it molecular and physical gastronomy. And that was a very new thing at the time. This is a very new discipline in cooking. It was basically there's kind of two bases of molecular gastronomy. It's number one, it's debunking myths. Like, there's so many old wives tales surrounding cooking. Right. Which, like, for example, adding olive oil to boiling water that you're cooking pasta in. I do that. Still separate it. It's just bunk. It is bunk. The reason why it's bunk is because oil and water don't mix. Even when you're boiling it. The oil floats at top. The noodles are down below that, and it's doing absolutely nothing. I feel like a sucker. What you should actually do is add a little bit of vinegar, like white wine vinegar, apple cider vinegar, just a little bit, because that actually does keep pasta from sticking to itself. Right. And one of the points of molecular gastronomy is getting to the actual truth of does something work? Yes or no? If it doesn't, we should broadcast that it doesn't work. So people don't feel like chumps. Right. That's right. Or waste time and money and effort. And if it does work, why? And why is explained on a scientific level. That's molecular gastronomy. That's right. He began looking at the physics and chemistry of the preparation of food, and he organized the first international workshop on molecular and physical gastronomy in 1992 and presented the first doctorate in that field at the University of Palais in 1996. Yes. Which is pretty huge because he created a brand new field, and within a decade or so, they're handing out PhDs in it. Sure, it was substantial, but it didn't catch on like wildfire. Wasn't super popular at first. No. And actually it was very fun. Controversial, sort of. Yes. Well, because chefs are all about cooking with the soul and cooking with love. And all of a sudden, there was this guy, these two guys that were breaking it down to the molecular level and kind of taking all the fun out of it to some people's opinion. Right. And as you said, it's soulful. It's artistic. Cooking is when you apply science to art, it loses something intangible, but very important. But on the other hand, molecular gastronomy has been able to produce things like snail porridge. You want to read the quote? Actually, I don't have that. Do you? I do. One eater of the snail porridge. Wow. What just happened to me? An eater of snail porridge described it as, quote, successively savory, sweet, snaily crunchy and tart ellipse. Nothing less than magical. That's pretty substantial for snail porridge, right? Yeah. And with snail porridge or with molecular gastronomy, you can come up with this as like snail porridge, which no one would ever have thought of creating. And you can also make it perfect. Nothing less than magical every single time. Yeah. That kind of precision is good when you're a chef, because one of the keys to a successful restaurant is consistency. But early on, it got a lot of criticism because a lot of chefs didn't find it was accessible to your average home chef. And they think certainly not. Yeah. They think to be a successful discipline then, because Julia Child, for instance, she was a talented cook and chef, but she didn't really hit it big until she put out that book. There's nothing that everyone wanted in their kitchen. Right. And, Chuck, while we're talking about books, we should probably give a shout out to Liz, who is the stuff you should know listener. That's right. And who runs little bit sweets liddabitsweetscom? Yeah. We plugged her before and her awesome trip. Yes. And I think it's been a little while since we got some chocolates, frankly. Yeah, I think it's about time for a little what's it called? Paola. Yeah. She gave us Harvey Tis book. Molecular Gastronomy exploring the Science of Flavor. Right? That's right. And I've had it since June of last year, almost a year, and have read the first entry. But we have the book thanks to her. And she gave us the book to kind of grease the wheels toward a molecular gastronomy podcast. So here it is. That's right. Almost a year late. So to wrap up the history in 1998, herveytes is a partner in starting up this new discipline. Nicholas Kertie passed away. Hervey then changed it to just molecular gastronomy. Dropped the physical part. I think that's very honorable that he waited till the guy died and was like, I'm getting rid of this part. Well, he didn't call it TCN gastronomy. No. He seems like a pretty cool dude. Yeah. So he also loosened his viewpoint a little bit on pure science and said, you know what? There is a lot of art and soul involved. Let's just say it's art and science and not one or the other. And it's quote, the art and science of selecting, preparing, serving, and most importantly to me, enjoying food. That's right, because you can get to a point where you're no longer enjoying food. The definition of gastronomy was the art of selecting, preparing, serving, and enjoying food. And a lot of people worried when molecular was added to gastronomy right. That it was going to take out the last part. It's not fun when you apply science to it. But he managed to combine the two, and since then, there's a whole slew of really talented chefs out there working in this field. That's right. And it's delicious food, too. I mean, it looks funny and looks interesting and different, but it's also yummy. It wouldn't be around at $50 a plate if it wasn't yummy. Right. Just because you can make a cube out of mayonnaise doesn't mean people are going to eat. It still got to taste like good mayonnaise. Right. And if you're going to call something snail porridge because it's made out of snail, it better taste good. Whose was that? Nothing less than magic. You know whose recipe that was? Was it wiley du frame. I don't know. I know you're a big fan of his, aren't you? Yeah. And I haven't been to WD 50, but next time we're in New York, dude, we should go. Okay. For sure. Okay. He makes I sent you that link. The ice cream bagels. Yeah. It's amazing. And it looked like little bagel halves, but they're bagel flavored ice cream made into the shape of a bagel and then dust it with, like, an airbrush to give it the shading and appearance of being toasted. It's pretty crazy. Something. All right, so let's talk heston Blumenthal okay. With the snail porridge. All right, let's talk chemistry for a second. If you're a chemist, you're going to classify matter into one of three things. It's going to be an element, a compound, or a mixture. Element can't be broken down any further because it's oxygen or hydrogen. Sure. Compound is, let's say, oxygen and hydrogen. H, two o. Water, salt. It's a compound. And they are actually chemically combined, but they have properties that are separate and distinct from their components. That's their constituents. Right, right. And then you have a mixture, which is when you combine substances that are not held together chemically, and they can be separated by physical means, like filtering something. Right. And then that's pretty basic stuff. Right. Chemistry 101. Now we start to kind of get into molecular gastronomy's interest in chemistry. All of that is taken into account, of course. But we get to colloid. Yes. And once we reach colloids, which we just have, we really have entered the realm of molecular gastronomy and food. And a colloid is basically a mixture of two substances that are dispersed but not dissolved. In one another, and they can actually be of two different phases or states. So you remember there's three phases of matter, technically four, which is plasma. Remember? Which is liquid. So hot it behaves like a gas. Yeah, but I don't think they've entered that field with molecular gastronomy yet. Where they use plasma. Lace is probably like trying to search that out. He's like plasma. Yeah, that's gas, liquid and solid. Right. And you can introduce one into the other and create something new. So, for example, if you introduce gas, you disperse it into a liquid, you're going to get what's called foam. For example, whipped cream or beer foam. Or if you're Marcel from Top Chef, he'll put a foam on anything and everything. I like a nice egg wash on some drinks. It's just like egg white. It becomes emulsified and turns foamy. Yeah. You're into the cocktails. Oh, yeah. I'm into pouring whiskey onto ice. I like that too. Well, sure, yeah. I'm going to make Manhattan for you sometime, man. I have mastered it. Really? Oh, yeah. I had a fancy cocktail the other night at some place, and it was fine, but it was just like, why are you putting all this stuff on top of the whiskey? In the end, it's not for me. I will change your mind with my Manhattan. Remember that cocktail that Yummy had at Momofuko that tasted like a sweat sock? Yeah. It was a mustard whiskey drink with a pretzel stir, and it sounded really intriguing and awesome on the menu, but it did. It tasted like not only like an old sweaty gym sock, but one that was taken off a foot that had some sort of infection. It was so gross. And you guys are adventurous, but both of you are like, no, I can't drink this. Sorry, David Chang. Yeah, but momofuku is awesome. We don't want to downgrade that place. Agreed. All right, so I don't think we can we're not in any kind of position to downgrade Mama fuku. Exactly. So colloidal systems, Josh, like you said, involve two phases, gas and liquid, or solid and liquid. But when you're talking about food prep, a lot of times there's more than two phases, and that is called a complex dispersed system, that kind of coil system, because there's more than two. And this is where it gets a little, like, mind numbing to me because T said, you know what, let me create a little shorthand for CDs by describing these complex systems through abbreviations of phases, letters representing the size of the molecules and what ingredients you're working with, and basically break down a recipe into what looks like a math equation. Right. And I mean, the fact that he created a shorthand for CDs kind of suggests how important it is to molecular gastronomy to basically create these kind of new and radical textures and shapes and things like that. But yeah. For example, I'm going to see if I can describe this. Okay, good luck. But the CDs shorthand for aioli right, just basically mayonnaise. Yeah. But it's garlic and lemon and fancy mayonnaise. Olive oil. Yeah. It's O x ten to the negative fifth, comma ten to the negative fourth, divided by W times D, which is greater than six times seven to the negative 7th. That's an actual sort of short handed recipe. It is. And frankly, I can't make heads or tails of it. I know that the O and the W stands for oil and water. And the fact that there's a forward slash or a division sign means that the oil is dispersed into the water rather than the water dispersed into the oil. And then the numbers like ten to the negative fifth or ten to the negative fourth, those are shorthand for the size of the particles that are meant to be introduced into this. So, really, if you're herveytes or somebody herveytees has explicitly sat down over the course of five years and explained this to you, you could look at this and be like, oh, well, yeah, there's aioli right there. And I know exactly how to make this. I know how to make it every time. And the surprising thing, don't forget, Herbie Teeth is not a chef. This whole thing started with a failure to make suffer. He's a physical chemist. Right. What he came up with stands up across the board. There are literally hundreds of different sauces in the French pantheon of cooking. Yes. He managed to figure out that with his CDs shorthand, with his colloidal dispersion system shorthand. Right. He can basically categorize them in, I think, 24 different groups. 23. 23 different groups. Yeah. Hundreds boiled down into 23 different groups. And you can make new sauces by going backwards. That's right. And that's one of the exciting things about it, is they're sort of reinventing classic recipes many times. And we should mention the two. I kind of walked over this. One of the most familiar complex dispersed systems that you know of is ice cream. Yeah. Because ice cream is actually very complex. It's solid, which is milk fat and milk protein liquid, which is water and gas air, because you whip air through it as you're chilling it, and in at least two colloidal states. So ice cream is a lot more complex than you might think. Yes. And delicious. Yes. And we'll see later on. Molecular gastronomists have figured out how to make that very complex delicacy in a very easy way. Oh, blaze with this. Liquid nitrogen. Yeah. So, Chuck, we have an idea now that you can apply what looks like math, which is really just shorthand to cooking for molecular gastronomy. Other molecular gastronomists have come up with basically new ways of preparing or presenting food. Right. Yes. Big time. And some are bigger than others. Some are more buzzwords than others. Like sous vide. Cooking very popular these days. Yes, sous vide is when you take sometimes it's meat, sometimes it's vegetables, and you put it in a bag with its spices that you want, and you vacuum seal it, gets every single bit of air out. And then you cook that bag of something that won't melt. Obviously, you cook the bag with the food in it in a water bath. That's a very steady temperature, but never boiling. It's not like rice haroni that you're boiling. Right. A little more complex than that. It's generally a very low temperature. So, like, if you're going to cook meat, you put it in about 140 degrees and you cook it for 30 minutes. Yeah. Well, it depends on what it is, but yeah, what it does is, in the end, you retain the nutrients more, retain the juices, the flavor, and you get a perfectly even cooking experience. Right. And take it out and you flash fry it on both sides to sear it. Real nice. Well, not flash fry, sear it. And you've just basically made a steak as per molecular gastronomy. Yeah. I like your recipe better, though. It's been working for you. Yeah, it's nice. Although I do want to try the sous vide. It's just a little pricey to get into. Yeah, because really you need a vacuum sealer and a water oven. Technically, I guess you could do it on the stove. But the whole key to Southea is having a really precise, consistent temperature. Yes. Unless you're really good on your gas range, you're probably not going to be able to do that with just a pot and water. That is correct. What about Spherification? Technically, you can do this with just a normal pot of water, right? Yeah. Tell me about that. So verification is basically a way of presenting food and kind of turning mundane stuff into delicious little balls of food that kind of explode in your mouth, right? Yeah, it's got liquid. It's like remember that gum that used to chew that had the liquid center freshen up? Yeah, freshen up. That stuff is still around. It's awesome. The blue peppermint kind. That's good. Yeah. So basically, Spherification is taking it's a gelling reaction between calcium chloride and alginate. Alginate is this gum like substance that's extracted from seaweed. Yeah. Okay, so you take the calcium chloride to make olive spheres. Right. Take olive juice, calcium chloride. And I'm not giving any amounts, which is very important, like specific amounts, but I'm just giving you a rough idea. You take olive juice and calcium chloride, mix it together, right. You take algen it, and you mix it with water, allow it to sit overnight, let the air bubbles rise to the surface and escape. Right. And then the next day, you make little tiny balls out of the calcium chloride and olive juice mixtures, and then very delicately drop it into the alginate blend of water and a chemical reaction happens. Right. Apparently, long chain alginate polymers become linked because of the calcium chloride ions. Right. A gel is formed because you introduce them as little balls. They turn into little gel balls of olive taste. And you take them out? No, you drain them, put them in a cold water bath, and then after that, they're set. And you can pop them in your mouth. Yeah. Or serve them like caviar. I know one recipe that they had in here was for someone that takes apple juice and makes little caviar apple. Basically. Yeah. You would probably spoon that on top of some sort of other dish, and all of a sudden, these flavors are bursting in your mouth as you bite into it. And it's just an experience. It is. So I guess at this point, molecular gastronomy is food done. Ridiculous. Yeah. They can flash freeze. That's a big popular thing. They have something now called the anti griddle, and I've seen Blaze use this, too. It's basically cold cooking. He's into the cold cooking, but it's a griddle, and instead of getting hot, it goes down to negative 30 degrees Fahrenheit. And so I've seen Blaze put mayonnaise on there and then take that little frozen mayonnaise and bait and batter it and fry it. So in the end, you have a fried mayonnaise ball. That sounds awesome. And it stays at its ball form until you squish the burger down. That is awesome. I did not know about that. Pretty cool. I don't know if he does that at Flip, but I've seen him do that on TV show once, so yeah, with the anti griddle and flash freezing, it's basically you're taking something that's liquid and making the outside hard and leaving the interior. The core is, like, in a liquid state. So you do that with, like, chocolate, you get something pretty awesome, right? I would think so, I guess. Chuck, those are some fairly common or if you go to a molecular gastronomy restaurant around the world, you're going to run into something like that spherification, which was, I think, introduced by a guy named Ferran Adria in Spain. Yeah. Who owns Abu Lily in Roses, Spain? He created that. But I think it's become kind of standard if you want to do it more at home. If you want to engage in molecular gastronomy, you could do verification. You just have to have the right ingredients. But it's also just kind of using technology. It's like transhuman cooking as well. So if you want to cook duck all orange, right? Yeah, duck all orange. I got it that time. Classic dish. You would basically roasted duck for 2 hours. If you're going to do it molecularly, you would prefer using a microwave. Takes a lot less time, a lot less energy. I'm not into it. I'm not either, Chuck. Josh, there are some tools. We said one of the great criticisms of molecular gastronomy is this isn't something that most people can do in their kitchen, which is that's part of cooking. That's what makes cooking soulful. You do it at home. There's a very special room in your house that you cook in, and you teach your kids or your grandkids, and it's a family bonding. Exactly. But a lot of the stuff we just talked about, you can't necessarily do in your kitchen. Or can you answer? You can. You can go out and buy an anti griddle, right? Sure. This is something you could have stored in your kitchen, I think about one $200. Okay. So if you were wealthy, you could go out and buy an anti griddle. Yeah. You can get a water oven for a few hundred and a good vacuum sealer for about a buck 50. So all in on the south, $500 or less. You can do that. It's not too bad. Yeah. The Hypodermic syringe isn't very expensive. You can go down to your local free clinic and pose as a junkie, and they'll give you a bunch of them for free. Yeah. I actually use those. They have, like, the cooking syringes. Yeah. Inject meats with marinades. Or if you want to make the little apple caviar, this is good to have. It's also very good for extracting egg white from egg yolk. There's a very famous picture that appears in this article of a cracked egg and a syringe dipping into it. That's like the visual icon for molecular gastronomy. That was it. Yeah. A vacuum machine is very important for sous vide cooking. Right? Yeah. Can't let any water in there. It's got to be sealed tight. And then there's the gastro vac, which is kind of like an all in one utility for cooking molecularly. It's about $5,000. Yeah. So it's what is it? A Crock Pot vacuum pump and a heating plate all in one. Not bad. And then you got liquid nitrogen, which is what Blaze loves to work with. Right. And we were talking about making ice cream actually easier and creating a colloidal system. You can say, follow any recipe for ice cream, and you get the ice cream mixture already. But before you get to the step of actually processing it, you just pour in some liquid nitrogen and you stir it, and bada bing, you have just created ice cream. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Another thing I've seen Blaze do is to get a very large serving plate, he'll have a very small, like, let's say almost like in a moose boost, like, literally one bite. And then he'll have spices sprinkled on the plate, and he'll at the table. They will pour some liquid nitrogen onto the plate, and it starts it's like something out of the abyss. It stays together, and it starts, like, dancing all over the plate and collecting the spice. So it's a clear it looks like vodka or something, but it's vodka sailing all over your plate until it's collected all the spice into its little sphere. That is awesome. It's very cool. Where was that? I saw a YouTube of it. Nice. Yes. Blaze has done it. Okay. Very inventive guy. And he lives I mean, we should have had him in here. Actually, he wouldn't have come in here. We could probably get in touch with him. All right, well, Richard Blaze, if you're out there and you have a time machine, get in touch with us because we'd like to have you on. I see him walking his dog and his kid all the time over. Is he live in decay? No, I saw him over near the Edgewood shopping center. Okay. Say hi for me next time. Hey, Blaze. Be like, hey, do that thing with that liquid nitrogen thing you do. Yeah, exactly. Dang old goat fell over. That's it. You got anything else, Chuck? Well, we should say that if liquid nitrogen seems odd, it's really blaze. Likens, it to deep frying, except it's cold frying. I'm glad you brought that up. There is a lot of criticism to molecular gastronomy. There's also a lot of explanation to it, too. Like that right. Hervetise once said, we pointed out that you can cook an egg by adding heat to it. You can also achieve the same end by adding alcohol to it. Oh, really? Yeah. So what's the problem? Especially if you can change the flavor, create, like, something new by adding alcohol rather than just cooking. Right. I think molecular astronomists kind of think that people who have a problem with it are just kind of looking at it the wrong way. Like you're still achieving the same and you're just running a different process or different means. Right. I think it's cool. I wouldn't want to eat this. It's expensive, for one. If you go to one of these restaurants, you're going to drop some serious cash. That's true, but I'm kind of a classicist as well. No, you're not. No, I'm a Egalitarian. I want the emulsifiers in my food. Oh, so you're classist upward, not downward? No, I mean I don't mean a classicist. I mean a classic. Oh, got you. I'm into the classic. Well, you went right from, like, very expensive meals into class. Yes. I didn't realize you were sorry. What's? Sad. If you said it correctly, I just assumed you got classes. No. Yeah. Somewhat confused now. Yeah, me, too. So that's it for molecular gastronomy. If you want to learn more, including a list of some of the churches of molecular gastronomy around the world, you can type in molecular gastronomy in the handy search bar@houseofworks.com. It will pull up a great article. And now, of course, we've just traced innocently into the forest of listener mail. That's right, Josh. And this is a sad one. No jokes on this one because we have lost a listener, sadly. And her friend Amanda wrote us to tell us about it. Hi, guys and Jerry. Hope you're keeping well. I am, unfortunately, the bearer of bad news. One of stuff you should know. As big as. Fans. Lynn Volos passed away from a particularly virulent cancer a few days ago, and I think we got this letter last week. So, mid March, my friendship with Lynn epitomized all that is new in this century. I was a full time student with no money needed, some entertainment in the evenings in early 2001, and I just read a book that delighted me. The publisher set up a message board. So off I went and joined a rabble, rousing community of women from all over the world. Lynn was one of the first to welcome me, and in the ensuing decade would often give me the keys to the bus, so to speak, when she was away or indisposed to keep the peace. Because, you see, Lynn was a peacemaker. She must have seen in me a glimmer of her ability to relax, afraid nerves, bring people together in crisis and joy, and be a center of calm and still water during many of the storms we have weathered individually and as a community, lynn lived a life that I doubt many of us could imagine. She discovered her true self later in life and moved from the Deep South to the Northeast to be with her darling Nikki. Facing hardships from the life to which she had given so much, lynn gave more. As a mother to Jessica and Becca, a beloved auntie, as a caregiver to seniors and special needs kids, and to her wonderful animals that gave her so much happiness. Just a short time ago, Lin was diagnosed with cancer, and with the bravest of faces, she fought on until she could no longer. I never met Lynn in life, actually, but I cannot imagine the last ten years of my life without her in it. Not only have I lost a friend, our community has lost a beloved presence. And stuff you should know is minus. One evangelist who got a treat with her last almost hour long show last week, lynn loves Stuff You Should Know, I think more for the rational, measured and well balanced way you all present information without judgment and controversy. So many traits that you all share with Lynn. I will think of her whenever I hear, hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and with me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. As always. Your friend, Amanda. Very sad. That is sad. Thank you, Amanda. And I asked Amanda if there was any kind of charity that her family might want us to mention, and she said yes. And she wrote her family and said that if anyone was moved by this, that you can make a donation to the Animal Rescue Fund of Mississippi at www.arfms.com. So, a great charity as well. Well, thank you again, Amanda, for letting us know and rest in peace. Linz Volos. Although we never knew you, we're glad you listened to us. Thank you for listening. Part of The Stuff You Should Know family for sure and we hope that you can still get us wherever you are, wherever you may be. If you want to let us know about something good, something sad, something neutral, we always want to hear it. You can send it in an email to stuffpodcast@houseupworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep works.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our home page. The housetop works. 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 schools out, the sun 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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c482fbaa-5460-11e8-b38c-5710a8a007ae | SYSK Selects: How the Rosetta Stone Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-rosetta-stone-works | Sometimes providence smiles on historians. Thus is the case with the Rosetta stone, an ancient Egyptian tablet that served as the key for unlocking hieroglyphics, lost to time for a millennia. In this classic episode, learn about the international intrigue, rivalry to translate it and the luck that led to the founding of Egyptology. | Sometimes providence smiles on historians. Thus is the case with the Rosetta stone, an ancient Egyptian tablet that served as the key for unlocking hieroglyphics, lost to time for a millennia. In this classic episode, learn about the international intrigue, rivalry to translate it and the luck that led to the founding of Egyptology. | Sat, 01 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=214, tm_isdst=0) | 35906130 | audio/mpeg | "Hey there, everyone. It's me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen a 2013 episode, how the Rosetta Stone Works. It's kind of amazing, actually, that had it not been for this one government decree that happened to be written in a few different languages, we may never have figured out what the heck hieroglyphics mean, and they would have been lost forever, including the culture that formed the basis of a significant portion of Western civilization. So check it out. How the Rosetta Stone works. Coming at you 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. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. The Overly hot Studio edition. I have a bit of a chill now. You don't. I do. I'm not at all hot. Yeah. You also said that it hurt when our new coworker shook your hand. What does that say? He has a strong handshake. Okay. And you're always cold. It's always lamps in here. Well, Jerry's decorated it's nice. It is nice. It's just like an Ikea catalog. That's right. Chuck? Yes. How many times have you been to Egypt? Counting that trip in high school, zero. Same here. Yeah. And yet we know an awful lot about Egypt. Yeah. It's popular, especially ancient Egypt. Sure. Like, I would wager that we probably know more about ancient Egypt than modern Egypt. Yeah. Most people in the west. Yes. Is there a modern Egypt? There is, and it's undergoing quite a bit of turmoil right now. Yeah, no kidding. Okay. I just want to make sure that you knew that Egypt was still around. Yes. Okay. Well, the reason that you and I know a lot about Egypt is thanks to a soft science, one of the humanities, you would call it called Egyptology pretty on the nose name for the study of ancient Egypt. Yeah. It's a really popular thing, and has been for a while. A while, but not too terribly long, I would say about the beginning of the 19th century. And the reason that all of it was fostered and that all of it came about and that we, you and me, know about Egypt was because of the discovery of a tablet known as the Rosetta Stone. That's right. But you can also go back even further and make the case that if it wasn't for Napoleon Bonaparte, we may not understand Egypt to this day. Yeah. That little guy. He wasn't that little, though, is that right? Right. He was average height. Right. Why do people say that, then? Where did that come from? Because some doctor wrote down, I think, upon his death, that he was five foot two. But what a lot of people don't realize is that the doctor was using the French inch, which is longer than the British imperial inch. Really? So when you translate five foot two from the French inch, to the imperial inch, he was about five six. Okay. Which is average height. And the other reason why he was called like, the little Emperor by his armies was because compared to most of his bodyguards and his people he had around him sure. He was shorter than them. Yeah. I guess when you're five six, he wants some 64 dudes around you. Right. But the idea that he was a very short man is not correct. Yeah, I'd always heard that, but I didn't know the story. The French inch. There's your band name for the day. Although I typically don't like rhyming names. French inch doesn't rhyme. It sounds similar. I wouldn't call it a rhyme. French an inch. Yes. French inch. Oh, the e and the I. Yeah. That's nitpicky. Well, yeah, it's the vowels that rhyme, not the consonant. Yes, but if you were Steve Malkmus and you put French at the end of a line and an inch at the end of another, it would be rymey. And you'd sell a lot of records. That's right. Yeah. Well, there was our Pavement reference episode. That's becoming a daily thing, too. So you want to get on with this? Yeah, let's do it. We're going to be talking Rosetta Stone, not the language software, which neither one of us has ever used. No, we're talking about the real thing, which is actually bigger than I thought. Many things are smaller for me. Like, when you see them in person, mona Lisa, of course, Mona Lisa is small. Like, I went to England. I was like Big Ben. That ain't so big. Oh, really? Yes. I don't think I had the impression of Big Ben, but it's kind of overwhelmed. It definitely didn't seem big. Whereas the Eiffel Tower, that was bigger than I thought. That is where I developed a fear of heights that still plagues me to this day. Like, it literally happened to me on the Eiffel Tower on the way up. Never had a fear of heights my entire life. On the way down, I was hanging onto the fence. Really? And it took me forever to get down because I was suddenly deathly afraid of how it just hit me. My brain changed. Yes. How old are you? 17. Wow. Yeah. I didn't go up to the top. I probably missed out. I didn't either. It was the first level that got me. Oh, really? Man. Wow. All right. Anyway, where was I going? Oh, it's bigger than I thought it was. It is black basalt, and it weighs about three quarters of a ton. 46 inches high point, 530 inches wide and twelve inches deep. And it's large. It's heavy. You didn't write this, did you? No. No. It's about the size of a heavy coffee table. Were you about to make fun of something? No, I was just going to say whoever wrote this referenced an LCD TV of medium size. Yeah. Medium screen, LCD television. Oh. By the way. Thank you. To Theresa Dove fan request. Okay. Yeah. That's who requested this one. Yeah. Okay. So it's larger than I thought, and I learned a lot about this. I thought the Rosetta Stone, because I'm a dummy, was literally like, here's what our alphabet is, and here's what everything means. And now that you found it, you can decipher everything. Yeah, I think I had the same impression as well until I read this. I thought it was, like, created as a key to hire glyphos. Not at all. Not so it was a government document. Basically, it's a stele. Stele is the plural. And it's not just the Egyptians that use the Mayans have largely been figured out. Their language has from old stele. Yeah. Well, that's it. Those are the two that use stele. Yeah. In this case, it's an inscription carved in three different languages greek, Hieroglyphics and Demotic with a T. Not demonic. Yeah, demotic. But since I'm from the South, I softened my tea, so it might sound like I'm saying demonic. Yeah. And basically, it was in the three languages to ensure that everybody could read it because it was an official government degree. Not super exciting, though. No, it wasn't. Basically what the Rosetta Stone says. And like you said, it's in three languages. There's a decree that says essentially that Ptolemy V is a great ruler and he is a righteous worshiper of all the right gods. So he's okay in our book. And this decree was made by some priests who gathered at Memphis. And they inscribed the stone or had it inscribed and dated March 27, 196 BC. Yeah. And it doesn't actually say March 27 in hieroglyphics. It says 18 Maschir, which on the Egyptian calendar translates to something like March 27. And then they got the 196 because somewhere in there references the 9th year of Ptolemy the fifth reign. Right. Which is about 196. So that's where they got the date from what we would in the west equate it to yeah. So like we said, it doesn't say anything of particular interest at the time. It was an important message. But it's not the Rosetta Stone because of what is transcribed upon that stone. No, it's the fact that it's in three different languages. Exactly. Yeah. So there's, like you said, hieroglyphics, Demotic and Greek and hieroglyphics were a sacred alphabet. They use that for really important stuff. So I didn't know this either. I thought just any old thing they wanted to write was hieroglyph. No, that's what they had demiotic for or demonic. That was kind of like an abbreviated, shorthand, more vulgar version of hieroglyphic. Yeah. And in between that was Higher Attic, which was slightly more complicated than demonic, but less complicated and not sacred. Like hieroglyphics. Yeah. It was like a kind of a transition between demonic and hieroglyphics. Yeah. It was cursive. Right. So you could use hieratic for, like, a business transaction. Sure. But if you were saying the king is a very righteous ruler. And you mentioned the gods. You're going to use hieroglyphics. That's right. So to have it written in Greek, demotic, which was an offshoot of hierarch, which was an offshoot of hieroglyphics and hieroglyphics, these priests that gathered and issued this decree that was written on the Rosetta Stone, they made sure that everyone in Egypt who was literate could read this one way or another. Yeah. And it was sort of not a stroke of luck. I mean, it was just smart thinking at the time, but ended up being a stroke of luck because the three languages without that, I don't think we may have never been able to figure out hieroglyphics. No, agreed. They've been lost forever. Exactly. And that's not the only way that the Rosetta Stone was kind of a bit of fortune. So the reason that it was lost was up until the fourth century Ad, any average Egyptian could have read the Rosetta Stone one way or another. Yeah. But after that, the Egypt, it left the Pharaonic stage. Cleopatra is the last pharaoh of Egypt, and then it came to be ruled by the Greeks later on, the Romans, the Talmites and a bunch of different foreigners or different groups. And with these groups came the introduction of new gods and the suppression of old gods. And since hieroglyphics were very much religious in nature, they are sacred or holy, but associated with those old gods, hieroglyphics itself came to be cut off, stop. Suppressed. Yeah. Especially Christianity. They tended to want to get rid of other competing gods and languages that are tied to those gods. Right. But luckily, we still had demotic. That's right. And demonic wasn't taboo. That eventually became what's known as Coptic, and Coptic used some Greek and then a little bit of still of the hieroglyphic symbols. So there's still like this is just a little bit very tenuous link between Coptic and hieroglyphics. But. Then Coptic is lost. It's pushed out by Arabic. Yeah. And then that was way gone. Goodbye, hieroglyphics. That's it. That was like the hieroglyphics is no longer understood by anyone walking planet Earth. And that means that all of the ancient Egyptian civilization itself was lost. Yes. 1000 years. Aside from its structures, the thought put into it, the reasoning behind it, all the explanations, all the inscriptions, all the writing all over these ancient buildings are understood by no one now. And then, as a result of that, the buildings themselves, the last vestiges of this ancient civilization, are deconstructed and used for the next wave by new rulers. And so ancient Egyptian culture is lost to the mists of time. Wow. Thanks. Very nice. Yeah. There was no love lost. They were basically like, we don't need this language anymore, we don't need these sacred buildings anymore. They're pagan anyway. Yeah. Let's tear them all down, build up new ones. And oddly, the Rosetta Stone was actually used as a buttress in a wall of a new building yes. As part of the construction. Right. This is another way that this is all just stroke of luck after stroke of luck. So the first stroke of luck, as you pointed out, is that they just happen to decree that this thing be written in three languages. Yeah. Okay. Same message in three languages. Then it's used for a building, a wall. Right. Yeah. Then it happens to be discovered by some French who are marooned in Egypt because they got crushed by the British right. When they tried to invade. Yeah, I guess. Let's talk about that for a second. Okay. The French thought, hey, we need to get a strong hold on India eventually. And Napoleon said, I think a good way to do that is to start a little further away in, let's say, Egypt. Let's cut off the Brits access to the Nile River, and that will really help our cause. Unfortunately, the Brits had a great navy and pretty much destroyed all their ships and stranded them in Egypt for, what, 19 years. Yeah. And so for the French, whose ships were now at the bottom of Abukir Bay, they decided that they really kind of needed to set themselves to creating fort. Yeah. Since we're here. Right. And it wasn't just military that was there. Part of this invasion, this strategy that Napoleon had come up with to take over Egypt was kind of a hearts and minds strategy, too. And so he created something called the Institute of Egypt, also known as the Scientific and Artistic Commission. Mineralogist mathematicians, art historians, a lot of engineers, chemists, all of these people from the letters and sciences brought together to understand and study Egypt. Yeah. They were actually given military rank, but they weren't I think that was just more of here. Just so we'll call you military. Right. They weren't from military backgrounds, so they were thinkers, but they were among this invading force that was less stranded in France. So as the real military guys were billing the forts, the people from the Institute of Egypt start studying Egypt. Yeah, I guess they were the first Egyptologists. Yeah. Oh, boy. Good. It was close. They definitely were. And it was very covert operation. Like, they weren't really allowed to talk about what they were doing that much, except to just say, hey, we're following Napoleon's orders, acting on behalf of the good of the French Republic. Right. That's what we're doing. Don't ask any questions. Yes. Don't ask why I have this measuring tape out exactly. Or why I'm transcribing things from papyrus. But they did become, I guess, embedded with the local population as well to help learn as much as they could. And so it's under this climate that French soldier one day finds this very polished black stone that's inscribed, and something about it told him that it was pretty important. So we took it to these early Egyptologists. The French and said, you guys think this is important? And they said, yes. Yeah, that was Lieutenant Pierre Francois Bushard, and he took it to his boss and they said, okay, this is weird that this is built into a wall, but it's clearly something of note and maybe we should take a closer look at it. And immediately they started to get to work on trying to transcribe. It super difficult at the time and would prove to be difficult over the years. It eventually ended up in the hands of England, of course, but luckily, the Institute of Egypt people made copies of it. Yeah. I think that like etchings or plaster molds and things, I'm sure. Yeah. But they had readable copies of the Rosetta Stone, so when they did give it up to the British, it wasn't entirely lost to them. That's right. And give it up, as in, not, here, have this. It was more like, Here, we're taking this in the Treaty of Alexandria. We're going to take this in a bunch of other stuff. So now, basically, you have the French and the British both have the Rosetta Stone, the one group that doesn't, or the Egyptians, but we'll get to that later. Yeah. Both of them recognize that this is a very important something. They know that it's some sort of decree. They recognize that it's in three different languages. And I think it becomes obvious to them that this could be the key to understanding hieroglyphs, which people have tried to understand. This is not new. No. People going back to a fellow named Horopolo, who was a fifth century scholar. Supposedly, he may not have actually existed. He created, basically, what was a translation for hieroglyphics, but it was a false translation, as we'll see, but dating back, basically, from the moment that hieroglyphics were lost to history, people have tried to understand them. So the British and the French were aware of this. Like, this may be the key to these mysterious hieroglyphics, and this is important, so we're going to try to translate it. Yeah. Well, it became a race, really, because they didn't like each other very much, and they both wanted to be the first ones to figure out what these hieroglyphics meant and how to unlock this history. They sent their best and their brightest on the English side, the British side, it was a scholar named Thomas Young. And then on the French side, we had Jean Francois Champagne, who he was sort of born to do this, apparently. He was way into Egypt as a kid, even, and as a young child said, I'm going to figure out hieroglyphics one day. Yeah. He was even called the Egyptian because he had dark skin and dark hair, and I think a magician, like, foretold his fame one day. Yeah. When he was born, supposedly a magician said, this guy is going to be famous. And he was. Yeah, he was a very talented linguist. He studied under a guy named Sylvester de Sassy. Yes. Antoine Isaac Sylvester de Sasi, who would take a crack at the Rosetta Stone, but he trained champagne on is that how we're saying it? Yeah, sure, he trained him, but champagne and quickly went from student to master. He applied to be a student at an institute in Paris and they were impressed enough with his application that they said, how about you just skip the school part and come beyond the faculty? That's pretty good. Yeah, that's a talented linguist. Yeah, they said the same thing when I applied to Georgia. Is that right? You just want to go and be an English teacher? Yeah. Oh, really? You turned it down? Sure, I wanted to be a student. Oh, got you. So before all this happens, we have the Greek inscription transcribed, which that was Reverend Steven Watson, too. And I don't want to say it was no big deal, but there were quite a few people that could have done this. It wasn't like unlocking hieroglyphics. No. But it was a necessary part of the process. Right. So we want to give them as due. So we have a translation, an accurate translation of what the stone says. Exactly. So that's step one. And if you have one translated, then if you're a linguist, I guess it sounds really difficult to do. I can't imagine the painstaking process of figuring out an alphabet. Yeah. Think about how hard it is to translate a well known language in a language that you speak. Imagine translating a language that's totally lost into something understandable. Yeah. So we had the Greek and then eventually we had the Demotic as well. Yeah. Thanks to Antoine. And that same year, at the same time, a Swedish diplomat named Ocrbalad also translated the demonic and they both went about it two different ways. I thought this is pretty interesting. Yeah. So Dysashi figured out that there were two proper names, at least in there, ptolemy and Alexander, and he used those to match up sounds and symbols. Ocrblad probably had the bigger breakthrough. He used a different technique. He recognized that there was something similar between Demotic and Coptic. Yeah. He was well schooled in Coptic. Right. Which helped, obviously. Yeah. That was his big breakthrough. He figured out what words spelled love, temple and Greek, and he used that to form, basically, this rough structure for demonic, based on his awareness of Coptic. Yeah. That's only eleven letters. That's pretty impressive. Yeah. But if you've got eleven letters, that's a decent I think they call it a skeletal outline. I guess that's what you'd have. Well, yeah, especially since Coptic was only about 22, plus a couple more from hieroglyphics. Yeah. It's like a big wheel of Fortune game after that. Right. So the thing is, though, this established connection now between Coptic and demonic, and then demonic and hieroglyphic, since they're side by side, that kind of opened up this mentality that would be needed to finally crack the hieroglyphics for the Rosetta Stone. And Thomas Young was the first to really try it. He was the British guy and he got somewhat far, but he gave up. Yeah. In 1814, his big breakthrough was figuring out what a cartoon was. And that is they say oval, but it's a little more squared away with round edges, but it's a loop, basically, with hieroglyphic characters in it. And he figured out that these are not only proper names, but royal names. Anything contained in a cartoon is a royal name, which was a big breakthrough because he identified Tolami the pharaoh's name in one of the cartouches. Cartouches. And his Queen Baranika was in there as well. So he said, you know what? Again, I've got these two names now to work with. But he was still working on Hieropolo's false premise that hieroglyphics was not phonetic in nature and that it was based just on symbols. Right. That's what Heropolo's big contribution was, to confuse centuries worth of scholars. It's not bad for Young because he was onto something, and if he wasn't using that, the fake or not fake, but just the poor system, then he might have figured it out. Right. So this is the thing. Everyone believed Heropolo because Heropolo claimed that his translation was a direct translation from hieroglyphic. It was written in the fifth century Ad, right around the time we lost hieroglyphics. So it was considered to be a primary source and basically completely reasonable. Yeah, but it was wrong. It was wrong because it said that hieroglyphics are symbolic. So, like, if you see a cart, a picture that looks like a cart next to a cat and then a lizard, what that should say under hiropolis translation is cart, cat, lizard. This kept throwing everybody off because it didn't make sense. Right. Especially when compared to the Greek translation and the translation of demonic. It didn't make any sense whatsoever. So, like you said, Young gave up, but he published his findings. And you can really strongly make a case that, had it not been for Young's breakthrough, champaglion would not have cracked the Rosetta Stone. No. We should mention here that they should just accept each other as co workers and colleagues and get along. But there was a competition that exists to this day of what country claims that they translated the Rosetta Stone. The French still say that champagne was really the one. The Brits obviously say no, it was really Young. And even when they displayed it in 1972, one of the few times it's left England, or maybe the only time they let France display it for like, a year, they argued about the size of the photos of the two on both sides of it, when in fact the photos were the same size of Young and Shampoolion. Yeah, not photos, but portraits. Yeah, but the French were like, well, no, Young's is bigger. The Brits were like, no, his is bigger. Right. And they were the same size. So they never came to a common ground on who did it, when in fact, they both did. And there were rumors, apparently during that time that France was going to just steal the Rosetta Stone and keep it and not return it back to England. And this is in the 1970s, so not like a long time ago. Right. So champagne picked up in 1814 where Young left off and started to think, you know what? I need to think more about this symbol thing. That hiropolo. I don't know if he was on base after all. And that was actually the breakthrough. He got some old cartouches and he figured out that the last two letters and one of them were identical. So that's a good thing because it's the same letter. He figured out that it was the letter S, and then the first character was a circle and he said, maybe that's the sun. Right. And in ancient Egypt, the sun god was ranked. Yeah. And so basically figured out that name was Ramsays. Yeah. And that was a huge breakthrough. He figured out the identical letters. The last two were s's. First one was RA. And since he knew that it was in a cartoon, that it was a royal name from that era, the only person it could have been was Ramsey. So that's how he cracked the code, like you say. Yeah. And cracked it in like, hey, this is a phonetic thing. He was wrong the whole time. And apparently he fainted on the spot, which is dramatic. Yeah. It's kind of cute. He was French. Sure. So out of that moment, Egyptology was fully born. Like now we had a way to understand all this stuff that hadn't been destroyed and reused as building material. Which took a long time, though. It wasn't like they could just read it. It still took a lot of translating. Oh, yeah. But they had the basis. Exactly. Yeah. All they've done is transcribe one single stella. They had millennia worth of things to, like papyrus or papyri and billing inscriptions and sarcophagii and all that love letters. Yeah. Whatever you have. Sure. Egyptology is born. And now that it's understood at that moment, there's also a great desire to protect Egypt and all of its treasures. Yes. And to get things right. Because previous to that, Napoleon and Gang did a pretty good job. But they also speculated a lot. Yeah. Because they couldn't read hieroglyphic. Yeah. So they ended up correcting a lot of things about what they thought about Egypt. And like you said, they wanted to protect things because Egypt, at the time, they were selling these things off to collectors left and right because, A, they didn't know their true value, and B, there was a market for it. Sure. Doctors during the Middle Ages who were just big dummies would use mummies from Egypt. They grind it up and use it to cure disease, which didn't work. So there was this move to protect Egyptian antiquities from Egyptians. There was kind of this patriarchal mentality, especially among the British, that we need to get everything out of Egypt and into museums and, like, the hands of us who will preserve them and not sell them to Middle Ages doctors for curals. But to his credit, in my opinion, champagne on argued very strongly in favor of founding a museum in Egypt to store these and keeping them in Egypt. Yeah, I think he was a little bit of a control freak. Like, he knew that he could care for things in the proper way, and I don't think he trusted even other museums at the time to care for things in the right way. And he was kind of right because a lot of it was destroyed. Yeah. Like, apparently to preserve an ancient papyrus, you have to store it in a low humidity area in a chamber, in a bamboo box container. And they didn't know this, and they shipped them by sea to the UK. And they all crumbled the nothingness on the way. Tummy yeah. So the Rosetta Stone still sits in the museum in London, where it's been since 18? Two, except for the time it went to France briefly, and in 2003, Egypt. I was like, you know what? I want this thing back. Not I. We want this thing back and it's ours. And I don't care who found it. It's ours. And England said in 2005, took him two years to build a replica and say, hey, how about this? This is just like it. I guess at least they didn't try to pass it off as the real one. Well, yeah, that's true. You send them a replica and they're like, I appreciate this. This is nice, but we really would like the real thing. And England said no. And not just England, but a lot of the big museums, the Louvre and a bunch of the world museums kind of all got together in support of one another and said, you know what repatriotation is? We're not into it. We're just not going to give things back anymore because we can care for it best. It belongs to the world now. And they just sort of banded together and said, we're keeping our stuff crazy. I think where it's probably going to stay, they are trying to get it for, I think in 2012, they tried to get it for the grand opening of the Grand Egypt Museum. Sounds like it didn't happen, but even then they said no. They want it for, like, three weeks, and they said nope under the guise of I don't know if it's guys, but they said it'd be too dangerous to transport it. That's the story they have, at least. Yeah. So that's how many DMs work? No pillage and do not do you got anything else? No, sir. That is. The Rosetta Stone, everybody. If you want to learn more about it, you should type that word, those words Rosetta Stone in the search Bar how Stuff Works. And it will bring up this article. And since I said search bar, it means it's time for a message. Now, Chuck, it's time for listener mail. Oh, no. How about instead? Okay. All right. For those of you who don't know, this is at the point where we read off the people who were nice enough to send us little gifts and trinkets and music and letters and all sorts of things. And here we go. Go ahead. All right. Sarah sent us some cool graphic prints, one of which was You Can't Take the sky from Me from one of my favorite shows, Firefly. Nice. Yeah. Very cool prints. Amy sent us a lovely carved wooden cicada from Timber green woods. Yeah, very cool. Anne McDonough sent us a Snoopy postcard and a handwritten letter of thanks. Very nice. Liz from New Zealand sent us a lot of stuff. That's new Zealand candy. New Zealand chocolates. New Zealand chips. Surfboard. Postcard. Really lovely framed photos from her dad, rudy Goldstein photography. It's on Facebook. It's Rgoldstein photography. So check it out. Yeah, it's very cool. I have those on my desk. Sean Antoniac sent us some custom vinyls, some stickers from Eight One One Graphics.com. He and his brother yeah, nice. Have this company, and it's cool stuff like skater style stuff. Right. BuyCostumes.com it's. Buicostumes.com, send us a full size adult gremlin costume which Ben Bowling wore all day yesterday in the office. Yes. Ben Bowen from stuff they don't want you to know. In car stuff. He's weird. Did you see that? He emailed me. They did that. Did you actually see that? I haven't seen a picture of him yet. I put on the hand one day and tried to creep out Strickland, but he was like, that's not the first scrumlined hand up out of my shoulder. Cat teepee. Megan oh, yeah. Sent a cat teepee my way because I have two cats and my big boy Lauren gets in it now we call it a spirit tent. Nice. And he just hangs out in there and it's pretty neat. I mean, it's what you think. It's just like a little small TP for your kitty. That's very cute. So if you have a cat, I would suggest you buying one. Let's see. Susan sent you a birthday card. It's a dog drinking beer. Yeah. That was nice. Yes, it was. Kelly Clarkson. Some T shirts. And he is a handyman in Brooklyn, and he gifted us 2 hours of handyman work to give to someone we know in Brooklyn. In Brooklyn. That is very cool. So I've actually texted our buddy Joe Randazzo, said, hey, you need any work done? We have two free hours of handyman work. So if you're in Brooklyn, you can go to Notjustandyman.com and give Kellam a call. He'll fix your sink or do whatever you need around the house, I guess. What's he going to do for Joe? I don't know. Joe didn't respond. We'll go to Hodgeman next, I guess, and just work our way down the list. Although Hodgeman can afford to pay people. We should give it to, like, someone else. Okay. All right. I'll figure it out. Clive fantasy gave us some really cool Panama Canal postcards. Yeah, those are neat. Rachel from Uber. Have you heard of Uber? Sort of like a taxi cab service now? Oh, yeah, but it's Town Cars, and they have an app, and you can say, Just come get me now. Right, yeah, Yummy was telling me about that. Yeah, they sent us Uber gift cards. And I will send you your gift code for us. Awesome. Like, $100 in free. Oh, that's a lot. I know. Somebody is going to be going to the airport for free. Yeah. Kristen Curran has been taking us along with her on a tour of Europe, it seems like. We've got postcards from her from Edinburgh, Bruge, Amsterdam, Slovakia, Berlin, all over the place. So thanks for those. We also got something from Threadless selfdesigned T shirt, bigfoot cradling and alien Loch Ness monsters in the background. Yeah, there was also, like, Men in Black and an abduction going on, all sorts of stuff. Very cool. And then Kiara Newrin sent the wife some jewelry, and you can visit her store. Thank you very much, Kiara, at Caribouclassics etsy.com. So that's our administrative details for now, right? Yeah. Part one. We'll have a part two, I guess, on the next episode. Yes, we will. We'll cover music and books. Nice. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshonow and you can join us at our home on the web. STUFFYou Know.com, stuffy 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 into your favorite show." | |
How will the future crime database work? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-will-the-future-crime-database-work | The US and England have databases containing DNA from millions of citizens. Originally only criminals were included, but as the programs expanded many more people were added. Learn how these databases work -- and why they were built -- in this episode. | The US and England have databases containing DNA from millions of citizens. Originally only criminals were included, but as the programs expanded many more people were added. Learn how these databases work -- and why they were built -- in this episode. | Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:14:41 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=18, tm_min=14, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=314, tm_isdst=0) | 27109494 | 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. 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, 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. With me, as always, is Charles W. Bryant. Hi, Chuck. I'm here, Josh. Oh, wait, this isn't the Halloween episode. No, that already came out. That was good, though. I appreciate that. Yes, that was really good. Well, truthfully, it's almost Halloween, so I'm just in the spirit. Are you? Yeah, in the spirit, yes. Dude, I have been punting lately, left and right. It makes me sick. You haven't stomach pumpkin, though, have you? Good one, Chuck. That reminds me that we've been talking about this pumpkin chunk and thing pretty hard. Let's do it again. Yeah, let's say it again. Okay, so the mothership of Discovery Channel has asked us to mention a show that's coming out a special, actually, a pair of specials. It's coming out on Thanksgiving night on the Science Channel. Yes. 08:00 p.m.. There's two shows like you said. The Road, the pumpkin chucking and pumpkinching. Punk and chunkin itself. And again, that begins at 08:00 p.m., eastern time because I believe it takes place in the town in the east. Yes. Which is appropriate in somewhere in Delaware on the Science Channel. Yeah. So, Chuck? Yes, Josh? You want a podcast? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So, Chuck, have you ever seen Minority Report? I have, sure. Steven Spielberg. And the good news? Yeah. I knew Tom Cruises and I didn't know Spielberg directed it. Yeah, I thought it was okay. Kind of lost me in the third act. Did it? Yeah, big time. Oh, you know, it's based on Philip K dick, I think. Novel. Short story, was it? Yeah, it was called the Minority Report. Oh, yeah. That's Hollywood for you. They're always changing something. Yes. Okay, so you know that it's about, I guess, a crime section. Anti crime section. Law enforcement. Some people call it that arrests people based on information given to them by this group of people who have precognition. Yes. And that would be the office of Pre Crime. Right. Appropriately, the crew was a pre crime officer. Right. We have a real dearth of people with genuine precognition. It's kind of tough to find three that you can really reliably count on who can send you images from their brain of crimes that are about to happen. Yeah, they had a bad off in that movie, too. They really did. They were formed. We are, however, it seems like, working on a database that will be able to predict crime, and if so, humanity is screwed. Personal rights? Is that what you're getting at? Yeah, there's a lot of problems with this. We'll get to this later. But yeah. So there's a database that there are several databases already around. Right? There are all kinds of databases. When I was a kid, my dad took me to get my fingers printed. Really? Just in case I was abducted. And I wouldn't talk to him on the way home. I was all like, you ratted me out, dad, just in case you got arrested. Your dad would just for that and say, Here you go. No, I have a mugshot ready for him. No. It was put into this database, ostensibly, so if I ever was kidnapped and my brain was washed and I lost my identity, they'd be able to fingerprint me if I ever wandered up onto the street. Right. And they'd be like, oh, it's Josh Clark. The chances of that are slim to none. The chances of me committing a crime, we're talking, like, near 100%. See, I was a kid during the Atlanta child murders, the famous murders. Wayne Williams. Remember that? Yeah. So my mom was like, Go play by Dumb of the Creek. Don't worry about fingerprinting. Your mum doesn't love you. Yeah. Go get the mail down by the street. Get the neighbors mail, right? Get all the neighbors mail. Jeez. You know where your children are? My mom never knew where I was. Wow. Yeah. I survived, though. Well, yes, clearly you did, but so fingerprinting is just one database, right? Yeah, that's one. There's another one that's a little more advanced, a little more sophisticated. That is called the National Crime Information Center. Right. You ever watched the movie or the show The First 48? No. Dude. I heard it's good. It is good. I sleep with a hammer next to my bed now because of that show. What's the concept there within the first two days is when all the evidence is, like, hot, and if they don't close a homicide within the first 48 hours, the chances of them ever closing it drop dramatically. They close it. Wow. Yeah. So sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. But it's a real life show, and it follows, like, real life cops on the beat, like, after a homicide and the stuff that people do each other is chilling. Yeah. My favorite is this ball guy who works in Memphis. He's awesome. squibby. It's not squibby. He would bust squibby, though, I can tell you that. Probably so. But they often access on the show. The National Crime Information Center. So it's got, like, all this information on people who have committed crimes, but it's more than just their fingerprints. It can be like, their street name. They're always using it to look up, like, somebody's street name. Sure. It also has people who are members or suspected members of, like, gangs, child organizations, child molesters. What else you can do is Yummy has this iPhone app that's disturbing. It's located a sex offender. Yeah, I've seen the website. Well, they have an iPhone app for it now. And sure enough, there's a lot of sex offenders around our place. And the weird thing is they aggregate. Like, you'll look at several of them and they'll all have the same address except, like, number six or number 13 or whatever. So it's clearly an apartment building that's been designated like, a sex offender can live here because it's not by a school or anything like that. Yes, I remember that article I sent recently about they told the ones in Georgia to camp out, that they quickly, once they hit the news, you can come back inside. Yeah. We'll find a place for you. Yeah. Okay. So we've got those two databases. There's another one, and here's where we start to reach the crux of this podcast, finally, after like, 70 minutes, the one in England and here. Well, you're talking about the national DNA database. Yeah. Yes. That started in England in 1999, and initially it was just people who had been convicted of crimes that they would get their DNA and keep that on file. Yeah, but that changed, didn't it? It did change, and I think 2003, they expanded it to include anyone who has ever been arrested. Right. So basically, if a cop goes, I'm going to take they can arrest you and let you go on a spot. Sure. But if the cop can collect a sample right there, if he's got a mobile sample kit, they can take your blood even if you didn't do anything. Yes. Even if they're like, oh, sorry, buddy. Yeah, exactly. And you can't say it. Can I get that swab back? And they'll break your arms. And before 2006, I think most people weren't getting arrested, but that year, Britain expanded the list of arrestable offenses, including wearing a seatbelt, or more to the point, not wearing a seatbelt. Well, you're under arrest for wearing a seatbelt into this petri dish. Right? Yeah. And I imagine that's how they do it, too. Right? It's a swab. I don't know about the mobile kits. Probably. I can imagine somebody going like, you're not breaking me. Right. But yes. So now in England, if you jaywalker, if you are not wearing a seatbelt, they can collect a sample of your DNA that they intend to keep on file indefinitely. Yes. And 4 million strong. Yeah. Which makes it the second largest database in the world. DNA database in the world. Second to ours, I would imagine. Of course, that was in 2007, by the way, the 4 million entries that same year in the US, we have a national DNA index system, NDIS, that's maintained by the FBI. And we had 4.5 million profiles that year. I looked and all I could find were estimates, like FBI funding estimates. So these numbers are probably high. But for 2009, the estimated that this thing would have 14 million samples. Now, ours isn't just if you're arrested, right? Isn't it if you're a felon or does it differ from state to state? That's how it started out. Okay. And then in 2004, California always on the leading edge of whatever's going on. Yeah, no kidding. They passed Prop 69. Controversial, to say the least. Yeah. Basically what it says is that law enforcement can take your DNA right. If you've been arrested for a felony in some misdemeanor. Right. And it's just arrested. Yes. And illegal immigrants, which they kind of just tossed in there, I'm sure. Let's see. How can we unfairly target illegal immigrants? Oh, yeah. We'll just take their DNA for no reason. Well, there are kids in there, too. Yeah. The one here that's causing a huge stir. As kids, when they're arrested, they can have their DNA taken. Sure. So you can imagine that just having your DNA taken, just having a swab stuck in your mouth by a police officer right. Is enough to really raise the ire of some people. Yeah. Obviously a lot of human rights advocates have problems with this, which we'll get into in a second. Unless we're getting into that now. We can if you want. Well, the first thing that kind of got, besides the implementation of the program in England was last year, in 2008, when it was revealed that half a million names in the database are just flat out wrong. That caused a big stir. Yeah. Either just incorrect or misspelled. It might have been typo, but some of them are just wrong. Yeah, that's clearly I mean, just having DNA samples of 4 million people in England and then saying, oh, and by the way, half a million of them are wrong. We don't know whose they are. We think they're yours, but they're not. That's a problem. But I mean, is there really a problem with just maintaining a database of DNA? What are they doing with it? Well, it depends because DNA is not like a fingerprint. There's a lot of information contained in your DNA that's not just identify the person. Right. Your genetic code, your family history. There's a program called DNA Witness made by a company called DNA Print Genomics, and it can locate ancestry markers and basically say, oh, you found some DNA? Well, we can narrow it down to this person is probably being Hispanic. Well, yeah. It's all to deal with racial breakdown. Right. Racial profiling is about as hot button an issue as anything else. Sure. Because the problem is, as it stands now, racial profiling is based on past statistics. Right. If you include DNA into the mix, does it become more finely honed or even more egregious? Right. Or does it open itself up? Who knows? Here's the problem with DNA profiling, Chuck. We have not in this country or the UK, from what I can imagine, had any real discussion about doing it. So we've never really come together and said, okay, do we want a crime free society or as close to a crime free society as we can get? If so, then, yes, everybody needs to turn in a DNA sample. If we all agree that that's what we want, if we decide that we would rather live with crime in combating crime under the techniques that we have now to maintain our privacy sure. Than DNA sampling has to stop. DNA profiling has to stop. Right. And the problem is, we've never had that conversation either way. Right. Well, the public certainly hasn't had no, but it's been continuing along. And then when you talk about the half a million names wrong, it's like, well, you're doing this without our consenter, even asking us, and you're not even doing it. Right. Right. The thing is, though, I don't even know, even if they hone this down, can you really prevent crime? I mean, even cops will tell you there's no such thing as preventing crime. Cops go after criminals after they've committed a crime. But unless it's just dumb luck, how many times has a cop come upon a crime before it happens and stopped it? Well, there are two different groups, one in the UK and one in America, which apparently are the two leading countries in DNA profiling for crime prevention that say, no, we do need to do that, and we're trying to. Is that the Homicide Prevention Unit in London? Yeah. Think about the name of that. Right. Homicide Prevention Unit. And they're doing it by forecasting crime. Yeah. Well, psychological profiling, too, which they've done for a while, and that's a little less hinky and invasive than, obviously, DNA profiling. Right. But what about when you combine the two? Why would you combine DNA with a psychological profile? To catch the bad guys, I guess, to an extent. But at the same time, what we're talking about is looking at DNA to find out if we can find a genetic defect in somebody that suggests that maybe they have a short temper or that they're sociopathic or whatever. If you combine that with a psychological profile, but where does that profile come from? Maybe records from mental health workers or maybe your insurance record or your doctor or dental records. Right. They're not doing that now. But who knows what could happen. That's the point. If this database gets big enough, right, or I should say if it gets accurate enough, then, yeah, people will probably start getting leaned on to provide information to be contributed to this database for use by law enforcement. It's kind of scary. Once you have enough information and you are confident enough that you can prevent a crime, or if you can say this person is probably going to kill somebody, what do they do, though? That's what I want to know. It's obviously not going to happen. Like Minority Report in that film and the story, tom Cruise knocks on your door and says, you're under arrest for the future murder of your wife. They're clearly not talking about that because that's impossible in the stuff of science fiction. But will they just monitor someone or tail someone? Yeah. So basically, potentially dangerous people just be under surveillance at all times. I guess so. But what if you've never committed a crime in your entire life and don't intend to, but you've got the cops breathing down your neck every night. Anywhere you go, there's a cop following you. You go on a date, there's a cop following you. You take your mother out for dinner, there's a cop following you. If you've never committed a crime in your life, how fair is that? All right? And plus, if someone's tailing you and I don't know, I could see a scenario where some renegade cop trumps up a traffic violation and pulls you over and shakes you down. And it's not like police trust me, I'm not dragging on the police who do a great job. But there are cases where people are framed and weapons are planted. And if some guy they think is a really bad person waiting to happen, what's to stop a cop from trailing him and doing just that? Not only that, but what happens if somebody gets access to this, if this information in the database is disseminated and hacked? And then you've got somebody who's like, well, you know what? I'm going to take it upon myself to rid society of these people right. Who may commit a crime. I can't say most, but there's a lot of serial killers out there who once caught, said that they were doing a service to society. Dexter, have you ever seen that? I haven't yet, but I am aware. Same scenario. I love 6ft under nate dies, by the way, the killer, John Wayne Gacy expected that he was going to get a wrap on the knuckles because what he'd done is just rid society of some bad kids. Bernie gets I remember in the I guess it was the subway. Yeah. He went out Charlie Bronson on every one, and he was the subway the giuliani. He definitely was. But he's a serial killer is what he is. I thought he just killed some guys once. Did he kill more than one time? Yeah, I think so. Well, I might be wrong. We'll hear from it. Okay, so, yes, there's a possibility of vigilantism. There's a possibility of police harassment. Right. There's also another possibility called, well, self fulfilling prophecy. Sure. Remember we talked about kids getting their DNA taken, minors getting their DNA taken if they're ever arrested for anything. And there's also a push. I guess. To make surround this database out as much as possible for any kid who has a behavioral problem or maybe gets in trouble at school. For the school to provide information about that kid so that they can say. We're going to keep an eye on you for the rest of your life because you're starting to fit this profile of somebody who might kill somebody later. Or maybe he just has added, or maybe the teacher doesn't like him. Who knows? Exactly. The problem is if you know that if you're sick and somebody's like you might kill somebody someday, what is it like to grow up for the next 30 years or so thinking that people assume that you're going to kill somebody one day? Well, did they tell you, though? I don't know. There's got to be something. It might not be that explicit. Both children parents are probably notified at the very least. Right. And if the parents say, oh, you're a bad kid, that's why they're watching you, well, why wouldn't the kid go be a bad kid? Right. There's a lot of concerns here, right? Indeed. In the US, we talked about the Homicide Prevention Unit in the UK, by the way, the senior criminal psychologist, Laura Richards has said that her vision is to know who the top 100 people, most potentially violent people in London are at any given time. You know, squibbies on that list. Sure. And you know, when they keep like most wanted lists, gangs, especially love getting at the top. I should probably take the opportunity right here to save our lives. It's ms 13. I understand. Not Ms twelve, right? Yeah. We refer to a gang as Ms twelve in the Witness Protection Show, and it is Ms 13, and we got that wrong. Agreed. Over here in the US, there's a guy named Richard Burke who's the University of Pennsylvania sociologist and statistician. Yes. I don't mind this one as much. No, it's much more innocuous. Yeah, well, it's not an invasive because they're not actually taking your DNA or fingerprints. He was at University of Pennsylvania. He's a crime criminology professor, and he has actually developed an algorithm using 30 different variables from when a kid was young and as they grow up, if they have offenses or if they were abused, and he determines a lethality score, which I don't know. I can accept this. In a way, I can too, but at the same time, I was a little well, I'm still put off by the idea of forecasting crime in an effort to prevent it from ever happening. Yeah, but I did go on and check out some of this guy's stuff, and he has another thing called crime regimes. Oh, really? Where he's taking into account so that lethality score is all centered around the individual. Right. And there's a movement afoot where sociology is making a huge move to take crime completely away from psychology. I talked to a sociologist who's, like psychology, has completely failed at explaining serial murderers. Really? Sociology is time to explain it. Right. So this guy's taking into account, like, time of day of the week area, like the location, is the drug trade there stable? If so, then there's probably going to be less crime because there's not going to be turf wars, things like that. And even larger stuff needs to be taken into account, too, like the economic situation that always creates more crime, but for a group or an area and not individuals. Is that what you mean? I imagine that this guy will probably eventually try to put both together. Right. So if you've got a lethality score, a guy with a lethality score and he's living in a high risk area sure. Then all of a sudden the cops might want to go, we should really keep an eye on that guy. Right. So it makes it a little more honed. The problem is this would probably be eventually compiled with the NDIS here in the States. Yes. If it turned out to be a pretty good algorithm and it was pretty accurate, I'm sure the government would get their mitts on it soon enough. So yeah. It's not like we were talking about mental health workers being leaned on to give up information or doctors disclosing their Med records. Insurance companies and census information did not know this. I didn't either, which is funny, because we're about to talk about population in about five minutes. Yeah. Apparently the census records, the public doesn't have access to those for 72 years after it's taken. I guess some aspects of it, because I've definitely accessed census statistics that are a lot less than 72 years old. Right. I think you can access the numbers, but I think all of the information oh, got you. Yeah, but the FBI routinely gets that information if they want it. The Japanese Americans were identified using census statistics or census information for the Internet camps, world War II for the internment camp. And that was, I guess, kind of against the grain. May be. Usually we don't usually do that. I understand. Kinky. I think we do it down in Texas these days with Hispanics try to make it across the border. Interesting. So rights violations all over the place then, right? Yes. But apparently it's having an effect on crime. Yeah, I guess so. Supporters in England will say that more than twice as many crimes have been solved using the DNA samples in the year 2005 as we're solved six years before that. Maybe it has an effect. It does they have the cameras over there, too? Oh, yeah. Did you see those thugs and whales that got beat up? It was crossdressing cage fighters. Yeah. That was the best thing I've ever seen. Yeah. If you haven't seen it. Yeah, I guess typing, cross dressing, cage fighters, thugs, whales. And it should bring out the video. Yeah. These English thugs were just drunk and walking down the street, really just causing trouble, and they were picking on this crossdresser, and it turned out that it was an MMA cage fighter, and the dude just killed him. Wasted him. It was great. It's inspiring. And I'll prevent the reader mail right now. Chuck ment Welsh, and he knows it. Yeah. So I guess everybody in the future look for a crime database that includes psychological profile, hopefully your correct name, or unless you're a criminal, then not your real name. Retinal scans, facial scans, medical history, pretty much anything. I got one more thing. Okay. I saw that the United States has a project that was originally called Project Hostile Intent. They since renamed it Future Attribute Screening Technologies. And it's one of these deals where they're going to make it a mobile unit, like a trailer truck that you walk through before you go into the football game, and it reads your pulse, your breathing rate, your eye pupil dilation, and supposedly to predict if you're, like, shifty or angry. Think about that. Yeah. I heard they're using we fit, really? Boards now to make people stand or they're talking about it. They're going to make people stand on because they think that terrorists are literally shiftier than other people. So they would be shifting their weight more because they know something is about to go down. Things like that don't take into account fear of flying. Well, there's a lot of problems with stuff like that. What kind of mood you're in that day? You and your wife just had a fight on the way to the airport? Because Emily and I have a long standing tradition of fighting before any plane flight. Oh, yeah. It's a good thing. And then, of course, once this is in place, one of the guys called. What we would see is security theater, which is not being shifty or acting like you're going to Hawaii on a vacation. Right. So trying to trip up the machine. Sure. So look forward to that, too. Yeah. The end. The end. So if you want to learn more about our colleague Shannon Freeman's predictions for future crime databases, you can probably get away with just typing in future crime in the search bar@houseoffworks.com. Also, try typing in unicorn. See what comes up. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised and shocked. I said search bar, right? Which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this I had no idea that we had an official listing club. That's what I'm going to call it. This is on the blog, but I'm going to read this. And this is kind of blew me away. There are some US. Americans living in South Korea, and they actually formed a little listening club. And they get together and they listen to our show, and they said, during the assemblies, we listen to you to ponder various interesting topics and then discuss them further by offering our own thoughts and experiences and compliment our sessions with libations of the alcoholic variety. So they performed a drinking game to our show. Let me tell you what, they drink, too. And they're listening now. So we're going to really get them hammered at this point. Every time there's a new statistic quoted, which I believe we do on four out of five shows. And when we refer to our producer Jerry over here, there's Jerry. Hey, Jerry. So we've said Jerry like four times. It's probably about four shots. You said Jerry. I said Jerry. We refer to our producer Jerry, right? When someone shares any of our first names. So if they're in the club and we say their first name, by happenstance, they drink. And I know who wrote this was Richard. So we're going to say Richard, like, four more times. Richard. Yeah. And Jerry. And also Chuckers. When you say Chuckers I don't know that I said that in this one, did I? You could say now, Chuckers. And the final thing, Josh, they drink, too. I think they're going to like this, is they're getting your back, dude. The whole Imme thing that we've been hearing about for the past 160 shows, whenever you actually correct yourself now with the IMI, is when they drink. So he writes and says they drink Soju, by the way, which is a rice wine, they say on soju, Josh, they say, sipped casually. The rice wine is not without its merits, but done our way, it all but guarantees a regrettable late night phone call to a coworker or former lover, tearful platitudes, mutual admiration or some form of public nudity later in the evening. So, Josh, sir, I beseech you, stop hypercorrecting. Let it fly. Pleadingly Richard. Tired of being hungover in Korea? Richard. Richard. Well, thanks, Richard, for sending that in. Chucker's, like darying. Jerry liked it. Richard clearly liked it. And I and me. I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that. I should correct myself. Well, if you want to send Chuck and email I'm sorry, chuck and me an email or Chucker's. Chucker is an email. And Jerry and me, you can send that to stuffpodcast@housetepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetoftworks? 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. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. 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c4474e7a-5460-11e8-b38c-03f229403e21 | SYSK Selects: How The Enlightenment Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-enlightenment-works | The Enlightenment stands as the moment the West withdrew from superstition and found its faith in reason. Did it shift too far? In this classic episode, learn about this massive shift in thinking which we are still sorting through and coming to understand today. | The Enlightenment stands as the moment the West withdrew from superstition and found its faith in reason. Did it shift too far? In this classic episode, learn about this massive shift in thinking which we are still sorting through and coming to understand today. | Sat, 23 May 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=144, tm_isdst=0) | 39002372 | 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 there, everyone. It's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen how the enlightenment works. And the reason we named it works rather than worked is because we realized during this episode that this battle between rationalism and superstition is still going on today. The enlightenment is still going on today. And I've chosen it this week because I feel like it explains a lot of the division in the world today, not just in the United States, not just in the west, but all over the world, where there's a dividing line that is separating people, that this gulf, this wedge, is getting deeper and deeper, and I think that this is the basis of the whole thing. See if you agree. If not, it's fine. It's still an interesting episode. Either way, I hope you enjoy it. 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 R. So this is stuff you should know. The Enlightened Ones. Exactly. The three of us? Yes. No one else? No. We're the enlightened ones. I am going to go ahead and preface this with what I just said off the air. This is a very tough subject to distill in a 30 to 45 minutes podcast because volumes of books can be written on the Age of Enlightenment and have been. And have been. So this is tough. This is going to be a very bird's eye view. Yeah. There's a dude named Jonathan Israel who just came out with, I think, the third volume of a three volume set on The Enlightenment, and he wrote literally several thousand pages of it and it's considered an obscure text. Yeah, he probably doesn't even think that he covered it in full. No, but he doesn't. Although he's fourth volume coming soon, right? I think he does have another one coming, so maybe it was a second. But the idea that he doesn't think that it's done, that it's not finished, is actually a pretty standard view of the enlightenment. During research for this, I realized that there are tons of intellectual arguments going on right now. Like the bill maher thing. Bill Maher and Islam. Yeah. He's been accused of being like just a complete racist Xenophobic dude because of his recent statements on Islam. Did you see him and Ben Affleck, did you see them get into it? Yeah. Okay. That argument is an Enlightenment argument. It provided the Enlightenment was so massive that the ripple effects are still being felt on a daily basis because it was such an enormous change in the way humans think that we're still trying to sit there and analyze what the heck happened. And that is one manifestation of it. Yeah, sure. What Bill Maher is saying is Islam is a religion or whatever, and therefore it's antithetical to progress and culture and real thought and rationalism. And Ben Affleck is saying, like, you can't say that about a culture. Each culture is its own thing. So what we're seeing there is the idea of moral absolutism arguing with moral relativism. And that is, like, textbook enlightenment argument. Yeah. Pretty interesting. Sure. Like, researching this article, seriously, I tied together probably ten different things that I didn't realize were connected. I love it when stuff like that happens. It was the start of the Age of Enlightenment, quote, unquote started and ended, but it was the birth of just a new kind of thought and a new value system. Philosophical, scientific, cultural, intellectual, basically saying reason over this previous longheld belief that just strict religious dogma is all you need to worry about. Right. Don't question anything. Don't try to think about science and nature and things like that, other than just this is God's creation and what does it mean in terms of religion? Exactly. So, of course it's still going on. But it wasn't just that. It was definitely enlightenment. If you're an Enlightenment fan, you would say enlightenment was the domination of reason over religion or faith. It was a value system, basically. But there was another aspect of the Enlightenment, the domination of the will of the people over the monarchy. Economic. There was a religious economic change, huge economic changes, thanks to Adam Smith. There were a lot of huge monumental changes in the way people thought. So much so that modern historians who are trying to unpack the Enlightenment, still one of the schools of thought is that you can't just call it the Enlightenment. It happened in too many different places under different circumstances, and then again, the different aspects of it. The fact that one part of it dealt with governmental change, one part of it dealt with religious change, another part dealt with economic change, that it's been kind of distilled into separate compartments now. Yeah. I mean, separate compartments. Some were divergent and contradictory. It occurred nearly simultaneously in the 18th century in France, Great Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Portugal, american colonies all over the place. I like to say it's the period of time where the world started waking up and pulled their heads from their rear ends. Right. Basically. Well, the question now, if you're a religious type, you're probably happy about the fruits of the Enlightenment. Like, everybody points to the Industrial Revolution is proof positive the Enlightenment was great or the American experiment proof positive the Enlightenment was great. But you probably don't like the fact that the world completely turned its back on religion, or not completely, but largely did. If you're a pro Enlightenment type, you're probably saying, this is for the best. Like, we were backwards. We emerged from the Dark Ages thanks to the enlightenment. And this is the argument that's still going on today. Like, yes, the Enlightenment changed everything but didn't go too far. We'll get into all that. But Conger, who wrote this article, I think did a very good job of taking the whole thing back further than the 18th century out of the French salons and set the stage for what created the basis for this change in thinking. Yeah, I think Kristen did a great job of distilling a complex topic down to, like, an eight page article. But she does take it back to there were a couple of things that sort of laid the groundwork. Well, a lot of things, but a couple of them are Mr. Isaac Newton and the famous story of the apple falling on his head, which makes a great story. He told a lot of people that I don't know how factually exactly true that is, but it makes for a great story. But either way you want to look at it, isaac Newton looked at the space at some point between that apple and the ground and said, there's something going on in that empty space that should be explained because that apple doesn't follow up. Something's keeping us all rooted here on the ground. And I want to look into that. Although if you were a fan of David Humes, you would say, well, actually, it could conceivably fall up because we've never proven it won't fall up. Yeah. And Him was one of the proponents. Well, not proponents, but he was active in the Age of Enlightenment. Yeah. Another thing that really laid the groundwork was the 30 years of war from 1618 to 1648, which pretty much paved the way for Protestant Reformation. And the Roman Catholic Church took a lot of the teeth away from the Roman Catholic Church. Hugely. First time. Yeah. There was a huge change. So what you just described, Chuck, is the foundation for the intellectual branch of the Enlightenment thinking, usurping the power from theological thinking. And then with the 30 year war, political power was taken away from the church because for the first time now, the precedent has been set that you as a citizen, your allegiance is not split between church and state. Your allegiance is first and foremost to the state. And we see that still today. Like, if somebody kills their parents or whatever because it's the 7th sign and Demi Moore's running around and it turns out that they were brother and sister, so you kill them because it's the will of God. The state says I don't care if it's the will of God. You can't kill your parents. The state's law is more powerful and more important than God's law. That's straight out of the 30 Years War that changed everything. Have you ever seen the 7th sign? Man, I saw that, like, when it came out. I don't remember anything about it. I just remember like, one of the characters was this kid with down syndrome and he murdered his parents because he found out that they were brother and sister and he was super religious. Executed. Yes. When they execute, I think he was like the last martyr. Okay, man, I'll have to check that out again. Yeah, tell me more. So Conger points out even further back about the Dark Ages sort of laying the groundwork, which the Dark Ages were dark for many reasons, but one of the big ones was that the Roman Catholic Church basically ruled everything. Latin was the language, the center of life, and academia were monasteries and abbey's. You weren't encouraged to get educated outside of theological realms. Right. It was not encouraged. I want to say you have to be careful using the term Dark Ages because apparently it is a disparaging label that people on the proenlightenment side of the argument, the humanists, they say these are the Dark Ages. That was back when the Church controlled everything, when everybody was just in ignoramus. Once the Enlightenment came along, we emerged from the Dark Ages. Technically, once the Renaissance came along, we emerged from the Dark Ages. So if you're in historian, you call it the Middle Ages. But even the Middle Ages are kind of sad because it just says these ages kind of existed between this important age and this important Age. We just call this the Middle Ages? But it's better than the Dark Ages. I like Dark Ages. But that's an argument or a label, a disparaging label that humanists use. Yeah, unfairly, because there were scientists working and laying the groundwork for future science in the Dark Ages. And Congo even mentions them in this article. Like Thomas Aquinas came up with scholasticism. Yeah. And scholasticism is basically the idea that you can understand God even more and be even more pure and divine yourself by studying nature. Yes. Roger Bacon was another monk who was a proponent of that. And I think that allowed them and I don't think that's the reason they did it, but that allowed them to pursue these scientific avenues because it was still tied to God. Another big change was, like I said before, in the not so Dark Ages, perhaps Latin was the language and they didn't have something called the printing press until Johann Gutenberg came along in 1438 and says, you know what? Everyone should be able to read. Start printing stuff in your native tongue. And that led directly to people starting to educate themselves. There was a the democratization of education. Right, exactly. And all of this didn't happen out of the blue, like Roger Bacon and Thomas Aquinas and a guy named Leonardo Bruni. They didn't necessarily come up with their ideas on their own. There was this really seminal thing that happened back in the mid 13th century where somebody I don't know who did somebody translated Aristotle, I believe his works, into Latin. And all of a sudden, the Greek rational thinkers of antiquity, their ideas were suddenly available to the west for the first time. And it just so happened that some people started paying attention to these things. Leonardo Brunei read Petrarch and revived the idea of humanism, which is a huge sea change, because humanism says humans are pretty awesome. And the fruit of our labors, the fruit of our intellect, the fruit of everything that we do comes from human ability, not God. We're not just vessels for God's brilliance to be shown through. If you create something and you come up with a work of art because God did that, you did that. Let's figure out how you did it. Right. That's humanism. And this is what the Renaissance started to revive and was a huge change. Like, maybe we should start paying attention to ourselves a little more. Exactly. Let's explore the human condition. Yeah. Aristotle was not a heretic because he tied his geocentric universe ideas to God as well. He thought the universe was composed of ten separate crystal spheres, and beyond the 10th sphere, there was heaven and God. Copernicus pretty much said, no, that's not true. The universe is infinite. And he was pretty alone in that thinking early on. He faced a lot of criticism from every religion. Protestants and Catholics, they thought it was a dangerous way of thinking because he didn't make room for God in the cosmos. And it definitely was a dangerous way of thinking to the Church. Like the Protestant Reformation was going on. You had the 30 Years War coming down the pike. You had Copernicus, thanks to this revival of interest in astronomy yeah. In Galilee or Galilee. Yeah. Starting to look at the universe around us and finding even, like, symbolic stuff, like, who was it? Kepler. He was an assistant to Taikobrahi. And Kepler figured out that the planets revolve around the sun in an ellipse. Well, the Church, the Holy Roman Church, said that the circle was a symbol of perfection. So, of course, everything revolved around the Earth in a circle. Not only did things not revolve around the Earth, it revolves around the sun. And they didn't even do that in a circle. They did an ellipse. So the Church is just losing its mind because all these people are coming forward saying everything that you're saying over here is starting to prove to smell like BS. And the Church is losing its power left and right, both politically and intellectually. It's losing its authority. Yeah. Galileo even recanted because he was accused of heresy for his theory that the Earth rotates on its axis. So he said, I'll take it all back. I didn't mean that. Please don't kill me. He's like, but just make sure my manuscripts survive. So we were talking about Bacon. He is the creator of the scientific method, and he says, you know what? We should use experiments to actually try and explain things. And so it's 1620. I think it's high time we have a method for doing so. So that was Francis Bacon. Yes. I wonder if he was related to Roger Bacon. I don't know. They're separated by a few centuries, but they could have been fan. Sure. I think so. Did you ever take philosophy in college? No. I think I might have. I didn't get much out of it, if I dig, so I don't remember. I took one class. We studied descartes a lot. I've grown to be a little more interested in it, but I like existential crisis philosophy, like Nick Bostrom stuff. I don't know what that is. Just basically how the world's going to end. Oh, okay. This stuff is, I think, like, Descartes is interesting, but it doesn't light my fire. Yeah, it was all right. I think I made an A in that class, actually, because it interested me at the time. But I never took a follow up class. I just took the intro. So it clearly didn't mean that much to me. But I get it. Yeah. And what Descartes was saying is, our experience is not what you thought. Yeah. Like, mind and matter are two different things, and the human experience is a subjective experience. And the mind what the mind produces is different than what is reality. And really, kind of that changed things tremendously, too. So you got all these people contributing to this. We haven't even reached the 18th century yet. The groundwork is definitely being laid, and it's still being laid. As far as the government goes. John Locke was one of the people who contributed to the idea of the social contract. The social contract. There was Hobbs, Locke, and later on, Russo and others contributed to this idea that humans are born with natural rights. You're born free. I'm born free. Even Jerry's born free. Look at her. And to form a society, you give up some of these natural rights. For example, one thing that you give up is your right to kill in retribution. Any society typically demands a state monopoly on violence, which means that if somebody kills your family member, you don't go kill that person. You go to the state and say, that guy killed my family member, trying to convict him and kill him on my behalf because there's a state monopoly on violence. So that's a natural right that you give up, I think, appropriately so, and for the better. But as part of the social contract, the idea that humans have these rights and that society in turn had rights because humans gave them rights, that was a big basis of Enlightenment thinking that would be added to later on, too. Yeah. And Locke also was one of the first champions of what would kind of become nurture over nature. His idea of the tabular rasa, that when humans are born, their minds are a clean slate and they are shaped by experience in education and not some preordained thing that you're born with. And this French intellect gobbled that stuff up. His name was Francois Marie Arowette, and he went by the name you might know, Voltaire. And he really loved this stuff and went back to France with all these ideals and said, we got to get on this. We can't go out in the streets right now and talk about the stuff, but we can meet in private, in homes, like a Tupperware party, and we'll call them salons, and we'll talk about these radical ideas and this new way of thinking and the privacy of homes for those that are willing to host it. So Chuck Voltaire has been lit up. He was in England from 1726 to 1729, living in exile because he was already critical of the French monarchy. While he was there, he ran into the ideas of Lock, of apparently descartes as well. He basically got turned on to rationalism and he was primed and ready for it. Like, this guy was just waiting for these ideas to pour into him. And when they did, he became a lightning rod for what we think of as the Enlightenment. Like, Voltaire was the main dude, to start, from what I understand. Yes. And like we mentioned, the salons, they had to do this in private because Louie the 14th. Yeah. Is that right? Yes. Getting better at that. He was pretty hard on. He didn't like that kind of talk. It threatened him for a good reason. Yeah. I mean, the reason why is, like, the power was taken from the Church and placed more in the monarchy, but in very short order. People said, you know, we're not really that fond of the monarchy either. We think we should rule ourselves or at least elect people to rule ourselves. The divine right of kings thing seems kind of hinky, now that we think about it. So the monarchies were threatened as well by the Enlightenment? Oh, yeah. The monarchy liked the dumb masses that stayed under their thumb, and any kind of, like, radical thought or original thought was super dangerous. Sounds familiar. Exactly. It is interesting how you talked about I think there are periods of time where things like the Age of Enlightenment keep popping up. That's like the 1960s in the United States. And I think, like you said, we're in one right now. I think we're in one probably more than even the now. Yeah. And I think there are periods where that lulls, like maybe the 1980s, where they're seeing remember disco. Yeah. Like a dumbing down of things. Yes. Just people not caring or whatever. Yeah, it's weird and cyclical. I read this article called Things Fall Apart how Social Media Leads to a Less Stable World. It was by a guy named Curtis Howland Houghland and it's on knowledge at Wharton, like the Wharton Business School website. And it was basically saying I thought it was condemning social media. And this guy was just basically stating matter of fact that social media erodes the state and that now we have ways to connect with other people in ways that are more important to us than, say, our allegiance to the state. So you may feel more connected to somebody over Hello Kitty and your fondness for Hello Kitty more than you would identify yourself as, say, an American. Right. And with social media, you're able to connect with other people who feel the same way. And so you form on social media basically bodies that supersede the state, in your opinion. No boundaries. Exactly. And as this happens more and more, the states, what's called sovereignty erodes more and more and more and it becomes a less and less stable world. The guy's point was that, yes, while it's very unstable and things are much more dangerous during periods like this, it's basically just a period of upheaval and change and then eventually things stabilize again. But what this guy was saying, using this as an example is that we're in, like right now possibly on the cusp of a period of tremendous fundamental change in the world. I see that every day. Yeah, it's pretty interesting time to be alive. Yeah. A little scary to me. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like the guy said, it's more dangerous than your average time because change frequently comes out of spasms of violence or upheaval where nobody is in charge because there's a power struggle going on or our normal structures are being eroded. It's interesting. It's super interesting. So back to the salon. We're back to the Age of Enlightenment. The traditional age of enlightenment. The salons. The members were known. There was a group of people known as the Philosophs. We've mentioned a few of them. Rousseau, Diderot, Voltaire how do you pronounce that? Is that? It's not montague. Is it Montesquieu? Montescue. They're kind of skeptics and critics of not everything but the establishment of government or the way government was at the time. Especially the church. Hated the church. Yeah. Like, Voltaire especially hated the church and the very fact that it even existed. And a lot of the enlightened ones were deus. And basically, I like the way Congo put it in a big picture way, they believe in a clock maker, God, which means maybe God created everything and set things in motion. But then it was like, all right, that's it. I'm out. I'm not getting my fingers and all the pies of everyone. And you have free will, basically, after you're born, which, again, was pretty dangerous to the religious establishment. Yeah. So you've got the basis you've got the foundation of the Holy Roman Empire in the west losing tons of power and political and intellectually. You've got the monarchy now being assaulted by the French salons who are planting the seeds of democracy. Yeah, like Monescu, for example, wrote in 1748, the spirit of the Laws. And he basically proposed the idea of a separation of powers. He was, like, the first guy to do that. He's a lawyer who was in the salon scene. And all of a sudden, it's like, separation of power? What are you talking about now? You've got a monarch and what the monarch says is right. And as a result of this kind of thinking, the seeds of democracy are planted. And then a hostility toward religion of almost any kind that you still see today, like in the form of Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins or formerly Christopher Hitchens. All of this started coming out of the French salon. Yeah. All right, after this message, we're going to talk a little bit about how the Age of Enlightenment manifested itself in different parts of the world. So we've mainly been in Europe this whole time. In France, there was an emphasis on the arts. In England, they had a more emphasis on science and economics. You mentioned Adam Smith at the beginning. Scottish man in 1776 wrote his wealth of nations, which basically said, government should not interfere with matters of finance and economics. There should be the invisible hand guiding all these principles. Yes. I read this article by this guy who was explaining that change in thought, like, before, that it was that whole social contract thing, like Russo saying, this is an interplay between citizens and citizens and citizens and their government. And the government's role is to protect the rights of people. What Hume said is the government is legitimate. Not Hume, but Smith. The government's legitimate insofar as it steps out of people's affairs and lets free trade take place, which that might sound familiar if you subscribe to Republican or conservative or libertarian ideology. Right. The whole laser fair attitude of government is what legitimizes government. And the government that medals in someone's affairs is an illegitimate government as far as classical economic thought goes. Yeah, and we talked about that and our stuff you should know guide to the Economy. Yeah, we got an email. Someone bought that the other day. Yeah, they thought it was 17 hours long or something. And then also in Scotland was David Hume, who's, like, my favorite philosopher of all time, because he's like he's the only one he studied. No, he's the only one who's ever really spoken to me of the Enlightenment philosophers. And Hume was this meat and potatoes dude who basically said, Show me the proof. Yeah, he was a skeptic. He was an empiricist. He said, you basically can't believe anything that you can't see with your own eyes. My belief in his philosophy has been eroded with the idea that consciousness is a subjective experience. Just totally subjective, basically. But I like his idea, and it was like the cause, in effect. Right. I think he used, like, Billiards as an example where you hit a ball like you're playing eight ball, and you hit like, the eight ball with the cue ball. You can predict where that's going to go, where the eight ball is going to go based on how you hit it with the cue ball. But Hume's point is, you can't say for certain that that's what's going to happen. Right. You're basing that strictly on previous experience rather than proof that this is what will happen. So we can't prove that hitting that Q ball will make this eight ball go in a certain direction ahead of time. And so therefore, we've come up with this thing called cause and effect, which basically serves as a stop gap between what we think will happen and the phenomenon we've already observed. Like, in other words, you can't say for certain the sun is going to come up tomorrow just because it's already come up so many days before. And the reason why is because we don't have empirical proof. And I liked him for that. So you don't think the sun will come up tomorrow, necessarily? It's not the point that I think it won't come up tomorrow. What humor is saying is we can't prove that it will. You can't prove that it will just based on previous experience. Right. Well, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were on board that train to a certain degree. Yeah. And we mentioned earlier that most of the establishment was pretty threatened by most of these ideas and the people in power, but not everybody. Some people wanted to get on the Enlightenment train because I think it was progressive and maybe made them seem open to ideas and modern, perhaps Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great was one of those who had a lot of dealings with the philosophy. And Frederick the Great of Prussia even had volunteer over and said, you know, why don't you come and live here? Yeah. And he did. Yeah, he said for free. And he said, for free. He said, okay, I'm just trying to think of Prussian money, but I have no idea. The prowlers the provaly betting. It was also happening in Germany, all over the world with Immanuel Kant. He was one of the first champions of freedom of the press, and his motto is one that I love dare to know. And again, he was just challenging people. Go out there and learn about something and don't just accept what these religious leaders are telling you you have to accept. Yeah. And actually, he came up with this idea called the categorical imperative. Basically, Kant gave the world the idea that there is such a thing as moral absolutes. Right. And I guess he didn't give the world that because the Judeo Christian ethic. And most religious ethics say that there is such a thing as right or wrong. And today you have that argument of, is there such a thing as moral absolutism, or is moral or cultural relativism a thing? Right. That's the argument. That's one of the arguments that's playing out right now in the intellectual world. Yeah. I just think that's fascinating, too. It totally is. So what does this all lead to? Eventually, it's going to lead to war, because anytime there is well, not any time, but a lot of times when there's an uprising of radical thought, people are going to want to take action. And it happened in the United States by way of the American Revolution and in France by way of the French Revolution. And they had different results, to say the least. They were both experimentations in this new idea of democracy. Yes, pretty much. And, yeah, the American one worked out pretty well, some would say. Yeah. The French one, not so much. Because apparently Robespierre, who was the head of the Jacobin Party that took power during the French Revolution, Robespierre was a follower of Rousseau. I remember Russo contributed to the social contract by saying, the people will something, and then it's up to the people in charge to carry out that will. Right. And so Rose Pierre took that to mean that the people stormed the Best Deal and overthrew the monarchy. And so it was his job as the head of the Koben Party, which is now in power, to kill everybody who wasn't down with the Revolution. And so thousands and thousands of French people lost their lives at the guillotine as a result during this reign of terror. So some people would say America founded itself based on democratic principles, and let's not pay attention to some of these darker spots over here and just pay attention to the democratic experiment. And it worked out great. And then the French one, there was a revolution. They tried to install democratic ideals, and thousands of people had their heads chopped off. It didn't work quite as well. Well, and some people say that effectively killed the Age of Enlightenment as we know it. The French Revolution, because the chaos and violence interrupted was in certain circles blamed on the Enlightenment and proof that we can't self govern. And these are radical ideas, and that's why we got stomped on. Yeah. Have you ever heard the theory that the French Revolution was due to moldy bread? No. There is one theory that people got a hold of bad bread, so it's a goat poisoning, and basically we're tripping on acid. On July 14, 1789, when they decided to storm the Best Deal, that was one of the explanations for the sale and witchcraft trials. Yeah. Crazy. I hadn't heard that. Yeah. So they were like, It's go time. Good, so let's get this party started. But like I said, some people say that ended the Age of Enlightenment as we know it, romanticism was soon ushered in and was way more appealing to the common folk than this weird, radical thoughts that were going on before. Well, romanticism was the first time people questioned the idea on a large scale that maybe the rationalism and the humanism of the enlightenment went too far in the other direction. Like, sure, maybe we were way too religious, and the religious organizations had way too much power, but we swung way over here and just rationalism had this idea too, and it became dogmatic in and of its own. Right. And so we still never really figured out how to fine tune it enough. And that's what we're still figuring out right now. A lot of people say the enlightenment the idea that the course of humanity is always towards civilization and rational thought, and that any culture that's not there is inferior to a culture that does think rationally. Right. So that means that colonialism and imperialism was supported by enlightenment thought, which is a huge like, enlightenment is not supposed to be about that. It's supposed to be about good things and freedom and all that. But it also supported colonialism. Right. People are arguing about that right now too. Yeah. Let's go conquer these people and make them modern and bring them into today's world. Exactly. Yeah. There's another article I want to recommend. It's called the trouble with the enlightenment. It's by a guy named Ollie cussin. It's on prospect magazine. Awesome article about this. He basically reviews a couple of books, one by Jonathan Israel, who I mentioned earlier, where he basically says, forget the philosophs. You got to look at Baruch spinoza, who was a dutch philosopher from, I think, the 17th century. He was the one who came up with the enlightenment ideas. And had we followed his enlightenment ideas, there wouldn't have been any governments now or there wouldn't be any religion whatsoever. He came up with the real revolutionary enlightenment. And what we got what we think of as the enlightenment was a watered down, moderate version that was changed. Sure, there was tons of change, but it was still palatable to the elite that people could still be governed easily even in these new democratic experiments and stuff like that. There's a lot of people who take issue with his book, but it's pretty interesting to discuss it. What's it called? Democratic enlightenment. I think he's the one who wrote several thousand page trilogy. Oh, that guy. And then there's another guy in a story named Anthony pageant. He believes that the enlightenment project is still going on, and basically that as long as there's religion in the world, the enlightenment won't be fulfilled entirely. Right. Which is again, it's like this idea that rationalism has become dogmatic. And if you're not just strictly rational, if you hold any kind of what could be considered irrational or superstitious belief right. You're acting irrationally. You're not thinking correctly, and therefore you have to be converted, right? Which is just as dogmatic. Yeah, sure, yeah, lots going on right now. Huge time of change. And also go read the Dark Age myth in atheist reviews. God's Philosophers by Tim O'Neill on strangenosionscom O'Neill. And I think that's about it. That is it for me. If you want to learn more about the enlightenment, go check out those three articles. Or check out and check out how the enlightenment worked by typing that in the search bar. How Stuff works. And now it's time for listening to Mail. I'm going to call this Mad cow theory from Seattle. Hey, guys, just listen to your podcast on fatal familial insomnia. In it, you mentioned the late 18th century cases in Venice and then wondered about the unrelated cases and what they were eating. This made me finally sit down and write my first email. For years I've had a theory about prion disease and mad cow in specific. Years ago, I was watching a program on Egyptian mummies. They talked about how mummification may have started out with the pharaoh, but the practice eventually made it down to call it budget mummification. They talked about how in the late 18th and 19th century crypts of these early mummies, they would be ground up and sold as fertilizer, specifically in England. Sometime later, when I learned about prions and how nearly indestructible they were, I wondered could ground up mummies have been used to fertilize a field? Then a cow comes along and eats grass that has been contaminated with prions, leading to mad cow disease. A human eats the mad cow's brain gets. So I've always wondered could never figure out if you could prove it or disprove it, if CFJ it was a real mummy curse of desecrated Egyptian corpses. That is Darren Gray in Seattle. And man, I just like that kind of speaking of radical thought, I had not heard that one. It's Darren's own Grayism. Nice going, Darren. Yeah, if you have anything to say about that, anybody else, we would like to hear from you. Can you prove or disprove that Critzfieldjacobs disease is a mummy's curse? You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshennow. You can send us an email which seems appropriate to Stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com and join us at our home on the web. Stuffyyshow.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iheartradios How Stuff Works. 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443542e0-53a3-11e8-bdec-8b2436abc8e1 | Printing press? Big deal! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/printing-press-big-deal | Was the printing press a big deal? You bet it was. One of the biggest. Learn all about the early history of printing today.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Was the printing press a big deal? You bet it was. One of the biggest. Learn all about the early history of printing today.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 08 Oct 2020 15:08:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=15, tm_min=8, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=282, tm_isdst=0) | 51631828 | 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 brian over there. There's Jerry out there, our ethereum Ephemeral producer. And this is Stuff You Should Know, which for this edition, I feel like we should be playing, like, harpsichord or something like that in the background when we start. You want to do that? Should we gussy it up a little? Yeah. Jerry knows what she's knows her way around an old harpsichord, so maybe she can do that for us. I wonder if we have a message break. Stinger that's harpsichord. Oh, that's a great question because we've been getting I mean, we've gotten great ones all along, but sometimes they're just showing up. I'm like, Where did this come from? I don't even recognize this one. It's great stuff. Yeah. And for those of you who don't know, those are made by listeners. Yeah. Submitted out of the goodness of their hearts for always have been. Just say, Here you go, guys. I hope you enjoy it. You can use it all you want. It's very sweet. It is. So we're talking about the printing press, and we're talking about the invention of the printing press. And the printing press itself is basically synonymous with a man named Johann Gutenberg. Johannes got right out of the gate, man. I'm going with Johann Gutenberg. Or as the rest of us in the world call them, Gutenberg. Sure. Let's call him Steve Guttenberg. Gutbuck. Okay. So Gutenberg is traditionally credited with inventing the printing press. And for all intents and purposes, he did invent the printing press. But as our friend Ed Grabinowski goes to great pains to point out, he did not invented out a whole cloth as apparently some people believe that it was just a pile of lumber and an idea for him that he put together. Like every inventor who ever invented anything, he built on different concepts that had been worked out over centuries. The thing is that's not to detract from his accomplishments or anything like that. What he did literally change the world, as we'll see, in some amazing ways. But he helped provide the first information age and got really kind of screwed over in the bargain. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of a familiar story at this point, right? Sadly, yes. Man, and I'm kind of sick of that. Of which one? Of building on others or dying a popper? Yeah, the second one. No, I understand. Building on the work of others. That's the other thing, too, is I don't think Gutenberg ever said, like, no, I invented all of this without any help. We don't have any indication he was like that at all. It just kind of got hung on him over the years. By 6th graders, we built on the work of Adam Curry. We did. Right. He's still at it. Did you know that? He's still podcasting? I'm almost a million percent sure, which is really sure. And did he really have the first one? I don't know if he had the first, but he's credited with having the first. Very interesting. He's definitely still active on social media, for sure. So for the printing press, if we jump back in the old way back machine and we breeze past Adam Curry there hi, Adam. Hey, Adam. Oh, look at his hair just waving. That nice. We would go back and see people carving up these things into wood, and then they would sort of like a stamp you would get for a kid these days. Or if you go to a stamp shop and you want to get a stamp with your address or whatever for an adult. Yeah. Like Emily got a stamp made of our house when we finally finished renovating our house. Cute. Which we've never used. So is it a picture of your house? Yeah, it looks like a little wood cut, but it's not like we send people letters and stamp out or anything. Man, I got to tell you to have one. I would like to see that on a Christmas card envelope. You know what she did give me and boy, I'm going to use it one day is you know how they would melt, wax and seal the envelope with a little stamp? Yes. She got me one of those little kits for Christmas a couple of years ago. Yeah. Nice. And you still haven't used it. Now, you know what? I'm going to write you a letter on some Vellum. Thank you. I'm going to stamp my house on it. I'm going to wax seal it, and then put on some red lipstick and then tinkle on the whole thing, give it a kiss and then be on it. We have a stamp, too, but our address stamped on. Our friends Laurel and Braden gave it to us. Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Right? And we have used that one before. But I want to see this stamp, this whole Christmas card with tinkle on it and velvet wax. I can't wait to see it. All right, that's going to happen. Okay, so a wood cut, and long way of saying it looks sort of like one of these stamps. It's cut out of wood block, and then you take paper or Vellum or something, or whatever you want to print it on, rub it down with some ink and then press it down. And they had a thing back in the day in Europe in the 1400s called block books that were made from these wood cuts. They were ten to 25, 30 pages long. And they kind of look like comic books. If you look them up, they have a little bit of artwork, a little bit of text. Yeah. Medieval comic books. Yeah, it's like comic books without any of the fun because they had some sort of moral message attached to it usually, right. It was like a Jack Shake tract or something. But they were a big deal in Europe in the 14 hundreds, and they thought that they invented something. But of course, the Chinese were like, excuse me, we've been doing this stuff for hundreds of years. Yeah. And I think as far back as naive, which is a while ago, more than 1000 years, about 10 00. 10 00. Plus, the Diamond Sutra, which is a Buddhist text, was the first known printed book. And they printed it like you just described, where each page was a wood carving in negative. Chuck in negative, yes, because if you made it in the positive when you put the paper on it with the ink, it would be in reverse when you looked at it on the page. So you had to carve each page like that, in negative. So it was a really difficult process, but it worked, it was useful. It was a lot easier once you got those blocks card for a page than it was to transcribe entire books and texts by hand, which is what they've done up to that point and still continued to do for a very long time. Yeah. So when I saw the Diamond Sutra, just obviously the word sutra stood out to me because of the Kamasutra. Sure, of course. And I realized I didn't even know what that word meant. And it's a collection of observations, basically. He said, oh, it means book. Well, it could be. It's a collection of observations in a book or a pamphlet. And I think we really missed a diamond opportunity for our book title by not calling it like The Stuff You Should Know suit. Right. Yeah. Well, hey, if this one goes even passing cells passingly, well, we'll probably have a second chance. You can pre order that thing, by the way, the stuff, you know, sue no, boy, you could pre pre order that one. Right. I'm getting limber as we speak and try and get that one done right. Yeah. You can preorder our book in complete companion of Mostly Interesting Stuff sutra thing. It should have just had comma comma sutra. Get it right. Yes, I like that. So that was one in 868 Ce, like you said. Then in 971 BCE, there was another one called did you mention that one? The Trippy Taka? Not yet. That was another Buddhist text. That was Cece. Oh, it is? Yeah. So they got it wrong here. Yeah. All right, so the whole thing starts about 10 00. 10 00 years ago. Okay, well, that makes more sense. Yeah. But that's the one that had, I think, 130,000 would block carvings. Yeah. That's insane. That means not only that somebody carved that, but somebody kept that, like, at their house. Imagine living around 130,000 wood block carvings and you would be like, I need to reprint page 832, and then having to go find the woodblock carving for page 832 just sounds like a nightmare. I'd be like, I don't care about reading or literacy or moving humanity forward at this point. Maybe it was the house. It just blew my mind right out the top of my head. So there was some more experimentation going on after this in China and Korea. And they were using, like, little wood or ceramic or metal blocks to make individual characters for the first time. And this was a big kind of push forward toward what we all know as what would eventually be the Gutenberg press individual letters, or in their case, characters, instead of just doing each page as a separate woodcut. Yeah. What's awesome is there's a commoner in China named Bi Chang who is thought to have come up with movable type, where rather than carving a wood block, for each page, you have letters, individual letters, carved out, and you can arrange them just so, any way you want. And then once you print that page, you can arrange them in a different way to print the next page. And that is a huge innovation, for sure. And again, note that this guy came up with this in about 1041 Ce. So a good 400 years before Gutenberg was working. Why does it keep saying BCE? I don't know. I think he really likes the sound of it. All right, fair enough. It's definitely Ce, though. No, I'm not doubting that. I was thinking too. I was like, Gosh, what if he was right? What if all this had started a good 1000 years earlier? How much further along would we be right now as humanity if this had happened 3000 years ago rather than 1000 years ago? Yeah, because here's the little spoiler. Printing books is a big deal. Like, some say that religion and democracy and just sort of the advancement of humanity. It was key to advancing all those things. You know who says that? US. People who are right. US. Yeah. I definitely am on board with that. Because the best way you can put it, it was the first Information Age that got launched by Gutenberg? By Gutbuck. I keep saying that because that's Steve Gutenberg's handle on Twitter. Oh, is it really? Okay. Steve Gutbuck. Is it really? He is the nicest guy too. Do you follow him? Yeah, I haven't checked in on his feet for a very long time. But years back, he used to be all up in our feed and he was just so nice. Happy Friday, everybody. Kind of stuff. Like, every Friday. Just a super nice guy. So I'm assuming nothing's gone horribly wrong with him and that he's still just as nice as he was a few years ago. Well, I highly recommend. I've always promoted the Great great Stars TV show Party Down, one of my favorite shows of all time. Oh, yeah, and Guts has a great episode, and it seems like that's who he is. And he's a super nice Guy in that episode because it's about a catering company. There were a bunch of writers and actors and stuff doing catering work, and he hires them to come over to his house for his birthday. They're there at the house when he pulls in, and he's like, oh man, we ended up having a surprise party for me, and I forgot. So he's just like, why don't you guys just come in and we'll be the party. Right? But you could really get the idea that that's who Goots is as a person. You know what's great is you definitely told that story before on the podcast, which means we've gotten to this point where we're amassing like we're building a standalone universe where, like, when Steve Guttenberg appears, this story pops up as well around, you know what I'm saying? Oh, I knew. I told it. I couldn't remember when, though. When would he have come up? I don't remember, but I'm sure we talked also about what a great guy he is on Twitter and all sorts of stuff. We have a character like a similar of Steve Gutenberg that lives in our podcast universe. And he's very less multifaceted than I'm sure he is in real life, but in our universe, Nice Guy on Twitter had a great episode of Hardy Down. That's all you need to know about Steve Goomberg. I know. We had even gotten into police caddy. Do we do a show on police academies? That probably would have made sense. I don't think we have. If we have, I must have been blacked out or something. All right, so printing press is advancing forward. Go to Korea in 1234, and you're going to find a man named Chow Yunhi who was commissioned to do some more Buddhist texts. A lot of this was Buddhist text? Well, yeah, if you'll notice, religious texts help push this whole thing forward from different religions even. Yeah, like that Bible that Gutenberg would make. Sorry. So this one was really long, and he was using this movable print that had already been around. But this time he was making these letters from metal, kind of using what the technique they did for coin minting, which had been going on for a while. Set them in a frame, lined them all up, coated them with ink and press them. And if you think, hey, that sounds like a printing press, you would be exactly right. You're right, fella, for sure. That's basically what Gutenberg came up with. He had a couple of extra innovations, for sure, that are definitely credited to him directly. But that general idea had been around for a couple of hundred years at least before he started printing his own stuff using this machine of his invention. Now, again, this is not detracted at all from Gutenberg. He put together a lot of disparate ideas, and there's also a lot of debate whether he would have known about the Korean or Chinese advancements in printing. If so, maybe it was the Mongols that spread it west, but they're not entirely certain. There's no smoking gun. So it's possible he also thought of it himself just by being involved in it and thinking about it. Or maybe he heard about some other stuff and refined it into his own thing. Regardless, he came up with the printing press, and the Chinese and the Koreans are not credited with that for actually a couple of reasons. And the upshot of all of it is that it didn't ever really take off in China or Korea, even though it was invented there. It didn't become widespread or widely used, and it certainly didn't create an information age revolution. Well, how's this for a cliffhanger? We'll take a little break and we'll tell you a couple of more reasons why it never took off in Asia right after this. All right, Chuck, I can't take this any longer. Tell us why it never took off in Asia. Well, some reasons that just make a lot of sense. They have very complex characters with their language, and they have up to tens of thousands of characters with different pronunciations, different phonemes, different syllables, and you just can't do it. You can't have that many little tiny blocks, much less multiples of those, if you want to print a page, because it's not like you can move them around. And then keeping up with all these was literally one of the big problems. Like, they made these big I think there was a man named Wang Zen who used these revolving tables to access these big racks of letters, but it was kind of like what you were talking about with the house made of wood blocks, 130,000 wood cuts. Right. It's like you just can't keep up with that many. So it wasn't practical. And then Gutenberg comes along. He's like, we only have 26 letters, so this is pretty dumb down, as the language goes. Yeah, because, I mean, even if you do capitals and lowercase, that's still just, what, 52? Throw in some punctuation. Yeah, some punctuation makes them doubles because you're going to use e a lot more times than one per page. So you need to make some backup copies of them. How many? You made about 300 in the end, right? That's what I saw. Yeah. 300 different characters, spaces, punctuation, uppercase, lowercase, and that's all he needed. So 300 versus tens of thousands. Number one, it's just easier to make, but number two, it's easier to keep up with, too. So Gutenberg just happened to be working in just the right language for a Movable type printing press to really make sense. Should we talk about this guy? Yeah. Because I like him. He had a bit of a hustle to him, and I like him. And he's also one of history's kind of hard luck guys in a way, even though his name is legendary. So you can't put a price on that. I'm sure he would have liked to have put a price on that. So I just want to say, from what I saw, it is very much up for debate whether he actually was financially ruined in the end or whether he was doing fine. Because one thing we got to tell everybody chuck out of the gate is Gutenberg was born at a time where his father was a patrician, he was an aristocrat in Germany. Mains, is it? Mains. maints. maints, Germany. So he was notable, but this wasn't a time where people of that class, he wasn't like a king or anything yet. So there was not a lot of documentation of his birth. We're not entirely certain when he was born. His early life has kind of lost the history, too, because he was just kind of a nobody until he invented the printing press. But the thing is, when he invented the printing press, it was so revolutionary and so obvious how revolutionary it was out of the gate that within a decade or two of his death, historians were studying and documenting his life. So there is a surprising amount of stuff that was documented about him that's preserved still. But the stuff that we do have is almost entirely his work and then court records when he was dragged into court by creditors and investors. Yeah. So you said he had a little bit of a hustle. I think Ed says they referred to him charitably as having entrepreneurial flair. It's another word of saying he had a bit of a hustle to him and he would get in. He was always trying to make a buck, always had some sort of scheme in the works, which means he had investors a lot of times, and a lot of times he might not come through. So as a result, he was taken to court a lot, like you said. And it's kind of funny to build this guy's life out of court records, but we are able to construct a little bit of it because of him being hauled in there and being sued time and time again. And most notably, we're able to kind of piece together the printing press that he invented, what he invented, what he knew when from these court records, because all of these lawsuits basically were over his work. They were between investors in his work and him. And the thing is, I don't have the impression that he was a hustler in the sense that he was a con man or shark or anything like that. He had very high aspirations. He also had the smarts to figure out how to achieve these aspirations. He just didn't have the money to achieve these aspirations. So he needed outside help. His big problem, as far as investors go, from what I can tell, is that he was a perfectionist. So rather than just figure out how to invent the Movable type printing press, which he did. He also tried to figure out one that could also print in red on a different set, or using copper engraving to create different types of type, some stuff like details that were kind of unnecessary, but made this transform this thing from an amazing piece of work to a masterpiece. And the time it took to be that much of a perfectionist made him run into creditors and investors that were not that patient. Yeah. And his first sort of tinkering with pressing anything, it seems, because of, again, a lawsuit was in Strasbourg when he lived there in around 1438. Is that C E? And he had this plan to produce these trinkets for people going on religious pilgrimage. Yeah, right. More than one. He had these tools that he could stamp out these trinkets and press these things. And so he sort of had an idea, at least, of how this kind of technology worked as far as cutting something, stamping and pressing it. And there's some indication, Chuck, that he was already figuring out the rough contours, if not more detail, than that of his printing press in Strasbourg, because that first court case was by the family of some creditors who took him to court because they wanted in on some secret work he was keeping from them. And being investors in him, they were saying, well, if you're doing work on the side, we should have a piece of that, too. And that's where some historians are, like this. Actually, what they're describing here is part of the printing press. Yeah, because for debate still. Well, I mean, it was ten years later, if that was in around 1438, and by the time he got back to mines in 1448, he borrowed some money from his cousin to do, like, a real printing business. I think you could be right. It's very likely those people knew that he was in the back room with his plan to print books and they wanted some of that action. Right. But he's like, no, dude, you invested on the ground floor, the trinket business. This is a whole different world changing business. You're going to have to cough up some more dough. And they said nine. Yeah, they did say nine. And he said, all right, well, I'm going to invent this thing or I'm going to cobble together a bunch of other people's work in a way that makes sense that you can make massive amounts of books that look good and that you can sell and make money on. And the Bible was a pretty obvious choice for the first big, big project. But he was like, the Bible is a lot to undertake. And if you've ever seen a Gutenberg Bible, they're huge. There's two volumes. Yeah, there's not like these little handheld Bibles. They're very large and I didn't get an exact measurement, but you can see when someone holds it, it's a big, big book. It's like a big, fat coffee table book. Let's say eleven x 18. They seem a little wider than that, but 36 x 99, that's as high as I'm going. So he said $1. He said that. I'm going to not start with the Bible. Too much to bite off. It's a little dull. So I'm going to start out with some other stuff. I'm going to print some pamphlets. I'm going to see if I can sell these things. I'm going to see how good they look. And he did. He printed a grammar book, was one of the first things. This is from another lawsuit by a Roman writer, and it was a popular book, which was, again, it's the smart thing that he did, is basically taking what would be a best seller at the time and seeing if he could mass produce it instead of block book as a regular printed book. Right. So he was also doing broadsheets. Which are kind of like early newspapers. Which they had a pretty we should do one on newspapers because the early election newspapers were these broadsheets. And sailors would buy them. Read them. And then take them into town at the next port. And they would be sold to those people who most people weren't literate at the time. So they would hire somebody who could read in town to read the news out at the local tavern or something. And we both have experience with newspapers. Sure, man, I would like to do newspapers one day. Let's do it. Oh, totally. That sounds like a twoparted to me. Okay, so basically the upshot of all this I think it's the second time I've said that. I never say that. I always want to deliberately make everything much slower than that. The upshot of something like yeah, you say it as much as we talk about gutenberg and party down. You know what's sad? I'm an unreliable narrator in my own life. Oh, man, what a great quote. The overall general point of what we've been saying up at this moment is that he kind of broke his teeth on some slightly easier projects to kind of figure out the ins and outs and everything. And then when he was finally ready to do the Bible, he apparently was well aware that this was going to be a masterpiece. He had figured it out, and he was ready to bite it off. And he started work on the Gutenberg Bible, also known as the Gutenberg Bible and also known as the 42 line Bible, because that's how many lines oh, really? He had per page, and even at 42 lines per page, which was more lines, because he lowered the space in between lines to fit more lines per page, it was still something like 1286 pages over two volumes. That's a lot. But bear that in mind. What we're talking about when we talk about this project eventually is that he was creating 1286 page Bibles. Okay. Yeah. One at a time, one page at a time, that is, which we'll figure in here in a second before he starts. He knows that he's going to be able to charge a lot for these things. And he knows he's going to need to crank them out as quickly as he can. So he's going to need more space. He's going to need more presses. He's going to need a lot of ink and other little doodads and spawn divots that it takes to make one of these. And he's going to need people. He's going to need some assistance. He can't do it all by himself because here's where that comes back. You can. Only it's not like he would print out a Bible and he's like, I got one. Go sell this thing. And we can continue to fund our little project here. You got to print out one page at a time, over and over and over and over. And then print out page two, over and over and over or two, and whatever the reverse side is. And eventually you're going to be able to start putting them together in bound form. And only then can you start actually making money. Right? Also, that was another thing that he doesn't get credited for enough, I think, is that he figured out how to do a rough, primitive version of an assembly line. Basically, he was mass producing these books out of the gate. That was the point. You're mass producing it, not doing it one page at a time like you're saying, like the old block books used to be, right? So he gets four presses going at a time. Later went up to, I think, six. And because of all this upfront money that he needs to keep this going until he can sell them and turn a profit, was he needed, like always, he needed some dough. He didn't have his pockets lined with money. So he had to go to a guy. And this guy's name was Johann Foust because he calculated he would need about two years. And because before he could start selling, yeah, the whole project he figured out was going to be about two years. This print run of Bibles is going to take him two years to do. So he needed to be able to pay everybody. He needed money for all the supplies, all the materials. He needed to be able to survive for two years. Because he would not be able to sell one single Bible until all of them were done. None of them were going to be done until all of them were done. That's just the way the process worked out, right? So Foost, I think, saw the writing on the wall, knew it was going to be expensive, but knew that he was going to probably be able to make a lot of money. And who knows? I don't know this fuzzy guy from Adam, but maybe in the back of his head he. Also thought, you know what, I might also be able to just sue this guy at some point and take control of these printing presses because this guy didn't have a pot to urinate in and he's not going to have any money. And that's exactly what happened. He ended up having no assets other than these prices. And when he got sued and lost and I don't even know what he got sued for. Was it for taking too long? Yes. Really? Yes. That makes the whole thing that much worse, that he was sued basically, like I was saying, for being a perfectionist. Wow. And technically, Gutenberg could have gotten the Bible out before boost sued him. But again, yeah, just a slightly less masterful version that would have just knocked everyone socks. Sure. Had just the same amount of an impact on the world. I don't think the world would have been changed really any had he gotten them out in a time when Foost was willing to not sue him. But he wasn't prepared to do that. He was an artist. He was an artist. He had the soul of an artist. So he just kept going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole to try to make this thing more and more perfect and elaborate. And Foost said, enough, and the court actually sided with Foost. So Fuse, Lennon, 800 Gildon or golden, which at the time was about the price of it's, a lot of money. Eight houses. Yeah, that's what we're going with. We'll see in a second. It'll make sense. But let's say eight average cost houses, that's how much he lent them. Then he did it again. He lent him another 800 golden. And so he was into him for 1600 golden. Would have easily been able to pay that back. When Foos sued him, the court said not only do you owe him 1600 golden, you owe them in interest. We're going to say two. Get this, about 2020 golden is what he ended up having to pay first. Now, did he sue him because he was that far over schedule? Because he told him it would take two years. Did it take like six or something? I saw that from the court records. They believe that he was done by 1455, and I believe he started in 1453. So he was probably right on schedule. I have the impression that Foost was a bit of an impatient jerkwad. Well, and also get the feeling that Gutenberg probably didn't dot his eyes and cross his teeth. Contractually, maybe not. I could see that, too, because you got to bake in a little bit of overtime there, for sure. But I think he may have been roughly on schedule because by 1452, he had created the Bible. And here's the other reason why Foos suing him was a bit of a screwdriver or a huge screw job. And by screw job, I mean like the act of a screwdriver screwing the screw into a slab of wood that the screw doesn't want to go into that wood, it wants to stay free. Exactly. That kind of thing. Right. So the reason why it really stuck that foo suit him is because he got the Bibles done. The Bible run was completed and fused to suit him and still won. If I had been foosted in the investor, I would have been like, okay, fine, you finished. Maybe pay me more, or something like that. But that was not the case. Yeah. And who knows what's going on back then? He could have bribed the judge who got a piece of the action. Right, exactly. I mean, that's speculation. But I'm just saying, it's not like today when our court system is just so perfect in every way. Right. Well, that's run exclusively by artificial intelligence. So Ed was kind enough to cobble together a few just sort of fun facts about that Bible run. He printed 180 of these things initially, sold all of them. Of course, today there are 49 of them still around, which Ed points out, and I agree, it's a really great survival percentage for something that old. 49 out of 180. And that just sort of pinpoints or just puts a point in. The fact that puts a pin in what am I trying to say? Really drives home the fact that these things were very cherished and taken care of from the beginning. I went to see how much you could buy one of these for. Oh, yeah? What did you find? Well, 87 was the last one I saw at auction. There may be one since then, but in 1087, it went for 5.4 million. So that was one volume. A complete set, hasn't been auctioned since 1978. That went for 2.2 million and 1970, $8. Wow. From what I saw, if you read half the Bible, you get the Old Testament only or something, if you're lucky. But if the complete copy, they think, would be 35 million today if it went to auction, that makes sense. That's about right. But he made two versions. He made one like a regular version on paper, and it sold for 20 golden. And he made a vellum one on cat skin for 50 golden. He made 45 of those. So allow me to figure these calculations real quick. Okay, boy, here we go. Remember, MAPFRE, I'm going to get this right. All right. So there's this historian named Andrew Pedigree who says that a house in Maines would have cost up to 100 golden a house. So the total that he could have made selling this is these Bibles. It's 180 print run of Bibles is 4950 golden. That's a lot of houses. It is. Let's say at 100 golden apiece, that's 49 and a half houses. Don't ask about the half of the house, but let's say today's dollars that we're saying that a house is $200,000 per house. Okay? Yeah. So $200,000 times 49 and a half houses means that he made off of these 180 Bibles, almost $10 million. Oh, I can't wait for the correction. It's right, dude. I'm definitely right. And so here's the other thing, too. When Boost Susan and gets that judgment of 2000 golden against him, a lot of people say, well, that ruined Gutenberg and he died a pauper. If that Bible runs sold out, he still would have had more than half of that nearly $10 million left over after paying food. So it's very much unclear that he was a pauper or not. The overall point of what I've been saying up to this moment is this the upshot a word you could have used earlier too, when you were looking for a word upshot where it works. Yeah, you're right. I wasn't going to encourage the use of that, though. But the upshot of is that Foost got his hands on Gutenberg's printing press right after that run of Bibles was made, or his six printing presses, rather. Yeah. And his printing assistant, who was actually Foost's son in law, he got the whole shebang, all these plates, everything. You know what my favorite thing about your math stuff is? What? I know the second that you start that there are thousands of people mathbusters, if you will okay. That just immediately get out their pencil and pad and to see if they can prove you wrong. That is fantastic. I'm fine with that. Yeah. That is a game and I always win. All right, so we're going to take another break, okay. We're going to tally up your math wins and losses. All right. And we're going to talk about how this thing actually worked right after this. So I think we came up chuck with that. I've won every math contest. I've initiated, everyone. Okay. All right. So shall we talk about the Gutenberg press? Yes. Well, you got your individual letters. Okay. Alright. So we said he ended up making 300 of these things. So you're going to need all these little individual letters carved. They're carved into steel using these little files, and these are the master letters. And then they punch those into soft metal, most likely copper. And then the impression in the copper is formed into a mold and then you're going to pour molten metal. And what I saw was that one thing that Gutenberg definitely invented was this hand casting instrument where you would actually pour this molten metal. I think use lead ten and antimony, whatever that is. That was an alloy that he invented. Even like add that to his list. Yeah. So he invented some stuff. But this is how you would actually make the individual letters was by this early process. Right. So the one thing that's still up for debate supposedly is whether he invented or used that punch matrix thing where you punch the letter into a softer metal. They're not entirely certain, but yes, he definitely was casting letters with alloy of his own making. And apparently it cooled like the moment. Like you just poured it in, closed the mold and opened it. And it would be cool enough to jump out on the table and start filing down. Because that was the other thing too. You had to file down every letter to make sure that they were uniform. And he even went, this is an example of how details he got. He even was like, oh, well, this F has a lot of space between on either side of it. So he filed down the sides of all the F. After testing it a few times to make basically kerning, he figured out kerning right out of the gate the first time anyone had ever really created the printing press. There was also kerning, which is the spacing between letters. Like if you've ever seen a bunch of letters strung far apart, it looks really weird. Kerning not a fan of that. That's a high kerning value, low kerning values, where they're tighter together, which is what you want. Yeah. So the long and short of these little blocks, though, is that you only needed to carve each one time. You had to pour a bunch of molds if you wanted a bunch of ease or a's or other vowels and stuff, that was nothing. But yeah, that was nothing. You only had to do that carving once. Filed these things down until they're all uniform. And then it moves on to someone known as the compositor. Yes, the compositor. Not to be confused with the eradicate or from kids in the hall, the compositor was the person who sat there with the manuscript right. And read each line. And as they were reading each line, they were gathering the letters they needed and putting the letters together in a handheld little rack to basically make each line. And they would slide each line into a frame called the form. And you would do that just line by line until the whole form, the whole frame is filled up with the lines that you're going to print a page with. Yeah. Basically what they did in Korea 200 years earlier, except it was far fewer characters. Yeah. And you get the idea that if you were a compositor working for Gutenberg the Perfectionist, it was probably a pretty nervy job because you're reading that manuscript. Any misspelling, any misuse of punctuation, I'm sure there would have been heck to pay from here at Gutenberg. So I imagine that job was just sort of high tension. And Gutenberg very famously, was super passive aggressive in his managerial style. He would just kind of wander out in the shop with his coffee and say, oh, you're going to put it that way, I'm going to need you to work Sunday as well. Yeah. And it was like you try to avoid him or whatever, but he had the 6th senses to pop up exactly right. As you were trying to leave for the day. Right. And he would ask about your stapler, and he would say, this is my red stapler. Yeah. That was one of the press men. This is kind of kept in the basement. There's a weird time for printing. It was another weird time is going to be right now when I ask you if you understand this, gobbledygook about Folios. Yeah. Because it's confusing to me. Right. So it's way easier to print. Yes. A logistical nightmare is another way to put it. Yeah. But if you take one large page that's actually two pages of a book wide and fold it, you have a Folio. Sure. And supposedly Gutenberg printed these things in Folios of five so that each little, I guess, thing that they did was 20 pages. They would do 20 pages at a time for, remember, something like 1286 pages. They were doing this total per Bible. That was that the key? Was this to answer your question? No, I didn't fully understand the folios. I think there was a lot made of Folios when there didn't necessarily need to be a lot made of Folios. The point was that when you printed this stuff, this is very tricky. You had to dampen the paper. Okay. Because if you didn't did you like that? We're leaving the head just got to breeze right on by that. Yeah. When you print on paper using the kind of ink that he created, another thing he created, which we'll talk about, the paper can stick very easily unless you dampen the paper. The problem is you got to print on the back side, too. But you can't dampen the paper again, my friend, or else you're going to smear the ink on the other side or it's going to run or whatever. So they would dampen the paper, print one side, and then have to print the other side. Like after the ink on the one side was dried, before the paper had dried fully. Right. That's got to be tricky. You talk about nerviness and high stress, especially when you're on, like if it's 180 Bibles in a $10 million project, each page is rather expensive and valuable, so you don't want to screw up any of them. So if you want to look at a press again, I would go to YouTube and see the video of it actually being done. But the press has two sections. You've got this frame that allows the plates and the paper to align themselves, the carriage, and then the actual press part of the press. And you set these plates onto the carriage, and they're facing up. And then you apply ink using these, and when you see it on the video, it kind of looks like these big giant gourds. They have a handle and then this big, round, sort of drum, head looking body, right. And you roll this thing all around with the ink and then roll them around on each other to make sure that all the ink is really even. And it's actually goose skin, these pads are. And then you just go around and stamp these four plates. And from the looks of the way this guy did it, it took about maybe a minute and a half to fully ink them for a good page. And these things are kind of heavy. He doesn't roll them because if you roll them, you end up smearing. Okay. So he's just sort of pounding them on there. And it's a lot of work. And all of this looks like a lot of work. Even the pressing part takes a lot of manual strength. Well, yeah. I mean, again, two years to just print 180 Bibles. Yeah, it's a physical workout. He uses this ink you mentioned. It's an oil based varnish. Previously, for many, many hundreds of years, they use water based, which is just no good. Water based ink is not what you want to do when you're printing a book. No. And that was actually another reason why it didn't catch on. Printing didn't catch on in China and Korea, too, is they were using water based inks exclusively. And it runs, it smears. It doesn't stay in place. It's just a bad jam. And that was another innovation of gutenberg, which was to use oil based inc. There was somebody I can't remember we've talked about it in a podcast before, but they were talking about how some inventor just knocked something out of the park his first time out. And they said that it was akin to invent, like it had the Wright brothers invented their airplane, complete with airline miles and food trays that came down off the back of the sea in front of you. This is like this complete thing. And that's kind of what Gutenberg did with the printing press. He solved all the problems all at once in his initial invention. Like he figured it all out. And as we'll see, it stayed the same for hundreds of years as a result. Yeah. So to hold the paper in place, because this frame is upright, and then you end up folding it down, it's held in by these pins, these little look like little nail heads. Not nail heads, but nail pointy parts, the opposite of the head, the ouchie parts. And that way when you flip it over, because you're going to have to print that other side, it's exactly in the same spot that it was before. Another nice little, very rudimentary way of making something perfect. And then you mentioned earlier he made certain parts. Read this rubrication. I'm not sure what he did for the Gutenberg Bible, but in the King James version, if I'm not mistaken, jesus words are all in red. Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I think I remember that being the case, but I think he just used it here for certain parts and maybe flourishes of art and there was some hand drawn art and stuff like that as well. Well, yeah, they went to hand drawn because he had so much trouble with the red, like going back and printing after the black was printed, printing on the same page with just the red text. It's pretty advanced, right. But they said, yeah, we'll just go do the hand lettering, like traditionally, so nobody will be mad at us for it. Right. Like, what do you call it when the first letter is big? Drop cap. Yeah, drop cap. They did those in red for sure. Yeah. And then you've got your screw. The screw press he used, he kind of ganked from wine and grape presses. And once you have this thing inked up, you move it over to the press, and it's just a big armed lever. It's not like something that moves in a circle. You just kind of pull it really tough, kind of one or maybe two times, and then boom, you've got your printed page. You do. And Ed points out something that I think is overlooked. But one of the other problems with Chinese and Korean printing or any kind of printing using wood blocks or something like that, is you're going to get uneven pressure, so you're going to get an uneven transfer. One of the genius things about the press, about it using basically a wine press for printing, is that it applies even slow pressure at increasing pressure and then decreasing pressure as you unscrew the screw at the same rate, like over the whole plate. Right. So there was a nice even amount of pressure that was increasingly introduced and decreasingly reduced. That really kind of made this beautiful outcome on the printed page. Yeah. You get when this guy in this video holds up the little printed page at the end, there's a little moment of OOH and going on in that room. Right. And like, a little trickle of blood comes out of his ears. He's just gazing into the cane. Oh, man, I was worried about that guy for me. I got to go see that. Yes, you should check them out. So that's the printing press. We should say after Gutenberg printed those Bibles, foost got his hands on those prices almost immediately, and in very short order, I think, like, less than two years, released a Salter, which is also considered a masterpiece. But Boost put his name on it, even though Gutenberg had basically created the whole thing. He also made a business for himself creating these Bibles using Gutenberg's old plates, because he got his hands on all those through the court. But again, Gutenberg was certainly not lost to history. Everybody knew what he did and very quickly revered him as a hero extraordinaire. But we were talking about what the Gutenberg press did for the world, and it's really tough to overstate the impact that it had on things. Yeah. I mean, just think about, like, you said, the first Information Age, getting out information on government and politics and democracy. Just little things like how tos and there might have been a HowTo on how to make those nails that we talked about in the blacksmithing episode. Right. Although I think a lot of that is passed down, but all of a sudden, you can get this out on mass. And that's the whole thing. It's like, all of a sudden, hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands of people could read information. Right. And they could learn to read, too, because books were now way more affordable than they have been before. And actually, ironically enough, I ran across a history.com article called Seven Ways the Printing Press Changed the World by our own Dave Ruse. He points out this, and I thought, this is really important. With the printing press, it made it way easier to make way more copies of something than ever before, which also made it harder to stamp out new ideas. Whereas before, if you had some heretic who had this new idea about the Earth revolving around the sun rather than the other way around, all you do is kill that person, burn them at the stake, and then burn their copies of their notes along with them, and idea gone. Right? Yeah. Now, that person could make a bunch of copies and disseminate them, and so this idea would be out there. You could kill that person, but their idea was going to survive because there were too many copies for you to get your hands on and stamp out. And that led to things like the Enlightenment, like the revolution in America and in France, and the birth of democracy in the west. All of this stuff came from that ability to disseminate things like never before in the legal system. It allowed judges to throw the book at people. Yeah. Before it was they just had one book. Yeah. They wouldn't throw that one thing. No. Why not? Get it back. That's right. So wow. That's a good one. I think on that one, we should end this episode on the gutenberg printing press, don't you? Yes. Well, since I said don't you? Everybody, it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this sweepstakes winner. This is from Devon. John hey, guys. Just listen to the sweepstakes podcast. Wanted to share one of my wins as a sweeper in 2016. I saw a sweepstakes from Interstate Battery and Firestone, where they were giving away two trucks and a bunch of gift cards. All you had to do is get a free battery, check at any firestone, and enter with your invoice. I thought, I need an oil change, so I might as well get that battery checked and enter. Less than three months later, I was contacted by a third party company who facilitates the sweepstakes. Almost didn't answer. They told me I didn't win. And he won a gift card? No, he won a truck. He won one of those two trucks. 2017 Chevy Silverado. He said, I loved having a truck, but as you guys said, you got to pay taxes on winnings, which counts as income. So I ended up selling it, buying a nice used car, and paying off debt. I've won a bunch of stuff and have learned how to spot real and fake giveaways, but they do exist, so keep entering. And that is Devon Johns. And he included a picture of himself with his lacar. Man. Great. Looks good still. Yeah. Thanks, Devon. Congratulations. And that is a fantastic story. That's a perfect listener male response to the sweepstakes episode, if you ask me. Yeah, in a smart, responsible thing you did by getting a cheaper thing and then paying off debt. Good for you. Yeah. Well, if you want us to give you a pat on the head for something you did email to us, you can send it off to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of Iheartradios how stuff works. 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How Castles Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-castles-work | In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the most famous fortified structure in the world -- the castle. Tune in to learn all about castles, from murder holes to modern fortresses. | In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the most famous fortified structure in the world -- the castle. Tune in to learn all about castles, from murder holes to modern fortresses. | Fri, 16 Apr 2010 16:33:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=16, tm_min=33, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=4, tm_yday=106, tm_isdst=0) | 26935599 | 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 housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck Jerry's over to my right that would make this Stuff You Should Know the most overheated, cramped, smelly, sweaty podcast on the market. I thought you could say overrated. No, overheated, because we were number three today in front of Mr. Ricky Gervais. Right. And since I don't recognize Alvin and the Chipmunks as a podcast, we're technically number two. Yeah. Right behind IRA Glass. Big surprise. We love IRA Glass. Let's just say that because people are going to say, why don't you like this American Life? I know. That's the problem with having such a substantial library of podcasts. So when we go back, like, 50 episodes and revisit a joke, only the really hardcore S YSK listeners know what we're talking about. The people sent an email, and they get 50 episodes back, and they're like, Right. I wish I would have held my tongue. Can we get on with this? Yeah, let's do it. Chuck, were you ever in the heman, arguably the most homo erotic action figure created? No, I was a little old for that. Well, it was right in my wheelhouse, as you would say. Yes. And I had a little toy that I like to call Castle Grace Cold, because that's what the manufacturers call it. Have you seen this? I've heard of it all. Yeah, it was pretty awesome. The cartoon was horrendous. Did you watch the cartoon? No, I was too old for that. How many times do you have to go over my age? I don't know. Have you ever heard of the Bay City Rollers? I know them personally. Anyway, I had this little toy called Castle Grace Go, and it's a big plastic castle, and it was pretty awesome. It had embattlements, it had tower, it had towers. It even had a little overhang hanging off the back and then the front entrance. The tunnel was a mouth with fangs coming down. Cool. And it was just generally one of the cooler toys I owned, to tell you the truth. Nice. And now that I've read how castles work, I could where I'd go back in time, stand next to my younger self, and be like, this is the tower. This is called the Port colis. This is a murder hole, and don't start smoking. Yes. I would say that to young self. Oh, my God. If there's one thing I could go back and change really? Well, if I had, like, three or four things I could go back and change, smoking would definitely be one of them. Yeah, it would be taller. Oh, wait, things you can really change? Yeah. Time travel has no effect on your height. I would tell myself to grow taller okay. When I stood the chance. Yeah. So let's talk castle. Chuck okay. Josh the word castle, like everything almost Latin, comes from the word castellum, which means a fortified place. And that's exactly what it is. And the French shortened it, lazy French people that they are, from castellan to castle, it means the same thing. And castles are actually very specific buildings. There are very specific features to them that make a castle a castle. Yeah. They're generally European, although there are some castles found in the Middle East and Japan. Sure. But for the most part, they are European and origin Germany lousy with castle. 10,000 of them in Germany alone. And they only actually existed for about 500 years, or they only underwent construction for about 500 years during the High Middle Ages, from the 10th to 15th centuries. Pretty cool. Yeah. So let's talk about the history of castles and not just historic castles, but the beginning of castles. Where do they come from? Chuck well, Josh, they evolved from the ancient walled cities back in, like, Troy and Babylon and Jericho. They would have big walls around their cities for fortification. Sure. So it evolved from that into the first ones were called a grad, I believe is how you pronounce that, or a grudge. And that consisted of basically wooden and earthen walls and then a gate with a moat around it. And that would become one of the hallmarks of the castle, was the motor. Yeah, you have to have a motor. We didn't know. It not a castle. It depends on the terrain. Sometimes if you're on, like, a rocky peak, you didn't have a motor because you couldn't and you didn't need it. But most castles are known for having boats. Yeah, thank you for that correction. Chuck I surely love to be corrected. There's another kind of castle that eventually became part of the modern, and by modern, I mean High Middle Ages castle called a bergfreed, which you may suspect is German, but it's actually based on Roman design that they would use these watchtowers along their frontier, and those became the towers of later castles. Right. Josh I believe that brings us to number three, which was the MOT and Bayley Castle. And that consisted of a mound, which is the Mott, and that's within the open courtyard, which was the bailey. And that, of course, as always, is enclosed by a wall and a fortified gate. That's the key. Right. So you put all these things together, fill them with bloodthirsty knights and pooping horses, and you have the castle as we recognize and love it the whole property. Yeah. Okay. So, Mr. Smarty Pants, you don't always have to have a mode. Okay. But most of them did have modes. Right. So you had a moat, which is really just a ditch dug around the outer wall of the castle. Yeah. What I love about castles dude, sorry to interrupt is everything is so rudimentary. Early genius sounded like me just now. It was all just genius. But it was so basic. They were like, well, we don't people get in, so let's dig a big ditch around it, or let's build a big door with a big brace behind it. Yeah. And there seems to be a lot of murderousness during this time. It was a very violent time. Sure. So most of the technology and ingenuity was based toward effectively killing people in the most horrific ways you could imagine. Right. So the boat that was used to keep people out right. And if it were, you could fill it with water. Everybody filled it with sewage, human and otherwise. Right. You don't see that in the movie. No, you don't. Can you imagine how badly that smelled? Yeah. And if you could keep it dry, although, again, you would fill it with sewage anyway, and if you kept it dry, likely you would bury sharpened steaks coming out at all angles so you could push people into it and be like SAINR a sucker. Right. That's what they would say in Japan. Right? Yeah. So you got your moat, you got your drawbridge, which lower the draw bridge, extends over the moat so you can get in and out of the castle. And you have the outer walls. Right. And the outer wall actually, all castles have outer walls. Some have inner walls. We'll get to that in a second. But the outer walls are actually two walls. Right? Yeah. Didn't know that either. So you have the one wall and then a space, and then another wall, and then in between the two walls, you back fill with rubble or stone or gravel or something that really make these things just like brick houses. Right. And then some castles even had an outer outer wall called a shield wall, which was even taller. Right. So people could walk along the inside wall and not have their head lopped off with a flaming arrow. Exactly. Which is true. They had those. Yeah, they did. That was a lot of things were made of wood, especially in the early days of castles. And this wood would probably be pretty well, it's like a big tinder box. Sure. Is what you were walking around in. So flaming arrow goes a long way. Yeah. It's very effective. Right. There were also overhangs that were initially made of wood that I found pretty cool. You remember I mentioned Castle Gray School originally, these things were called hoardings. Okay. And they would have arrow loops, which are basically just narrow slits right. You can shoot through. Right. And they would hang over the front of the castle. So when people were storming the front of the castle right. You could shoot them with arrows, the arrow loops. But they also had the coolest sounding things of all time. Murder holes. Yeah, I love these. Murder holes were holes, but you could shoot arrows. So basically, if you're standing on a hoarding, there were holes in the floor. You could shoot arrows. Also, you could pour hot oil, hot metals, hot whatever. Exactly. And the way that the entrances were arranged, when you're walking in the entrance of the castle, you've crossed over the drawbridge, and now you're walking in the tunnel. There's arrow loops on either side of you, and then above, there's murder holes. So if you were able to breach the drawbridge in the gate, you were subject to having all sorts of hot, horrible stuff poured on you. Yeah. And you were in big trouble. Not fun. No. The other thing they had, too, for defense and for protection while defense is in defending yourself, was the crennelation. Like, when you see the top of the tower and it's one block is higher, then the next block is low, the next block is higher. That was actually purposely done that way, so soldiers could hide behind those blocks, peek around the corner and fire an arrow, and then hide behind the tall block again. Right. And I would argue that crenulations are the most readily recognizable design of a castle, for sure. The little sandcastle molds, even those have crenulations on them. If they don't have the crennellations, it's really just a big rectangle. Yeah. You're going to chuck, you were talking about guys hiding behind the blocks of crennelation and then moving to the side and shooting an arrow. They also designed staircases in a clockwise circular fashion. Coolest fact of the show right here. Do you want to take it, buddy? May I? Yes, please. Okay. You're right. Clockwise while going up. This is because at the time, soldiers were right handed. The fought with their right hand, swung the sword with the right hand. If they were left handed by nature, they were taught to fight with their right. Because why? Because lefthanded people were considered evil at the time. Actually, the word sinister means left handed. So weird. So they design it counterclockwise going up. So if you were flying up the stairs to go fight somebody, you had room on your right hand side to swing your weapon, and it wouldn't hit the wall. Right. Isn't that the coolest fact of the whole thing? It is. And also, if you're running up the stairs and you're an archer, you have plenty of room to draw an arrow and shoot it out of one of the arrow loops. Yeah. So, Chuck yes. That's the outer wall. We've got the crenulations, we got towers built into it. We have holdings and different variations on the holding. Right. And then you have the inner wall right. Inside the outer wall, you would have what's called a bailey, which is basically just a big open courtyard. So anytime you see knights jousting, like the heartthrob Heath Ledger in A Knight's Tale right. Where that joust is taking place is actually inside the outside wall of the castle. Yeah. And here's the thing. We'll talk about the sieges later, but once you storm into the castle, it's kind of like, great, we're inside. But it's also like, oh, boy, we're inside. Because now you're trapped. Right. And all the little dudes up there in the tower and on the walkways all of a sudden just turn around and start firing flaming arrows down at your head. Right. Because at the very least, the castle would have an outer wall and then some sort of tower or inner fortification. A lot of castles actually had an outer wall, then the bailey and then an inner wall, and then within that was the tower. So, yeah, you're toast, basically, if you made it in and if you were feeling under the weather that day, that was the day you died. The courtyard, josh they also use it as a marketplace. They had festivals and fairs, they did soldier drilling, trained horses. And then later, once castles later on became more for, like, the kings and the noble ben and less military in nature. And they were used for, like, gardens and fountains, that kind of thing. Right. And when the nobleman actually lived in the castles, which they did, but for the most part, castles were originally made for military purposes. But then, as the military technology advanced, castles became much less strong or able to withstand attacks. Sure. So what was originally called the keep, actually, what was originally called the Don john right. Became the Keep. And the keep, or the Don Johnson, it was usually Pastel that became the keep. And that's where the lord of the manor, whoever owned the feudal surfs, lived. Right. The other thing, because obviously you need a lot of people to keep up a castle to work the kitchen, flagsmiths, carpenters. There were residential apartments inside. Yeah. Which you never really think about, you know, the fact that they had people living there on site. So sort of like a little live workplace scene way back in the Middle Ages. Right. I just assume that feudal lord slaughtered all the workers afterwards. Exactly. Yeah. They're also chapels Chuck and there's a castle in Scotland, and the name escapes me right now, but it is supposedly the most haunted castle in the world. And the reason why is one of the things that happened there was the feudal lord, the person who owned the castle, his brother was saying mass in the chapel of the castle and he came in and murdered his brother, beheaded him while he was saying mass. It's probably bad luck. I think running over gravestones is on par with that with your car? I'd say so, yeah. It's pretty bad stuff. Yeah. So they had chapels, they had live in priests many times because they went to church every day back then. They had the great hall inside the castle, which is what? When you see them drinking the meat and feasting at the big table, it's in the great hall. Right. They had storage, obviously, for their food and the horse food and all that kind of stuff. And little known fact, inside the Keep, most rooms were heated with a fireplace. Yeah, I saw that. That was worthy of putting in here. I thought that was interesting. Chuck, one of the things that I hadn't thought of until I read the circle, it makes complete sense, is that castles needed to have a self sufficient water supply. So you had to have a well within the castle walls. Sure. Right. Why? Well, because if you were trapped in there and we'll get to the siege later on, that was my segue into the siege. Well, you need to have your water because when people siege, they kind of basically surround you and say, no one's coming out to get anything right. For months or years. Long time, so you better have your water and your food. Right. And they said it just like that. I think. Actually, I thought you were going to mention the dungeon. That's why I didn't know you're moving on. Well, yeah, the dungeon was originally up high when it was called the Don Johnson, like you said, and then that became the Keep and the dungeon was moved down low. Yes, down low. So that was just another interesting fact I thought was dungeons used to be, like, in the upper reaches. Yeah. You always think of dungeon is below the ground. Right. But they're harder to escape from. Exactly. Dude. Bingo. The other thing they had, Josh, besides the Wells, because they needed to get their water was they use cisterns to collect rainwater. Very green living type of thing going on. Right. Very smart to do so, though. Yeah. So, Chuck, we were talking about sieges, remember that? Yeah. Back to sieges. So let's say that you have a standing army within your castle and you're a feudal lord and you may or may not have just murdered your brother while he was saying mass, but otherwise everything is hunky dory, and then all of a sudden, an invading army from another nearby lord comes up. So you basically batten down the hatches, to use a metaphor that doesn't really make any sense whatsoever because it's nautical in nature. Sure. But basically you try to fight them off as much as possible. But also you've got all of your entrances closed and guarded and you've got people ready with hot oil at the murder holes and all that. And like we said, this can last for months or years. Yeah. The impression I got was that a lot of times, there was never any fighting going on when they did the surround and wait you out technique. Right. And it actually led to the fewest casualties because a lot of times the invading army could negotiate the surrender of the castle. Well, true. But the other side of the coin is if you're going to be the army that surrounds the place, you got to have your food and water, too. Right. So people inside the castle would use flaming arrows sure. Catapults with flaming boulders, maybe, and shoot them into the countryside to set it on fire so the invading army couldn't go get supplies from it. Right. Yeah. Or forage around and hunt and that kind of stuff. Right. You could see some invading army guy going, the berries, they're on fire. That's what we counted on. The other cool thing, too, if you were the invading army, you could catapult and this is not just for Monty Python. You could catapult like a dead cow. Diseased cow or diseased human or diseased dead human into or I guess a disease live human. All bets are off. I'm not dead yet. And you can catapult them over the wall, and all of a sudden this bovine diseased animal is just like splattered in the middle of your keep. Yeah. And you're in big trouble. Yeah. And I think probably the other reason that laying siege to well, just waiting, that kind of siege was favored was because the whole reason you're attacking this castle is probably get the castle. I would think so. So you want as little damage into the castle as possible. Yeah, sure. Because if it took five, I think two to ten years to build a castle, you don't want to wait that time. You just go wait for some other schmo to build his and invade it and then take it. Yeah, it's a good idea. That's the broadwater way. Right. One of the other ways, Josh, and this you would think is right out of the cartoons, but actually happened to get into a castle is you would use a scaling ladder and you would put a big tall ladder and you would climb up it. But just like in the cartoon, you could just go up there and push the ladder off once the dudes are on it, if you were strong enough. Or you could shoot the flaming arrows at their head, which is our favorite technique. Throw objects down, pour hot oil on them. Same deal. Right. To get around this, you could create a what do they call, chuck assiege tower. Yeah. Build your own portable tower, essentially. And you have a bunch of soldiers inside, and they are waiting while some other soldiers down on the ground are pushing this tower right up against as close as they can get to the castle. And then the door opens and guys come streaming out. Yeah. Dude, they would lower a plank across like a pirate ship would do. And let's say when they pulled up to another pirate ship and they would storm that way from up top. Yes. I think that appeared in, like, the Last Lord of the Rings movie. No. Okay, I don't even say that. Yeah, they use that device in The Last Lord of the Rings movie. Oh, cool. Yeah. But Josh, that is not my favorite. And when I was talking about rudimentary genius, the battering ram oh, yeah. You build big door, we take big pole, smash door. You know, it's funny, the Fuzz still use that today. Oh, yeah, the little metal things. Yeah, I want one of those. You can get one. You should probably dispose of the complimentary brass knuckles that come with your order, though. Right. So, yeah, the battering ram obviously was a big tool for the invading army. And some of them were covered in, like, shields to prevent the flaming arrow from hitting their head. Some were wide open. And then to defend it, once again, rudimentary Genius, they would slide like padding down in front of the door, like, oh, here they come with the battery and let's throw this mattress up against the door. Which, again, I think that that's used in modern storming techniques by the Fuzz and terminals. They would shoot flaming arrows into the door as well. Yeah, because it was wood. So catch the door on fire and maybe you can weaken it a little bit. I think anytime there was wood, flaming arrows came into play. Right. You always had to have the flaming arrow at the ready. Castle actually entered decline, at least for military purposes, because of the invention of something we call the cannon. Yeah. Once you had superior firepower, it doesn't matter how big your wall is. Exactly. Oh, we've left out one siege technique that I thought was awesome. The tunneling. Yeah. You were going to say that this sieging army would dig a tunnel all the way under the castle walls. Right. And then they would use timber supports to hold the thing up while they are digging. When they finished digging, they would come back out, set the tunnel on fire, the timber supports would burn and the wall above would collapse because there is no longer any support. Pretty cool. Isn't that awesome? Yeah, it didn't make sense to me at first, but then I got it. So this is what you had to do to make a wall collapse. Then the cannon comes along and all you have to do is shoot a couple of cannonballs in the same place and then the wall collapses. Right. So castles kind of fell out of use, but strangely enough, history repeated itself. It actually came full circle because remember we were talking about the predecessors of castles were earthen walls and wood. And that's what we went back to, because earthen walls, we found could sustain the impact of a cannonball. Wow. So like colonial forts. Yeah, they were made of earth and walls and wood, and they kind of replaced. Well, not replaced, but as far as the military outpost replaced the castle. Exactly. And they were also really speedy. Apparently, the colonial army could put up a fort in basically 24 hours. Wow. Yeah. Instead of two to ten years. Yeah. Or 30 years. Right. Is that how long some of them took? That's how long one in Arkansas taking. Oh, yeah. Let's talk about this guy. This is another freshman named Michelle Guillot. And Mary Lynn Martin worked on a project in France called Project Guillotine. So out of my league with France, and they are basically building a castle in the Bordeaux region of France using the old techniques. It started 1997, expected to take about 25 years. And I went to the website, Day, and it looks pretty rad. It looks pretty cool. So far, it's like more than one third finished, and it's open to the public. Well, that's how they're paying for it. With tourist money? Yeah, it's pretty cool. And they use all ancient tools. Not ancient, but yeah, ancient. No, not ancient. Ancient. Prehistoric. But you could make the case that it's ancient. Like wooden calipers. Right. They have a rope with knots tied in it to measure things out. They're quarrying the limestone by hand, carving the bricks by hand. They're transporting it from the quarry to the site by horse. Not just a horse, but a horse drawn wagon. Right. Yeah. And that's actually in the article. And then we got an email from Dana in Arkansas who said who turned us onto this guy before I read the article. He's actually doing the same thing in Arkansas now. Yeah. He said I would build one in Bordeaux and Arkansas. Random. It is random, but it looks like it's going to be awesome. Yeah. And it's called the Ozark Medieval Fortress, and it opens actually in May of this year for the public. And I think for $50, you can go see the thing in progress. And once again, it's like a 15 or 20 year project. Right. Or you can go to a major regional mall and have a nice chicken dinner at Medieval Times. True. Or you could go see them about the same price, the Hearst Castle. They're like some rich dudes later on in the 20th century. I want my castle. What says that? I own the labor of 25% of America. A castle. Hirst castle is awesome, though. You ever been there? I haven't. I've seen pictures. Yeah. Really cool. Yeah. And there's a castle in my neighborhood. What? Yeah, there's a castle in Oakhurst. Have you ever seen it, Jerry? Yeah, it's like a five minute walk from my house. I walk by there with the dogs all the time. Sweet. It's like a small house, and it's got the tower, and it's built a rock. I'll have to go check it out. Yeah, I could probably find a picture of it. Isn't there a castle? That's mausoleum that used to be in one of the mall parking lots? Avondale Mall parking lot? No, it's a walmart now. But it wasn't a castle. But it was a stone mausoleum. Okay, close enough, right? Yeah, this castle. No. Chris is kind of cool, but every time I walk the dogs by, there some dude pours hot oil on me. So kind of off putting. Nice one, Chuck. Nothing more needs to be said after that, I don't think. So if you want to learn more about castles and see some cool pictures of castles actually, there's a bunch left in this article we didn't cover. You can type in castles in the handyarchbar@housetepworks.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this email from Anna. She seems pretty cool. I think Anna is from Poland. Wait, was there a email from Anna Colon? She seems pretty cool, or she seems pretty cool. She does. I think she's Polish, so that inherently makes her cool. Okay. Hi, Josh and Chuck. I have to thank you for the hiccup podcast, as it reminded me of how special I am in my 27 years on this planet. So she's either 27 or she's been living on Earth for 27 years. She's Martian. She's 40 years. I've acquired exactly two superpowers. One, a photographic olfactory memory, which I've had since childhood, and two, the ability to cure my own hiccups just by thinking about them, which I perfected once I was of legal drinking age. The latter superpower is made for a hilarious party trick. Basically, if I get hiccups while imbibing of the sweet, sweet booze, that's how I knew we'd like her. Yeah. All I have to do is pause for a second, concentrate on just the hiccups, and they go away within just a few moments. Of course, strangers at parties don't know this, so I can pretend that I am plagued by uncontrollable hiccups, and the only way I'll get cured is if, say, for instance, someone does a keg stand or a guy gives me a kiss. Pretty smart. Jeez, wily. Now, I know that with great power comes great responsibility, so I have resisted the temptation to use this ability for evil. So far, my only hope is that I don't become so blinded with power that I turn to the dark side and use my hiccups to start a major war of influence on an election. Or influence an election, anyway. How about a future podcast on Burping? Anna says that, and she says, kudos to Chuck for having good taste in music. We've seen The Flaming Lips myself this year, and her email signature she's written in before has a Charles Bukowski quote. It's the other way I know she's what is it? The best part of a writer is on paper. The other part is usually nonsense. Nice. And it's probably followed by a hiccup and a bird. Well, thanks for that, Anna. We appreciate the email. It's pretty cool. If you have a special power, if you have a great Buchansky quote, or if you can tell us your age in Martian years, we want to hear it. Put it in an email, spank it on the bottom, and send it to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housedef work? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage. 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. Host 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." | ||
Should we be designing our children? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/should-we-be-designing-our-children | In 2009, a fertility clinic controversially offered parents the ability to customize their children. How will society take the idea of designing children? Do we have a moral obligation to design better people? Join Josh and Chuck for this heavy episode. | In 2009, a fertility clinic controversially offered parents the ability to customize their children. How will society take the idea of designing children? Do we have a moral obligation to design better people? Join Josh and Chuck for this heavy episode. | Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:09:23 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=22, tm_min=9, tm_sec=23, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=325, tm_isdst=0) | 33442256 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Jerry's charles W. Tucker. Bryant. This is stuff you should know. The podcast. This will be done on all in singsong. You don't want to hear me sing songs because I've heard you sing songs. Your heart will melt, glasses will break, my heart will go on, birds will sure. And grown men will kiss each other on the mouth. Right. So inspiring. That'd be pretty cool if you could do that just by singing. Yeah. What you're talking about is Chevy Chase in modern problems. I never saw that one. He didn't have to sing, but he gained telekinetic abilities. He could make things happen just by thinking. I shouldn't even say I never saw that one. That's not that much of a surprise. Everyone knows how my dad raised me, but I've never even heard of that 180s movie Modern Problems. It was very dumb. But it was one of those early HBO movies for me, so I just sat down and watched it, like, constantly, and I had a couple of dirty jokes. Oh, my God. I got you. Yeah. How do we get on that? It was me. So, Chuck yes, Josh? We are now friends, I guess you could say after four years, we finally crossed that cusp. No, I'm not talking about us. Oh, we're not friends still? You and I are friends. Yes, we are. We are friends with Science Channel. Oh, yeah. And as such, we are pretty excited that they have something going on pretty soon. Yeah. And this relates to our podcast topic, which is the reason we chose this podcast topic. Yeah. Science Channel is bringing Fringe, the cult classic television show Fringe, to its airwaves starting November 20. Yes. They're going to show all five seasons. And we were even lucky enough to meet the guy. The guy at Comic Con. Yeah. Not Joshua Jackson. Doctor Fringe. Yeah, that's not his name. Timmy Fringe. Mr. Noble. And he was very nice. Yeah, because he's not just on Fringe. He's on Dark Matters too. He's the host of Dark Matters on Science Channel. But I personally watched Fringe. I watched all the first season. Me and Emily did. Emily and I. Excuse me. And I really enjoyed it. And it was one of those things that I didn't watch season two, beyond and beyond, because it just life got in the way or something. But it wasn't because I didn't like it. It was really good. It sort of had an X Files vibe oh, yeah. And the twists that they've managed to work in there. Yeah. But the science was more predominant. Right. So I liked it. And I'm totally going to watch seasons. I'll probably start with season one again. Well, then you should tune in November 20. Yes. And I'm going to watch seasons two to five now in Science Channel. I'm pretty stoked about that. Right. Well, in honor of Fringe, we chose kind of a fringe science topic. You did that's right. I think it's a good one, Chuck. Yeah. Designing Women. I mean, Designing Children. Oh, yeah, man. What was the one that followed it with Bert Reynolds? Evening Shade. Was that a spin off? No, but I think they were packaged together. Tuesday night. Redneck Hour. Sugar Bakers. Yeah, right? Yeah. I watched Designing Women. I didn't watch Evening Shade, though, which surprises me because I love Burt Reynolds. Yeah, I didn't see it either, but yeah, Designing Women, it was a good show. We're talking about designing children and not just designing children. Designer children. That's right. The idea that one day in the very near future yeah. Like, now we'll be able to make kids ready to order. Yeah. In certain ways. I think right now we have the ability to select eye and hair color, but they're just not doing it yet because they tried that in Los Angeles and people were like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Do you remember that? Yeah. We don't like this. We shouldn't be doing this. And I think that's really significant that that happened. Like the first real commercial attempt for basically just saying, hey, you want a blonde kid? We can give you a blonde kid. Received public outcry, international outcry. So much so that people are like, okay, sorry we opened our mouth, but forget we said anything. Here's your brunette. Yeah, exactly. You roll the dice, jerks. We don't care. Right. But I find that significant. Sure. Because I wonder how it's going to go when it does become really commercially viable to really make your kid a different person than they would have been naturally. Like, how people will accept that. Yeah. I mean, this is the stuff of science fiction that is really happening now. The movie Gatica is referenced in this article. I never saw it. Really good movie. Is it really good? Yeah, man, it's good. It's like a thinking man's science. I don't know if you call it a thriller, maybe a thriller intrigue at the very least. Okay. But, yeah, it's good. And basically the synopsis there is, without spoiling anything, the not too distant future, we are able to inacca to build designer children that will grow into designer adults that are, like, disease free and highly athletic and very intelligent. And then the rest of the shrubs of the world are sorry, PS for them, basically. Yeah. Go with your potato chips. Yeah. So see category. This is a good one. Okay. I like it. Yeah. Every time you say, like, this isn't going to spoil things. I tried really hard not to spoil it. I was watching an episode of Breaking Bad the other day. You and I were and I was like, how do I know what's about to happen? And I was like, did I spoil something there? Yeah. In the math episode, I thought you meant the one in Breaking Bad that was about meth. I was like, they're all about math. Right. I didn't spoil that. Yeah, I got you. Yeah. All right, so sorry. That was not a spoiler for Gatika, though. So, Chuck yes. Let's talk about all this. You say in 2009 they came out against the fertility clinic in Los Angeles. Yes. That's a good example of a commercial business saying, hey, we can do this now. A good example of a government saying, hey, you can do this now. We need to do something about it. Was the UK proposing a bill and we couldn't find out whether it passed or not? It's frustrating how hard it is to find out things like this sometimes. Yeah. If you write an article about something that is big enough for somebody else to use in an article, you better follow up. Yeah. Journalist so what we know is it was protested, at least, so I'm not sure if it went through well. And the reason it was protested, it was protested largely by the deaf and hard of hearing community over there, because this bill would have or did prohibit selecting kids for disease or disability. Right. So it allowed you to select against that. So if you have a kid that has a disability, you can be like, I don't want that kid, but it prohibited selecting for them. And the deaf community said, hey, if hearing parents can select hearing kids, deaf parents should be able to select deaf kids. So if you're going to call deafness a disability, you need to change this bill. Which is a pretty cool thing to protest, if you ask me. I don't know how I felt about it. I still don't know. Wow, this can be a good one. Then I was utterly confused. I was like, Why would you want your child to be deaf and be at a disadvantage straight out of the gate in life? But then I thought, well, is it a disadvantage? Exactly. That's a great question. I don't know. That's where I ended up was, did you know that 93%, that's the highest, most recent figure I've seen. 93% of all down syndrome fetuses are Aborted? 93%, I believe that right. And that's the same question. It's like, some people are like, well, why would you want your kid to be disadvantaged? Well, are Aborted or not selected through IVF boarded? Okay. And so some people would say, Why would you want your kid to have you know, your kid is going to have a disadvantage, and other people say, like, have you ever met a person with down syndrome? They're pretty awesome people. Exactly. And I think that's just one argument throughout this idea of designing children. Save your siblings was also included in the bill. In England, let parents select embryos that would make suitable save your siblings. Yeah. Very controversial. I read a couple of articles on this. Save your siblings are basically kids that you conceive initially with the purpose of being able to act as donors for their older brother or sister. Like the kid that you love is born with bad kidneys. Yeah. Have another kid that's going to be a suitable tissue donor because you know ahead of time before the kids even born that it will be yeah. So that they can give them one of their kidneys. Yeah. There was an article that I read where these parents had had a quote, unquote savior child, and they said what we ended up using was a teaspoon of, umbilical, blood that would have been thrown in the trash, and that's what saved our other kids life. And this is not a designer child, not some freak of science. This is the reason we have this child, but doesn't make it any less valid. I think ultimately it's how you treat the child after they're born. Well, you treat them as like your regular child. We put them in a closet and wait for the kidney. Sure, you'd hope, but at the same time, I mean, like, you can go down the road and say, well, having a savior sibling is also having a kid to strip for parts. There's another interpretation of the whole thing. So, I mean, like, if you are going to have your kid like that, is it valid for society to be like, whoa, whoa, you can't do that? How are you going to treat your kid afterward? Is that one of the worries, how they would treat the kid? I've never heard that. It's an argument. Yeah. Really? Yeah, because it's not like you can have a kid use harvest all of their organs and kill them. Of course not. So I think the effect, the impact it's going to have on that child and their own identity is like a human being and unique individual human being rather than a walking organ bank for their brother. I would think I would appreciate that growing up, knowing that I was born with a higher purpose of potentially saving my older brother if he ever needed it. Sure. Depending on how you're raised. Yeah. Are you like Danny DeVito and twins right. Or are you like the savior sibling? It's a great way to put it. Like you're the savior of this other sibling. Yeah. It just all depends to me on how the parents raise those children in that abnormal dynamic that's fostered through our technology. Yes. I can't imagine, though, that a parent who would care enough about their one child to have another to save them would mistreat or shun the other child in any way. That just doesn't make sense to me. I just opened my hands in a gesture. I don't know, everybody. All right, so let's talk about this. Chuck. Let's talk genetics for a little bit. I had to go back and do some Genetics 101 priming, and I did that. As I did it, I realized that I wasn't going back and remembering it. I was teaching myself for the first time in a lot of ways. Sure. I've never really gotten genetics, even though it's so straightforward and cut and dried, there's always like even if you read this designer children article, these are two of our best writers, and it just doesn't come across quite right. Maybe it's just me. Maybe so. Like me in numbers. So back in 2003 yes. The Human Genome Project announced that it had fulfilled its destiny and successfully mapped the human genome. And the human genome is the sum total of the information contained in the human DNA. That's right. Right. Are you going to say the word what DNA stands for? Oh, dioxyribonucleic acid. I would say deoxy. Yeah. I've always heard dioxy. And then I was looking at the e. Yes. Either way, well done, though. DNA and DNA is simply a couple of strands of sugar that form a helix, a double helix, and they're joined by what looks like wrongs on a ladder. Sugar and phosphate. Yeah. Okay. And these wrongs are made up of nucleotides, one coming off of each of these strands. It's a little twisty ladder that we all love now. Exactly. So the rungs of the ladder are made of these nucleotides, and when they come together, one on each side, they form this full wrong. And those are called base pairs. And there's four types of nucleotides, right? That's right. There is adenine, cytosine, thiamine and guanine. And you put them together and what you come up with, ultimately, is a four letter language for the blueprint of an organism. Pretty cool. Not just making an organism, but maintaining it as well. And if you look along this strand of DNA, you're going to find little segments where this combination, if red by a ribosome, can be used to explain how a cell can make a certain kind of protein. Usually about three proteins on average. Right. And proteins are what are used as the building blocks of cellular life. And its functions, like everything from our behavior to the structure of your eye right. Is based on proteins. Right. And your genes, these little segments that are encoded along the DNA that express these proteins are blueprints for how to express the proteins. That's how they're made. That's what they do. That's right. That's right. We have between 26,040 thousand genes. Right. As a human, everybody's so happy. You just did that as a human. Human. That just messed it up. How about that? Had you been designed properly? So what I thought was interesting that out of the 3 billion base pairs, it's about half and half of useful DNA, and the rest are junk DNA. Yeah, junk DNA. Okay. And they don't think that it's like junk DNA. It's totally useless. They think that possibly we haven't found the use yet. Right. Or they think that possibly one of the uses is that it says it tells stop here's where this gene stops. Or this is how much of this protein you should express and this adjacent gene that this junk DNA is next to. Or it just provides structure, like actual structure, to the double helix. Right. It's also possible that this is just DNA leftover that was deposited by viruses eons ago that don't express themselves any longer in them. Right. Because that's what viruses do. They insert their own DNA in ours. That's right. Isn't that crazy? Dirty buggers. Yeah. So you've got this DNA, it's making up chromosomes. You've got 23 in your body and as complex and as massive as the sounds. 23 pairs. 23 pairs, thank you. As massive and complex as this whole thing sounds, every cell except for a mature red blood cell has a full human genome and many chromosomes in it. Yes. Every cell. And it's just in the nucleus. That's crazy. It is crazy. So you've got all this we've got a pretty good handle on this, the human genome. We've mapped it. Now we go back and figure out where the genes are. And they used to think that it was like 96% of DNA was junk, and then they found out that if you look at the human genome, some areas are gene rich, there's a lot of genes. Other areas are gene deserts where there's very few. Right. We have to go back and look at this map and basically crack this code of this four letter language and figure out what genes are, what they do, and then ultimately how to manipulate them. And once we do that, we effectively have taken humanity out of evolution. That's right. Scary, is it? I think so. Our friend David Pierce would begged, it different. Who the guy from the Happiness audiobook that we should ratchet up human happiness because we can. Yeah, it's an interesting argument, that's all I'm going to say. So we're already kind of at a very primitive form of this, aren't we? Well, yeah. Like I said, we feasibly could choose eye color and hair color if we wanted to. Right. And then one thing we can definitely do is well, I guess we should explain about IVF, for those of you who don't know. Right. In 1978. We first perform in vitro fertilization. Which basically means when you're a couple and you're having trouble having a kid. There are a bunch of different steps you can take. A bunch of different routes you can take. And one of them is IVF. Which means you take the sperm from the man. Egg from the lady. And you get them together outside of the human body to form a zygote. And then you put it back in the woman and then she takes it from there. And it can be expensive, it can be very hard on the woman, on her body. And emotionally? Emotionally, I think it's probably hard on the couple. Emotionally, it doesn't stick, but dudes aren't pumped full of hormones. You know what I'm saying. So that is what IBF is. And that is one way that you can have a baby. If you're having trouble having babies with IVF. Came something called Pre Implantation Genetic diagnosis, PGD, which basically means, hey, we can look at your stuff here. And if you are predisposed in your family to certain things like hemophilia A, down syndrome, Tasec syndrome, we can stop this process now and try again. Right. We can scream for it. Yeah. And some of it is intuitive. Like with Hemophilia A, if you and your husband both have that, that usually tends to strike boys more than girls. So they'd probably not use embryos that were male, likely male. They would use female embryos instead. Which brings up the sticky point of choosing your gender. Right? Yeah. Some others, you can find that evidence of that disease that say, I guess, malfunctioning gene that creates that disease, because that's what disease is. Yeah. And not use those embryos either. So we are kind of at this primitive state, but it's selective. It is. And these are tough decisions that couples face in life. A lot of thought should go into this if you're out there going through this process. Sure. It isn't easy. And don't let anyone else tell you what you should or shouldn't do. This is a personal thing. Oh, yeah, for sure. So that's what's going on on the IVF tip. So, yeah, the point is from that came PGD, Pre Implantation Genetic Diagnosis, which is kind of right now, the most widely available type of genetic engineering for couples looking to have a baby. Right? Right. And like you said, the sticky point of potentially being able to choose your gender, if you really want a boy, you've got three girls, and, man, I really wanted a boy. And then in countries like China, where they definitely want boys, it's like this could be the future that might upset the balance of nature. And how many boys and girls are born? What does that mean for the future? So I heard to have a soft landing from their one child policy, which they're now starting to relax. They should have stopped it about 20 years ago. Yeah. Does that mean they're in trouble? Yeah. Does that mean we need to follow up like we recommended writers do on our podcast? Yeah. You want to? Sure. I guess you just did. Okay. There it was. I heard. So, Chuck, we've got this genetic screening. That's one way to do it. There's also another way that is a little further out as far as humans go, and that is transgenic therapy, which is where you take the gene of something else, that desirous trait, and insert it into the human. Right, right. So what we're just subtracting is actually adding a gene. Right. What we've been talking about to this point is unnatural selection, but it's been selection. It's like it appeared naturally, but we're going to take away all of the other. We're going to reduce the chances that it won't happen or we're going to increase the chances that that will happen. This is straight up copying and pasting or cutting and pasting genes to create something desirable or new. That's right. And they already do this in animals. So if you can do it in animals, it's not going to be long before you can do it with humans. Sure. And long term, maybe that means we can eliminate certain diseases by correcting this stuff along the way. Right. Like before it happens. So that could be good. When you take a gene from one animal and implant it into another, it's become a transgenic animal or a chimera, which is based on the goat, serpent, lion, fire breathing animal of legend from Greece. Yeah. They call it a chimera, which is kind of hurtful, I think, especially if you're a human and know what a chimera is. Sure. And you're a chimera, I'm sure it probably hurt your feelings, but thus far there aren't any human chimeras, as far as I know. It's. Mostly the big one that we've actually talked about unknowingly before is BioSteel, the goat with the spider. Remember we were trying to figure out how they got spider silk from a goat? Yeah. Body vest one. It turns out that spiders and goats share enough traits to where this ultra strong spider silk can be produced in the goat's milk. They have similar proteins, and they said I don't know how they came across that. I'm sure they had some hint. I don't know why they would start with a goat's milk. Yeah, I don't know either. But the protein you know what would happen if we put the spider silk in this goat's milk? What rhymes with spider silk? Goat's milk. Let's try that. Yes. It worked. But they figured out that the protein and spider silk is similar to a protein and goat's milk. Identical. Once you inject the goats genes with that spider gene, it just meshes like a glove. It starts producing a ton of that protein in its milk, and you harvest that protein and then start weaving spider silk and make this stuff called BioSteel, which is really good. Body armor. Yeah. And that's where we talked about it, right? Yeah. Body armor podcast that you can find on our RSS feed. Yeah. Which also happened to be our first ever listener request. Oh, really? Yeah. Someone requested that and we acquiesced, and then we started getting all those emails. So the point of that is they're doing this in animals. There are scenarios where we could potentially do this with humans, but in another follow up article we read, turns out that enhancing ourselves genetically could eventually lead to unknown consequences down the road. Sure. Specifically, in this case, we have learned that our human brain is evolving. It's getting larger, it's gaining more cognitive abilities as we evolve. And if you start tampering with natural selection via genetic modification. These things might not show up right away. It might show up generations later. So you might be doing something you think will help when and in fact, years from now, it might keep your brain from growing like everyone else's. Right. And this is just one example of something that could go wrong. Organisms evolve right. Through mutations. Well, we lack the foresight to know what mutation will be beneficial and what will be harmful years down the line. Even something that may be harmful immediately or somewhat harmful, could be extremely beneficial. Decades, hundreds, thousands, millions of years from now. We would never know. No, it's too late once you've done it. Yeah, you're done now. I kind of had the impression that once you start tampering, you could conceivably keep improving, but it would have to be constant. Well, and what this article points out, which is a good point, is natural selection is at its best when you've got a large gene pool. And if you're narrowing that gene pool for a reason you think is great, you're still narrowing the gene pool. Right. And I think proponents of genetic engineering would say, well, that's fine. We're narrowing the gene pool. Who cares? We're taking full control of evolution so evolution can kiss off. Yeah, but this raises all sorts of questions, like, some of which we've already touched upon. But who decides what's ideal, right? Who decides what traits are good and what are bad? What happens when this becomes commercially viable? But it's still extremely expensive than just the wealthy have designer children. What kind of designer children do we make? I read this one Ethicist, who said that we have a moral obligation to genetically engineer and modify our kids so that they're not a harm to themselves or other people. I read that one, which makes a lot of sense. I can see how that is a moral obligation. If you have the technology to improve people and improve society like that, you have to do it. Yeah, but then, of course, there's, like, the other side. It's like, no, I don't know. Yes. We don't really know what we're doing here. Playing God. Yeah. Because what happens if you make a kid that's off a little bit and they're just totally messed up, but they wouldn't have been if you hadn't tampered with them. Who's responsible for that, and in what ways are you responsible for it? Well, not more importantly, but additionally, where the line is drawn, is it okay to say, like, my baby dad blue eyes. Right. No big deal. Right? Yeah. Was that the line or is the line like, maybe it be would cool if they were athletic right. And super smart and had blue eyes and blonde hair and then boom, boys from Brazil. But again, what are the problems with those things? Well, yeah, it's going to be athletic and smart. Right. Or happy is another one that david pointed out that I find tough to disagree with. Like, if you have the technology to make your kids happier, like ratchet up their baseline. Happiness is how we put it. Yeah. Why wouldn't you do that? If you can make society a better place because everybody's happier, why wouldn't you do it? Well, this is just the luddite in me saying there's always far reaching consequences, there's always ripples. Every stone you throw in a lake. What else is going to happen if everybody's happy? Are there downfalls? Are there setbacks? What's going on? I know it is a tricky, tricky subject. Anytime we bring up genes, it becomes a tricky subject. It does. Which is why they're fascinating. That's right. And why people really get up on their soapbox when they you know this means a lot to a lot of people. Religious circles, scientific circles. A lot of folks are weighing in from different parts of circles. I don't know what that means. It was just stupid. If you want to learn more about genetics, how Stuff Works is loaded with them, articles on them. On it. Yeah. You can type in genetics, teens, designer babies, whatever you want in the handy search bar. And it's going to bring up some pretty cool articles. We recommend you waste a year or two reading them. And I said, handy search bar. I think so that means it's time for listener mail. That's right, Josh. I am going to call this plug for our friends at QSAC. Remember meeting Sandra at Trivia night in New York? She gave us the hats, the baseball caps. Yeah. What is the QSAC is the quality services for the autism. Okay. All right. So this room is Sandra. She's super sweet, very nice, and she says this. Guys, thanks so much for humoring, my over enthusiasm for my cause, and my over enthusiasm for meeting you guys at Trivia Night, who I look up to. It was an amazing night of randomness. All the other people on our second place team met in line, total strangers, after my initial star struckness died down, which never happens to me because I work with famous people all the time and couldn't care less. I just felt like it just felt like a night where I was hanging out with a few buddies I've known for a while. She still met us. She's starstruck. We're very practical. It's just silly, she said, I felt that way about my whole table of strangers, actually. So, anyway, she told us that night about QSAC organization she's with, and she says, I'm very passionate about QSAC because they changed my life, literally. I did a five K to support them because it was local. My nephew was autistic, and I wanted to see if I could actually walk that far. She had broken both her ankles the previous year. Okay. Okay. I thought that was funny, too, man. I wonder if she was it called cobbled. Cobbled is. That in Misery. Oh, yeah, it's Cobbling. There's a name for that. The Hobbling. She Hobbled. Hobbled. Cobbled would be if you just make the foot rather than the ankle. Might be called hobbling. Yeah, you're Hobbled. But that's like a state. No, but the process by which Cathy Bates, like, broke the ankles I don't want to talk about it. It was called something like it was Cobbling. Somebody maybe I'll look that up. That was so nasty. Anyway, I don't think Sandra was Cobbled or Hobbled, so at the time, I had no clue who they were. Cusack made friends with everyone there and many people who work there. Then three months later, I actually started work there as an employee. I was in corporate television as a video editor for ten years, and it beat down my soul. I was always volunteering and donating what I could, and I felt like maybe nonprofit is what I should be doing. The opportunity arose and I took it. And it has been life changing. Dudes. Since you guys are so excellent at being philanthropic, I decided to see if you'd be interested in knowing more. So Josh mentioned you guys were considering doing podcasts on autism. I'm sure we'll get around to that at some point, right? For sure, if you do, I have plenty of people that could answer a lot of questions and gladly pass along addresses and phone numbers. QSAC has been around for over 30 years, truly amazing in helping the New York City and Long Island areas. So if you guys want to help support this great cause for autism, you can go to qsac.com or she has a bowling page. And I think you do like fundraisers going through bowling, right? At www. Dot. firstgiving. Comfunraiser. Sandrasarokafault. And that is Sandra. S-O-R-O-K-A. Sandra. Sorosa very nice. Yeah, she was super nice. And she's working for Autism now. Very cool, man. Can I give one more shout out? We heard from another listener? Of course. A listener named Emily Eisenman is running for lifestyle. Did you see this email? I did now. I was going to read that later. Let's go and do it now. Okay. Yeah. All right. So Emily is running for lifestyle. She heard our podcast in 2010 on Lifestyle, and she decided to raise $1,000 to buy Life Straws by running 1000 miles. And she is going to cross 1000 miles mark for the year this week. She may have already done it, and she's proving to be a better runner than a fundraiser, she says. So if everybody who listens to stuff you should know would go help her fundraise, that would be fantastic. You can go to www. Dot fundly fundly.com runforlifestraw. And you guys can go check that out and help Emily raise some money for Lifestyle. And if you are unfamiliar with Lifestyle, go listen to our podcast on that subject, which you can probably are going to have to find on our RSS feed as well. Yeah, you know what you do? You Google or get your favorite search bar, and you type in Stuff You Should Know RSS feed, and it's like, boom, right there. All of our shows ever. Yes. Stuff you should know. RSS Every single one is good stuff. All right, well, I guess that's it, right? That is it, sir. All right. If you want to contact us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast, join us on facebook. Comstuffyshenew and you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstaffworks.com." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-11-16-sysk-cursed-movies-final.mp3 | Can movies be cursed? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-movies-be-cursed | First of all, movies can't be cursed because curses aren't real. However, that can't stop Josh and Chuck from taking a look at some movies throughout history that have had a disturbing number of bad things surrounding their production and release. Dive in | First of all, movies can't be cursed because curses aren't real. However, that can't stop Josh and Chuck from taking a look at some movies throughout history that have had a disturbing number of bad things surrounding their production and release. Dive in | Thu, 16 Nov 2017 15:41:51 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=15, tm_min=41, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=320, tm_isdst=0) | 50305222 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, Seattle. Hello, Portland. We're coming out to see you this January live. That's right. What are the dates, my friend? January 15, we're going to be at the Moore Theater in Seattle. And on January 16, we're gonna be at Revolution Hall again in Portland. That's right. Tickets are being snapped up fast, everyone, because love us out there, and we love you right back. So just go to Sysclive.com for all ticket details. We can't wait to see you. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Gerry. My tongue is super big today for some reason. Gross. And this is stuff you should know. I know. It's like I sound like Peter Overbee, for God's sake. Who's that? You know that guy's voice anywhere? He's like an NPR reporter. And he has me even beat for the large tongue, candy sucking sound. Do you remember when we first came out and people would write in and be like, till Josh, stop sucking on candy while he's podcasting? And I'd just be like, that's my normal voice, man. Thanks a lot. Yeah, I appreciate that. But now that we're high rollers, they provided me with a private nurse to suction out the saliva every 30 seconds, and then Jerry has to edit it out. So gross. Gross but true, right? Like a cursed movie story true. Yeah. Do you know what I hate at the dentist? Besides everything? Yeah, that was a pretty good segue. I know that. I just totally mowed over it's. All right. I hated the dentist. Now you don't have to spit anymore because they do have those suction things, but it's still like I still do the fake swallow. You know how it feels like it builds up in the back of your mouth, so they'll be in your mouth and you'll just go like that. I hate that. It's funny. Do you do that? Does everyone do that? A gag reflex thing? Well, it's not even a gag reflex. It's just the hard swallow. Swallow? Yes, the sort of swallow reflex. If that's such a thing, you feel like you're going to break your vocal cords or your throat muscles. God, I hate that. I know what you mean. I don't hate it, though. I think it's kind of not enjoyable. But I don't know when they talk to you, they can talk. But yeah, there can't be any questions involved. Maybe rhetorical questions that you can shrug at. My last hygienist, I really didn't care for, like it was a personality thing. And they have TVs at my dentist that they'll put down in front of you, which is fine, I don't really care. But she would stop and look and make comments about the news and stuff. Why don't they just let him do his job? I didn't like it. It was really annoying. And then I came back in not too long ago and there was a new hygienist for me, and she was awesome. And on the way out, I was like, by the way, I won't say her name. I was like, but this new hygienist I really like a lot. She was like, what about before? I was like, I wasn't crazy about her. And she went, no one was, and you guys need to tell us that. And we let her go because we got all these complaints, started flooding in. I was like, well, I feel bad. Like, I don't want to get anyone fired. Sure. But she wasn't good. So anyway, was this in Brookhaven? Yes. Is it Brookhaven? How do you know where my dentist is? Well, I just had an experience in Brookhaven, and I'm like, this town is just small enough for that to be possible. Well, I'll go ahead and shout out my dentist, the great Doctor Darryl Kimchi. She's wonderful. Kimchi. That's one of my favorite foods. But is that your dentist? No. Okay. But it's possible that we're talking about, like, a hygienist that gets fired pretty frequently. Maybe she's making the rounds in bucket. Brookhaven, right? Yeah. Dr. Darryl Kimchi of Atlanta Cosmetic Sports Dentistry. Wow, that is quite a shout out. I think Dr. Kimchi owes us some free kimchi, maybe as a thank you. She's sort of a celebrity then. She does a lot of the sports people in Atlanta, in the Real Housewives, maybe. But I went in, and they have memorabilia up everywhere, and when the TV show was out, I gave them a poster, and they never put it up. Oh, no way. That's hilarious. Yes. Wow, that's great. That reminds me of the Friends when Joey tried to get his head shot up at the I think it's like the dry cleaner or something. Do it, man. That is so stuff you should know. All right, well, this has got a nice loose start indeed, Chuck, but this is a fun one. But let's begin, shall we? Well, yeah, this was written by The Grabster. The article is ten movies that were supposedly cursed. And it goes to great lengths to point out how there is no way that anything can ever be really cursed. Right. I think probably a couple of lines where he's, like, so stupid. Where it was edited out. I got the feeling you got to sign. This was like, oh, God, are you kidding me? I want to write about real stuff, like Satanic Panic. But he does love writing about movies. He's definitely a movie guy. Yeah, especially horror movies. And it seems like more than any other movie, horror movies, they're the variety that tend to be associated with curses more than other types. Right. Or at least the marketing department cooks that up. Yeah, that's definitely par for the course these days. But there was a more innocent, gentler time when rumors of Satan influencing the production of a movie was a legitimate rumor. It wasn't a PR stunt. Right. So, like you said, it goes to some trouble to point out what's actually behind the idea of a movie curse. That some things are bound to happen in just about any movie trailer. Especially when you stop and consider, especially in the early days, the kind of stuff they were doing with the technology they were working with at the time. Of course, bad things happen on movies. Of course people died. Yeah. Like for example, I looked this up, right? There was a 1928 movie called Noah's Ark, and they used 600,000 gallons of water to create the flood scene. One take. They did one take and three extras drowned. One guy who did survive had to have a leg amputated, it was broken so badly because this is the flood scene and you needed to basically get it as real as possible. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, especially back in those days. But they didn't care back then, right? They were just like, oh, they're just extras. Who cares? Although John Wayne, it turns out, was an extra on that movie. But he's obviously yeah. And he acts into another curse. He does. He also worked in the special effects department on that movie. Or Prop. Prop. Sorry. Prop. Like special effects was what he did early CGI. He would clap the coconuts together for all the horse scenes. Right. Hold on, I have another one. Okay, so this is another movie years later. They died with their boots on. I think it's about the Charge of the Light Brigade, maybe. Okay. It was a 1941 movie starring Arrow Flynn, and during this cavalry charge that they recreated, three extras in that movie died just in that one shot. That one scene, one of the guys was thrown from his horse and he threw his sword away from him. Unfortunately threw it ahead of himself and the sword stuck into the ground handle first, and he was impaled on the sword. Wow. This happened on a movie set. And it's not just like back in the day, either. 1983, the Twilight Zone movie, very famously, there was a disaster, right? Yeah. That was very sad. That's when Vic Morrow and two children were chopped up by helicopter blade. Very infamously. It was terrible. Terrible tragedy. Yes. Shiny Chan and Micah Din Lee were the two child actors who were killed. So things do happen on movie sets, and again, when you stop and think about what they're doing, it's often very dangerous. So what Ed is saying is when you start to put these things together and then you get rid of all of the things that don't support your point, you got a curse on your hands. Should we start with poltergeist? Yes, poltergeist. That's one where people always list this as a cursed movie because quite a few of the actors died sort of unexpectedly after the movie. And then it goes on to say, very astutely. But it's also a textbook example of why the idea of curses is silly. As I mentioned, the curses are silly over and over. So three of those first three, poltergeist 82, 86 and 88. I didn't see the remake. Did you? I didn't even know there was one. Yeah, of course there was. They remained it a few years ago. No, I didn't see it. No, I don't think it was very popular. But Dominic Dunnik. Dominique excuse me. Her father was Dominic Done, correct? Yeah. And her brother. Was Griffin done or is Griffin done? Yeah, well, she was murdered. She was murdered by her boyfriend, John Sweeney. Yeah. That was a very disturbing case. Have you ever poked around that case? Yes, like, the signs were all there. It was one of those things that could have been prevented, and he got away with it for the most part. He did, like, three years in prison. And Dominic Done, her father, he was there every day for the trial of the man and just crushed by the injustice of the sentence that the guy received. Well, it changed his life. He became a crusader. It did, yeah. You can read some of the best coverage of high profile murder cases in the pages of Vanity Fair that he covered for years and years and years as a direct result of him basically covering his own daughter's murders trial. Yeah. OJ. Very famously, he covered that. Yes, he did. And apparently the Dons spend a great deal of time basically keeping tabs on John Sweeney for years. He was a chef for a while. He was, and I even started tracking him down. I just went down the rabbit hole, like, six or eight months ago on this for some reason. Really? Yeah. This is one of those things where you see something on Facebook and then all of a sudden you go, oh, yeah. And then you go down the rabbit hole. And I was trying to find this guy. I was like, Where is this guy? Where is he? And the last I saw, he was some chef somewhere. I think he had changed his name, even. Of course, yeah. The John Mora. M-A-U-R-A. Yeah. Well, keep changing that name, buddy, because it's going to follow you around. Yeah. There was no question whether he did it or not. He admitted to it. He told this guy who had been in the house at the time, in Dominique Dunn's house, rehearsing lines to call the police, that he just killed his girlfriend. Yeah, but yeah, he was hounded for many years, and I guess toward the end of his life, dominic Dunn said, you know what? I can always my life, like, keeping tabs on this guy anymore, and just dropped it. But, yeah, there's a lot of people out there who don't like that dude. Yeah, I would imagine so. She died by murder, then the young girl, and this is like a couple of months after poltergeist came out. Right. So it was very close to the production. Yeah. She was not in the sequels, obviously. Heather O'Rourke was the little girl in Poltergeist, and she passed away after Poltergeist Two was wrapped. And she initially was diagnosed with the flu. We talked about this in her flu episode a little bit, but what she really had was an intestinal blockage, and at the tender age of twelve, she had a heart attack and sepsis and passed away. Super tragic. Yeah. And so those two dying so close to the production of the actual movie, it was Poltergeist Three. I believe that Heather O'Rourke died after filming. They were basically done. I'd get it wrong. It got it wrong. Oh, man. And then Dominic again died just a couple of months after the first poultry guys came out. So that's like one big hallmark of a movie being cursed story, is the deaths that happen typically need to happen either during production or right around production. Right. Okay. So those two are the big ones. But then people say, oh, still not convinced. Well, listen to this and pull your guys, too. There's an actor named Will Samson who played Taylor, the medicine man who helps the family. And he is better known for playing chief. And One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yes. One of the great characters of all time. He died, I guess, after filming a few years after filming. The year after filming in 1987. He died following a heart and lung transplant. Yeah. He had a history of health issues. He was a giant man, again, tied to the curse. But what can you say about someone who just dies sort of natural causes after a heart and lung transplant? I think there's pretty good odds. Yeah. And then there's Julian Beck, who played the scary, scary, scary preacher. Yes. Caine, also in Poltergeist Two. Man, he was creepy. He died, I guess before Poltergeist Two actually came out. So that would have been close to the production as well. So it checks those boxes. But he died of stomach cancer, and he apparently had a long standing issue with battling it as well. So you can make the case. It doesn't really count, but are you really trying to make a case or a curse about curses? Yeah, let's just talk about them instead about that. Agreed. Okay, what's next? The wizard of Oz is next. That's right. Great movie. But a great movie that was marred for such a happy movie. It had some rough stuff going on because it was in the early days of making movies. And like you said earlier, back then, they didn't know or care as much about safety. Like, for instance, the Tin man Buddy Epson. They said, all right, we need to make you look silver, and so we'll just coat you with aluminum powder. And that stuff was really dangerous. He went to the hospital. That irritated his lungs, and he could not even continue in the role. No. Luckily, he survived to go on to play Jed, the dad in Beverly Hillbillies, thank God. But he was out of the wizard of US. He was. So Buddy Epson was replaced by Jack Haley, and they said, well, we probably shouldn't use that same aluminum powder. So they used an aluminum paste, which didn't get into his lungs, but did give him a really bad eye infection. Man right. Just the Tin Man role itself had a bunch of problems, but that was just one of many. Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch of the west. She was burned pretty badly with some of the pyrotechnics from the movie. And I think she was hospitalized. But she came back and completed work on the movie. Yeah, but she said she wasn't going to do any more firework. Apparently the trap door that she was standing on, the timing of it wasn't right. Yeah. So it didn't open up and drop her right before the fireworks went off, but did it simultaneous to the fireworks going off, which is not what you want. No, but it was right. So they were like, whatever. What are you going to do? There's the very famous urban legend, which is not true, but Bear is mentioning that one of the munchkins hanged himself in the background of a scene. If you just Google image that junk hanged munchkin, wizard of Oz, it will have a screen cap with a little circle around it. Just looks like something that is not a tree. In other words, it's not attached to the ground. Right. It doesn't necessarily look like a hanging munchkin, but apparently there was a bird. Yeah, it doesn't look like a bird to me either, though. Like, supposedly it's a silhouette of a bird. And if you watch a close up of the video of it, it does sway back and forth above the ground. So you can see where people came up with that for sure. Yeah. But that is not the case. There was no munchkin that just couldn't take it anymore. There's actually there's a really great horror fiction story by, I think a guy named Steve Negi called the Hanged Man of Oz. Looking up and reading it's pretty good. But it's about this dude kind of becoming obsessed with that rumor and seeing it on video and not being able to unsee it and all the stuff that happens after. Wow. I think it's Steve Nagy. It's definitely called the Hanged Man of Oz. All right, I'll check that out. Other tragedies and wizard antmandic. She killed herself at age 81. Yeah. And she left in her suicide note that she was going on her greatest adventure. Well, that's kind of nice. I guess. So it's about as pleasant as it can get with the suicide note, I think. The wizard himself, Frank Morgan, he was injured in a car wreck just a few months after they released the movie. And then, of course, Judy Garland had one of the more tragic lives in Hollywood history. Yes. They're making a movie about her soon, I think. I can't believe they haven't already. I think they've done it on TV, but not a big movie thing, I don't think. She was basically owned by MGM. Yeah, like almost the definition of being owned. Right. She was discovered at age 13, I think, in Kansas, actually, at a state fair. And they said, we're just going to buy you from your parents, basically. And they took her and they said, you can't get fat, so smoke 80 cigarettes a day. Yeah, they basically prescribed her that. They got her on amphetamines to keep her going. They let her have one square meal a day. Terrible. Yeah. Really? It makes a really good point. If there was any real tragedy that came out of The Wizard of Oz, it was Judy Garland's life. Yeah, absolutely. So she eventually would die by suicide herself on an overdose of barbiturates. And I think she had the equivalent of ten sekanol capsules in her. Oh, Lord. Yeah. Wow, man, it's sad. I want to see that movie. Do you know who's going to play her? Oh, man, I just saw this the other day. I can't remember who. But I remember thinking, yeah, good casting. Okay. Like it wasn't Owen Wilson. That'd be pretty bad. Troubles. Come on, get happy. So she was 47 years young, by the way, which is far too young to have lost Judy Garland. You want to take a break? Yeah. A night downer? Yes. All right, we'll come back and talk about the man of Steel right after this. Alright, Chuck. So there's actually a role, Superman, that's considered a cursed role. Did you know that? I did know that because I remember as a kid, even though I'm not 65 years old, I like to watch reruns of stuff like Gilligan's Island and Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. Oh, really? Petticoat Junction. Is it good? Yes, it's one of those old shows. They're all great. What about F Troop? FTroop is probably one of my favorites. Yeah, I watch the troop. I watch all that stuff. Superman. The name of the show that I watched was called Adventures of Superman. And that was straight up from the 1950s and still in reruns in the mid seventy s. At least because that's where I watched it. And that was the one starring George Reeves as the not even very muscular and slightly tubby Superman. Yeah, like that kind of like 50s fit, barrel chested, chunky and just weird like weirdly shaped. Yeah. What kind of exercise were they doing back then? Well, I don't think they did exercise back then. Wasn't that the deal? Oh, is that what it was? Yeah, they were just like, you're going to play Superman, so eat a bunch of steak. Right. Buff up a little bit, do some pushups. Maybe George Reeves. Reeves. He's george Reeves. Christopher Reeves is not plural, singular version. Right? Yes. George Reeves became synonymous with Superman. Like, everybody thought of him as Superman. He wouldn't be cast in anything else. Right. And he had to put up with quite a bit being known as Superman. Who recognizes Superman? Apparently, kids would come up and punch him in the stomach to see if he has made a steal. I looked into it. I learned this years ago from the Uncle John's bathroom reader. And I looked into it, and I think it actually may be correct. But at one public appearance, he had to talk a kid out of shooting him. Like, this kid had brought his father's loaded 38 caliber pistol to shoot Superman, to see if the bullets really bounced off of him. And George Reeves got the kid to hand the gun over to a cop or something because he told them that, sure, of course the bullet would bounce off of him, but it could ricochet and hurt somebody else who was standing nearby. Yeah. That was in the Ben Affleck movie. Hollywood land. Is that right? It's about George Reeves, and that scene was in the movie. Okay. You've heard of it? Yeah, it's okay. It's not great. You lost me at Ben Affleck. Not bad. But yeah, he talks a kid out of it in the movie and said exactly what he said. Of course, blah, blah, blah. And then he takes it. Then you can see him. He's just like, oh, God. Jesus. Like I almost got shot. Right? Yes. I can't imagine the relief that would wash over you after that. Yeah. So George Reeves reeves. Reeves. Yeah. He's the plural. It's tough to keep up with. It is. He had a very sort of sad life, which is in that Hollywood Land movie. Like you said, he couldn't get other work, and he was only known as Superman. So I think he turned to the booze and was not a happy guy. And eventually, in June of 1959, he was having a party at his own house. His fiance was throwing a party and he said, I'm going to go upstairs and shoot myself in the head. Yes. And Ed makes it sound like he was upset about the noise or something like that from the party. I mean, that may have been the straw, but he was upset about life. I got you. And I got the sense, like, legitimately, clinically depressed, right? Yeah. As we get to know more and more about depression, it's so much easier to look back at, like, people who were depressed before, but you just never really kind of pegged them like that because people didn't know about that kind of thing then. It's just sad to see how many people suffered like that because no one knew what was going on or they just thought it was the blues or you should just snap out of it. Right. We've never done one on depression. I think we should have. We not I don't believe we have, ma'am. Well, then we should definitely do that. We have done one on cats and then Christopher Reeve played Superman. And that is why some say it is a cursed role because he was very sadly injured in a horse riding accident in the mid 90s, which lets him paralyze from the neck down. And he became very much an inspiration to people because he became an advocate for research into spinal cord injuries. And he went on to direct and even act some as well after that. And it also points out that after Christopher Reeves died, his wife Dana, who saw him through this whole thing, she died of cancer, like two years afterward. Yeah, I felt so awful for that family and those kids. Yeah, that random, to be thrown from a horse and then just be paralyzed from the neck down. So you put those two together and everyone says, well, Superman is a cursed role. Correct. What would the grabster say? No such thing as curses. So stupid. The Conqueror is a movie that, like we said, John Wayne factored in. And this one was definitely I don't know about cursed, but well, here's the story, okay? It is very unlikely that John Wayne would play Mongolian Genghis Khan. He did, though. But it was Hollywood back in the day where they just would cast white people to play whoever, right? And he played Genghis Khan. And they shot the conqueror in Utah, less than 150 miles from the Nevada Test Site. Sorry. Nevada Test site. Where our own us? Government set off eleven nuclear detonations above ground the year before. Just in the year before. Yeah. And that area was crawling with bad stuff. Lingering fall out in the dirt and the rocks and everything. It was in the soil, and they were just running around in there filming movies. Yeah, I read this really interesting article in The Guardian called Hollywood and the Downwinders about the people who lived in that area who suffered tremendously free health problems from the fallout. The government went to great lengths to cover it up and just assured everybody that there was no danger whatsoever to them, even though their houses and schoolyards were covered in radioactive ash. And so from filming there, when this production came to town and they filmed there, they were exposed to the same radioactive debris and dust and dirt that these people who lived in the area were as well. And as a result, supposedly, something like 91 out of 220 cast and crew members who worked on location for the movie The Conqueror came down with cancer later on in life, which is highly unusual, statistically speaking. Yeah, that's like 40 something percent of the crew. And years later in People magazine in 1980, they actually did a special report on that movie and the cancer connection, like John Wayne, Agnes Morehead, Gene Gerson, Susan Hayward, the director Dick Powell, they all died of cancer. And in that People magazine, dr. Robert C. Pendleton, he was director of Radiological Health at the University of Utah, said that this would hold up in a court of law. That's such an outstanding number of people. Yeah. And apparently not even just the people who worked on the production. It came to be known. The Conqueror came to be known. By the way, it's considered one of the best bad movies of the golden age of Hollywood. But people who visited the set battle cancer later in life, too. Both of John Wayne's sons who came to visit him, there's a famous picture of him with two of his sons and a guy using a Geiger counter on set. Wow. Both of his sons had cancer later in life, too, but supposedly the family and Dick Powell's son Norman, who's interviewed in the article I read, they discount the idea that people got cancer from that test site. They said maybe it was a contributing factor, but these people all smoked heavily, ate steak eight times a day, and that they had a lot of other risk factors that probably led to it. But it's also entirely possible that they may not have died of cancer as early had they not filmed at that site. Well, that Dr. Robert Pendleton said, essentially that is about three times the rate of cancer that you would expect. So I think that it definitely contributed. It's pretty curious. I want to see it. Have you ever seen The Conqueror? No. I got to see this. I've seen pictures of John Wayne as Genghis Khan. Yeah, it's pretty cringy, super racist. But apparently, even if you take all that away, just like the dialogue is awful, the whole premise of it is he kidnaps a woman and forces her to marry him. And of course, romance blossoms as a result. Just the usual stuff from the Omen. Yes, this is a good one, because this is one of those where it's a movie about the devil, and so all these stories are going to be heightened. Right? Because it's kind of like poltergeist. If this was When Harry Met Sally and some of this stuff happened when Harry Met Sally was cursed with great laughs. It was I love that movie. One of the few romantic comedies that were legit good movies. Yeah. So let's go back to the beginning of this one. Obviously, The Omen, everyone knows, was the great movie from 1976 about the antichrist taking. Well, not, I guess possession, you could call it, but it's not like an exorcist thing. Basically, the antichrist is this little boy. He comes back as a little boy. Yeah. And a bad, bad, naughty little boy, Damien, who dresses like Angus Young. Yeah, sure. Okay. So Damien is adopted by Gregory Peck in the movie, and in real life, Gregory Peck's son killed himself. He died by suicide, apparently. Out of the blue. No, Suicide note or anything like that. And this was before production had started, but after Peck had agreed to do the movie. Right. And he still went ahead and did the movie, he left the US and went to London. And even on the way to London, before he even got to London to start shooting, something happened to him. Right. Yeah. He said, I'm going to get on a plane and fly to London. His plane was struck by lightning. Right. And the producers plane was struck by lightning. Separately, these are two different planes struck by lightning on the way to start shooting in London. So this curse thing is feeling legit this time. This is the one that even Ed got a little shaky on, if you ask me. How about this? The hotel where they stayed, at least where the producer and some other folks stayed, was bombed by the Irish Republican Army. Yes. Hilton. The London Hilton. I don't know about a curse in that case because the mid 70s, there's a lot of that going on. Yeah. The IRA was bombing all sorts of stuff back then. Yeah. It was like a restaurant where the crew and the cast went to eat one night. Yeah, they were about to go eat there. So there's actually, like all these close calls actually make it seem like this movie production wasn't cursed, but instead was actually being looked out for on high by the Dark Lord. Right. So the crew that was going to go to dinner didn't go to dinner. They didn't make it there in time for the bombing. The people who were staying in the hotel when it was bombed weren't there yet. There are a lot of close calls, but there is one close call that really is just mind numbing. I would have freaked out had I been one of the people involved. The private jet. Yeah. So they chartered a private jet to fly them around London to get some good aerial footage of London. And at the last minute, the charter service switched planes to accommodate a group of Japanese businessmen. Well, the plane that the Japanese businessman took that the crew was supposed to be on crashed on take off, actually crashed into a car and killed everybody on board the plane and everybody in the car crashed into. How about that? And this is like a last minute switch, too, supposedly. Yeah. Those make you think. Yeah. Cursor know, just knowing that you are that close, I get you. How about this? A worker there was an animal sanctuary where they filmed and a worker there was killed by a tiger. That one fits. I think that was the actual animal wrangler for the movie was killed. Oh, really? Yeah, which makes it even closer. This is the one, though, Chuck. You got to take this one home. This is the one that really gets everybody, even though I think it's like a lot of it's made up. Yeah. There was a car crash with John Richardson, who was a special effects worker. He designed the effects for The Omen, including a very famous decapitation scene toward the end. Yes, very famous. And I thought that was the beginning. Was at the beginning. I think so. I think it's how it opened, if I remember. But it's been a while. Okay. Either way, he was in Holland after working on a movie called A Bridge Too Far, and he was involved in a head on collision in his car and was injured. But his assistant, Liz Moore, was decapitated and killed in that car wreck. And he claims I don't know if this is Lore or not sounds Lorish. It does sound Lorish. But he claims that he awoke from that crash and looked up and there was a street sign where they crashed that said the distance to the next town, and it was the town of Omen. Omnen at a distance of 66.6. Is that true? There's no way it's true, because I looked up on the Internet, that sign, trying to find any picture of that sign. If that sign existed, there would be so many pictures from tourists taking photos of it on the Internet. There's not a single one. You think from back then, those pictures would still be around. The sign would probably still be around. Well, see, I think that's the presumption that may not be true. Like they may have taken the sign down for that reason, maybe. I guess that's possible. But no picture of it whatsoever. That no AP photographer went, I got to get a picture of that sign. Nobody did that. There's no existing photo of that thing, for sure. Yeah, that's the one that makes me think like that. Although there is a town called Omen in the Netherlands, so it's entirely possible a crash took place by there. So that checks out. That definitely checks out. So we're going to take a break, everybody. We just decided, but we're going to be right back, so don't worry because we're going to talk some more about cursed movies. All right, we're back, as I promised, and we're on The Brainstorm, which I think Ed was just kind of showing off with this one because he even says, you're not going to find this on many list of cursed movies. Yes. I'm not sure I get the curse in this one, but we'll talk about it. Brainstorm was the 1983 Sci-Fi movie most famously known as being the great Natalie Woods final film. Right. Because she died in real life after the movie, obviously, when she drowned after being out on a boat one night partying with her husband Robert Wagner and her costar Christopher Walken. Right. Under some say many say mysterious circumstances. Yeah, I was reading up about that case, and they apparently have been drinking since at least four in the afternoon, and they made it back to the boat pretty late and they've been drinking through dinner. They were all just pretty crocked. Right. And supposedly Natalie Wood was either afraid of water and or couldn't swim, and for some reason she had tried to get into a dinghy that was attached to the boat that they were staying on and probably hit her head and drowned. That's the story. That's the official story. Right. But apparently in 2012 it was reopened or her cause of death was changed from accident to undetermined. Yeah. I mean, there were stories that she and Robert Wagner had been fighting. The Captain, even many years later, said that he actually killed her. No charges were ever brought. Christopher Walken for his I think he's never talked about it publicly, if I'm not mistaken. No, he finally did years and years later in a Playboy interview, and he basically said it must have been an accident that no one knows, but surely it was an accident. That was what he said. And that's probably the only thing he said because I didn't think he ever said anything. Yeah, he said it's an accident. Clearly. That was great because that was Christopher Walken with just a hint of John Travolta. Yeah, it's a little Travolta escort. Yeah. I mean, that's tied to brainstorm as being a curse, I guess, because they were both in the movie. Even though The Grabster points out that some people tied this back to a Rebel Without a Cause curse because that makes way more sense to me. Yeah. Because James Dean and Salmanio and Natalie Wood then all died from that movie relatively young. She made it the longest. She was in her early forty s, I think, when she died. But James Dean died very young in a car crash right after Rebel Without a Cause was released, I think. Yeah. And I think when Samuel murdered he was murdered in 1976 at a pretty young age still. He was stabbed to death in the heart in an alley behind his house. Yes. By a pizza man, to me. Oh, really? Yeah. So weird. Well, it is, but I mean, we're talking about curses. Well, I mean, usually the pizza man gets stabbed, you know what I'm saying? Right. I think this guy was actually a serial killing pizza man. Oh, wow. Yeah. I just saw recently is there a serial killer in central Florida? I don't know. I hadn't heard anything. But aren't there at least 50 serial killers operating at any given point in time? I don't know. But I do know that I saw something that I heard that like three murders in the Tampa area were just linked. Oh, man. I think and that made me think it's been a while. Yeah. You don't hear about them very often, but as I grow older and wiser, I'm starting to think like, there's a lot more serial killers out there than you would imagine. That human life has very little value to more people than you would hope. Is that the darkest thing you can think of? It's pretty dark. The last high profile when I remember is BTK. But surely there's been one since then, right? Yeah. Because he was like early two thousand s. Right. I know, but I can't think of one. I can't either, man. But it's been a long time since we've heard of Jeffrey Dahmers and man, that was Ted Bundy and stuff like that. Yeah, thankfully. Sure. The Son of Sam's and the Zodiacs. It seems like the were sort of the time where that was happening more. Yeah. I don't know why. Maybe it was harder to get away with it or easier to get away with it, or who knows? I'm listening to that Heavens Gate podcast. Have you heard that? I haven't heard that. No. It's good. It's from our buddy Chris Bannon over at Mid Roll. Put it out. Is he hosting it? No, Glenn Washington narrates it. But I've been through three episodes now. It's really good, but it's kind of funny, man. That time of the we talked about it some in our cults episode. People just believed more in trying stuff out like that in UFOs. And it was all just kind of in the mainstream. Right. And it just all seems so unbelievable now. But back then it was kind of believable that someone might join up with a cult. Well, a lot of people were on grass back then. Yeah. On the grass. Yeah. That's crazy. I got to hear that podcast, man. That's just a fascinating story. But now that means we can't do Heaven Skate because Bannon did it. Yeah. And then you can't cover in 45 minutes what they cover in whatever, ten episodes. Ten sounds about right. I'm not sure. I don't think they release it all at once, but it feels like a ten. Let's say seven to ten. So, anyway, can we close on brainstorm or did we miss something? Yeah, I think. Natalie woods. Murders or death? Death. Sorry. Is unsolved still. And it's a mystery. It may always be. I had no idea about that, about Robert Wagner. I just knew Natalie Wood drowned. I never heard anything about it being mysterious. Yeah, it's long been mysterious. And well, here's how we'll finish it then. She wasn't even able to finish filming on that movie. And they did use a body double to complete some of those scenes. And it was a big flop. Yeah. Yes, it was. Okay, Chuck, so for the last one, then, we're going to combine two together. All right. Great idea. Strangely, they are almost the same story, but with two different films. And both of them are films that were never made or have yet to be made, I guess is a better way to put it. The first one is a confederacy of dunces. The film adaptation of John Kennedy tools book, I guess. Novel. Great book. Yes. I've never read it. I really want to. I've just never read it for some reason. Yeah, it's a classic, classic book. And very sadly, Too killed himself in 1969, and the book was not out yet. And part of the reason he killed himself is because he could not achieve success as a writer. His mother gets it published. It wins a Pulitzer Prize in 1981, and posthumously, he became a famous author. Yeah. So people, when it first was published in the early 80s, people were like, oh, we've got to turn this into a movie. This is a great idea. Great book, will be a great movie. And they said, who can possibly play the main character, Belushi? He'd be perfect. Belushi dies. Well, who's next? Let's wait a few years and let's see who else could play this main character. John Candy died. Okay. All right, everybody, let's just take a breather. We'll wait a year or two. Who's the next guy? Who's going to play this? I got it. This young up and comer named Chris Farley. Chris Farley died. So a confederacy of dunstan just kept getting put off and off and off. Right. And then finally Will Ferrell steps in, and it looks like it's going to happen because Will Ferrell is obviously indestructible. Right? Yeah. And if you haven't gathered by hearing the people cast as Ignatius Riley, he was a heavy man in the book. So obviously Belushi, Candy, and Farley are all big dudes, and they all died. So finally to go to Farrell, and they're like, well, he's in shape, and we can bulk them up, maybe use some special effects. I have no idea. But at least he's probably not going to drop dead of a heart attack or something, right? He was a safe bet. Yeah. But that didn't happen either. I think it was sort of in turnaround forever. It took a long time in development, and eventually the head of the Louisiana State Film Commission set in New Orleans, so they would have shot there. He was murdered, and Hurricane Katrina came along to wipe out a lot of where the film would be shot. And so I think that kind of just helped to put it on indefinite holes at the very least. Right. But they are I was looking this up, see if it was back on track, and I saw there's a movie called The Butterfly and the typewriter about John Kennedy Tool. Oh, neat. So they're doing a biopic on him with Owen Wilson. Thomas Mann. No. Thomas man Playing Tool Who is he? He's an actor. Right, obviously. But what has he been in? The thing that I saw him in was a movie out a couple of years ago called Me and Earl and the Dying Girl. Okay. It's good little indie film. So he's good. So he's playing Tool. And then I think Susan Sarandon plays his mom, and Diane Kruger is in it as well. And Susan Saran is going to totally try to date him too, I'll bet. Why would you say that? Oh, she likes younger dudes. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Maybe have a shot. She likes young hipster dudes. No way. Younger than you, my friend. Maybe not. Good for her. I love Susan Strandon. Oh, yeah. More power too. I think she's great, but she is totally going to try to date Thomas Man. All right, well, good for him too, then. Sure. I'm not being judgy. No, I know. Okay, so then that's a confederacy of dunces, right? Yes. There's another script out there called a Took that has virtually the same story to it. Right. But the story is totally different. But the curse story is virtually the same with a tok. It's like a fish out of water movie about an Inuit man who comes to New York and has to make his way in the big city. Right, yes. That script was early on. It was optioned. And John Belushi was scheduled to play the main character. Right, right. Well, what happened to John Belushi? He died. So who is up next, Chuck? John Candy. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Okay. Well, John Candy passed, god rest his soul. Who was after John Candy. Chris Farley. That's right, chris Farley. And so the narrative to this curse story takes a huge sudden turn when the next person up after Chris Farley is Sam Kenneson. Yes. And Sam Kennesson, they're actually going to make the movie. It was happening and Sam Kenneson kind of destroyed that because he wanted to be really heavily involved in the scripture he writes in the direction of the film. He wanted creative control. He battled with the studio. I think there may have even been lawsuits going on. Yeah. And he eventually got to the point where he was like, you know what, if you're not going to give me creative control, I'll be in your movie. And I'll suck on purpose. On purpose. And they said, oh, yeah, we're going to sue you. And he said, oh, yeah, right. And then he died in a car wreck before anything could happen as a result. So it took for the moment, died with him. Again, in a little bizarre it is the idea that those two things cross over like that. That one obviously is not a curse, but I think that it's pretty interesting at the very least. Yeah, for sure. Well, if you guys want to know more about movie curses, just go start watching movies and ask people, is this one cursed? And then if they say no, go watch another one and ask about that. And then eventually someone will say, yes, this one is cursed, and then ask them the story behind it. In the meantime, since I said all that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this just a very kind email from a kind Aussie. Nice. Hey, guys, discovered your show a couple of months ago, and I reckon I have listened to two or three podcasts a day since then. Awesome. I absolutely love you guys. And to say that your show is addictive would be an understatement. Until very recently, I was a news junkie. I lived in Melbourne, Australia, and would listen to Radio National at every opportunity. But since brexit in the recent US election, listening to the news and current affairs has become a health hazard for me. I also have two youngest children, eleven and nine. Having grown up in the shadow of the mushroom cloud myself, I don't want to subject my kids to the same fear. So finding your podcast has been a true joy. I love how enthusiastic and optimistic you both are about everything, and your curiosity is truly infectious. That is so nice. Isn't it? Yeah. You are so gloriously accepting of different ideas and cultures. I've even adopted Chucks. I don't want to yuck someone else's yum. Which, by the way, Bridget, I did not make that up. Now, there was another listener who's remaining, but we love to say it for sure, and I'm glad you've adopted that, but I love the podcast so much, I've got my husband and kids into it as well. My husband is a radio ham. We listened to your episode on Ham Radio together. He was impressed with your efforts. Keep it up, guys, and thank you for all the joy and information you brought to my life. Cheers. That's from Bridget Foster and Melbourne. Cheers with some Fosters. And I tell you what, Bridget, we're coming to Melbourne in September of next year for shows and you write in with a friendly reminder and you and your family can get on the old guest list. How about that? Awesome, man. Chuck, you're the guy. You're the guy. There are passes, too. All right, cool. Well, thank you. Thanks a lot, Bridget. It was Bridget and family, right? Yeah. Bridget with a D bridge. Thank you for writing in, and if you want to get in touch with us, like Bridget did, you can tweet to us. I'm at S-Y-S Kpodcast and at Joshmclark. Chucks at Charleswchuckbryant on Facebook and at Facebook. Comstuffytow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyhow.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." | |
d24af1b5-5df2-4784-958b-aebc00ff1b80 | What's up with bariatric surgery? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-up-with-bariatric-surgery | Bariatric surgery can also be called weight loss surgery. Some people think it's a highly underused tool to fight obesity. Others think it's a shortcut. We discuss all the ins and outs in this week's episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Bariatric surgery can also be called weight loss surgery. Some people think it's a highly underused tool to fight obesity. Others think it's a shortcut. We discuss all the ins and outs in this week's episode.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 23 Jun 2022 11:49:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=11, tm_min=49, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=174, tm_isdst=0) | 46326262 | audio/mpeg | "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 lurking around here like a creeper weirdo who takes pictures of people without their permission. And this is stuff you should have. I like that. The joke is so nice, I said it twice. So we should issue a trigger warning before this episode because we are talking about bariatric surgery, which some people refer to as weight loss surgery. And the topic of food and weight and weight loss and obesity and weight loss surgery can be very triggering for people. So if you want to listen to this one, great. We're going to just break it down like we usually do. But if it's something that you don't want to listen to, we totally understand. Yeah, after researching this, I totally get why, like, a fat positive or somebody who would be triggered by talk of that could be upset by it, because there's a pretty substantial argument to be made that bariatric surgery is conducted just to make obese and overweight people acceptable to society. That's basically the upshot of why people get the surgery done. It's not necessarily true for everybody, but there's a whole school of thought that says this is a medical form of fat shaming, for some people, at least. Yeah, and there's another school of thought that it's disease solving surgery, and the evidence plays out that it really does help with things like diabetes and hypertension and can be very successful. The reason I thought of this to begin with was I saw a Vox article called we're barely using the best tool we have to fight obesity. And the sort of crux of that article, which we'll talk about here, is that only about 1% of people who qualify for bariatric surgery use it. And the Vox article was all behind it and basically said, we have this great tool for people that cannot seem to get down to what is a healthy weight for them who are suffering from hypertension and diabetes. And they were saying that people should use this surgery more, and there's a lot of reasons why people don't, which we're also going to talk about. Yeah, I mean, there's one thing that everybody can agree on. Like bariatric surgery works for weight loss. It's like a spectrum of how much it works, but it definitely works. There's substantial results once it happens, and understandably so, because it is a radical surgical procedure where you're really profoundly altering your internal anatomy so that you can, in some cases accept less food, in some cases digest food less or have less of a chance to digest food. And we should point out we're talking about 2022 modern bariatric surgery, because even ten years ago, results were wildly different. The preferred surgeries were wildly different, and they've come a long, long way in the past. Even ten years. Yeah, it definitely has hit its stride in the last ten years, for sure. But as far as the history of this whole idea goes, this is not a new concept. It goes back at least to the end of the 19th century. Some people say it goes back as far as the 10th century, which is amazing to think about. And you know what? Livia helped us with this. And I had a feeling when I said, hey, let's cover the history, I was like, there's got to be some hundreds and hundreds of years old procedure that somebody did. And if you believe the story, in the 10th century, there was a King Sancho of Leon, and Sancho was so big, and this is when Ed McMahon chimes in. How big was he? He was so big that he couldn't ride a horse or walk. Ouch, as the story goes. So the doctor did the most basic form of weight loss surgery at the time, which was to suture King Sancho's lips shut, so that King Sancho could only ingest a liquid diet and apparently lost about half his weight and got the throne back. So that's a nut so story. I find something else that comes later. Chuck even more nuts, though. No. In the 21st century, there was a push to basically reintroduce jaw wiring. Oh, yeah. So this whole thing with King Sancho, one of the original Kings of Leon, it got picked up like a thousand or so years later, even though it's been shown not to work, as we'll see. But the whole modern bariatric surgery actually was born in the 19th century out of the same kinds of procedures, but for a totally different purpose. A guy named Caesar Rue came up with a surgical technique called the Ruin Y, and it was used in case you had some sort of like, bowel or gastric obstruction. He figured out how to bypass it and connect your stomach to a different part of your intestine to get around the obstruction, and yet you would still have functioning parts. And that was where the idea of gastric bypass surgery came from. Or the name of it. Yeah, which all the way back in 1892, which is really hard to believe, but they called it Ruin. Why? Because I believe it sort of forms a Y shape when you're finished. And there was about a 21% mortality rate initially in 1892, no surprise. But they got that down to about eleven, which is really great for the time period, I think. And then things kind of went along as people were experimenting with those obstruction surgeries, there were doctors that started to say, hey, wait a minute, we now have a thing called a scale. And humans, we don't just need to put grain on it, humans can stand on it, so we know how much we weigh. And everyone went, what? Hey, that's a great idea. I can't wait to weigh myself every day, is what everyone said. I haven't weighed myself in a long time, I kind of quit doing that. Me either. Me too. But hard to believe, but yes, humans started weighing themselves, and all of a sudden, in the 1920s and 30s, doctors started and patients started paying attention to their little literal weight, not just like, how they looked and how they felt. Right. Weight gain and being overweight and I'm using scare quotes here, or obese scare quotes became medicalized at that point. Like it became a medical issue, a problem to be treated. And it's just that whole idea, and that whole concept has taken off since then. It's just so fully ingrained in our society that it's really interesting to think, like, it's only been around for maybe 100 or so years, but they basically would give you anything that you wanted to lose weight, like amphetamines, laxatives, just anything. You just go to the doctor and he'll give you whatever. But it wasn't until the 1940s that whole idea of medicalising being overweight really kind of spread into society at large when the insurance companies got involved. Yeah. And I should point out, too, you're using scare quotes when you say things like overweight and obese, because there is so much individual variation in body weight and how people carry it and how healthy they are. And we understand this. We sort of understand this now as far as people accepting it. But there's still not a lot of acceptance around it. That's why when you calculate something like a BMI, that is, to judge a population, that does not take into account an individual or their muscle mass or their body shape. So they kind of throw these tags on overweight and obese and BMI that are useful in a certain sense, but also not useful in a certain sense. Yeah. And the BMI scale was invented in the 19th century by a guy named Adolf Quadleet. He was a sociologist, and he based it exclusively on white Western Europeans. Right. So in a way, you could say the BMI scale has created the ideal body form is an average sized, or whatever the BMI says, average size, white European. The problem is, that's a problem in and of itself, because you now have a compartment that you're trying to shove everybody in regardless. And if you're not in that compartment that you're supposed to be in, you have a problem, a medical problem, even maybe even a lifethreatening problem. But more than that, if you're not white and Western European, that scale shouldn't really apply to you. But that hasn't kept humanity or people from plugging all of humanity into that same BMI scale. So there's a lot of questions about the BMI scale itself, especially in recent years. Yeah. And I hope everyone understands when we use those terms, all of this goes into that. As doctors were looking at still kind of performing these surgeries, they noticed that, hey, you can lose weight. The initial ruin. Why, when you had an obstruction, they're like, Wait, this is good for weight loss too, because quite simply, your stomach is smaller and your body is not absorbing you can't eat as much it's not absorbing as many nutrients. And in 1952, they believe the very first real deal weight loss surgery occurred again from a Swedish surgeon named Victor Ein Rickson, when Victor removed 103 small intestine from a woman, a 32 year old woman who didn't lose that much weight, but supposedly it improved her life quality. Yeah. And just the next year, an American named Dr. Richard Varco created a slightly altered, ruin y procedure called the Juno ilio bypass. I practiced that so many times, my brain just says, no, you're never going to get it right the first time. I think that was probably close. It was close, but there was like a hitch and a stumble in there, too. Jejun allele, is what I would say. Oh, showing off, eh? But that may not be right either. And that comes from I'm sorry, that's what the first time they called it bariatric surgery, right? Yes. And bariatric is from the Greek for weight or heavy. So they said, I guess this is surgery for heavy people. Maybe, I'm not sure. But that's where that's about the fifties is about when that name became applied to it. And then in the 60s, they were starting to do studies and experimentation with it. And there was a study that found that a temporary procedure where you would have, like, your stomach move to a different part of your small intestine temporarily, you lose the weight, and then they go reverse the procedure. They found that patients just basically gained the weight back after the procedure was reversed. And at that point in the early 60s, these surgeries started to become permanent in nature pretty much across the board. Yes. That was my first surprise in this research. I thought even modern bariatric bypasses and stuff, I thought that was all a temporary thing, and that you don't live with an egg sized stomach for the rest of your life. And that's not true. You live with an egg sized stomach the rest of your life. Yes. As we'll see, they remove a significant portion of your stomach in either one of the surgeries that you get. And when they do that, that's irreversible. That part of your stomach is gone. What's amazing to me is that they've gotten good enough at it that it has tremendous results, and the complications have kind of died down over the years to where the risk of death is now down to about zero 1% in the 2020s. It's gotten that low, but just around 2020 years ago, it was still up at 1%, which is really high for a surgical procedure in the Western world in the 20th century. But they've whittled it down ten times lower than it was 20 years before because they started using laposcopic surgery that's right. And Livia points out that zero 1% is less than knee replacement surgery. Just to kind of put that to frame that. Yeah. And also, I want to correct myself, it wasn't in the 21st century. It was in the mid 20th century that they tried to bring back jaw wiring, but it just doesn't work. That's right. And as a result of the success rate and obviously whittling that death rate down to zero one, surgeries now are crunching up toward 300,000 per year. I think $256,000 was the last year that we have a number four, and that was in 2019, as opposed to about 20,000 a year in the about 150,000 and change in the mid 2000s. Yeah, because they said, hey, everybody, we don't kill nearly as many of you as we used to. Come and get it. Should we take a break? Sure. All right. That was a good setup. So let's take a break, and we'll be right back. Okay, Chuck. So we're back, and I think it's high time that we actually talked about how a bariatric surgery goes. And there's a couple of different ways you can go. Some are more popular than others, it seems like one that used to be more popular, the Ruin why the bypass? Has become less popular in favor of one called sleeve gastrectomy. See, I can never get it the first time. You want to say gastronomy. I did. I wanted to say gastropub. Yeah. This is easily the most common perform today. This is the one that's very popular right now. They remove about 80% of your stomach, and basically the stomach, instead of being a large pouch, becomes a narrow sleeve. That's why it's called sleeve gastrectomy. And it's very simple in that you have a much smaller stomach, so you can't eat as much. You will feel full more quickly. But what also happens is and I'm not sure if they had a hunch this would happen or if they knew this would happen, but it also tricks the body into releasing few of those hormones that say that you're hungry. So it's not like, oh, I'm still hungry all the time. You just have a smaller stomach, you eat less, and you're satisfied. Yeah. You eat less, and you have the desire to eat less on top of that. So, I mean, you can imagine that this has tremendous results. And I think that they did know that that hormone effect was going to happen, because they specifically remove a part of the stomach called the fungus, and that's the portion that expands when you eat a lot of food. So your stomach can't expand when you eat food. You have to keep that in mind. And then also, the fungus is where ghrelin is largely made, and that's the hunger hormone. So you're producing less ghrelin, and you just can't physically fit that much food into your stomach anymore. Right. And like I said, it's the most popular form today. I think in the mid 2000s, it was about 18% of bariatric surgeries. Now or in 2019, it was 59%. It's even more than that in 2022. I just don't have the most recent number. I just got back from vacation in Mexico, and one of the two families that we kind of hung out with and buddied up with, I was chatting with the guy and I was like, so what do you do? And he said, I'm a bariatric surgeon, and I'm not kidding. And I was like, we're about to do a podcast episode on that. And he said, what's a podcast? He should have said, well, what's a bariatric surgery? No, he didn't ask that because we had already talked a little bit. But he very nice guy from Texas, and he talked a little bit. I didn't want to bother him too much about it. Although he really enjoyed talking about it because he's not only a bariatric surgeon, but he's very much a wellness doctor, and he believes that it's just part of a wellness plan for your life, not just like, all right, we'll do it and then have fun in the world. So he was a good guy to talk to, but he talked about there I went again, sleep gastropub being the most popular gastropub. Yeah, it is the most popular gastropub of all time. So how does that surgery go, though? It's pretty quick for one. Yeah, I think it's like 40 to 70 minutes. Not that long. You stay in the hospital for a couple of nights to keep an eye on you. And one of the reasons they're keeping an eye on you is because for two weeks afterward, you can have nothing but a liquid diet. Because if you go look up sleeve gastrectomy videos, there's a lot of computer animations out there that show you what they're doing. So you can imagine that if you remove probably, I think, maybe 80% of your stomach, it needs to heal. And the way that you help it heal over the first two weeks is by just drinking, like, broth, water, maybe some Gatorade if you're feeling spicy. But again, remember, you're not sitting there going bonkers wanting food. Most people who have a sleeve gastrectomy report having to make themselves eat. They have to keep a strict schedule because they don't want to eat like they used to. Like most people want to eat. Yeah, we'll talk a little bit about maintenance later, but I think in the end, they recommend you eat four to six very small meals a day. There's no way around it. You're going to change your eating habits and your lifestyle in a big way if you have the surgery. And I read a lot of first person accounts of, like, can you ever go out to eat again and sit down with your family and enjoy a meal? Because if you're filling something the size of an egg, it's like, can you even order a meal. And everyone that I read was like, yeah, you get used to it. You go to the restaurant, you order an appetizer, maybe, and you don't even eat half of the appetizer, and you take the rest home. You do a lot more talking at dinner. And you don't drink alcohol. You can't drink liquids while you eat at all. They're saying you drink liquids no more than 30 minutes before you have a meal because there's so little room. I did see some people say they could drink a little alcohol, but it's really recommended you basically quit drinking. Certainly you don't want to drink beer when you have a tiny egg sewing. Oh, my God, that sounds terrible. It does. But there's no way around it. You are changing your lifestyle. But across the board, when I read all these first person accounts, everyone was like, you get used to it. And the trade off is for them that they are much healthier and happier and generally didn't have the regrets. I'm sure you could find some people that had regrets and were like, I miss sitting down and eating big meals with my friends and family. But most of the people that I read were pretty satisfied with the surgery. So after you get surgery, too, and I can imagine they're satisfied because when you get a sleeve gastrectomy, the doctors who perform these kind of procedures, they use something called excess weight to qualify the success of the surgery. And excess weight is the difference between your ideal weight and what you weighed before the surgery and 18 months after the procedure. Patients typically have lost about 70% of their body weight after the surgery within a year and a half. Their excess weight, right? Yes, they're excess weight. Yeah. And generally it's not like the days of yore with gastric banding, which has really gone out of favor, a lot of complications. The weight generally did not stay off, but with sleeve gastrectomy, and then, as we'll see with gastric bypass, the weight does tend to stay off for years. Although people do gain some of the weight back. One study saw after twelve years, about 40% of patients had maintained a 30% weight loss or more compared to their original total weight, and 93% were at least 10% lighter than they'd been. So 60% of people gained back more than their weight. Is that a way to say it? Yeah. I have to admit you just made my brain do a somersault, but yes, that's the converse, I guess. Yeah. So 60% of people gained back more than that 30%. But it doesn't mean they gained all the weight back. That could have been 32%, 35%. No, because again, like you said, 93% or at least 10% lighter than they've been before. There's a lot of percentages flying around here. Yeah. But the upshot is that you are definitely going to lose weight if you're a physician, especially if you're a bariatric surgeon, you consider bariatric surgery the gold standard for rapid and sustained weight loss. If you have a patient who is again obese, maybe say 300, \u00a3400 or more, you would say, look, you really need the surgery and it's going to change your life. You would probably also tell them it's going to save their life too. Again, it's questionable, but that's the medical stance. That's right. Then we have the gastric bypass, the original rue on Y or RYGB surgery. They staple off part of your stomach. They reduce that remaining part to, again, about the size of an egg, and then they attach it to that rue limb of the small intestine. And most of that stomach in the upper small intestine is now bypassed. That's why they call it bypass surgery. And this one is I think there are a few more complications now, and that's why this one's falling out of favor a little bit compared to sleeve gastrectomy, right? Yeah. The impression I have is that sleeve gastrectomy is much less complicated afterward because you're not messing with the original plumbing. All you're doing is removing a large section of the stomach. Everything else remains as is. Right. So you still have a risk of developing an infection or leakage in your stomach or all sorts of stuff, but you're not like bypassing. You're not detaching the stomach and then reattaching it elsewhere, which adds an entirely different dimension to that surgery. And that's what ruin why is. And when you're doing that, Chuck, the reason why you're doing that is because you're basically keeping the small intestine from being able to digest as much like fats, carbohydrates, all that stuff from the food you eat. So you're eating less, but you're also digesting less of it or absorbing less of it. So that leads to rapid weight loss as well. That's right. So like we said, as far as just being an effective thing, losing weight for some people is really hard. So for some people it is a mountain that they cannot overcome. Diets. You know, I think the verdict is in across the board on diets, which is diets are a quick fix and it's very hard to keep that maintenance. Everybody basically agrees that long term weight loss involves life complete lifestyle change and not some kind of crazy diet that you're doing, or even not crazy diet that you're doing. Exercise we've talked about on the podcast is great for your body, but you cannot exercise the weight off if you don't change the food and drink portion of your life. Precisely. And even when you do diet, you may actually change your body so that you aren't able to lose weight after a point. And when you stop dieting, you may gain back more weight than before. That could be dangerous, for sure. You don't want to mess with your metabolism too much. And I would direct people to our intuitive eating episode. We talked a lot about that. Yeah, but like you said, the verdict being in on dieting has really kind of supported the idea of bariatric surgery is not only the gold standard, but really the only real option you have if you want to lose a serious amount of weight. And so a lot of people have been studying, like, just how effective it is. And like you said, there's lots of percentages flying around and how many people kept how much weight off. But there was this one study that looked at people who have gastric bypass surgery and contestants on The Biggest Loser, which is a weight loss competition that's been on TV forever. And they use them because it's hard to find a group of people who lose about as much weight as you would lose with the gastric bypass surgery, but without using gastric bypass surgery. So they made like an ideal control group. That's right. And what they found is really super interesting. Both groups lost about the same amount of weight, or at least similar amounts. But the Biggest Loser group I hate in saying that, I hate that dumb title, the Biggest Loser group experience what's called metabolic adaptation, which is to say that their metabolism slowed down and it made it harder to keep that weight off. So six years on down the road, that control group with the Biggest Loser bunch had regained a lot of that weight, but their metabolism was still really low and slower than it was to begin with. So it kind of permanently altered, it seems like. I don't know about permanently, but at least six years later had altered their metabolism. It's not permanent. No, but they will have to go through the process of retraining their body to not store as much fat or burn energy slower in order to get back to normal. But that's what dieting can really do to you. Right, but what happened with the other group? Well, the other group, the bariatric surgery patients, their metabolism stabilized. So there's a lot of rapid weight loss just because you're taking in less, but also because your body is not producing hunger hormones like ghrelin, and it may actually produce more of the satiety. Is that right? Satiati. Satiety, for sure. Sitcom, Sachetti, sashity, hormone, leptin. So their metabolism actually is just stabilized. So eventually they stop losing weight, maybe gain a little bit back, but typically kind of hold what's referred to as a baseline weight, basically the weight that your body and your metabolism says, this is how much you should weigh. Try as you will, we're always going to try to get back to this, and if you mess with us, we're going to make it harder on you than ever. Right. Which, I mean, that study really makes a pretty good case for bariatric surgery as an option for people. Right. So does this. There was a meta analysis in 2021 that saw we talked earlier about health complications from carrying too much weight, that bariatric surgery reduces the risk to develop type two diabetes by 61% and hypertension by 64%. And if you already had those conditions going in, which can be one of the criteria to get the surgery to begin with, the surgery was associated with remission. Even so, just to take a little sidebar, I didn't understand how people can say, okay, if you're faced with data like that, how can you possibly say that obesity is not necessarily linked with poor health or that there's a concept called healthy at any size, which I want to do an episode on eventually? And the thing that I saw, the explanation is, yes, these things are associated with obesity, with being overweight. But the point is, if you're obese or overweight, you're not automatically going to get type two diabetes, you're not automatically going to develop hypertension. And in much the same way that smokers may or may not develop lung cancer, people who are overweight or obese may or may not develop type two diabetes or hypertension or some of the other maladies, I guess, associated with being overweight by the medical establishment. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. Yeah, I just wanted to add that. Sure. But Chuck, the thing is, it is evident that, yes, if you do have those maladies, gastric bypass surgery, bariatric surgery will definitely help your health outcomes as a result. Yeah. Or headed toward those. And it's not like if you get regular physicals, you know, when you're headed toward type two diabetes and hypertension, it's not like a switch is just flicked and you're like, all right, I've got those two conditions. Now, the blood tests that they give you, and trust me, I go every year now. I want to know about my body. I'm not one of these guys who is overweight and just buries my head in the sand. I probably too my detriment want to get too many tests done and things like that because I want to know what's up. But I've seen my own health, like, creep up toward those numbers to levels that I don't like. So then I have to work to get those numbers back down, and it's all data driven, and it's all from blood tests, and I just encourage people to go get their physicals every year. I know people that bury their head in the sand and are just like, I just don't want to know about that stuff. And I just think people should really be advocate for their own health. What's the word I'm looking for when you are just sort of preemptively sort of getting tests to find out where you stand? Taking action. Yeah. Well, taking action on the medical side so you can take action at home. Yeah. Also, you don't have to go to a doctor to get blood tests. You can order your own, basically, and just go to Quest or LabCorp or something. Just like, do your own blood panel. Yeah. And they have the results show if you're in a normal range or whatever. For everything. Yeah. Or if you cut yourself, squeeze a little bit on a piece of white paper and just look at it for a while. That's right. What does it look like? It's like reading tea leaves or chicken guts. What was I going to say? Oh, they did. As far as the meta analysis, another study with that analysis, they found about half the people with type two diabetes that had the surgery had enough improvement that they could get off their medication. And that's what remission basically is. It's sort of like you're always an alcoholic even though you quit drinking. Technically, you're still diabetic, but if it's in remission, that means you've gotten your numbers down to a safe level, you can get off the medication and stuff like that. So also, by the way, that's questionable as well, whether you're still an alcoholic after you quit drinking. Well, is it? Yeah, I mean, it's sort of just terminology, though, right? No, not necessarily. I think there's definitely a school of thought that once an addict is always an addict. Like, you will always be addicted. Even if you go for the rest of your life, 50, 60, 70 years without ever taking another drink, you'll always be an alcoholic. Other people say, no, that's not true. And that's the whole mindset that keeps people trapped in this idea that they're addicted or an alcoholic when they aren't any longer, and it produces a lot of unnecessary shame and hardship. You know, I'm glad to hear that because I always thought that was weird when someone who quit drinking 20 years ago says, I'm still an alcoholic. And I just thought, that's not for me to judge. Like, that's their terminology that they need to use. But I always thought that was a strange way to think about it. So I think that does apply for some people. I'm not saying right. For all people. Yeah. It's just the opposite is true as well. Just because you're an alcoholic doesn't mean you're always going to be an alcoholic for everybody. Okay. I got you. So Chuck chuck yes. I'd say we take a break. All right, let's do it. I'm going to go into remission and use the restroom. All right, we're back. I'm glad we cleared that up about alcoholism. I didn't know that that was going to pop up. I didn't either. I'm glad you said something, though. That's good information. Yes. Some might say it's stuff you should know. I just used the line that I hate that everyone else uses when you first meet them and tell them what you do. Yeah. At some point when you meet someone new and you tell them what you do in the name of the show, at some point they say, oh, that sounds like stuff you should know. Right? Yeah, they definitely do or they'll hit you with. So tell me something I should know. Yeah, I also realized just this week, Chuck, why some people who write in abbreviate the show Sufk I've never understood what they were doing. I finally noticed the Y and the you are next to each other on the keyboard, on a query keyboard. Oh, you think that's what it is? It's got to be. I just figured people were doing the prints thing or just Internet shorthand for you as you right. But it doesn't make sense. Yeah, I guess it does. It does. You should know. Okay, well, maybe I'm back in the wilderness as much as I was before. Let's talk about some risk factors. You did talk about leakage. Always. Just with any kind of abdominal surgery you might get, there's a risk of infection and clotting, hernia ulcer, gallstones, bowel obstructions. I think you find more of those specific ones in the gastric bypass rather than the sleeve. And then explain to everyone what these two great words together mean. Dumping syndrome. One of the most unfortunately named medical conditions that has ever been put together, I think. So dumping syndrome is where you basically, when you're eating after gastric bypass surgery or bariatric surgery, the food just moves out of your stomach too quick. It's not predigested enough. So when it hits your guts, it causes cramps, it can cause diarrhea. There's another variation called late dumping syndrome where if you eat an overly sugary meal or snack or whatever, it can drop your blood sugar precipitously, because so much insulin gets released because, again, it wasn't predigested or pre absorbed in any way. It just kind of shows up in your gut, like, here I am. I'm a bite of steak. Let's see what we can do. Yeah. The other thing you're going to have to do is potentially take supplements just because you're eating so little. You're also getting fewer good things into your body, and hopefully you're eating good things if you continue to eat just very small amounts of bad stuff. And again, we're using scare quotes, but if I get this and I continue just to eat fried chicken and mashed potatoes, then I'm not giving my body the nutrients that it needs. And you might need to take supplements. One thing you definitely have to do is eat really slow and chew like you've never chewed before. Yeah, you got to chew like Dr. Kellogg. Yeah. I mean, I think you're essentially trying to trick your body into thinking you're on sort of a liquid diet still. Yeah. But I think also your body is sending you signals like, please stop. Three bites of steak is too much. Right. Like, it's sending you those signals. From what I understand, it takes some working out and figuring out how to eat under these new circumstances. It's a little bit of trial and error, but that people work it out over time. I bet you really appreciate food. Yeah. I could see that being an effect of it. I could also see becoming totally neutral toward food being an effect of it as well. Yeah. I mean, they're definitely psychological impacts. And that is played out with another interesting side effect, which is and I saw this in a few places, is that you are more likely to get divorced than if you didn't have the surgery. And I think there was one study there have been plenty of studies, but there was one in 2018 that found 9% got divorced after the surgery compared to 6% of the control group. And there are a lot of ways to look at that. One certainly is maybe you have the increased confidence to leave a relationship you didn't have the confidence to leave before that you should have leave like a bad relationship. Yeah. Apparently you get married or in a relationship more after you get the surgery, which also could make a lot of sense. Yes. Which is nice. I like that one. That's the silver lining to the other cloud. Yeah. So if you said, okay, what about me? How do I know if I qualify for bariatric surgery? Because I don't know if we said or not. Chuck insurance will cover it. Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance will cover it under certain circumstances. Because, again, obesity has been medicalized and is seen as a disease or syndrome or symptom of disease right. Or associated with disease, if not a disease itself. So they've said, okay, we'll cover this. If you have a BMI of at least 40 or you're more than \u00a3100 overweight, I was surprised it was just \u00a3100. I would have thought it would be more than that. Yeah. Or if you have a BMI of 35 and you also have type two diabetes or sleep apnea or hypertension or fatty liver disease that's not from alcohol, osteoarthritis, lipid abnormalities, heart disease or gastrointestinal disorders, gastropub disorders. Along with that 35% BMI. Or if you have tried to lose weight with several multiple efforts and are unable to. And I think that's included with the BMI, right? Yes. And that's actually the insurance companies will make you jump through a lot of hoops, and one of them is you need to try to lose weight and show that you can't before they'll insure you. In some cases. There's a lot of meanness to it, really, if you step back and think that you're treating somebody like that not because of any medical condition, but because they're overweight. But that's what insurance companies do to get to pay for it. And if you pay for it yourself roxanne Gay got it done and wrote an essay about it, and she said that she paid out of pocket because she didn't want to have to jump through any hoops or red tape. And she said that the cost was breathtaking, as she put it. Really? So, yes, I would get the impression that the average person would not be able to afford it out of pocket. So there are hoops you're going to have to jump through. Apparently. According to a 2020 paper by Boston Medical Center, fewer than 1% of patients, like we said, get the surgery that qualify. And one of the big reasons is a lot of physicians PCP still do not recommend it. Apparently, you are five times more likely to get it if it is recommended by your primary care physician, but it just doesn't happen as much. Yeah. And I think a lot of the PCPs aren't up on the advances that have been made in things like mortality rates and the fact that it's moved over to laparoscopic. So if you get like a kind of old and said in their ways, primary care physician, they might not know that bariatric surgery is much safer than it used to be and much less invasive. They're like, Here, just have a soda pop and it'll be fine. Exactly. Have a Diet Coke. So if you do get bariatric surgery, there's a chance, an 80% chance that you are a woman, right? That's right. Even though obesity rates are the same for men and women are way more likely to get the surgery. Also, when women get the surgery, compared to men, they are younger than their male counterparts. And I think that it's more like referrals. You're more likely to get the surgery because you've been referred by someone who got it rather than coming from your doctor. And it also shows that women and this is sad and not surprising at all, that 84% of women listed psychosocial concerns as one of their biggest motivations, even over health related concerns. Yes. But infertility has also been strongly linked, as far as I understand, to be overweight or obese. So it's possible that some of the increase in women who get it or the disproportion of women who get it could be because they're seeking to have a family or have an easier pregnancy too. Right. And again, on the sort of general shaming outlook of this surgery, there was a survey about five years ago, in 2017, a poll, I guess, that in the US. Almost 40% of people responded that bariatric surgery was the easy way out. Other than just like, losing weight the old fashioned way. Yeah. And that's just such a crack because it's like, hey, you should really lose a bunch of weight. Oh, you're getting bariatric surgery. That's the easy way out. And that really underscores how much people look at being overweight as an individual moral failing. That there is a choice. There is something wrong with you. Yeah. Or a choice or that you're just lazy or you just can't help yourself, whatever. So much so that just people who are overweight or obese are just looked down upon. They don't they're not treated with the same kind of dignity that an average sized person would be. And this actually shows up in medical settings, too. Apparently, doctors will not pay as much attention to health indicators like cholesterol level or glucose levels or whatever, and instead just pay attention to the appearance of an overweight or obese patient when they recommend gastric bypass or bariatric surgery. So they're not saying it's because you're Hypertens or because you have diabetes. They're essentially saying it's strictly because you're overweight. Yeah. And sort of the one thing that's obvious to me is everything that I've seen about the surgery, the recovery, your lifestyle afterward for the rest of your life. There's nothing easy about it. Yeah. It is not the easy way out. It's not like it's a 40 minutes surgery, then you're good to go. It's not an easy thing, and it is not something to go into lightly. It is a major surgery that will completely alter the way you eat. And a lot of people, the way they eat is a big part of their lifestyle in their life, and it will alter that forever. And it's a big, huge, monumental change. And there's nothing easy about it. But it is your decision. It's up to you. From what I've seen about the fat, positive activist community, they would probably recommend that you reflect on exactly why you want the surgery. Is it because you are being pressured by family, friends, society? Or is it just for whatever reason and whatever reason you have? Again, it's your decision. No one can tell you that it's right or wrong, but you should definitely educate yourself on the risks and the benefits and everything about it and then just make your decision and feel good about it either way. Yeah, I agree. I think this is, like, one of those topics that people might research late at night, even feeling shamed to even look into this kind of procedure. And hopefully we could clear up some of the stuff, and if something people feel good about, then they can own it and move forward with their head held high. Very nice. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, since Chuck City has got nothing else, that, of course, means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this just a new listener from Canada. Okay? I don't think that's how they see it. I'm a new listener. I just want to say how much I enjoy the show. My husband told me about stuff you should know, and I kind of brushed him off thinking, this is just another boring podcast trying to teach me boring things. But I finally gave it a shot and was hooked after the very first show I listened to. You guys have great chemistry. I heard another listener call you Burt and Ernie type. Burt and Ernie type. I feel that. I'll take that. Sure. You have a great mix of random knowledge and important knowledge, and I love your true crime episodes, too. I hope you keep going forever and you should know my husband is not letting me live this down, that he is the greatest podcast taste. That is from Autumn in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. North America. Planet Earth. Very nice, Autumn. Thank you very much. And we're glad that you're with us, even though it was your husband who made you do it. That's right. If you want to be like Autumn and get in touch with us, we would love that. You can send us an email. That's the best way to do it. Just wrap it up, spank it on the bottom lightly and send it off 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." | |
How Earthworms Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-earthworms-work | Earthworms come in a wide range of sizes: The average U.S. earthworm is 6 to 11 inches long, and the giant worms of Australia and South America can grow to a length of 11 feet. Join Josh and Chuck as they burrow into the weird world of earthworms. | Earthworms come in a wide range of sizes: The average U.S. earthworm is 6 to 11 inches long, and the giant worms of Australia and South America can grow to a length of 11 feet. Join Josh and Chuck as they burrow into the weird world of earthworms. | Thu, 15 Dec 2011 17:52:43 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=17, tm_min=52, tm_sec=43, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=349, tm_isdst=0) | 40926634 | 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. There's Charles W. Chuckle. Brian. That makes the stepping take two. Yeah. Rarely do we have a take two. Very rarely. But we did today. Yeah, we did. We started just kind of talking and shop, and Jerry's like, what are you guys doing? Yeah. But anyway, here we are. We're back, we're happy, everything's good, and we're going to talk a little bit about Earthworms, right? Yes. You feeling good about this one? I am. Very interesting stuff. I wrote this article specifically so we can podcast on it. Yeah. So, Chuck yes? Have you heard of a man named Charles Darwin? You know I love Chucky Ducky. Chuck D. Chuck D. Charles Darwin. Very famous. On the origin of the species. Incredibly important work. Did you know, though, that The Origin of the Species was outsold in the 19th century by another book of his called The Formation of Vegetable Mold through the Action of Worms with Observations on Their Habits that sold more copies. For real? Yeah, throughout the rest of the 19th century. It was published in 1881, and I think The Origin of the Species came a little after that, but just during the 19th century. For a while there, The Formation of Vegetable Mold was crazy out selling on the Origin of Species. I saw today where he studied Earthworms for it said 39 years. Yes. This book was very near and dear to his heart. Like this topic was he spent a lot of time really looking at Earthworm. 39 years. I guess he died because why would you give up at 39? I would say let's just make it an even 40. I think he wrote the book and was like, okay, there you go. I'm done. Let's go to Galapagos. Right? Exactly. He came up with, in his 39 years and in this book, some very well understood observations that are still accepted today. Right. As a matter of fact, we have a quote from him as read by him. All right, let's hear. You want to hear? Yes. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures. So there you have it. Wow. The earthworm is very important. I didn't know he talked like that. I didn't either. It's kind of surprising, but this idea, this concept of the Earthworm is extremely important to the Earth was kind of put forth by Darwin, has been accepted as gospel since then and in the decades and centuries since Darwin, he did such a good job that Earthworm research kind of fell by the wayside. Yeah. Scientific community was classifying as extinct, like worms they just hadn't seen in a while that would just later pop back up like the giant Paluse Earthworm in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, it was thought to be extinct, classified as such in the then in 2010, it pops up and they're like, oh, it's not extinct. The worm pops up. Yeah. And that happens a lot with Earthworms. People just classified them as extinct. So this kind of, like these appearances have kind of reinvigorated science and inquiry into Earthworms. I wonder how he got on it. Who, Darwood? Yeah. Out of all the different things he was studying, I wonder how he honed in on the earthworm and knew its value. Because if no one else had studied its value, I would never look at an earthworm and think it's very valuable at all. No, but people, before Darwin realized the value of Earthworm, like Aristotle called him, the intestines of the soil. Okay, I got you. No, but he's the one who dedicated 39 years to studying them. Okay, so just in sheer size alone, I guess in sheer volume is a better way to put it. Earthworms. They have a substantial impact on Earth stat time, I think so. 3000 species. Notice it didn't say species. People say species. Germans? No, a lot of people say species. Species, species, species, species. See, I don't know which one I say. I think both are acceptable. I think not species. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. They have a range in size from about a centimeter to 9ft, although they go way more than that. Yeah. I think the world record I found was one in South Africa was 22ft long. A 22 foot long earthworm. That's huge. And there are plenty of others. Japan has some giant ones. Australia does too. Of course. I found one. We'll talk about that. Lots of giant freaks of nature. But here's the cool stat of the day for me. Plus, we get to say the word hectare. Just close to two and a half acres. Yeah, it's like 2.47 a single hectare. You can find 500,000 to 2 million worms and their total biomass, wet biomass, equals ten times the total weight of all the other animals living above ground combined on that same size spot of land. On that same hectare. Yeah. That's nutty. That is nutty. Especially considering that worms don't go that deep, maybe about 10ft into the soil. Let's say there's twelve deer on that hectare. Yeah. I mean, that's going to be a lot of weight right there, just from the deer. Say each deer weighs \u00a3150. It's like \u00a31800. And that's only a dozen deer. Some amount of kilograms. Yeah. That's probably like 900 kg. So the point is a lot of worms. Yeah, there's a ton of worms. They're spread all over the place. But here's an interesting fact. If you've read 1493, you probably already know this. Charles Man's brilliant follow up to his triumphant 1491. I can't wait for 1494. Yeah, look out for that one. He's just going to pick some random date. Like, if you go into the average North American woods in the northern United States, say, and you find an Earthworm. That Earthworm, had you dug in the same spot 500 years before, you wouldn't have found any Earthworms there. Like, all Earthworms in North America and Canada above about the 40th degree latitude are new. They're relatively recent immigrants from Asia and Europe, and they hitched a ride, thanks to the colonists, to America in plants. Yeah, root balls that were attached to plants that were imported to the United States and Canada from Asia and Europe. Yes. Chuck, I have a question. Yes. I have a few questions for you because you wrote this, and it's always nice to speak to the author, and you're right in front of me. How's that? I'm right here. Do they know what was here before the Ice Age that killed off all the original native species? Surely there were worms. That is an excellent question. Okay. No, they don't know. They know that. I guess not because it was pre Ice Age. It's not like they had records. There's fossil records of Earthworms that go back, like, 165,000,000 years. Like there was a huge giant earthworm that was armor plated. Right. Really? Yeah. But the stuff in North America, apparently, the fossil record is fairly incomplete here. Okay. They do suspect that a lot of worms made their way southward toward warmer ground when these glacial ice sheets started bearing down from Canada. Everything, a lot of stuff died. Some stuff high tailed itself. So you can bet that if you go to Southern California or Mexico and dig and find a worm, that's probably the same species that were higher up, species that were further north prior to the last Ice Age, because you make a point later that it's considered an invasive species because it's not native. Right, but I thought, well, surely they weren't that different before the Ice Age. Right. Well, the species that are here, especially the common European Earthworm, which we here in the United States called nightcrawlers, that's from Europe, which is why it's the common European night worm. Right. Those are recent immigrants. Okay. Those guys weren't here before. Right. So the other reason they're invasive, Chuck, is since the end of the last Ice Age, say ten to 20,000 years ago, these woodlands in the northern United States developed. They adapted, they changed to life without Earthworms. Now they're having to adapt to life with Earthworms. That makes sense. Which makes Earthworms invasive now. Yeah, I get that. That makes perfect sense. All right. Well, hey, look at that. We covered a bit at the end. Yeah, no doubt. We're going to get out of here early now. Thanks. Another cool point you make is if you dig down into the earth in your backyard and the Earth a couple of feet, you're probably going to find all three classifications of Earthworm because they're classified by where they live in the soil, because they are also similar in appearance except for maybe how thick around they are, how many segments they have, how long they are. It's pretty much the differences in earthworms. They're all very similar, like, wherever you are. But there are three classes, and like you said, they're based on where they live. Like, there's the ones above ground. epig. Yeah. Is that how you pronounce it? I've been pronouncing him. I had gaiak, but Gaiak sounds a lot OOH, I like gaiak. Do you like gaiak? Yeah, let's go with that. Well, because it's derivative of gaia earth. Right. And EPI is above. So this is the classification of earthworms that live, like, in the leaf litter, which is also called the litter horizon, that pile of leads and organic material that covers the soil. These red wigglers redworms have a lot to do with the fact that it's eventually going to be black and slimy. Yeah. Almost all of the fat, they have almost everything to do with it. I mean, there's other, like, microbes and protozoa and other stuff like that breaking it down. But the worms are the ones that can get it done. So those red wigglers are fun to play with if you're a kid. So are the next level down you get to the endogaic, as we'll say. Now they live in the top soil. How deep? Like, the first several inches. Yeah. You know, like the dark topsoil. Yeah. The good stuff. Yes. As I like to call it. Yeah. And they spend their whole lives beneath the soil, which is why they're usually, like, very light in color. Gray, pinkish, they're white, they're kind of uglier. They're disgusting. Have you ever seen that movie the Layer of the White Worm? No. That's a great horror movie. Yeah, I heard one of Hugh Grant's first movie. Awesome. Was he the white worm? No, he was the dude. Okay. He played a man. You say because they live under the soil full time, that the least amount of information is known about them. But another question. Okay. The next level down. An ESC. Anneek Anisec they hold the nightcrawlers, the deepest dwelling ones, but it seems like we know more about them than the other guys, the little pink and gray guys. So why would that be? Well, the reason is because the little pink and gray guys, the epigiac ones, spend their whole lives underground. So they just stay there? Yes. Okay. They also make horizontal burrows. Right, right. So they don't have to come up at all. They have almost nothing to do with leaf decomposition. So the nightcrawlers come up and then go back down. Exactly. Not only do night crawlers come up, they come up and travel as far as, like, 62ft in the night looking for food. Like they hang out above ground. The epigio coins you have to dig down for them. They're not coming up to greet you. So these scientists don't have spades? That's what I'm saying, man. Like, science generally was like, okay, Darwin wrote the book on Earth. There's any more investigation about that? Interesting. Yeah. Another cool fact about the Night Crawler is that they go upstairs to grab some food and bring it back down. They're like, hey, that leaf is really choice and moist, so I'm going to grab it and take it back downstairs and just chow till my little belly bursts. Exactly. I love that. Yeah. But it also kind of gives you an idea of just how powerful, like, a nightcrawler is. It drags its food back to its house. I used to hate fishing with worms and the potential one time I went fishing and caught brim, and I didn't have a hook remover. And this thing, this brim swallowed this hook like crazy. And I was trying so hard to get it out, and it was just, like, obvious that this fish was dying. And one of his buddies was just sitting there, almost at the bank, almost up on the ground, watching, howling, just looking at me, like, Why did you do that? And then she clubbed that one. I was like, Stop looking at me, fish, and just punch the water. The potential of a fish dying and then the guarantee of worms dying made me quit fishing forever. Yeah. I use artificial fish because fish is fun. Fishing is fun. I love the fish. Yes. But I just don't do it anymore. All right, well, that's sad for you. Club fish, I'll go clubbing, but I won't actually use, like, a rod and reel. Earthworms are segmented, Josh, which is also very interesting. They are from the phylum Analid, which means ringed worm. And there's about 100 to 150 of these rings, and they're each controlled separately, little muscles, which is very important because they expand and contract to move their little slimy bodies forward. Yeah. And they have these bristles at the front towards the head, the anterior end that are retractable, they're called sette. And they can just go big and dig into the dirt right. And hold the head in place while the rest of the body kind of contracts to get smaller to move forward like that. So these sets that you go in and out depending on whether the head is moving or needs to be anchored so the rest of the body can catch up. And that's how they scoot along at 62ft per night. Yes. For night crawlers, pretty much. Chuck, I don't know what we're naming this one yet, but one of the suggestions you made was earthworms eating and pooping machines. Yeah. Kind of like sharks. Kind of, but possibly even more beneficial than sharks. Sharks are like an apex predator, right? Yeah. Of course, earthworms are not an apex predator. But like I said, Aristotle call them the intestines of the soil. And one of the reasons why is because they just eat and eat and eat, and the stuff that they do eat, they poop out, and it's actually what's crazy. Remember the digestion episode? How can I forget? So, like, the stuff that comes out of us, it's like nobody needs that. It's total waste. With the worm, it's actually better than it was before. Worm poop is better than the food it eats. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That is pretty cool. And the way it eats is even cooler, I think. They obviously eat. And you're not going to be able to tell a huge difference between the mouth end and the anus end. No. Unless you really dig your fingers in there. But at the mouth end, they're going to pass dirt and organic matter into their mouth, and it's going to go into an area called the crop, where they store it for a little while, then into the gizzard. And this is the coolest part to me. In the gizzard, they have these tiny pebbles that they've already eaten, and those pebbles grind the food up even more, like a little food processor to make it easier to pass through. That's right. That is so cool. And in the intestinal walls, they're aligned with blood vessels and sort of like our own blood vessels, they absorb and distribute nutrients. Right. So it's not that much different than people. Yeah. No, it's not. The thing about earthworms, though, is the nutrients, especially nitrogen that they eat, that they pass out, is about 75% of what was, say, locked into a leaf. Right? Right. So they only keep, like, a quarter of the available nitrogen for themselves. Awful nice. But through digestion, what was once just locked into this leaf and was totally unusable to, like, a tree root is now digested and broken up and available. It's called nitrogen fixing. And that's what worms do. They're casting their feces is broken down nitrogen, which is why people use worms for composting. That's exactly right. They are the secret ingredient. Well, not secret, but key ingredient. The compost. Yeah, but that's the epagaic, right? The ones that live above ground. Yeah, the redwood or the compost ones, the earthworms. Like the anisak ones, they're big into composting, too, but they do it below ground. Right? Yeah. Earthworm has five hearts. Kind of a neat fact right there. I would say aortic arches. And I think I saw in another photo, like, they have one of the main ones. Is that right? And then four other ones, or are they all equal? I think that there's a main one. Okay. I believe so. You'd think? I'd know you and Chuck D. Breathing through their skin is another cool trait. They don't have lungs, but they still need to breathe. So they just pass it passively through the skin. Inhaling and exhaling. There's no inhaler exhale because it happens. But I call that an inhale. Even though there's no bodies. When I was writing this, I had to go back. I was like, no, they're not inhalers. Right? Yeah. As long as their skin is coated in this mucus that they produce. That's how air exchange is allowed to take place. And if there's enough broken down available oxygen in a body of water a worm can live in water. It can survive in water for a while because the air exchange is still taking place. They're just grabbing oxygen. Yeah. The problem is when they encounter really dry, hot air, like above ground. Yeah, I think we've all seen that sad sight. Right. So if you've ever seen like a worm that's curled up and is dry on the sidewalk, that worm suffocated to death because it wasn't able to breathe. It's mucus, dried out, I couldn't breathe. And all it needed to do was reach those leaves. Yep. But it failed on the sidewalk. And that happens a lot in Georgia, obviously. You see a lot of those in the summertime. Oh, yeah. And to make sure that they survive, they don't have eyes. It's not like they can say, oh, the sun's out. But they're able to sense light through these photosensitive cells on their skin that convert light into electrical impulses. So they feel this and say, hey, it's sunny out, I need to burrow down a little bit more. Yeah, pretty cool. And this is why these buggers have survived for so long. It is. And also the role for their brain, their brain plays is to say, I'm sensing some light, so let's move down a little further where there's not light. That's pretty much the extent of the worm brain. Yeah, that's what I saw. They said if you remove the brain, then you're hardly going to notice any change in behavior. Right. Except I guess they would dry up in the sun. Yeah. So maybe that's what we've seen is brainless worms on sidewalks. Yeah, or maybe they lost part of it. Someone removed their brains. We can go ahead and talk about that, the regeneration. Okay, go ahead. Because I need some explanation on that part. I get it. A worm, if part of it is chopped off, somehow, they can regenerate more towards the tail than the head. Is that right? So like, if you cut a worm in half, only one half is going to regenerate. They have an easier time regenerating their tail than they have their head. That makes sense. The thing is, one of the joys of this is like anytime there's a question or something vague, I can be like, yeah, science really dropped the ball on Earth or research for a century. Not my fault. There is evidence that both sides can regenerate into two new worms. People documented this. Supposedly there's different contrary evidence about how much could regenerate or how little, like how little of a segment you need to regenerate into a new worm. Right. So apparently there's a bunch of evidence out there that says worms are spectacular at regenerating and others are saying they're a little more limited than we think. Well, any kind of regeneration is pretty amazing if you ask me. I agree. But if you want to make a bet with your friend, a very cruel friend who just cut a worm directly in half, which end was going to regenerate, always put your money on the tail end. It's just a little worm. But I could never do that because they just squirmed so much, like they're in horrible pain. Have you read Consider the Lobster? No. David Foster Wallace. Like his article for Gourmet magazine? It's good. Well, they sent him to the lobster festival, and we're just expecting a kind of a travel foodie article. And instead he went and did a bunch of research on whether or not lobsters feel pain because they boil to death. Yeah, and at least make noises, too, when that happens. They do. They scratch like the pot trying to get out. And of course they do. But the key is, yes, surely they feel pain. Of course they feel pain. It's been shown that they have nerve receptors that sense pain. Do they experience suffering? Right. So we're squirming in pain and suffering or just pain. And really, does it matter? I mean, think inflicting pain on anything is cruel, but inflicting suffering is evil. Yeah. I don't eat much lobster. Yeah, Jimmy read that and was like, I've never eaten lobster again. I was like, yeah, I like a good lobster bisque, though. I love lobster, man. But there's another cool thing from this article. Did you know that until probably about the 20th century, people considered lobster like sea insects? And they are it was for the poor and basically the lower classes. And there are actually laws apparently, in New England about how many times a week you could feed patients in an insane asylum lobster because it was considered cruel. I believe that because from the research I've done, it's amazing that lobsters are considered some great thing because they're kind of bottom feeding. I think they're like into spiders as close to anything. Yeah. And they'll cannibalize one another. They're just like really crazy. Boy, you dip it in that drawn butter. I know. I can kiss lobsters goodbye, too. All right, so let's talk about reproduction. I can handle this first part, but I did get confused when it comes to the clutellum fertilization. So, you know, like the band on an Earthworm. Well, let's talk about the first part first. Okay. Earthworm reproduction. Yeah. This is the fact for me. They're simultaneous for macrodites. Yes. All of them? Yeah. Remember that grouper that was in the tank when we swam with the whale sharks? Do I? That's called a sequential hermaphrodite, where, like, at some point during that grouper's life, it changes sex with simultaneous hermaphrodites. They have both reproductive organs of male and female for their whole lives, which is pretty cool and another great reason why they have hung around in such vast numbers forever. Yeah. So what they do if they want to make love, is they do a little New Hampshire Vermont action and line up opposite head to tail. Oh, goodness. They excrete all that mucus that we were talking about. They excrete so much of that that they form a little mucous tube. They both get in or they're in, I guess, but they used to, like, rub against one another. Well, the trick is that they're encased in this tube, right. So when they release their semen, it just rubs around until it finds the semen receptacle. Is that right? Of the other worm? Well, obviously, right. But yeah, that's exactly right. They rub on one another with their slime tubes and their semens all over their slime tubes, and then yeah, that's how they exchange seminal fluid. So I get all that. But this next part confuses me a little, and I might suggest you rewrite it to make it a little easier, really, before you publish. Well, this is unedited, so I need to go through it. Okay. I'll see if I can explain it. And this is taken largely from a guy named I think his name is Jim Conrad. He wrote some pretty good, interesting, and very well written books on Earthworms. So it's probably trying not to paraphrase or plagiarize him, which is why I'm like, oh, just make it more confusing than here. Right. Basically, you know the band on the Earthworm, like, say, a nightcrawler, that the thickest band. That's the clutellum. That's like 15 segments in, right? Yeah, but in, like, three or four segments. Why? But it's just one segment. Right. So the clutellum is responsible for creating another band of mucus, a slime tube. Right. And what that does, that carries the eggs. It moves over the earthworm. It moves over the place where the eggs are stored. Okay. Attaches the eggs to the slime tube. Okay. The slime tube then keeps moving forward across the seminal receptacle, where the other worm sperm is now deposited. Right. So as the slime tube with the eggs attached move over the seminal receptacle, the eggs become fertilized by the other worm sperm. That slime tube from the clotelum keeps going over the head, and as the worm, as it passes all the way over the worm's head, it closes off, right. Because it's mucus and forms a cocoon. And now inside that cocoon are fertilized worm eggs, four to 20, roughly, for, like, a nightcrawler. It's about four to 20. It can be as little as 120 is the highest I've seen. Right. And then there's little baby worm eggs in there that are now fertilizer that will sit there for, like, I can't remember how many weeks? Two to three weeks. Okay. And then you get little newborn babies, and they can do this every seven to ten days, which is yet another reason why they're abundant and surviving and thriving. Well, then the other point is, both worms that are in this mating process can become pregnant or can lay a fertilized cocoon. So there is no such thing as just a male worm or a female or thworm they're both. They are hermaphroditic. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. Really? That didn't come across in this paragraph. I was slightly confused. I'll rewrite it then, just slightly. You don't have to do it now. I need to make a note. Okay. Their life expectancy is pretty impressive, too. A nightcrawler can live up to 20 years, but generally live about six to nine, which is man, that is a long time when you're talking about little tiny things that live underfoot compared to, like, an insect. That's pretty amazing. Red wigglers, two to five years. Gray worms between 1.25 and 2.6 years. Very specific. Well done. That's Miracati, who came up with that one. Oh, really? Yeah. So that's a long time. Even for the lowly, ugly, gray worm, two and a half years is pretty good. Yeah. And actually they have this thing called estimation, which is a form of hibernation. Yeah, I thought that was really cool, too. It's actually more efficient than hibernation. And hibernation like a bear that's sleeping. They have to gorge themselves before they hibernate because their metabolic processes are still operating, so they're still using up fat stores and food stores. With estimation, it's pretty much as close to death as you can come. Like almost all of your body processes just stop. They screw up in a little wormy ball. Right, yeah. To keep their mucus supply abundant. So that's the only thing they're doing is creating mucus. Pretty much. To stay moist. Yes. And the reason they're doing this is because worms definitely have preferences for the temperature and the conditions on the ground, the moisture, and when things just don't meet their liking, they estimate. So you can imagine that during the Ice Age, a lot of worms excavated and died because it didn't get any better for 10,000 years. Well, they're cold blooded, but when they freeze, they die. Yeah. You're talking about their preferences between 50 and 90% humidity, which is why Georgia has lots of worms. Between 59 and 86 degrees Fahrenheit is about what they like. They can survive, but they're not going to be as active and thrive outside this condition. Right. That's like when they're most active is between those and they will eat any kind of organic matter. This decaying. But this is kind of cool. They found out they actually like certain stuff more than others, which is neato. Yeah. And the way I read it was because they like the taste. At least that's how I enter. Is that anthropomorph pies? So close species. In Washington state, they prefer maple over oak. Right. Here in Georgia, they prefer clover over grass. That's pretty neat. Yeah, I got lots of clover in my yard, too. They'll eat the tar out of that stuff, especially if you turns of worms. If you pulled it and buried it, it would. Be gone like that. I wonder how they do in the clay here. They do very well, as a matter of fact, they are the reason why. Well, they're one reason why any water can percolate through the clay. But man, I had clay in my backyard that was impenetrable. It seemed like worms can penetrate it. Really? To a certain extent, yes. Man, pretty much what Darwin came up with is that earthworms are extraordinarily helpful. Yeah. And we'll talk about in a minute. Like scientists have come to realize, like, okay, well, they're still an invasive species, and as a result, it's not all beneficial. Right. But let's talk about the helpfulness first. One of them is basically burrowing down through dense clay, dense soils, and creating places called biopoos macropores. Basically holes in the ground, underneath the ground that let water percolate down to prevent flooding above ground, which also filters that water. It does. As it goes down to the water table, I guess. Yeah. It allows roots to grow more easily, aeration plants. Aerate brings oxygen down. It basically makes soil more usable for the stuff above ground. Well, they're just basically little tilling machines. Yeah. They're moving the earth under there so you don't have to right. We talked about nitrogen fixing with their castings, where they take about 25% casting poop. Is that right? Yes, that's a nice word for their poop. Okay. Worm castings. And apparently Darwin calculated that in ten years worth of worm castings would cover an acre of land about two inches thick. So if you took all the worm castings produced by a group of worms in an acre, in ten years, you'd have two inches of worm castings. That's crazy. Yeah. And like you said earlier, I think they only take about 27% of the nitrogen for themselves. They're like world, you can have the other 73%. Yeah. And again, it's in a usable form now as a nutrient. Pretty awesome. But it's not all good. No, it's not all good because they eat too well and they are an invasive species. So because they consume what do you have here? \u00a39240 or 4200 organic litter for every hectare in eleven weeks. That's too much because spiders and lizards and arthropods and snails and frogs and slugs and everything else living down there needs that stuff as well. Just their home. But the worms are taking it for themselves and they give back. Well, they definitely do like nitrogen. Right. But they're taking too much. Right. Also, that litter horizon, that layer of leaves right above the soil? Yeah. There's a layer that's closest to the soil surface that's at the bottom of this leaf layer is called duff. It's like the spongy, dark organic material that is actually a nice little place for a seed to safely gestate. Sure. So without that stuff, without it being there long enough for a seed to start to germinate sorry, not just ate, but germinate. Right. Understoried plants like smaller plants, saplings plants that aren't going to grow as big as trees in a woodland. They have trouble taking hold. And actually, you can see photos side by side on the Internet of without worms. With worms. And the difference is this wasteland. Like with worms, it's missing all sorts of little plants that you see should be there, but aren't because the worms are eating their habitat. That's sad. Actually. It can reduce the understory canopy between, like, 25 and 75%. The presence of earthworms can because they eat so much so fast, that not enough leaf litter falling to keep the worms happy and allow seedlings to grow or keep a place for spiders to live, that kind of thing. Well, and not just spiders, but that works its way all the way up to chain, because you're going to have larger mammals are going to want to eat vegetables and leaves, and if they're not there, then they're going to be in trouble. Yeah. And then we're in trouble. Yeah. What about the deer? Where are we going to go without deer? I go to the chicken section of my grocery store. Everything works out. Do you eat chicken instead of deer? I don't eat deer. Okay. I'm against it. I just don't come upon it that much. Yes, you have to go to one of those processing places out in the country. They always have, like, deer for sale. Yeah. They are also contributing to global warming in a way, because they are emitting a lot of carbon as they go through all this organic matter. Some of the carbon is going to be released there, or some of it is going to be released as carbon. And they have a stat here from Colgate University. What are they? New York. No, Coal Gate. They contribute as much as an additional 28% of carbon released from the soil. So that's substantial. Yeah, but there are other studies that show that actually, depending on where you are at. Colgate was a North American study. They found that in Malaysia or Vietnam. Right. They're actually better. They actually lock carbon into the soil. So it really depends on where they are. But they're not an invasive species in that study. In Vietnam, they were native, but at the end of the day, they do a lot more good here in North America than bad. Right. Probably depending on whether you're a spider or a small shrub that lives in the woodland. What if you're human? If you're human? Yeah. You love the worm. Okay. Yeah. I have a couple of additional little facts. The biggest worm I know, you found some in Japan, but the Australian Gypsyland earth worm, I saw 12ft long, \u00a32. Wow, that's a lot of worm. Yeah. And what was the Japan one? Was that just another giant earthworm there's just a bunch of, like I think because Japan's been a culture for so long, there's just been a lot of reports on record of giant earthworms found by farmers. So they had a lot of stories. It's worth googling giant earthworms because people have wrapped around their neck and stuff. Yeah. And it's just this big mindless worm. They're not aggressive like they are depicted in tremors, but they're still like, whoa, they can eat their weight every day. Saw that. That's a good one. They are able to move forwards and backwards, but they like moving forwards. Yeah. Okay. And I didn't know this. If the soil dries up, some of them can actually lose their clutellum, but once they get moist again, it can come back. Cool. So that's another survival adaptation, I guess. Very cool. Pretty cool. So you got anything else? Do you ever eat them? How to eat fried worms? I never did. I don't think if I did, I've blocked it out of my memory because I don't recall eating worms. It wouldn't have been fried. It would have been like somebody was like, Here, eat this. Right. Raw worm sushi. Yeah. But no, I haven't. That was a great book, though. Did you read that? Sure. Classic, wasn't it? Like Judy Bloom? No, I think it was written by a man, and they made a movie about it. I never saw them. I didn't either. There's no way I was going to spoil that childhood memory. It's a good thing to do. All right, well, if you want to learn more about Earthworms, probably wait a couple of weeks and then go see the edited published version, the better version that includes the fact that they can move forward and backward about Earthworms. Just type in Earthworms in a couple of weeks at the search bar@housetuffworks.com. And I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. That's right, Josh. This is an email. Before we do the email, though, we have a quick announcement. We get messages from our fans from time to time around the holidays that are suffering in some form or another. Because although the holidays are a great time of the year for most folks, sometimes it's a very sad time of year for others. And we just want to say generally that we're thinking about you guys. Every time we get one of these emails, we reply, and it's very sad and we wish there was more we could do. But we're thinking about you during the holidays, and we hope everyone out there and the stuff you should know, army is hanging in there. Yeah, that was very nice of you. So onto the email, I'm going to call this Sherpa overdue. Sherpa email from Grace. Hey, guys. And Jerry using it as a collective. She points out, I know this is a while back, but I actually met a Sherpa. He's a kid who went to my school for a little while, and he was totally cool with me asking him 1001 questions. He thought it was cool that I knew some information, and when I told him about your podcast episode. He wanted to listen to some of it. But before I give you his feedback, here's his story. Until he was five, he lived in a village near Mount Everest, but not so close that he ever got a good look at it. I couldn't imagine he was that near then. I would think you'd have to be really near it to not get a good look at it. Oh, maybe that was the case. He was so close. Yeah. It was just like a wall, a wall of rock. And she says even if he did get a good look at it, he was only five, so he may not remember it. Got you. He had to leave his village, though, because they were threatened by the Maoists. So he moved to a city as a refugee, and he lived there until last year. From what I understand, they were still under the threat from Mao, so they came to America as a refugee. Still. Here's his little additional facts as the plural of sherpa is sherpas. So we were right. Cool. You pronounced the region solo kombu correctly, and he was very excited about that. And he said, there are a lot of potatoes now. Remember, they started growing potatoes at a certain point. Oh, yeah. And that's the bumper crop, I guess. Right. So that's all he heard of the podcast, only about five minutes of it. Grace didn't want to make him listen to the whole thing because she felt like he already knows most of the stuff and she didn't want to bore him. Right. So he was excited about it. She was excited about it. And she just wants to say thanks for reading this on the year. Sweet. And that is from Grace. Thanks a lot, Grey. Thank you to your Sherpa friend, too, for supporting us, and welcome to America, Sherpa boy, and good luck here. Wow, Chuck, you're just spreading glad tidings all over the place, aren't you? That's great, Joy. Yeah. If you want to spread glad tidings to us or to anybody else through us, you can send us an email at stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. To learn more about the podcast, click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. 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, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun 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 Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. 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How Maglev Trains Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-maglev-trains-work | Thanks to the amazing properties of magnets, clever engineers have figured out how to make entire trains levitate above their tracks, letting them move frictionlessly and allowing them to reach incredible speeds. Learn about how maglev trains work and wha | Thanks to the amazing properties of magnets, clever engineers have figured out how to make entire trains levitate above their tracks, letting them move frictionlessly and allowing them to reach incredible speeds. Learn about how maglev trains work and wha | Thu, 05 Dec 2013 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=339, tm_isdst=0) | 28932044 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the allnew 2014 Toyota Corolla. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck. Chuckers is Brian. Yeah. And this is where you're going with sure. Yeah. I might bust right into CC Rider all the style. I'm already going with the Muppet show. Oh, yeah. This time we put on makeup. Yeah. What was that? Somebody's giant stomach. What was that? That's weird. Did you guys do that? Yeah, that was crazy. I couldn't have been Jerry's stomach. There's no way. All right, what's your intro, stalwart. Chuck? Yes. You remember our Magnet podcast? Yes. I personally thought it was a great episode because we explain how magnets work. Yeah, good. Tough, but good. Yeah, it was tough, but it was one of those ones where you're like, oh, okay. That explains pretty much everything about magnets, something that I've used before in my life. Sure. I just kind of took for granted some people think that they're magic, but we kind of said, this is how they work. I liked it, so I liked this article, in theory. The one we're about to do a show on. Yeah. About Maglev trains. Yeah, we did a video on Maglev trains. Remember that? One of our interstitial shorts was on Maglev trains. Did we? Yeah, I remember doing the quantum levitation. Was that it? Yeah. Maglev. Are you sure? Yeah, because that's the only way I knew about any of this was the fact that we had talked about it before. Well, what did we talk about? The basic principle in 1 minute behind magnetic levitation. Well, that's pretty much what we're going to do here. Yeah. Except slightly longer. Yeah. So that was my intro. And we should say also, everyone, it is next to impossible to get up to the minute, up to the year information about what maglev trains are in operation, what are still planned, what's still going on. So it is possible we may get that part a little incorrect, but we're going to try our best to be as accurate as possible. Yeah. And the reason why is because magnetic levitation to power a train is so new. Well, it's actually not that new because they've been doing it for a while. Well, yeah, it was proposed ever since Tesla started noticing what was going on in the late 19th century. But it's so new in this regard as far as super fast speed trains powered by magnets, transporting lots of people over distances, maybe great distances. Yeah. That is so new. And there are a few different technologies that it is kind of hard to keep track on, which one is in the forefront, which ones are being funded. Because this stuff is expensive. It is. And it's hard to get funding, especially here in the States. Yeah. And if you just type Maglev into Google or your favorite search engine or DuckDuckGo, if you're kind of watching. Who's watching you? Oh, is that like a secret? It's like an anonymous search engine. Okay. You will find there's projects all over the United States. And all of them are like, we're shovel ready, we're ready to go. Just give us some money. And they're not getting any money because the construction costs are so enormous because with Maglev trains, you can't use existing railways. Yeah, it's all new. And I saw one quote, and again, who knows how recent this is, but \u20ac50 million per mile? I can believe it. Is what the German consortium is quoting. The thing is, once you get it built, maintenance is not bad. Yeah, not bad at all because there's not a lot of wear and tear on it, as you'll see. No friction, baby. And if you do look into Maglev, you will see that it is very much like the transportation technology of the future that's going on today. Especially after looking into Elon Musk's tube hyperloop thing. I haven't heard of that. So basically, Elon Musk, who is like our good friend yeah, he's a super rich guy, right? He basically just jotted down this idea on a cocktail napkin and all of a sudden it's like the new thing. But it's an enclosed tube system that just you put in a little car, whatever that beats twelve people or something comfortably, and you suck all the air out of it. The vacuum tube, no resistance. So you can go really fast. Basically, I think it goes about 700 miles an hour, little under the speed of sound. So you can get from the West Coast to the East Coast or vice versa very fast. The thing is, the construction costs for this are just preposterous. But if it can come along or come down a little more, then it will give Maglev a run for its money. But if Maglev can start to really kind of get some traction and get some lines going, it will be the movement of the future for at least a decade or two. Yeah, I saw where they're proposing both in the future maglev trains that operate inside vacuum tubes, okay. As fast as 2000 miles an hour. That's crazy. Right now they're breaking records like 300 miles an hour plus. What's the fastest right now? So apparently this is kind of mind boggling because Maglev again, we realize, everybody, we haven't explained what Maglev is we're talking here, but Maglev, the great advantage it has is that it supposedly goes faster than the normal steel wheel train. Apparently a TGV train, which is a steel wheel train in Europe, they beat a Maglev land speed really? That was held by the Japanese Maglev of about 351 miles an hour. I think it went like 360. Man, I don't know if I'd feel safe. Yeah, I can imagine. I was reading a quote from a Maglev rider and they were saying, like, you can tell you're going really fast like on the bullet train. Yummy is going to be so disappointed because she's taught me how to say it in Japanese so many times. I don't want to butcher it, but the bullet train, it goes pretty fast, like 150 miles an hour or something, but it just looks like everything's blur. You don't feel like you're going fast. Apparently in a maglev, it goes fast enough to where you feel like, holy cow, we're going 350 miles an hour. Well, our very own parent company did a show, world's Fastest Trains, and I watched the maglev segment, and the dude was in the front room with the driver, and they were like, all right, we're going 300 miles an hour now. And it's hard to tell on the TV, you know, exactly how fast are going, because I looked and I was like, well, then, looks like about 100 to me. But yeah, I think being on the train and I think the key to not feeling too weird is obviously you're not being shot out like a bullet. You're ramping up to that speed. Right. So that helps. Plus, if you dress normally for your train ride, you'll feel less weird, too. That's right. Also, hold on, one more thing. We're talking very high speeds, 350 miles an hour. That's the speed record of a maglev, but they're averaging, like, 250 or more, which means if you get these things built, you're going to expand the range of where people can live and commute and go to work every day. Tremendously. So there is a lot of value in creating these maglevs. Right. Are we there yet? Well, before we do that, might as well do a message break now. I think it's a good time. Okay. All right. So now can we get down to brass tacks? Yes. Okay. This is kind of confusing because I read a paper in where this guy was saying, like, there's a lot of people calling all these different technologies maglev. Yeah. This is all very early stage proposal, hadn't been proven yet, but he's saying there's at least seven different kinds of technology here that everyone's calling magala that are different enough that they're just different. But for the purposes of this podcast, we can get away with maglev, but we have to point out that there are some really different systems that are in use and being proposed right now, and a lot of them have to do with the suspension system. Yeah. I think what's going on now, there are three pretty much leading competing systems, right? Yeah. Because we should say, Chuck, a maglev train is a train that uses magnets to float above a track by either a half a centimeter. I saw one that floats up to a foot off the track. That's a little scary. It seems a little scary, but apparently the higher you go in that high end of the range, the more stable it is. All right. Yeah. But the train is literally not touching the tracks, and it floats along. And the reason that's why it can go so fast is because there's no friction. No friction. The only resistance is air. Right. And they're super sleek, of course, so even the air is cut down. So let's go to Germany first because they have a system, trans Rapid actual company is called Trans Rapid International. There's also a trans rapid USA now, I think. USA, that's right. And the German version is electromagnetic suspension. And the way that the guy on the Discovery Channel Show described it was that electromagnets. Well, when you use electromagnets, they're only magnetized when there's a power source. Right. When there's electricity running through. Exactly. So that's important to remember. It is. And we'll point out why later. Because in the German system, the EMS system, it's all about attraction. It's not magnets repelling each other. It's magnets that are attracted to each other. And the reason that they float is they're basically switching it on and off, pulsing the electromagnetic magnet so fast that it creates that hovering attraction. Okay. So that's the German version. Okay. And apparently this German version, I think they do use repulsive magnets, but on the sides for the guidance magnets. Yeah. So to make it hover, they're turning it on and off a lot. So it wants to stick, but no. Stick but no yeah. And there's not a dude on a switch doing it really fast. So it's all programmed to pull. Right. They have computers handling it. Sure. And then so this is the suspension system you're talking about, right. The electromagnetic suspension. Yeah. The EMS and the word suspension is kind of easily overlooked, but in this case, we're literally talking about how the train is suspended in mid air above the track. In this case. And with the EMS, it's about, I think, half a centimeter to a centimeter. It's very close to the track. And they use the electromagnets to attract and they use the guidance magnets, which are magnets installed on the side of the train that are along the side of the track, to repel magnets along the side of the track to keep the train from bumping into the guide rails. Yeah, but it requires a computer system to constantly make adjustments to the current that's going through these electromagnets to either attract the train to make it float, or to repel it from the sides to adjust it to make sure it never bumps into the rails of the track. Because if you're going 350 miles an hour and your train scuffs the track, you're in big trouble. Big trouble. One advantage of this, the German system, is that you only need to power on for the section of track that you're using at the time. So they literally will turn on a section of track, the train goes over it, and then they'll turn it back off. Right. It's very economically not fuel efficient because it's not fuel. Right. That's power efficient. Right. And it doesn't use fossil fuels in the sense that a normal train does. Although if you go far enough down the line, that electricity has to come from somewhere. So ultimately it is coming from fossil fuels, I guess. But the efficiency, the fuel efficiency is incredible compared to a normal train that burns fossil fuels just to move. Right. The guy's shoveling coal into a fire. Yeah. I should say my understanding of the delivery of electricity to the track is the same for both suspension systems that you propel like that. So the whole track is made of electromagnets right. On both systems. And you're just sending electricity to the electromagnets that are immediately in front of and immediately behind the train. Yeah. Because you need to float the train, then you need to propel it. Right. And the way you're propelling it is the magnets that are just ahead of the train are going to be positive. Yes. And so that's going to attract the train, meaning it's going to pull it forward, and then the magnets behind it are going to be charged so that they're negative, and they're going to repel the train, push it. So in the front, the magnets are pulling it, and in the back, the magnets are pushing it. And again, remember, there's no friction here. It's just air. So it doesn't take a whole lot to make this train go really fast just using magnets. Yes. And in 2002, debuted commercially in Shanghai, China, a pretty short run, transporting people from airport to airport, basically at a speed that speeds over 250 miles an hour. So I read that the 19 miles journey now takes about seven and a half minutes, as opposed to about an hour in a cab, and they were going to expand it. But that was halted in 2008 over radiation fears by people, and now it's being proposed as an underground system, like to go underground to halt those fears. But in 2010, another high speed train in the area was non magala system opened. So they basically said, well, we probably won't do this. We probably won't extend the Shanghai line now. So, yeah, I heard it's definitely on hold, but I didn't hear that they decided they weren't going to do it. Well, the regular bullet train popped up and they were like, well, now that we have that, I guess we don't need the maglav. Oh, well. So Japan's got the other big rival system. So the propulsion systems are the same. You use magnets ahead of the train and behind the train to attract or repel it, right. To push it forward. I believe so, sir. The suspension systems are what differ. In Germany, you're using magnets to repel it. Right. To attract it. In Japan, you're using something called the misner effect. So basically, Chuck, the misner effect is where you take a super cooled superconductor, right? Yes. I think, like liquid helium temperature, which is very cold, and you put it in a magnetic field, the magnetic field basically hugs it. It goes around it rather than through it. Okay. Yes. So when you do that, the field actually levitates the thing. So if you take enough superconductors that are at the right temperature and you put them in the presence of a magnetic field, whole bunch of magnets, say on a train, the magnet will float, it will levitate. That's right. And that's the electrodynamic suspension that the Japanese are using. So basically you have a tunnel, a magnetic field tunnel that these things are traveling through. Which means that they don't need any extra magnets on the sides, or they don't need any on the bottom or extra magnets on the bottom. It's just going to stay put within this bent magnetic field that's warped to wrap around it. That's right. It's never going to drop. And it's totally stable, which is a big advantage, from what I understand, of the Japanese system. Over the German system, the stability doesn't require a bunch of computers to constantly adjust it. And it is just inherently more stable because it's not just being held up from the bottom and then a little on the sides. It is wrapped in this basically blanket of an electromagnetic field. Right. It can conduct power, electricity, even when the power is cut off. So that's a definite advantage. Although the German system does have battery backups. It's not like if the power went off, the train would just go and stop. Right. But the German one doesn't need tires and the Japanese one does. Yeah, because it needs to ramp up to a certain speed in order to begin the float. It doesn't just start immediately. What is it, like 88 mph aspect of the future? 62 miles an hour. And I think they use liquid nitrogen. And it's just expensive to supercool these coils. And I think that's one of the drawbacks. But they're all expensive. They're very expensive. None of this they haven't figured out a cheap way to do any of this? No. There's a proposed line in Japan. It's the one that set that land speed record for Maglev trains. Right. It's the Jr. Toque. That's the railway company, the Jr. Tolkien kind of close, but it's their line supposedly is already in operation. I read somewhere that it's moved like a million people already. But they have a proposed line that they want to open by 2027, and it's from Tokyo to Nagoya, and then they want to extend that from Tokyo to Osaka by 2045. And they're talking like it's like a $50 billion project. And I think that's just the first line. Yeah, that sounds about right. But the reason that it probably will happen is they're basing all of this on data showing that people are going to keep moving to Japan in Osaka, so they're going to have customers, and they're not relying on any government money. They have so much money, they're just going to fund it themselves. Is this privately funded? Yeah. Another con, though, the Japanese version, is that if you have a pacemaker, you don't want to get on that train because that magnetic field will wreak havoc and you probably won't live. It will shut you down. And then there's the end up track. And that is another type of Eds system, which is the Japanese system, except that they use room temperature magnets. And from what I could tell, this is as close to just the whole thing of two magnets, regular magnets opposing each other. And they're just going to use that, right? Yeah. Like, it's as close do we get as you going out to the store and getting two magnets and putting their light poles against each other so that they repel. Yeah. There's actually something called the Hallback array, which is a way to just line up the magnets in certain directions so that their poles are facing north, southeast, or west. And when you put them together in a clump, basically the magnetic field below the magnets doubles the magnetic field on the top of the magnet, cancels one another out. Right. So you have your extra strong magnetic field that can produce this Mezner effect, basically, without this super cooled superconductor. Yeah. And these aren't even electromagnets, I don't think. Aren't they just magnets? I think they're permanent room temperature magnets. That's crazy. Yeah. There are three designs right now. The induct track, one, two, and three. One is high speed, two is slow speed, and three is heavy load. Slow speed. Yeah. So I guess just freighting stuff back and forth. I guess so, yeah. They did this in London at one point, but then shut it down. Like in the 80s, they had a maglet train. Yeah. Just a very slow moving like it might have been an airport type situation. Got you. And I looked up the one here in Atlanta, the new airport train, and I thought it might have been magla. But of course it's not. It's just wheels. Just stupid wheels. Although they have atlanta have its day. Well, they have proposed one. Atlanta is one of the cities that's trying to get maglev going between Atlanta and Chattanooga. Yes. And there's one proposed between DC and Baltimore. La. In Las Vegas? Yeah, la. In Vegas, and I think one from Pittsburgh to someplace, but I'm not sure exactly where. I saw that one, too. I don't remember where it might have been Dcsburg. Philly well, hold on. We're getting ahead of ourselves, man. Well, no, these are just proposals, and they're having a hard time getting the funding they need for any of these to really take off. Right. Because it's expensive. It is. Chuck, how about a message break? Huh? Hey, let's do it. Okay. All right. So this whole idea of going 350 miles an hour through space, even without friction is awesome. It is. Awesome. It can also be deadly. There have already been maglev accidents. Yeah, the one in Germany was a little distressing because in 2006, it crashed into a repair car that was accidentally left on the track. And this is a test, too. Yes. Everything should have been cleared. Why do you leave a car on the track? Period. So they actually people died in that one. The train was going at least 120 miles an hour when it struck the car, so it must have just been getting up to speed, I guess. Yeah. But yeah, 29 people died on that one. There's another one in Shanghai on that line. That is an operation. Yeah. That was just a fire, though, and I don't want to make light of that, but it wasn't like a crash or an incident like that. Yeah. I'm just glad no one got hurt. Exactly. And this is breaking news, dude. This was in the paper today as we record it in real time. Okay. The Washington Post said that Northeast Maglev, everyone's getting in on the Maglev game because it really is a great idea. It's just really expensive. But if you can get it up and running, it's awesome. I mean, I imagine literally in 100 years, there'll be a lot of this as major transportation. Sure. But we won't see it. But as of today, November 4, northeast Maglev has raised $50 million in private funds. They can build five inches of track with that. Yeah, exactly. And they're trying to get the Washington Baltimore leg going with private funding because the government is not ponying up any money for it. I think we'll see it in our lifetime. They think 10 billion between DC. And Baltimore. Yeah. Although they don't have a firm cost yet. I wonder how long it would take, because that's not even that long of a drive anyway. Yeah, agreed. Maybe ten minutes. Which, I mean, if you live in Baltimore and work in DC. I'm sure that would be extremely attractive. Yeah, that's true. I don't know about the Atlanta to Chattanooga thing. Who cares? Yeah, right. People in Chattanooga will be psyched, I guess. They could get to the airport in, like, 30 minutes. Yeah, I guess not. Just in Chattanooga. I'll go there and paying for gold. I saw this. It was some discovery show, a video from a discovery show, too, and I had our good friend Michio Kaku oh, yeah? And he was talking about a bullet train that could get you from one side of the world to the other in an hour. Wow. And the way that it would do that is to go through the middle of the earth, basically, you would have to create this tube. Basically like Elon Musk's idea. You create a tube, you evacuate all of the air out of it so that there's no resistance whatsoever, and you just drop, and the force of gravity takes you up to about 18,000 miles an hour. And then once you make it to the center and out the other side, your gravity starts to work against you, so it slows you down. So within an hour, you should be able to make it from one side of the Earth to the other. But as Dr. Kaku put, it's going to be very difficult getting through the center of the earth. Yeah, that's the two. I love all these theoretical ideas that you guys come up with. It like it's not even remotely possible. Right. And he'd probably say, like, I was just talking about what they asked me to talk about. Yeah, it's like, dude, I was at McDonald's one day when I said that. I was waiting in line at McDonald's. Yeah. So what else you got? I got nothing else. Maglev. Yeah. The wave of the future. Yeah. We have a standing bet now. We will see a maglev train in operation that we can ride on while we're both alive. That's my bet. You say no. Well, if we went to Shanghai, we could do it right now. I feel like I just want my bet. What else are you going to pay for here in the United States? Okay. Within our lifetime, which for me is going to be about 25 years, we're both still healthy enough to ride it. Okay, I'll take that bet. Okay, cool. Let's see. If you guys want to learn more about maglev, you can type that word in the search bar@housetoforce.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this opportunity for students, filmmaking students, to get your film on. Hey, guys. I work for nonprofit Antiquity Now, which is dedicated to raising awareness of the importance of preserving our cultural heritage by demonstrating how antiquity's legacy influences and shapes our lives today. Yeah, they have good stuff. We follow them on Twitter. Oh, you do? Nice. We do, Chuck. Yes, we do. Many of us at Antiquity Now are big fans of you guys. We thought you would be interested in this upcoming project we are holding the first ever Legacy Quest International Children's Film and Video Festival, which aims to get queens and teens excited about history. The festival will be held in conjunction with the Archeology Channel International Film and Video Festival on May 9 through 13th, 2014 in Eugene, Oregon. So here's what you got to do, kids. Okay, young people, if you're between twelve and 15, you can submit videos that represent antiquity's legacy in our contemporary life. For example, you could depict how the invention of the wheel or calendar has contributed to modern society or how ancient methods of solar energy have informed today's green technology. You got that? Yes. Entries may be submitted by an individual student or by a group or class under the guidance of a teacher as the festival was designed in accordance with the United States national Curriculum Standards for social studies. Legacy Quests would be a great project for teachers to do with their classes. Creating the video will support the development of literacy, research skills, writing skills, visual communication and storytelling. And they have prizes. 1st, second and third prize, along with ten honorable mentions, will be announced at the Archeology Channel International Film and Video Festival. Nice. And promoted online by both the Archeology Channel and Antiquity now. And US. And US. So for more information and submission forms, go to antiquitynow.org. And that is from Shahandra Goldfinger. Not Chandra, right? She points out it's Shawndra Goldfinger, which is a great name. It really is. And again, that's May 9 to 13th of next year. Teachers, students, where can they go to find out more info? Yeah, antiquitynow.org. Or you can follow them on Twitter and ask them yourself. Yes, if you want to let us know about any cool stuff you've got going on that you want to share with everybody who listens to stuff, you should know your fellow syskfamily. You can tweet to us at Fyskpodcast, you can join us on Facebook.com Stuffynow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, you can join us at our wonderful, nice smelling website Stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetoftworks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla." | ||
What's the future of the internet? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-future-of-the-internet | It's tough to predict the future. Instead, the future looks a lot like it does now: Faster data transfer rates, more social networking, ubiquitous mobile devices -- and possibly dumber people from using all this stuff. | It's tough to predict the future. Instead, the future looks a lot like it does now: Faster data transfer rates, more social networking, ubiquitous mobile devices -- and possibly dumber people from using all this stuff. | Tue, 09 Aug 2011 17:10:01 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=17, tm_min=10, tm_sec=1, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=221, tm_isdst=0) | 37655700 | audio/mpeg | "What if you were a global bank who wanted to crunch billions of transactions against thousands of compliance controls? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data, and now you can supercharge your audit system with AI. 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 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, 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. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Welcome to the future of the Internet. It's called stuff you should know. We have the past, present in the future, my friend. Yeah. Choke on that, haters. Yeah. So that's what we're talking about today, and I'm hoping you have some awesome, cool story about the future or the Internet. You'd think I would. No intro on this one. No. There's a surprising dearth of stuff out there about the future of the Internet. I found that a lot of people are really nervous about putting their neck out because we finally reached a point in time where you can build a career based on successfully and accurately predicting the next move. Right? Yeah, true. So everybody is kind of confident about what's coming five years from now, seven years from now. And if we haven't by the time this thing comes out, put it on the actual name of this episode, I'm going to go ahead and put what is the future of the Internet? Parentheses seven years from now, because that's really what it's about. Yeah. Unless you want to start talking transhumanism, Chuck, which I'm prepared, too. I like transhumanism. Not on this one, though. Okay. But unless you're prepared to talk about that, it's basically like, what's it going to be like seven years from now? And there's some pretty good guesses. And one of the people who's not too shabby at guessing is one of our coworkers colleagues. His name is John Strickland, and if you don't follow him on Twitter, you're missing out. Strick of tech stuff. Yeah. His twitter handles. John Strickland. J-O-N strickland. Obviously one word, no other. Anything in between. Well, Josh, and lieu of an interesting story from you, the opposite is supportive. No, we should totally support him. I always do. I love straight. Even though there's a fake Internet battle between us that fans like to think exists. I know it's funny in lieu of a great story, then how about I have a few stats on just the Internet as it is and as it was. Then we could talk about what it might be. Okay. How does that sound? Yeah. Here's a nice infographic. These all come from the Pew Research Institute Research Center for people in the press specifically. Okay. That's us, the Pew no press. Are we? Yeah, technically, we're a journalist. Internet adoption. This is just a little infographic. In June 1995, about 14% of American adults, 18 and over, adopted an Internet. Used the Internet. Isn't that crazy? What year was that? 1995. Okay, 13% sounds right. Not 1912. Not that long ago. No, but yeah, I mean, remember that was back in the day of Prodigy, and they'd have ads for Prodigy, and you'd still be like, what? The Prodigy? Yeah. What was Prodigy anyway? It was a web server. Was it browser ISP or yes? No. Service provider? Yes. Okay. November 1. So between June 95 and November 1, it went from 14% to 60%. And today we stand at about 77%. That's staggering to me. 77%? Yeah. It's not higher. 78% are men. 76% are women. Pretty evenly divided if you want to go to household income. Wait, what is interesting, so the 150% is split pretty much even. No. 78% of men use the energy and 76% of women, so just 2% more of men for some reason. Household income. I can think of the reason. If you make 75 grand or more a year, you have a 96% chance that you use the Internet. Sure. And I guess the other 4% are old people that don't understand it. They're filthy rich. They pick up the keyword and try to talk into it. That's ageist. That's the next thing that's coming, you realize. Less than $30,000 per year. Surprisingly, 63% still use the Internet on a daily basis. Well, this is why they call it ubiquitous. It is ubiquitous. And then finally, Josh, I'm going to finish up with what people do on the Internet, what American adults do on the Internet on an average day. Let's hear 61% send or read email. Okay. And then I found period like 85% use email. So 25% of people don't check their email on a daily basis. That's nuts. Those are what they call the relaxed people. Right? Type B, personal. 50%, use a search engine to find information. 40% get their news. 38% go online just for fun. Is that the category? Yeah. 37% use some sort of social networking site. 37%. That's it? Yeah. That was November of 2010. That's probably even higher right now. 34%, check the weather. 26% bank online every day. 23%, watch the YouTube or a video sharing site. And about 20% of people look for news and politics, political information every day. Just interesting. That is the current state of the Internet. I think I do all of that, except not news weather, little commerce, little news shopping. Communication, social networking, it's all pretty basic. It is. When you think about it, compared to 1995, it's not basic. True. But yeah, well, that's the whole point of the Internet. It's there to serve us, right? That's right. It's supposedly all of our needs right there. And what we are seeing right now is a movement toward making accessibility easier and easier. Very true. So one of the ways to make accessing the Internet easier and easier, Chuck, is to increase download speeds, or what's called the effective data transfer rate. Yeah. And also, I think we should put this claimed in here. If you've ever wanted to chew me and Chuck up alive for missing something, for screwing up something, for getting something just totally wrong, the trolls just work. Here's your chance. If you couldn't get us on the sun podcast or the Epigenetics podcast, here's your chance, so let us know. You can be nice about it, you don't have to be a jerk, but you can definitely correct us because we're open to that kind of thing. Okay, so the effective data transfer Rate, right? That's the average rate at which X number of bits transfers from one place to another in some block of time. Aka how fast your junk runs. Right. That's what we're talking about. When I click on this thing, how fast is it going to load this movie, right. And that's funny because movies are pretty much the go to standard of how fast something goes, right? Yeah. So Strickland wrote this, and one of his first prediction for the future of the Internet is that it's speed speeds are going to be increased tremendously. Really went on a lender. But that's what I'm saying. Like, if you go and look, if you do a search for future of the Internet, you're not going to find anything different than this. It's crazy. No one is sticking their neck out at all. No one knows. But he said that according to Akamai Technologies, which puts out a State of the Internet report on a quarterly basis, the average global data transmission speed late 2009, which might as well be one 9.95, was 1.7 megabits per second. To find the current one, I couldn't either. One reason why is because if you look up stuff like this, all you're going to find is at. And D says it's this fast, verizon says you can get it this fast. And people advertising how fast they can do it. Right? Or to get an average if some obscure website about what a 4G network should be or somebody broke a record. And in fact, there's a record that he mentioned from Bell Labs. Right. It's the current record. As far as I know, yes. Although it could have been from yesterday and now it's outdated. This one is pretty recent. I believe it was May, maybe, I'm not sure. But it was 100 petabytes. Okay. What's a petabyte? Josh? A petabyte, Chuck, is a million gigabytes. So that's 100 millionGB in a second that they transferred, or 100 billion megabits. Okay, that's just another way to say it. Or I guess a trillion bits. Right? I better math is wrong somewhere. And then, of course, that's in a second. So they managed to transfer 100 millionGB of information in a second. And what does that mean in DVDs, which are like the Big Macs of the Internet, right, exactly. Well, it turns out that they transferred 22 million DVDs worth of information in a second. Right. Now, this is using a laser. Well, yeah, and I need to point out, I did go to the Acamie technology site, which publishes this quarterly report, and it sat there as a PDF and I was like, oh, great, Q Four 2010 or Q one 2011. I was like, Perfect. Click. You must be a member to access this information I got you. So the point is, though, is not that we know the average transfer rate worldwide. The point is what we're getting and what is potentially possible is there's a huge gap there between what you can get commercially. Right. And while that transfer of 100 petabytes was across a laser, which no one is using right now in a commercial network, not yet, there's the record for fiber optic, which is in wide use, that's your broadband was 26 terabytes, which is, I think, 1000GB. That's fast. Yeah. So 26,000gb in a second. So that's still broadband. Huge gap between what is available to us. So the whole point of this is say it again. This is where we can potentially end up is you can download a movie to watch an HD movie in a second right. Just by clicking on it. What makes me sad is that we are not already at, like, a petabyte of information transferred already. Yeah. I wonder what all the reasons are. Like on our local area network here at the office, it says like 100 megabytes a second. It's like, no, that's what I could be getting, but it's never what you get. Right. And I just think the Internet is fast, but it could be faster. Agreed. That's point one. All right. And the prediction is it probably will be wirelessly and landline base. Right. And wireless is going to get faster and faster. And that's probably where people are going to start putting most of their money, if they're not already, in figuring out ways to make it faster and faster. Because wireless is what everybody wants. Right. If the Internet is found in devices, if that's the future of it and how it's consumed, then wireless is probably the basis of most of these devices. And not only that, Chuck, not only do consumers want it, but companies, Internet service providers want wireless to be the next Internet as well, because that FCC ruling from December of 2010 on net neutrality basically said, yes, the net needs to remain neutral unless it's wireless. And they left the door open for wireless Internet service providers to show favoritism. And this is the second part of the John Strickland prediction extravaganza of the future of the Internet, where the net is going to be going. That's right. Net neutrality, Josh, is a big can of worms of which we could do an entire podcast, but we are going to only pull one worm from this and simply say, if you've heard the term net neutrality, you don't know what it is. Basically, it is keeping the Internet wide open. No matter which is p you're using, you can access the same content as someone else using another ISP. The potential against this would be if an ISP, let's say, cuts a deal with certain vendors with a website. Yeah. Certain websites doesn't have to be a vendor, but it could be okay. Then they're going to put their juice, their best juice, into making that really fast load. Right. You would get your 100 megabytes a second download for that website. But maybe the other website, which may be the competition of that other website, it's going to make it really slow or just not make it be available at all. Right. And like a cable company, you can't get our beloved Science Channel, which is wrong. Yes. Because certain cable companies, they got a monopoly in your area and you're like, oh, I can only go with blank cable company in my area, and they don't carry these channels or they don't carry these websites. That's the future of it. Exactly. And that's a big problem because the Internet was the model of it was kind of based on all the mistakes that have been made in the past, learning from that, and then now, once we realize what we have at our hands, it became less neutral in December 2010 and it's a big deal. Yeah, it really is. We've seen with the Arab Spring how touchy people get when you shut down their access to the Internet. Revolutions occur. Right. So censoring the Internet in any way, shape or form is a definite no. But the problem with this FCC ruling is that it allows for basically financial censorship of the Internet. And one of the problems with this lack of net neutrality is if you get what you pay for, then the Internet will become divided across class lines. Yeah. The biggest websites that can afford fastest download times and speeds will weed out the mom and pop, quote unquote, of the Internet. Right. And then, just based on the basic capitalist theory, those websites aren't just going to hang out over here and hope that the net expands once again. They're going to weather on the vine and die and we're going to have a pared down, leaner, probably more corporate eyes version of the Internet. Exactly. And what I think should happen, Josh, and I think a lot of people agree, is to let it be a little more darwinian, which is what it has been, which is keeping an even playing field, and just see who survives. And remember when all the start ups, the big boom in the 90s when there were so many new commerce sites, and I remember thinking at the time, the Amazon's will survive and all the other ones, or a lot of the other ones will die off, but you think Webb is going to make it? I had a director I worked for that bought a lot of stock in Webband. Yeah, I have a friend who did that didn't work out so well. And I'm not laughing. It's not funny. I feel very bad for people who put a lot of money into a startup that failed. But that's my point. It was a level playing ground. At least whoever does it the best will win out. And the Amazon won out. Yeah. The YouTube's one out. Did you put your money where your mouth was and, like, invest in the Yahoo? Do you think I had any money in do you think I have any money in 2011? If you have money in 95, you would have it in 2011, I imagine, unless you hung onto that Yahoo stock, right? 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. 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One of the ways that net neutrality, I guess, is threatened is a lot of companies that make devices weren't waiting around to see how the FCC ultimately ruled or whether the net would remain neutral. They started making what are called wall gardens. Right? So the devices, I should say, by the way, they're called tethered appliances. What are we talking about? An iPad? Okay, it's an iPhone, it's a Droid, a smartphone. Apple is just such a great example of this. I'm going to pick on Apple. But it's not just Apple doing this. Sure. Like the Xbox. Xbox live. You can't access Xbox Live through any other device than the Xbox that makes the Xbox a tethered appliance. You have to have that to do that. Yes. Okay, so with the iPad or the iPhone, that's a tethered appliance. You use that to access what's called a walled garden, right? It does. The iPhone, it's supposed to be it's a very nice, pleasant, like, user friendly, very design heavy corner of the Internet. It's part of the Internet. But you can't get to it through traditional means. You have to get to it through this device that you buy from this company. And they own this section of the Internet. The iPhone App Store is a part of the Internet that Apple owns that you can't get to any other way. So there's this one way to get in there and as, say, you can't get to the iPhone App Store to your Droid, right. Go to the Droid marketplace, you can. But let's say 90% of the market share for handheld mobile devices went to Apple and Droid had 10%. But you can't survive with 10%. And eventually it's going to be Apple that creates the user experience of the Internet in your hands. Yeah. That ubiquitous design I'm sorry to use that word twice, but that design, that's just so emblematic of Apple, that is so many people's experience of the Internet. You're experiencing the Internet through Apple's core. Exactly. Nice, Chuck, but the Android has completely different designs, a completely different experience. And if you ever put an Android user and an iPhone user into the same room, they are barely talking about the same thing. Yeah. Even though what they're talking about are handheld devices that access the Internet, supposedly the same Internet. And then, all right, think about this. You've got, let's say, a less popular handheld device these days, the Sarnie, like the Carnival, like the Palm. Let's say the Carnivale. The Carnival people are designing apps for the Droid and the companies are designing apps for the Droid and the iPhone like crazy because those are the two biggest ones and they want to get it all over the place. You feel maybe bad for other handheld devices that don't have people saying, oh man, I want to design a Carnival app. Right. So Carnival users can have that same rich experience. Carnival doesn't have the money. I'm sure they're trying to get in that marketplace and design their own cool apps. But the apps are coming from houseworks.com. Right. And what do we do apps for? We did apps for the Droid and for the iPhone so far. We haven't done a Carnivale yet. We have not done one. And poor Carnival is going to suffer one day because essentially they're being left in the dust. And the Internet experience is being lived through two handheld devices. Two. And eventually there could possibly be one. Or it could expand. And the BlackBerry, I'm sorry, the Strawberry could catch up and revolutionize things and get way more apps than the iPhone. Who knows? It's true. But it still follows the same model. I mean, ask Adobe. They make flash and everybody loves flash It revolutionized how we consume material on the Internet. Right. Apple chose not to operate Flash on its OS, on its mobile OS. So any site that has Flash, you just have that little cube, the little Rubik's cube, and that's it. And Apple is not the least but apologetic of it. And the crazy thing is, Apple users aren't demanding Flash. Flash is just going the way of the dinosaur because Apple chose not to support it. And now everybody is like, there's whole HTML Five developer movements out there where this is the next thing that's going to replace Flash. Right. Because Apple chose not to support Flash. Right. How's it that's the Internet being carved down by people who are making decisions for everybody else. How are we doing on this? We good. I think we're okay. I think one of the ways we're getting away with this in large part is that this is opinion. Well, I know. I feel like I'm in a lake with, like, the waters just under my nose because dealing with this tech stuff is such strickland's line of work and he feels so comfortable with it. And with techies especially, it's not like we're talking about bear spray and like five people know that we're in and overhead techies really pay attention. I'm going to be like, these guys are so wrong. I know. And again, if we are wrong, please do correctly start a discussion. We like that. Yeah, but Chuck, I feel like I'm bleeding from under my fingernails and just hanging on that's two. Number two is that the Internet will be a leaner, slicker, more corporateised version of itself. Now perhaps, possibly. There's a book I ran across, I haven't read it, I just came across it today. It's by a guy named Jonathan Zittrain. Z-A-T-T-R-A-I-N. It's called The Future of the Internet and how to Stop It. That's where I got the tethered appliances thing. Got you. And he's basically like, we need more user generated stuff and less wall gardens. And if we don't have them, if we don't do something now, then we're toast because there's so much cash to be made out there on the Internet that it's going to be a big fight either way, even if there is success in creating a more democratic Internet or maintaining it, I guess. So that's some of the tech stuff. What's the third one? Oh, yeah, we know this one. Yeah, nicholas Carr, we've talked about this. This guy wrote a book, I'm sorry, an article called His Google Making a Stupid. That got a lot of press we use it in presentations, we've used it in podcasts. And the hypothesis is that the way you navigate and read things on the Internet is not like book learning and book reading. It's not deep vertical absorption. It's horizontal and it's spottier. Right. Rapid absorption. And it's basically his argument that just because we have this library of information doesn't mean that we're using it to make us smarter. Well, he was saying that it's so revolutionized how we learn by the access we have the information that it's changing our brains. We're being cognitively restructured. I believe that to a certain degree. Oh, I do, too, man. My attention has decreased spectacularly over the last four years since I've worked here. Well, and then I did stuff from the future podcast this week. It's one of the podcasts. It is out. Awesome. Telling everybody about it real quick. Stuff from the Future. It's a podcast where someone just muses on something for about five minutes on what it might be like. Okay. Mine was personal communication. And my point that I was making is that people are not communicating the same way since the advent of the smartphone. They're not even talking on the phone as much because of texting. They're not talking face to face. And what does that mean 100 years down the road? Are people going to be freaked out when someone drops by their house and knocks on the door? Or when someone I'm already close to that point. Or when somebody has a personal eye to eye confrontation with you? I'm right there, buddy. I'm the future. You're looking at it. So I argue that all you see nowadays are the tops of people's heads instead of eyes. All you see is people looking down all the time, everywhere. And that we're not flexing. We can't remember anything. We don't have the opportunity to remember something we used to know and flexing those deep memory muscles because you can hardly get the word out. Who was that someone before? Someone has looked it up and told you who it was. Kato Kalin. So there's no more tip of the tongue experiences, there's no more deep memory, but we're flexing different parts of our brain, like how to use my thumbs to type. Right. But it's making us stupider. It's certainly changing things, and I don't know if it's for the better. I mean, we have immediacy of information, but the way Strickland took it was that Carr was saying that we're taking our need to keep this information. And I know he made this point in this article, but we had to know the right answer to something before we had to know it. And now we don't have to know it because we have a repository that anybody can access through their phone now to go get the answer. So it's like a giant collective brain that we're coming to rely on. Exactly. But what happens when that brain malfunctions or that brain is being fed certain information that's false. That's false. Or that I'm not saying it's going to be like 1984, but dumb down if it's net neutrality, if the government gets more involved and all of a sudden, I mean, look at what's already going on in China. They're being fed specific information. Right. And that could one day be our truth in reality. Dystopian yeah, with my concern about it, it's kind of closer to yours, but it's more that like my brain is literally being restructured physically through plasticity, that instead of being able to absorb something deeply, I'm just getting the bits of information I need out of something very quickly. And then when that brings up another question, I just open a new tab, search for that question, start putting stuff together. So I'm able to connect seemingly disparate ideas into a third hybrid idea, but at the same time I'm not necessarily getting it. When something clicks, things don't click anymore. Those are such beautiful moments when they do click, the tip of the tongue moments. When you finally think of that thing, it's such a rewarding experience. And that's going away to a large degree. Yeah. When things are clicking, when you know it is that what you mean? What you're saying is not clicking? No, what I'm saying is like the tip of the tongue moment, like when you can't think of something like oh, what was it? What was it? And when you finally think of it 2 hours later, it's so great. But that can't happen anymore because some dummy won't even give you the chance to think of it. It says here it was Jackie Chan. We actually at Max funcon at the after party in Hodgman's room. It's about twelve folks hanging out and he said, this is a Google free evening. He said, no one touch your phone, leave it in your pocket. And we spent 3 hours talking and many things came up that people were like oh, what was that? What was that? And it was like no one drowned. Or no, it was like the old days, six years ago when you would have these awesome conversations and not be able to think of something and be like oh man. And then the next day you would see one of those people and say, dude, I thought of what that was and I don't know, I think the smartphones are ruining things in a lot of ways. Yeah, there's a lot of problems. They're not connecting people. Like they're kind of putting up walls in a lot of ways as they also connect. It's a conundrum. I read something once I think we should end on this. There's a rule of thumb out there that it's basically etiquette when you can use your phone in a social situation where I feel like if you follow it, you can still be a normal person. But if you wouldn't pull out a crossword puzzle and start. Doing it. In a social situation, you shouldn't pull out your phone. Right. It's pretty much the same thing. Yeah, I like that. 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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. 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. Do you have anything else? Yeah, I'm going to discover a few of these sarah Kessler at Mashable Road. Oh, yeah, these. Sorry. A cool thing. Six web pioneers on what the Internet of the future will look like. Chuck found five satisfactory, so we'll just briefly go over a couple of these. Barry Glick, founder of MapQuest. The Glitcher, he says kind of what we were talking about earlier. He said right now the Internet has been very computer oriented and that's the association you need a computer to connect. He said that's going away, of course, already. But basically he sees the future of there being no boundaries. The Internet is just this invisible present power supply, and all you will have is access devices. There will be no more television, there will be no more telephone. You'll just have these devices, everything crammed into one yeah. That tap into the brain of the Earth. Interesting. You came up with the brain of the earth thing, right? Yeah. Okay, do you want to read any of these or yeah, I liked Jeremy Stoppelman, who is the CEO of Yelp, and he talked about augmented reality, which kind of dovetails with his business very well. One of his applications well, there's an app for Atlanta I read about recently where it's like you hold up your phone, this Map feature pops up like augmented reality on all the stuff that's showing up on your phone of the area around you. Like, here's this restaurant special today, or this is a great place to go dancing if that your kind of thing, but I don't think the augmented reality says that part. But it's already here, I think, extremely interesting to me. Do you remember the human body and, like, the little celluloid? Yes. You could peel back, right? And it was like the skin, and then you peeled back the skin and there's, like, all the muscles. You peel that back there's, the organs and the nerves and all that. It's kind of like laying one of those over real life. I just think that's really cool. I think if you fill back the final one in those books, it just should have your face, like, right around the abdomen. But it's dead. It's, like, rotting. That's horrifying, actually. Ryan Ozema, president of Open Source Matter, sees more and more focus on the cloud. Yeah, well, yeah, obviously, like I said, these guys aren't exactly going out on a limb drive. The founder of Drupal thinks more websites within a single organization, more different devices that need to consume those websites with different experiences and more social things. So basically, more of what's going on is what he thinks. Exactly. More of the same. Interesting. So I guess I want to say if anybody wants to tell us what we got wrong, that's fine. Or speculate on what you think, yeah, we'd love to hear you stick your neck out. So send us an email. We'll give you the email address when we're finished. But if you want to learn more about the future of the Internet, type in future Internet in the search bar athouseupworks.com and that brings up what? Chuck facebook s Josh and Chuck Feature We call it something different every time. All right, we did this. That these are running concurrently on the previous show, where we post on Facebook, ask us whatever, we'll buzz through as many as we can. Some are funny, some are serious, and we will treat them thusly. We will treat them all funny. Alexandria, do you guys prepare what you say together or by yourselves before you record? Alex we've answered this before, but for new listeners, we do not prepare. We do not go over stuff. We try to just prepare separately and have a conversation. Yeah, and record. It pretty simple. That is it. That's the mojo. I got one. Have we ever met? Jad and Robert from radio lab now. I have not. But Robert Lamb of Stuff to Blow your Mind has interviewed him. One of the guys on the phone? Yeah. He's a big fan of theirs. Yeah, I am, too. They're grossly. A huge fan. What you got, Chuck? What music are you listening to right now? Attending any concerts this summer? I'm hopefully going to attend. Kiwi Lewis That's right. I'm listening to the new Bonnie there. It's good. New My Morning Jacket. New PJ. Harvey Tyler, the creator. Have you heard this kid? No. Is he a rapper? Yeah. Is he good? He's a part of that group odd future will destroy the Earth or something like that. There's like 19 year old kids out of La. And it's just crazy. I'll check it out. It's really good. And it's very creepy, too. Kids shouldn't go listen to this stuff. No. Yeah, they sing about some pretty awful stuff. That's a snake. Yeah, I'm listening to Herb Albert and Chuckman Dion today. That's what I've been listening to. I am going to see Dylan in a couple of weeks. Are you good? Fred? Dylan? My morning jacket with Nico case. You want to see them in a month or so. Oh, that's a good match up. Yeah. Good to some. Yeah. That's all I have on the concert schedule. Tapes and tapes, actually in a few months, too. Yeah. Steve mountainous. He's coming too. And you saw I saw dinosaur Jr. Recently. Oh, yeah. How's that? It's good. I told you at the airport. Yeah. He was not looking good. He was probably looking exactly the same as when I saw him. Little haggard. Yeah. Still good, Chuck. Loud. There, I said it. It was loud. That's what you can say about Dinosaur Jr. Let's see, what's my drink of choice, Chuck? What's your drink of choice? Like a good gin and tonic or good bourbon on the rocks? Yeah, on the gin and tonic. Right now? Yeah. I'm on this one called Guadalajara Sour. It's awesome. Really? I make a modified version of it, then. I'm not going to give the secret away. Okay. But it's good stuff. Lately, Decatur has a craft beer store called Al. Yeah, I saw it. And they sell growers. So you buy your growler for, like, $5, and then you just go up there and they have, like, eight beers on tap and you can fill it up for can you ride off with it on your bike? Sure. There's a little market by Dead Garage that has a wine island, and it's like really? They sell it by the measured amount, and you go get a little prepaid card and you slap your card in there. You stand in the middle of this market and drink your wine. Wow. You start laughing at people after a couple of glasses. That's right next to Emily shop. I'm going to have to check that out. No, not in Decatur. It's Dad's garage. Okay. I was thinking push. Push? Yeah. Brian TEBone Perkins. Donald Duck versus Daffy Duck. T Bone Perkins. T Bone Perkins? Yes. Ryan. T Bone Perkins. Donald Duck or Daffy Duck? Oh, yeah. He says in a sing off, but I'm just going to say in general, easy. Daffy Duck. Like, that's who you rather hear? Dude, no question. I was looney tunes all the way. I was not a Disney kid. I like Donald Duck. I heard when I was a kid that he was banned from, like, Sweden or something like that for not wearing hair. No, we heard that in the podcast. I heard it a long time ago. Oh, but the lady confirmed it in the podcast. Okay. I think it was Sweden. Yes, that's right. She did send the comment two years ago. A long time ago. You got any more? You want to do one more each? Yeah, one more each. Let's see. How is Nick Cage an Academy Award winner? Because of raising Arizona. That's not what he wanted for them. It doesn't matter. He won because leaving Las Vegas, he was awesome in that. He's good. And the competition that year was pretty weak. Richard Dreyfus and Mr. Holland's Opus was that year. Anthony Hopkins is Nixon. Massimo Troy, c and El Pasino. I thought that guy won. Now, do you think it was Roberto Benini? No. I know, but El Pastino was like just the darling of okay. And then the other, actually. Sean Penn and Dead Man Walking. That was his only real competition. He didn't win. No. He should have that. Wow. Although Nick Cave was great. Yeah. All right. My last one. Ever want to do the show without wearing pants? And that is Cody. Heineman and Cody. My answer is what do you mean? How about with wearing pants? Hell. Nice, Chuck. I think you answered for both of us on that one. Yes. Kelly Cronley. Asked about Nick Cage, by the way. Yeah. I'm sorry about that. I haven't been saying people's names, have I? Haven't. Saracilius asked what our drink of choice was. Okay, well, if you want to ask us questions, go on Facebook. For once in your life, why don't you? That's facebook. Comstuffychildnow. And you can also tweet to us at syskpodcast and you can send us email. Remember, if you have a prediction for the future of the Internet, we want to hear it right? We'll pass it along to all the so called experts. You can send us email at stuffpodcast@housetepworks.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 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. You know you're the best pet mom when you growl back during playtime epic belly rubs and feed them halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | ||
456dea24-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-33cbbee06fca | Short Stuff: The Sandman | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-sandman | Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream! But who is the sandman? We'll tell you in today's edition of short stuff. | Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream! But who is the sandman? We'll tell you in today's edition of short stuff. | Wed, 20 Mar 2019 15:52:20 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=15, tm_min=52, tm_sec=20, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=79, tm_isdst=0) | 11707981 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. Let's get busy. Bring me a dream, Josh. It's a good song. It's catchy. It's been in some movies, including Halloween. Right? It played during the end credits of Halloween. And I can't remember for the life of me, I know that there's an even better example of it. I can't remember, Chuck. I'm sorry. Back to the Future. Oh, really? Yeah. Was it the credits? No, it can only be used in the credits. Right now, Marty goes back to 1955, and I believe it's one of the first songs he hears when he goes into Hill Valley. And that song, very famously, Mr. Sandman is what we're talking about. Everyone was a big hit in the year 1955 from the Cordettes. Nice. That's a great band name, too, the Cordets. Yeah. Acapello. Ladies, what more do you want in the 1950s? Nothing. Maybe civil rights, that kind of thing. But good point. At least you could hear that song while you're fighting for him. That's right. So this Sandman that's mentioned in the Mr. Sandman is actually not a 50s character. It was actually from way earlier, probably out of Central and Eastern Europe. And it was one of those very famous characters that arose from Central and Eastern Europe's preoccupation with the duality of darkness and light in the same human being. Just like in Santa Claus. That's right. When you wake up in the morning and we call them eyebooggers in our house, what do you call them? Sleep. You have sleep in your eye? Crusty. We don't have an official house name for it, but these are names I've always called it. Yeah, sleep. That's what we called it in our house growing up. You have sleep in your eye. I think that's the last time I had a house name for it. Yeah. So I've called the mybooggers. I don't know where I got that. Well, that's different. Huh? An eyebogger occurs during the daytime. Sleep is like the crusty stuff that you wake up with. Not in my house. Oh, hey, Chuck, let me ask you this. Have you ever woken up with such a copious amount of sleep or eyeboggers? Whatever you want. Don't say what you're about to say. That like your eye is crusted shut. I need to open it. Say that. Has that ever happened to you? No, it's atrocious. You've had that happen. You have to be very sick. But, yes, it has happened to me before, where I'm like, I can't open my eye. That's so gross. Well, there's a name for it. There's a real scientific name of that. Crust. R-H-E-U-M. Is that pronounced room? I think. Room, yeah. All right. That's the scientific name. It's a discharge that dries up. It comes out of your eyes. It dries up when you're asleep. And if you are from Northern Europe and it was a few hundred years ago, you might be told, or might have been told that the sandman had come and visited you and sprinkled sand in your eyes while you slept, or magic dust. At least that's what it was. And you would think, maybe as a child, like, why would a sandman want to come and sprinkle magic sand in my eyes to make my eyes crust? It doesn't make any sense. Well, apparently this is a byproduct of the mechanism by which the sandman spun your dreams. It was the sandman who is responsible for your dreams, which is why the Cordettes ask the sandman to bring them a dream, because that's where your dreams came from. The sandman. That's right. We don't know exactly where the sandman comes from, but we do have some ideas, and we're going to talk about those right after this break. All right, so I promised the origin of the sandman. We don't know for positives it was not metallica, but in 18th century German dictionaries like, this is the first time I believe it was on paper. On the paper. I just turned into a German. What's wrong with todd? He's on the paper? Der San mon comte means sandman is coming. And the whole idea was that the sandman would come along and parents would tell the story in Germany. Although that one woman says she didn't think it was German folklore. Right. She thinks that it kind of became popularized in Germany, much like our conception of Santa Claus probably came from that area, but it was maybe from a different area altogether, like maybe Norway or Finland or something. But it was the German immigrants who really brought the concept to America. All right, I think that's what she means. Got you. Because that didn't make sense to me. Regardless, in 1818, there was a writer named ETA Hoffman that wrote Der Sandeman with two ends. And it's just like the Grimm's Brother's stuff. It's this horrifying nursery rhyme, or not nursery rhyme, but sort of a story, the kids story, about a nurse telling a story about this creature who throws sand in your eyes of little kids who don't go to sleep, and your eyes fall out of your sockets. Then the sandman collects those eyeballs, puts them in a bag and lives on the dark side of the moon, goes home and carries them there, and then feeds those eyeballs to his children. There you go. That's what happens with the sand man. And it makes a lot of sense because, especially if you were 18th or early 19th century German, one good way to get kids to go to sleep was to just terrify them with the story. But it also provides a physical function, too, because what is the appropriate reaction when somebody tells you something like that? That person exists and is going to come to your bedside soon? It's to shut your eyes tightly and to keep them shut, ostensibly until you wake up in the morning. So it's pretty clever if you really think about it. Sure. But the dark side of the moon thing, that's like icing on the cake, you know? It just makes me feel good knowing that in, like, 1818, parents were struggling with putting their kids to bed. I think they always have. I think so. You don't think about that, though. I think that from the time that it became not okay socially to lay on your kid until they weren't unconscious and then went to sleep, from that moment on, it became a struggle to get your kid to go to sleep. Yeah. Very interesting. Flash forward a bit to 1841, when none other than Hans Christian Anderson put out a fairy tale. Do you want to pronounce this? I can. Are you ready for this? I was practicing. I looked it up. Really? Luke Ayya. Wow. It's not dead on, but it's okay. Yeah. Anytime I see one of those letters, it looks like the null set. Yes. I have no idea what to do with it, but we finally know how to pronounce Ola or Oola. Yeah. You remember in the Lego episode, we call them Ol Kirk Christensen. Oh, that's right. It was Ola Kirk Christensen. Yeah. So finally, after basically a decade, we have corrected ourselves that that is the inventor of Lego's name pronounced correctly. Yeah, because I remember joking like ol Kirk Christensen. Yeah. And we met a guy once that I can't remember, some telecommunications company, and he was the president, and we called them Old, and they corrected us, but it was just lost on us. That was not right. And I think up to this point, up to this moment, we've called everybody Ol. All right, so what is it again? Ola oola. Luke Aya. Okay, so that's the story. That's the fairy tale. That means old. Shut Your Eye. Yeah. That's a good title. I think so, too. But it's weird that Hans Christian Anderson doesn't just call him the Sand Man. He does everything but call him the Sandman. Well, because vile accounts. He got it from Darsonman. Right? Yeah, for sure. But, I mean, was he worried he was ripping off Darsanman or something? I'm not sure why he didn't just call it Darsonman if the Sanmon or Sandman was already a widely recognized figure. I don't know. At any rate, in the story, very good. Would dress in silk. Jamie very nice. Stylish. And would carry an umbrella. Colorful umbrella. And I guess I mean, it doesn't really say would he do the same thing? Basically, he would not he would squirt milk in your eyes. That's right. Yes. Rather than sand. Come on, Anderson. You're a beloved children's author. You can just go with the original. Yeah. And he also says in here that he introduces a boy in the story to death and sexuality. Right. Which is a little odd, but it is typical, like, children's fairy tale, nursery rhyme, children's story, kind of thing where there's this weird duality between people who are really kind. They also have a shadow side, or it can be a shadow alter ego, like with Santa. And I think what was Santa's Altrigo? Was it Black Peter? The very least, it was Krampus. But I know that some of those traditions, there was, like a dark figure that was the guy who would steal the children who had been naughty, and then it eventually translated into Santa leaving coal in your stocking if you've been naughty. But prior to that, it was like you'd just be kidnapped and eaten by Santa's heavy hitter. This is the same thing. The Sandman has the same thing. And in this Hans Christian Anderson story, ULA has an alter ego, a brother, who, rather than visiting the kids bedsides to bring their dreams, visits everybody's bedside once to bring death. And his name is also Hula Luca. Yeah, he would walk in, say, exit light, enter night forever, take your stand. It's off to never never land forever, kid. Oh. I always thought it was. Take my hand. Well, I think that's a different verse. Right? Okay. I got in trouble last time I talked about Metallica on the show. You did? For what? I think I said that album stunk or something. It probably did, depending on the album you're talking about. Unless it was angel for all or any preceding album. Yeah. Ride the Lightning. That was a good one. Still holds up. Agreed. Another verse goes, don't steal singles from our band. But in the end, the story of Hans Christian Anderson wrote was just like all the Grimm Fairy tales. There's always this dark, awful thing, and it's usually embedded in a lesson to teach your children. And in this case, the lesson is going, go to sleep now because I'm tired and we're both tired. So we're going to end the short stuff right here. That's right. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-01-11-sysk-invasive-species-final.mp3 | What is an invasive species? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-an-invasive-species | Invasive species can mean a lot of things, from fungus to feral pigs and European starlings to kudzu vines. Basically, it's anything brought to a place, either by humans or nature, that didn't originate there. They aren't always a problem, but many times | Invasive species can mean a lot of things, from fungus to feral pigs and European starlings to kudzu vines. Basically, it's anything brought to a place, either by humans or nature, that didn't originate there. They aren't always a problem, but many times | Thu, 11 Jan 2018 18:37:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=18, tm_min=37, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=11, tm_isdst=0) | 48669337 | 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. There's du d stuff you should know. Action edition. I got a laugh out of Jerry, at least. Giggles. I got a derisive snort. How about that? That's what it was. How you doing? I'm great. Well, I'm concerned about the Earth. You're concerned about the Earth? Yes. More than usual? Yes. Because of this podcast? Yes. Okay. Yeah, man. So before we get started, you've heard of the anthropocene, right? I know you have. You definitely have. We've certainly mentioned it before on the episode or on the podcast. So there's this debate right now over whether we've entered a new geological age from the one to the anthropocene. Right. I really wish I could remember what the current one is because people are going to write in and be like, it's this a million times over, which thank you, everybody, for writing out. I mean to sound ungrateful, but the idea is that we've entered this period. Some people place it starting at the Industrial Revolution. A lot of people place it more at 1950 when there was apparently a huge spike in the presence of humanity, from radioactivity, plastics, all this stuff in the environment as a whole, to where our presence has so muddied the geological record that we've effectively come up with a new age. A new geological age. The anthropocene. The age of humans. Right. So one of the things one of the factors that people point to that suggests that we're changing the natural geological record. We're leaving the whole essine. Thank you, Charles. Sure. So the idea that we're you are altering the natural course of the course it would have taken had humans never been around. One of the ways we're doing that is by shuffling species from one environment to another. From one ecosystem to another. Where they've never been before. Probably never would have ended up. At least not in any of our lifetimes. And that they are altering those ecosystems in radical new ways such that when those things fossilized. Those ecosystems become fossilized and can be studied hundreds of thousands or millions of years hence. Archeologists would be pretty puzzled by what they were finding. And that's the basis of the idea that we should be calling this the anthropocene. Wow. Now I'm scared. That was my goal. Well done. Thank you. All right, so what we're talking about is invasive species, and I'm surprised we hadn't done this one. I was, too. I went back and double checked. I think we did, and I remembered what episode I remember it was the Beagle Brigade. Oh, we talked a lot about invasive species and the beagle brigade. That's right. And we may have even said we should do one on that if so wish fulfilled. So what we're talking about is invasive species. This can be any type of not necessarily a plant or just an animal, it could be seeds, it could be eggs. It can even be a disease. Right. Or a fungus. Yeah. A pathogen, a pest, a predator, a plant. It could be anything. Yeah. Any kind of living organism that's not native to a singular or a particular ecosystem. Right. And the House of Works article kind of leaves it at that. But the National Wildlife Federation article that you found, I think really kind of drives home that there's, like, an extra couple of factors involved. Right. Yeah. Because you can have a nonnative species that we actually kind of like like European honeybees. They're a nonnative species here in the United States, but we're crazy for the pollinating they do. It doesn't always funny things. Right. And the honey that they make, rice is not a native crop here in the United States, but people love rice, so just being nonnative isn't enough. It has to actually harm the ecosystem that it's not native to and has been introduced to in some way, shape, or form. So it's a nonnative species that's causing harm either directly or indirectly or both, to this new ecosystem it's been introduced to. That's an invasive species. Right. And it's not just, do we grow rice in the United States? Sure. Okay. And it doesn't have to be from another country. Like we said, it's an ecosystem. So it could be something from one area of the United States to another area of the United States or from Mexico to the United States. Right. Like trout from the Great Lakes. That's their natural habitat, so they're fine. But you take that same trout and put it in I think the example given it was the Yellowstone River, and they're now competing for habitat and food with the local trout. That's an invasive species. Right. They come in all shapes and sizes, as our very own article says. There are different names for them. God loves them all. Like, some people might say exotic pests or non indigenous species, alien species, stuff like that, but invasive species is kind of I think that's the go to these days. Sure. That's the one you hear starting in the 90s, actually. It's funny. Like, all of the eco stuff that we know about, from recycling to invasive species, all was born in the know what I mean? Yeah. Bill Clinton, I think he invented that name, but he went I think he gave it the stamp. What did he say, though? I think he said, Nailed it. He could have been talking about any number of things or people right there. But in that case, he was talking specifically about Executive Order 13112, where the term invasive species was first defined by the United States government. And the reason that they did this this is 1998 the reason that they were defining invasive species is because around about that time. The world was really waking up to the fact that if you take a species of plant. Animal. Bacteria. Pathogen. Whatever. And you put it into a place. A new ecosystem where it has no predators. It's going to create havoc for the ecosystem as it was before. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of one of the keys here, is that generally they will cause a lot of harm, maybe to the environment, maybe to the economy. Maybe two people, maybe one, two, or all three of those. And another key aspect of the invasive species is that it's pretty hard, if not impossible sometimes, to contain and eradicate. Yeah. I get this impression from researching this, Chuck, that the second wave of waking up to invasive speed is realizing they're never going to go away. Now it's done. Like the first wave, you don't notice it's already happening. Right? Yeah. By the time we do notice, it's too late. And then now we're realizing, like, okay, well, we can handle this. It might be tough. And now I think we're finding you can handle it, you just can't eradicate them. One of the big problems is, like, if you, say, develop a poison that kills some invasive fish that was introduced, say, carp, you're going to kill the other fish in the area, too, or some of the other sea life or something like that. So there's just not really any way you can target these things short of shooting each one of them. And you're going to shoot a plant, they'll think you're crazy. They'll lock you up for that, so don't even try it. And here's the deal. This is not a new phenomenon. This nature has been doing this for years on its own in various ways. Whether it's leaping over the Tasman Sea from Australia to New Zealand, or over a channel of water or over a mountain range, it happens. But generally bodies of water and mountain ranges and deserts and all these other geological features help to stop this stuff. It's really humans that are doing most of this, not necessarily on purpose, but sometimes on purpose, as we will see. But sometimes it's just like it's in the ballast water of a ship or there's an insect in the wood of or it's in packing material. What are those things called? The crates of pallets. Yeah, shipping pallets. And all of a sudden it leaps out on the other side of the world and you have an issue to the tune of 50,000 estimated non native species in the United States alone. Yeah, I was looking that up. It's one of those things we always like to give advice if you see something all over the place, like double check it. Right. Is that the real number? No, I think it is a real number. It's from 1999, so there's no telling. We're probably at 50,000 and like, 500 now. But it was from a guy named Pimentel, who is a world famous ecologist. Pin and Teller? No, Pin and Tell. He's from Cornell. I don't know if he's still at Cornell. But the thing that this leaves out, though, it's 50,000 non native species, but that same study from 99 found that about 4300 of them could be considered invasive. Okay, that's what I was wondering. The other ones are like the honeybee, where we're like sweet. Sure. Or rice. Don't forget rice. And like I said, sometimes in the water of a ship's hole, sometimes in this wood, and sometimes on purpose, like we said. Like when the Burmese python found its way to Florida. Dude, that was no accident. Have you looked up Burmese python everglades recently? Yeah, dude, they get so big down there. And did you see the one that had burst itself to death eating an alligator? No, but I did see the alligator and the python fighting on a golf course. That is amazing. That makes me glad to be alive to see something like that. Well, here's the deal while we're on that earlier. Well, all right. More than 2000 of these pythons have been removed. 2000 have been removed since 2002, when it was just, I guess, recreational activity. But starting in March of last year, 2017, florida started sanctioning python hunters and 1000 dudes applied. They accepted 25. So we'll pay you minimum wage. We will literally pay you $8 an hour. I think that was a minimum wage at the time to hunt pythons. And they're all like, done. And they started hunting pythons. They've caught 743 since March of 2017. And late last year in December, the dude, Jason Leon, did you see that one that he caught? No, I may have seen a picture of it. Wow. 17ft long, 133 pound Burmese python. And the reason why these are a big deal, aside from just sheer terror, is they're eating furry creatures. A lot of them. I saw that some populations down in the Everglades of types of deer, rabbits, a lot of creatures that you know and love have gone down by up to 99% in some areas. Yes, they do, because of the python. University of Florida, and I won't say what everyone wants me to say. Good for you, man. Yeah, that's like, how can you be possibly the national champs and throw shade at anybody below you? So the University of Florida and Gainsville did a project they released, and this makes me so sad. They released 95 rabbits into the Everglades, and these are all tracked. And it's not like when these rabbits didn't turn up a year later and they're like, we can't find them. I guess snakes ate them. They know that snakes ate them. Snakes did. A year later, 77% of these rabbits were eaten and dead from these pythons. Wow. That's a problem. That is a sad study. It is. Can you imagine, like, opening that with crates and being like, alright, go. Be free, live your new life. It's an adventure. Oh, man, it's so sad. So that's just one example of the most horrific and that's not one that's, like, costing $200 billion in damage a year. But that is an estimate from professor at Cornell. That's the same one pimp. Yeah. Okay. That's the estimate from him that it's costing United States between 100 and $200 billion a year in damage from all these invasive species problems. Yeah. That's a lot of dough. It really is. And the Burmese python is a good example also of people just releasing, like, a pet that you don't want anymore. That's probably how they were established. Absolutely how it was established. There's a lizard called the Tagu, which is a big problem in all of Florida, apparently, as well. They're just a huge lizard that were originally pets and were released, and now they've established a feral population in Florida, and they apparently will eat your cat. They've been known to do that. They'll storm your house. They'll come into your house. It's just a bad jam. Right. There's also the nutria swamp rats, which were originally grown for their fur in Louisiana. They use rat fur, apparently, in Louisiana, of course, to keep warm. And when the rat for industry went under in the think, they released these things into the swamps. And then last, most recently, feral hogs were imported so that they could hunt them. And there's a huge population that's wrecking the ecosystems they've been introduced to a lot of times. Humans are lunkheads when it comes to shuffling animals into ecosystems where they're not native. That snake's too big. Put it behind the house, right? Let it loose, then. Let a bunch of rabbits loose and see what happens. See, he wins. Snake wins. Snake wins. Should we take a break? Yeah, I was going to say the same thing. Well, actually, quickly, before we take a break, I talked about how much it was costing the US. Department of Interior, spending about $100 million or more a year trying to fight this in various ways, all to very little success. Yeah. All right. So now with that stat, we will take a break. So, Chuck, we talked about people releasing animals purposefully, and you mentioned some other ways, but one of the things that gets me is ballast water. Like, how is this allowed to go on where a ship will take on water to balance out its cargo load? Because different cargo is going to weigh different. It's going to be laid out differently. So you need new ballast every time to balance it out, which makes sense. But surely there can be some other technology, because you're like in Eastern Europe, picking up a bunch of water to balance your ship out, and that cargo is bound for Detroit. So you enter the Great Lakes and you're like, oh, well, water is water. I'll just release it here once I unload my cargo. And whatever animals you picked up in Eastern Europe now live in the Great Lakes. And this actually happened with the zebra muscle, which is a huge problem in the Great Lakes now. Yeah. The zebra muscle and the quagga muscle, which apparently are almost the same thing, and how they act, they're from Eastern Europe and they're small, and that's exactly how they ended up in the Great Lakes, like you said. And they will talk about spreading. Are they like, how many of these? Like a trillion, a trillion? At least. The reason why is, like, a quagga zebra muscle will live about five years, and the female in that time will produce 5 million eggs. There's 10 trillion of them. That's so many muscles. 100,000 of those eggs will reach adulthood. And so the offspring of one single muscle will produce about half a billion adult offspring. So, yeah, 10 trillion is a pretty reasonable number. And they just entered the Great Lakes in, I think, the 1980s. Yeah. So just within, what, 40 years. Gosh, can you believe the 80s were, like, 40 years ago were coming up on it? It doesn't seem that long ago to me, but, man, that's crazy. Well, and the problem with these is you're like, Wait, I'm reminiscing stuff, all right? I'm done. The problem with these is, like, big deal. There are these tiny little muscles, but they are blanketing the bottom of the Great Lakes, and they're eating plankton because they love to eat plankton, which makes the water nice and clear. Everyone's like, look how shimmery Lake Michigan is. Have you seen pictures of Lake Michigan recently? No. It looks like the Caribbean. Really? White sand. Beautiful. See through, like, turquoise water. That's not good. People. Gorgeous. No, it looks really amazing. But ultimately, no, it's not healthy, because, like you were saying, they eat all the plankton that's supposed to be on top and on the bottom, too, and the sunlight can penetrate all the way to the bottom, causing algae blooms. Right. Deadly algae blooms. I just happened to run across an article yesterday, Chuck, and I understood why I was seeing what I was seeing, but the article was about how the Lake Michigan has become so clear that you can see shipwrecks on the bottom of the lake from the air. If you're flying over it, you can clearly see shipwrecks. And the reason why is because the zebra muscles have doubled the clarity of the water since the 1980s. Well, and not only is it just the plankton, but they're eating the plankton is causing salmon to go hungry. White fish. It's wrecking the ecosystem down there. Right. Thank you, Eastern Europe. Well, thank you, ship captain. Who took on that water as ballast? Another ballast story I ran across, too, was fire ants the worst thing in humanity. Right. That's pretty bad. Fire ants are native to South America, and they think that they stowed away on dirt that was scooped up as ship's ballast and released in New Orleans. Really? Yeah, in, like, the but that's where the fire ants came from. They shouldn't be here. Didn't that make them even worse? Yeah, I hate those things. So here's another one. You want to talk about the Asian carp? Sure. So in the 19th, think like in Arkansas, there were some farmers, fish farmers, that is, who said, let's get some of these Asian carpenter to filter the water. And they did. It sounded identical, what the researchers from University of Florida sounded like in my head. Right. And they all sounded like Bill Clinton, right, who was from Arkansas. Right, yeah. So Asian carport introduced I guess they did a pretty good job of filtering the pond water, but then they started spreading. And that's the deal. Like with the zebra muscle they get in these waterways, like in Chicago, these man made waterways that said basically like expressways where they get in the Mississippi River, and it's like, all right, here we go, the rest of the country, let's do this. Yeah. And so Asian carp, it's sort of a catch all name for a bunch of species of carp from Southeast Asia. But here's their problem. They're very dense. They consume about 20% of their body weight each day in plankton. They can be as big as \u00a3100, which is very large for a fish, right. If you haven't noticed. And they're all over the place now. They went up the Illinois River. They are almost or maybe even are invading the Great Lakes now that they didn't have enough problems. And they're another one, they lay about a half a million eggs each time they spawn. Right. And they eat a lot of plankton. And there's this guy, they're a good example because they're so thoroughly crowd out the rest of the ecosystem that the rest of the animals in the ecosystem that it actually kind of wrecks the whole ecosystem. They're an example of like a grade three or level three, I think you'd call it. Level three invasive species. Right. There's this dude, he is a marine biologist, and I don't know if you can tell or not, but I'm stalling while I look for his name. I can see it. Is it coming across everybody? So I cannot find the dude's name anyway. You don't have it either? Yeah, well, he came up with Dr. Zhivago. Okay. Dr. Zhivago came up with these basically four levels of impact that an invasive species can have on biodiversity in an ecosystem. The first level is basically like they're just a new species. They're not doing anything. You could even make a case that it's a good thing that they're there now because they've improved or increased the biodiversity of the habitat. Right. So level one is they're just there nothing bad has happened yet. Level two is when they start to have an effect on the ecosystem in some very specific way. Right. And Dr. Zhavago gives this really great example of the Eastern North American gray squirrel, which was inexplicably introduced in 1876 to England, and since then it has basically outcompeted the native red squirrel there, but it's just the native red squirrel that's been affected. The rest of the ecosystem is basically the same as if the North American squirrel had never showed up. It's just a red squirrel who are trying to go around and tell everybody like, doesn't it suck? The North American squirrels are here. Everybody's like, well, it's fine with me. I don't care. And the red squirrel just can't get any kind of ally in this. That's level two. Shall I continue? Please. Level three is where the species become so dominant, spreads so fast, so wide, reproduces so quickly and so massively that they begin to impact the entire ecosystem as a whole. Right. We'll talk about that in a second. And then the fourth level is where they have upset the ecosystem that they are not native to, but have established themselves in so thoroughly that it now impacts other ecosystems either nearby or that are somehow connected to that ecosystem. And then level five is when you wake up covered in 100 squirrels. Right. I'll just quietly staring at you. Can you imagine? No. You ever seen those black squirrels in Brooklyn? Yes, I've seen them in Toronto, usually, or DC. I love those things. Yes, they're pretty cool. I'd love to get some of those guys, too. They'll charge you? You don't take any guff? No, but see, if you brought some to Georgia, it could be bad for the squirrels here because it's a non native species, even though it's in the same country. Yeah, but man, we got so many squirrels in Atlanta, I wouldn't mind seeing a few of those go. And I love all furry things. Well, you know how I feel about squirrels. Well, that's why it's going to haunt your dreams, waking up being covered by 100 squirrels. Yeah, it would be worse if I had a dream where 100 squirrels covered my bird feeder. That's worse to me. I'd rather them cover me. Cover me instead. Leave my bird feeder alone. They would be so happy to chow down on you, though. Their little tails would be all flitty. They'd be so excited. They'd say, this is a long time coming, Josh. They'd store some of you for the winter and their haunches, but then they'd forget, except for about a third of me where they put it. Exactly. Stupid squirrels. So those are the four levels. We are kidding about the fifth. And I feel bad for Doctor Chicago because once that dude listens and he's like, oh, they're going to say my name. Yeah, Doctor Shivago. Or maybe he's going to start going by that maybe. So we just changed that dude's life. All right, so we talked a little bit about how some of these can affect things like eating plankton. What are some of the other deleterious effects? Delete? Well, you can basically categorize the effects that these things have in two categories. There's direct and indirect ones. Right. Okay. So direct would be like, if you like, let's say those Asian carp eat the eggs of the other fish that's competing with, that would be a direct impact. That would make the other fish very unhappy, right? Yes. They could also be a bug that carries a disease that kills trees. I can't remember what bug carries, like Dutch elm disease, but there are bugs that carry diseases that kill trees that's directly impacting the trees in that ecosystem. Yeah. Then there's like, indirect ones too right. So let's say you have, like, a grass that grows really well in its new habitat, nonnative grass, so much so that it out competes the other grasses. Well, this new grass is really good at growing in this ecosystem, but it's terrible as far as, like, nutrient density is concerned, and it's choked the rest of the grasses out, which means that the sweet little deer and the rabbits that are about to be eaten by snakes don't have those grasses to eat anymore, and they can't eat the new grass. That's an indirect impact. So suddenly the populations of these higher animals are going to thin out, either because they're going to die off, they don't reproduce as fast, or they just move. So that's an indirect impact of an ecosystem. Or like that cocaine grass, which is the one here in the Southeast, it's an Asian plant. Like, that one does the one thing you're talking about, no food value for the wildlife, but it also burns really hot and fast, more so than native grasses. So it's like it has this dormant danger of being a wildfire hazard. Right, yeah. I saw another one called Cheatweed has the same thing. It's altered the wildfire cycle, I think, in the Southwest, where it's growing from like 50 to 70 years to something like three to five years. Now they have massive wildfires, and it's because it burns so fast and it's so dense, it's just such a great fuel that yeah. There's another way that they can indirectly affect an ecosystem. Too a lot of plants that are non native come in and alter the composition of the soil. They either change the amount of nutrients that are available, they change the PH, they just alter the soil chemistry. And I mean, like, the soil that's like the building block of an ecosystem. You start altering that, everything from the soil up is affected and impacted in some way or another. Well, and then that soil can then be transported to another ecosystem. Right. Yeah. Which is how the spreads yeah, it's actually one of the tips for something you can do is not move soil very long, far distances that can cut down on invasive species transfer. Too all right, well, let's take another break and then we will talk a little bit about the two ways to try and manage this and some more yes. And what you can do and the story of kudzu, which is probably not quite what you think. All right, so as far as management, there are a couple of main ways that we're trying to control invasive species, proactive management and reactive proactive. If you go to California and you have to stop at the California border and they say, do you have any fruits or vegetables from outside the state? That would be an example of proactive management. It's trying to keep it from happening to begin with by not allowing stuff in that shouldn't be in. Yeah, I guess apparently in this house, stuff Works article, the author talks about how they quarantine firewood sale up in Connecticut, emerald ashbors from making their way through the state. Crazy. Guam has this huge brown tree snake problem. We must have talked about this in the beagle brigade, but they've basically killed off the population of every other animal on the island. It's a little bit of exaggeration, but it's not too far off. They've really had a huge impact on it and they train dogs to sniff them off. The case from any cargo plane or ship that leaves Guam has to be inspected by these things, by these dogs to find the snakes because they are taking it that seriously because they've had such a terrible impact on Guam. Wow. Proactive management. Another thing that they do, aside from border inspections and stuff like that, is basically just trying to destroy it, I guess in that first phase, doctor Zhivago's first phase. By the way, Doctor Zhivago's name is I found it. Are you ready for this? I think we should get a drum roll, Jerry. Doctor Alexander Meenz. M-E-I-N-E-S-Z. Marine biologist. But he says you can call me Al or just call me Doctor Z, like Paul Simon. Yeah, sure. All right. So, yeah, eradicating them in the early stages, and this has happened before in California specifically, they beat down an invasive weed brought in from the tropics so it can work. But I get the feeling that in researching this stuff, like once you're past that first stage, you may be sol. Well, yeah, I have that same cross your fingers. That is not one that'll wreck the ecosystem. So that's proactive. There's also reactive management, too. Right. And there's the age old well, just get your hands on whatever its natural predator is and then introduce that into the ecosystem. That's like from that classic Simpsons episode. Do you remember that where Bart has a tree lizard that eats birds. So they release some tree snakes and then they release some tree snakes and they say that a cold snap will cause all the gorillas to freeze to death. So that'll be that's basically what they're doing. There's this bug called brown marmarated, stink bugs, which are actually stink bugs, and they'll swarm in your house. So they're a pest, but they're also really bad for fruit crops and vegetable crops and they don't have a. Natural predator here. Over in Asia, where they're from, they are predated by a parasitic wasp. So they're thinking of bringing parasitic wasps over, and it's like, oh, yeah, sure. Nothing could go wrong if you bring parasitic wasps into an ecosystem. Man, those stink bugs, they will scare the bejesus out of you in the middle of the night. Yeah, because they'll swarm. Well, I mean, I've never seen more than one at a time. Oh, yeah. But I'm just talking about waking up because one of them is crawling over your cheek. Well, supposedly the brown marmorated stink bugs are different from the southern stink bugs that we're used to. Oh, really? Yeah, they're warm. I can't tell the difference. I've never smelled any stink either. I haven't either. I saw somebody say that they smell like cilantro. I'm like, that's fine. That's great. Put some of them on your tacos. That's weird. They're all over the place, though. I see them in my bathroom, especially in the winter. Yeah, because they come inside to stay warm. Yeah, I feel bad. But supposedly they swarm. The brown marmarated ones swarm. So they come inside your house, hang out, and then just cover your face and you fall down the stairs and then the squirrels get you. That's invasive species in a nutshell. What else we got here? Do you want to talk about a couple more of these? Yes, I want to talk about my favorite of all time. Are you ready for this? Yes. The starling. The European starling. Yeah. And you know what? This is a great time to shout out one of our new brother podcasts here on the network Omnibus with Ken Jennings of Jeopardy's fame sure. And John Roderick of the indie band Long Winters. Right. They have a new show called Omnibus that is about sort of obscure history, and they did an entire episode on the European starling. Oh, they did? Yeah. Well, then this ties into that. It does. So go listen to that show subscribe and hear. That is in a nutshell. Oh, okay. So back in 1890, there was this guy, he was a German immigrant to the US. His name was Eugene Shifflin. Did I pronounce it right? I think so. Eugene Shifflin was a Shakespeare enthusiast, right? To say the least. He had this idea that it would be really cool. And remember, this is 1890. They had no idea about invasive species. At the very least, you wouldn't think a bird would be but he decided that it would be really cool to release all of the birds mentioned by Shakespeare into North America. So crazy. And he would start with the European starling. So in winter of 1890, and then again like a month or so later, in 1891, he released a total of 100 European starlings in Central Park. Make note of that number. 100 were released in 190. And now there are more than 200 million European starlings in the United States. And they are jerkbirds. Yeah. They'll swarm like a brown marmurated stink bug. They'll swarm. But they swarm on cattle to scare them away from their food so that the starlings can eat their food. So these birds are capable of scaring cattle off? That's a big one. They'll also crash your plane. They will. They will swarm your airplane. It has happened before. There was one that took off from Logan there in Boston. Worst airport bathrooms in the world. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Okay. I think I talked about up the bathroom stalls there. There's, like three inch gaps in between the doors. Oh, yeah. It's like, literally, you can just see each other pooping. You could fit, like, a whole Annie's through there. Yeah. You're going to eat that bagel? Just let me slide it through there. Well, she makes pretzels. Delicious pretzels. Oh, okay. Yeah. I wasn't saying she made bagels. I got you. I was just trying to think of something fatter than a pretzel. Could you fit a bagel through the stall? Is it really that bad? You could fit a bagel flat, man, like a bagel half. No, it's not quite that bad, but it's bad. I remember pooping at Logan and making eye contact with the dude. Sustained eye contact. Very distressing. Yeah. So, anyway, birds crashed a plane into Boston Harbor, killed 62 people. These starlings. Yeah, it's not good. And they are also very dense eaters, apparently. Right. Like the carp. Yes, I believe so. They're definitely a huge problem, from what I understand. But the idea that they were released in appreciation of Shakespeare, I just find fascinating. I know. Thank you, Eugene Chiffon. Now they're a major problem. There's one other one we got a shout out, too, Chuck, is the cane toad. Yes. Which is another invasive species that was introduced using the Simpsons technique because there were some cane beetles that were harming Australia's sugar crop back in the 1930s. And so they got the idea to import some cane toads to eat these beetles. And the cane toads, from what I understand, worked pretty well, but then their population boomed from, I think, 107 initial ones to again, 200 million, just in less than 100 years. Yeah. There's a great classic documentary on the cane toad, and we talked about them before in an episode, didn't we? Sure. Yeah. One of the ways Australia is delightfully weird. Yeah. We'll see you guys this fall. That's right. Your spring. Oh, yeah, that's true. They're all confused, like, where are you, mate? Right. Although it's their summer. Well, no, September will be their spring, but that will be be our summer right now. Yeah. It's the dead of summer for them. Man, I can't wait to meet those people in person. I know. It's going to be cool, man. I'm going to get me a hat that has alligator teeth around the brim, as his local custom. So, Chuck, let's talk kudzu. You want to yeah, we'll finish up with kudzu. This is a great story called The True Story of Kudzu comma the Vine That Never Truly Ate the south by Bill Finch. And everyone has probably heard of kudzu. It has a very steeped mythology, and it's one of those things where people, especially outside of the south, talk about you got your cutsu, is just everywhere you look, there's kudzu in the south, and if you go to any Southern town, there will be a Kudzu cafe or a kudzu antique. There's a kudzu antiques right here in Decatur. It's just one of those things. The south took it and ran with it as far as just, like a marketing thing. But here's the deal most people know. It was introduced at the 1876 Worlds Fair Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Was a vine from Asia. And the story goes that it just took over the south, but that's not quite right. In 1935, there was dust storms that damaged the prairies, and Congress said, you know what? Erosion is a big problem, so let's use kudzu. And they brought in 70 million seedlings to grow in nurseries as soil conservation. Right. Remember our episode on desertification? I think we talked about that. Yeah. So they, like, were planting it on purpose. They were paying people as much as $8 an acre, which was pretty good money back then in the 1930s, to plant kudzu. Flash forward a little bit. There was a radio host for The Atlanta Constitution, one of our newspaper. Well, now it's AJC. Back then, there were two newspapers, the Journal in the Constitution. His name was a columnist named Channing Cope that became an evangelist for this stuff. And basically during these Depression era radio broadcast would say, plant kudzu so the south can live again. Yeah. To restore the soil back to its original nature, these farmers were taking money from the government saying, okay, sure, I got some land that I'm not using or that could use some fixing, so I'll play at this stuff for $8 an acre. And they did. But the problem is no one could ever figure out how to make money off of it. It wasn't a crop. It wasn't good for grazing, because apparently when cattle and horses grazed on it, it died, and no one really wanted to buy it from a nursery, so there's no way to make money off of it. So when the Soil Conservation Payment Program ended, everybody just kind of tilted into the soil and went the way of the dinosaur. Or it would have had it not been for the railroad industry and the highway construction industry. Yeah. So the original goal is to plan about 8 million acres of the stuff around the south, but by 1945, there was just about a million acres planted. But because of the fact that cattle don't graze by the highway generally or on the railroad, that's where it really took hold and did envelope things like, roadside signs and full trees. And this is how it got their reputation, because people would be on the train or they'd be driving down the highway, and that's where it was the worst, and they would see it. And it got this reputation as this monster vine that was eating the south. Yeah. Because it really is disconcerting to see kudzu growing up like a 50 foot tree and totally covering it like it's consuming. It evokes that same feeling. Like seeing a snake eat like a whole rabbit. Right. Yeah. It evokes the same feeling. And the thing is, most Southerners from, say, like, the when this really started to take root on these roadsides, their connection to the land was no longer in the farms or the forest. It was in the cities. And they traveled mostly in their car or on trains, which is where Cudsi was most visible, remember? So there was this idea, and it was a pretty understandable idea that kudzu had taken over south or was in the process of taking over the south. And the whole thing was helped along, apparently, by a garden club newsletter. Yeah. So the idea is that there were and this is a stat that an incorrect stat that you can still get that says up to 9 million acres of the southern United States is covered in kudzu. It all comes from these two books, a craft book and a culinary and healing guide are these two books that are most frequently quoted as to that number. The US. Forest Service says actually it's about 227,000 acres of forest land about the size of a small county in Georgia, nowhere near what they're saying it is. And while it's still when you drive along some of these Southern highways, it looks like it's eating a water tower. And it is. Once you step 10ft into the forest, it stops. Yeah. Because it grows terribly in shade. And yeah, if you have a kudzu problem, just get some horses or cows and there goes your kudzu problem. It's not a very hardy plant. It's just it has no real predators or anything to hold it back on those roadsides or on those railroad embankments, which is why it grows so wild there. So that culinary book and the craft book that have to do with kudzu, that seriously are the most widely cited sources by academic journals I see. By scientists, by the government. Everybody cites these sources, and apparently they just made it up. But they said that it grows at a rate of 150,000 acres a year. And that same Forest Service report estimated it really grows at about 2500 acres a year, which is entirely manageable. What's basically the poster child for invasive species in the United States, kudzu is actually not really much of a problem at all. Yeah. So everybody we don't all drink Coca Cola. Well, that's actually not true. Yeah, we all drink actually, I don't really drink it that much, but yeah, there is not a kazoo problem. Stop it. Stop saying hot lana. Yeah, nobody here says that. No, I remember that again. In the 90s, there was a little push for that recycling invasive species in hot lana. One of them didn't make it. That's right. You got anything else? No. I thought this is a good one. I thought so, too. If you want to know more about invasive species, there's tons of them that we didn't even cover. So go look them up, educate yourself, and then go save the planet and tell them Josh and Chuck sent you. And in the meantime, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this very sweet orchid story a big hello to Josh, Chuck and Jerry. I'm writing in to say how much I love your orchids episode and also share a bittersweet and pretty amazing thing that happened to my family. My grandmother was an avid gardener who had a knack for coaxing her collection of orchids into bloom again and again. I think some of her orchids might have been a decade or more old. When she was diagnosed with cancer, she passed along her orchids to my stepmother, who has continued the tradition. One particularly beautiful orchid had refused to bloom after the move until one day in August 2016, when it did bloom again. When my stepmother posted a picture to Facebook that morning, she didn't know that my grandmother was in the final process of passing away. Someone used their smartphone to show the photo to my grandmother at hospice, and it was one of the very last things she saw. It must have brought her a lot of joy to know that her orchids, in fact, lived on. She attached a photo. Very beautiful orchid, she said. Orchids will always have a special place in my heart for sensing my grandmother's last day with us. And each of those plants is a treasured family heirloom. I hope I'll be the next to inherit the Trinity Matrilineal. I think so. Yeah, that's right. I hope I'll be the next to inherit the Matrilineal green thumb. All the best, Maggie. That is a great orchidstory. Yes. Great. Listener mail. That's how you get on listener mail, everybody. Yes. You just warm our hearts. Okay. Or insult us. Yeah, but we don't actually read those. We just make grumbly references. That's right. If you want us to make a grumbly reference to something you wrote, well, then write as an insulting email. If you want it to get red, then warm our hearts. You can tweet to us at Sisk podcast or Josh Clarke. I also have a website, by the way, called Ruceriousclark.com. You can join Chuck on Facebook.com, charleswchuckbryant and you can also hit up the official Facebook page at stuff you should Know. And what else, Chuck? Emails. You can send us all an email, including Jerry, Noel, Matt, everybody, to Stuff podcast, how Stuff works.com. And as always join us at our home on the Web stuffyoushineknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. A 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. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-03-22-sysk-framington-heart-study-final.mp3 | How the Framingham Heart Study Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-framingham-heart-study-works | In the 1940s, a tiny town outside Boston volunteered to be test subjects in a study that would become one of the longest and broadest in the history of medicine. Originally designed to study heart disease, it's revealed things about plenty else too: every | In the 1940s, a tiny town outside Boston volunteered to be test subjects in a study that would become one of the longest and broadest in the history of medicine. Originally designed to study heart disease, it's revealed things about plenty else too: every | Thu, 22 Mar 2018 14:25:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=14, tm_min=25, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=81, tm_isdst=0) | 48988247 | audio/mpeg | "Hello. Colorado. The state's so nice. We're playing there twice. That's right, two days in a row. Chuck, we added a second show to our Gothic Theatre tour. That's right, we're going to be there June 7 and June 28. Now the 28th is sold out. Out. But one of those weird cases where you go see the first show, you were actually late buying tickets. Right. We're also going to be in Boston april 4. DC. April 5. We're going to be in St. Louis on May 22 and Cleveland on May 23. And then of course, we're going to wrap this summer up on June 27 28th at the Gothic Theater in Colorado. So go to sysclive.com for all of your information and ticket needs, welcome to Stuff You Should Know from Housetopworks.com. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Chuck Bryant there's guest producer Noel All of nature wild and free this is where you long to be should know. So let's go ahead and admit that we just did a rare retake of like the first four minutes of the show. Yeah. And I still reused the Madonna lyric joke. That's fine, but do we have to recreate the rest of the previous format? No, I don't think so. I think we should just kind of let it flow. I was saying to myself, by God, that Madonna jokes getting in there. All right, well, maybe just a quick recap. NOL's dressed up and looks great cause he's a snappy dresser. We mispronounced words in the UK and got laughed at. Right. And now we're talking about the Framingham Heart study. That's right. I don't know what podcast it was on, but years ago we called it the Farmington Heart Study. Every time we said it, we said farmington. Did we really? Yes. You don't remember that? No. I mean, that definitely sounds like us, but I don't remember it. Yeah, that's why I made that joke when you first came in about the Farmington Heart Study. Okay. Yeah, it was years ago. It was one of our earlier couple of years. And we said the Farmington Heart Study probably twelve times. Yes. Back in the day the standards used to be a tad lower because we were low hanging fruit podcast. It was us. Xyraglass was Ricky Gervais and Jesse Thorn. And then Adam Curry was out there somewhere. Sure. And probably Adam Corolla. Sure. Oh yeah. No one else? There were eight podcasts. That was it. That was all you had to choose from. So you better like at least one of them. Do you know how many there are now? I just saw today. No. Do you have an actual number? Well, I mean, it's an even number, so it's probably not exact, but the latest Hot Pod newsletter said that there are roughly 350,000 podcasts. Oh my God. That's nice. Wow. I know. Man alive. That's pretty impressive. And probably only like 500 of those are good well, we went from that was mean. We went from eight to 350,000 and how many years? Ten. Yeah. We're still hanging strong. We are. That's great. That's what happens when you say things like farmington 1012 times. He's long gone. Yeah. He pronounced everything perfectly. That guy's washed up now. Yeah. So the reason we're talking about framing them, which, by the way, it's going to be tough to say it the same way every time, but framingham is the city of Massachusetts. I don't get the framingham. As opposed to framingham. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The H is a hard H or a soft H. Like, whereas if this were in Scotland, they would just say, Foreman, you're right. Which is, again, why we were laughed at in Manchester. That's Germany. Sorry. Right. Which is landlocked. So, again, we're talking about Framingham, massachusetts a very small town these days. In 2017, I think the census, the population estimate was something like 70,000 residents. Not a huge town. I think that qualifies as a small dinky town still. Yeah, but it's a suburb of Boston, which is a huge metropolis. Sure, it is. But aside from being a suburb of Boston, it is in its own right, an internationally renowned tiny town. Sure. Not because it's like a place where the circus used to hang out during the winter or because they have some amazing kind of fudge. Right. Farming of Massachusetts is on the map because that town, back in the day, actually two times over that town, decided that they were going to present themselves as test subjects, study participants, for some of the most important studies ever carried out in the history of medicine. Yeah. One of the largest and certainly most influential longitudinal studies ever performed in medicine. Yeah. It's called the Farmingham or Farmingham heart study. The Framingham. Oh, my God. Was that an accident? Yes. Oh, boy. The Framingham Heart Study. Yeah. We've had challenges, as the medical community and research community throughout study history of being frustrated with bad studies and poor sample sizes. This one has really set the standard. Yeah. The gold standard for anything that has anything to do is studying cardiovascular disease. And as we'll see it, basically, is everything we know, you and I, just Joe Schmo walking around on the street, know about cardiovascular disease, basically came out of this study. And even before that, there was another study that the town participated in that helped lick tuberculosis. Correct. Which was appropriate because framing them yeah, I got it. Right. Is in Massachusetts, which is part of New England, which was part of the vampire panic area, which, as you remember, was the result of tuberculosis. So it was appropriate that that little town contributed to humanity in that way as well. Yes. Should we hop in the way back machine? Oh, yes. All right, let's set the dial. Let's load up the flux capacitor with Miller Heavy beer and banana peels. Miller Heavy? Yeah. That's what he used. Nice. I think so. Yeah. It's more highlife. Okay. That's at the end with the more modern version of the DeLorean. Yeah. I think you used some sort of plasma waste incinerator. So let's set the dials for the World War II era. We're not going to be super specific here. No. Sometimes we roll the dice in the wayback machine. Let's see what happens. Out anytime in the 1940s. Not in Europe or the South Pacific. That's right. So in the 1940s. Here was the scene in the USA. And I guess all over the world is we did not know a lot about and all this stuff seems so second nature now and like duh about heart disease. But we didn't know a lot about heart disease back then. And it was sort of just accepted that once you reach a certain age. Like yeah. Your heart just may take you out. Nothing we can do about it. Right. Might as well not research it. And there's certainly no preventative medicines to ensure that health. No, certainly not. They could try to treat it or whatever, but most of the time, once you came down with one of the cardiovascular diseases, you were a goner. Yeah. 44%. 44% of us deaths were due to CBD. Right. And so there was a confounding factor that led to this huge increase. There are actually two of them. One is as far as percentages go. The cardiovascular disease deaths lurched forward in the mid, early mid 20th century because what used to be the big killers, which were infectious diseases, which we now consider highly treatable, they used to kill everybody. Right. And as we started to treat them, thanks to the discovery and use of penicillin and antibiotics, those things fell into the background and by extension or by proxy, cardiovascular disease was basically bare naked out there, statistics wise. Suddenly something that was just kind of like a secondary problem was now the leading cause of death in the United States and in the west, I believe. Yeah. Because I guess people were living, routinely living into their fifty s and sixty s, maybe for the first time. I don't know. Yes. And they were saying, my god, I'm so glad I get these extra couple of decades of eating raw steak and smoking cigarettes at the dinner table. Gross. That is so nasty. It's a true story, though. I saw my grandpa do it with my own eyes. Smoke at the table? No, actually, my grandpa was one of the he went the other way. He was like subscriber number three to Prevention magazine. Oh, really? Yeah, into like, coffee animals and all sorts of weird stuff. He was big time healthy guy. Is that what led your dad to become the herbal Elvis? I think that had to have had something to do with that, for sure. Luckily, my dad didn't carry on the family tradition of coffee animals down to me. All right, so by 1948, 44% of deaths are cardiovascular. Everyone's dying now from their heart because they're living longer, because they're not dying of TB in their thirty s and forty s. And then the second big thing that happened that you teased was president Roosevelt started to get really he got cardiovascular disease. He started to get really high blood pressure. This was compounded by now, we understand that stress and anxiety can compound these things, and he certainly had no shortage of that as president. And you know, Winston Churchill, of all people, when he says he seems to be a very tired man. If Winston Churchill is saying that, then you're in trouble. Yeah. He wasn't the picture of health. No, he certainly wasn't. But apparently FDR made him look like he was fresh as a daisy. I guess so. FDR had high blood pressure when he went into the White House to begin with, but by the time 1945 rolled around, right after the Yalta conference, where they divided Europe up between Great Britain, the United States, and Russia, the Soviet Union. Right. He died a couple of weeks after that. At age 63, he had a stroke from hypertension, which is another word for high blood pressure. And boy, oh, boy, did he have high blood pressure. Like, off the charts. Chuck yeah. When he died, he had 300 over 190. Just one more time. 300 over 190. So I went and looked that up. I'm like, even without looking it up, I know that's high, but how high is it? So ideal is between 90 over 60 and 120 over 80. That's ideal blood pressure. Anything over 180 over 120 is what's called a hypertensive crisis. And the chart tells you to go to your doctor immediately for that if you have anything over 180 over 120. FDR had 300 over 190. Yeah. And his doctor said, I predict he's a very sick man. I predict he will be dead within a few months. And he was running all the money, right. Churchill's doctor? Yeah. FDR's own doctor was like, here, take this digitalis. Oh, was that Churchill's guy? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. At the Yalta conference, who I guess he just travels with. I would think so. I would imagine all those guys would travel with their doctors just for fun. Like, what kind of pills you got today? Yes. And again, I'm watching the crown. I know. I talked about that in the TV. Well, not episode, but when we talked about it. And John Lithgow as Winston Churchill is great. What? He's awesome. When he and FDR, like, have to part ways after the Yalta conference, does he punch FDR in the face and say, go FDR? He hasn't been in it. Okay, well, look for that scene coming up. Yeah, but it's crazy. Churchill's all over the place. He had the Gary Oldman movie, and then there were dual Churchill movies. Brian Cox was in another one. Oh, man, it's quality. He's great. Although his Hannibal Lecter it was fine until Anthony Hopkins got his hands on that role. Yeah. The rare case where the second actor totally owns the role. Usually, like, the first actor will just probably by the first. Although I liked what's the to live in Diane LA's guy's name. Who was the lead guy in Manhunter? William Peterson. Yeah, I liked William Peterson's character. That's a great movie. More than Edward Norton's version. And Red Dragon. Because Red Dragon and Manhunter, they're based on the same book. Yeah, it's the same thing. Yeah, you're totally right. William Peterson are way better than Edward Norton in that role. But Jody Foster better than all of them is claimed. Oh, yes. All of them put together. I just watched the end of that again the other day, and you're going to appreciate this. Emily was in the other room, in the bathroom or something, I can't remember. And she didn't know. I turned it on and I paused it right at the moment of the penis tuck when he had his arms out in the Jesus Christ pose. And Emily came in and just got in bed and looked up and was like, oh, my God, what a great movie that was. It had everything. The perfect face frame. Yeah. Everything had Jody Foster, Anthony Hopkins and a penis tuck scene. Yeah. We should probably take a break. All right, we're off the rails here. You ready? Yes. Break starting now. Okay, Chuck. So we were talking about penis tucks. Right. FDR famously did that at the conference. The reason FDR's death from hypertension really factors into the store is because it was extremely public. Okay. And what FDR basically did, without using these last words, he basically said he pointed at modern medicine and said, I beseech you. And then killed over. Right? Yeah. So modern medicine was like, who, us? We don't know what we're doing when it comes to cardiovascular disease. And shortly thereafter, the framing of heart study was born. Farming cut. No, you almost got me. The framing of Heart Study was born because Harry Truman signed the National Heart Act, which is probably the thing that he's most famous for as president. Yeah. And that included $500,000 in the form of a grant for this study for 20 years to cover 20 years for the study. And I think initially, Public Health Service physician Gilson, or Gilken Meters said, it sounds like you messed that up, but you didn't. I think you hit it right on the head. Gilsen medders. Gil Meters sounds like a weird you think it would be meadows or something. It sounds like you're drunk in saying Meadows. And this was the original quote, which is actually a pretty good mission statement for the study. Their mission was to study the expression of coronary artery disease in a normal or unselected population and to determine the factors predisposing to the development of the disease through clinical and laboratory exam and long term follow up. So there you have it. Not bad. It's got a clinical ring. It's concise. You can dance to it. Yeah, exactly. So the Framingham Heart study was a heart study before it was set in framing him. And they went to Framing him for a number of reasons. One, they said, well, this is a pretty standard middle America, middle class community, at least of the kind that we pay attention to in this day and age. Right. Meaning it was almost entirely white people, which we'll see is a huge criticism of this study that the study directors over time have tried to work on. But they said, aside from the almost complete and utter lack of diversity yes, in this study, it's a pretty good slice of America. It's a small town. Most of the people there middle income. It's got a big enough population at the time. This is the 1940s or something like 28,000 people that we could get a pretty decent, like, random sample of the population going. But the town itself is small enough. There's only like two hospitals, and in time there would only be one hospital that we can actually easily keep track of the people in this town. And it's not too far from Boston University, which would win the contrast to carrying out the study on behalf of the National Heart Institute. Well, yeah, and they had also, like you said earlier, proven that their game for this kind of thing by participating in that, what was called tuberculosis ho down or something. Yeah, it had a name. It did have a name. It was called the Framingham Tuberculosis demonstration. All right? They would be like, watch this. It wasn't a hot down. No, but it could be on a Saturday night. It was the ho down. Well, not the whole town, but the town had gotten behind being test subjects or study participants for a whole other study about 30 years before the Heart study began. So they were already kind of like their health care providers were already aware that this stuff was going on. And at the time, apparently, healthcare providers like your general practitioner, that was like the end all, be all of your health. That person was meant to know everything about you and everything about disease and how to treat you. And that was that. There weren't any longitudinal studies, there wasn't any preventative medicine, there wasn't any National Heart Institute, there was nothing like that. It all came down to your general practitioner. So it was really important that the general practitioners and the healthcare providers in the town of Framing them were on board with this kind of thing because they could very easily have seen this as encroaching on their turf. Sure, but they didn't. And I think the Framingham study directors and the people who carried this actual study out deferred to the general practitioners in the town as far as giving advice from the findings and keeping up with the outside medical findings or even the stuff they were finding from the study. They didn't directly give it to the study participants. They gave it to their doctors, and then the doctors would tell the study participants. So they were kept in the loop. So there was a symbiotic relationship that was forged. Yeah. I thought it was interesting that they just kept the research. Like, they weren't there to offer medical advice. They were literally just collecting research. But I do wonder if some of the times they would say, hey, GP of Mr. Donaldson, you really need to get him in, like, next week. Yeah. Really? Yeah. It's kind of like, I guess, how Churchill's doctor saw Roosevelt. Right. I know we're not supposed to give advice, but my advice to you is to call this guy up and say, maybe you should come in a little earlier than next spring. Right. Or go up your malpractice insurance. So we did say that it wasn't super ethnically diverse, which didn't phase them too much at the time. And it really hit home to me just how white probably every major study had been up until this point, without even, like, thinking it was a problem with just being like, I don't know, there's a great study. They're like, well, you didn't include any black people. And it probably just didn't even occur to them at the time. I don't know if it didn't occur to them. I think that it was mostly that's who their clientele was. I think that that's probably who was being studied, because that's what America catered to at the time. Or who America catered to, I should say, at the time. I don't know. That much has changed these days, unfortunately, but I think it was vastly more pronounced back then. Well, I think they're way more inclusive now and probably have to be to get research grants these days, I would think. Yeah, for sure. No, I'm saying America as a whole being catering to yeah, I hear you. But that did change in framing him after World War II. Apparently there was an influx of a more diverse population after the war, at least. Right. And I think, by the good Lord, was it the 90s when they added the new cohort? Well, we'll get to the cohort. Okay. Well, anyway, sure. Well, spoiler alert. They made the study population more diverse. Yes. One thing that is in the credit of the study designers is that they included women at about 50%, which was totally unheard of in any kind of medical study at the time. Because, again, not only did they cater to almost exclusively white people in America at the time, they catered almost exclusively to white men at the time. Yeah. And I think also women. I think heart disease probably still has a stigma of, like, yeah, men have heart disease more than women do. Right. Like, what are you, a trucker lady, how do you have heart disease? Go back home. Exactly. Get out of my doctor's office. Yeah, you dummy. Yeah. Which is not the case, right? No. But the weird thing is what they found from the study, just overall, they found that the stuff that they've come up with, which we'll talk about in a second, is really good at predicting things for white guys, for cardiovascular disease, for white guys. But even though women were very clearly represented in the study, they've actually found that the same predictors don't work for women. So it's kind of led to a separate study of women and how they suffer from cardiovascular disease, because they definitely do it's just under different circumstances, it appears, than men. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. So let's talk about the beginning of the study. Right? Yeah. So they recruited people between the ages of 30 and 59, initially, because that is the window where you might develop CBD. And they thought by recruiting people in this range, they would also get a certain amount of people that are already have this appearing, like these symptoms appearing. Right. They didn't, though, actually. It turned out that they had to actually go recruit people who had cardiovascular disease already and put them into this study themselves, I think, because people probably, that maybe were on that track don't volunteer for studies like this. Well, it wasn't a very random sample, especially at first, because they initially got participants through word of mouth at civic groups and clubs. So the presence of a social network or a certain type of social network just kind of does away with randomness right out of the gate. And they ended up recruiting other people outside of these groups and civic clubs and all that, who initially formed a large part of the study cohort to make it a little more random. And I guess they were successful because it seems like the idea of it being not very random or not very representative sample of the whole isn't really discussed any longer. So I guess they took care of it by the inclusion of the additional, I think, like 700 people. Yes. The idea was that you would come in every two years to give your medical history updated, to get it updated, to have your physical, to get all your labs done. And they thought at the time they were smart enough to know that there's probably not one thing that's causing CBD. So collecting all this history from all these people over time, and initially, it was going to be 20 years, but as you will learn, it's still going on today, which is amazing. They can really get a robust sampling of people and time from kind of all walks of life once they started being more inclusive. Yeah. And they can watch the disease develop or not develop. And since they do like a really they did a phenomenal baseline exam. And Chuck, actually, I saw in the very original conception of the study was that they were going to do a baseline exam and then a second follow up three to five years later, and that was it. But luckily, they had the foresight to be like, no, let's keep this thing going. Keep it rolling, baby. I'm feeling hot. Right? Yeah. So by doing this baseline exam and saying, do you smoke? How much red meat do you eat? How much do you drink? How much exercise do you get? How often do you go parasailing? How many kids do you have? What were your parents'medical histories like? By getting this really great baseline exam, they had an idea of all the different factors that could come into play when it comes to cardiovascular disease. And then with these follow up exams every two years, they would find people as they got the disease or didn't get the disease, and then they could go back and look and say, well, this person has cardiovascular disease, and they smoke and they have diabetes, and their parent had a stroke, their dad had a stroke, and they just had a stroke. So they started to see from all of this data, it was basically like, you know, how big data is just enormous right now. That's basically what the Heart Institute did in Boston University. They just went and set up camp in this town, and they started collecting as much data as they possibly could. And then they said about sorting through it and publishing papers based on the findings. Yeah. And you mentioned the cohort earlier, and I'm just going to go ahead and say each of these Cohort names is a great band name. Okay. All of them. That's a blanket great band name statement. So the initial you said when they went out and got another 740 people and those were the people who had the early signs of CBD. Yeah, they were included in there. Okay. That's the Framingham Cohort. That's everybody. That's the first group. Okay. All of the first group combined was the Framingham Cohort. That's kind of an emo folkie banner. Then in 71, they said, you know what? These people are having kids. So what would be awesome is if we started studying these children in their lifetimes, and they were known as The Offspring Cohort. So it's like an Offspring cover band. Okay. That's terrible. It's not bad. What was Offspring? I don't even know. Oh, remember, you got to keep them separated. I do remember that song. They had a couple of good songs. Yeah. And I think the guy, if I'm not mistaken and I'm not thinking of Milo from The Descendants, this was the guy from Offspring went on to get a PhD in oh, really? Like biochemistry or nuclear physics or something really impressive. Interesting. Yeah. I have no idea about any of that genre, whatever that genre is. I'm not sure what that is either. The Offspring were kind of their own thing. Yeah, but isn't it a part of just the whole, like, what was that tour? Like, the vans, Warped Tour and all that stuff? Yeah, I know nothing about any of those vans. I bet they were on Warped Tour. Now that you mention it. They were not definitely not a part of Lilith Bear. No, but ironically, they did go to a couple of dates just as audience members, probably, so all right, so the Offspring Cohort were the kids. There was about 5100 of them, and then they included their spouses, which was a big deal because, like I said, adding the kids allowed to look for hereditary functions as far as CBD goes, and then the spouses just gave that extra layer of examination when they weren't related. Right, yeah. So it's almost like a built in control group as far as looking at hereditary stuff goes. Right, for sure. And then that was also, like, I've seen it remarked on. Ma'am, my brain is a little broken today. Okay. But adding the kids as a second cohort was just a stroke of genius because even before they had any idea that we were going to be able to easily examine genes and DNA, they started building this study data that can be mined now for genetic stuff, thanks to these guys foresight by adding this Offspring Cohort. Yeah, that's pretty cool. The first omni. Cohort. First of three. Those are all three good band names. Not bad. And this was when they started getting that diversity. They said, hey, maybe we should sort of officially include this and break this out. So that was made up of about 500 people of Native American descent, african American descent, hispanic, Indian, Asian and Pacific Islander. Right. First and I guess second and third on the cohorts. And that was that's surprising to me that it took that long when they knew out of the gate that it wasn't representative of America as a whole. Yeah. That's not to say they didn't have any of those people in the study, but they officially recruited more, isn't that right? That's my impression, yeah. Okay. Yeah. I don't know that the original Cohort was entirely white, but from what I understand, it was pretty so majority white that it was not representative of America population wise. And by the way, Omni Cohort, that's obviously an EDM band. Okay. That would probably tour with, like, The Crystal Method or something like that. And then finally, the third generation Cohort, or Gen Three, which is their album title, that started in 2002, and I think they're expected to shut that one down next year. That I thought was really weird. Why shut any of them down? Why not be like, we're going to follow you to the grave, man. We might even dig you up in ten years after you're dead in case we figure out something new to do with you. Yeah. And these are kids who had at least one. Parent and the offspring cohort. Is that right? Okay. And then there's another one called The Offspring spousal cohort. The New Offspring spouse cohort. Right. That's just a weird one. Yeah. They're getting a little meta. Yeah. So the New Offspring Spouse cohort is made up of spouses who, for whatever reasons, weren't part of the original offspring cohort and have at least two kids in the gen, three cohort. Is that correct? Yeah, it gets a little wonky, but the point is they're like adding more and more people in the town. As the town is getting bigger and as the town's getting more diverse, they're making the study reflect this population more and more with the hopes that it's going to reflect America more and more. And again, the study designers and directors have always known that this isn't just like a perfect snapshot of America. There's always been criticisms of it, and I don't know. You want to take a break before we get into this? Yes. Okay. We will do that right after this. Okay. So I said we were going to get into criticisms, but first we should probably talk about some of the successes, right? Yeah. And like I said earlier, that so much of what we learned from this today seems just so brainless. But it's important to remember that before this, even though you think, like, yeah, you smoke cigarettes, you're going to increase your risk of heart disease. It seems like such a second nature thing to know now, but until you have actual scientific proof, you can't say something like that. And this study gave us a lot of these things that we take for granted now is obvious. Right. And prove them came out of this study in particular. Cigarettes was a big one. Sure. I read in this article I can't remember where it came from, Chuck, that I sent to you, where they were talking about how one of the reasons why cardiovascular disease spiked in the 40s was because they were giving free cigarettes out to all of the GIS during World War II. They had, like, an endless supply of free cigarettes over there and that they think that directly led to a rise in deaths from cardiovascular disease. Sure did. But no one knew for sure. Some people probably suspected every once in a while a newspaper would quote them. They would be called a crackpot or not by somebody else in the article, and that would be that. Right. So these guys went to town, like, establishing a link between smoking and cardiovascular disease. They tried very hard to connect diet and cardiovascular disease and had very mixed results, so much so that some of their early work in that realm was just went unpublished for the most part. They just kind of were like, we don't understand this, so we're not going to include this. But some of the other ones were stroke. Like, if you have cardiovascular disease or at a much higher risk for stroke. Nobody knew that conclusively before. Yeah, they confirmed that things like cholesterol and blood pressure abnormalities increase your risk. Irregular heartbeat, atrial fibrillation increases your risk five times. Menopause. Yeah, that was a big one. Super big one. Here's one. Seriously, this was figured out in this study that physical activity decreases your risk for cardiovascular disease, while lower physical activity and obesity increases your risk. Again, this is stuff that we're like, of course, who doesn't know that? Well, America in the world didn't know that until Framingham Heart Study actually published its results. Yeah. Here's one that if you're in your go to get a physical, there's a pretty good chance that at some point after your labs, your doctor will talk to you about your FRS score. Your framing and risk score. It is still widely used today as the standard. And that is the very sad moment where your doctor says you have this much of a percentage risk of developing heart disease within ten years from this state, they tell you 103% risk. You say, well, what can it go up to? And they say, 100%. Yeah, that's not good. So the Framing of Risk Score is based on a bunch of different risk factors. And by the way, the term risk factor was coined from the Framingham Heart Study, so that's another thing it gave to the world. Your risk factors are based on your age, your gender, total cholesterol, HDL cholesterol, whether you have diabetes or not, whether you smoke or not, and your systolic, blood pressure. You put all those together, each of those gets a score. You can come up with a really good indicator of whether you're going to come down with a cardiovascular disease in ten years. If you're a white guy to a lesser extent, if you're an African American guy to a much lesser extent, if you're a woman of, I think, any ethnicity. Do you get a physical every year? I try to. Oh, it hasn't been a year yet. I'm just under a year right now, but I need to find a new doctor. How's your cholesterol? It's great, man. My family dude. Oh, yeah. It runs high. Well, I mean, I certainly don't do myself any favors with my weight and my diet, but me, my brother, and my sister are all on cholesterol medication. Oh, is that right? Statins? Is that what it's called? Yeah. And my brother is in great shape, and so is my sister. So it's just a totally bright family tradition. Just naturally high cholesterol, huh? Yeah, well, I mean, my dementia runs in my family, so I'm toast one way or another. Oh, yeah, it's basically you look at your family history and spin the big wheel and say, what's going to kill me? Right. It's like, Come on, medical science. Find a cure for mine. Let's go with that one first. Well, thank God for Statins. Now my cholesterol is great, so since I last went to the doctor, I've begun to introduce butter into my diet way more than I ever had before. Real butter? Yes. Of course, if it has, like, a picture of an Amish person on the cover of the package, go with that butter. Yeah, the goody Daniel's Butter. Yes. And I actually read a taste test on maybe ranker or something like that of butters, and apparently the ones that are, like, $20 a pound really don't taste much better than, like, carry gold that you get at the grocery store, just about any grocery store. So I found, like, that's good. I'm not really missing out on anything. I'll just eat more cheap butter, and just, like, a little bit of butter on some bread is a really delightful little treat ten times a day. So I'm actually really interested to see what my cholesterol is like this year. I'm basically just performing a test on myself right now. Well, and they've learned so much in the past, like, ten years or so about good fats and bad fats and low fat foods really not being all they're cracked up to be, because then they're packed with other things that are bad for you. Yeah. Especially high fructose corn syrup. Yeah, it's good. We go with a good local butter called Banner butter. It's good, and who knows if it tastes any better, but it's locally made, so that's always nice. Is it made from those doomed goats across the street from you? No, we just fed them yesterday, though. Did you go, I'm so sorry for what's going to happen to you. No, I don't think they're doomed. I think they are being raised again and sent to Jamaica. Not for food. For what's? For milk and cheese to raise people's spirits. Well, they certainly do that. Look at those goats playing. But yeah, it's not like every goat has to be eaten to have worth. No, I agree. I'm just saying they're also milked and they're cheese. We save all our emily is a Juicing theme now, so we have a lot of green scraps now, so we just save them all. And then about two times a week, we'll take the kid over there and feed the goats, and it's pretty fun. They bray at us now when we leave our house. Yeah. They're like, hey, bring that over here. I'm pretty boomed. Yeah, they love it. So you guys have green scraps. Let me give you a little piece of advice to pass along to Emily. Okay. One word, but I'm going to pronounce it, like, two vitamix. Oh, dude, we've had a vitamix for, like, ten years. Is that what you use? Yeah. You shouldn't have scraps. You got to throw all that stuff in there. So you get the fiber, too. No, we don't throw, like, the butt end of the celery stock in there. Okay. All right. Stuff like that, I got you because there's, like, juicers that just extract the juice and leave all of the fiber. I thought that's what you were talking about. No, well, we do two things. We have the vitamix for a lot of the green smoothies and stuff, but then we are also juicing some of the stuff and we'll give those the juice scraps to the goats, but we do both. I got you, like, every morning now with some sort of green juice and smoothie. Okay, so you do have, like a juicer juicer then, too, right? Yeah. Okay, I have another piece of advice for you. You're going to love this one. Get yourself some good mezcal. So hard to find these days. Juice, some cucumber. Yeah, we've been doing that. A little bit of lime juice, which you don't need to run through the juicer. And then some sort of sweetener and thank me later. And then mescal. Yeah, which as you like, because then we've been drinking the vodka with her fresh juices cocktail. Yeah, that goes really well with the two. This is a different this is something different. You know, the mescal really stands out with the cucumber. Makes it pop. Yeah. Give it a shot. All right, let's bring this home. Let's stop torturing all these poor people who are still listening. I think we got off track with butter. Yes, I think so, too. And goats. So FRS is what we were talking about. Oh, here's another one for you. Just some little ancillary. Things they've learned over time, because it's not just about CBD. They've learned about things like depression and stress and anxiety, sleep apnea, for one, increasing your risk of stroke. And then they gave a really ingenious thing when they just said, hey, we've got all these people over this big chunk of time, so why don't we start seeing if people give us a little bit of brain matter upon death and we can start looking into things like Alzheimer's and dementia. Yeah, and they've actually found recently, at least in the framing of population, dementia is going down, which hopefully means that it's going down in the larger population as well. But, yeah, they have all this study data and they say, well, let's start mining it for other diseases as well. And it's becoming not just a gold standard for cardiovascular disease, but for other neurological diseases as well. And eventually, almost certainly, it will become the gold standard for genetic investigations into diseases as well. Yeah, and like we've been talking about the lack of diversity, basically, this is really good results for white dudes. They have since over the years, included other calculators for minority groups. For women. The at risk calculator is for British minority groups. The Reynolds Risk score has been developed for women and I think a couple of others, too, where they've tried to take all this data and then tailor it to a specific group. Yeah, they've also found that people who go on vacation tend to have lower incidences of cardiovascular disease. So remember to vacate at least twice a year. To vacate. What else? That thing about dating people who look like you, that was interesting. Yeah, I guess they saw that in the initial cohort. A lot of married couples look alike, and they think that people were preferentially seeking out people about their height, their weight, maybe their hair color, who knows? But that's largely gone away in the second and third cohorts. I also read an article that said that they found that human evolution is still going on. They're noticing that each generation of women is slightly shorter, slightly plumper, and I'm talking like a 10th of an inch shorter and something like a half of a pound heavier, but that this is traditionally tied to being able to more easily have live births. Another way to put it is having kids. It is a lot easier to have kids. Right. What is wrong with me? So they think that this is like they're seeing in Framing evolution still in place, which very much contradicts what a lot of people have long said, which is humans took ourselves out of evolution a while back when we started intervening in medicine and things like that. So just cool pictures of humanity that this is provided. It's pretty sweet. Yeah. Pretty great study, actually. It is. And hopefully this will be I know they had a little trouble getting extended funding at one point, and they had some private institutions that stepped up, some kind of unusual ones, like Oscar Meyer and I believe one of the cigarette companies. Right. And then Nixon eventually he got out the checkbook and wrote him a big fat check. Probably the thing that he's most known for is president, too, I think. So continuing the Framingham Heart study, I read that he got out the checkbook or twisted the arm of the National Heart Institute because one of the early champions of the heart study was Nixon's personal doctor. And that's how it all went down. He's like, Turn your head and cough and give us $50 million. You got anything else? No. Well, we could probably just talk about framing them for days, but we're going to stop now. I would urge you to go read I'm not even sure when it was written, but a CBS Sunday Morning article from maybe like the early 2000s about framing them and the heart study, and it really just kind of gives you a picture of the people there. And then I also saw one that was critical of it that was pretty interesting, called Framingham Follies on something called Proteinpower.com. Just go read them both. You'll enjoy it. And since I said you'll enjoy it, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this follow up on the beach near the Hearst Castle. I think a couple of weeks ago we talked about when I went and thought I didn't think they were walruses. I just couldn't remember what they were, and they are in fact, elephant seals. I said they were sea lions. I was wrong. Oh, that's right. You did say sea lions. Well, that's right. Hey guys, listen to the show in Walrus and Chuck referred to the beach near Harsh Castle. They call it Pedros Blancas elephant seal rookery. I think it's funny that you had mentioned that because for our honeymoon last June, my husband and I stayed in Oceano for a week near Pizza Beach, and one of our activities for a day was to go to Hurst Castle in Elf and Seal Beach. Of course. Hers Castle was amazing. I still haven't been in there. I need to check that out. You know, that one party scene in Billy Madison was filmed at Hurst Castle. I never saw that stuff. And getting to see the architectural history and artifacts that reside there were great. But the beach, unfortunately, on that particular day was pretty quiet. I think it was nap time by the time we got there because most of them were sleeping or adjusting and going back to sleep. Well, it's still fun to see them. Sure, it's not like they're out there with a beach ball like in cartoons. It's fun to be overpowered by their stench. When you're downwind of that massive elephant seal, there were a few males that started an altercation, but that ended pretty quickly and wasn't all that noisy. I think the most interesting thing on that day, besides seeing them up close, is watching them sleep in the water first. I got a little nervous because I wasn't sure if they were alive, but after several minutes of watching one of them, it moved once the waves pushed it close enough to the rocks. However, if you do suggest people to go there, please tell them to be aware there are no feeding of the squirrel signs. There was a group of preteens that didn't regard the sign and literally got chased by a big fat squirrel. It was hilarious to watch, but a little scary. Thanks for the show. Hope you're doing well. Keep up the work. And that is Morgan body. And Morgan actually just emailed back when I told her she was going to be on and said, OMG, no way for exclamations. Thanks. Smiley face emoji. And then she inserted, I guess, her previous surname, morgan Myers body. Okay. Way to go, Morgan. Thanks for the emojis. And the exclamation points to all four. If you have a story you want to straighten us out with, you can tweet to us at Joshua Clark or at syskopodcast. You can also go on to Facebook.com charleswchuckbriot. You can also visit facebook. Comstuffyshonow. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestuffworks.com and join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com. A 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 The Gap and listen today." | |
4599b8f2-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-0b84bc23a98f | Short Stuff: Robert Johnson and the Devil | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-robert-johnson-and-the-devil | Did the legendary blues singer really sell his soul to the devil in exchange for amazing musical skills? Probably not! But there’s still an interesting story there and it features the Coen Brothers. | Did the legendary blues singer really sell his soul to the devil in exchange for amazing musical skills? Probably not! But there’s still an interesting story there and it features the Coen Brothers. | Wed, 05 Jun 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=156, tm_isdst=0) | 12272174 | audio/mpeg | "Hello, and welcome to Short Stuff. There's Chuck. There's Jerry. I'm Josh, and this is well, I already said short stuff. I've already screwed up and wasted time squandered precious Time. Chuck. Let's just get started. Oh, yeah. Like I said. Oh, yeah. Who was the gosh? I can't remember the Simpsons character now. What a dummy. Bleeding Gums Murphy. Bleating Gums Murphy. Well, he played the sax. Yeah, I know, but I don't know. He was a jazz man, not a blues man. He was a hep cat. He was super. Hep he wore, like, sandals year round without socks, with suits, I believe. Yeah. This is about the blues, and specifically Robert Johnson. And I have an interesting relationship with the blues. I love occasionally putting on, like, sunhouse or Robert Johnson or something like that and enjoy it for a bit, but then I have to turn it off. And I also recognize that blues is the foundation of rock and roll. Like full stop. Right. But I also hate like I just call it the Blind Willys blues. It's a place here in Atlanta, this legendary blues bar. It's like the blues version of smooth jazz. Yeah, it's like where you see, like, the 52 year old in flip flops and cargo shorts up there playing the blues. That's the stuff that makes me hate the blues. Despite loving rock and roll and recognizing that blues is the foundation of that, I'm with you, so you can be selective. It is complicated, actually. That's really a good way to put it. All right, so we're talking about Robert Johnson and whether or not he sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads to gain more talent as a blues guitarist and singer. Spoiler that did not happen because there is no devil. What? I've wasted my life. But we're going to talk a little bit about Robert Johnson's history. And he's certainly a man who sang the blues for a lot of reasons. Yeah, he had a pretty rough life. So as a little kid, he got moved from place to place, mostly between little towns in Mississippi and I believe Memphis. And he lost his dad early, and I think his dad left his stepfather abused him, and he just kind of had it rough, especially after he became an adult. He married his girlfriend, Virginia, and they had a kid, and Virginia and the baby died during childbirth. And so he kind of got unmoored after that and very quickly started singing the blues more than ever. Became a pretty hardcore alcoholic, I believe, as a result. So, yeah, he definitely had it rough. And he lived the life that you could live to be the foundation of the blues, basically, which he grew up to be. Yeah. And they think he even he's a member of the 27 Club, perhaps the first, even, if you really think about it. But he died at 27 years old, supposedly out of and records are tough on guys like Robert Johnson, but supposedly was poisoned by the husband of one of his lovers when he was 27 years old. Right. So in that time, though, he managed to create, like, a body of work that, like you said, is basically pointed to as one of the major blocks in the foundation of rock and roll. This is in the he was playing prolifically, right? Yeah. And he followed in the footsteps of he wasn't the first blues guitarist by any means. No, he wasn't. He wasn't. And in fact, there's the story. And this is the whole thing where it's like, why did he sell the solar? What's the story? We're going to tell you the story. The whole thing starts back in 1930 in Robinsonville, Mississippi. And there is a juke joint where the blues is being played by a couple of legends. Sunhouse, who you mentioned. Yeah. Love it. And I think who else was there that night? Willie Brown was playing that night. And these guys were already established as Delta Bluesman. Right. And the house is packed. And I guess in between sets, a very young Robert Johnson came up to the stage and grabbed and I'm sure the stage is just a chair that was on the same level as the other chairs or wherever people were sitting there standing. And he grabs a guitar. Not even his guitar, I mean, the audacity. Right? Yeah. And he starts playing. And because it's Robert Johnson, you would assume that everybody was just stopped transfixed at how amazing he was. That is not how it went down at all. As a matter of fact, no, he wasn't very good. And Sunhouse, he said that people came and told him, why don't some of you all go down and make that boy put that thing down? He's running us crazy. Right. Because his playing was so bad. Yeah. And this is humiliating enough. They went over and basically said, you not only need to stop playing, you need to leave this jukejoy you just showed. You're actually not cool enough to even sit here as, like, an audience member anymore. So he left and he disappeared and he vanished. And then a year later, as legend has it, right, at another blues place, again, willie Brown and Sunhouse were playing and Robert Johnson shows up and he shows up with a guitar, his own guitar this time. And he starts playing. And it's like nothing anyone else has ever heard. This guy has turned insanely good almost overnight. And he's got a 7th string on his guitar and everyone was like, what? Yeah. And he used it to great effect. Eric Clapton put it kind of succinctly. He said that he was simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings and lead on the treble strings, which had the effect of sounding like there were multiple people playing when it was really just him on that seven string guitar. That's how fast and how varied the music he was playing was, and no one had ever heard anything like it. Yeah. So the legend is that he went down to the crossroads during that time, sold his soul to the devil, and Satan granted him with these special talents in exchange for his soul. But like you already spoiled, that actually probably didn't happen. So should we take a break? We should take a break. We'll do some more explaining when we get back. Hey, everyone. 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Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the homepage and enter code stuff. Okay, Chuck. So we've established that there actually isn't a devil unless it's the greatest trick you ever pulled. We may have just fallen victim to that. But not only so, does that mean that the story didn't happen in that sense? It probably didn't even happen to Robert Johnson. There seems to have been a case of mistaken identity because there's a story of an earlier blues man who is not related to Robert Johnson, but had the same last name. His name was Tommy Johnson. And if you're a fan of the movie, oh, Brother, where Art thou? Yes. And you are only familiar with Robert Johnson, like me, you may have been wondering all this time why they didn't just call that character Tommy Johnson Robert Johnson, since he was clearly based on Robert Johnson. Well, it turns out I know now that the Coen brothers did their homework. They tend to do that. Yes, they do. So, yeah, Tommy Johnson was in that movie and had sold his soul to the devil in that movie. It's been covered elsewhere. There was a great movie to me, crossroads with Ralph Machio. Was it good? Well, I mean, it was one of those HBO movies that, as a young kid who got a guitar at 13, watched, like, 50 times. I never saw it. I thought it was pretty great. Steve I, isn't it? Oh, he is, yeah. He plays Satan's right hand man and lead shredder in the main cutting heads competition at the end. Did Pet Morita play Satan? No. He totally should have. No. Who was it? Man, he's been in stuff. If you saw him, you'd be like, oh, he plays a good Satan. Wings houser? No. Tree Williams. No. I don't know. Then those are the only three actors you know. Yeah. Tommy Chong. No. Anyway, I haven't seen it in a while. I'd like to check it out, but there's always sort of been this blues legend all the way around. Where the crossroads? You go meet the devil, you sign up for a lifetime of hellfire in exchange for what seems to be like a good deal on Earth, even though the tail end of that tail always ends is like they die young or something. Right. Don't fall for it, kids. That's right. Supposedly Jimmy Page sold to the devil, too. Sure. Who didn't? So the story, though, seems to have originated with Tommy Johnson. There's a site, Chuck, called Paranormal Academic, which is just like a dream come true for me. I just found it. It was linked to in this House of Works article. Does that mean you're not going to tinfoilhat.com anymore? No, not anymore. I've rescinded my membership. All right. So on Paranormal Academic, there's an excerpt from an interview with Tommy Johnson's brother, who said, tommy told me the story of what happened, and he supposedly went down to the crossroads. He said, Anybody can do this. You get onto the crossroads, get there a little before midnight to make sure you're there on time, which is hilarious that he included a little detail be punctual, and if you bring your own instrument, like great big black man will show up, take your instrument from you, tune it for you, hand it back, and the deal is done. That's how it happens. And that's what the legend became. But then at some point, it seems to have been transposed onto from Tommy Johnson onto the later on, much greater known Robert Johnson. And Robert Johnson seems to have been like, sure, yeah, that happened to me. And you can really see that in some of the song titles of the body of his work. Yeah. Hellhound on my trail. Me and the devil blues. Obviously. The song crossroad Blues up Jump the Devil here's the thing, though. Singing about the devil and talking about the Devil in that community at that time was very commonplace. And Robert Johnson was talking about his demons, right? Not literal demons, just his demons in life because he had a rough go and then fell into alcoholism and chasing women and probably believed that the hellhounds were on his tail or I'm sorry, on his trail. Right. The devil had given him. So that's the interpretation by his grandson Steven Johnson, who also has an answer for that question. Okay, all right, fine. Besides the supernatural, how could somebody go from zero to hero blues legend wise, in just a year like that? And Steven Johnson is like, actually, it's probably more like three years. He actually probably was kicked out of that juke joint for playing badly, and he probably did come back and blow those same people away. But it wasn't a year, it was about three years. And he didn't go sell the devil. He went and studied under a legendary guitarist named Ike Zimmerman, whose family confirms that Robert Johnson was there all the time around that time. Yeah. So, like, the boring but also inspiring answer was practice. Yeah. Don't sell your soul. He got good because he played a ton of guitar, probably because he wanted to get better, but probably also due to a little bit of shame and wanted to go back there and make a name for himself. So he practiced and practiced and practiced like anybody who is good at anything does. That is the true legacy of Robert Johnson, legendary blues man. Right? That's right. Well, thanks for listening. You can read about this article on how stuff works. It's where we got this one, right, Chuck? That's right. All right, well, then, until next time, short stuff away. Stuff you should know is production of Iheart Radio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
455d18ac-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-e7eb25b74aad | Short Stuff: Turbulence | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-turbulence | If you’ve ever had a bumpy airplane ride, you know it’s nothing fun. But have you ever noticed that the pilots sometimes tell you ahead of time to buckle in? How do they know turbulence is ahead? Are they some kind of fortune teller? How can anyone see wind? | If you’ve ever had a bumpy airplane ride, you know it’s nothing fun. But have you ever noticed that the pilots sometimes tell you ahead of time to buckle in? How do they know turbulence is ahead? Are they some kind of fortune teller? How can anyone see wind? | Wed, 20 Feb 2019 17:03:18 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=17, tm_min=3, tm_sec=18, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=51, tm_isdst=0) | 11367761 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Mr. Chuck. And there's Ms. Jerry over there. That's Ms. tuccha. This is, like I said, short stuff. Buckle up, everyone. Yeah. For the turbulent edition of Short Stuff, have you ever had a bad, like a really bad? No, not really bad, no. Yeah, I haven't either. You know, there's actually a classification for that. It's not called really bad. It's called extreme or severe. But there are three types of turbulence. There's light turbulence. It's the kind that kind of shakes like your drink a little bit, and you're drinking this again right there's. Moderate, which is like your drink is now spilling out of your cup, and then there's severe, and that is like the kind where people get hurt sometimes, very rarely die. But I saw photos of a plane ride from Santa Ana up to Seattle. I think. And it was like a Delta flight. And the drink cart was on its side. And they had been serving drinks. And the thing the plane just hit turbulence. Took a 200 foot nosedive. And apparently one of the flight attendants and the drink cart were on the ceiling and it just came down. So it can get pretty bad, but it's very rare, it turns out. Yeah, so if you haven't picked up on it, we're talking about airplane turbulence, and specifically when a pilot knows, when they come on there and say, hold on to your butts, everyone, here we go in the next ten minutes. I've always wondered what the deal was. Well, now we know. Now we know. And we can just bother every passenger next to us till the end of the day. You know how they realize when they make this announcement? Yes. If you really want to get somebody sleeping next to you on an airplane's attention, don't just kind of elbow them. Like, just slowly increase the pressure of your pointy elbow in the ribcage until they wake up. That'll get them talking. Yeah. And regardless, like you said, of how bad it gets, it's usually not that big of a deal. As far as planes go, they're made to take it. I know sometimes if you're sitting on the wing and looking out yeah. It can be a little distressing seeing those things almost flapping. But they're meant to move a little. They're supposed to do that. Yeah. So don't worry, the wing is not going to snap off. Most likely. No. Remember when we talked about cars and how it seems like they're made terribly today because they come apart, but they're actually designed like that to make them easier to take a crash? Same thing with the plane. If it were just completely rigid and brittle, then the wing might actually snap off. So it's supposed to flap a little bit in turbulence. Yeah. And the other part of that is injuries. The FAA said 44 injuries in 2016 due to turbulence. 900 plus million people flying. That is not a lot of injuries. Yeah. I think the most exceedingly rare. There was 13 in 2013. Oddly, there was 17 in 2017. And between 19 82,008, there were only three deaths from turbulence. So it is very rare. And one of the reasons it's not way worse and it's actually getting even better is because pilots are able to predict where the turbulence is coming, because, number one, they're trained to see signs of it. But also, there are an entire network of people on planet Earth back down on the ground who are working to let those pilots know what places to avoid and why. Yeah. So when they go to take off, there's a few types of turbulence to look out for convective. That is kind of the standard thunderstorm turbulence that you might expect. Yeah. Like when air on the Earth's surface gets warm, it rises and it can create clouds as it carries water vapor up and cools. And the taller the cloud, the more turbulent there is in there. That's right. Then there's mountain wave turbulence. And that's when air is just literally cresting over the top of a mountain in a wave like you would see in the ocean. Yeah. Because it's all fluid. I mean, air and water, they're both fluid, so of course they would break like that. You don't want to get your little plane caught up in a breaking airwave. No. And then finally you have the clear air turbulence. And that's the toughest to predict because it's not like you see a big mountain range or lightning popping off in the foreground. That is just air colliding with warm air and cold air colliding with one another. Yes. So it forms jet streams. Right. And that can be problematic because the difference in the direction that the wind is moving and the speed it's moving in can really wreak havoc on your plane. And when you're cruising through a patch like that, very quickly, all of those little bumps and jostles and turns come together to make what we think of as turbulence. That's right. So that is what turbulence says. Let's take a little break here and we're going to talk about how these pilots can avoid it. If you want to know, just listen. So before they even take off, they have started avoiding turbulence. When they get their flight plan together, they don't just say, we're flying from Atlanta to La. So let's just take a left turn after take off and fly west until we get to La. Maybe even take a nap. Yeah, it's very planned out. And although they can't predict every bit of turbulence, they can certainly say, well, we know there's a mountain range here and there is a thunderstorm going on here, so we're going to set our flight plan accordingly. Right, exactly. So they start off on the right foot. Yeah. They also have little handy weather maps, too, because storms can develop even after you've already taken off that weren't predicted. And they can also line up, too. So you might have to choose what storm you actually have to go through. Yeah, if you have to. Right. And so they have weather instrumentation that makes it really simple to choose, like a storm up ahead. That's yellow says if you have a green alternative, choose the green one. Ones that are red, it says you're going to have to course correct. It sounds like doppler, basically. Yeah. And when you course correct, you basically have to get in touch with air traffic control and say, hey, I know we weren't planning on going up an extra 10,000ft, but I need to fly over this turbulence for a little while. And they'll say, do it. And you fly up, you go over the turbulence, you say, Can I come back down now? And they're like, We've been waiting for you to ask, buddy. Come on back down. And you go back down to your original flight plan. Or you may not. Or they may say, you know what? Since you went this far out of the way to avoid this thing, why don't you just take this course instead? Right. And you have a new flight plan after that. Exactly. You got to be nimble up there. You got to be quick when you have your hands on the sticks. Isn't that what they call them, sticks? I think so. I'll bet they do call them sticks. Can you see pilots calling them that? Sure. Ladies and gentlemen, I got my hands on the sticks. I've never heard that. You haven't? Not from a pilot to a passenger. Okay. I think that doesn't leave the cockpit. I got you. What happens in the cockpit? That's cockpit talk. So the mountain turbulence, that is pretty easy to predict because mountains are there. And if a pilot is driven, have flown past the Rockies or the Andes or any big mountain range, they probably already know what to expect there and have routed their plane in such a way where they're not going to get the worst of it. They can also tell by the clouds that are there. Sure. There's some called lenticular clouds, which are lenshaped, but I think it actually kind of traces the contour of a wave. But in cloud form, you can be like, well, I'm going to stay out of there because there's breaking waves of wind right there. Yeah. So, yeah, there's things they can do visually. The problem is the clear air turbulence. I mean, they don't call it clear air. Exactly. And it really is. It can be really rough. Not just because it comes out of nowhere, but because the differences in speed between one spot and another is so pronounced that it can really jar and jostle you. Yeah, for those and this is kind of cool. The thing they count on the most is talking to other pilots. There's a lot of planes up there. And chances are, if you're flying anywhere in the United States, there's another plane on more or less your route just a few minutes ahead of you. Right. And so they're always in touch with one another. They share information. It's not like a Delta pilot won't be like, hey, the Southwest guy is behind us, but don't tell them what's up. Right, exactly. This is going to be so they're always warning each other about what to expect, how bad it is, whether or not you need to really alter your route or maybe just park it at a certain altitude. Right. And so when they get this info, they'll say, ladies and gentlemen, please put your seatbelts on. Get out of the bathroom. Flight attendants put them carts up, I think is how they put it. That's in pilot lingo. And that's usually when somebody gets up, I really need to go. That's the moment I'm like, I have to go to the bathroom so bad. Yeah, but if you're not getting up, and even if they aren't telling you to put your seatbelt on, if you're just sitting in your seat, you should always keep your seatbelt on just because there is such a thing as clear or turbulent. I'm bad about that. It catches everybody by surprise, and then all of a sudden, you're, like, floating up against the ceiling, which is bad enough for you, but you can also come down on other poor, unsuspecting travelers, too. It's about floating people. More like smashing into the ceiling for a moment. Yeah. It's like people who don't wear the seatbelt in the back seat. That's me, too. You're not just putting your own life in danger when you're getting ahead on collision, you're flying forward past the people in the front who did have their seatbelts on, and your feet and your fists in your head are kicking their heads off with you. Yeah. You know what I mean? You got to wear your seatbelt in the backseat. Check. So if they're talking to other pilots in the air, they get a five to ten minute warning. If they're getting a warning from the ground, that's about 20 minutes, up to 20 minutes. So that's plenty of time. That's why it works so well. That's why you don't get more severe cases of turbulence, because everyone's in contact at all times, making sure that you don't feel the worst of it. Right. Which is great. They also figured out that you can't put two planes too close together because planes create weight and that creates turbulence. Sure. And they figured that out the hard way. Apparently, planes have crashed from following too close, coming in for a landing. Don't do it on the road, either. No, certainly not. Although apparently it does save your gas mileage. Oh, drafting? Yeah. Behind like, a semi or something. Yeah. That's why they do it in NASCAR. Right. But it's not safe. No, don't do it. You're no NASCAR driver? No. Unless you are a NASCAR driver listening to this, in which case, draft away. You're doing what you're doing. Well, thanks for joining us on short stuff. We love you. You." | |
How Muppets Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-muppets-work | Jim Henson's Muppets, including the beloved Kermit the Frog, first came to life in the mid-1950s. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the history and nitty gritty details of the world's most famous puppets in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Jim Henson's Muppets, including the beloved Kermit the Frog, first came to life in the mid-1950s. Join Josh and Chuck as they explore the history and nitty gritty details of the world's most famous puppets in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:14:21 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=17, tm_min=14, tm_sec=21, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=239, tm_isdst=0) | 31127160 | 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. 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There are so many songs about rainbows and what's on the other side. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Hey, Chuck. Brian. Hey, Josh Clark. It's a beautiful day here at House of Work, huh? It is. I have a question for you, Chuck. Yes. Have you ever been half sleeping? Have you heard voices, Chuck? Josh? I've heard them calling my name. Is that the sweet sound that calls a young sailing? Oh, I can't remember the next one. It might be one in the same. I think it is one in the same. Yes. Clearly, we are speaking of none other than top 25 hit Academy Award nominated song Rainbow Connection. Yeah. It's performed by a certain Philosophizing Frog yes. In a swamp at the beginning of the Muppet movie. Yes. We're going to be talking about how the muppets work today. I know. Josh is, like, rocking in his chair right now. He's so excited. I love the muppets. Who doesn't love the muppets? Everybody. You show me someone that doesn't love the Muppets and they've got a butt kicking coming to them via me. Yeah. Chuck's the muppet enforcer. Muppet love enforcer. I think we should probably give a disclaimer, Chuck. If anybody is really attached to illusion and doesn't really want to know, like, the nitty gritty details of how puppets are made sure and moved about, right. They should probably not listen to this one, right? People that don't even want to acknowledge that they are puppets. Yeah. The lovers, the dreamers, and me, right? Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. So, Chuck, let's start at the beginning. Let's start back in 1955. Got to start with Jim Henson. Yeah. Well, yeah. There are no muppets without Jim Henson. It even says it right there in the article, how Muppets Work, which you can find on how stef works.com. Right, right. Washington, DC. Has a local TV station, and I think the winter of 1955, a young college freshman, Jim Henson, 55 dude I know. Probably had no idea that this went back that far. No, this guy was starting something huge at this time. Right. I mean, it's puppets. Puppets were relegated to what? Children's birthday parties, stuff like that. This guy's bringing them on the TV. Exactly. Huge. And what was kind of surprising is that this show, Sam and Friends, right? That was his first show. The one on the local Washington, DC. Television station was for adults. Yeah, absolutely. I believe there was some satire involved. Correct. A ted political satire parody. They parodyed other television shows, and it ran for six years and got him on The Ed Sullivan Show. That's a night show. Yeah. And actually, this is where a little lizardlike creature who came to be known as Kermit debuted. Should I do it? Yeah. Hi, home. Kermit Defrog here. This is wonderful. Not bad. Chuck revealed before, I guess, the real the real that's run by a hamster started rolling that he started with Kermit. That was your first voice? First voice. What else do you got? My voices are mediocre at best, but I still like doing them. I got to tell you. You nail Kermit. But I've been doing kermit since I was, like, six. Right, Kermit? Yeah. Well, you've got them. I'm trying to get a yea out of Chuck. Yeah, I can't do it. I have a limited range. Well, lizard like Kermit, as we'll call him, it was joined by some other wonderfully named puppets that weren't quite called puppets yet. These are puppets in Henson's mind. You had Sam York. Harry the hipster. One of my favorites. Right. Professor Magcliffe. I'm surprised it wasn't a hippie rob. No. Hippie rob, yes. Give it another decade. Right. Mush, melon and chicken liver were part of the regular cast. Right. And basically it was Henson and a classmate of his named Jane Nabel yes. Who later became Jane Henson. Yeah. They met up, and she kind of assisted him early on. They fell in love, dated, fell in love, and she was actually replaced when they got married and had kids by one Frank Oz, a 19 year old Frank Oz. And he was originally hired just to be the right hand, literally, of Ralph the Dog. Right. They call that technique right. Handing. We'll get into that, which we'll get into. And Ralph actually, fun fact, ralph the dog with the big floppy ears, who's performed with the likes of Liberace, among others, was actually created specifically to sell purina dog food. Yeah. After he did Salmon Friends, he produced TV commercials for a while with the early Muppets, a bunch of them. So this is clearly we've transitioned into the era where there were Muppets. We went from salmon friends. And now Muppets are starting to come about. Right. Kermit's? Now, frog, he's made that sexual transition from lizard to frog. Exactly. That rite of passage that every lizard has to go through. And there's still no TV show. We're in the everyone's getting to be aware of the Muppets, Chuck. Like you said, they were on The Ed Sullivan Show, the Jimmy Dean Show, which you should have been in the green room for that one. Sausage everywhere. Sure, he did create some pilots, but they never took no one ever bought them up. No. And he got really close with ABC, but they walked on a deal. Right. What really kind of catapulted them into a possible TV deal was the formation of a kids show called Sesame Street. Yes. The Children's Television Network started by Joan Kooney in 1968. Right. And Jim Henson always kind of thought of his puppets and then puppets as for adults. Like, this is adult stuff. Even today, there's puppet up. Uncensored. It's a live, improv puppet show for adults. It's carried on by his son Brian, and that's very much in the tradition of Jim Hanson's original idea, which is these are puppets, but they're for adults. Like, there's just that kind of ironic twist that these puppets are cursing. Right. But apparently, somewhere along the way, he came to figure out that children could be a very sophisticated audience with a quote in the article. Absolutely. So he went along with Sesame Street, right? Yeah, and that's really where it blew up. Everyone who grew up in the United States and probably elsewhere watched Sesame Street as a kid and may still. And that's where we were introduced to Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird and Burton Ernie cookie Monster doesn't get any more classic than that. No. Grover is my favorite Sesame Grover character. Really? Yeah. I did a little video one time with a Grover finger puppet. This is back in, like, the old VHS days where you could edit. Like, I literally had to edit it all in camera as I shot it. Got you. And he's like a Wean song and a Grover finger puppy. Pretty fun, does it say? Nothing to do with karate, chuck no, these are just my early filmmaking days. Got you. It's fun. Okay, so Sesame Street takes off, and it's still going today. I mean, this has got to be one of the longest running television shows of all time. Yeah, I think 60 Minutes has a beat. Maybe General Hospital. Sure. You know, General Hospital has been on since the mid 50s. Who cares? Yeah, but, dude, that's a really long time for a single television show to run. That's a lot of crap. It is. They just shovel it on, don't they? Yeah. Back to the goodness of the Muppets, though. So he's almost there. He's so close. He's been shooting pilots. None of them are getting taken up. ABCs walked and a little show called Saturday Night Live starts up in 1975. Yeah. I did not know this until I read this article. I didn't, either, and I'm a big SNL fan. I'm trying to sound like I did know this already. Okay. The first season included sketches called The Land of Gorge yes. Which were larger puppets. And the SNL writer said, we're not writing for puppets. Yeah. In fact, I think their head writer is famously quoted saying, I don't write for felt, which I thought was kind of who was that? Al Franken? No, it wasn't. Al Franken. I can't remember his name, but Senator Al Franken. Senator Al Franken. So crazy. So that was very short lived. Finally, Henson strikes a deal with ITC, and they start shooting The Muppet Show in London and syndicating it out to CBS. And this is yeah. The pilot, though, I thought was interesting, I should mention, the name of the pilot was called Sex and Violence. I was watching it earlier, and one of the muppets comes out. Not one I could identify by sight. It comes out, and there's this huge thing carved out of stone. It says sex and violence. And the announcer says, and now the end of Sex and Violence on TV. And the Muppet presses a dynamite plunger and blows up the sex and violence. And then the Muppet show theme starts. Well, there you have it. Yeah, that makes sense, then. Yeah. I thought it was just one of those ironic names or something. I don't think so. Like, Jim Henson was trying to be ironically funny. I think he was still but sure. Yeah. Got you. The end of sex and violence. So, yeah. The Muppet Show was born, and the rest is history. The end. The end. Thanks for coming, Chuck. What was your favorite muppet? Eggs in Space. Nice. How did you get your voice to do that? Any time you say those three words together, that happens. Let me try. You should try it at home. I can do this for the judges. Two old guys in the balcony. Yeah. What was it? Statler and Waldorf. Statler and Waldorf. These guys were excellent. And Jim Henson. Actually, voiced waldorf. I guess we should talk about who the creator actually voiced specifically. Okay. Obviously he did. Kermit the Frog. He did. Ralph the dog. He did Waldorf. He did doctor teeth of Electric Mayhem. The Electric Mayhem was the hippie band. Yeah. I think Doctor Teeth was probably modeled after Dr. John. That's a guess, but probably. I think so. Yeah. He had that kind of New Orleans accent, didn't he? Yeah. You want your kid eating the best nutrition right. For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed. Your bed. Yes. We mean that kid. Your dog. Halo Elevate is natural sciencebased 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. 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. 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The little professor. The little affable professor with beaker. Love them. Have you seen Beaker doing Ode to Joy? No. It's pretty cool. It's on YouTube. Really? Type in Meep and owed to Joy and it'll come up. Yeah, he's like to check that. Meep, meep, meep, meep. Pretty cool. And of course, the chef, the chef who was Swedish Chef, who actually has the distinction of being the only muppet with live human hands uncovered by gloves or anything like that. I was watching a clip of The Swedish Chef, and you can very easily see why they did that. He has to put, like, dashes of things in and pinches and stuff in. So he actually has, I believe, Frank Oz's hands. Yeah. And then Henson doing his head. Yeah. And we'll talk about the muppeteering in Mint, too, because it gets pretty intense, so I get ahead of myself sometimes. I know. It's just exciting. And then Frank Oz, of course, which was the other half. And I think the quote in the article, which I thought was cool, is Jim Henson said that Frank Oz was probably the person most responsible for the puppets being funny. Right. Frank Oz is a very funny guy. He is. He also puppeted and voiced Yoda in all Star Wars. Oh, you knew that, did you? Yeah, I think everyone did it. Frank. Oz did Yoda and he did Ralph the dog. I'm sorry? He right handed. Ralph the Dog. Jim did the voice. Remember? That's what he was hired for at eight. That's right. He did the Burt half. He did. Grover, your favorite cookie monster. Animal. He doesn't love animal. I love animals. A lot of screaming on that one. Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear, of course, two of the iconic characters. And Frank went on to direct movies. I mean, he worked with Henson for, like, 30 years. Yeah. And then directed movies. He directed. What about Bob and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and other classics? I have to tell you, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is one of the greatest movies ever made. And he's acted, too. He was in the Blues Brothers? Briefly. Oh, was he the corrections officer who hands him back as prophylactic? Yeah, he is prophylactic. Later on, he reprises that role, sort of. In Trading Places. He plays the officer checking out Dan Ackroyd in prison in that film as well. Got you. So he's a specialist. He plays officers giving prisoners. There the poor guy. Poor Frank Oz. Yeah. So, Chuck, you want to get into a little behind the scenes stuff? Yeah, why not? We might as well. Well, let's start with how a muppet is made. Yeah. Josh, the muppets were created only by Jim Henson. He did all the original sketches, and he built some of the original muppets when he was still kind of a small shop. Yeah. But he figured out pretty quick that he had too many in his head and he needed too many to just do it himself. Right. Yeah. He started out using some materials like paper machete. That didn't work out because it was too hard. And then he tried different types of foam. I think he used foam rubber, but found that that deteriorated. Yeah. So he's reticulated poly foam, which is, I imagine, very much like foam rubber, but a little more durable. Right. And I think it's more flexible because that gave him the opportunity, if you stick your hand in Kermit's head, to operate the puppet, to move your knuckles around, and, like, he would raise an eyebrow, and it would give him a little more feature to his face. Chuck. You know I love Lore. I want to toss this one out. Lizard Kermit. Yes. Pretty great transition. Kermit sure was. Actually made from the skin of kermit was made from fuzzy green coat that Jim Henson's mother owned. And his eyes were two halves of a toy, which I'm not familiar with. I wouldn't either. Wacky stack. Yeah. Wacky stacks I never had in half. Yeah. They always kind of look like Ping pong balls with the little pupils drawn on. Yeah. Well, let's go ahead and talk about that. The pupils? Yeah. They say that they do the eyes last when they're building muppets because it's the most important part. And the pupils are actually very important in this. I didn't know either. The bigger the pupil, the younger the muppet. Right. Pretty cool. Yeah. And it really kind of makes sense. It gets the point across that they're kind of wide eyed and innocent and unfamiliar with the horrors and evil of the world. Right. And it says they also tilt the pupils in slightly to give them more focus. Well, they move them closer together. Yeah. Because if they just put them on these huge eyes where they should be in the middle looked like they had lazy eyes. Right. And the man responsible for this was one of the first guys that Jim Henson hired. His name was Don saline or solen? Solen. I get the impression that this guy was like the man behind the man. In a lot of ways. Jim Henson was a very creative, artistic person, and he knew what he was doing. But I think Don Stalin was the one who was like, okay, I'll make it work. Well, he was definitely the master. Like a sewer. It sounds like he came up with the Henson stitch, which he very graciously named after henson. The Henson stitch, which is, I guess, a method of sewing that hides the seam. You don't want to see a seam right there. It's like, I forgot it's a puppet. Exactly. And this is so chock full of things I never knew. I'm so glad we're doing this. Kermit the frog actually has a stitch, a Henson stitch, going right at the center of his nose. And you would never know it because the Henson stitch and the little fuzzy felt kind of helps to hide it. Yeah. And the fuzzy felt actually is called antron fleets. That's the covering of Kermit and most of the other that kind of muppet skin. Yeah. They actually call it muppet fleece. That fabric sort of like a worn tennis ball. You know, you've arrived when there's a type of textile named after your creation or stitch. Sure. Named after you. Yeah. So most muppets well, there's either two ways you can go about it. There's either the hand and rod method of operating or a live hand. Right. We talked about the live hand, and that is when you literally stick your arm into the arm of the puppet, into a glove, or in the sweetest chef's case, a natural hand. Right. And there's actually two people operating. Let's start with the hand and rod. One hand. Yes. So most muppeteers chuck are right handed, and so their right hand would be inside the muppet operating the head, the face, that kind of thing. Their left hand would be holding the two rods that were attached to the muppet's hand. Grover is an example of a hand and rod one. Right. So the left hand would make the hands clap, that kind of thing. Two very thin dowels. You can move them with your fingers. Right, sure. So one person can operate it. Right. And actually, since most muppets were right handed and they were operating with their left hand, most muppets are left handed right. Since they were operating the hands with it. Yeah. Another cool fact. Except there was one muppeteer who was left handed, and all of her muppets were right handed. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know that. Yeah. I'm learning so much. And then occasionally, clearly, if one person is offering both hands, there's a limited amount of things they can do. That's where the right handing comes in. If you need specific movements done with both hands, then a second puppeteer comes in, operates only the right hand, which is what Frank Oz was hard to do in the case of Ralph. Right. Ernie is another example, too. Is he right handed? Yeah. So there's one muppeteer who are two guys standing next to each other. There's one guy who has his right hand up as high as it can go. Sure. And he's operating the face, and then his left hand is up the arm of the muppet. And then the other guy has his right hand up the muppet's right hand. There's two people operating these three parts, and they do a pretty good job. But you think about it and you look at Ernie or something, and you wouldn't think that there's two people operating. It sounds very cramped and close. And it is. Yeah. Talk about Henson at the beginning of the muppet movie when Kermits on the log. Oh, yeah. Well, sure. When the shots in the movies where you don't see a human well, I guess let's backtrack a little. What they usually do with a technique that Henson invented called platforming up. So they would build the actual muppet stage about six to 8ft off the ground so the puppeteers could stand fully upright so they don't have to bend over. Sometimes, when that wasn't possible, they built trenches for the muppeteers to get down in. And then for the movies, which is what you were talking about for the scenes where, like, Kermit was sitting on the log and singing Rainbow Connection. In the opening of the film, jim Henson was in a little capsule cramped down underwater. Underwater. Sealed with this thing all around, sticking up out of the water, probably disguised as a reed that allowed him to breathe. Exactly. But they were showing off right out of the bat, right out of the gate. They did a 360 shot of Kermit on the log to show that. Right. No wires. It's not a marionette. Pretty cool. Yeah, it was pretty cool. I love that. And then they did scenes where they were, like, riding bicycles. And in some cases, I think they had to have multiple they called it muppet switching, where they had, like, a full body muppet that they would occasionally have to use the marionette wires or they would have a little person in it, or they would have a little person, or they would use a remote control, which came a little bit later. Also, this is my favorite, when they had a muppet driving a car, the car was actually being driven so the muppet would be in the front seat. The muppeteer would be crouched down in the back seat operating the muppet. And then there would be a little person in the trunk driving the car with remote control, looking at a video screen. Yeah. They're actually extremely sophisticated. What they have to do. This is incredibly complex. Imagine having to build like, you have to know exactly what's going to happen in every scene. Right. Then you have to build the set to accommodate a human person and a muppet and their puppeteer. I know. There may be several different levels. It sounds very dangerous. Yes. And then as a muppeteer as well, Chuck, and they have had, since the 70s, monitors strapped to their chest so they can see what their muppet is doing. Right. Which is all backwards. It is backwards. So they have to know that if they are looking at the screen and they want their muppet to move left, they have to move right. Very. I mean, I imagine that the wiring, the neural connections of these people's brains are very unusual. If you could slap them in a wonder machine and take a look at them next to one of ours right. I'll bet you've noticed some real distinction. Yeah. We should write an article on Muffeteers brains. Be good and you're dead on, man. Because one of the puppeteers there's been about 100 of them. One of them named Dave Gold said it takes maybe five years to do everything without thinking about it. In fact, I still find it difficult. And Frank Oz said, what you're doing is so complicated that you really don't have time to think about what you're doing. First your body understands and then your mind grasp what you're doing sometimes. So very complicated stuff. There's one other kind of muppet. We've got Hand and Rod live hand or right hand muppets. And then there's full body muppets. Like Big Birds. Sure. So this is actually Big Birds as tall as he looks. What is he, like 8ft tall? He's pretty tall. So there's a muppeteer in there. Probably a fairly tall puppeteer. Yeah. Platform shoes, five inch shoes. Standing up with his right hand going up to Big Bird's mouth. And it's a reach, too. Yeah. Can you imagine? I'll bet they feel like Neil Pert all the time. Right. You know what? You should look on the article, actually, and there's some really good illustrations, excellent illustrations. It shows like, Big Bird with the person inside of it. And it is a stretch, man. That would get really tiring. Just physically exhausting, I would imagine. Yeah. So the right hand is up, the left hand is controlling the left hand. And then there's a wire connected to the left elbow that's connecting Big Bird's right hand. Or that's controlling Big Bird's right hand. Right. Which is why, if you notice, if you watch Big Bird, when the right hand goes up, the left hand goes down. When the left hand goes down, the right hand goes up because it's like a little pulley system. Right. Chuck, we were talking about Muppeteers performing in trenches on the site set or platforming up or how difficult it is to create these sets. And once you know what they're doing, you can see it pretty easily. Like I was watching a clip of Steve Martin playing dueling banjos with some Muppets classic on The Muppet Show. Right. Classic. And they're doing it, I guess, in between performances because they're out in the theater seats and Steve Martin doesn't move the whole time. So God knows how many pits are on either side of him and how far he would fall if he stepped one way or the other. And then some of the other Muppets are in the Roses seats behind them. Right. So that clearly provides a trench for the Muppeteers, too. Once you kind of know how they did it, you can see the techniques in use. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, I bet it was a cool set to visit, for sure. The sets were usually speaking of sets, there were a couple of ways they could do it. They're either Muppet sized when there was only puppets involved, which would be scaled down, obviously. Or when The Muppet Show is famous for having celebrity guests each week when humans interacted, and as they do in Sesame Street, too. They would have kind of a mix. Some things would be human size. And then they would do is a technique called force perspective, when they would make, like, a door, seven, eight the size of a real door in the background to make it look like it's really far away or just to bring everything to where it all matches up. Fantastic. Pretty cool. Yeah. That is cool. What's the quote from Carol Burnett? Because the article talked about humans interacting with Muppets and what's it like to act with poly or polyphony. She said something like when you're standing next to Kermit and interacting with them, you totally believe him. Right. She was on the puppet show a lot, wouldn't she? Yes, she was. And the other cool thing was they said that between takes that they said the puppets would often just kind of chitchat with the actors. Right. Like making small talk. Just totally buy into it. Yeah. I love it, man. That would have been an awesome show to do. It was a good time for it too. And, Chuck, if you notice, there's so much going on on The Muppet Show. Yeah. They really nailed the realism in part because there are so many Muppets going around yeah. In the big scenes. Right. And then you have the stars, clearly. Like Ms. Piggy Kermit, Swedish Chef Buns and Baker all them. But then you also have some Muppets who you don't really recognize. Background extras, basically. Right. And there's actually a name for these Muppets. They create blank slate. Muppets. And then, depending on what they need, they have all sorts of costumes. Eyebrows, eyes, hair, Noses, all that stuff that they can just switch out real quick. Pretty cool. And what do they call them? Well, there's a couple of names. Originally they were called Anything Muppets, but the one I like, they were called Whatnot. Yeah, I love that. I knew you'd like whatnots? Over anything. Muppets. Well, who wouldn't? The Whatnot. So it'd be a good band name. You know you're a pet mom when your camera roll is all pics of your pet. At Halo, we get it because we are Pet Moms, too. And just like you, we know their nutrition is one of the most important decisions you'll make. Halo is natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science and thoughtfully sourced. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Find Halo at specialty pet stores and online. 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 handson, 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. Yeah, they were basically the background extra of The Muppet Show. And they would just interchange, these guys and girls. Yeah, I guess they were gender specific. Sure. Yeah. Miss Piggy actually had her own costume designer or her own real human costume designer for the Muppets. One of the few well, not few, but one of the Muppets that were closed, a lot of them were in the buff. Yeah. Well, Kermit actually wore his trench coat sometimes. Well, when he was on Sesame Street, he was the roving reporter where he had the trench coat and the hat and everything, which was pretty awesome. I love the idea of a frog reporter. But then on The Muppet Show, his character was the kind of the lead producer of the show. That was kind of the idea of the show. That leads me to the 30 Rock thing I was going to tell you about. Okay. Television show 30 Rock. There's a thing on the internet someone did on a blog, I think, where they linked The Muppet Show to 30 Rock and how they were basically the same show. And Liz Lemon was Kermit trying to pull the show together amid the craziness. And Jank Kirkowski was Miss Piggy. And I can't remember the other characters, but they kind of tied each one to the other. And the only one who they couldn't get a representation of was the Alec Baldwin character, which I thought was pretty interesting. Maybe he would be Carol Burnett. Yeah, maybe so. I think they said he could have been both Waldorf and Statler. Got you something like that. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Chuck I guess that's kind of emblematic of The Muppets, right? The Muppets Show produced a bunch of spin offs. First of all, you've got the three movies, right? Yeah. You've got the Muppet movie. The Muppets? Take Manhattan and The Great Muppet caper. All three of them. Excellent, excellent films. And apparently there's Seth Rogen and Jason Siegel. The actors from Knocked Up were trying to make another Muppet movie. And I don't know if that's ever going to happen, but they were kind of in talks with the hints and people to write a script to make another Muppet movie. Did you ever watch Fragle Rock? Did I watch Fragle Rock? I didn't actually. Dude, Fraggle Rock was on when I was 1112 and 13 on HBO. Right. When I first got HBO. You just answered the question. So, yes, I lived and breathed fragile rock. Okay. I live down there. You will be happy to know, or possibly dismay that there is a Fragle Rock movie that's supposed to have already come out. It hasn't yet, but I imagine it's coming down the pike. It is. I looked it up today, and right now they have the date listed as 2011. Good. Got. So we'll see. Okay. And Fregle Rock is not the only one. Did you ever watch Muppet Babies? I did not. That was after my time. That was right in my time, actually. Embarrassingly. Maybe slightly after, but I still watched it. Okay. Yeah, that was a really good cartoon. Barbara Billingsley played the nanny whose face you never saw. Oh, really? Yeah. They used to have some great adventures. I didn't know. They took me along. And then my favorite was Emmitt Otter's Jug Band christmas have you seen that? Man are you joking? How old are you? It came out 1977. I was six years old. I was one. Emma's Jug Band Christmas. Have you seen it? Jerry? No, Gerry hasn't seen it. Emma Otters Jug Band Christmas is one of the best Christmas specials ever in the history of Christmas specials. I'll check it out. It was awesome. Okay. The Riverbottom Nightmare Band. There were two bands. There was Emma Otter, clearly with his jug band, where these little nice otters that played country jug music, right? And then there was the evil faction, which was the Riverbottom Nightmare Band. And they did this, like, hard rock, heavy metal stuff. And they had a snake muppet that was swimming around in a tank. And that's pretty cool. Really good. I will check that out. I'll add that to a Christmas story and it's a wonderful life. You totally should. Okay, well, that's pretty much muppets. They're still going on. As we mentioned, brian Henson's doing the puppet up Uncensored show. I think you can catch them at Comic Con in San Diego, Australia. TBS heads and stuff. I'm pretty sure if you type in puppet up on the Internet, it'll bring up some stuff for you. There's a Broadway show there is a Broadway show called Avenue. It's like a revision of Sesame Street, but adults. A little more drama. Yes. They had to work it out with the Henson Company to get approval. It wasn't Tony in 2004 for best Musical. Yes. Good move there. Yeah. And I want to just recommend if anyone visits Los Angeles ever, or lives in Los Angeles, if you live there, you know about it. But the Jim Hinton Company is located at the corner of LaBrea and Sunset. And it was the original charlie Chaplin Studios. So it's a really cool old kind of English tutor studio, but it's small. It's not like some big studios right in the middle of Hollywood. So it's not very big. But you drive either now, and it's got a big archway right when you drive in. And on top, there's like an eight foot tall Kermit dressed as the Charlie Chaplin Little Tramp character with the top hat and cane in there. Cool. It's really cool. And the Hitler mustache. Yeah, the Hitler mustache. No, I don't think he has a mustache, actually. So, Chuck, I want to leave everybody with a really chilling thought. Imagine Jim Henson back in 1955, had decided to go into accounting, and this world was a world without muppets. Are you trying to make me cry? Isn't that a weird thought? Are you trying to imagine there are no muppets? It really kind of barrels it into perspective. We should write a book called A World Without Muppet, like some sort of alternative reality fiction. It would be awful. It's nothing but war. So thank you. Jim Henson, who everyone knows, sadly, in 1990, passed away of a kind of pneumonia, and they said it wasn't actually pneumonia, but it was a bacterial infection that shut his organs down, basically. He complained of flu like symptoms to his wife or his ex wife, who he was still close with. I think they were separated at the time and went to the hospital and 20 hours later died. It was very sad. But his children continued that tradition, and his son does not actually do the voice of Kermit, as many people thought his son, Brian, a lot of people thought that he took over for Kermit. It was actually me. I took over for Kermit. Yes, you did. That's my side gig. Yeah. So that's muppets. I could go on for hours. I know you could. I got to stop you right here. We're going to press stop on the stopwatch. Okay. Okay. Chuck, are we doing any listener mail today? No, Josh. No listener mail. Okay. This is a special episode. We want to play it out with a little treat for the fans, a little snippet from song we all know and love. So without further ado, take it away. Thanks for coming, everybody. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more Housetoftworks? 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. 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 holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics. For digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | ||
b8a5c56c-3620-11ea-938d-076d6b87656f | Short Stuff: Haunted Real Estate | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-haunted-real-estate | Do you have to disclose the notion that your house may be haunted upon sale? Listen in to find out. | Do you have to disclose the notion that your house may be haunted upon sale? Listen in to find out. | Wed, 21 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=295, tm_isdst=0) | 12343218 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. This is Josh talking. And there's Chuck sitting there waiting on standby to launch this short stuff about real estate. But wait, scary real estate? Yeah. And this is one that you were pretty convinced we had done before. We may have talked about it, I think, but I cannot for the life of me figure out where. We've never done an episode on selling your house. We've never done one on haunted houses. Like, we've done haunted house attractions. We did ghosts, but I don't know where this would have come up. Yeah, someone will know. Yeah, they'll be like, you guys really screwed up again. This time you did a short stuff with something you've done already. I quit. How could you be such idiots? I'll never listen to you. I question everything you say from now on and everything you've ever said. And stop being so liberal. I hate you. Stop talking about politics. Oh, man. Election. Your emails have been fun, but this is about something else. This is the scary season, and this is about something that I was kind of curious of. Not that I've ever looked at a haunted house, but I just kind of wondered if your house is haunted, or at least you think it is, and you believe in that kind of thing if you have to tell a potential home buyer, if you have to disclose that, like, the basement links, the windows are fairly drafty, and there's a spectrum on the third floor. A what? Excuse me, I didn't catch that. Did you say specter? Specter says what? Yeah. So your house is pretty old. Do you suspect it's on it? No. Although it's funny you mentioned that last week there was one night where a few weird things happened and they weren't like noises, they were just like all of a sudden something would be in a weird part of the house. I can't remember what they were, but three very not intuitive placements of things. Where I was like, did you put this there? And I was like, what? And then suddenly you guys look like Little Orphan Annie with cartoon sweat jumping off your forehead and your pupils were gone. Maybe, but we kind of laughed. We were like, Is this house haunted? But I think after 13 or 14 years, we would have seen something by now. I agreed. I'm sorry to get off track because I know this is short stuff, but have you watched The Haunting of Bly Manor yet? No. Oh, my God. Is it really scary? Maybe the best of the best anyone's ever put to film. It's so well done. It's so great. And I wasn't a fan of the Haunting of Hill House. This is everything you wanted, the Haunting of Hill House and basically every ghost movie or TV show to be. It's so good, man. Wow. You're going to love it. I put it on par with, like, the others and the orphanage. It's just beautifully done. Okay, awesome. I'll check it out. Okay. I didn't see the other one. Yeah, I watched a little of it and then just kind of stopped. But check this one out. Okay. All right, so the question you posed was, if you think your house is haunted, do you have to disclose it? And the short answer is, no, you don't have to disclose it. But the longer answer is, if you don't disclose it, and you actually do think your house is haunted and everybody else thinks your house is haunted, then you could actually get sued. If the person you sold your house to finds out that the house is haunted and decides they don't want to own a haunted house and you might have to give their money back. And now you own two houses, the one you bought after you sold that house and the one you sold originally. And that's actually based on case law from the 1980s in New York, didn't it? Yeah. There was a woman named Helen Acley, and she and her family lived in an old Victorian in upstate New York, and she claimed that they had ghosts there. And she didn't keep it quiet. She was in the newspaper. She was in Reader's Digest. She kind of talked to anyone who would listen about they were on the ghost tour of the town. And everybody knew this, I guess, except for the guy that bought it when Jeffrey Stambowski. And in 1989, he came from New York City, bought the place for a tidy sum of 650 grand. Yes. Back in the was a lot. Yeah, totally. I mean, this must be quite a house. And then the neighbors were like, oh, so you bought the old haunted Acle place. And he was like, what? And he got mad and sued. Originally, the judge said, no, sorry, it's kind of buyer beware. Yeah. And then that was overturned in an appeal. And I think you should read the part of the decision there. It's pretty good. Okay. This is me doing an appeals court judge for New York reversing the decision in Stanbowsky versus Acley. Okay. Yes. Whether the salts of the spectral apparition seen by defendant seller are parasychic or psychogenic. Having reported their presence in both a national publication, rita's Darn Just and the local press in, respectively, wrote the court, defendant is stopped, prevented from going back on her word to deny their existence, and as a matter of law, the house is haunted. So, for those of you listening, this is just a little preview of what's to come for our annual Halloween episode. I'm down to one accent. Basically, I got one accent. He's doing accents now, everybody. Twelve years in, I'm doing accent. It's the best news that I've had in a long time. Josh is doing accent. Well, I was doing it for the Halloween episode, and I just thought I'd shot it out for this one. I love it. Yeah. Because in real time, we just read that, but this will serve as a little teaser. So just hold on to your hats for that one, everyone. And in fact, maybe we should take a little break and then I can get myself together and then come back right after this. Okay. So, Chuck, that judge reversed the decision and said no, I think you mean magistrate. This is you have to give that $650,000 back to Mr. Strombosky or Stambosky. I'm sorry. And she did. She had she was stuck with two houses now. And the reason why is, traditionally with law, it's buyer beware caveat emptor, which is basically saying, like, if you didn't take the time to examine a house, it's your own fault, basically. But this circuit or the appeals court judge said, well, this is a material defect. Everyone knows it's haunted. So if you tried to sell it, whoever you sell it to is going to find out it's haunted. So it's a problem unless somebody wants to buy a haunted house. So it's affected, the real estate is affected. But then, secondly, you couldn't possibly find this out just by examining the house. Right, right. Except that it's an old Victorian in upstate New York. You could make presumptive chance. Right. But he was saying, like, so buyer beware doesn't apply in this situation, and actually overturned it. So when he did that, there's no state laws on the book. There's no state I think Zillow did a survey. There's no state that says you have to disclose whether people think a house is haunted or not. But because that decision was made, there's no precedent for it, and people can point to it when they try to sue other people and say, look, see, other people have said, this is correct. So find in our favor. Yeah. I think Minnesota has in its disclosure law something that says it free sellers up from having to disclose non material facts, including if the home has any perceived paranormal activity. So it is actually listed, but it's listed in reverse. Right. Like saying if your house is haunted, you don't have to say so. And I think it depends on what state you're in. I guess this is precedent in New York, but would that be true for everywhere? Yeah, I think that that would apply in the country and possibly even in other Western countries, too, because it's such a rare, unique ruling. I think you could cite it elsewhere. I don't know if it would hold up depending on where you were, but it is legal precedence in the United States. Yes. Well, there's a woman named Cindy hagley. Cindy with an eye, and she is a real estate broker in California. I think she was forced to change the Y to and I when she became a real estate broker. Yes. So she could dot it with a balloon hanging above the sign that's right, that says open house. She's with the Hagley Group and also president of something called Past Life Homes, which is a business where she consults to sell houses that may be haunted. It's pretty cool. Her deal is she's like, listen, you've got to disclose it in a couple of cases if it will affect the value of a home. Kind of like what the court case said, hey, this thing, you can't sell it for as much in the future, so you have to say something. That's one reason. And the other reason, she says, is if it's open and notorious, if everybody in the town knows about this, the person that lived there said, hey, there's a ghost. Trust me, all this weird stuff happened. Yeah, if it's been in Reader's Digest yeah, if it's been a Reader's Digest and it's on a ghost tour, she feels like she has to disclose it. And the other sort of sticking point here is if someone asks directly, hey, is this old spooky farmhouse haunted? Then you'd have to answer if you know something. Yeah, which I think is pretty cool, but that's a useful thing for everybody to know when you're buying a house. Just always ask. I think the worst they could do is be like, you're a cuckoo. But yeah, exactly. Then just send them our way and tell them to listen to this episode. And they'll be like, oh, okay. Now that makes sense. But what about if it's not necessarily haunted? What about if a father killed all of his family in their sleep one night 20 years ago? Creepy. Chuck. So that would be something that's called psychologically affected real estate or stigmatized real estate, something that was, like, the site of a murder, a meth lab, something that's openly and notoriously haunted. Those are called stigmatized properties. And when it comes to an actual physical death, not a haunting or anything like that, but somebody has died in the house, especially if they've died violently, whether by suicide or by homicide. There are actually some states that say you have to disclose this. Almost all states. Don't say you have to disclose it again, though you would be probably better off in the long run just to cover your bases legally afterward, to disclose it after you're basically signing papers, like, by the way, my grandmother died in your bedroom, and then just run out the door with their check. But in Alaska, California, and South Dakota, you actually are required to disclose it ahead of time. Right. And so if someone said, is Bly man or haunted? You would have to say, yes. This is pretty cool stuff. It is. I love stuff like this. So, yeah, I guess the thing here is to be truthful, is to be honest and open about everything from homicides to hauntings to if you've been making math, let the people know. I've been making math here. No big deal. This house is probably just infected forever. Right, well, that's it. That's it about distressed real estate. And if you want to know more about it, go home shopping and see what you find. And let us know what you find too. And in the meantime, short stuff as out Stuff You Should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
How Pet Psychics Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-pet-psychics-work | In the early 21st century a trend of people who claim to be able to telepathically and clairvoyantly communicate with animals has grown. Today, the concept of visiting a pet psychic to find a lost pet, find out why a pet is behaving badly or even to learn | In the early 21st century a trend of people who claim to be able to telepathically and clairvoyantly communicate with animals has grown. Today, the concept of visiting a pet psychic to find a lost pet, find out why a pet is behaving badly or even to learn | Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=16, tm_isdst=0) | 34765499 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles WWF Bryant. That's me. I've mentioned myself already. Have I mentioned Jerry? I think so. Things just keep getting worse and worse. Not the series over there. We're all in the Christmas spirit. I think this is the last show we're recording this year, right? Yeah. We're ahead of the game a little bit, so we can have a cushy couple of weeks. So we're hammered. Not true. You got your coffee? I got my soda water. Lacroix. Lacroix soda water? Yeah. My coffee is neither Spanish nor Irish nor anything like that. No. What is Spanish coffee? Oh, it's the better of the two. What is it? Well, it depends on your recipe, but you get a little bit of rum. Okay. You get a little bit of triple SEC or I can't remember the other name for it, but good. Triple stack. Yeah. Put them together in a tempered snifter or an Irish coffee glass fire. Tempered. Make sure it's tempered or else you're about to hurt yourself. Yeah. Bust on it. You like it. It's got to be high proof. Rome, you light the rum triple SEC combo. Just let it burn out for a second. Or you can blow it off. You don't want to burn off too much of the alcohol. Yeah. And you add some espresso, some kalua, and then top it off with a little whipped cream and nutmeg, man. It's good stuff. And that's just one version. There's plenty of other versions of Spanish coffee that makes Irish coffee look silly. They're just like I don't put down Irish coffee for someone to be in the coffee and drink it. Pretty much. It's also called the eye opener. Yeah. I love the simplicity of the Irish just doing that. I love that. Have you seen the great country? I don't know if it was a new one. Last week I started watching The Simpsons again after years off. Yeah. And it's awesome, man. It is. Back there was one I don't know if it was new or not, but Krusty syndicated himself around the world so he could make a lot more money. So there's like a Jamaican krusty? There's, like, all these and then the Irish one, depressed alcoholic who would sit at a table on a chair in, like, this spare room. Didn't even do that. Really? Yeah. Would just drink and say, like, these really bleak, depressing things is perfect. And he ended up with his own stage show on Broadway and everything as the Irish crusty. Yeah. Awesome. That's a good one. I have to check that out. Yeah. That was my Intro to Pet Psychics. All right. You know that cat sitting over there knew everything I was about to say. Oh, yeah. Not many people know we have a studio cat, and I wish we did. How awesome would that be? Studio cat? Yeah, that'd be great. You get gaming in here, wouldn't it? No, it's already pretty warm in here as it is. A cat would love that. Yeah. All right. So pet psychics factor fiction. They're fiction. Are we debunking right now? The thing? Well, I am of the Fordium ilk. All right. I think that using science as a means of avoiding scientific investigation of something is a slap in the face of science, and that science should be used to exhaust all avenues. And just because we can't currently explain something using science doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I think there's a whole echelon of stuff out there that does exist that we can't quite explain yet. Yeah, sure. I don't know if pet psychics fall into that one, but I'm not one to just overtly poopoo something out of hand. Okay. That said, I had a hard time, like, taking this entire article seriously. Yeah. Well, you want to know something? Yeah. Emily just went to a pet psychic. I thought that there's probably, like, an 85% to 90% chance that something like that was going to come up. Yeah. We had to put old Lucy down, and Emily went in the following week. We have a local pet psychic. I'm surprised having one there probably is. Yes, but one near our house. And she went and talked to this lady. Was it comforting? She said it was really interesting. And there was less talk about Lucy and more talk about, like, me and our other animals. And she wouldn't tell me a whole lot because she didn't want me to poke fun at it. And I tried to be super supportive, and I was sure, of course, I fought every instinct I had to you're. Like, that sounds like a great time. Neat. How much was it? But Emily and she asked me not to say this, so of course I'm going to say it. She is getting books now herself to read because she feels like she is very intuitive with animals and that she is very intuitive with animals. And so she's going to poke around there and not to do it for a living or anything. Right. Just to do it with your own dogs at home. Yeah, just to see if she can become more in tune with our animals. And they are called animal intuitive sometimes, or communicators, not necessarily pet psychics, because that makes you sound a little crazy. There seems to be, like, a whole gamut of people that would fall under the umbrella of pet psychics. Yeah, like a horse whisperer or Caesar Milan, some people might say is an animal communicator, that they're just maybe more in tune with the signals that animals send out. And they can send signals to animals. Yeah, but that I fully believe. Okay, so that's totally different from what a person who claims to be a pet psychic says is going on. Well, yeah, but not always. Like, this lady Emily went to sounded more like an animal intuitive and communicator than a medium saying, I'm talking to Lucy, she's in a better place. She's playing with your grandfather in heaven. Right, but there are pet psychics that claim to do that and charge people money for that. Yeah, just like real psychics. Sure. All right, so let's get into it. Well, I thought we already had. Well, I guess we have. I just wanted to go ahead and drop that bomb about Emily. I think you're in trouble. So pet psychics? No, she didn't listen. They claim, depending on who they are, there is a spectrum of pet psychics, like you said, that claim certain abilities, but some claim that they can actually telepathically communicate with animals in their mind. Right. And, like, one step beyond intuition, like, we're actually talking. Right. Not only are we talking, we're transferring images from one mind to another. Yeah. In some cases, they are talking. Like, there's a pet psychic who claims that when she speaks to animals, they respond to her in a childlike voice. The animals have childlike voices? They speak like children? They do in Disney movies. Yeah. So why not? But basically, at its most supernatural, I guess it's most extrasensory. Pet psychic, what they're claiming to do is a convergence of clairvoyance, which is farsight, and telepathy, which is mind reading, and they're putting these together, and then if you already have a hard enough time swallowing that, you may have an even harder time following it when you realize that they're saying they're doing this with animals, which may or may not even be self aware. Yeah. It's hard with humans to believe that someone might have ESPN telepathy and we speak the same language, so it might be even a deeper reach to say that you can do that with a dog, let's say. Yeah. Okay. Emily went to a pet psychic. Yeah. She went after Lucy passed on, basically to find out how Lucy was doing. Yeah, I think she was just curious about the she had been curious for a while, and this afforded her an opportunity to go see a pet psychic, I think. Right. It gave her a good reason. Okay, so that's one reason people go see pet psychics after the death of a pet. Sure. Another one is when a pet is sick or injured or ailing. Tell me if it's time to go. Right. Yeah. Which, man, that's got to be a lot to put on a pet psychic. That's a lot to put on a vet. Sure. Yeah. Although I think vets are kind of like, yeah, let's just go ahead and do it. No, that's not true. And then what if the pet is acting like a jerk all of a sudden? That's another reason people why is my dog acting out? Or maybe my pet is lost. Can you tell me where my pet is? Right. That's a little more of a niche thing. Not all pet psychics will take on those cases. My guess is because the success rate might not be great and they don't want to charge somebody for something and not provide the service that they said they can. Yeah. Because unless you can talk somebody into giving up their bread for you just to say, yes, your dog will be home in a couple of weeks. Yeah. Then how are you going to work that? You can't. But there are anecdotal success stories locating pets this way. If there weren't, this wouldn't be around and a skeptic will say that's just luck and coincidence. Yeah. Like the dog was on its way home anyway. Exactly. This pet psychic didn't call to it with her mind. That's right. Pet psychics say they use electromagnetic energy to accomplish this. There's this energy field in the universe that science hasn't quite figured out yet, but it exists, and we are able to pick up on that energy and use that energy to speak to your animals, whether it's a childlike voice or I think most of them generally do it in pictures, which makes a little more sense to me. Yeah. And this thing, this electromagnetic energy, there's this guy who wrote a book, his name is J. Allen Boone, and he wrote a book called Kinship with All Life, and it apparently is the pet psychic Bible. And it's kind of his relationship with this German shepherd named Strongheart, which is a Hollywood dog that he cared for starting in, I think, the 1930s and who he became telepathically linked with, intuitively linked to. Right. And basically Jay Allen Boon wrote this book on how to communicate with animals, and in it he mentions that all things are connected by this thing called the primal cause midichlorians. Right. And I think that's what a pet psychic would say. Well, it's the electromagnetic energy. Right. The point is, since it binds all things, we can just kind of use that to connect to the mind of another thing, human or animal, because we're all connected by this. Right. It's a lovely thought. It is. Animal Planet actually had a show for a little while about ten years ago called The Pet Psychic. And the lady on there, what's her name? Fitzpatrick. Yes. She claimed that she picked up this in childhood as a result of a hearing loss, although other people say they pick it up as adults after studying it and not necessarily born with a gift, but they just studied how to be more in tune with animals. Right. And apparently a lot of them discovered that they had this gift after they saw the pet psychic on Animal Planet. Is that right? That's what Tracy says in this article. Okay. I wonder what that sounds like, one of those statements. Did she do research on that? I don't know. Did she do a poll? Well, I think that it definitely did kick off a trend. Okay. If it didn't capitalize on it, it definitely kicked it off. All right, so you go to your pet psychic. You're going to go into a room, and they're going to do something like this. Not exactly like this, depending on their methods, but they're probably going to, like, just relax and tell you to calm down. And they will make contact with the energy of the animal, and then they will actually try and contact the said animal telepathically. Right. Like ask a question of the animal or they'll call its name or something to get its attention to. Yeah, or have a picture. A lot of times, like, you don't need the animal there necessarily. In fact, a lot of times I think the animal is not there. Right, because why do you need the animal? No, you don't. You've got the great cause, the primal cause. Exactly. So they go like this with their mind. They do. And then they will accept whatever response they get, relay that back to you, ask you some more questions, or if you have any more questions, and basically act as the go between. You communicating with your pet, just like you would think it goes down. Your pet is saying that they're not happy with the new couch and that's why they're being on it. Right. Or ever since you took that promotion into middle management, you've changed, man. And I'm not happy with this new year. That's why I keep chewing your suits. Exactly. It's pretty controversial, as we pointed out, because there isn't any hard science behind it. There's no proof of this electromagnetic energy. I know a lot of people believe in energy. I mean, electromagnetic energy does exist. Yeah. Not this kind of electromagnetic energy. Yeah. Just want to make sure everyone knew that we believe in electromagnetic energy, but they haven't picked up. They haven't proven that there's any actual sensory organ in people or animals that allow them to tune into this energy. Right. Does that make more sense? Yeah. So during these pet psychic sessions, the purpose of this normally is to get to the bottom of a problem, say, like we said, or to get some sort of comfort or even for decision making. The problem is when a pet psychic asks an animal what's going on, and the animal is thought to respond, well, I'm doing this because of this. Beyond the telepathy, beyond the clairvoyance involved, there's still the question of whether an animal is capable of that higher level of reasoning and thought, that it would be aware of its own reasons for its behavior. That, in and of itself is a controversial aspect of this whole topic. Yeah, that's self awareness. A lot of animal intuitives believe that animals are basically kind of like people that just can't talk. They experience the emotions, they're self aware, and they're just not trapped. But they're in an animal's body. Right. And when you look at your pets, you may think they're experiencing emotions, and it's a controversial subject because it's not something you can prove. Well, it's become more and more proven over the years. Yeah. Nowadays, it is accepted that animals can feel certain emotions. Yeah. Especially the basic ones. Yeah. Like stress, fear, upsettedness. Yeah. Rage, I think, is one lust, separation, distress. Yeah. But it's hard to define an emotion period much less than an animal. Right. But the idea that emotions just belong to humans, or even humans in higher primates is definitely faded. We are aware that animals can experience basic emotions. They can probably experience even higher emotions, too. Like, if you look at a dog and your dog looks sad, and it's sad because you're leaving, you may be correct. You know your dog pretty well. And we've reached the point where science is starting to come to grips with the idea that, yes, animals can experience some higher emotions as well. Sure. And there was actually a conference at Cambridge University in 2012, and it was a pretty heavy hitting conference. The people involved were no slouches, and they came up with the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Interesting. And they basically said that the components that you need to experience emotions and consciousness are not relegated to the cortex. Meaning it's not just humans that are capable to have the hardware for experiencing consciousness. Right. Right. They also said that if you artificially stimulate the neural circuits that are responsible for different aspects of consciousness in humans, you can stimulate the same things in animals, too, which suggests that they have the same equipment. You can also disrupt those circuits using hallucinogens in humans and animals. Okay. And since they have all the equipment, all the science points who said this group of neuroscientists and other professionals, they said there is a pretty good chance that it's not just humans who are experiencing consciousness. The trappings of consciousness, like higher emotions, self awareness, the things that make us human animals might have that make them animals. Right. But the people who think that if your dog is sad, you're probably right. Are right. Dog likes you around, and it might be happy when you're home and sad when you leave. And the whole reason that this has been a thing is simply because humans haven't been able to figure out how to accurately test what is an emotion in an animal. Right. Because animals can't say, I'm feeling like this right now. We can be like that's. Love. You're feeling love? Yeah. Like, when a mother cares for her puppies, it looks like it's showing love. Or is it oxytocin, a hormone in the body that says you need to care for your young? Is it love or care? Or does anyone realize it's love or care? Well, that's the big one. Yeah. Because you can say, we have that same exact neural circuit, and we react to oxytocin the exact same way. So if it's love for us, why isn't it love for the animal? Well, the key is we think about it. We're thinking, I feel so good about taking care of my baby. That means I love my baby. That makes me even happier. That's called metacognition. Right. That's where most people are drawing the line with animals these days. They might be able to experience some pretty high emotions. They may be self aware, but the ability to think about their emotions and the implications of their emotions, or think about thinking, that's metacognition, and not everybody agrees on that one. That's the new threshold that we're at, it seems like. Oh, really? For animals, whether or not they're capable of metacognition. So if an animal sees itself in the mirror and notices itself, is that self awareness? Yeah. Which would be a form of metacognition. Right. But that's not proven. That's where a lot of people you'll lose a lot of people now. Whereas ten years ago, even saying that an animal could experience happiness or joy would have lost a lot of people. So who knows? In ten years from now, maybe everyone will agree that animals experience metacognition. Yeah. Grief is definitely one I've seen firsthand a lot. Yeah, we talked about it in the grief episode. Yeah. And when we put Lucy down, they recommend that we did our house. They recommend that the pet not see that act, but then they come in afterward, so they see the body and so they can understand what's going on, and so they don't spend time looking for that animal. Yeah. And we did that with Buckley and Charlie and let them back in. And Charlie was stressed. We didn't even think about it. She was a feral dog, so she gets stressed when other people are in the house. So we forgot this vet lady was in there. So Charlie's just stressed running around. Buckley goes up. Smith's, Lucy. And it was really sad, I'm sure. And he was different for about four or five days. Seemed depressed to me. And when we would take him on walks and come back, he would still run around to all the rooms, I think, looking for Lucy, because he never had done that before. He usually just walks in and lays down, but he literally would go to each room. So I definitely think there are things like grief. Whether or not the dog realizes it's grief, like, who cares? That's what I think. Yeah. I mean, it's still experiencing on that virtually the same level, right? Yeah. And it's most profound level, that gut experience of grief. I think the fine line here with investigating or talking about whether or not animals can experience these things is you're walking this edge where on one side you have anthropocentrism, where you're just like, no, they can't. Only humans can. Humans are the greatest ever. And you're forgetting that we're animals as well. Right. Then the other side, you have anthropomorphizing, where you're attributing human attributes to animals unduly. So it's kind of like you have to be luckily so happy because we're putting up the Christmas tree. Exactly. Luckily is happy because we're in there having a good time and drinking some egg nog and like, the music is on, we're dancing. Right, exactly. So you have to resist both of those temptations to just kind of keep plodding along down the line scientifically. But I think ultimately, as we go down that line, we're going to finally come to, as a species, hopefully, the idea that animals should not be in zoos or tested on or whatever because they are a lot closer to us consciousness wise than we currently understand or want to admit right now. Agreed. All right, well, we're going to talk a little bit about pet psychics and contradictions between them and what might be going on here right after this message break. Okay, so there are some contradictions. If you go to ten pet psychics, you're probably going to have ten different eleven opinions. Yeah. Eleven different stories about what's going on, which is one reason it makes it hard to swallow for some people. Again, I feel like since we went to break and came back, this is a good time to read it. Right. I'm not poopooing intuitiveness. No, I'm not poopooing. Some people's ability, greater ability than others, to really kind of connect to animals and understand them or deal with them, however you want to put it. It's when it strays into telepathy and clairvoyance that I start to become skeptical. Yeah, I know what you mean. And I think some people are more in tune with other humans than others. Right. Some people have their heads up their butts and are completely absorbed in their own little universe. Other people, I think, seek out input from other things. Whether it's people or animals, they're always looking for something. Right. Justin, his mom, Kerry, one of my favorite people, is one of the most in tune, intuitive people I've ever met in my life. Because she's a studyer of people. Yeah. Like, you can see her, man, when there's a party going on, she'll be sitting back and watching. Yeah. Is she weird? No, she's not weird at all. She's awesome, but she watches. And I don't know if it's a gift as much as it is something you can work on. Yeah, I think it is. Remove your head from your butt and pay attention. So some contradictions, like you might see if it's Patrick that says your animal ratted you out about something, you might go to another pet psychic that says animals would never do that. They're loyal. Right. So what's the story? Yeah. Supposedly, according to Sonya Fitzpatrick from the pet psychic show, animals are very gossipy and they like to tell one another all your secrets. That's hilarious to me. And she told the story. She wrote a book called what the Animals Tell Me, and she told the story about a turtle that she was communicating with, and the turtle told her that it would love to have a fish friend as a pet. Right. So Sonya Fitzpatrick introduced a fish to this turtle's tank, and the turtle was like, thanks, chump. And ate the fish. Yes. And so she said, Why did you eat the fish? And the turtle said, Well, I knew that if I asked you for a fish to eat, you wouldn't give it to me. So I just tricked you, basically. Okay, so animals are gossipy and wiley and have the potential to lie. Yeah. You should not trust animals. Debbie McGillivray. She wrote The Complete Idiots Guide to Pet psychic Communication. She's the one that said, no, animals are loyal. They're innocent. They would never rat you out. They would never lie to you like that or embarrass you. Sure. So it makes it tougher to swallow when you have people saying these wildly different things, not about what they're picking up, but the fact that no animals do this. No animals do this. Which is it, right. But you could say the same thing about humans. If you hang out with certain humans, you can be like, some humans gossip. They'll tell other people all of your terrible secrets. True. Other people might have hung out with the Waltons, and they're like, no, humans are all loyal. It's all about your perception and your experience. That's right. So what might be going on here is what's known as a cold reading. Yeah. Any success? Or what appears to be success? Yeah. It's telepathically among pet psychics. Cold readings. Yeah. ESP people use cold readings to explain that. Fortune telling, tarot card, palm reading, crystal balls, you name it. A skeptic will say that. What a cold reading is is the following they are maybe stating the obvious. Your cat is telling me it loves to lay in the window and look at the world outside. And the person goes, oh, my God. The wizard loves that. Right. All cats love that. Exactly. So that might happen in your reading. They might also use very vague language like, your dog says, Something has changed around here. And you go, oh, yeah, I just accepted this middle management promotion. And the pet psychic says, yes, exactly. That's this new thing that's changed. And you said earlier that your dog was chewing up your new shoes, and that's why your dog is not happy with this change, so he's chewing your shoes. I am a psychic. That's how they finish every reading, too, by the way. They throw their arms up in the air and shout that. Well, it's interesting because what might be happening there is your dog might be chewing up your shoes because you did get that job, because you're working an extra 15 hours a week and your dog has separation anxiety. Yeah. So ironically, it might be actually on the money, but the disconnect comes in when the psychic says that your dog told them that. Exactly. What else? How about this? Here's another way to state the obvious. Your dog, I'm looking at a picture of your dog, and they chew on their paws all the time and say they itch. And that's because in the picture, they have a bandage on their paws. Or you went in and forgot. You said, my dog is chewing their paws all the time. What's the deal with that? They'll glean these bits of information without you maybe even necessarily recognizing that by asking you questions, and then they make that part of their cold reading. But then asking questions is another one, too. It's fishing for details. It's like, I see that your dog is wearing a red green, and then you say blue, blue collar. Your dog is wearing a blue collar. So every time something is that you indicate something is correct, it'll be restated, rephrased, respoken, as if the psychic is saying it right. And you're so enrapped in this whole thing that you're just missing the fact that you're feeding them the information that they're giving to you as a psychic reading. Yeah. This isn't just pet psychic. No. Generally, if you go into a psychic, you are there because you want to believe and you are seeking an answer. Right. If a dude like you or I went into a pet psychic, we probably wouldn't have much luck because we would go in there looking to shoot holes in it. And I did encourage Emily. I was like going there with an open mind. I would go in there with an open mind. I see. I don't think I could. I would not invited. I would try at the very least. If I were going to go in there just to poopoo, I just wouldn't go. Well, yeah, because who wants to do that, jerks? There are plenty of them out there, too. No, that's true. But Emily did say that she made a point to not reveal too much and to sort of watch out for those cold reading tricks. And she said I didn't reveal a whole lot, and she gave me back something. So she's a believer. Well, whatever she spent on that the drop in the bucket compared to what people spend on their pets these days, it's a little crazy these days. Not just for pet psychics, but just in general. Yeah. Americans spent $61 billion billion with the b dollars in 2013 on their pets. $61 billion? And that was up from 36 billion in 2005 and 17 billion in 1995. Wait, what's the current number? 61 billion. Wow. I don't want to say gotten out of hand, but you definitely noticed in the past decade, more doggy spas and stuff like that around. Well, there's supposedly more disposable income. Yeah. And there are more people who are not having kids, so they're just dumping their money into their bets. Well, good. Get them off the street, people. That's what I say. The point is for spending $61 billion on our pets, And it keeps increasing, almost doubling every few years now, every 8910 years. Pet psychics are not going anywhere. No, they're not. They're here to stay. I've got one more stat for you. There was a poll in 2008 that found that 67% of pet owners say they understand their animals purrs or barks or other noises. And 62% said that when they speak, their pet understands them, or at least their intent. And one in five owners claim their pets understand each other completely, like the two pets do. And one quarter of cat owners say they completely understood their pet sounds. Only 16% of dog owners said they were fluent bark. So I guess those were two different polls that are wildly different in their numbers. Yeah. I think people can and animals sense a lot of subtle micro expressions in body language, and that is communication. Don't you think that's just a result of proximity around another living being? Just living with something, whether it's a person or an animal? Yeah, like you get to know them in their mannerisms and you can read them and that is, like I said, micro expressions is a form of communication. I think so. It's not like I think, sure, you can communicate with your dog, sure, but it may not be telepathically like a conversation, but if it feels as easy as a telepathic conversation, then you got it going on with your pet. Yeah. And again, if you want to go out and drop your dough on a pet psychic, more power to you. Probably get something out of it. Same here. If you want to know more about pet psychics, type those words into the search bar households.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Go Figgy puddings. Remember that in our lives? Well, just go and read it this semester, guys, I'm studying abroad in the UK at the University of Hertfordshire. During my travel exactly. During my travels, your podcast has helped me pass the time of plan and train rides while learning new things and hearing the American accent I miss so much. I just listened to is there a scientific for me? For funny? You mentioned richard Wiseman from the University of Hurt. For sure. And Josh said, go figure puddings, which was very funny. I couldn't have thought of that. You could have. Not that quick. I was a little taken aback. Guys, since you're always dead on with your university team names, I regret to inform you that uh does not have a team called the Figgy Pudding. So they're actually the University of Hertfordshire. Hurricanes. This guy is joking right now. He knew I was joking. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, I think so. Okay, boy. I think so. Andrew, you know Josh was joking, right? Please, Andrew. I think so. We have the Hurricanes, which is a little weird since they have more finger puddings here than Hurricanes. There's not a lot of hurricanes over there, isn't there? No, I don't think so. They tend to come this way. Yeah, uh, hurricanes are actually one of the best British American football teams around with four national championships. But I think he corrected himself in a subsequent email. I think there are 512 division titles since 1997. Just want to set the record straight. Also wanted to thank you guys for such a consistently great show. And that is Andrew Millie Cocaine, and I hope he knows you're joking, but he said he was taken aback. I think he was kidding. I hope I don't know that he was joking. Let's go with that. If you want to pull one over on me and Chuck, that's fine. We'll see what you got. You can tweet to us at s yskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychildo. You can send us an email, the stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, join us at our beautiful, spacious, warm smelling, comb on the web stuffyshinenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit househopworks.com hey, Netflix streams, TV shows and movies directly to your TV, computer, wireless device, or game console. You can get a 30 day free trial membership. Go to www dot netflix. Comstand up now. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun 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 Aaron Kilguera 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. 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a6830fa8-5462-11e8-b449-33852213ae44 | How Ranked Choice Voting Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-ranked-choice-voting-works | In the US, winner-take-all voting has created A LOT of political polarization. But what if rather than voting for one candidate, you could rank all of them so if your first choice doesn’t win, your vote goes to your second choice? So long, polarization! | In the US, winner-take-all voting has created A LOT of political polarization. But what if rather than voting for one candidate, you could rank all of them so if your first choice doesn’t win, your vote goes to your second choice? So long, polarization! | Thu, 20 Sep 2018 15:52:26 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=15, tm_min=52, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=263, tm_isdst=0) | 41391415 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to Stuff You should Know from Housetopworkscom G'day. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. The trio was reunited like peaches and herb and cream. Peaches and herb and cream. Yeah. Didn't peaches and herbs being reunited and it feels so good. Yeah, but I don't know how Eric Clapton figures in. Well, there's three of us here. Oh, got you. And Clapton wasn't all cream. I mean, Ginger Baker was a force to be reckoned with, too. Good point. He still is. Is he still alive? Unless he died recently. I saw a great documentary about him. Yeah, I haven't actually watched it. Is it good? Yeah, it looks like it is. He's quite a dude. Yeah. I'm excited already to watch it. Yeah, you should check it out. Okay, I will. Oh. Have you seen Hereditary? Oh, yeah. I saw that in the theater. That's pretty cool. I liked it. I did, too. I liked just about anything a 24 puts out. Yeah, shout out to a 24. Yes. So, speaking of A 24 and horror movies, Chuck, we were down in Australia recently. We just got back. Yeah. I'm sick. I know. I am not. I can't believe it, but I'm not. Yeah, I got sick in what was it? Sydney. Yeah. You were starting to kind of feel under the weather. It got full blown. You seemed okay on the flight back, though. Those were the beginnings. I think my body was in combat mode, and then when I got back here, it just lowered its defenses. It said home, and I got some weird Australian rhino virus, man, walking around the airport. It was like, you just sneezed on me. What is that? What was that? Yeah. And we should point out to people that we took ten plane flights in eleven days. Yes, we did. So that's a pretty good way to get sick. Yes. And let's see, there it was. Atlanta to La. 5 hours. La. To Sydney, 14 hours. Sydney to Perth, another four or 5 hours. This was all in one stretch. There was like two hour layovers in between those three flights, and it was about a 33 hours experience getting there and about the same on the way home. Yes, it was. And it was totally worth it, too. I would agree. Although when we come back, we're going to route things a bit differently. When we landed in Sydney, I remember my first thought was, why can't we just start here? Yeah, but there's no magic route. But there's probably a better one. Well, we did the black magic route, if there is such a thing. Yeah, but boy, it was a grind. But we had a great time. Had a couple of days off in between, which was I don't know if I would have made it had it not been for those days. Yeah, I think you're right. I think it would have been too grueling to do like five cities in five days. Yeah, those were long flights. Yes, they were cool down days, too. You spent most of the time in Melbourne, actually, south of Melbourne. I went to the Mornington Peninsula. Yeah. So you and I were down there, too. That's where we saw the penguins march in from the ocean. And it's gorgeous down there. That's like their wine country, right? It's one of them. There's another wine country. The Yarra Valley, north of Melbourne. But this is the one by the ocean. Yeah. So wine country the most beautiful beaches I've ever seen and you pretty much get happy, Chuck. Yeah. That's cool, man. And we spent another day in Sydney, too, which is a pretty cool town. Just walking around the opera house alone is worth it, but there's a lot of cool stuff to do there, too. Yeah, I went ziplining. Nice. I went to the beach, went to drink a lot of wine, went to a lot of wineries. And that time of the year, in mid week, it was just sort of shut down. So my buddy Scotty came over, as you know, I'm telling everyone else, but my buddy Scotty came over and met me in Melbourne, so we felt like we kept joking that we had rented the Mornington Peninsula. Nice. Because there were never more than two people anywhere we went. And I'll bet the wine tasting, they had a heavy hand. Yeah. They basically was just like, let's go sit on the porch, fellas. Nice. They brought the bottle out and we just sat around and drank with the loveliest people on the face of the earth. Yeah, they are some really lovely people. And not just in Australia. We did New Zealand, too, which I already knew. You mean. I've been to New Zealand before, so I already had a pretty good idea of just how awesome New Zealanders are in wheels, as they call themselves sometimes. But you got to experience the first hand, too. Yeah. Everyone is just so nice and accommodating. Like, the whole no worries thing is not just something they throw around. Like, you feel it. It's for real. Yes. It's pretty cool, man, to just experience it. It's a very cool trip. Yes. And even flying ten times in eleven days, their airports and the TSA and just the way people are, it really made it pretty great. It would have been a different experience flying ten times around the United States and eleven days, I think so. It would have been awful. But it was great. We had a wonderful time. We're definitely coming back. We both loved on koalas and kangaroos. Yeah, it doesn't get any better than that. Oh, man. So, yeah, you guys will see us again sometime in the near future. We'll do another tour for sure. And I'm now getting up at 06:00 A.m. Tomorrow to watch another Aussie Rules football final match. Oh, yeah. You got into that, like, for real, huh? Big time. That's cool, man. It's great. Why not add another sport to the pile? Well, I've lost a bunch of sports. Oh, yeah? I'm kind of down to NFL and college football. No more NBA. Very little. I see. It's tough with the Hawks, and I watch a little bit of the Finals, maybe, but then baseball. I follow the Braves a little bit, but since they moved to the suburbs, I'm not as pumped. It's a little different, isn't it? Yeah, it's just not as cool. I'm with you. Okay. Well, shoot. Might as well just add another one. Australian Rules Football. Yeah. Well, cool, man. Well, thank you for having us. Australia and New Zealand. We'll see you guys again soon, right? Yes. And what a great segue, because Australia happens to be one of the countries in the world, as far as I know, the only country in the world that utilizes ranked choice voting. Now, there's two others, but, yeah, as far as I know, they're just the three in Australia's use of the long. What are the other two? The other two are Malta and Ireland. Yeah. I mean, big countries. Okay. No disrespect to Ireland. Australia is the only country that's also a continent that uses rank choice. Correct. Like I said, they've been using it, from what I saw, at least a century. I couldn't find exactly when they started using it, but I believe it's tied to Robert's Rules of Order, which is a book of rules for order that you can use if you're voting on stuff or you have some sort of parliament or whatever you're trying to do. It's the preferred way of voting, this rank choice voting. Right. Oh, they've been doing it for that long? Yeah, century. I thought it would just for the past five years. No, it's coming around in the US. Again, even though it was around before, about a century ago. But in Australia, it's stock for the last 100 or so years. Interesting. I read a big article that felt like they felt the need to explain to people how to do it five years ago, so maybe they forgot. Oh, really? You're freaking me out now. But here in America, we are not quite on board. No. Let me give you a little intro here, Charles. Are you ready? Yes. Okay, so back in the 2000 election, it was the presidential election. It was a squeaker, you might say, between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Yeah. Apparently the state of Florida. So everyone knows about the Electoral College, and if you don't go listen to our episode about the Electoral College, but you can win in the United States, the popular vote, meaning you got more people voted for you than your opponent. But if your opponent wins some very strategic states, states that have more Electoral College votes, they can actually win the presidency without winning the popular vote. It happened in 2016. It happened in the 2000 election. And every time it does happen, everybody just gets up in arms. And in my opinion, rightfully so, because the will of the people has not been served. Right. Clearly, the majority of people voted for somebody else who is not the winner. And it just really kicks everybody off in this country when that happens. And in 2000, it was so close that the Supreme Court had to decide who was president. And it all came down to Florida. Florida had a lot of Electoral College votes, and Bush and Gore were neck and neck. Although Gore ended up winning the presidency. As far as popular voting went, Bush won because in Florida, it came down to he won 48.847 percent of the vote, and Al Gore won 48.838% of the vote. Okay, so 9% of the vote made the difference in the state of Florida. And with the Electoral College, if you win that state, you get all the electoral votes, which pushed Bush over the edge and made him president. Right. And a lot of people pointed to Ralph Nader, who, as we all know and love from the Pinto's episode, is like a crusader for people, just a great guy. But since 2000, a lot of people have hated Ralph Nader because they said that he handed the presidency to George W. Bush by acting as a spoiler. That something like 90,000 people voted for Ralph Nader in the 2000 election I'm sorry, almost 98,000. And since it was that close in Florida, those 98,000 votes in Florida for Nader pushed Bush into the lead. Well, that's just totally unfair because it turns out, actually, like 308,000 registered Democrats actually voted for Bush. So you could say that actually the Democratic Party didn't run a very good campaign in Florida if that was the case. But forever, ralph Nader's borne the brunt of everyone's eye because of and the same. We see this in election after election after election. People calling out people of similar views for voting for a third party candidate, saying that they split the vote and handed the office over to their shared enemy. Right. And one way to solve this problem, the spoiler, is by fixing what we call this plurality voting system, which we have, which is if you get more votes than your opponent, even if it's not the majority of votes, you still win. It's called winner takes all elections. And that's what we have right now. And it's actually creating a lot of polarity and polarization in the United States. That was impressive. Thanks. Yes. Man. Basically, what you have is, at least in the United States, is a situation where if you vote for your favorite candidate, you can actually hand the election to your least favorite candidate. And that's like with the Bernie or Busters in the last election. That's kind of what happened. The people that voted with their hearts that were like, I can't vote for Hillary Clinton, or I don't want to vote for Hillary Clinton, I gotta vote for Bernie. Very clearly, that does swing an election. People should vote who they want to vote for. Agreed. But there is potentially a better way. And we're talking about what Australia does, ranked choice voting, what some cities in the United States do on small local elections. It's sort of seeing a test run all around the country in little markets to see what people think. Sometimes people are voting on whether or not they should try this style of voting. Sometimes that passes and then they actually vote on candidates. But what ranked choice voting is, is when you fill out, you don't just say, I want to vote for this person. You say, I want to vote for this person. And then my second choice would be this person and my third choice would be this person. Sometimes it stops there at three, sometimes it's capped. But sometimes you just rank all the candidates in order of how much you want them in office. Right? So the whole point of ranking them is not just for the satisfaction of putting the person you like the least dead last, right. Maybe filling in the name of the little bubble next to their name with the skull and crossbones. The point is, it comes after the ballots are tallied. If Chuck, everybody voted for one single person. A majority of people voted for one single person in the first count that person won. If they had a majority of the votes, say 50% plus one single vote. Right? Yes. It's done. It's just like a normal election under that circumstance. But let's say one of the candidates didn't get a majority of the vote. This is when ranked choice voting really kicks in. And this is another reason why it's also called an instant runoff vote, because what happens is an instant runoff election from those ballots. And I think we should take a break. Oh, detail this. It's a cliffhanger. Yeah. Right after this. Well, now we're on the road driving in your truck. Wanna learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck stuff you should know. All right. All right, everybody, if you remember what we were talking about, talk about ranked choice voting. You list out your candidates in order of preference and then after you hand your ballot in, they just kind of work from the bottom up almost and start striking people out until they get to someone that has a majority. And it's really that simple. It really is. If you think too hard on it, you can over complicate it. It's actually pretty easy. And if like, what we're going to explain doesn't quite make sense, go on to the web and watch. There's a couple of minute and a half long videos that do a really good job of explaining it using visuals, I think. One is by KQED out in San Francisco and another is by Minnesota Public Radio. And both Minneapolis and San Francisco use rank choice voting. So go watch those videos and you will totally get it. But again, if you have, let's say you have candidate A-B-C and D and you cast your ballot and you like them in that order, candidate A is your top choice, candidate B is your second choice, candidate C is third, and D is fourth. Right. Okay. Easy enough so far, right, Chuck? Yes. Okay, so let's say that after allies, all the ballots are tallied. Your guy, candidate A, just didn't make the cut. He came in dead last. Your ballot doesn't get thrown away, it gets set to the side because whatever all the people who voted for candidate A chose for second, those votes get distributed to those candidates in this next round. Yeah, exactly. And that is how you end up with a majority. So what you won't wind up is a situation like you had with the current governor of Maine where he won the election with 38% of the vote. And there's something wrong with your voting system if only 38% of the people in a voting pool like this candidate enough and they end up winning. Yeah, I mean, that's the big problem that everybody points to with our current plurality system is if there's three candidates, you can win with 34% of the vote, which means 66% of the people who voted didn't vote for you, they voted for somebody other than you. And the other part of the thing that I've seen from research in this. Chuck. Is that when it's a winner takes all kind of election like a plurality election like we have. That seems to incentivize candidates to be more polarizing because what they're trying to do is energize their base and get their base out. But they have no incentive whatsoever to reach out across the aisle to other voters. All they're doing is getting their base charged up to get out and vote frequently about issues that don't really mean anything. They're just kind of like I'm not quite sure what the term is for them, but nonsensical issues that don't really mean anything, they just tick everybody off. That kind of polarization comes from this plurality thing. And one of the reasons so many people are pointing to rank choice voting as a kind of a way to solve this is because it does the opposite. It incentivizes people to reach out to as many voters as possible because you want to end up as their number two choice. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting argument. In theory, it would push politicians toward the center. However, a lot of people don't want centrist politicians. As we've seen in recent years, there are a lot of people that are very hard right and very hard left that I imagine would reject this kind of voting because they don't want to go toward the center. Although right now independents are largely ignored, third party candidates are largely ignored, so they would probably embrace something like this. But again, I mean, we had a situation in Kansas where the gubernatorial primary was decided by less than 200 votes. So that meant that 52,000 votes basically didn't count. I mean, they counted and that people got to speak their mind and vote their conscience. But those 52,000 people, if you pulled them, they would probably say, well, you know what, I might like a second chance to vote then on these two jerks. That was decided by less than 200 votes, right. And that's where rank choice voting comes in. Because if you vote your conscience, which I think it sounds like both of us agree, you totally should, and I think even further, you should not deride people who vote their conscience. It's a pretty terrible thing to do. But if you share similar views with another candidate, they might be your second choice, you might not like them, maybe they're the establishment candidate and you're more like the more progressive or more far right candidate. You like that person first, but you're also saying this person might have a better shot. So I'm going to make sure that they're my number two rather than the other person. And so what you're doing then is rather than the vote being split, like in a winter takes all, if your person, your third party candidate, doesn't win that first round, your votes are going to go to that other, more like minded person. So rather than splitting the vote, you're actually going and helping to bolster it if your candidate of choice doesn't make it to the second round. Right. Obviously you need at least three candidates for something like this to happen. Yeah. Which doesn't always happen. So you can't always use this kind of voting. The state of Maine is an interesting well, it's interesting in a lot of ways because mayors are weird and they know that they're very independent and just sort of estate into themselves in a lot of ways. So what you've had here, nine of the past eleven governors have been elected with less than 50% of the vote. Nine of the past eleven, which is amazing. Five of those won with less than 40%. And as I mentioned earlier, the current governor, Paul, La Paz or La Paje, he won with 38%. And as of hours ago, as of this recording, he just vetoed a bill for this kind of voting to continue on his way out the door, basically. I saw that there's been a real push in Maine against this too. And there's a lot of allegations that it's basically the status quo is worried that they're not going to be able to get enough centrist people to vote for them and so they're going to start losing elections rather than these winter polarized. Winner takes all contests that they can win by energizing the base into a frenzy. So push by politicians, I guess, right a push by incumbent politicians, no less. Yeah, because the people voted for it. They had record turnout, apparently, because one of the worries is that more complicated voting in theory leads to people being less interested in voting. Like this sort of sadly American thing where you have to make voting super easy and super dumb or dumbed down at least. And if it's just confusing, people won't understand it and they won't know what to do. So they may not even vote. But at least in Maine they had a record turnout and a lot of people think it was because they moved to rank choice voting. And I saw also a 2014 study from the University of Missouri that they looked at like 76 elections or 79 elections in 26 cities that used rank choice voting and they found that overall there was like a 10% higher turnout than in elections that hadn't used rank choice voting. And that definitely flies in the face of one of the great criticisms of rank choice voting that it's way more difficult than regular voting, like you were saying. Right. The thing is it's not that much more difficult. It's really pretty easy and the average person can figure it out. What I think it calls for more, though, Chuck, is a more informed voter, you know what I mean? Like you can't just scan try it. You can't just make a Christmas tree out of it and expect any kind of good result rather than just knowing about your one candidate. And that, yes, I like this person. They most align with my views, so I'm going to vote for them and I don't need to know anything about the other people except I don't want to vote for them. It means that you need to know something about all of the candidates because you got to figure out who's second and who's third and who's fourth and who's fifth. And to do that you have to be an informed voter. Maybe they should in the states, do it with pictures as a who's hot and who's not or who wore it best in terms of ranking, just so we can understand it. Yeah, I mean, there has to be as far as ranked choice voting goes, there has to be a real, understandable, really robust public education campaign that goes along with it or else it's not going to get anywhere, I don't think. But I think so far in like Maine, which I think you said already is the first state to ever use this in statewide elections in the US. Right? Yeah, they hand count there too. They do. But this article kind of worried about that. It's like, well, how long is this going to take if they're in counting? Well, if under the first count, like they normally do, there isn't a clear winner, a majority winner, all those ballots get sent to the capital, which I think uses software from that point on so it's not that big of a deal as far as Maine goes. Yeah. And I read the governor of Maine, the reason why he vetoed it. He wrote, like an op ed or whatever, made a statement, and he had a couple of reasons. One was financial, because they came back and said it would cost an extra $330,000 or something. And he said, they're sticking it to you. They're sticking the taxpayer with more money for this election, which I don't know, I haven't done the math. I can't imagine that would amount to very much money per person, like per voter. And he also said that it was sort of voted on and run through in the middle of the night, one of those type of deals where a lot of people weren't there. It wasn't debated. It was voted on in less than five minutes late at night, and that kind of thing. That kind of sneaky politics. Right. That was his contention. Although I imagine if the people of Maine voted for it to begin with, from everything I've read, it sounds like he was just sort of like on the way out the door giving everybody the finger. Yeah, that's what I've read, too. That's kind of my interpretation. I want to hear from the people of Maine, though, about this. Well, the people of Maine have already spoken on, I think, June 18, using the ranked system for the first time. The first question on the ballot was, do you want to keep using ranked voting? And it was passed like a 64% vote. So clearly a majority of people in Maine at least say yes. Let's give this a shot. Was that ranked choice? Was it like, yes, they used rank choice. Right. And then maybe but only if this well, I guess if they don't do this, then we should do this, right. So maybe let's take a break, talk about some history. Let's 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. All right, Chuck. So rank choice, like we said, it's been around for a little while in the US. Took a stab at it before, I think back in the 1930s in New York, right? Yeah. The Brits used to do it in the then America tried it in New York, of course. And if this weird thing hadn't happened, it may still be around today, you never know. But in council election, a Communist actually won a seat because of rank choice voting, and that changed everything. And I think if it hadn't been for that, it might have actually caught on. Yeah, because I think a decade later, they used the Red Scare to basically say, look, you can't have rank choice voting. It gets communists in power. Are you crazy? And everyone said, oh, okay, let's get away with let's do away with rank choice voting. And they did. But in this case, as in all the other cases where rank choice voting has been tried out and then left behind later on, it's been tied to some other issue. It doesn't seem like ranked choice voting itself is the problem. The establishment who is threatened by rank choice voting tends to tie it to an unpopular political thing and then gets rid of it that way. Like in Burlington, Vermont, back in, I think, the mid 2000s, they tried rank choice voting, and this mayor that got elected was the super progressive who upset, I think, a Republican incumbent. And the progressive was doing fine. Everybody's happy with them. But then he got embroiled in a scandal where apparently he used public funds to keep a telecom company in business. That did not make the people of Burlington, Vermont very happy. So he became a very unpopular mayor, like almost overnight while he had been elected through ranked choice voting. So the Republicans the next time around said, look what rank choice voting did. It got this scandal plagued mayor in office. Let's get rid of rank choice voting. And people voted against rank choice voting, and it was a very close vote, and it was mostly Republicans who voted against it, but more of them turned out to vote against rank choice voting, so it went away. Same thing with the communists in New York. The Democrats did that. They said, look, it elected a communist to the New York City Council. Let's do rank choice voting. Same thing. So it's not like the rank choice voting. There's anything wrong with it, and there may be a lot right with it. It's just that it gets tied to political scandals pretty frequently to get rid of it. I think it's because it's a new thing. People are like, oh, yeah, that was weird. That was weird. Let's go back to the old way, even though the old way is broken. Yeah. Oakland, California is a pretty interesting situation, too, in 2010, because people could make arguments, I guess, on either side. Here in 2010 for its mayoral election, there were ten candidates on the ballot, so you got to rank all ten. And I didn't see anything about like, is a ballot counted if you only rank, like, four? Oh, that's a really good point. I wonder if that's an incomplete ballot. It is. And all that's counted, though, is your first vote. So in the first round of voting, your ballot counts whether you rank one person or four or three. However, if you don't fill it out and you just fill out one, it gets counted once. So you could write nine out of ten, and it only counts the first, from what I understand, yes. Interesting. All right, so in Oakland, there were ten candidates. There was a front runner named Don Parada. He got 35% of what they called the first choice vote, which is obviously pretty low for first. Choice did not win. And then Gene Kwan, she finished pretty far behind. She only got 24% of the first preference, but she ended up winning with 51% to paradise. 48% after they rolled all those other votes up. Yes, because she had gone to the other candidates who were long shots and said, hey, let's form an alliance here. Let's try to get as many voters as possible to vote for us. And that's one of the things that rank choice voting does, Chuck, is it incentivizes you to appeal to as many voters as possible rather than alienating another candidate's voters and just appealing to your own base. You want those second choice votes, too, because they count in later rounds. And that means that you have to say, hey, I know I'm not your first choice. I might even be from a different party than the one you're planning to vote for. But let me tell you about some of the things that we have in common that might change your opinion of me. Which means that there's probably going to be less negative ads. Less negative campaigns. And in some cases. I think for the main Attorney General's office. Some candidates have come together to basically run ads. Like joint campaign ads saying. Hey. Everybody. I know you're planning to vote for me. But maybe put this person as number two. The other person says the same thing. And in doing so, what you're doing is, rather than splitting the vote, you're consolidating what would have been previously split votes into something that could actually lift one or the other to office. Yeah. As far as appealing to the center, whether or not people want that, that's got to be better than what we have now, which is people digging in so far and so hard to the left and the right, that basically they might as well just come out and say, screw you, 50% of the country. Right. And that's a broken system. Right. And there are a lot of people, including Bloomberg View columnist Leonid Bercitsky, speaking of Communist. I'm just kidding, Leonard. I'm sure you're a fine American. He basically came out and wrote an article that said if we had gone with this type of thing. Donald Trump would not not only would he not be president. He would not have even won the primary because there were so many sort of establishment traditional conservatives that would never have voted for Donald Trump and may have even set out the election that would have written in. Like. Maybe John Kasich first. Then Jeb Bush second. And then who knows third. I can't imagine who they would have picked third, but they probably would have put Donald Trump dead last, so he would have never rolled up in the primaries, even. Right. And so the reason why people would have put Trump dead last in this case is because he was so far away from the clump of the other guys who were a little more toward the middle. And just by date of there being more of these guys more toward the middle, that means that there are more voters voting for those people. And so Trump would have been left out and somebody like Jeb Bush or somebody who was a centrist would have been more likely to reach the primary. And that's the point, because more people tend to aggregate toward the center than toward the fringes. Rank choice voting serves the center a lot more clearly than it does the fringes, and it drags the fringe candidates toward the center more, and it does away with the polarization that creates the fringe candidates in the first place. Yes. And I guess we should point out that center of your own party more, like, I don't know, man, I think center the thing about the center of their own party is that the difference between the two is not as pronounced. And so there's a lot more reaching across the aisles, which I think is why a lot of people value centrist politics a lot more. There's a lot more compromise that comes out of it rather than gridlock. Yeah. I guess in theory, center right and center left is more toward the overall center. But when I hear things like Ted Cruz is more centrist, I mean, it depends on who you compare him to, I guess. Exactly. He's a little more central compared to Donald Trump, maybe on the Republican side. I don't think any Democrat would identify with him. Sure, agreed. So I think you could make a case that rank choice voting would probably keep somebody like Ted Cruz from being president one day, too, you know, maybe so. Who knows? What I'm interested in is the money. Like one of the things that Governor Lapage or La PAJ do you know which one it is? No, I don't. Or however you pronounce that in Maine. Let's go with La PAJ. It sounds fancy. Yeah. So La PAJ talked about the money, and that is one of the things that critics bring up, is it will cost a lot of money. But I'd be curious to see to see dollar signs on runoff elections and what they cost. Well, that's the other thing, too, because this would eliminate those. It would. Right now, from what I saw, there's twelve states that have runoff rules. The rest of the states don't. It's all winter takes all but the states that do have runoff rules, that's only in the primaries. Interesting. Yeah. So in a federal election, rank choice voting or a general election, it's going to cost more just because it's a little more expensive. But what I saw was that it cost Maine. There's a Boston Globe editorial by the editors of the Boston Globe that said, let's do this in Massachusetts. Yeah, they said it was just like $110,000 more for the entire state of Maine to run this election over ones that didn't have ranked choice that used plurality voting. Yes. That's like fractions of a penny per voter. Probably right. I should say. Also, since talking about bringing it to Massachusetts, I thought of doing this episode because remember our friend Dave who used to work at Sweetwater? Dave Morrell? Oh, yeah. He is running for the I think district Five house for the New Hampshire house. District Four New Hampshire house. He's got my vote. Same here. Unfortunately, we can't vote for him. But Dave was saying one of his platform planks is bringing rank choice voting to New Hampshire. Interesting. Yeah. And he's like, I'm happy to be your number three. I think he wants to be your number one. Well, another criticism that this one is the one that gets me. Everything else sounds pretty good, but a lot of these cities limit, like I said earlier, at the very beginning, to the top three candidates. So there's something called ballot exhaustion. If all three of your candidates on your list are eliminated, then your ballot is basically just burned. In fact, I think they burn it. They hold it up and they burn it in front of your face like Tony Colette and Hereditary and then laugh at you. So you would think this probably didn't happen much, though, but there was a study in electoral studies in 2015. They said in four cities, between 9.6 and 21.7% of voters were eliminated due to ballot exhaustion, which those numbers are super high. They are very high. One way to get around that is to not just rank your top three, but to rank every single person. I wonder why they did that, though. Maybe to make it easier. I'm not sure. But San Francisco just ranks the top three for their mayoral races, which is kind of I don't know about that because they frequently have like ten people in the race, like you were saying. So just to rank the top three, that will lead to a lot of ballot exhaustion, which is a real problem. But again, if people just rank all the candidates, their ballot will keep getting counted round after round, because after your first two are eliminated in three and then four, your vote for that rank keeps getting added depending on the round that you're on. It's pretty interesting stuff, man. I don't know. You think it'll catch on here? It has piqued my interest. Same here. I think anything that does away with Polarization and does away with people who share pretty similar views, but anything that does away with that, I'm in favor of trying, for sure. Agreed. Well, if you want to know more about ranked choice voting, go check out some of those videos on the web and you're probably going to learn to like it. But whatever, make up your own mind. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. All right, this is a bit long, but it's a good one. This is from an actual recently retired New York City detective. Hi, guys. Love the show. I was an NYPD detective for 20 years and just retired, and I'm glad to say you guys were mostly spot on with the lineups episode, right? And then he gives us some really interesting tidbits here. I can't wait. He says double blind lineups are better, but they are a huge suck on resources. You have to transport a witness or witnesses who also need to be separated. Philly the suspect who requires two detectives to safely transport from one site to the next. And now you have to find another detective who knows nothing about your case. So that usually means to go to an outside detective squad who themselves have their own cases for which they may need blind administrators. So you can see how this ripples outward. Photo arrays would be helpful in terms of logistics, but they are inadmissible as trial evidence. In New York, they can only be used to identify a possible suspect, but in order to bring charges, you have to conduct a live line up. Additionally, many victims feel more confident looking at real people than at photos. Defense lawyers will claim they want to be present for the lineup to verify its impartiality, but do not actually want to be there, and in fact, rarely are. If they're not present, they can then accuse officers of all kinds of misdeeds in an effort to have the identification suppressed at hearing. If they are present and observe nothing untoward during the procedure, it becomes more difficult for them to later claim otherwise. Super interesting lawyers. Lastly, I spent the last four years of my career in a robbery unit that worked with federal prosecutors. We begged squad detectives not to show photo arrays or conduct lineups. As we know, what Josh said many times is true witness testimony, more often than not as terrible. We built most of our cases using co conspirator testimony, perpetrator statements, DNA, criminalistics social media analysis, cell phone tracking, security video, license plate reader data, et cetera, et cetera. Witnesses really just muddy the waters. They're best used to say, hey, I got robbed, and then just leave it at that. It also takes the emotional burden off them at trial, should it ever come to that. My wife and I are big fans. Kept us entertained on many road trips. Thanks, guys. Have a great day. And that is from former Detective Jason Allison. That is an amazing email. Man. I'll bet social media is a huge tool, because I bet there's so many goons just running around like, I totally just robbed this plate. Check it out. Yeah, here's the money I stole. Speaking of huge tools yeah, good one, Chuck. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like the former detective did, that's pretty awesome. We always want to hear from experts in the field that we talked about. You can get in touch with us via social media. Just go to our website stuffysheneau.com, and it's got all of our links up there. Or you can send us an email, just send it to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.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 Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Th. Listen to new episodes of my favorite murder one week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | |
Is Bhutan on to something with Gross National Happiness? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-bhutan-on-to-something-with-gross-national-happ | How do you measure happiness? How do you measure it on a national scale? Tune in as Josh and Chuck discuss Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | How do you measure happiness? How do you measure it on a national scale? Tune in as Josh and Chuck discuss Bhutan's Gross National Happiness index in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com. | Thu, 01 Oct 2009 14:52:21 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=14, tm_min=52, tm_sec=21, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=274, tm_isdst=0) | 31885530 | 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 city comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housestuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Luscious Bryant. How's it going, Chuck? Sounding funny the second time around. Josh actually had to do two takes there. And to hear your name as Luscious twice in a row is very special. What did it do to you? Made me feel luscious, I guess. Good. You are Luscious. I'm doing well, sir. How are you? I'm pretty good. What about Luscious Jackson? Remember them? Yeah, they were good. They were around the same time as good. Beastie Boys. Yeah, because they were all buddies. Yeah. Were they? Yes. I think one of them produced their album or something she loved and Special Sauce. That's who I was thinking. I was a huge fan of them early on. Were you? Yeah. And then they got picked up and you're like, no, I think I just kind of lost interest after the third CD or something. Got you. Anyway. Okay. Chuck equals luxurious. Jackson fan. Also, I'm thick tongued. People always ask if Josh eats things while we podcast, and that is not true. It has a real effect on my happiness. Yes. Good. Lead in. No, that's not the lead in. I was just trying to psych you out. The seemingly uniquely American tradition of killing Census Bureau workers has begun again just ahead of the 2010 census. Chuck, are they doing that now? Yeah, it's about that time. I didn't know. No one has ever knocked on my door. There's a guy named Bill Sparkman, a 51 year old Census Bureau employee. I think just a worker. Like, he was just getting work as a census taker. Right. They found his body hanging from a tree in a cemetery. I heard about it in Kentucky, and the word Fed was scrawled across it. Wow. Yeah. That's a new kind of hate crime. Yes. Well, no, it's not new. Census Bureau workers get killed every census. I had no idea. Yes, it's weird. It's a weird thing to do, but I hope they get paid. Well, some people don't like their privacy being invaded right. Or their land being stepped on. You don't want to knock on my door, brother. Wow. Jeez. I can tell you a place where there are census takers that probably will not be strung up in trees. Bhutan. Bhutan. They had their first census just, like, four years ago. Is that right? Bhutan has been undergoing a lot of changes lately. There, Chuckers. Big time. In 2008, the king abdicated his throne in favor of a parliamentary democracy. Very popular. King. Huge. Yeah. Beloved, you could say. Actually, he was the beloved son of a beloved king. Yeah. And he abdicated his throne in favor of a democracy because they determined that democracies make people happier than kingdoms do. So he wanted to make his small I think the census was 690,000 people. Is that it? Yeah. He wanted to make them happy. He did. And he did. So much so that they've also, at the same time, when they adopted a new constitution and a new form of government, they also adopted a pretty much a guiding principle for the country called Gross National Happiness. Awesome. That sounds familiar. Doesn't it? Remember that listener mail, the girl who was clearly headed to Yale this fall? Yeah. That she did the survey at her own school to find out how happy the fellow students were? Yeah. Cool. The Boutinis are into the same thing. You can't try and pronounce his name. Yes. The King Jigmek. I got the wangchuck part. Definitely. They said you could call them Dragon King. Okay. They meaning they called me up, the Boutonnese did. They said you can just call them Dragon King. They heard that we were doing this podcast. Indeed. Okay. Well, the Dragon King thank you for that, by the whole thing. Back in 1972, he came up with the idea of Gross National Happiness. This probably sounds a lot like gross domestic product. Or Gross National Product. Right? Right. Which we talked about before. I'm glad you pointed out in the article, too, that it wasn't just a fluffy little happy thing they decided to do. They were really serious about it. Nor is it tongue in cheek like the five day weekend. Which we've also talked about. Right. Well, we'll break this down. Yes. Okay. Basically, what the Boutanese have done is come to a collective agreement that, number one, happiness is not just a response to external stimuli like a new car or something like that. They've taken the decidedly more Buddhist approach to happiness, that it comes from within. Right. Which is a lovely sentiment. I think that's step one. It's easy for Bhutan to do it because they're a Buddhist country. Right, right. Peaceful. So step one was to say, all right, happiness comes from within. Step two is to say, okay, how do you achieve this happiness key? They actually did this survey over three months. I think it was 108 questions and that was the second version. The first one was determined to be just way too long. Yeah, it's awesome. Those questions too. It's pretty cool. Like what, buddy? Well, I mean, I went to that. What was the website? Grossnationalhappiness.com, I think, actually, or.org one of the two. Oh, is it? I can't remember. Is it an.org it may be. I can't remember what the questions were. I didn't know you're going to put me on the spot like this. But there were things like how do you feel about or how much rest do you get when you perform certain tasks and how does this make you feel about your family? Just things like that. So what they came up with, Chuck, was basically nine guiding principles toward happiness, right? Yes. I actually have them here. I do too. Oh, really? Touch. Yes. That means touch in French. What are they, Chuck? Because I can't find mine. Jerry loves that joke. Time use, living standards, good governance, psychological well being, community, vitality, culture, health and education. Ecology. Okay. Those are two, I think. Education and ecology. So basically they figured out that these are the nine things combined that make a happy life. Right. I can take that. And some of them sound a little obtuse, like psychological. Wellbeing, what is that? Right. Basically what they've come up with is you can't just say, hey, how happy are you? Scale of one to ten or seven, would you say? Seven. Sure. It's not bad. Would you say that you're more happy, less happy, or just as happy as you were last year? Like the Boutonnis pretty much immediately threw this out the window. They said that it's too imprecise and we have to turn this into a metric system. A system of metrics, right. Is that right? Metrices, sure. Okay. They wanted to quantify it very much so, because like you said, they're very serious about this. Right. So let's say let's take psychological well being. They took these guiding principles and then they broke them down by indicators. Right. So you have an indicator like the prevalence of negative emotions like jealousy or frustration or selfishness. The prevalence of positive emotions like generosity, compassion, calmness. Right, right. And those right. There are indicators that when you compile them all together in a survey, you have an impression of the psychological well being of the household that's being taken in the census. Right. Could you imagine our country ever doing anything remotely close to this? No. And the reason why is because just like the Boutonnis recently, said, we're going to collectively agree that we want to focus our national focus on happiness. Sure. The US. A long time ago, actually around World War II, when the GMP was first introduced, we made a collective agreement that we want to focus on materialism. Right. Money stuff. That's how we measure our well being in this country. Sure. And that's not to say that it's any worse or better than Bhutan's idea. It's just radically different. And one of the reasons it is radically different is because in this country, we don't tend to think of happiness as coming from within. It is like behavioral psychologists believe, or a lot of them do. It's the response, a physiological response to an external stimuli. Right. Like money. So we've said we're going to go for the materialism route, and this is what's going to dictate our policies. How much money do you have? If you got a bunch of money, you can go get your car and all that stuff. So let's figure out how to make a bunch of money for everybody in this country. Right. Right. And even if you, on an individual level, don't agree with the concept of materialism, if you're in the US. You tacitly agree with it just by going to work every day. Right. The whole point of most of your waking life is accumulation of money. Right. Or you're looked at as a freak of nature. If you are one of those people who decide to drop out and go live off the grid and sow their own seed in the mountains. Sure. You're a weirdo in this country if you do that. Or if you die after three months, they make a movie about you and a book. The bear guy who I thought you were talking about Timothy Treadwell, the grizzly bear. No. I was talking about Christopher Mccannless. Okay, sure. From into the wild. Fame. Right. Similar thing. The bear. I thought that was actually about a bear. No, Timothy Treadwell was a bear enthusiast who went to live among the bears oh. And was killed by a bear. He was killed and eaten by a bear. Yeah. What do we go so, Chuck, let's get back to how Boutann has made this quantified. Right? Yes. So we were talking about psychological well being and then all these different indicators. One of the other things that they've decided to do is to take objective data as well as subjective data to evaluate just how much worth something has. Right, right. I was reading pretty much a breakdown of the gross national happiness system that Boutann has by the center for Boutann study. It's pretty impressive. It is. And what they've said is so you've got, like, crime. Right. In the US. We have crime statistics. Right. And then the FBI issues the Uniform Crime Report every year. Right. And it gets kind of granular, like crime perpetrated by race, by gender, by age. What kind of crime? Yeah. It gets real granular. It does. But really, if you think about it, it's just a statistic. Like, I shoot you, you die. That's one homicide. Right. So what the Bhutanese do is they still have these crime statistics, they use crime data, but they take it a step further through these surveys and say, how safe do you feel? Right, okay. I guess it's one of the perks of having a country of 690,000 people. Sure. I guess the census goes a lot faster. Sure. That one. Right. So the crime statistics taken with how safe the population self reports feeling, right. That would be part of community vitality. Right, yeah. Makes sense. It does, doesn't it? It's weird that it makes sense because really it's the opposite of the premise behind gross domestic product or gross national product, which is all material, but it uses a lot of the same model, but rather than money, it's going for happiness. I think that's boggling, actually. I think it's only when they could have pulled this off is if they did use, like, a GDP model instead of just kind of willy nilly throwing some questions out there about happiness. Right. They actually said that in this breakdown of gross national happiness, that like, you know, it's a great idea, but we had to quantify it or else it was just going to be useless. They really went to town on it. Right. So what they've done is take these nine guiding principles right. Dimensions. Is that what dimensions? That's right. Cool. And they've broken them down into all these different indicators that can be subjectively reported on. Right. And they've established a threshold, just like we use for poverty lines. Right. So in the US. What is it if you're an individual and you make some ridiculously low amount, like $13,000 a year, right. You're below the poverty line, but if you make $13,001, you're above the poverty line. Exactly. They created thresholds for achievement, is how they put it to where let's say we'll go back to a scale, just to make it easier. On a scale of one to ten, four is the threshold for general psychological well being. Right. Okay. So if you say yes to X number of questions on these indicators, and then they add them all up and your score is five, you've surpassed the threshold, but you're not put down as a five, you put down as a four. Do you understand what I'm saying? What they're doing in that is that they have chosen to focus on building up any deficits that turn up in gross national happiness. Right. As opposed to touting how happy the happiest people actually are. Yes. Their goal is to be a happier country. Right. They have a lot of poor people there, too. Like, they're really being hard on themselves here. Like their gross national happiness the most you could ever possibly be if every single person in the country is happy at the same time is one. Everything else is negative. Okay. So then they go focus on why it's negative and they break it down much the same way like the FBI breaks down crime, like by gender, by region, by age, and then they can say, all right, what can we do to make these people happier? What's lacking? You see what I'm saying? I do. I hesitate to use the word crazy because I don't want anyone to get the impression that I'm casting any doubt or dispersion on it. Right. This is crazy. Yeah. Well, especially considering where they are. I mentioned the poverty line or you did? 31% of their country lives below the poverty line. Right. But in a Buddhist country, that doesn't necessarily mean these people are unhappy. Well, no, because they only have an unemployment rate of 2.5%, so the material is not that important. They're working. Right. And I saw their big exports, their industrial exports are cement. That's like their biggest industrial exports. And then wood products and then agriculture is their big deal with rice and corn and stuff like that. Okay. So what we just talked about is that they have a 30 something percent. 31%. 31% live below the poverty line. But it's a Buddhist country, so they're big into the rejection of materialism. So that doesn't really matter. Or does it? One of the other things that the Gross National Happiness model that they've come up with serves as a framework for accountability for the government. Right, right. The government's like, well, we just all reject materialism. So it doesn't matter if you're below the poverty line. If enough people start self reporting that they are actually unhappy and all these people happen to be falling below the poverty line that's published for Buddha and everybody to see, and then all of a sudden you can point to the government like, you guys are wrong. You're making some incorrect assumptions, and we need to fix this over here by making more money. If that's what yeah, because if you're dedicated to the Happiness collectively and individually of your population, then yes, it's going to turn up on this Gross National Happiness economic indicator or indicator. And it's going to need to be fixed or else you've just been blowing smoke up everybody right. Bottom keystroke. Do you know what the real GDP was, actually? I checked that out. Per capita. What what would you guess if America is 46,000 and change, what would you think it would be there in Bhutan? $3 per year. Yeah. $5,200 per capita GDP. I can see that. So I guess that's a world fact that you have to have they still have the GDP. Right. That's an excellent point, Chuck. The reason that they instituted Gross National Happiness is because I think the leaders kind of saw the writing on the wall like, you can only remain shut off for so long. And this is very much a shut off kingdom. It's high up in the mountains between China and India. On purpose? Yes, very much so. They've isolated themselves. But the Internet came in 2001, TV showed up in 1999, and it brought with it these Western influences. Right. So what the leaders said, rather than, you can't have TV, you can't have internet, they said, okay, we'll enter the world stage, but we're going to do it on our own terms, and this is how we're going to plot it. Right. So let's get to the point there, Chuckers, as to whether or not Boutonn is actually onto something. This is an age old question, like, is money more important than happiness? Can money buy happiness? Let's talk about some studies, not necessarily ones conducted in Boutann, but just in general. Like, does money provide happiness? I think if you were just to talk about Boutonn now, you'd find out pretty quick that $5,200 a year, that is their GDP, they're probably pretty happy. And if you talk to your average American, they might not be as happy. That's just a guess. Agreed. But the GNH will turn that up. Sure. Eventually. Right. They'll turn the frown upside down. Right. Actually, Chuck, the Bhutanese census takers aren't the only people who go around asking people if they're happy. I know you're talking about who am I talking about? The World Values Survey. That's right. They ask people how happy they are. And they've been doing it for a long time, since 1981, actually. And they usually ask about 350,000 people in 97 countries. And they ask in each country they ask that many? No, the whole survey population is 150K. Got you. They asked two questions. Are you ready? Taking all things together, would you say you are very happy? Rather happy? Not very happy? Not at all happy. That's one question. And then secondly, all things considered, how satisfied are you with your life as a whole these days? And that's it. It's a two question survey. Right. And then they rank countries. In 2008, the happiest country on the planet was Denmark. I could believe that. The US ranks 16th. Right. I can't believe that. But if you look according to CIA, if you look at per capita GDP, the US was, I think, number eight. Number five or number eight. In 2008, Denmark was at 46 and then Denmark was number 30. So they're the happiest country, but they don't make nearly as much money as the US. So no correlation there. But not necessarily. There's a lot of criticism of the World Value Survey, I'm sure. Number one, somebody pointed out, number one, how do you translate happiness from you? And I can't even describe what real happiness is, necessarily. Right. We could possibly anecdotally but it's so subjective. Absolutely. Number one, how can you and I, who have so much in common, not establish what happiness is, that you can also spread it out over 97 countries and all these different societies and groups within it. So that's number one. Number two, I read an article that pointed out that Denmark is the happiest country in the world. It also leads the world in per capita alcoholism and suicide. Really? Yeah, I understand the alcohol part. Yeah. Suicide. That doesn't add up. No, it doesn't. So, Chuck, it's becoming evident just what a responsibility, what a task bhutan is taking on its own shoulders, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, like, happiness is really tough to quantify and they've done a great job trying to figure that out, but yeah, I know they do the studies and you point to one in your article, you're fine article about I thought it was okay. They always study lottery winners. Yes, I love this. And they always compare them to amputees, which I find odd. No, it was just a very famous one that started it. Is that what it is? Yeah. Is happiness relative? Well and then what did they find out? That after the initial joy of the lottery wore off that people kind of generally and the same with the amputee, they generally go back to where they were before. Yeah. If you look at it as like a line, a horizontal line, and the event happens at the same time, somebody loses their leg and another person or wins the lottery. Right. The lottery winner goes up, the amputee goes down, but after three years, they both go back to that same line. Sure. Which is kind of startling, if you think about it. Yeah. And you also made the point about money, which I thought was a really good point, as dichotomous. So money can bring many things. Money can bring happiness and cool stuff and security. And it can also be the evil in your life. It can be I mean, that security. You've got financial security, but maybe you're a little more worried that your house is going to be invaded during a robbery or something. Yeah. The point with pursuing happiness that I think the boutonnies are hip on is that happiness only brings happiness. Good point. That's awesome. There was another study by a couple of guys from Princeton et al. And they basically use something called day reconstruction method, which is self reporting. It flies in the soft social sciences, but that's about it, little Hanky. But basically they ask people to write down their experiences from the previous day and do that over a set period of time. Right. I'd love to see mine from like, yesterday. That'd be great. Oh, yeah. Were you in a bad mood yesterday? No, just were you drunk? No. They're charting your mood or what you did and how it corresponds to I think both. Yes. We should do that. You want to do it? No, I don't either. What these guys found was that when you ask people to report on their mood as it happens, or the day after it's happened, and then you evaluate it by income, they found that actually, money did indeed bring happiness to a certain extent. Right, right. So the point is, I think people who made under $20,000 a year are actually less happy than people who make 100,000 or more. Okay. That's kind of a no brainer, if you think about it. Imagine the strife and struggle you have in your daily life if you're making it's the struggle, that's what it lasts. Right? Yeah. Even happy people, I think, can be beaten down by finances, right? Generally happy people, sure. Yeah. But what they did find was that when you get to 50,000 to 89,000, that segment was virtually identical to people who made over $100,000. Okay. Which is kind of significant because there's a substantial difference between 50,000 and $100,000. So what they've concluded is that money does bring happiness to a certain extent by possibly by satisfying our needs. Right. But after that, it loses a lot of its value or a lot of the happiness it can bring when it reaches a certain point, once those needs are satisfied. Yeah. When I worked in La. I worked with a lot of rich people, obviously, in the film industry, and it never really hit home to me until I left that I was always jealous of the amount of money. Like, these commercial directors would make insane amounts of money, like $20,000 a day, for their stupid TV commercials. I'm unimpressed because you've already told me that. Yeah. It's just amazing how much money you make. But you grow your lifestyle to fit your salary to a large degree. Not always, my friend. You're talking about the hedonic treadmill. So basically wait, come on. Have you heard those two words put together before? Yeah, all the time. Don't you see my T shirt? Yeah, it's right there. Wow, Donna. What is silly drawing. I thought so, too. Yeah. Your lifestyle grows to fit your salary. So if you make $20,000 a day, your expenses, or let's say $30,000 a month, your expenses are going to be going to match that. I'm not saying this well. No, I know what you mean. Let's say an example I've read in an article from the San Diego Union Tribune, a sterling article, actually, on happiness. It's called Pursuing Happiness. This guy makes the example of winning the lottery and moving to Rancho Santa Fe, which I take is one of the nicest suburbs in San Diego. I guess so. Okay. He says that when you do that, you go from the how did I get this lucky type of happiness? To living among similar wealth. So it becomes your normal, everyday life that wears off. Sure. Another argument against money bringing happiness is that a lot of times it leads to poor choices. Apparently about 40% of our happiness, if you look at it in a pie graph right. 10% is life circumstances, 50% is genes genetic, I believe. And then 40% is our choices. That the happiness or unhappiness or choices bring us right. And one of the points is, like, okay, let's say commuting is almost across the board, like one of our least favorite things to do as human beings, right? But you make a bunch more money. So you move out to the suburbs into a bigger house, but you've also just doubled or tripled your commute, right. But then you buy the BMW Seven series. So your drive is a lot sweeter, but then it costs $3,500 for the tune up. Sure. It all comes out in the wash. The point, I think, that you and I are inevitably going towards stumbling towards faltering is that you just shouldn't take money quite so seriously. That's good. I find it interesting. And we've set up a thing in this country where you can never go backward. It's all about going forward. I thought that with the Peter Principal well, with money, though, too, like in a divorce case, you always hear whether it's a husband or the wife that's rich and the one that's asking for the spousal support. The point is always made, well, I've got this lifestyle now, and I need to get the $40,000 a month from you to stay at this lifestyle. The thought of going back is just unthinkable in this country. It is money wise, if you think about it. Stock brokers don't tend to throw themselves out of windows when they make a bunch of money. It's only when they lose it. Right, but that's drastic. But you think, why can't you just, all right, I'm going to take a job that pays less and I'm going to have a little less. Some people make this choice. You know what I think some people do. And I would like to hear from them, anybody who's made that decision, right? US, and tell us, are you happy? And what you did? But the court supported with that divorce thing. They think, well, now you've got this lifestyle and you must stay at that level. You cannot drop your lifestyle whatsoever. Right. And that definitely does underscore that social agreement that materialism is what we're into. Well, let's see. Since I said materialism is what we're into, that means that I should tell you to go to housetaffworks.com. You can type in Gross National Happiness in our handy search bar. And you might also want to read another article on the site, can Money Buy Happiness? Right. Which means what, Chuck? Actually, I got just one more quick thing. There was an earthquake in Bhutan on Monday. Did you know that? Everybody okay, 6.312 people at least, are dead. And that wrecked a bunch of ancient monasteries which are, like, built on the mountainside. Yeah, I imagine they came tumbling down. That's very sad. Yeah, that is sad. I just wanted to say hello if we have any fans in Bhutan. We have one fan of Bhutan. Yeah, the Internet is there. It is. All right, well, with that sad news, I guess it's time. For listener mail. It is listener mail. Josh and this is just a couple of quick shout outs. This came from Amelia, and Jerry thought it was a good idea to plug it, so we will. It's a website called Freerisecom. Oh, yeah. And apparently what you do there is you go online at this website and you answer vocabulary questions, and it's like a game. You play these games where you answer trivia questions and participate, and when you get these questions right, they donate rice to the needy around the world. So it's like a little interactive way, I guess, of getting people involved. And ten grains of rice per correct answer. And the website today said over 68 billion grains of rice have been donated today. Can't you imagine the Porsche lob whose job it is to count out every single one of those cranes around? It may be symbolic, maybe not. You think? No. You're staring blankly. So thanks, Amelia, for that. And that is a worthy cause, indeed. And then I wanted to give a special shout out to Ben, our listener from University of Wisconsin in Madison. Ben and I have been writing. He, at the age of 20, was diagnosed with a form of leukemia that I cannot pronounce. He said it's evidently the good kind, even though after hearing what he's been going through, it doesn't sound like it. They were going to have a bone marrow transplant for Ben, but they could not find a match in 11 million person database. And so he has been approved as chemotherapy. So radiation worked, and he's going to have an umbilical cord blood transplant. Well, and he's been traveling, I think he said, something like 80 miles each way every day for, like, a two minute radiation. And he's been listening to our podcast, which is why he wrote in, and that's been helping him out. And Ben is a really cool guy, dude. His attitude is, like, leaps and bounds ahead of ours. His outlook on life. Is it? Yeah, it was one of those perspective shots where Ben is just and he's like, oh, man, don't feel bad for me because I told him I felt really awful about it. He said, I didn't picture this as my life, but it's what I've been dealt and dealing with it, and everything's going to be okay. Nice. So he was approved for the he was admitted last Wednesday for the transplant, and it's a six week hospital stay and then a two year recovery period. And he said that the one thing that he's loved is our podcast and hydromorphone he's become fond of, which is with the painkiller they've been giving him. Okay. And he said that he found out later heroin addicts use it as a substitute because it has similar effects. Heroin addicts will use anything as a substitute. Sure. Ben, we hope you're well. If you're listening, our thoughts are with you, obviously for you. Please keep us posted? Yeah, he will. Cool. Well, you keep me posted, will you? I will. You kind of have a lockdown on the information that comes in. I do. I control the information. Remember? We want to hear from you. If you decide to take a giant step backward out of the rat race and how your life's going, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more? Howstofworks. Check out our blog on the housetheporkworks.com homepage brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun shining, the daylight is 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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How Food Cravings Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-food-cravings-work | Why do we crave certain foods? Does everyone experience food cravings? In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck explore the delicious topic of food cravings. | Why do we crave certain foods? Does everyone experience food cravings? In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck explore the delicious topic of food cravings. | Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:20:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=16, tm_min=20, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=335, tm_isdst=0) | 27942887 | 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. It's Charles W. Bryant. Sounded like the nursery rhyme. Did it? Was it's a new one? How's it going, Chuck? Oh, you know, dude. It's Friday. We're all ready to trip the light fantastic this weekend. You know what I mean? Dance, right? Yeah. I don't dance. Paint the town brown. Red? Well, I'm a ween fan. So you paint the town brown what is the name of the God that wean worship that tells him to get wasted? The Boognish. Is that what it is? Well, that's their little symbol. The little guy with the spiky hair. Right? But there's like a god that they listen to that commands them to just get wasted. Yeah. How about this, listeners? What is the name of the god that wean answered to? Yeah. God Wean Satan was the name of their first album. Yeah. So, Chuck? Yes? I could go for a sloppy joe right now, man. I haven't had a sloppy joe since I was a kid. You haven't? You poor bastard. Like the man. Which kind? Any sloppy Joe. It's like barbecue sauce and ketchup with some ground beef on a bun. Should it get better than that? Not since my mom was cooking for me as a kid have I had a sloppy Joe. I've never made one myself. Let me give you a little secret here. Sloppy Joe, fish taco. Sloppy Josh. Not yet. We're not out of work yet. Insert fish taco into sloppy joe and thank me in the morning. Wait, put a fish taco in the sandwich itself? With the beef and everything? Oh, yeah. That's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. Just try it. Let me know what you think. Sure. I guarantee that after you have a fish taco sloppy joe, you will end up with the food craving for it at some point. Wow. Yeah. That's a great set up. Thanks, buddy. Food cravings. Food cravings. That's what we're talking about, right? You think that's what I'm prepared for? Yes. Same here. So, Chuck, you've had a food craving, right? If so, you're part of the males in North America who have had one in the last year. I found that to be staggering. I thought everyone has had a food craving, like, once a week. Yeah, the stat on women was much more, I guess, in my wheelhouse. Right? Yeah. 100%. 100%. But what? 30% of men don't have a craving in a year? Just like, who are they? Jerks who are like I'm not answering that question. I'm going jogging. 100%. You and I both know that. Everybody knows that, right? Everybody's had a food craving in the last year? Well, that's what I couldn't determine if it was an actual classifiable food craving or just like, oh, I'm hungry for a burger. Or maybe they thought that slim gyms don't count. That account for that 30%. That's a good point. Slim gyms aren't food. They're slim gyms. That's a good one. Yeah. Josh 70% say yes, and women all say yes. And women in North America and Europe particularly like the sweet stuff. Yeah. I think chocolate is the most highly reported food craving. Yes. Women in North America, we need to specify right. Because it appears that food cravings are also culturally specific. Yeah. So women in North America like the chocolate, but say women in Egypt like, let's say a meat stuffed eggplant. That's pretty specific. Kristen Conger wrote this, and it's a great article, but I love that she actually said that they will crave a meat stuffed eggplant, which actually sounds kind of good. And I'm not even hip on eggplant, but I would eat that stuff. You know why? Meat. Exactly. Wrap it in bacon, stuff it with meat, or put a fish taco on it. I'll leave it even a milk steak. Sure. Although I just recently found out what that is. Was that right? I believe so, yeah. We haven't gotten any correction. So I assume so that's because no one from the 19th century is still around, they can correct us. So, Chuck, actually, food cravings, we talk about how they're different in North America and in Egypt, for example. Sure. They appear to be universal. However, while the food cravings may differ, or the food that is crave may differ, the food craving is pretty much a universal human trait because we all have a brain. Well, let's talk about there's two different kinds. There's a stomach craving, which accounts for hunger. Sure. And then there's the food craving, which we'll get to in a minute. It's like all mental. Right. You have to have a brain, right? Yes. Actually, you have to have a brain for both. But let's talk about, like, regular old hunger. What is that? Dude, that is the stomach telling the brain by way of the is it Vegas or vagus? I think Vegas. Vagus nerve. Yeah. Basically saying, I'm hungry. I need food to live. Sophie right. Yeah. It's pretty much as simple as that. It is. And this hormone grelin, which has made an appearance incorrectly in a previous podcast, if we get some more I said ghrelin tells your stomach or tells your brain that you're not hungry any longer. Actually, it does the opposite. I know I'm an idiot. It's a hormone that is actually emitted by fat tissue. Right. And it travels up the vagus nerve to the hypothalamus and says, Dude, I'm hungry. Right. And it's triggered when your blood sugar and insulin levels start to decline, which is just awesome. I love the human body. I think it's about as fascinating as it gets. Yes. I like the brain in particular, and I think articles like this, everyone Knows how Much we Love the brain and studying the brain. Yeah. Look for an audiobook on the brain from Chuck and I in 2010. Little spoiler teaser, but it always amazes me that the brain is so complex and then the rest of the body is almost like just a big, dumb, functioning group of organs compared to the brain. Compared to the well, yeah, but I mean, that's like comparing like they all work together in 88 Dodge Colt to like a bugatti. A bugatti. Thank you. I don't know where that came from. Okay, so the ghrelin comes up, the vagus nerve hits the hypothalamus, which the hypothalamus also provides some other function management, like sex drive, thirst, sleep. Yeah, things we like. The hype pretty smart. Yeah, exactly. It's the party part of the brain, right? So the hypothalamus says, all right, we're hungry and we're going to release neuropeptide y. Right? And this makes us hungry, right. It stimulates our appetite. Right. So what we eat yes, we're eating the sloppy joe fish taco combo. And as we eat, something else starts to happen because you just can't keep on like this. Or you would just keep eating and eating and eating. So your body has to do the reverse almost, and say, you can stop eating now. Right? And it does this in a couple of ways. The first things that happens is fat tissues, expel Leptin, and son of a gun, I am never going to get ghrelin. Ghrelin is released in the stomach. Leptin is released in the fat tissues. Oh, did you say? I did. I'm just a big dumb animal. Well, so hold your emails, folks. We will get this, all right? By the end of this thing, maybe. Okay. I hate growing. So Leptin gets going and tells our brain, basically that, hey, you're satisfied? You're not hungry anymore? You're satiated. You do not need to keep eating. Right, but this doesn't take place immediately. No, and actually, my half Okinawan girlfriend taught me that the Japanese have a little rule of thumb called hara hachibo. Nice. Thanks, buddy. It means basically stop when you feel about 80% full. And it works like a charm, actually. Well, you don't see a lot of obese Asian people. Not too many. And they live forever, too. Yes, we should follow that model. So Leptin actually does this by turning down the production of the neuropeptide y and cranking up the production of propio melanocortin. I was hoping you take that one. That was an excellent pronunciation, buddy. I had to literally sound it out and spell it out. Very good. Yeah, but it worked. Yeah. And that is an appetite suppressant in the bloodstream. So that basically says the hypothalamus monitors the insulin and blood sugar, and then everyone's happy, we're eating, we're satisfied, we're full, right? So there you go. We're alive, right? Yes. So that accounts for normal hunger, right? That actually does begin in the stomach. Crazy enough, right? That's how you have hunger. And that's how your brain tells you that you're not hungry, but that doesn't account for food cravings. Food cravings are pretty much all mental, or at the very least, they're all brain centric. Right? Yeah. And it's not, hey, I need to eat to stay alive. It's, hey, I really want that sloppy joe. Right, with the fish taco. Well, I want to know about that that's mind hunger that you're talking about. Yes. Which accounts for the craving. Right. And one of the reasons that it's, I guess, worth writing an article about researching and podcasting is that it's kind of curious. It's a little bit of a mystery because they're not really essential for survival. I actually thought this for a very long time and probably will continue to do so because I don't give up my views very easily. But I tended to think that food cravings were the body's way of saying you need more iron, so you really want a steak right now? Debunked, whatever debunk care. It's a good way to live life, and I'm going to live it like that. Yeah, but scientists have largely debunked that basically saying it's really not. You saying that, oh, I need a particular nutrient to keep me healthy. And one of the reasons why it was debunked is because most food cravings are for really rich, fatty foods high in calories. And do you know why we crave those, Josh? Why? Because they are loaded with chemicals called opioids. That is true. This is a depressing moment for me, by the way. I've lived like this for years. Yeah, me too. Opioids, what they do, they bind to your receptors in the brain, and they bring you the feel good feelings. They do, actually, the same process is followed for drugs, new drugs. It actually follows the same, I guess, mental processor, brain neuro pathway. Excellent, Chuck. Thank you. I was flailing there that drugs do, right? Yeah. I thought that was interesting. So let's just use chocolate. It's just so easy. Yeah, it's a good go, too. So you eat a little chocolate. Let's say it's the first time, and the opioids that are released actually form part of your memory of eating chocolate. Right. You have a sensory memory that is very pleasant associated with eating chocolate. Sure. It gets filed away by what part, Chuck? Is that the hippocampus? Is it is the filing? Yes, it is. Okay. It sorts sensory data and puts it into long term or short term memory. Right. And when we see chocolate again, we say, oh, yeah, chocolate. That makes me feel pretty good. Yes. Right. So there's one aspect of the craving. It's psychological based on long term memory. Right. And it also stimulates the caudate nucleus. Sure. And basically that helps control the dopamine reward system. And dopamine is another feel good chemical in your body. Right. What's your favorite, like, drop dead favorite? What would be your last meal? You're on death row, let's say. Not a stretch. You're really thinking about this I like that. I really like the porterhouse steak at Kevin Rathbones. Oh, very specific. Have you had it? No. Dude. Awesome. Yeah. Or there's a fried chicken at Watershed. Have you had that? I've never had their famous fried chicken. You should go Tuesday nights. Tuesday nights and after six, if you make reservations, they can't guarantee the chicken. I know, I've been they can't guarantee it's good. No, they can't guarantee it'll be there. We can give you some chicken, but it might be rock. It's going to be pretty crappy. Yeah, I've heard about that for years. It's definitely worth it. One of those two probably would be my last meal. I can't get super specific, but I think my favorite last meal would be like a big fried seafood platter. Oh, yeah. With like, fried shrimp, fish and clams and scallops and hush puppies and French fries and coleslaw. Man, I'm busy making me hungry. Tartar sauce. We should go to Long John Silvers after this. Long John Silver. Where the fish and the chicken are equally good and taste much the same. Yeah. I love Long John Silver. So do I. So, Chuck, we've talked about the reward system, right? Yes. And actually there was a study in 2004 where people were jammed into the Wonder Machine and asked to think about food. There's actually the fMRI, which is the wonder wonder machine. No, that's the Wonder Machine. MRI. Just an MRI. It's worthless unless it's got that little F attached to it. Got you. So they jam some people in the water machine and say, think about food. And then people started thinking about food, and like you said, the caudate nucleus, the insulin and the hippocampus. All right, so it's very clear that our reward system is triggered when we think about food. So that explains part of food cravings. And we also said that it's linked to the same neural pathways as drugs and drug addiction, which also accounts for food addiction. Yeah, it's just a milder version. We also said that memories, like the sense memory remember the chocolate? OOH, chocolate. Makes me feel good when I eat it, so I want chocolate. Right? Yeah, it reinforces all that. That's part of it, too. But where did the food cravings come from, I guess, is my point, if I'm to make one. Josh, you know what? You know where this starts, dude? No. You do. You're just being coy. It starts in the womb. You pronounce the b. No, I just did that as a joke. OK. It actually does happen in the womb. And they found in studies that in utero, a fetus can distinguish between different flavors that are passed to them through the amniotic fluid. Is that remarkable? It is remarkable, Chuck. And although I'm not entirely certain how they figured that out, there have been studies on post birth children and their taste for food. And a lot of it, apparently it comes from their time in the womb and whatever their mother's eating while they're nursing. Sure. Right. Yeah. They found that mothers who ate lots of garlic or who ate a steady diet of garlic, their baby is nursed longer. I know. Isn't that crazy? Possibly. To try to figure out what the heck this taste is. Yeah, I love that. Because garlic is tough to miss, right. It comes out everywhere. And I imagine garlicky breast milk would throw the baby for a loop to the point where they're like, what is this? Oh, I can tell you. It throws you for a loop. Okay. Garlic is just the best in anything, though. It is. And really good for you, too. Have you ever had a whole roasted garlic? Roasted? Just squeezed out onto, like, a piece of bread. The whole thing? Like, the whole bulb? Yeah, dude, I do it all the time. I cut off, like, half of it and drizzle with some olive oil and bake it in some foil. No, I just throw it throw it on, like, a cookie sheet, wrap it in foil and twist the top. Okay. And you don't even need the cookie sheet. Just throw it in there on the rack. It's awesome and great for you. Have you ever taken garlic pills? I don't like them. I'd rather eat, like, the garlic bulb. Well, I would, too, but garlic pills are weird because you'll take, like, a garlic pill in the morning because it's good for you, and at 930 in the morning, you feel like you're burping up, like Italian food, and by afternoon, it's coming out of your breasts if you're nursing. Yeah. Or your skin pores. Yes. Sweat. You know me with my sweat. You don't want to be around me on a hot day after I've had some lasagna, brother. Right. Yeah. Not good. Oh, I know it's not. I was getting hungry, and now I'm revolted all of a sudden. This just took a real nose dive in it. Yeah. So, Chuck, you're saying we're first exposed to taste in the womb, and also, apparently, we carry these on. Right. Those memories stick around, those sensory memories, and that's the beginnings of establishing our food relationship, basically. And it can also be established by the mother, apparently. Studies have shown that I should say at least one study has shown that women who have more adventurous diets have children who have more adventurous diets, I think you could say. Well, maybe that has to do with the way they're raised. Yes, probably. But it could go either way. Yeah. Another thing I thought was cool, how you said it was kind of like the same thing as a drug addict seeking drugs. Just like that. You need more and more to satisfy you. Just like a crackhead. Might need more crack to get high as they progress in their drug career or hobby. If you eat chocolate, just that little bit of chocolate isn't going to do it. If you keep eating, you're going to need more and more to satisfy you. Yeah. Pretty cool. It is. Unless you have a chocolate addiction. That's true. Or crack addiction. Yeah. So, Chuck, what do you do when you do have a chocolate addiction? You eat chocolate. You do? No. Okay, I thought you meant me. No, I'm saying, you know, you like anybody. Sure. You're not a chocolate addict. I know you're hard on yourself, but you're not. No, I like chocolate, but it gives me the heartburn, too, so it doesn't have a fine line I have to walk. Jerry thought that was funny. She just laughed. So this is something that people have been paying attention to. Luckily, although they still haven't quite cracked the code, it turns out the body is a little wonky when it comes to food cravings. When you have a lot of fat tissue. Yeah. This is weird to me. You emit a lot of leptin, which is the thing that lowers appetite. Right. Presses appetite, then it's in fatty tissue. So the more fat you have, the more leptin you have. So that should mean, strangely, that the fatter you are, the less you should eat. Not true. No, it's the opposite. Yeah. For some reason, as the body mass index increases, meaning you get heavier and more fat on you, you actually eat more. Right. Which doesn't seem odd, really, if you think about that. But you're putting out more left in. Yeah. And nothing we found, like said, why this happens is it just one of those things in the human body that we can't account for? Do you know another cool thing, Josh, that if you try to diet or quit eating a certain thing, like, let's say you're a lady and you have a big chocolate thing, the more you if you say, I want to cut down on eating chocolate, you're going to crave it more. They did a study in 2000 and 750 percent more. 50% more? Yes. If you're trying not to, you're going to crave at 50% more. Right. It's the info, the perverse. Remember we've talked about that. The more you try to push a thought from your head, the more you're going to think about it, because not only are you thinking about keeping it out of your head, it inevitably floods in and you push it out. So really what you're doing is engaging on the cycle of constantly obsessing about this one thing. Let me try something here. Okay. Josh, whatever you do for the next 10 seconds, do not think about a sloppy joe with a fish taco on it. All right? What's the first thing that just popped into your head? Do you want to know? Oh, no. What is it? Donald Duck. Really? Yeah. Is that your go to? No. That's an odd go to. No, it's not my go to. I read an article on it, and somebody said, whatever you do for the next sentence, don't think about Donald Duck. Okay. That was kind of my introduction to the empathy perverse. Right. So that's why I thought of Donald Duck. I'll tell you what I didn't think of, and I think 10 seconds has passed I didn't think of a sloppy joe. Fish taco. No. I don't believe you. I think you thought of Donald Duck eating a sloppy joe without pants. Right. Like I never wears pants. Yes. Don't you wear a diaper or something? Or was that did you know? No, that was just his duck bottom. Okay. Who was banned in Finland, I think, because he didn't wear pants. That's Finn or they had to put pants on them, too. That's good stuff. Josh, I think people are learning a lot here. I think we have gotten really far off topic. I think so. Should we reel it in here? Yeah. If you have a food addiction and you have food cravings, people who didn't deny themselves every food craving managed to lose the most weight. Yeah. They said the trick is to give into it occasionally to reward yourself, but to just keep that all in check. Right. Yes. Is that how it works? Yeah. And you're big on the calorie restriction. So what do you think about that? I found that just not eating I don't eat breakfast or lunch. I just eat dinner. Sure. And I found that after probably a week or two of really just doing it hardcore yeah. You just don't even think about it any longer. If I stop and think about it, like right now I'm hungry. Right. Because I stopped and thought about it. But what are you hungry? I don't think about it. I think you know what I'm hungry for, Chuck? Yeah. Sloppy joe with a fish taco. That's right. Should we talk about weird food cravings? Yeah. Like ladies when they're pregnant. Yes. Which I was interested to read about this, actually, because I've always wondered what get somebody who they never liked cheese before to suddenly like cheese once she becomes pregnant or something. Right. Well, it has a lot to do with the hormones that are going berserko when you get pregnant. Right. Especially estrogen. Yeah. And it also has to do with their sense of taste and smell. Really become honed when they're pregnant. Right. So something like maybe really pungent, like coffee and cigarettes is even more of a turn off than usual, which is probably a good thing if you're pregnant. Right. Don't you think? Yeah. I think coffee and cigarettes is probably bad for a pregnant woman. And the cravings focus on really sweet and really salty, really spicy. It's kind of the extreme, it seems like. Right. So, Chuck yes. Pregnant women have strange food cravings. Pickles and ice cream, whatever. That's the old joke. Yeah, it is. And science hasn't really figured out exactly why. Right. But, yes, it probably does have to do with the Hormonal surge. I used to work in a gas station up in Athens, and people yes, I did, too. Which one? Well, I worked at the golden pantry, so I didn't like pump gas, but I worked in the little food market. I didn't pump gas. Same here. Okay. I worked at the magnolia station on Atlanta highway. It's pretty funny. Yeah. We're both gas guys. Yeah, who knew? And we used to white dirt, and people came in and bought it by the bag full. I don't know what that means. It's white clay. Okay. And they would eat it. Really? Yes. Is that what you sold it for, to consume? Yes. I don't even know what you're talking about. It's really weird. People chew it and eat it and ingest it, and actually, it was a real big hit among pregnant women, too. Well, I do know what you're talking about. Why? It's called pica. Yes. And specifically in this case, eating dirt of any kind is called geophagia. Right. And there's also one called pagiophagia, which is eating ice. Yeah, which I've heard of before. Apparently, people who have iron deficiency as anemia eat ice a lot, but you're not getting any iron for the ice from the ice. But they think that possibly there's apparently discomfort in the tongue when you have an iron deficiency, and the ice alleviates that, which is why they crave it. Makes sense. Isn't that weird? Yeah. Well, pike, just specifically, I guess we should say, is craving or ingesting a non food item or I guess the craving. And then if you act on it, then you're carrying out the craving. Right. And actually, if you have a weird food craving, you should actually probably see a physician because it could mean like an iron deficiency or some other problem with your body. Right. Unless you're pregnant. Don't be alarmed if you're pregnant and you want to eat some dirt, because that's actually kind of common. About 20% of women actually feel this way, and 50% eat ice. And the other thing that I thought was weird was this geophagia you were talking about is more common here in the south. Yes, but you don't find too many people who eat white clay up north. Why not? I don't think there is white clay available up north. It's weird. Well, that's food cravings in a nutshell. In a huge nutshell on a man. Which bun. Yeah. Thanks to Kristen conger for writing a really good article for us to podcast on. So I just want to finish up by getting this really clear. You take a sloppy joe and you take just the corn tortilla, fish taco, that's open face, and you put that on top. It's a taco, man. Well, it's not a taco until you hold it and roll it up. Right. You put it in, folded, rolled up, half over, double over, and then put the bun of a sloppy joe on top and go to town with the meat and everything. Yeah, that's the weirdest thing I've ever heard. That's Pika esque. Well, if you want to know more about Pika food cravings or anything your brain can come up with, you just type some words into the handy search bar@howtofworks.com and you'll be taken care of straight away. And since I said the handy search bar at how stuff works.com, that means it's time now for listener mail. Josh, I'm just going to call this Henry Hill exposed. Remember we did our podcast recently on the Witness Protection program? We talked about famous gangster Henry Hill, basis of the film Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven. And My Blue Heaven. And we had a guy riding that has met Henry Hill and here's what he has to say. And I think he's from England because of all the weird things he said. Did he say cheers at the bottom? Yeah, of course. I've met Henry Hill, an ex entrepreneur and that's in quotes. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. And myself brought him over to England to do an after dinner gentleman's evening type speech. I don't know what that is either. He was also on the local TV promoting book. I think he was an absolute nightmare. He decided that the Witness Protection program was not for him, probably because he had been kicked out of it a half a dozen times and he was going to travel far and wide to help kids from a life of crime. Not bad. Noble the problem was when you have a world famous gangster doing an after dinner speech, the paying guests don't want to hear him telling them, stay out of trouble and behave. They want to hear him talk about Jimmy the Gent and the Lufthansa. Heist sure. Naturally, his minder was his UK agent and it was the first time they'd ever met in person. We had a VIP dinner drink afterwards with a special drink in a posh club in Liverpool and Henry decided he kept to keep wandering off, trying to chat up the girls. Sadly, he'd also been a little too keen on this imported product and could hardly string two words together. So it sounds like he got bombed and was hitting unchecked. Oh, yeah, that's the American translation. Still, for someone who's killed as many people as he has, he was a nice bloke and despite the sounding wrong, an example of the maximum that you should never meet your heroes. Not that he was my hero, but I couldn't think of another way to put it. Lastly, he had to take him to dinner in a cab and we did a quick tour of the Yellow Submarine, the Cavern Club and other famous beetle landmarks. And he said that he would like to sing on stage at the Cavern Club. And when I chuckled, thinking he was joking, guess what he did? The you think I'm funny gag. He did that to him? Nice. And he said it was the scariest thing. He'd ever seen. Cheers, chaps. Jazz. Just in case we weren't sure he was from England. Cheers. Chaps chaps from Jazz. Cheers to you, Jazz. Thank you for that story. That's pretty awesome. Actually. It kind of went back and forth. Like, I would have not liked to have hung out with Henry Hill. I would have loved to have hung out with Henry Hill. That happened like five times. Sure. I feel like I'm about to vomit. Okay, well, if you have a cool story about Henry Hill or any other former gangster, celebrity, unicorn, you name it, send it in an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more Housetofworks? Check out our blog on the Houseofworks.com homepage, 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 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 Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstark, 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." | ||
SYSK Selects: Did a cow start the Great Chicago Fire? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-did-a-cow-start-the-great-chicago-fir | In this week's SYSK Select episode, Josh and Chuck find who's probably to blame for the Great Chicago Fire. The newspapers of the day reported that a cow (or perhaps its owner) was responsible for a fire that burned half of Chicago in 1871. Yet in 1997 Mr | In this week's SYSK Select episode, Josh and Chuck find who's probably to blame for the Great Chicago Fire. The newspapers of the day reported that a cow (or perhaps its owner) was responsible for a fire that burned half of Chicago in 1871. Yet in 1997 Mr | Sat, 07 Oct 2017 13:47:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=13, tm_min=47, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=280, tm_isdst=0) | 27643089 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everyone. This is Chuck and welcome to stuff you should know. Saturday selects. I'm picking this one this week from July 19, 2012. Did a cow start the Great Chicago Fire. You all know I love my history episodes, especially especially those where we can set some things straight. That history. You might have gotten wrong in class, at least as a kid. And we talked at great length today about the Great Chicago Fire. One of the great tragedies in American history. Give it a listen, and I hope you enjoy it and hope you have a great weekend. Welcome to Stuff you should know from Housetepworks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles w chuck O'Brien. I guess that makes me the cow. This is stuff you should know. Daisy the cow. Is that the borden cow? No, that's Lizzy. No, they wouldn't have named the borden cow Lizzie. That'd be bad marketing move. Apparently, this cow was either Daisy, Madeleine or Gwendolyn. There's been different accounts. Well, one of the cows there wasn't even hers. Who are we talking about? Maybe we should clear everybody in. Chuck. Yes? Have you ever seen fire? Yes. Well, there happened to be one akin to what you saw, except there was massive. As a matter of fact chuck, let's go back in the wayback machine. Oh, yes, it's been a while. All right, blow the dust off flux capacitor up flexing man, jerry hated that. I think it's still working. Let me press a couple of buttons here. All right, let's go. Here we go. Chicago, enter the year. Let's go. Enter the date. October 8. Okay, so Sunday. Maybe we should go back on a Saturday and stop it. We're not supposed to do that. Contract space time continuing on that. Okay. So here we are. Chuck. What a dump. Yeah. It smells like the death of cows and the manure that they excrete. Because Chicago is a huge Stockyard town if you can't tell the World fair is 22 Years. Off. Ghostbusters is 113 years away. Did you just do that in your head? Yeah. This is just like, basically the middle of nowhere, temporarily speaking. Yeah. Okay 1870 119 84 -18 71 is 113 am I wrong no I think it's right. Okay, man, we just had a math argument. And I can't do in Chicago in the 19th century. You think we were throwing darts or something. Anyway, there's some things I want to point out to you, Chuck. Do you see? The streets are paved with wood. Yeah. And this sidewalk we're on is wooden. Yeah. And, like, 90% of the structures around here are all wood. Everything Is Wood. I want you to make note of that. Okay. Also make note of the temperature. It's October. And yet it's like in the 80s. Right. It's pretty hot. And it was really dry this summer. Dry. Do you see all this stuff? A lot of it again, is dry. Cow manure just kind of floating around, but it's because there hasn't been any rain at all. Okay. Yeah. Are you ready again? Let's get out of here. All right. Are we back? And we're back. Okay. So, Chuck, that was pretty good steak. Yeah, definitely a good milk steak. So what was about to happen, and I really do feel for these people for not being able to stop it, especially the 300 who are about to die. 300 people will die because we were too busy filling our faces with stake rather than warning anybody. Yeah, but that's the way of history. That's right. You can't change it. What's about to happen is what's known as the Great Chicago Fire of October 8, 1871. 300 people will die. 3.5 sq. Mi of the city will be utterly destroyed. 18,000 structures. Yeah, I've got some stats here, if I may, please. Because you hear about the Great Chicago Fire in the 1800s, it's easy now to say, like, yeah, that was a heck of a fire, but, dude, it was insane how big this fire was. I know. The West Division, they were divided into divisions back in the day. Okay. 194 acres burned, 500 buildings, 2250 people homeless. South Division, 460 acres burned. This is, like, where all the expensive stuff was. This is where March County seat, the courthouse, the newspapers, the loft, the banks, all the good stuff. 3650 buildings, 28 hotels, 210 people homeless. When you say buildings, you're saying utterly destroyed. Burned to the ground. Burned to the ground. North Division, most devastating, 1470 acres burned out of the 2500 acres in that division. So almost the whole division burned. 13,000 buildings burned. I'm sorry. Yes. 13,000 buildings burned. 74,000 homeless in total. Because Molly, she did a good job, but she really didn't hammer home how severe this was. In total, 2124 acres burned, 17,450 buildings burned to the ground, and almost 100,000 people, which is a third of the city. We're homeless. Yeah. And if you go and type in Google Earth, great Chicago Fire and hit images, it has a picture of modern day Chicago and it hasn't read what was the fire, and it looks like 75% of the city. Wow, that's really neat. Yeah, it's really scary. And neat. And neat. The whole thing came to damage, surprisingly, for that much of Chicago, I guess there wasn't a lot of valuable stuff there. Just $192,000,000 worth of damage. Yes. Three and a half billion now. Oh, so that's in that area. Yeah. Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Yeah. So it was a huge fire. It was an enormous fire. And again, like 300 people lost their lives. Yes. I think it's number three all time in the US. Behind World Trade Center in San Francisco. San Francisco, I'll bet. And the crazy thing about this fire is just about everybody points to the same location as the source today. Back then it was in a barn at Coven street. And that barn did happen to belong to a woman named Mrs. O'Leary. Catherine, kate O'Leary and Mr. O'Leary. Yeah. Mr and Mrs O'Leary and their children lived at 137 To Covet Street. They had a house. They rented another house to another family that was right in front of them. And then behind them was the barn. And in the barn, they had three cows. Three cows? Yeah. No, five cows total, I think. Okay. Five cows, I believe a calf and a horse. And then also in this barn, wooden barn, two tons of hay and two tons of coal, and apparently, like, hundreds of pounds of wood shavings, which they kept to use as kindling, and their pyromaniac nephew in a straitjacket. It was just pretty much a big accident waiting to happen. Yeah. And you mentioned that they owned another house, but they were poor. They weren't like, some rich family that owns these houses. Like they were poor family. Right. Mr. O'Leary, he was a labor. I couldn't find what kind they were definitely working class. And Mrs. O'Leary sold her milk in the neighborhood. But they were on welfare, as I understand it. Yeah. And ridiculously. The Chicago Tribune claimed early on that one of her motives was that she was booted off of welfare when they found out when the city found out she was selling her milk. And she was like, I'll get you. I'll burn the city down. Right. Which is ridiculous, starting with all my stuff. This is the Chicago Tribune still around today? Yeah, the Tribune immediately they pointed to the O'Leary as the source of the fire. It was either Mrs. O'Leary or another Tribune reporter made up the idea that it was possibly her cow. A guy named Michael Ahern later confessed to just making up the cow story. And so Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern and setting the barn on fire, that started the Great Chicago Fire. It gained a lot of traction before Ahern ever admitted to making it up, I think, many years later. Yeah. Apparently he was quite the drunkard newspaper reporter in 19th century Chicago. Was a drunkard? Hard to believe. So you're right. Over the years, through song and legend and story, mrs. O'Leary's cow was always blamed. And if you ask people on the street, Jay Leno style, I bet eight out of ten people would say if they have heard of the Great Chicago Fire, that it was started by a cow of some sort, and then Jay Leno's NBC lawyers would serve you with cease and desist papers. Yeah. And Jay Leno, one of the other reasons that this cow has persisted for so long, this cow legend, is not just because it makes a great story, like a cow set Chicago on fire. Yeah. But also because they never really figured out who the source was. Mrs. O'Leary just kind of went down in history as the villainous, whether it was accidental or on purpose, or the very least the cause of the great Chicago Fire. It was her barn no matter which way you slice it, right? Exactly. And this is despite, like, an exhaustive inquiry. You were saying? It's an enormous fire. Chicago burned. They did a really big investigation into this. There was 10 00, 10 00 pages of testimony taken, all taken by shorthand. Some court stenographer took it all by hand. Oh, man. And they still never figured it out. But history has shown us possibly who the culprit was. Let's talk about Mrs. O'Leary first and why she may or may not have been culpable. Okay. She testified that her neighbors was it in the house that they were renting from her? Yeah, the McLaughlins. In the house in front of her. OK. She said they threw a big party. They're all partying. And some of them went into my barn to get milk for milk, steak for oysters. A punch that required milk. A milk punch. I looked it up. Milk punch is the thing. Sugar and vanilla and bourbon and milk. Well, there's a lot of different milk punches. It sounds disgusting. It's got bourbon in it. Just drink the bourbon and milk with oysters. Sounds really disgusting. Yeah. I was really curious what that's like, but I mean, think about Oysters Rockefeller. That's cheesy. What's cheese if not milk at its heart? Yeah. I don't like the Rockefeller, though. I just go raw. I like it both ways. Really? Oh, yeah. Do you like them fried? Yeah, I'll eat oysters pretty much anyway. As long as they're good. Yeah. All right. So anyway, Mrs. O'Leary contends that the partiers the revelers went into her barn seeking milk for some odd meal time or drink time. We're sitting there milking the counter, like, oh, I'm so wasted. Yeah, exactly. And then kicked over a lantern. Right. Either kicked over a lantern or was smoking out there. Something happened. They don't know. There was another suggestion as recently as 2004, that Bella's comet split into pieces that night, and chunks of it set fires in various points all over the Midwest on the same night, which is not possible. Not possible. Scientists say that when a comet enters our atmosphere, it's not going to be what, hot enough a meteorite to set a fire. Right. It's going to cool down too much to be able to set a fire by the time it makes contact with the ground. So how does this have traction in Ford? I couldn't find that fringe. A bigfoot expert. Yeah. So those are a couple of the other theories. What about Mrs. O'Leary herself? Oh, well, they said that she was out there milking the cows at night. And she said no. I was asleep. She was asleep with a sore foot. And the piece of evidence that probably exonerates her more than any other is that none of her stuff was insured. Well, yeah, exactly. Like I said earlier, why would she burn down, especially in retribution for being put off welfare. Why would she burn her house down? Her livelihood. Her livelihood down, possibly killing her cows, which is like tantamount to killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Yeah. The fact that it wasn't insured, it doesn't matter what kind of person she is right out the window. Nobody is going to do that on purpose. No. So at the very least, she didn't do it on purpose. Correct. But she also probably didn't do it on accident either. She probably really was in bed with the sore foot. No one saw her. There were no reports of her being around the barn. Right. And how did Mr. Oli escape all this? I don't know. I wonder if he's at work or something. I guess she was really strongly associated with the cow. Yeah. You always only hear about her. Yeah. Mr. O'Leary, I guess he enjoyed his anonymity. Well, she did too. Just like it's her, as you find later on. Gal. Right. Exactly. He just didn't even say anything. She's like, Say something. What? I don't want to be in the papers. Where are we then? So, Mrs. O'Leary, we're going to go ahead and just kind of exonerate her at this point. Agreed. Which initially happened in 1997. Right. There is a guy named Lewis M. Cone who went on to great wealth in Chicago. And later on, after he died, somebody came forward, I think, in the said remember Lewis Cone? He told me that when he was 18, he was gambling in the O'learies barn with one of the O'Leary boys, which kind of holds water because James O'Leary went on to become one of the biggest gambling bosses in Chicago, one of the sons. And we kicked over a lantern accidentally and set the place on fire. And we accidentally started the Chicago fire. This guy was apparently kind of a boastful type, so it's possible that he made it up. Right. He even said I was winning at the time. Like he bragged about it. Yeah. So you've got all these people and none of them really, though, can hold a candle. Even Mrs. O'Leary herself to one Daniel Peg Leg Sullivan. Why do they call him Peg Leg? For a very good reason. He had one wooden leg and then went clop. That's right. And he testified. He testified. And it sort of became a case of thou doth protest too much, sir. Yeah, because he made up the story. Well, remember in the lying episode, it's like when you add stuff that doesn't need to be in there, it's usually a pretty good sign. And I'll bet he didn't use any contractions when he gave his testimony. He did not, sir. I can't believe you want to know why I was sitting on the curb in front of someone else's. You want to know? Then I will tell you. But I can't believe you want to know. In the meantime he's cooking this whole story up. He testified that he had gone to visit the O'learies about 08:00 that night, said Mr. O'Leary was in bed. Again. No mention Mr. O'Leary at all. After the visit, he apparently went to go home. See this is what I don't get. It says that he started for home but then later it says he passed his home. Right. And to smoke a pipe in front of Wayne White house, said, I'm just going to go have a little pipe smoke for some reason. I'm going to walk by my house to do it in front of Willy White towels. Do you know why? Here's why he said that. Because that places him near enough the fire that he could reasonably say he saw it. Yeah, but not so close to the McLaughlin's house. Like his house was closer to the McLaughlins. That the part of your account could have been like, I didn't see you there and I was standing right outside looking at in front of your house. Very clever. Mr. Pegleg. He claims that he spotted the fire and ran for help screaming Fire 193ft with his peg leg and tried to extinguish the fire and then escape to the burning barn, freeing animals too. He freed the animals. Oh really? And he actually did do that? Oh he did, yes. So this guy was there, he was around the fire. But the problem is placing him on the curb in front of William White's house has some real problems. So no one disputes that this guy was near the fire, but exactly where that was changes everything. Right. So he was a pig legged man so he couldn't run fast? No. And certainly not close to 200ft. No one heard anybody shouting fire alongside the house. Right. Definitely not him. So he definitely did. Another problem was that his mother kept a cow in the O'Leary barn and he admitted to frequently visiting the cow in the evenings. Oh really? Yeah. Okay. And then it's also possible that another man named Dennis Regan was present. It was something of an accomplice or at least a sympathetic witness to Peg leg. Right. Because he had another part of the story that didn't quite add up. He was about a block away in his home and he testified that he heard someone yelling fire, jumped out of bed to help. But Richard Bails, this attorney, modern day attorney for a title insurance company in Chicago, is the one that dug this all up, pieced it together and said, how would this guy block away have heard this and none of the other people, the Illeries, especially not, have heard this? Not only that, he got his hands on the property diagrams of the area at the time and mapped it out and placed Pegleg where he said he was and showed that he would have had to have been able to look clear through a two story house to see the barn. There's no way he could have seen that it was on fire from where he said he was sitting. So the fact that this guy confabulated all of this story suggests that he may have done it. And probably what he did was he was visiting his mother's cow, decided to have a smoke afterward and accidentally set the barn on fire. The lawyer. Richard Bailey is very understanding. He said it was probably an accident, but that once he saw that he pretty much burned a third of the city of Chicago down. He just kind of kept his mouth shut and let Mrs. O'Leary take the fall. Yeah. Once that rumor circulated, I'm sure he was like, yeah, that's how it went down, all right. Pretty crazy. I was there. I think I feel bad for the guy. He's there, probably starts his fire, probably gets out of hand and freaks out and hobbles out. Kind soul. And in the end, they couldn't put out the fire for some of the reasons you talked about earlier. All the wood, the dryness, strong wind. Did you notice the strong wind when we visited Chicago? I don't know if they did, but it was strong, josh 56 miles of wooden streets, 560 miles of wooden sidewalks, and only about 200 firemen in the whole city. There was about a 16 acre fire the night before that they'd put out. Right. Well, it had started. They had fought it all through the night before and into Sunday afternoon. Okay, so most of these guys hadn't eaten or slept, and the fire brigade damaged their equipment in some cases, yeah. Then some of the fire engines went to the wrong address to begin with. Right. There was a guy whose job it was to look out for fires. Like, he sat in basically gross nest in the courthouse firewatcher. You're right. And he didn't see it for a while. He finally did, but he picked the wrong department to activate. Oh, really? Yeah, like the wrong little segment that he was supposed to guess. And so some people went to the wrong place first, and it took a little while to correct it, so there's some confusion. So that happened, too. And then apparently, the fire destroyed the building that housed the water pumps for the city, and then they tried to get water from Lake Michigan, and that didn't work out so well. And all these things added up to the third biggest fire disaster in the nation's history. And like you said, the longhead idea of connecting the wooden buildings with the wooden streets and wooden sidewalks that I think fell out of fashion pretty quick after the Chicago Fire, I bet. And people smoking on the streets and well, that probably didn't fall, keeping two tons of hay and two tons of coal, and apparently it burned, what, through the following evening. And then, thankfully, it finally rained, and that helped put it out. And that is a great Chicago fire. You want to hear an irony of it all? I'd love to. The O'Leary House was spared. No way. Yeah, it was not burned. So it just took off in one direction from the barn. Yeah. And now the O'Leary's house, the house they rent to the McLaughlin's, William White's house, all that stuff is gone in its places. The Chicago Fire Departments training Academy. And they have a Maltese cross on the floor. They have a cross on the floor that marks the spot where the barn stood. Oh, I thought you're going to say like a CVS. No, it's very appropriately it's the fire department. Did they do that there on purpose? I believe so. Okay, that would have just been too much of a coincidence. Exactly. And then Mrs. O'Leary really did not like the well she didn't like the limelight, I get the impression anyway. But she really didn't like being treated like this horrible person. And she was not shy about taking a broom to people like reporters who came to her doorstep. And she also chased off a representative of PT. Barnums and he sent somebody to go offer a job traveling with the circus. It's like the scapegoat, I guess. Yeah, they would bring out a cow and her oh no, we forgot to mention she had a pretty healthy beard. What? Man, she's in the wrong line of work. Yeah, it would have gone right up with the fire. Her house is barebitter, beard burned off. Yeah. That's good. So. Yeah, that's the Chicago Fire. You said she was exonerated, right? Yeah, she was exonerated officially after Richard Bail's work. I had something else. Oh. I think it's just remarkable that did you have the number at 300 people died? I've seen varying accounts but that's the max that I've heard. And it's just amazing that that much of the city burned and 18,000 buildings burned down. Like you hear about a fire today that hits like three buildings on a block in a city. It's a huge deal. Yeah, I'm surprised only 300 people died. It's pretty remarkable and that's a lot. But I'm surprised it wasn't like 5000 people. They always say God loves Chicago. Yeah. Except when it comes to the Cubs. Yeah, that's true. If you want to learn more about Mrs. O'Leary, her cow, the Great Chicago Fire, fires in general, anything. You can type whatever you want into the search bar@howstuffworks.com. I said search bar. And then it's time for listener mail. But first Joshua going to call this a fish called ganja. You're getting pretty good today with that. I appreciate that. Hey guys, I'm a tender of bar in the Bear city of New York and one of my regulars turned me on to your podcast a few short months ago. He even gave the guy's name. But it's so funny when they put it like that. Like, hey man, turn me onto that podcast. Like in a back gallery. Since then, I've been playing catch up and listening to as many episodes as I can on a daily basis to quench my thirst for knowledge. Currently, I live near Philly with my wife and new daughter, but I sling drinks in New York. Before I'd been turned on to you all, I dreaded my two hour commute. Now I look forward to it. And I managed to listen to 192 episodes. Nice. A few months, some dedication. That's hardcore. Several years ago, my uncle decided to purchase a new saltwater aquarium and ended up purchasing an enormous 150 gallon unit. He bought the tank online from a reputable website, but to save money, he purchased most of the accoutrements, including lighting, fish, coral, and plant life from a local pet store. This is where it gets good, because the lighting he purchased was a special type of lamp, also very commonly used in grove houses. He must have been flagged by the DEA at the moment of sale, because about a month later, after the tank was finished on a Tuesday evening, my uncle, my aunt, and three cousins, all under the age of seven, were sitting down to dinner. In an instant, six fully armed DEA agents burst into the house oh, my God. Including front door, back door, and from the garage and proceeded to scream things along the lines of on the floor, hands behind your head. They even held my aunt and uncle at gunpoint while they looked around the house. After searching from top to bottom and realizing they made a huge mistake, they calmly apologized and left. I'm not 100% sure if the lawyers were involved, but I believe my family received a handsome compensation for the mistake. I'll bet. And that is from Ben the bartender. And he has a hook up for us in New York if we want to have a vet at a bar. Nice. Hang on to that email. We may do that again sometimes. I know. We miss you. New York. All of our work travel has been on the West Coast. Yeah. Certain other city. Yeah. So let's see what else I can't top that I can't send your other misinformed DEA stories. How about anyone that has any Chicago Fire? Like, I always wondered about the O'learies, if their family line continues. Yeah, Lore. Yeah. If you have any family members that had anything to do with the Chicago Fire, we'd love to know about it. I don't even know why I'm here anymore. You just take a chuck. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstoffworks.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 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." | ||
4533ea18-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-e373e7c1752c | Short Stuff: Laughing Buddha | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-laughing-buddha | Did you know that the friendly, smiling Buddha we all know from bars and restaurants isn't really Buddha? | Did you know that the friendly, smiling Buddha we all know from bars and restaurants isn't really Buddha? | Wed, 12 Dec 2018 15:23:28 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=15, tm_min=23, tm_sec=28, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=346, tm_isdst=0) | 12153111 | 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 podcast, the short podcast. I still look forward to those intros. Oh, I'm sorry to let you down every time. You'll never learn what you chose. No, I think it's great. I enjoy them. Oh, good. I'm glad one of us does. So we are talking today about Buddhism, which is an extraordinarily complex, nuanced, layered world religion, one of the Big Seven, at least. And there's going to be a lot of stuff we're not going to talk about. There's going to be terms that we don't necessarily bring into it. The point is, everybody, it's not wrong, okay? We're talking about a major religion on the Short Stuff episode that's supposed to be 15 minutes or less. So just go into it giving us a break. Yes, because this is not about Buddhism as a whole, because we talked about it here and there. I believe we did one on Nirvana, correct? Yeah. So we know a little bit about it in Karma, right? Yeah, we did that one, too. We danced around Buddhism, which is a B, from what I understand. But specifically, this is about a bit of a Chotch key. This is about the little happy, jolly, chubby, usually shirtless, laughing Buddha. It looks like Rick Ross that you see if you go to Chinatown and go to a little tourist trap shop there, you might see these. You might see them at an Asian restaurant by the cash register. If you're a Chuck, you might have seen one on his desk for many years. Oh, yeah, you do have that one. Yeah, someone gave it to me years and years and years ago. A little bank. And I don't know, he's just got a happy little face, so I liked it. He definitely does. And he's just smiling. He can't even see his eyeballs, he's smiling so much. And everybody knows that that's the laughing Buddha. But here's the thing. That's not Buddha. No, not technically Buddha in the very Buddhist way. Yes, he counts as Buddha in some way, shape or form, and we'll kind of explain that. But when you're talking about Buddha, when most people who are not Buddhists point to that and say, oh, that's Buddha, you're wrong. That's not Buddha. That you're thinking, there is one Buddha who is the Buddha? The teaching Buddha for our area that we live in right now. Capital T-H-E Buddha. Exactly. And that's just capitalized chuck italicized as well. So the Buddha, he was an actual man who lived in the 8th century in India, and his name was Sidartha Gautama, and he was actually born a wealthy prince, had a great wife, had a kid, was just living the life, but found that he was still unsatisfied. Unfulfilled. He wanted to know what the meaning of life was. So he went on basically a vision quest and figured it out and achieved nirvana. And in doing so, he became the Buddha, and I believe his name changed to what is his name? Oh, Shakyamuni. So we went from Sidartha Gautama, the man, the prince, to Shakyamuni Buddha, the teaching Buddha of our age. The Buddha, that's right. Buddha means awakened one. And like you said, during this vision quest, he meditated for 49 days under a bodhi tree. And I imagine that was a wonderful peaceful experience. Dude, I bet his legs had such pins and needles at the end of it, came out the other side. Enlightened. And this religion has since grown, of course, to the point where, I mean, they're approaching like, 400 million followers at this point, right, somewhere there, which is pretty respectable. Yes, very much so. For sure. This guy more than mine does. How many? Just me. Just you? I usually keep it secret. You need to, like, give me a pamphlet and I'll take a look at it. She's thinking about it. I'm working on it. So over the years, Buddhism has really expanded to the point where there's just not Gautama Buddha. Is that the pronunciation you used? Yeah. Galtama is everything I saw yeah. Galtma, Buddha, to where there are many deities, including a bunch of bodhatvas. Yeah, yeah. Which, by the way, I was like, oh, yes, steely Dan, and ended up listening to every major dude, because I saw that word in print. Oh, man. Let me some steely, Dan. That's good stuff. So it's sort of a term for these individuals who work for enlightenment for everyone. Yeah. I was like, okay, but what is it really? And it depends on who you are. So if you're a practicing Buddhist who has really dedicated yourself to living the Buddhist life, to following the Buddhist path, you are technically a bodhisatva. But in certain traditions, like the one that's practiced largely in Japan, in Korea and China, bodhisatva is actually somebody who's living, walking the earth, who is so Buddhist that they could achieve nirvana. They're actually putting off achieving nirvana so they can stay here on Earth to make it a better place. Wow. Which makes them like mr. Rogers would have been a bodhisattva, basically. Yeah. So there's Bodhisattvas, there's the Buddha, but then there's also some traditions that say, well, you realize the Buddha has been born and reborn and reborn multiple times. So this gautama was just the most recent in a line of 28 so far. Apparently, every time the world gets destroyed, the Buddha is reborn. And right now, in this incarnation of the world, gautama became the teaching Buddha of our age. And then those reincarnated versions of the Buddha are called avatars. You've got all of them being revered as deities as well. So it's kind of understandable how you could say, well, that guy technically qualifies as the Laughing Buddha, but he's actually another individual, another historical figure, from what we understand. That's right. And you know what? That's a great place for a little quick break, and we're going to come back and reveal who the Laughing Buddha is once and for all 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. 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. 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. All right, so you said that the Laughing Buddha was one of these Avatars, a real human being who walked the Earth. 10th. I like TIF. Like you just said it weirdly. Sounded like when I didn't have teeth up front, they did, but they're all there, Chuck, and they're looking sharp. 10th century Chinese monk whose name was not Buddha, but Buddha. Okay, so that was his nickname. His real name was I think that was my attempt at it is spelled Budai. And he's the guy that you see, he was potbellied. He was happy and gregarious. He would go around from village to village with sort of like Santa Claus with a big sack over his shoulder. And in fact, his very name means cloth sack in Chinese, and he was a very beloved figure. He helped the poor children loved them. He would give out sweet treats and rice and was generally like, what you would imagine that character is, except it was a real human. Right. That's a weird way to say that. Right. But because of this sack of goodies that he would give to children and the poor, and like you said, he was very Santa Claus. Like, he started to become kind of associated as a Buddha that represented, like, abundance and plenty and contentment and fulfillment kind of materially, but not necessarily, but in a very Buddhist way. And so the laughing Buddha just became a very lovable, well liked figure. Like, he was just the kind of Buddha or Buddhist avatar that anybody could get into. That's right. But the thing that really kind of cemented his position in the pantheon of Buddhist deities was he basically was a self proclaimed incarnation of Buddha. Yeah. He wrote a poem on his deathbed in which he said basically, like, hey, guys, just want to let you know the truth. I'm actually the incarnation of the next teaching Buddha. Remember, we live in a certain era right now, and Shakyamuni is the teaching Buddha. Well, the next time the world destroys itself after it's reborn, the incarnation of the Buddha that I am, maitreya is going to come back, and then that Buddha will be the teaching Buddha for the next era. I was just coming by to say, what up? Y'all have some stuff out of my goody sack. Yeah. And just call me future Buddha. Right. So they did. So that cemented Buddha's position in the pantheon of deities. But the reason why you see Buddhai next to a cash register is because over time, he became associated with restaurants and bartenders. Yes. Which is really interesting. And the only thing that sort of makes sense is and, you know, people have researched this, but it became this imagery of this particular future Buddha became very popular in art and sculpture, and this started kind of cropping up in about the 15th century. Right. And then global trade starts starts expanding. 16th and 17th century porcelain becomes a big thing. Ceramics becomes a big thing. And somehow in all this trade and moving kind of spreading the word west, the image of this guy, this little happy Buddha, future Buddha that is, that everyone knows and loves, just sort of got picked up into the west, and it became sort of like a souvenir. Yeah, like a spoon. If you're going to St. Louis, if you go to Beijing, you get a laughing Buddha instead. That's right. But that's how likable this guy was. Yes. And to me, the most likable thing about Buddhism period, is if you rub on the Buddha's belly for good luck, that had nothing to do with them. And I thought, man, just a bunch of dumb, white Westerners rubbing on this thing. It's probably sacrilegious. But not to Buddhist. They're like, you know what? It's all good. Rub on that belly. I don't blame you. It's highly rubble. Call them laughing Buddha. We don't care. Yeah, it's fine. Because you know why? Because we're Buddhists and we're not worried about stuff like that. Yeah. And then to button the whole thing up, the reason why you see him and why you can rub his belly out of restaurants, because he became the patron saint of restaurant tours and bartenders because of his association with contentment and fulfillment. Amazing. Isn't that cool? Yeah, I love it. And I really can't stress enough what a charming, welcoming thing that is for Buddhist to be like. You know what? Any quality that represents Buddha nature is great. It's all good with us. I think that's pretty cool. Very cool. Well, that's it. That's the laughing Buddha. Now, you can point that out to everybody the next time you go to a Chinese restaurant, and they will love you for it. Yeah, rub that belly. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go onto our website stuffyoushouldnow.com. You can check out our social links there. And then you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstworks.com you." | |
How the Moonwalk Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-moonwalk-works | When Michael Jackson debuted the moonwalk in 1983 the world was enrapt. The dance goes back farther, to the 1930s, and pops up again in the 50s, before reappearing via mimes and West Coast poppers in the 70s. Follow the circuitous route of an iconic move. | When Michael Jackson debuted the moonwalk in 1983 the world was enrapt. The dance goes back farther, to the 1930s, and pops up again in the 50s, before reappearing via mimes and West Coast poppers in the 70s. Follow the circuitous route of an iconic move. | Thu, 21 Jul 2016 18:58:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=18, tm_min=58, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=203, tm_isdst=0) | 39635979 | 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 just moonwalk right in this joint. Can you moonwalk walk? I think everybody at the Bellhouse on June 30 knows I can moonwalk. Cannot. I didn't moonwalk, but I think based on my moves, you could make the assumption that I'm an awesome moonwalker. I've seen your moonwalk, jerky. It's that kind of moonwalk that guys like us do. I don't understand. It kind of simulates the moonwalk I see. You know what I mean? It's an echo of a moonwalk. I wouldn't call it smooth and floaty. Oh, I would. Yeah. Now I know it's not a great moonwalk. That's right. I never learned the moonwalk because I didn't try to practice the moonwalk more than, like, once. And I was like, I can't do that. Oh, yeah. I just bailed on it. Like my brother practiced and got okay at it. I'm surprised he didn't like, yes, teach it as a class for free to children in need. No, he got okay at it, but I think I bail on things that aren't easy for me. Well, that's definitely a candidate for that. Yeah. I think that's a trait I have. I don't like to spend a lot of time on something that I don't think I'm good at. I'm not one that's like, no, man, I'm going to try to moonwalk until I learn it. I see. I was like, no, maybe I'm not a moonwalker. Didn't you say you bail on books, too? That don't capture your attention at this point in your life? Is that you? I don't think I said that, but no, I didn't say that. Okay. Will you work your way through a book? Well, I'll give it a fair shot. It's been a while since I bailed on a book, though, just because I usually just pick good books like that I know are really good. Right. I don't know how long I give a book. How long do you give a book? A book? Two pages. Yeah, but, like three or four times. Right. Like, what am I missing? Let me try that again. Yeah, that's fair. I just read a book called Head Full of Ghosts, which is pretty neat. It's like a psychological thriller. Oh, yeah. I haven't read a fiction book in forever. And then right now, neither. I'm reading the right stuff. Tom Wolfe classic. I think Tom Wolfe might be the greatest reporter of all time. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I don't think there's anybody better. Our buddy Joe Randazzo. Oh, yeah. At midnight, fame people are like, wait a minute, I thought he was at The Onion. No, he said at midnight. He used to work at the Onion. He just recommended a book, which I'm really interested in, that I wanted to tell you about. Okay. Because it sounds like it's right up your sapiens. All right. A Brief History of Humankind. Oh, that sounds neat. By UVAL Noah Harari. Love that guy. And it has a pretty remarkable thesis, which is that humans didn't kill each other off because they can cooperate in large numbers because we have a unique ability. Animals don't have to believe in things that exist only in our imagination, like government and money and God. Right? And he said all of these things allow us to cooperate. Like we talked about in our money episode. It's like money. That paper has no value. We just all agreed. So it's essentially fiction. Right? The whole concept of money is just something we've all agreed on. And he said it's this cooperation by believing in these fictional things, that is the only reason that humans didn't kill each other off like any other weird species. Yeah, I've got to check that out. It sounds super interesting. Thanks, Jim. He said it was amazing. And thank you for relating that to yeah, maybe you should read it and just tell me about it. Okay. Because I still have never read 1491. No, man, I'm a fiction reader. I try to read nonfiction and I don't know, I just like a good fictional yarn more. I'm quite the opposite. Like I told you, I wanted to be a Civil War buff and got one of those huge books that's supposed to be great. I just can't do it. It sounds like the moonwalk. You don't like fiction? I do like it. So much of the time I'm reading for work, so I think you would enjoy fiction as a break. Well, that's why I read headpillar ghosts, right? I was like, I'm reading a fiction book. I need to just read something different and use my imagination again. And it worked. It had an effect on me. What was that? What was it? Yeah, what was it about? It was about a girl who may or may not be possessed and like, how her family unravels around her. Is it like poplit? I don't know what that is. Easy to read dean Coote and no, it was a little more literary than that. Okay. I wish I'm sorry to the author who wrote the book. I don't remember the dude's name, but he does a good job. I'm sorry. To Dean Coons and John Grisham. All of a sudden, they know what they are. Those guys know what they are. Although, Dean Cootes, man, that guy's imagination is fantastic. I always assume that he was better than Stephen King because he could finish the story. I've never read a Stephen King book. What? I don't read a lot of that stuff. Okay. I read one Dean Coons book in my early twenty s and one night. It's the only time I've ever done that. Well, yeah, that was the good thing about a Coon's book is you can go through it like crazy. Yes. Started reading it at like eight or nine, and I stopped at five in the morning, but each one is way different than the others. I mean, really different. Like, the guy's got a great imagination. You should read some of Stephen King's work. I know, he's so unfairly. I was actually talking to Hudson about this the other day. He's like, very unfairly criticized as a hack, but he's actually oh, yeah. A lot of people are like, Steven sucks just because he's so prolific and because he very famously has trouble finishing a story. Oh, really? Yeah, but it's like nobody can get inside the mind, like the dark side of the average person's mind better than Stephen King. He's a great storyteller. Aside from the ending part. So what's? The Shining is probably the one I should read. Probably not, because you're so used to Kubrick's Shining and it's just so radically different. That's the big one, right? That's a big one. I've never read the stand. I would start with the short stories. They're fantastic. All right. Those he can finish. It's the largest. What do you mean not finish? Like just amazing build up and then the resolutions, like, so he finishes you just mean it's okay. Right? It's not left unfinished. The resolution is the payoff is not so great. Yeah. Interesting. And it's still fine, but he's so good at building things up that it would be almost impossible to finish it. I don't know if we should call this beginning book talk with Josh and Chuck or padding the episode. You want to talk moonwalk? Yeah. We need a little something, though. This is a short one. Well, you're saying that you just couldn't do it. Yeah. Let me tell you how I approached the moonwalk. All right? My left hand was covered in a white glove with sequins sewn on that my mom made for me. Did you really? Wearing the Thriller jacket. Wow. Little black pants. Yeah, that's how I moon walked. Wow. I was still not that great at it. You were in man, this is so in my wheelhouse. Yeah. I listened to pop music, but I was also influenced by my well, he's now my brother in law, the General started dating my sister when I was twelve. Okay. So he was always around and he was like, you're twelve years old, you need to listen to the Almond Brothers and Leonard skinnerd and Molly Hatchett and Blackfoot and the Atlanta Rhythm Section black and the Dooby Brothers. Like, heck yeah. But I also listen to the American Top 40 every week. I was in MTV. I was glued, too. Sure. So you can't be glued to MTV and not like ingest some of that stuff. Sure. But I never owned parachute pants or sequined anything. That was the only sequin thing I ever owned. That's very sweet that your mom did that. I think so, too. It was a very sweet gesture. But I think one of the other reasons the moonwalk spoke to me and I didn't realize it until researching this article, Chuck, that I was also super into breakdancing at the time. And the moonwalk is actually not a breaking move. It's a popping move. But for all but actual breaking and popping dancers, it's the same thing. Yeah, I don't see how it's a popping move. I saw that in the article and I couldn't put it together because so herky jerky and a good moonwalk is so smooth and buttery. Well, so locking is herky jerky, right? Well, no, popping is too poppin. Is that like yeah, but it's also really not good for audio. So you know the one where you hold out one hand and make a wave? The wave goes through your body to the other hand? Yeah. The clock is popping. Is it? Yeah. And I was like, okay, I'll bet the worms popping wrong. The worms are breaking move. I clearly don't know. But the average person who's doing these dances is probably popping, locking and breaking. Yeah. It all kind of worked out at the same time. Yeah. And I know we covered break dancing some in the hip hop episode, but we should do a total breakdance, like give it its full due. Okay. And we're going to call it the total breakdance episode, but we got to cover some of it here because there's such a basis of it in the moonwalk. Or the moonwalk has such a basis in it, but the moonwalk goes even further back than popping and locking, which we'll talk about in a minute. It goes all the way back to the 30s. Yeah. Should we take a break? Oh, man. Yes. All right. Josh just taught me how to moon walking now. I'm great at it. Yeah. And this I can't remember what that's called. The wave. The wave is where you stand up at a baseball game. So what is this? I don't know. People that don't know what Josh is doing right now are probably frustrated. But it's that move you do where you wave the one arm and it goes through your body and the other arm waves and then you pass it to your friend. Yes. That's a pop in move. Is it? Yeah. I don't know. Body popping clearly doesn't I don't know what popping means. I think the name is a bit of a misnomer. Yeah, probably. All right. And by the way, people, we might as well get to this. I'm not going to be able to gush much about Michael Jackson because I'm one of the people that thinks he did bad things in his private life. So if you don't hear me talking about how awesome he is, that's why. Yeah. I have a hard time separating the art from the artist. Throw it out there, man. If you believe that, how could you? Yeah, I'm unconvinced at this point. All right. But I'm seeing my own A. Yeah, that's a good one. A bunch of people are like, that's what COA means. Yes, I'm covering my own a, speaking for myself. Anyway, you hear a little bit of, like, callousness in my voice. That's why. So going back in time, it was not invented by that man. Like you said, it goes back to the 1930s. If you look on the YouTube history of the moonwalk, you will see a nice video that shows the evolution of this dance, starting with Cab Callaway in the 1930s, doing something called The Buzz. The great band leader, jazz big band leader. He remains unaccused of anything. He was also awesome in the Blues Brothers. Oh, yeah. Wow. He was still around for that. That's right. Forgot about that. About 50 years on. Yeah. So in the 1930s, he did something called The Buzz, and it was a little more herky jerky and not as smooth. Then there was something that this article mentions called the Camel Walk, which I looked into, or the collegiate walk that Sammy Davis Jr. Did in this video. I don't think it looks anything like the moon walk. Not really. I think going forward first of all, right. Which is a big one. And it's cool. It's a cool move. Sure. James Brown dare Sammy to do it. Sammy's like, all right, I'll do it. Awesome. Could you imagine being in that audience, man? Sammy Davis, Jr. And James Brown on the same stage. I know. Who do we have now? Bieber and whoever else. I don't even know him. Bieber and Bieber. It's a nightmare group. Yeah. So sorry, man. We sound old. You're not old. Because we're trashing. Justin Bieber. Yeah. He's the same. He's a jerk. You know, he really has done a lot of stuff to say to earn that. Yeah. It's not like he's some super nice guy. People are just unfair to look at some of the videos. Him, like, peeing in a bucket in a restaurant. Do you ever see that one? No. I heard about that one, though. What's wrong with that guy? Well, I think he's too much wealth and not enough guidance. Yeah. And probably too much booze and stuff. I think maybe he might be somewhat reformed now. Oh, really? I think he's grown up a little bit, but I don't follow it that closely. I see just the pee in the bucket thing. Yeah. That was enough to turn me off forever. When I'm back, justin, win them back. Good luck. We're talking about the walk or the Camel Walk, right. So you were saying it doesn't look like a moonwalk. In fact, it looks kind of like a reverse moonwalk. Sort of. But the point is, it's somebody sammy Davis Jr. Floating. Their feet are floating a little bit. They appear to be floating while they move. All right, so it's related to the moonwalk. Right. I'll give you that. The one that's, like, dead on, though, is Bill Bailey in 1955. Full on moonwalks off the stage. Yeah. In 1955 at the Apollo yeah. And there's a great video, and it's at the very end of the video, but I urge you to not just skip to the end because you've got two or three minutes of some sweet, sweet tap dancing. Yeah. Which I didn't realize how much I loved until I saw this guy. And he was supposedly trained by Mr. Bojangles himself. Really? Yeah. That was a real person. Yeah. I don't remember his name, but it was Bojangles. Yeah. I love tap dancing. I didn't know it. I watched this, I was like, man, that's amazing. She goes to Gregory Hines. Is he still doing it? Probably. There's no way. He's just like, I'm done tapping. Yeah. Tap was life for that guy. Yeah. I mean, that stuff is amazing. And what's the guy's name? I can't remember. Mikel Bersenikov was Knight. Well, I did see that movie. Yeah. There was a guy. Savion Glover. I know who you're talking about. Like, much more recent. Yeah. Like, mean tap dancer. Yeah. Like, he just shout insults while he was he looks stupid, but watch me dance. So Bill Bailey in 1955, Legit moon walked. And it's hard to say, like, he's the guy that invented it because dance, like, any art form, is just borrowed and changed and morphed along the years to where I don't know that anyone can specifically say bill Bailey might have seen it from someone else. That's a hot move. Yeah. He seems like the type of talent that he could have come up with himself. Yeah, sure. But what's weird, Chuck, is that's apparently where it went and died. Like, he created the moonwalk and it stopped with him for a while. Sure. No, if you go back in the history of it, the people who popularized the moonwalk didn't know that he had done that. Yeah, I see what you mean. So simultaneously, there's also some movement that's similar called the airwalk. But it's mime. Yeah. Like, Marcel Marceau is walking against the wind. Very famous routine where his feet are floating. It's called airwalking, and it's strictly mine. Right. Yeah. The difference between that and a moonwalk is that they're stationary and acting like they're walking forward. Right. And the wind is blowing them, but they're not going backwards. But it's also not part of a dance either. Correct. Don't dance. But this is a weird little thing that I didn't realize. There was apparently there's a period of the 70s where mimes were cool. Did you know that? Yeah, I remember watching Shields and Yarnell as a kid on television, on major network TV. I was all brainstem at the time because I was totally unaware of that. Yeah. Mining was a big deal. And I would practice that. Okay. A little bit. Not for years, but yeah, I practiced miming. What a bizarre period of American pop culture. Oh, yeah. Shields and Yarnell, this mine couple had a were they two dudes? No, it was a man and a woman. I think they were married. Okay. That they had their own TV show. Oh, yeah. Shields and Yarnell was watched, apparently by a lot of people, including you. Sure. It was also watched by a dude named Jeffrey Daniel. Yeah, man, jeffrey Daniel was a great dancer. Probably still is. Yes. Not only was he on Solid Gold, he was in the band Shalomar with Jody Watley. Yeah, Jody Watley. And shallowmar was created by the great Don Cornelius of Soul train rip, I believe. Did he die a few years ago? Yes, he did. And Gary Mumford was the original singer. And then on album number two, Gerald Brown took over, like you said, with Jody Watley of Shallow AR fans, I guess. And then later on her own fame. Yeah. She had her own solo career. Right? For sure. And this guy. Jeffrey Daniel. Right. So Jeffrey Daniel dancing in the sheets. Remember that hit? Yes. This great Footloose soundtrack song, dancing in the Sheets. That was the 80 stuff. They came around in the 70s with more disco. It was super Discoe to start with. But this dude, Jeffrey Daniels, who was in Shelamore, who's also a Solid Gold dancer, he had a pretty awesome move called the backslide. And when you watch him backslide, he's moon walking. Yes. Total moon walking. It totally is. And later on, he was interviewed, like, where did you get this? Where did you come up with the idea? He was like, I was super into Shields and Yarnell at the time. So Miming influenced the Backslide, which, as we'll find out in a second, directly led to the moonwalk. And we'll get to that, finally, after this. All right, Chuck, we're back. Yes, Jeffrey Daniel. I watched that interview that's on the YouTube. It was on a British talk show called Soccer Am of the 2007 thing. Yeah. They had him on soccer. Am. Apparently, it's not just about sports, but they have, like, comedy bits and pop culture stuff. Okay, so he was surprised on that show. They showed a clip of Bailey in the he was like, what's that? He's like, I've never even seen that. He was surprised to see that someone was legit moon walking, whatever, 50 something years earlier. The same move. Yeah. It's not like, oh, that's kind of close. Like, maybe the Camel Walk or the Buzz. Like Cab callaway. It was a moonwalk. It was the moonwalk. But that's what I'm saying. That's what's so bizarre, is that this guy invented the moonwalk in 1055, and it began and ended with him. And it took minds getting a TV show to create the moonwalk as we understand it today, radically different about it. Talk about chaos theory. You know what I'm saying, though? Like, other people could have influenced the minds that knew about Bill Bailey. I guess. That's entirely possible. But Marcel Marceau was doing the airwalk as far back as the 30s before Bill Bailey. Was he around in the 30s, from what I understand. Okay. Which is weird because well, he was pretty old in the 70s when he hit it big, so yeah, I think then he was doing it in the 30s because that's what this article says. I didn't find anything. Yeah, it said the didn't find any footage of him from the 30s. Like, all of it seemed to be from the 70s or early 80s. Well, that's the heyday of Mines also looked up. I was curious why people hate mimes. And I did a little research, and of course, there's no definitive thing. It's not like a phobia. No, but everything I saw came down to a few things. They look like clowns. Clowns. We did a whole episode on that cholurophobia, and the silent thing seems to bug people. And then just the notion that they'll get up all in your face in the park, you're out, just enjoying your day, and a mind will come up and be like, start doing intruding upon you to do their act. I don't even know if that's the case. Do your act over there. Oh, it is. Believe me. Mine very interesting. I like to start static, and I finish it. So back to Jeffrey Daniel. He's dancing on Soul Train. He's dancing on solid gold. There's another couple of dancers named Jeron casper candidate. Great name. And Derek Cooley Jackson. J-A-X-S-O-N. Another cool name. And they were moon walking around or backsliding around. And so all these dudes were basically kind of laying the foundation for what the moonwalk would come to be. It got real. Like, even if you watch Bailey's, it's a legit moonwalk, but it's not as smooth as Daniel ended up doing it. Yeah, right? Like, when you see him on Solid Gold, that's one of the smoother moonwalks you'll ever see. And he probably debuted it for the first time in American history on TV, on Top of the Pops in 1982. That's the one I was talking about. Yeah. That's so smooth. People thought he was cheating. Yeah. They were like, Is the floor oiled or something? Like, what is that? What kind of witchcraft are we watching? Right? It blew everybody away. Right? Yeah. But everybody no one knew who this guy was, really? He was a Solid Gold answer at the time. Everybody knew who Michael Jackson was. Sure. So about a year later, almost exactly a year later, NBC broadcast this special called Motown 25. Yeah. Big retrospective. And it was a huge thing. Diana Ross did her first appearance with the supreme since 1969. Oh, wow. Marvin Gay played. I need to see that. There was a battle of the bands between the Temptations and the Four Tops. Who won? Stevie Wonder. I'm sure everybody wants, like, a soccer game and Michael Jackson comes out, right. And people are like, who is he? He was pretty big at the time. No, of course he was. He was huge. But so was Marvin Gay and the Four Tops. And Stevie Wonder, right? Oh, yeah. Michael Jackson comes out and brings the house down. And one of the reasons he brought the house down is because he's doing Billy Jean, which, when the thing came out, was the number one song in America. But during the dance, he did the moonwalk, and it was the first time basically anybody who had ever seen the moonwalk yeah, like, no one in America watching this NBC special had been watching Top of the Pop that way. I've seen stuff on Solid Gold here and there, but it was definitely like a mind blower because it was such a widely watched special. Yeah, for sure. Well, here's the deal. He was taught the moonwalk. Depends on who you ask. Some people say he sought out daniel said, you teach me. Other people say no, it was Casper Candidate or Coolie Jackson. But from what I gather, it sounds like all those guys eventually worked with them over the years. It's like either choreographers or choreographers, backup dancers. So he learned it from some or all of those people. Yeah, like, Daniel choreographed his Smooth Criminal video, and Coolie and Casper are the dudes who like, lean with them on that very famous, like, crazy side lean that he did in the video. Does he do one of the lien move? Yes, the crazy side lean, I think is what it's called. Can I say what happened to me yesterday? What? Did you do a lien? Well, I was looking at videos on how to moonwalk tutorials to see if I could get it. And when you watch it slow down and broken down, it's like, oh, well, I get it. It's not that complex, but it's hard to master. And we'll get to all that coming up. Okay, I'm sure we're going to bumble our way through a description about a moonwalk. We always do, but we're going to try. But then I started following into that little YouTube vortex of videos, and I saw this guy saying, here's how you do the lean, right? And I was like, I want to know how to do that because it's cool. It is. It's like an illusion. It is. It's a camera trick, obviously. Well, it's not. It's real. Yeah, you got strong ankles, right? Well, I don't. And there's a guy named Robert Hoffman who, it turns out this guy is great. He does his dance tutorials, and he's kind of funny and does it in such a way that it's interesting to watch. Right. And so I encourage everyone to go watch Robert Hoffman's tutorial on how to do the lien. Nice. And he kind of fully explains the illusion and how to do it well. And I look at it and I'm like, oh, man, you're about to fall over. Right? And then he pulls it back, and I thought, I'm going to practice the lean, because that'll be like, I've always wanted to know how to dance, but I'm just not good at it. Yeah, but I want to get the lean down at least so I can bust that out. Right. It's just like standing in place. Yeah, but you shouldn't even do it on dance floors. While you're having a conversation with somebody, slowly just start to lead. And then they said, you're about to go over, snap back into place, and be like, what? You're totally right, because I don't go to dance parties anymore anyway. What am I talking about? Just regular parties. Yeah. I would be in the office one day in the kitchen, and I'll just do my lean. Oh, my God. He didn't go over. He stood back up. Oh, man. All right, so where are we? So we were talking about how there's a discrepancy over who taught Michael Jackson the moonwalk. Correct. The thing is, Michael Jackson never claimed to have invented the moonwalk. People just assumed he had because he was huge at the time. And he also later said that he didn't know what his dance routine was going to be for Billy Gene for this Motown special. I don't know if I buy that. So a lot of people say, well, obviously he just did the spur of the moment or whatever. No, totally untrue. He employed choreographers, and including those three guys, like you said, all three of them worked with him as choreographers. And he also, as far as his sister Janet, I think, says they went to see Shalamar at Disneyland before this and saw Jeffrey Daniel doing the backslide and said, dude, you got to teach me that. Right. Here's some money. Teach me the moonwalk. Oh, wait, it's not called the moonwalk yet. And he also said that he never called it the moonwalk. That it was actually the media that came up with that. He adopted it for Surely. Obviously someone named it. Yeah, some AP reporters like Our named it. Yeah, it was me. For what it's worth, daniel said, besides Shield and Yarnell, that the Electric Boogaloos yes. Is who inspired him as well. And I looked up those guys. They're the ones who originated body popping. Yeah. And they were dance group. And I was looking at one of them, and I was like, That's Rerun. Okay. You're talking about locking. Yes, it is rerun. Yes. He was huge in it. He was a member of the Lockers, which was, at one point the Electric Bugulus. No, those are two different well, no, at one point, they were merged. Okay, then that's where popping and locking came from, because popping and locking are two different types of data. Yeah. Originally they were the Electric Boogaloo Lockers. Okay. And then I guess they diverged at one point. Maybe they were like, I want to lock. I want to pop. Well, the dude who invented locking was good friends with Rerun. Yeah. And if you think of Rerun dancing, like. Those twists and the jumps and the suspender stuff, that's locking it. Totally. And they were on that dance squad, the Lockers. It was Don Campbell who invented locking rerun. And then Tony Basil, the girl who sang Mickey. Oh, Mickey. Yeah. So if you don't know who Rerun is, you're like, what in the world are you guys talking about? What, you oldsters. Oh, yeah. It was a TV show called What's Happening? About these three friends in South Central La. In the seventies. Great show, very funny. And Rerun was one of the characters played by the great Fred Berry, who was in the lockers. In the Electric Gulu lockers. Yeah. And just go type rerun dancing What's Happening. Yeah. And what you're watching is pure locking one of the great TV theme songs of all time, too. Now, if you throw what he's doing, it really is. Yeah. What instrument was that? Like a klezmer or something? I have no idea. It's weird. Yeah, but it's a great one. If you throw in that arm movement, that wave and the worm, you've got popping, locking and breaking what people think of as break dancing. That's right. Pretty amazing. I was thinking the other day about how in our lifetime is people our age and there's a range, but we've seen at least two new complete art forms created in hip hop music and breakdancing created out of holcloth. It's amazing. And new sports. Like what? Like X Games and snowboarding and skateboarding. Oh, yeah. Like we've seen these new things created and you always think that, well, music is what else can you do? Right. Nothing new under the sun, I guess. Techno and all that stuff that was created as well. Sure. Jazz. Well, that was before us a little, but no, it's true. I just think it's pretty neat to look around. No, I know what you're talking about, too. You're like. Oh, there's Grunge. Well, grunge is an offshoot of, like, rock and roll or whatever. But yeah, these are completely new art forms that some people still think are a fad, which is funny. Really? Well, you hear, like, old Karmudgens, like rap was going to be a fad. No, rap is a brand new art form. He's here forever and it changes in morphs and is amazing. It's neat. We did a hip hop episode. You mentioned that. Right. Yeah, it was good. I thought for a couple of schmoes like us, we did a pretty decent job. Agreed. All right, so do we need to explain how to break dance? I want to hear you explain it. No, I can't. You mean moonwalk? Yeah. What does it say? Breakdance. Breakdance? Yeah, we need to say how to moonwalk. Okay, so go ahead, take it away, Chuck. Well, you're the one who does it, so well, all right, are you ready? Yeah. So you start. First of all, you want to take off your shoes and put on some socks on a nice slick floor. Don't try to do it on, like, pine bark. No. Maybe pour yourself a vodka gimlet. Yeah, well, that's the drink of the moonwalker. So you are on a slick floor wearing socks, and you stand straight up and down, right? And you take your right foot and you put it out in front of you with your foot flat on the floor. Bend your left knee and go up on the ball of your left foot. Okay. Okay. Now, holding yourself in place with just the ball of your foot, everything is on whatever foot you have up. The ball of whatever foot you have up. Yeah, take a sip of that gimlet. Right. Maybe another one, too. I need one now. And then you drag your foot back, the foot that's on the floor. And as you drag your right foot back past your left, you drop your left heel and raise your right. That's right. And then you repeat the same process and you're floating there's. The moonwalk, aka the backslide. You're pretty square if you call it the moonwalk these days. We had to title this episode Moonwalk because we wanted everybody to know what we were talking about. But it's called the backslide. Okay? That is correct. And I watched the tutorial, which the guy who did the tutorial actually wasn't great at it. He had it down, like, how to teach you, but when he did it, I was going, It's not great. Was it Steve Brulee? No. God, that would be great. I just think the guy had the wrong shoes on, personally. I'll bet that's what he blames it on, too. The thing he stressed for a good moonwalk is a long stride, which is where you're lacking, if I can be honest. Oh, am I doing it too short? Yeah. Okay. Long stride, Josh. Okay. I didn't realize you'd had so many formed opinions about my moonwalk. That foot that you're keeping flat needs to be so flat to create the illusion. Right? What am I doing? I'm not talking about you now. Okay? Your foot was pretty good and flat. It's your stride. I pretend like it's dead. My foot is dead. That's good when I drag it. And then when you go to switch feet, he said you really just snap them both real hard to create that illusion. Like a good, completely synchronized, simultaneous snap up and down with those 2ft. Right? Your long stride. Keep that foot flat, keep that vodka gimlet flowing, and you're going to be moon walking in no time. And then you can also because what you're doing is it's supposed to look like you're walking while you're moving backward. You're walking forward, but moving backward. Yeah, that's the definition of the moon walk. So you can add your arm swinging. Sure. Lean. Tilt your body forward a little bit if you're real good. Michael Jackson used to move his head up and down and rhythm to his walking or whatever. Yeah. And it adds to the effect totes shallow more. I feel like I kind of should try it. Try it right now. Well, I'm not going to do it now. You don't have a vodka gimlet? No. Are you anything else? I need to go get some cocktail onions. Those are great Gibson onions. Oh, is that a Gibson I'm thinking of? Yeah, but that's it. Jimmy. It is the lime juice? Yes. Rose's lime. Yeah. If you want to know more about vodka gimlet, you can type that word in the search bar. Howstepworks.com? And since I said gimbal, it's time for listener mail. Before listener mail, we call this correction time. Okay. We need, like, lullaby music. We do. So we have corrections on the show from time to time. This is sort of a big one because we really goofed on the Gettysburg Address episode, and boy, did we hear about it. Remember how I said I wanted to be a Civil War buff? I don't anymore. You had a rough start to your career as a Civil War buff. Yeah. They're not nice people. As it turns out, no one on the Internet is a nice person. No. I was just very surprised that people got angry that we messed something up. So what did we mess up? We said 50,000 dead. It was 50,000 total casualties. Is that what it was? So we messed up and said mistake casualties for dead, when in fact casualties is dead, missing, or wounded. Okay. And then we also said that while we were talking about the percentage of the army, it was this much a percentage of, like, 25% of the Union Army and a third of Lee's army. Right. But it was just for the army fighting in that battle, not the total Union Army and the total Confederate Army. And we very specifically were like, oh, we were, huh? Yeah. This is for the entire army. So we got a little excited and a little ahead of ourselves. Well, clearly, we're the most evil people of the century. So very sorry about that. Civil War buffs. Don't ever contact Chuck again, please. All right. Listen to mail now. Yeah, I'm just going to read this one. Hey, guys. Great podcast. I especially like how you pointed out he's talking about the bogus studies, how to do good research. Got you. I especially liked how you guys pointed out the pressure when you're an understudy, to do studies that support the current theories of your employer. Without getting into a ton of detail, I've been there, and I left research altogether because I became pretty disillusioned with it all. One thing you did not mention is that entire industries get erected based on the results of a few initial studies. The sexiness of the studies aside, which is what you talked about, the researcher does a good job and does not show anything or has a negative study. Their funding is often at stake from my personal experience, this is the largest basis for bias. Whoa. That was a mouthful. It's hard to say when you're missing the tooth. Sure. Researchers become heavily vested in being right from a face perspective and a monetary perspective, we don't really recognize realize this because the scope of the impact of the studies are usually small. But that researcher who suddenly lost all their grants is a pretty high price to pay for being ethical. I don't really have any answers to how to clean it up, but science is contrarian and by nature, anti consensus. Instead, we have a system that rewards only rewards reinforcement. Good researchers have to be allowed to say, you did this great study and found nothing about the fear of losing grant money. Hey, man, that's from Trevor. Thanks, Trevor. That was very illuminating. Yeah. And enlightening. Very era tight. Yeah. Arudy. Okay. If you want to get in touch with us, like Trevor did, you can tweet to us. That's why skodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychano. You can send us an email to stuffmodcast at work dot. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com." | ||
bc03dd1e-ba49-4339-af35-ae9800e882b1 | Squirrels, Ahoy! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/squirrels-ahoy | Squirrels are rodents, sure, but they’re rodents with personalities the size of Las Vegas and Detroit put together. Get to know your bushy-tailed (and sometimes not so bushy) neighbors who live interesting hidden lives right out in the open.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Squirrels are rodents, sure, but they’re rodents with personalities the size of Las Vegas and Detroit put together. Get to know your bushy-tailed (and sometimes not so bushy) neighbors who live interesting hidden lives right out in the open.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 17 May 2022 14:13:07 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=13, tm_sec=7, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=137, tm_isdst=0) | 49964162 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And Jerry is here. And this is one of the greatest episodes will ever do, as far as I'm concerned. All I really want is squirrels. I've been saying that all day. Wonderful. That is so wonderful. It is. That song isn't but yeah, if you go back and listen to BC voice, you're like, wow, they come a long way, though, in pronouncing that stuff. Yeah, for sure. So we're talking not about the BC voice, surprisingly. We're talking about squirrels. In the morning, it's squirrels. Every evening, it's squirrels. Squirrels. Two syllables. Right. I don't care. However you want to say it's. A squirrel. Sure. Or Boston, I guess, probably they say it similarly as well. But if you want to get fancy, you can bust out their Latin name. They're members of the road in order but for their family, their day skierade. Nope. Skurride. I look this one up. All right. Sierra dai. Like my more. Okay. Did you just toot on my presentation? Yeah. Even though it was correct. If you give me a Bronx cheer, how is it, Sierradai? Well, let me do the person online, sierradai. Okay. Is that Emma? Who said that? Or Sierra? Dae was another but I think we've heard from people that Dae is Dy. Okay, that's fine. If that's what it's called. I'm just going to call them squirrels from now on. But there's actually exactly like 300 species of squirrels, and it's kind of hard to wrap your head around because usually if you live in a place with squirrels meaning you live on a continent outside of Antarctica. Yes. Like everywhere. Basically. There are probably a lot of squirrels living around you, and they probably all look basically exactly alike because it seems like when they fill an ecological niche, brother, they fill it and there's not much room for competing species, it seems like, from my experience. Yeah. Who helped us with this was this edge of the Grabster. Yeah. So Grabster points out that you can find mountain squirrels and city squirrels and forest squirrels and jungle squirrels and desert squirrels. You can find squirrels in Alaska that hibernate with the lowest body temperature of any mammal. They have body temperatures below freezing at times. It's so cool. You can go to Africa and find one of the cutest squirrels, the African pygmy squirrel, which is as small as a tiny little mouse, where you can go to Bhutan and find the giant flying squirrel of Bhutan that with their head and body and is over 2ft long with that tail. They're huge. No, 2ft long without the tail. Yes. They're distressingly large. Yeah, because the squirrel tail will get into this. But that's one of their signature features generally. Although, depending on the species, because there are 300 species, like you said, more than or almost 300, some of those tails are a little diminished. But usually when you think squirrel, you think of that big bushy tail. Yeah. And not only when you think of squirrel, you think of the tail, but the Greeks themselves. Somebody decided that a Greek term would make sense, but scorias, which roughly means something like shadow tail. It says shady, but I also saw shadow tail, which is a reference to how squirrels sometimes hide in the shadow cast by their own tail. It's pretty clever. But the squirrel is usually kind of the bushy tail of the squirrel is what makes a squirrel squirrel. One of the other things that really differentiates it from other rodents is the way that its jaw and muscle are attached to its skull. There's actually a name for it, sireomorphis Zygomasiterric system. Hey, look at you, hooked on Phonics works for me. You even recorded the new pronunciation. That's right. You worked it right in there with the Syria Die. I adapted. Yeah, because you should have heard it before when I was workedhopping it. That was the first take, everybody. We're not lying. So those are two things that really kind of differentiate squirrels. But as we've really gotten better and better at taxonomy, with the introduction of genome mapping, sure, we can see like, oh, this animal that doesn't look anything like this animal is actually really closely related. And with just about every other animal we've studied using modern genetic taxonomy, squirrels, our understanding of squirrels has really kind of changed shape of who's related to whom, who's descended from who. But we are kind of going to go the old school way, which is differentiating them based on their habitat and their behavior. So there are three groups of squirrels that we're going to cover, even though there's technically five sub families now. Ground squirrels, tree squirrels, and flying squirrels. And before we go any further, I officially dedicate this episode to Momo, one of the great lovers of squirrels of all time, who changed me in my heart towards squirrels. I used to be a squirrel hater, chuck squirrels. You remember? Oh, yeah. The bird feeder. Momo pointed out to me, the dad, squirrels are great. I'm going to teach you to love them. And she did. Yeah. Dogs and squirrels. What was the disney either Pixar or Disney had an animated movie where the dog would just stop and go, squirrel. Anytime there's a squirrel. I can't remember which one it was. I don't remember. It wasn't that long ago. But before we move on to ground squirrels, it is kind of fun to learn that because of that DNA analysis that we now have at our fingertips and fossil evidence, we know that squirrels went to western North America 35 to 40 million years ago, because squirrels like to get around, as we will see. They crossed a land bridge to Eurasia about 10 million years after that. And then as soon as they could, as soon as Eurasia met up with Africa about 20 million years ago. They went, all right, we're in Africa now, too, because squirrels like to get around, as you will see. Well, we'll just tease that and say squirrels like to get around. Yeah, I mean, you put one tree next to another, squirrel is going to go from tree to tree. Put another tree, squirrel is going to go to the next tree. And if you put trees all the way across one continent to another, they're going to migrate. That's just what they do, and that's what they did. But if I thought I loved squirrels before, now that I know that they're actually native from 35 million years back to North America, I just think that's just the tops. Yeah, and we talked about it before when you were having your bird feeder issue. But Atlanta is the city in the forest, and we have tons and tons and tons of squirrels kind of everywhere along the East Coast does, but Atlanta just has a lot of squirrels. And as I was reading from my upstairs office, there's a window not right in front of my face, but sort of above me and our huge, big, beautiful oak in our front yard. I'm doing this on squirrels. I just look up for a second and I see four squirrels running around that tree together, playing, like circling it like a barber pole. Yeah. I take my daughter to school this morning and I count the squirrels that I see on the way. I counted 22 squirrels that I just saw on a twelve minute car ride. You hit one of them? I had before. It's the worst thing ever. It is the worst, but they're everywhere in Atlanta. And it hit me a while ago about how easy it is living here or anywhere where there's a lot of squirrels, just to sort of be like, yeah, squirrels. But it kind of hit me, like how crazy it is that there are these little mammals, they're not hiding in holes generally, like mice and stuff like that. They're just out all over the place at all times. We're surrounded by these little mammals. Yeah, out and proud. And if you come too close to one of their trees when you're walking by and this girl doesn't like it, he's going to sit there or she and chatter at you and basically tell you to beat it, you punk, get away from my tree. That's one of the great loveable things about squirrels. They have such huge personalities. They're just so great. Chuck, remember my famous squirrel attack not too long ago? When I went outside, I got it on my doorbell camera and that squirrel leapt through the air and hit me in the leg. It was a complete accident, of course. I don't think the squirrel was trying to kill me. But you don't know. They're all over the place. We're going to get to all the fun stuff about the black Squirrels of New York and why squirrels stop in the middle of the road when they go to cross the street. We found reasons for all this stuff, which I love. It's not that squirrels are dumb and we're going to reveal all that in this episode. Okay. I'm a little excited. I'm a little worked up. I know it's a ted early, but our first break, okay, we are so scored positive that I mean, it's a great way to put it. Chuck all right. Are we taking a break? I say. All right, I need to calm down, too. And I guarantee you I'm going to go, like, blow my nose in the other room. I'm going to see a squirrel. I'll be right back. Alright. Chuck so as promised, we're going to break squirrels down into three groups ground, tree, flying, or aerial. And I propose that we start with the ground squirrel. Sure, many species of which you probably not you, but I mean, you, dear listener, and me all include too I didn't realize we're actual squirrels. That groundhog. Chuck did not know that was a squirrel. Chipmunk I had a feeling that might have been a squirrel. Gosh, they're so great. Too. Yeah. I love Chipmunks. What about a groundhog? You already said groundhog. Did I? Yeah. Okay, well, I love in a list of four things I'm swirling still and my love is prairie. Yeah, well, that's what was coming out of my mouth next. Prairie dog. Yeah, prairie dog. Didn't know that. What about that? Meerkat? I didn't know that. Well, that's because they're not but prairie dogs, chip monks and what's the other one? Yeah, I brought them in groundhogs. Those are all ground squirrels. They're squirrels friends, and that makes them pretty awesome. But one of the reasons why you wouldn't think they're squirrels is because in a lot of those species, they lack that characteristic bushy tail. But then also they live almost a totally different life from their tree dwelling. More famous cousins. Yeah, I mean, they might climb a tree, but generally you're not going to see a groundhog or prairie dog up in the tree if they need to for a brief time, if they're trying to find food or something, or like on the run from something, trying to kill it, they might go up in a tree, but they generally hang out on the ground. Hence the name. They love their rocky terrain. Chipmunks, for speaking for them, are pretty solitary, unless they're trying to reproduce. But I know that you found some stuff was it on the prairie dogs that have their big families and colonies? Yeah, I mean, that's one of the main characteristics of ground squirrels in general, aside from a couple, but they're much more communal than tree squirrels. And in particular, the largest town, a prairie dog town is what they're called. The largest prairie dog town on record is in Texas because of course, everything's bigger there. But it was a colony of blacktailed prairie dogs, and this town, Chuck, stretched 100 miles wide by 250 miles long and contained 400 million prairie dogs. My gosh. Again, crown squirrels all living in this kind of large community. Jeez. I mean, that's like a Chinese megacity or something like that times ten. Yeah. So are these the ones that tend to stay grouped with their own sex? No, those tend to be either tree squirrels or flying squirrels because they live in communal groups and kinship is a big deal. Ground squirrels, like prairie dogs, tend to have a really good ability to smell the scent of other ground squirrels, so they can tell, like, who's a blood relation, who's not. And they've done studies to see if a ground squirrel they have a lot of really sophisticated calls, too, because they're alerting others to the presence of a rattlesnake or a hawk or something. They're really talkative, and they have a lot of sophisticated, different communication. And they found that, like a prairie dog that will stand up and take the time to risk its own life to alert others, it's actually alerting the others that it's alerting are actually related by blood. And the groundhog or the prairie dog knows this because it can smell its blood relations among all these other extended family members in the town. There's not much cuter than a squirrel sitting up on its rear. Haunches. Obviously, those prairie dogs, they do it for a living. But even our Eastern gray squirrels sit up on those back legs if they want to work a nut with their little front paw pads. Yeah, or a chipmunk on its back legs. It doesn't get much cute with little busy hands. Goodness me. Yes. All right, so we can move on to our tree squirrel. They're known as arboreal squirrels, obviously, because they are tree squirrels. And this is when you're talking your Eastern gray squirrel. This is not a groundhog. This is not a prairie dog. This is your dyed in the wool, cute, little fluffy tailed, sort of they're called gray, but they're sort of a light brownish color, generally, although the colors do range, as we'll see. And these are the ones that you're going to find all over Atlanta jumping around, climbing around, leaping at podcasters in their front lawn. They spend most of the time I mean, you see them on the ground plenty, but they live in trees. They nest in trees called dre's or Dreis spelled right. And probably if you've ever looked up and seen a mass of, like, sticks and twigs and a leafless tree in the middle of winter, you're looking at a squirrels nest called a dre. And this is where you were asking about them staying in same sex groups, apparently, in the winter. Even though the tree squirrel does not live in a communal society like a ground squirrel does, they're still social, they still interact with one another. They play they chase they chase one another off. They mate. But when it gets really cold, a tree squirrels will kind of group their heat together by staying in a dre community up to, like, 30 members. Adorable. Yeah, it is very adorable. I want to do a little exercise here real quick, Chuck. Okay. I want you to use your imagination. Mines are close. Imagine a very cold winter day. The wind is blowing. Snow is being carried on the wind and it's passing by just outside a woodpecker hole. And we're inside that woodpecker hole. I love it dark. The light is very faint because it's kind of an overcast, snowy day to begin with. But we're also inside a tree in an old wooden piper hole and it's lined with a bunch of different leaves. And there's half a dozen or so squirrels all kind of snuggled together, sleeping, sharing their warmth as the winter day passes by outside and they snooze an afternoon away, fat on acorns that they all just ate. Oh, boy. Isn't that amazing? Almost fell asleep. You're real Robert Frost, my friend. Thank you. That was something I like to think. Robert Redford crossed with Robert Cross for sure. Well, you know, Robert Redford if you look in the mirror, but Robert Cross, when you pick a pen up with the touch of Robert Gule if you sang it, surely. Oh, man, that really did almost put me to sleep. That's quite nice. I love that scene. So here's a little fun adaptation that squirrels have. If you see a tree squirrel running down a tree face first with little resistance, just like it was made to do, it just because it is. And they have those little claws, of course, that really helps. But if you look closely or if you look up a picture, rather, and you see like a still image, you'll notice that they have the ability to and Ed says they can turn their feet around. They really kind of just turn their whole back legs around backwards to where those claws are gripping on the way down. And that's why it's like the perfect adaptation to be able to run up and down a tree. So have you ever watched one do that up close? Sure. So anytime I've seen that if you look their legs because they're turned around, it kicks kind of their elbows out a little bit. And though they climb down, it looks a little different. And I've noticed that it triggers the part of my lizard brain that's like a spider alert that's triggered by that. So it's like a giant furry spider is coming down to some little part of my brain that sends off an alarm. And it's really off putting sometimes until the larger part, the executive functioning part of my brain is like, it's a squirrel, don't worry. But there's that one just zap of this is weird and scary for a second, but it happens to me from time to time when they come down the tree like that. Well, it can be a little startling if you're going to take out the trash or something and your trash can is next to a big live oak like ours is. And there are two or more squirrels that are I don't know what they're doing. They seem like they have a beef with one another, but maybe they're just playing chase. But when they're really boogie and up and down and around a tree right as you walk upon it, it can be a little bit like, oh, okay. I read that when one was chasing the other, it's a part of the mating ritual. Okay. So that's embarrassing for them. I don't know if that's across the board, but I saw that in at least one place. All right. I like knowing that. Here's another cool thing about squirrels. All kinds of squirrels have scent glands, and it depends on the species where that scent gland is located. It can be near their little bumhole. It can be near their mouth, in the corners of their mouth. It can be on their back. But in the case of the tree squirrel, they have their scent glands on their feet and sweat glands on the bottom of their feet. And they are a squirrel that buries their food over large, large areas. Sometimes, like up to 25 acres can be their habitat where they're burying and hiding food. And they are literally every time they walk to bury something, they're leaving a little scent trail that they can go back and pick up, ideally. But it's not a perfect system. Sometimes they will lose stuff and not be able to go back. But what they have then done is planted a tree. Yeah. Which brings up their huge ecological role, which is like planting new forests, like keeping forests healthy by forgetting about nuts. And that nut is actually a seed, and it grows into a new tree that the squirrel help move away from the tree. It's amazing its range. They're known as the gardeners of the forest. Yeah. And we did a whole short stuff on squirrels bearing nuts. And I remember one of the things that came up was there was a study that found that if they know they're being watched by another squirrel, they'll fake dig a hole and then won't drop the nut in it. And then we'll go somewhere else and mislead the squirrel that they think is watching. Yeah. They'll look around first and be like, did anyone see that? Yeah, I think I'm good. Todd was watching. I better not drop the nut in this hole. He'll come along. So that's what the I'm sorry, not flying. But the tree squirrels, that's how they use their scent. The ground squirrels we should say, mainly use their scent glands to mark their territory. And because they're all about their clan and their colony to sort of mark their territory, and find out if someone is a part of their clan. Yeah. And then also, as far as scents go, I saw somewhere that some kinds of ground squirrels that are prey to rattlesnakes will actually find shed rattlesnake skin and rub it on themselves. Chew it up and rub it on themselves to give themselves a rattlesnake scent to throw off rattlesnakes. They camouflage their scent. That's pretty cool. Yes. I wonder if they ever wear it and just, like, fashion a couple of holes and stick their arms through. Yeah. And they brag that they killed it. Yeah. Man, I shouldn't even mention this. I'm going to mention it because it is roadkill, but have you ever seen the pictures of the squirrel roadkill with the little GI. Joe action figures? No. Just look it up. They aren't squirrels that someone killed. Someone will take a roadkill picture of a squirrel and they'll take the little GI. Joe figures as if they were big game hunters. And they'll have their guns and they'll have, like, one leg up on the squirrel's head as if it was their trophy. And the squirrel looks positively giant next to the little action figures. And it's kind of funny. I'll have to check that one out. I don't want to encourage people. Maybe I shouldn't have even said either. Well, I don't know if you're encouraging people to swerve onto a squirrel that one guy or kill a squirrel to do that, but maybe just look it up on the Internet if you want to see that, don't recreate it. If you kill a squirrel and we find out about it, we're coming to your house. I know. Okay. With the ghost of that squirrel. Yes. That will introduce to your attic. So have we moved on to flying squirrels yet? Yeah, let's do it. Those are the old story when we had one growing up. For a little while, you probably don't remember, but my uncle gave us his flying squirrel to watch for a while, and he would leap from the curtains on the other side of the room onto my shoulder. And then when we went out of town, apparently they said the squirrel got out. But now that I'm adult, I realize that the cat ate the squirrel. Oh, man. Yeah. Just to recap that childhood trauma that's wow. Okay. But for a little while, we had a flying squirrel in our home for a brief shining moment. That's the upshot. So a flying squirrel and I thought this I thought they were fairly rare. Apparently they're as common as tree squirrels in some places. The reason that you think they're rare is because they're nocturnal. So we're usually sleeping when they're out and about. I love thinking about those things, just flying around all night. Yeah. And flying is right, man. Ed says that they can glide up to 150ft. I saw 300 in some cases. Wow. And that's what they're doing. They're gliding. They're not flying. They have no means of, like, propulsion, but they have a skin flap. They've evolved the skin flap that is the batsuit that people like skydive with. That is basically 100% on the flying squirrels membranes between its front legs and hind legs that it can spread out when it jumps and it just catches the air and they can move it this way and that and use their tail as a rudder and go 150ft in a pretty purposeful direction, too. Did you say what the name of the flap was? No. Do you want to? No, I'd probably screw it up. I'm going to go with potagium. That's great, Patagum. I wonder what they call that in the flying suit biz. Extreme flying suit biz. I don't know. And I think they call them bat suits, but that's a misnomer if you ask me. I got to say. I mean, I'm not into any of that stuff. I would never do it. But those videos are amazing and it's oh, I know. As close as humans have come, I think, to flying, it feels like agreed. Yeah. I would have to have probably a lobotomy to actually try that. It would take that radical of a personality change for me to try. Well, I mean, sure. That kind of thing. That's the most extreme, like years and years of training, skydiving training and stuff like that. Like jumping to a batsuit. No, definitely not. But even if you do, once you get to that point, I can't imagine how dangerous that is. If you smack into something, you're going really fast. Yeah. Your toast. Yes. And that happened, sadly, but I get the impression that the rush is worth the risk. That's right. And speaking of risk, there are endangered flying squirrels, the Carolina Northern flying squirrel. And we talked a little bit about these little land bridges that are starting to pop up in the United States overpasses and freeway crossings. And I just read today there's one in La that's opening up that's like 160ft wide. I can't remember the name of it. It's named after someone and to allow cougars and mountain lions to pass and all kinds of animals. And they have done studies for squirrels and they found like radio tagged squirrels are foraging and building on the other side of these massive freeways. Thanks to these bridges, it's been proven to work. Yeah, for sure. I think it's called the Robert Evans Memorial Animal Land Bridge, baby. Yes. If only. So that actually kind of leads us to a quote I ran across, Chuck, because if you put like I was saying, if you can kind of connect your tree to another tree, which really ties into that rewilding episode, because you're connecting core to court via corridor, basically, is what they're doing with that. There is an old saying that before well, not too long ago, I think, into the 18th century, maybe even early 19th century, that there were so many chestnut trees in North America that a squirrel could make it from Maine to Georgia without ever touching the ground. Yeah. What do we cover that in? I don't remember. I remember that factoid. That's a great one. So it really kind of goes to show like there used to be a lot more forest in the United States, but there were also a lot more squirrels. Because there's a positive correlation between mass producing trees, which are chestnut, beech, oak trees that produce nuts, that squirrels and other forest animals eat, and the number and population density of squirrels in an area. You have a lot of mass producing trees, you're going to have a lot of squirrels because again, they fill their ecological niche to basically bursting. Yeah. And they bursting with food because they are opportunistic eaters is what Ed says. And that's a pretty good way to say it, because while they obviously, if they can get fruit or nuts and seeds, that's the stock of their diet. But they will eat whatever keeps them alive. They will eat insects and fungus and they actually spread fungus, which is great. They eat roots. They have found little tiny eggs and little tiny birds and little tiny lizards in the guts of squirrels. So they technically are omnivores, which is just to say squirrels are remarkable at staying alive. And they will eat your garbage, they will eat whatever they need to. But that's only if they're not finding the nuts and the seeds and stuff like that, which there are generally plenty of in the United States. And one reason that they're suited for nuts, or that nuts are suited for them is because they have two sets of incisers, I believe up and down is the technical term. And they grow constantly throughout their lifetime. I think they grow something like is this even possible that I'm seeing it six inches a year? Well, I mean, they're constantly grinding them down. So I think if a squirrel was in a coma, they could have six inch bang. That's crazy. And then apparently if they don't continuously grind them down and they kept growing, they would grow through the top and the bottom of their face all at Lisa Simpson that time she needed braces. But that's crazy. So they use these very hard nuts like a chestnut or pecan or walnut shell to impart it's a food source. But as they're getting to the food source, they're keeping their teeth ground down, which apparently they have to do all the time. That's pretty amazing. Squirrels also like a little sweet treat every now and then. They have found red squirrels in Maine that will tap sugar maple trees. They make little bite marks in the tree and then they just say, alright, do your thing. And they come back a few days later and that trap has hardened up and run out a little bit. And that is just a little tiny sweet treat. For a squirrel. That's right. It's pretty awesome. They also found that squirrels can learn by observing other squirrels doing something, particularly finding new ways to get food. They're adept at that. Okay, so they see Todd doing something and they say, not a bad idea. Let's give that a shot. Yeah, that Todd really came around. Yeah. And if you'll notice, I think we kind of skipped over this if we didn't mention Australia. Squirrels, I think, used to be in Australia, but aren't so much now. And is it a mystery or is it just the obvious that the Australians were like, mate, I don't know. I didn't see that anywhere. But I know that they introduced the eastern gray, and then in Perth, they introduced the Indian palm, which is like if you mashed together an eastern gray squirrel and a chipmunk, that would be an Indian palm squirrel. But apparently they both died out. I don't know if it's a mystery or not, like you're saying, but supposedly there's some feral colonies that escape from zoos, at least in Perth. So there are wild squirrels in Australia, but they were introduced in the 19th century, which is actually a trend, as we'll see. But I say before we tackle all that, we take a break. How about that? All right, we'll take the break and we'll talk about squirrel migration right after this. Okay, Chuck. So as I was saying, back before precolonial days in particular, but also even into the 19th century, I think even the 19th 60s, there were reports of massive numbers of squirrels basically stampeding. They call them squirrel migrations. And they have been documented enough times that it's not an anomaly, but they are fairly rare. And today they've kind of figured out that there aren't dense enough populations of squirrels to ever have a genuine squirrel stampede like they had before. But there used to be so many of them that every once in a while, thousands to tens of thousands to tens to tens of thousands of scrolls would pass generally in like a big wave over an area. And apparently it was quite a thing to see. I imagine it was. And this happened because there would just be a really big fruitful year for squirrel food, tons of availability, and they would boom in numbers because they go to where the food is. And usually if that is followed by historically, when that was followed by a really bad year, like the rain didn't work out so great for producing nuts and seeds and stuff and fruit, that all of a sudden you've got a ton of squirrels in an area that are all looking around going, what's the deal? And their opportunities. So they said, all right, we're getting out of here. We're going to where the food is. Let's go, everybody. And they would do it all at once? Yeah, all at once, for some reason. And so these migrations, they'd be running through the forest. They'd be running across fields, they'd be swimming across rivers. And apparently, in at least one account I saw, they would be gulped up by baths in the rivers. And I can't imagine seeing my Lord being worse than a squirrel being eaten by a fish. That seems unnatural. Yeah. But there were so many of them. This is also at a time where squirrels were roundly among basically everyone living in America, viewed as vermin, as invaders, as things that were unwanted, but also a tasty food source, too. So anytime there was a squirrel stampede, the yokels would run out with their sticks and bags and beat squirrels to death and then cook them and sell their pelts and do all sorts of things with them. And one of the reasons why they were viewed as vermin, Chuck, is because on these squirrel migrations and other times where they were just if you were unlucky with your planting, those squirrels might see as a food source the crops. You just planted all those seeds and would dig them up and ruin your year's crops in a day or so. People didn't like squirrels for a very long time. And this idea of squirrels being everywhere, these little mammals living among us, like you were talking about earlier, that's fairly new, and that's actually very deliberate and purposeful, because squirrels were basically gone up until about the mid to late 19th century in America. Yeah. Between being hunted because people hated them on their farms, like you said, people and people still generally in certain parts of, like, appalachia, still eat squirrel on the menu. It is a little gamey, from what I'm told. I'm never going to eat a squirrel. But they still use pelts. But that kind of just like they would eat any larger mammal and use their pelts. They would just get crafty with as small as a squirrel. And certainly in times of real need, small rodents would come in handy on the menu back then, but they were almost gone. We started growing more urban in the 1800s, obviously, and they were killing squirrels as fast as they could. And in the 1840s and 50s, there were so few squirrels that they were introduced to city parks, but not many at first. They were just like this weird curiosity where you would go out kind of like bird watching, and you would try to spot a squirrel running around. Right. Because it was such a novel thing. But then by the time Frederick Law Olmstead, who, by the way, deserves his own podcast, came along and really introduced the idea of these really large city parks and urban parks, they introduced a lot of squirrels to these parks. And that's kind of why we have the squirrels we have today, was from this movement to reintroduce them in a big way to urban parks. Yeah. And we talk kind of a lot about that whole idea in our Central Park episode. This idea that they just kept building the city and building the city and building the city, and people started going crazy because there weren't green spaces. So that brought the parks in. And then the idea of adding animals to the park just to kind of naturalize it even more that squirrels played a huge role in that, and not only in Central Park, but also it started out in, I believe, Philadelphia and then followed by Boston. So by the mid to late 19th century, that's when squirrels started to reestablish themselves. And the way that people saw square started to change too. And there was this idea that they weren't vermin anymore. Don't shoot them, please. Try not to hit them with a stick. Instead, let's go to the park, spend some time outside and bring some nuts with you and maybe feed the squirrels. And not only you feed the squirrels, but you got a little kid. That little kid wants to hit that squirrel with the stick so bad because kids are awful like that. Good luck. You can actually use squirrels feeding squirrels as a way to teach kids to have compassion, to be upstanding morally, to have charity. And that was kind of how the whole interaction between humans and squirrels was kind of framed around that time, like the late 19th, early 20th century. Yeah. The Boy Scout co founder Ernest Thompson Siton said that squirrels and introducing them to boys in general would cure them of their tendency toward cruelty. But I said good luck a second ago. How do you hit it? I guess if there's a stampede, but you show me a kid that can get a squirrel and hit it with a stick, and that's a future Olympian. Sure, there's no way those things are so fast, but don't try to do it. Kids definitely no, don't even practice that. Don't try to qualify for the Olympics. And that because you'll show up to the Olympics and be like, we don't have that. That's not one of our sports. You hate Australia. So these days we've kind of come full circle into just sort of letting squirrels be. There are if you're a hunter in the United States, that may be the tradition in your family, if you live out in the country, to start off your child with hunting squirrels with a little 22 rifle or something as practice to teach young hunters, I'm certainly not into that, but I'm not going to judge you if that's your thing. And like I said, people still do eat squirrel in certain parts of the United States today. We found a lot of extra fun stuff. Well, let's talk about so we were talking about how they're viewed in America. Depending on where you are in the world and depending on the squirrel you're talking about, they can be viewed quite negatively. Sure. I remember in our rewilding episode, we talked about how Eastern Grey squirrels are considered an invasive species in Italy, where they call them American killer squirrels. And there's also an issue with eastern gray squirrels in Europe where they've killed off most of the Eurasian red squirrels over there. That's true. They've just outcompeted them. It's not like they've choked them or anything like that. They're almost twice as big. They're a lot more ornery. And they've just kind of diminished the number of Eurasian bread squirrels in the UK, so much so that three quarters of the population lives in Scotland. And I would just like to direct everybody to the Scottish Squirrels website, go to scottishsquirls.org UK. And this is very important. About and on their about page, the header image is maybe the cutest squirrel you'll ever see in your entire life. Is that the one you sent me and Jerry? Yes. Isn't that the cutest squirrel ever? It's pretty cute. You also sent something else. If you go to Rspca.org Ukadviceandwelfarewildlifeanamelsgrealsfeeding, or you could just Google feeding squirrels and using nest boxes, you're going to see a squirrel with a chicken wing in its mouth. It's better than a bath eating a squirrel, I'll tell you that. Yeah. That's a good article you sent, because it talks about if you like squirrels around, which I certainly do, creating a good habitat for them. Trees, obviously, is a good thing to have. Not cutting down trees is a great thing to do if you can avoid it. Yeah. And then having squirrel safe bird feeders. And this means not that the squirrels can't get to that seed, because, as you have attested, they will find a way. Life finds a way. Right. But it won't trap the squirrel inside of it. No, that's a big one, too. They also kind of get into they get all Macbeth or Hamlet. Which one was to be or not to be? Why are you asking me this? Because they get all Hamlet or Macbeth on whether or not to feed squirrels. There you go. They're like, you could feed squirrels, but really you should. And the RSPCA takes, I think, a pretty sensible tact, which is build a habitat for the squirrels. And that you're planting the right kind of trees that provide a place for them to nest and a place for them to get food and then just step back and enjoy them. That's fine enough. If you're like me and Mo and you go on walks or whatever and you want to feed the squirrels. There are some things that are better for squirrels than others, and it's basically you want to give them what they would naturally eat, which is mast, unshelled nuts like walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, hazelnuts, that kind of thing. Sunflower seeds, probably, huh? Yes. But not black safflower seeds. I saw that. If you are one of those people who can't stand squirrels rating your bird feeder black safflower seeds, they'll eat them, but they're not crazy about them, and most birds like them instead. So that's one way to do it. But you can also feed them vegetables, too. And Chuck, they included this little tip that I didn't realize. But if you're feeding squirrels or leaving food out for squirrels in your yard and you have a garden that you care about, you don't really want the squirrel taking the food and then burying it elsewhere. So they said if you're going to feed them fruits and vegetables, shred it because the squirrels is going to eat it there. It's not going to try to bury it. I thought that was smart. Yeah. And if you have the nuts, don't give them like honey roasted almonds, like unsweetened, unsalted stuff. I have set up have a camp cam at the family camp, trail cam. And it's keyed in on my deer feeder that I got, which is corn. And I've seen one deer, but almost every night I have scores of raccoons. Nice. And almost every day well, every day I have squirrels, crows, and now daily turkeys visiting. Oh, neat. Lots and lots of turkeys. So I don't care that the deer aren't visiting. All kinds of animals are coming around. It's always fun to watch on the camp cab. That is very cool. One thing you want to be careful with, with peanuts, too, is giving them raw peanuts, because peanuts can carry an athletoxin, which is very good. It's not good for squirrels. It's not good for humans either. It's a type of fungus, I think, that actually is not only carcinogens that can actually just kill you on the spot, neurologically speaking. So you actually want roasted peanuts, but not salted or anything like that. So like plain roasted peanuts or what's? Even better, because it helps with their teeth are mass nuts again, like pecans, walnuts, that kind of stuff. But a lot of people say don't feed squirrels, because what you're doing is, as we've seen, if squirrels know that there's a lot of food, they're going to mate, mate, mate, mate, mate. And there's going to be a lot of squirrels, and they're going to become dependent on that additional food supply. And they might start showing up at your neighbor's house. They might start burrowing into your attic. There's just a lot of things that to take into consideration, I guess. Yeah. Well, the family camp, there's nothing but wood, so I hope we get overrun. So I agree with you. So you found a couple of cool things, including why squirrels seem to dash in front of your car when you're driving, right? Yeah. And again, I love that we've just finally found answers for this stuff because this is kind of a fun, non obnoxious fact to drop on someone if you're driving around a neighborhood and the squirrel does that thing and people go, why do squirrels do that? We can say, well, it's actually an evolutionary instinct to get away from a predator. So if you run out and you initially freeze when there's a predator. The predator is sort of like a football player waiting for the defensive player to make their move. And then you go the opposite way with a little juke. And that's what the squirrels do. They go out, they freeze when they see that car. And if it was a predator, they would wait on the predator to sort of make a move, and then they can quickly go in a direction. That really comes in handy when it's a predator, when it's a car that's going generally in a big, hulking straight line, it's not the same thing. But a squirrel has a squirrel brain, and it doesn't realize that. So that's why a squirrel will jump out in the street, see a car, and just stop. They're not dumb. They're waiting on you to make some hawklike move, which doesn't happen in the car. So what you do is you just slow down and check your rear view mirror. Don't slam on the brakes or anything, but they're everywhere, and I've hit, I think, maybe two squirrels in my adult life. So it's not like the most common thing to run over a squirrel. Yeah, I ran over one once, and my brother in law said that he was on his way to buy a birthday present for his young kid who was waiting forever for their dad to come back for his birthday present for his party. It was not helpful. What about these black squirrels? Emily and I were taking a walk through Brooklyn one day and saw a black, black, black squirrel. Not just a hint of black. And it was the coolest thing I've ever seen. And I've since seen a few more here and there in New York. And we have the answer there too, right? Yes. So they used to think that they were freaks of nature, I think, as one naturalist put it, like years and years ago, and somebody said, I don't know if that's true. I think these actually might have been the dominant version. They seem to be closely related to eastern gray, if not just a type of eastern gray, like a different breed of that species. But they were saying they used to possibly be the dominant version, and they got edged out by the eastern gray. And so they're there. They're just kind of infrequently. They infrequently appear. But there are parts of North America where they seem to populate more than others. Like New York, you mean? I used to see them in DC. Toronto, they're all over Toronto, in Ontario in general, from what I understand. So it seems like, from what I could tell, that they think that they were there already, and now we're just kind of seeing them in this kind of moment in time where their numbers have diminished tremendously, where if we went back in time, we might see a lot more. Does that seem accurate? Yeah, I mean, it's just genetics. It's a recessive gene that causes an abnormal pigmentation. And you're only going to get more of that recessive gene if these squirrels or any creature is reproducing in a smaller area. So if you've got a contained population, like, let's say an island like New York or Ontario, apparently Roosevelt Island has a lot of them. You're just going to see more of them. So DC is a little not inexplicable, but it makes more sense in New York because you're just going to get more of this recessive gene happening in a certain area. So not at all my explanation then? No, it's your explanation. No, you nailed it. And this was an article, the Mysterious Black Squirrels of NYC, from what turns out to be a really good website called Untappedcity.com and writer Michelle Young. It's really cool read. Yeah. So you got anything else on squirrels? Nothing. Hug a squirrel, embrace the squirrel. But don't do that. If you do feed them, don't let them eat out of your hand. Yeah, because they'll bite you. Even though they're grateful, they're still biting. And since I said that, everybody, it's time for listener mail. That's right. And it's great to listen to mail because we get to say hello to a kindergarten class, which is always fun. Hello. Hi, Mr. Chuck and Mr. Josh. My name is Katie. It's either Finky and I'm emailing with my kindergarten class in Baltimore City. We sometimes listen to your show, and we were so excited when you heard you mentioned the three sisters in the recent watermelon episode. We actually spent a whole weekend learning about the three sisters this fall and wanted to share with you our excitement. We hope you do a short stuff on them soon. We definitely will. If you need some three sisters experts, we want to tell you these facts that we learned this year. Oh, yes. And here's a little short list. Native Americans would plant fish first in the ground to prepare the soil and make it healthy and rich. Love that. The corn grows so tall it holds up the beans and the squash, keeps the soil moist so the other two sisters have enough water to stay hydrated. And finally, all three of the sisters are dried so that people can save them to eat later in the winter, which is a great benefit. So we really want to share our knowledge in case you do a short stuff. Thanks for reading. Love. Ms. Finkies or Ms. Finks? Kindergarten class. And like I said, this is in Baltimore City. Man, that's really impressive. I remember in kindergarten I was learning red. I wasn't learning about the three sisters and ground covers, like keeping the moisture in place for the other two. I mean, come on. That's really impressive. This week, red, I think it was more like that month. Yeah, February is red month, right? Oh, that's great. Well, thank you, Ms. Fink or Finkey's class. Hats off to you guys. Keep it up and yes, we will definitely do a Three Sisters episode some day dedicated to you guys. Right, Chuck? For sure. If you want to get in touch with us, you can too via email at 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." | |
4309bfcc-53a3-11e8-bdec-4b46052cb006 | Optogenetics: Controlling Your Genes with Light | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/optogenetics-controlling-your-genes-with-light | What if a genetic brain disease could be turned off simply by flashing a light in your eyes? What if your depression could be cured that way? Sounds amazingly wonderful, true, but what if your behavior could be controlled that way too? | What if a genetic brain disease could be turned off simply by flashing a light in your eyes? What if your depression could be cured that way? Sounds amazingly wonderful, true, but what if your behavior could be controlled that way too? | Tue, 11 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=42, tm_isdst=0) | 44104823 | 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 Bryant and there's guest producer Josh T. Over there Josh Tizzy. That's his new nickname. Okay, Josh. Good nodding. Good. Yeah, he knows the score. How are you doing, man? Oh, I've had better days and weeks, but if only there was a Led light, someone could blink in my eyeballs and fix everything. That was a question of mine, like, earlier about, could you just shine a light in somebody's eyeballs and make this work? And that's probably the future, but who knows? Not the present, unfortunately, no. So soon enough. Chuck, though. Soon enough. Just hang on another 50 years. Okay. So we're talking today about optogenetics, and if that word doesn't sound at all familiar, don't worry. It's only been around for, honestly, 15 years. It's like the cutting edge in manipulating the function of brain cells to make them do what you want to do or to study brain pathways to see which ones are responsible for what. And it's really, really difficult to get across in the details, but it's one of those really interesting, interesting science tech things that the broad strokes are, like, really understandable. Yeah. I mean, you're literally one day, hopefully well, hopefully, but possibly going to be able to turn on and turn off neural cells after we have modified them. Right. So we can control them. Yeah, and modify them genetically. That's a big key here. Yes, but this is really important, and Ed put this together for us, and he makes a really good point. Like, if you read kind of cutting edge sci tech articles about this stuff, it sounds like we're right there. We're about to start flipping on and off neural circuits in humans any day. We're not we are way far away from that. We're still figuring out the ethical and legal implications of even beginning to try that. Yeah. I think the writers like that. They get really excitable about stuff. They're like, fruit flies are so boring, and, like, we could do this and just think, we could do this. And this is maybe one day, many years from now, but maybe not even. Yeah. Because of that whole moral and legal and ethical implications of it. But I think there are probably plenty of people out there who are like, my depression is severe enough that I'm fine with the moral and ethical implications of this. I just want this to fix things for me because it could conceivably someday. But we say that just to say what we're talking about is on the frontier of science. Although some of the research that has been conducted has been successful, but it's just been conducted in things like mice and fish and fruit flies. Poor little well, we'll put a pin in that one. Not literally. Well, maybe. Yes. Poor little fruit flies. I've done some things to fruit flies. So here's the thing, right? The human brain is pretty complex as far as organs go. You compare it to your spleen. Your spleen is just going to slink away and be like, there's no comparison here. I just produce bile. Yeah. So the brain is far more complicated than the spleen, which everybody knows. And the reason it's so complicated is because there's so many specialized cells inside that brain. Neurons, right? Neurons are just one type of brain cell. Yeah. And we've talked about the brain a lot over the years on the show, and we always kind of come back to the same thing, which is as much as we've learned, which has been a ton. There's still a lot of shrugging going on in the room. Yeah, for sure. Jeez, I don't know. But when you look at the 100 billion neurons and the quadrillion synapses yeah, 1000 trillion. I'm giving humans a break here that we haven't figured all of this out at this point. Sure. No, we haven't. And then you look at the brain, it's just a big, gross, lumpy, gray mess. Yeah. It's like a spleen on steroids. I know. Who even wants to get in that thing to begin with, right? People who like making squishy sounds with their finger. It should be shiny and sparkly, and you have to stop doing that. It is a little sparkly, though, if you think about it. Like, it's shiny because it's bathed in cerebrospinal fluid, remember? Yeah. I guess I've never seen a picture of the brain when it's really doing its thing. I didn't know it was so exciting looking. Okay, so the brain is extremely complex, and we figured out some stuff about it. Mainly what we figured out starting back in the 19th century, that all of these connections, these 1000 trillion synapses that allow neurons to communicate with one another and carry, like, an impulse through the brain, all that is based on electricity, chemical electricity, right. To where there's a difference in the concentration of different types of ions, say, like calcium and potassium in the cell, so that when it reaches a certain concentration, it actually generates an electrical impulse. And then that impulse can be translated or transferred to another neuron. And then that neuron may send that electrical impulse on and on and on until it finally reaches its destination, where suddenly you're flooded in dopamine and you're feeling pretty good because you just tried a crispy cream that was fresh and hot right off of the line. Yeah. So when you hear people say or say, like when your neurons are firing, that's literally what's going on. They are tiny little electrical charges. We can call them action potentials. And they measure them in tiny little millivolts. It's adorable. It is. They have little bow ties on and short pants. Yeah. But there's little tiny electrical triggers that go off constantly. Right? Or they don't go off, which also has an effect as well. Right. So, like, you can have something firing, firing, firing, and then it stops firing, and you're suddenly not feeling pain any longer, which is great. So you want to have them on and off, but it all is based on electricity. And we figured this out thanks to a guy named Chuck. Are you talking about? Luigi Galvani? Yes, I am. And you know that famous experiment with frog legs where you can take dismembered frog legs and sprinkle salt on them and they'll start twitching or whatever? Those are always creepy. Well, this same guy figured out that you could introduce electricity into the brains of frogs, and you can make the frog legs kind of twitch and hop in the brain of a dead frog. So it shows pretty clearly that electricity is what makes the brain move and that the brain is what makes the legs move. Right. And then later on, there was a guy named Roberts Barthelo. Oh, boy. This guy. Did you look up this experiment? I did. Pretty bad, yeah. So there was a woman named Mary Rafferty who had an ulcer on her brain, which ended up resulting in a literal hole in her skull. So her brain was exposed, and Robert Barthelow, I guess, was like, well, perfect. This is just what I've been waiting for, is access to a human brain. So let me see if I can stimulate these neurons by poking it with needles, her brain, and see what happens when I stimulate that with electricity. And he kept it super low voltage at first and noticed some things like, wow, when I poke here, her arm moves, right? He's like, does anyone have a question? Mary, you do. But he ramped that electricity up at higher voltage, looking for what he called a more decided reaction. He argued afterwards that he did not cause her death, but she had a seizure, she went into a coma, and she died. Right. The sticking point here is and he was censured by the AMA, but nothing really happened, was that he was experimenting on a human being, but not with the aim of curing anything that was wrong with her. No. He even said in the study that he produced that anyone who tried to replicate this would be conducting, like, a criminal experiment, but it would be criminal to redo it. Yeah, I'm good, right? I'm all good, but just don't do this again. But what was interesting to me is, like, it wasn't until 1946 that we started to the scientific community started to enforce informed consent after the Nazi atrocities of World War II. And this guy was carrying this experiment on, I think, in 1874, but even at the time so in his defense, people weren't about informed consent. And there were like the ethics of scientific experiments weren't nearly as pronounced and structured as they are today, and yet his experiment was still denounced. Like, everybody could see that on some level that hadn't been elucidated yet. He had violated something which is actually like the life of a person. Something is bothering me, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Oh, well, now he's hit me with the electric needles, and my finger is going exactly where he wanted to. The AMA actually banned human experimentation if it was not for the purposes of saving a human life after this. Very good stuff. So what we figured out, though, from Galvani and Bartholo yeah, he's got a tough one, tough last name. And others who showed that electricity is the currency that moves messages around the brain, that you can actually stimulate the brain with electricity to go around its internal drives and externally make it do things right. But the problem is, if you're using the side of the brain, it's really clumsy. An electrical impulse is really tough to keep localized. So if you're trying to just kind of see what one particular type of neuron does, well, TS for you because you're electrically going to stimulate a whole bunch of neurons in the neighborhood. And it's not a very fine tuned way of studying how the brain works. And again, it's really important that we understand what regions of the brain are responsible for what. So if we're just kind of trying to see what regions are responsible for raising your arm, we might hit those neurons with electric needles, but we might also kick the leg out, too. That is kind of it's not as precise as it needs to be. Do you want to use this repeated metaphor? It was a fine metaphor, but it was a mixed metaphor, and the first one really didn't work. Yeah, let's just go ahead and say it okay, because it does get a little bit more credible as the metaphor develops. But I agree this first one was a little rough. But just take this metaphor, put it in your pocket, everybody, and smoke it with some salt. I don't know what that means. So imagine a neighborhood or a city, if you will, with all the people, let's say New York City and people everywhere moving around. These are your neural network. Everyone's going places. They're taking subways or riding buses or driving carts or walking. Some of them that have no conscience or in a horse and buggy in Central Park is a giant. He just stole it. And electrical stimulation, which is something that deep brain stimulation we talked about on the show, something we currently are doing and are able to do just very imprecisely. So that electrical stimulation is like trying to learn about people only driving Ferraris through New York City by setting a city block on fire. That's where it loses me because it doesn't make any sense. Okay, you said shocking entire city block. Sure, I guess so. Yeah, that would have made more sense, right? Yeah. I saw another analogy on, you know, how we always say, when you can't understand something, go to the kids science website. Sure. I found one called frontiers for young minds, and they were explaining optogenetics, and they basically put it similarly, saying if you wanted to study the movement of traffic in the city, but you wanted to see, like you were saying, how Ferrari car drivers drive, you want to be able to tell everybody when to drive. But the problem is, if you're using an electrical stimulation, that doesn't just tell Ferrari drivers when to drive. It tells everybody in the city when to start to start driving, and everyone starts driving. So it doesn't tell you anything about just the Ferrari drivers. Yeah, that makes sense. And by the way, Ferrari, you owe Chuck and me for Ferrari each for all this buzz Ferrari marketing Ferrari. I would just like to drive one once. That'd be fun. Set your sites higher than that, Chuck. See if we can get a free one. Ferrari would just stress me out. Well sell it on Craigslist. I'm going to park a Ferrari in my driveway. Oh, goodness. So should we take a break now that we have a nice little set up in hand? Sure. All right, let's take a break. And we're going to talk about potassium and calcium and color dye right after this. All right? So people figured out pretty quickly that, yes, electrical impulses will make parts of the brain work, but it's not very precise. We need a more precise way to study the different parts of the brain to see what's going on. Where, at any given time that's right. And enter Lawrence Cohen in the 1970s. Leonard Cohen's brother? No, it could be. Oh, man, I don't know. I was so disappointed. I thought, wow, that's amazing. All the genius in one family, right? Yeah, that's a lot of genius. And in 10 00 19 80, it was further developed by a man named Roger CN, leonard Cohen's one time stage manager. Okay, I was waiting on that. Is it C-N-T-N-I don't know. Tsien? Yeah. Anytime your name starts with T-S-I assume one of those is silent. Yeah, but I think they together make a d sound. Oh, really? I think so. In what language? Chinese, mandarin? Maybe Cantonese. One of those two. Okay. Oh, God, I feel like I'm drowning. It's okay. Grab hold of me. Yeah. Thanks, Chuck. So what they did was they worked on this synthetic die, like I said, cohen in the 70s, refined in the 80s by Roger t. Roger t. Yeah. You already talked about in the intro about the action potential in a neuron. Right. That's created that little electrical charge. It's not like it's plugged into something. It's created by concentrations of potassium and calcium shifting around. Right. So what they figured out what Lawrence and Roger figured out is that you can actually introduce the synthetic dye so that the dye is produced or triggered or it becomes apparent once calcium ion concentration reaches a certain point. And if you know that a calcium ion concentration will trigger this action potential, this electrical impulse, and the neuron, if the neuron suddenly is glowing or has this color dye that's showing up under a microscope, you know that that neuron is just fired because the calcium concentration changed enough for that diet to become apparent. Yeah, it's like the very easy way to say this is scientists basically said when someone metaphorically turns on a light and that neuron, that would be great if an actual light turned on. Yeah, this is very similar to that, for sure. And it's a little clunky, because I don't fully understand why it's a little clunky. Think it's that maybe you can't control it. It's just you can witness it, I think is the issue with it. Well, if we're going to further that metaphor, I was really trying to escape past this one, but go ahead. The next step would be you want to learn about these Ferrari drivers in New York City. So you just paint an entire city block instead of shocking it with electricity or setting it on fire. Right. But any car that's driving on that city block is going to glow. It's going to move through the paint. So you're going to get car trek. Sure. You're going to get glow paint all over every car. You still are not just targeting the Ferrari, but it's better, the metaphor. Sure, that's right. Much better. But it's still not precise enough. And I think where it's lacking is that, yes, you can see now what neuron has just gone off, but you can't make the neuron go off. But Lawrence and Roger gave future researchers an idea. They're like, wait a minute, we're onto something here. Like being able to see when a neuron has gone off. That is a great idea. Let's figure out how to do that. But also make neurons go off. And to do this, they turn to our friends in the sea for help. Yeah, this is really interesting. And this is where genetics come into play, because it is important to point out that neurons are basically the same. They all contain basically the same genetic information, even. But it's that mystery of the difference, is switching these genes on and off. And why would one be switched on when another switched off? That's sort of like what makes them unique among each other. Right. So, like, if you have a human cell, especially like, say, a stem cell or whatever, but any cell has all of your genetic blueprint in it, just depending on what genes are on or off, that determines what kind of cell it is and what it's responsible for doing. So maybe it's like a retinal cell and it detects light, or maybe it's a cardiac cell and it makes up heart muscle. All of them have the same DNA, the same genetic blueprint. But some of those genes are going to be turned off. Some are going to be turned on. And the same is true for neural cells, too, right? You have neural cells that are responsible for releasing dopamine you have neural cells that are responsible for sensing temperature? You have all these different neural cells, and all of them are roughly the same kind of cell, but they have different genes turned on and off. And once you know that, and once you can differentiate between one gene and another, you've just taken your first step toward genetically manipulating these different genes and understanding Ferrari drivers. Exactly. So you brought us to the sea, and I jumped right back out again, and now we are back at the sea. Like the manatee. That's right. But here, this is where it gets super cool and sounds like it's confusing, but it's really not. It's really pretty simple. Still. There are genes in Mother Nature that respond to light, and then there are proteins that emit light when they're triggered by something they say fluoresce. Yeah. I like to say glow. In fact, if you look here, I scratched out fluoresce every single time. Yes, you did. Wow. Glow. That's a lot of work you put into those two. Just a lot easier to say glow. I think people get it a lot better than fluoresce. I watched Coming to America the other day, a man soul. Glow is so hilarious. It still holds up. That movie is even better than I remember, actually. It's great. Yeah. It's when we go back to a lot like, I knew Eddie Murphy was a charmer, but, dude, that guy is one charming human being. Yeah, all the barbershop stuff is just so classic. It's great, but all of it really it's just a great movie. You know they're sequencing that thing? No, they've been shooting it in Atlanta. Sequencing or rebooting sequencing? Oh, good. So I think the easiest way to go about a sequel is what they're doing, which is now King of Zamunda. Eddie Murphy has a son who wants to find his love. Yeah, but I think everyone's back. Like, Arsenio is back. Sure. I'm not going to be mean. Good. They found him in great spirits and he was eager to work. He said, yeah, that's a great idea. I can fit it into my schedule. Then he went, did you see the Grammys the other day? No. I don't usually watch those either, but I happened to see the entire thing. Oh, wow. I didn't know that you were kidnapped and held to guests to robot. It was like Mel Gibson in Conspiracy Theory. Okay. I was tied to a wheelchair and my eyes were taped open. So you watched all of it, huh? Yeah. I haven't watched all the Grammys since I was, like, 13. I haven't either. It was really something. It's like a marathon or an Ultra thon. Really? But Tyler, the creator, did, like, a live thing. And it was amazing. I've never heard a single second of any of his songs or him perform or anything, but I like that guy now. Yeah, he's great. And I listened to that early I can't even remember the acronym, but his sort of hip hop collective band that they all started out of that like Frank Ocean came out of that. Tolerate the Creator and a bunch of other guys. Whoa. What's it called? What was it? Do you know? Odd Future. And then it had another, like, five or six words after that. Odd Future was the shortened version. Oh, nice. Good stuff. Well, very good stuff. Thanks to Josh T for swooping in. And that first Rank Ocean album was amazing. I've not heard that either. Oh, man, it's so good. Channel Orange. I think I'm always confused by rappers who just have normal names. Frank Ocean. Yeah, he's kind of a singer crooner type. He does it. Okay. All right, now that makes sense. Yeah, he's awesome. So jeez. That's how it happens. It does. We're in the sea. We're in the ocean. The Grammys are over. Right. We have found genes that respond to light and also proteins and other organisms that emit light when triggered. I'll let you walk people through what those two things are. But the point is, they said we've got the two components to make this happen. We can build them. We can control genes by turning on a light, and we can also see what happens when something responds to the light. We just need to be able to get these two things from two different organisms into one thing that we can control. Exactly. And that's the entire basis of optogenetics. I think you did a fine job of explaining it. Well, I didn't know if you want to talk literally about the jellyfish. Well, sure. So if you don't mind no, it's great. So the algae, like green algae, has something called so it's like a single cell organism, right? Yeah. And it has an eye hole, which is light sensitive. It's a light sensitive area on the cell. And when sunlight hits the eye hole, it triggers the tail of the algae to start moving toward the sunlight so that that single cell algae can maximize its exposure to sunlight as much as possible. All right. So that's one half. You got the thing that sees light and reacts to it. Right. And again, all this stuff has to do with ion channels. That has to do with the concentration of minerals inside and outside of the cell in these channels. Right? Yes. And that's what triggers this movement? That's what triggers the electrical impulse that's the basis of all life, apparently, are the movement of minerals inside and outside of cell membranes triggering electrical impulses. That's life. That's right. Isn't that bizarre? It is. So then with jellyfish, they have a similar thing, too. We're not exactly sure why they fluoresce but say, like a predator comes up and they sense like a predator is coming, it might trigger a change in their ion concentration, which triggers a protein that fluoresces to be produced. So the jellyfish starts to glow. And these are two separate things. But like you were saying. At some point. I think in 2005. A team led by Carl Dieseroth published a paper that said. Hey. Man. We could take this algae light sensitive gene and we can take this jellyfish fluorescent gene and put them together and then take that so that one triggers the other in. Like. Kind of this Rubik's Cubey way. So that if you shine light on this one gene. It will trigger the production of this fluorescence. And if we can just figure out how to take that gene combination and put it into another organism that doesn't have either, then we could shine a light on the organism and make the cells in that organism glow. And now, finally, just the Ferraris would start to move when we signaled for them to move. We don't have to set a city block on fire. We don't have to coat everything in glowing paint. We can just signal to the Ferraris, can you believe this? It's astounding that they figured out not only in theory how to do this, but they have actually, over the last 15 years, been successful in doing it. It seems like something that if someone was describing, they would just be laughed out of a room and say, yeah, that's great. Take this jellyfish thing, put them together, shove it in fruit flies butt, and then shine a light on his face and make him rob a bank. That's the ultimate goal. Really? It's unbelievable. It really is. Chuck all right, so the fruit fly is a great little candidate because we've been working with fruit flies for a long time when it comes to genetics. We share, like, gene sequences that are so closely matched that when we find, like, a novel gene in a fruit fly, we go look at the human genome and just try to find its match. And it usually matches. That's how closely related we are. 75% of human genetic diseases are also found in fruit flies. This all seems made up. Am I being pumped? Maybe. Is this going to come out April 1? Maybe. So the fruit fly is a great little candidate for all those reasons, and for one other reason, is we don't need to cut a fruit fly's head open to see its brain. We can see that little guy's brain through a microscope. That's pretty great. Which is a pretty good way to analyze something just by letting it do its thing, especially as far as the fruit fly is concerned. Oh, sure, just hold me down. That's fine. Just don't cut my head off. Yeah, but you're setting people up to think it's all wine and roses. Yeah, it gets pretty bad. That's when you pull the rug out from under him. Chuck so what's happening, though, is they're putting that stuff in a fruit fly and then what you do is you have to breed like a next generation, I think. I don't think it would work on that one, would it? No, but you can very easily cultivate, like, a fruit fly colony that is now genetically modified. Yeah. Just throw them in a cage with some martinis and a little bit of Sinatra classics. So this is what they did and it was successful. And so this gave them the ability to do two things to map out where all these neurons are, which was the first kind of big part of this problem. And the second thing they could do is actually activate these neurons with light. Right. So now, one of the first things they experimented on are you ready to pull the rug out from people? Sure. One of the first fruit fly experiments that they conducted, or I shouldn't say one of the first, but one of the big ones, was that they genetically modified fruit flies, whose neurons responsible for their escape reflex, which is when their legs tense up and their wings tense up and they just fly away when they sense danger. These were now genetically modified with an algae and jellyfish combination gene sequence. That's right. So they shine the light on the fruit flies and the fruit flies sprung away and they said, that's pretty great, but makes sense. It's entirely possible that we just scared them with the light. Sure. How could we possibly figure out if the actual neurons are being activated, opted genetically? Right. And in the movie scene, you just hear a voice on the other side of a desk of some scientists eating Chinese food out of a box. Right. He goes, you can cut their heads off and they still live for a little while. You should do that, I imagine, instead, Robert what's his name, like scratching the chalkboard slowly. Roberto. Yes. With his idea about cutting their heads off. They could probably shoot it both ways, because just like Mike the headless chicken had a lot of his brain left when they cut his head off, so, too, with the fruit fly, there are genes, or neurons, I should say, associated with the escape reflex that are not just located in the fruit fly's head. Right. So they cut the fruit flies heads off because, like you said, or like the guy eating Chinese food said, the fruit fly will still be able to fly around and move around for a little while without a head. So they cut the heads off and then they shine the light into the thorax, where some of these neurons are, and sure enough, the fruit flies sprung away and flew into the air, headless zombie like. But they did it specifically because those neurons were reacting to light. So they successfully showed that you can control the. Behavior of a once living organism by shining a light on it once you genetically modified its neurons with these proteins. Yeah, I wanted to know a little bit more about that second part. I'm sure they did a lot of other controls, but my first instinct was how close was this light? Did it feel like the air move when they put it in front of it or was it distance? But they're scientists. I'm sure Rodney and his Chinese food, I'm sure he had a lot of other great suggestions for everybody. Right? The other questions are, did they match the heads with their thumbs to make sure there is no way that they were getting any light info? Alright, I feel like we should take another break because what we've described is almost a miracle. But what good does that do us? Great question. And we'll talk about what good it could do us right after this. Okay, so the fruit fly experiment, that was pretty huge. And it didn't just end with fruit flies like we said. They've successfully experimented with mice, with fish worms. Worms, I think. Worms, yes. And all of these, they use these types of ion channels or ion pumps called Dopsins or Opsons. It's specifically rodopsons. They respond to light, they're stimulated by light, but they've figured out how to insert different ones into different genes. And eventually what they're thinking is that if we can figure out how to use these in humans, we will be able to do all manner of things, some of which we've already successfully demonstrated on things like mice and fruit flies. Not just to get a human to jump using our escape reflex, but things like treating depression is a big one. Yeah, that's sort of one of the huge potential benefits here, is what if we could literally control the release of Dopamine in someone's brain? And when people suffer from depression and they're having a hard time getting their dopamine reactions to occur naturally, instead of putting them on pills, which a pill doesn't just affect the cells that it needs to, that's why they have a whole list of side effects, because they affect everything they're like. Maybe we can get so specific that we can literally turn on those cells with light. Give someone a dopamine hit that will take seconds instead of weeks and weeks of being on medication that may or may not work and may or may not have devastating side effects. Yeah, and you just hit the nail in the head that the effect will take seconds. That's one of the really big advantages of optogenetics is it's light controlled and we have really great lights that can turn on and off very, very quickly. Like lasers connected to fiber optics is one way that they have figured out how to deliver this. I saw a cute heartbreaking picture of a mouse with this kind of plastic helmet on the side of its head and coming out of it was a single fiber optic cable. You remember those fiber optic kind of brushes that had, like, a light source at the bottom? And the brush itself was just this beautiful, colorful thing. I used to sell those at the laser show. I love those. I went and looked through, like, Google Images and pictures of those, and I was like, God, these are so pretty. Oh, man, kids went nuts for them. So they had one of those fiber optic little fibers coming out of the mouse's head, and the mouse is just this little dirt looking at the camera like, what? But it can connect the end of that fiber optic cable to a laser, and it will deliver that light source inside the mouse's brain. The problem is there's all sorts of brain damage that you can create by inserting even, like, a really tiny fiber optic fiber into the brain of something. Sure. But it is one way to do it. Now, what they're working on also is, like I said, those road options. One of the ones they're looking at is, like, red shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, which means that you can use something like infrared light, which is absorbed more deeply into the body as an external light source. So you just shine like an infrared light through the skull, and then that will activate the neurons in the brain too. So I don't remember exactly how we started on this, but there's stuff that we're starting to figure out from these mouse models, including things like treating depression. Oh, yeah. How precise it is, how precise the delivery of light is. Right. Which is really important because the timing of neurons and triggering them and the cascade of events that it sets off is extremely precisely timed. So you can't just use, like, a flashlight and expect to treat depression. You would have to be able to time it in the way that the brain is supposed to be doing it in the first place. Yes. What I wonder is if in the future and first of all, you've got to get past all the ethical hurdles of gene therapy to begin with, which are many and complex. So let's say we do get through all that, and let's say we get FDA approval to start therapies like this. What does that look like? Because if it happens in seconds, do you make an appointment and go to a specialist who does this light therapy? Or is this something that do you have a device that you're in control of? Right, so it would probably follow a model like deep brain stimulation, which you mentioned earlier, where you have electrodes implanted in your brain that are doing basically the same thing, but a lot less precise and a lot more clumsy. But they're electrically stimulating neurons, say, that release dopamine to treat depression. I don't know if we're doing that yet, but there's definitely deep brain stimulation. But do you go to a place to have that done? You have, like, a pacemaker like, device connected via wire from your brain, and then the device is, like, under your skin and your chest, but it's being controlled by a computer. Like, you have an onboard computer on you. Right, but what I'm saying is you don't, like, carry around a button. No, it's under your skin. Okay, so how would this work, then? I would guess the same way that we would figure out exactly from studying optogenetically, these neurons that glow when they go off. So we'll figure out the brain pathways in the regions responsible for things like depression and all that. We would figure out what the standard normal pattern is and then teaching computer to recreate it, and then the computer would regulate it when needed in the brain. Okay, well, that makes a little more sense. But, I mean, just that kind of stuff, like, just that alone shows you how far we are from actually doing this in humans, we have no idea what the normal pattern in the brain is for normal serotonin release, for a normal mood. But it also raises these other questions, too, Chuck, where it's like, okay, if we figure that out and we figure out how to replicate that, why stop there? Like, why not just make everybody happier than we are normally? Yeah, which brings in the whole free will debate, which has been around since the dawn of time. And it also does a great job of kind of wrapping it up and pointing out that kind of makes you think about things like, are we just a bag of cells that can be manipulated by a flashing light? Is that what you're saying is yes, we are? Yeah, totally. Is that what happiness is? Like, you think happiness is seeing your dog when you get home from work and getting those licks, but if those are just synapses firing, that's scientifically what's going on. But it is a very cold, inhumane way to look at things. I think I disagree with that. I think that's a better understanding of what's going on, but I don't think it undermines the happiness you're experiencing. I think for a lot of people, it might. Well, yes. It's not like I can't see how it wouldn't, but to me, it's like, no, I mean, you're still experiencing happiness. The happiness is still important to you. Happiness is still the point of life. This is just understanding the mechanism that we experience happiness by. That's true. And I have seen you around dogs, and you constantly are just saying, I'm a bag of neurons firing at once. It's like Francis Crick, the guy who co discovered DNA, he had a book in the 70s called The Astonishing Hypothesis. I know we've talked about it before, but he has this famous quote where he said, you're nothing but a pack of neurons. And, I mean, to me, that's a really good way of maintaining a positive outlook on things. Like, no matter how bad things get, it's just neurotransmitters in your head that are going haywire or that are doing control over it. Right. Well, that's the reason to do all this, is to regain control over it when it's not functioning correctly and then making things even better than they are normally. Naturally, there's no written law that says if we figure out how to make ourselves happier that we shouldn't do that. And as a matter of fact, basically every moral code there is says we should do that. If we can be happier, let's figure out how to be happier. Yeah. I think the other thing that makes me think about slippery slope wise is will people cease to do the things that they do to make them happy if they can simply touch a button to do so? Yeah, that's called wireheading. And that's actually a big problem with artificial intelligence, is they're saying, like, okay, if we train artificial intelligence to do something based on a reward, the artificial intelligence is going to go figure out how to go right to the reward button. It's going to circumvent that. And that's a great question, too, where if we start to become, like, digital consciousness, right, where we migrate online, we shed our bodies, and our consciousness just exists in digital form, then all that stuff will be available to us. And it does make you think, like, okay, if our existence is just digital, there's no purpose to it except to experience pleasure. Is there anything wrong with just sitting around experiencing pleasure all the time? Or do we need more than that? I don't know. That's a next level question if you ask me. Yeah. Do you ever see Wall E? Yes. Sort of. Like, that could be the future. Like, why go out and take a walk if you're feeling down to get some sunshine on your face? If you can just press a button to do the same thing yeah. In that movie, it's like, well, there's something inherently wrong with that. But I don't know, man, because if you think about it, when you go outside and you get a walk, you feel better. You feel, like, more positive. If you can get that without doing the walk. If you can get everything from a walk without having to go on a walk, do you still need to go on a walk? Well, including the benefits to your health and body, yes. If you could get every single scrap of benefit that you can get from a walk digitally or somehow without actually going on a walk, do you need to go on a walk? I say yes, but you and I are different. No, I'm with you. I still say yes as well, but I can't explain why. Okay. Yeah. I'm not just, like, this full transhumanist guy. I definitely have questions about the whole thing, too. I think you just spilled some bong water on the carpet, too. It's never going to come out. I'm going to soft it up with the fabrize dryer sheet. Remember that? Remember when you saw kids do that at the dorms? Yeah. I don't know if kids had fabrics, dryer sheets when I was in college, they didn't exist yet. Okay. You mean just like the bounce sheets? Yes. Oh, sure. Yeah, I've seen those old tricks. It's hilarious. Okay, well, you got anything else about optogenetics? No, it's pretty fascinating stuff. Yeah, we'll see where it goes. Agreed. Actually, we probably won't see where it goes in our lifetime, but I don't know, man. I suspect that while we're alive, things are going to change quite a bit. We'll live to see a lot of this stuff. I'm going to check in with you in 35 years, okay? You'll be sitting across the desk from me still when we get commemorated into the Podcasting Hall of Fame. Well, you're on that, aren't you? You're going to stroll into that room wearing your VR headset, pressing your little dopamine button, talking about how great life is, right? Just wire headed to the guild. Right? So if you want to know more about optogenetics, well, go start reading about it. Pretty interesting stuff. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Listener mail. I think it was me who goofed up on the Going Postal app when I think I off handedly. When they were talking about the California Commission, about how much money was spent, I think it said pixel money. Yeah, like a dope. Because we've covered the US Postal Service and we know that that is not the case. And this is from Peter, among many others. Hey, guys, I want to start off by saying how much I love the show. You always do a great job researching the subjects you talk about. However, I knew however, I got a small bone to pick. In your recent episode Why Postal Employees Go Postal, you talk about how the US. Postal Service spent 4 million tax dollars on the Joseph, California Commission. While Congress does still control the USPS budget, it receives no funding from them at all and has not since the early 1980s. The USPS operates solely on the money they make from stamps and packages. Zero tax dollars. Anyway, thanks for the amazing content. May you keep doing so for many years to come. That is from Peter and many, many others. That was very kind, Peter. And by the way, we heard from a lot of people, employees or people whose family are or were in the Postal Service, and we got a range of things from you guys are crazy. My post office is great. There's no toxic environment. To people saying, oh, there absolutely is a very toxic environment. Yeah, like, it's even worse than you guys said. Yeah. So I think for the people that wrote in that said that was not the case, then I am very happy that you work in a great place that has a great environment, but it seems like there is a range there, right? That's the nicest way to say it. Yeah. Well, that was Peter. Right? Peter? Thanks a lot, Peter. That was a very nice way to put it. And if you want to get in touch with us like Peter did, you can go and send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradiocom. 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 the Gap and listen today." | |
c45992ec-5460-11e8-b38c-430f80c811ca | SYSK Selects: How The Black Panther Party Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-black-panther-party-worked | The Black Panther Party was a complex political movement that was unfairly painted as a militant group who hated white people. Far from it, they were actually men and women trying to affect change in their community. Their history is one of the more interesting American stories, from the early stages of policing the police to their community service efforts to their inevitable fall. Learn all about the Black Panther Party in this classic episode. | The Black Panther Party was a complex political movement that was unfairly painted as a militant group who hated white people. Far from it, they were actually men and women trying to affect change in their community. Their history is one of the more interesting American stories, from the early stages of policing the police to their community service efforts to their inevitable fall. Learn all about the Black Panther Party in this classic episode. | Sat, 06 Jun 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=158, tm_isdst=0) | 62899195 | 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 me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen how the Black Panther party worked. And I think you probably know why I did. I know a lot of people listen to Stuff You Should Know as an escape from the rest of the world, from the terribleness of news and politics and all of that stuff. And we get that. And we're actually grateful that we can provide that kind of distraction for people under normal circumstances. But these aren't normal circumstances. And right now is not a time to be distracted, and it's definitely not a time to be silent. And so I hope that you will listen to this episode about the history of the struggle for civil rights and human rights that black people in America have had to undertake. And then it helps you understand better the struggle that's going on in America right now. And I know that a lot of people who listen to Stuff You Should Know don't necessarily agree with us politically. That's fine, we get that. That's wonderful, too. But we don't have to agree politically to agree that human rights matter for everybody. And right now, every single one of us, every single one of you listening to my voice right this moment has a once in a lifetime opportunity to do something about it, to stand up and to use your voice to help other people be treated equally and make this country a better place. You can't argue with that. More people having more human rights can only make America a better place. Just being a Stuff You Should Know listener means that you love to learn. Well, now is a really good time to learn about what life has been like all of these years for people of color in America. And I hope you will. I hope you'll open your hearts and your minds to all the people who are trying to teach us right now. Thanks for listening. And thanks for listening. 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. It's just the two of us. No producer today. We're producer free. Just the two of us. We can make it if we try. Let's try, Chuck. You and I, right? I think we're both pretty excited about this one. Yeah, this is going to be a good one. I love my history, as do you. Sure. Especially contemporary history. And especially history that I didn't get taught in high school. I don't remember learning much about the Black Panthers. No. In high school. None. So, Charles, you didn't know much about the Black Panthers. I didn't either. A little bit, yeah. I would guess we were probably in about the same boat I went to college. Yeah, I don't recall learning much in college about them either, but I knew a little bit. Here. There are some of the highlights. But it was in researching that I realized just how much if you don't actually go research it, just how completely wrong a lot of this stuff is. And not just in detail, but in overall tone. Like, you get the idea that the Black Panthers were nothing but, like, racist terrorists who basically wanted to kill all whites and take over the White House. Not true. No, not really. After further digging, it turns out that a lot of that image that most people have today who don't really know much about the Black Panthers, that idea comes from a misinformation and smear campaign carried out very purposefully by the FBI back in the yes. Boy, let's just call him divisive at the risk of smearing someone, but has there ever been a more divisive individual in this country, perhaps? Well, who knows now, but J edgar Hoover? Yeah. I mean, my God. FBI Director for Life. I mean, I want to say we should do a podcast on him, but it would definitely be a two parter cause he worked for 187 years, I should say. That smear campaign. And there's a lot of other stuff to that campaign as well beyond just smearing. But it had a name COINTELPRO counterintelligence program, and that in and of itself deserves its own one or two parter episode, too. Yeah. I mean, at one point, Jed Guru came out in the news and said that the Black Panther Party was the single greatest threat to the United States of America. Right. And this was during the Vietnam War for the Uninformed. Like you said, people thought, all right, well and it was not coincidentally from that point forward is when the cops really were like, all right, we truly don't have to even respect civil liberties at this point. We can go in and shoot people in their sleep. Right, exactly. And what's Crazy Chuck, is when he said that it was less than three years after the Black Panther Party was formed. Yeah. So let's go back to the beginning, actually. We'll go back before even the founding of the Black Panthers. Just provide some context. Right? Yes. So this is roughly the tail end of the Jim Crow era, right before right. At the New Deal era. And if you are black in America, your experience, whether it was in the south, where it was just even more openly and overtly hostile. Or in the cities of the north, you were probably just statistically speaking, it was likely that you were poor, that you probably had routine, especially if you were a black man, especially a black man under a certain age that you were routinely mistreated, harassed, beaten, or possibly murdered by police. And there was a tremendous amount of racial tension as a result. Right. Yeah. Not just up north. I mean, we're talking pretty much any major city. Right. But especially in the south. In the south, actually, there was a guy whose name was Robert Williams, and he was NAACP leader in North Carolina, and he wrote a book back in, I think, and he called it Negroes with Guns. And it advocated blacks arming themselves and carrying out violence in self defense in the face of this racial mistreatment. Right. Yeah. And Williams actually kind of codified or enshrined into a book form this idea that was pretty predominant among Southern blacks. It was like, look, stuff is real and we need to defend ourselves. And that idea spread a little bit to the cities here or there, and it germinated in the minds of a couple of guys, a couple of college kids in Oakland named Bobby Seal and Hughie Newton. Yes. And they officially formed. It was called the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. Initially. It was eventually truncated in Oakland, in there. We'll go through there. Because they had sort of a roller coaster ride as far as what they did as a group and as a party. But initially kind of the whole thing was self defense. We need to defend ourselves against police brutality. Right. And this nonviolent civil rights movement is great. We love Martin Luther King Jr. And what he's doing, but it's going too slowly. And in the meantime, we're getting beaten and killed in the streets by law enforcement. So we need to be proactive and do something about that. Right, exactly. Robert Williams may have written the book, but the guys who formed the Black Panther, seal in Newton, they were the first black rights group to advocate militancy. Although, again, you have to point out, like, they advocated violence and self defense, not aggression. Right. Yeah. Which is why they specifically chose the Black Panther as their, I guess you'd say, mascot, but as their name mascot makes it sound like a baseball game or something. Right. But there's a quote here from Bobby Seale co founder, and he said that Hughie Newton said, the nature of a Panther, I looked it up. If you push it into a corner, that panther is going to try and move left or right to get you to get out of the way. But if you keep pushing back into that corner, sooner or later that panther is going to come out of that corner and try and wipe out who keeps Oppressing in that corner. And that was sort of the idea like, hey, listen, we're trying to sidestep, we're trying to do the right thing, but if you keep coming at us, then we're going to defend ourselves. Yeah, exactly. Again, they weren't the first people to come up with this. And they looked around and kind of surveyed the black rights movements that were around and they kind of said, this one works a little bit, but that part of it doesn't work. Or this one we don't agree with, but it's a nice sentiment. Like the MLK nonviolent civil rights movement, like you said, they said, this isn't working. It's not happening fast enough or it's not happening at all. And some other groups and people like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rat Brown, who were the heads of the Nonviolent Student Coordinating Committee, were some of the first black leaders to publicly break with MLK's nonviolent theory and say, no, we need to meet violence with violence. Malcolm X was another one. And Malcolm X probably had the biggest influence on the Black Panther ideology than anybody else. Yes, he advocated black militancy that included violence. He advocated black self sufficiency and dignity, but he didn't necessarily say you were only going to advance with the helps of other blacks. We need to exclude whites or other races from our struggle. And the Black Panthers, specifically Hughie Newton. And Bobby Seal really identified with that. And actually that became one of the hallmarks of the Black Panthers, that they were willing to work with other like minded groups regardless of race. Okay, yeah. So that was kind of a big one that I wasn't aware of, that I learned from this. And then the other aspect of Malcolm X that really formed like one of the foundation keystones of the Black Panther ideology is that it wasn't race that was the problem. It was class. They were basically avowed Marxists, right? Yeah. The central issue that created the struggle was class with capitalism and that the white establishment and the police and the government were keepers of the capitalist structure. And that same capitalist structure was keeping the black people in America down. And so to rise up, to become self sufficient, to get that chance that they needed to grow and advance themselves, they had to get rid of the capitalist structure itself. Yeah, they were very much into the socialist ideal and one of the first things they did was they realized they needed sort of a foundation on which to build upon, something easily digestible, that people could look at and could read and understand what they're all about. So very smartly. Early on, they came up with a very specific, what they called their ten point program, what We Want and What We Believe. And they wrote this out, we're going to read them in a second. But they wrote them out and then immediately printed them on a thousand sheets of paper and set up an office and started passing these things around. This office was in Oakland, which is where I think we already said where they founded, and they basically quit their jobs. Every member of the Black Panther Party was a full time, I guess you could say employee, but full time worker. Member. Yeah, member. And they gathered their paychecks, a few guys at the very beginning and rented an old shop storefront base and started handing out this ten point program. Yeah, they did. And you want to go over the program first? Yeah, we might as well just go ahead and read all ten so everybody knows what we're talking about, right? Number one, we want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our black community. We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny. Yes. Number two, we want full employment for our people. We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give it a high standard of living. Number three, we want an end to the robbery by the white man of our black community. We believe that this racist government has robbed us, and now we are demanding the overdue debt of 40 acres and two mules. Number four, we want decent housing fit for shelter of human beings. We believe that if white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperative so their community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people. Yeah, that was a big one. And as you'll see, a lot of what they were after was just, like, the ability to live in a neighborhood where you could have a decent school and a decent place to live and a chance to work. Like, it wasn't some radical thing that they were after. They just wanted the same opportunities, basically. Yeah. And I mean, I said earlier that if you were living and you were black and living in America in, the chances are you were poor. 32% of all black people all black people in the United States were living below the poverty line in 1966. Wow. 71% of the poor living in metropolitan areas were black, and in two thirds of the black population lived in ghettos. Wow. So, yeah, of course it makes sense that their agenda is we want to just get to basic normal, and then we'll go from there. All right. Number five, we want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decade American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in present day society. Number six, we want all black men to be exempt from military service. This is a big one. We believe that black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. Yes. And later on in there, during the Vietnam War, they actually, some of them traveled to Vietnam and kind of found a common ground with the North Vietnamese. Right. It's very interesting. Is it my turn? It is. Number seven, we want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people. Pretty much speaks for itself. Yes, but part of that was that they point out that the Second Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed the right to bear arms, and that's going to be a big part of the Black Panther Party. They're credited historically as being basically the ones who pointed to the Second Amendment and said, hey, we're advocates of gun rights. Yeah, we'll get to all that. It gets pretty juicy. Number eight, we want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county, and city prisons and jails. It says that they believe that all black people should be released from prison because they have not received a fair and impartial trial. Number nine, we want all black people, when brought to trial, to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities as defined by the Constitution of the United States. Number ten, we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace, and as our major political objective, a United Nations supervised plebusite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny. They're basically saying, we believe that black should have the power to separate from the United States, from the white establishment, and form their own self sufficient and respected self governing body, basically. Right. So they took this ten point program. They founded a newspaper called the Black Panther, and they sold that for $0.25. It got to be a very popular newspaper, had a really wide circulation. And it wasn't just black communities. There were all kinds of people reading this newspaper. Aside from donations and stuff from various groups. It really kind of funded the organization, was the sale of this paper. Right. And every single issue, I believe, featured this ten point program on the inside cover. And a quick shout out to the artwork of Emory Douglas. If you've ever saw this great documentary called the Black Panthers Vanguard of a Revolution. Yes, I watched that, too. And this artwork from this artist and graphic designer Emery Douglas, that was kind of the hallmark of the paper, was just gorgeous stuff. And I think he's one of those that has sort of not been lost to history, but I had never heard of him before. I think he did a cover for one of the editions of Native Sun. Oh, really? Because I was looking at that. Looks really familiar and I think that's where I saw it before. It's really good stuff. Yeah. So, Chuck, we've got the Ten point plan and the original headquarters in Oakland, and all of a sudden the Panthers start spreading like wildfire their ideas, because the experience was so similar as far as poverty and being harassed and brutalized by police and just generally being held down by the white establishment. Since that experience was so similar throughout all the major cities and even smaller cities in the United States, the Black Panther Party spread pretty quick. And eventually they had something like 5000 members. And remember, that doesn't sound that much like that many people, but like you said, to be a member, you were committed to the Black Panther Party. Twenty four, seven. You had to quit your job, you had to quit school, and your life was the Black Panther Party. So the fact that they had 5000 people doing that around the country is pretty nuts. But they have many more supporters. And the Black Panther newspaper eventually grew to a circulation of about 250,000. It's amazing. It really is. Well, I guess we'll get back to their history 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 to 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. All right, so if you want to start anything that you want to grow and be noticed, then it sounds kind of silly to talk about, but you need to be good at branding. Yeah, that's true. And I don't know that they specifically thought about it as branding initially, but they quickly realized that the media really ate this stuff up. When these black men in black leather car coats and black turtlenecks and black berets donning shotguns with the ammunition draped around their shoulder. The press ate it up. It was a cool look. And young black men wanted to look like this. Black women started growing out their Afros. It was all kind of sort of tied into the black is Beautiful movement, which was sort of just the notion of embrace your blackness. Don't try to fit in and look. Don't straighten your hair. Don't try and look like white people. Like, wear your dashiki. Grow your afro out. Be proud of who you are as a black person. Embrace your roots. And the Black Panther Party was really tied into this, and it became a really big part of their branding and recruitment. Yeah. If you were hip at this time, like, you were definitely hip to the Black Panther look, even if you hadn't adopted it yourself, you were like, there's a cool cat walking down the street with a bandolier of bullets and a shotgun. Right. So the Panthers, they had to look. They have the offices now. They have the newspaper. And one of the first things they started doing even before they really started to spread, but those first Panther members, hughie Newton, Bobby Seal, and then a guy named Bobby Hutton, was their first recruit. One of the first things they started doing was patrolling the neighborhoods of Oakland and looking for police who had stopped black motorists. Right? Yeah. It was almost like a guardian angels that protected citizens from cops. Right, exactly. That's a really good way to put it. Right. So they would stand there at a reasonable distance and just openly and obviously observe the traffic stop. And they would shout at the cop anytime he started to violate the civil rights of the black driver. And they were armed. They were holding shotguns, oftentimes not necessarily pointed at the cops, but in that documentary we mentioned, they would talk about how they would kind of bring it this, move it from side to side, kind of shifting position. And as it did, it slowly was aimed for a moment at the cop. And the cop got the point, like, yes, I get it. You have a loaded shotgun and it's right there, and you could shoot me. And some of the first traffic stop monitoring that happened just scared the bejesus out of the cops. They had never experienced anything like this before. All of a sudden, there were a group of young black men standing there in black berets and shades at night holding shotguns trained on them from time to time. And the cops actually responded in exactly the way the Black Panthers did. They were much more hesitant to brutalize or violate the civil rights of the drivers. And a lot of times they just get in their cars and leave, especially if they were on patrol alone. Yeah. So that was one of the huge early foundational hallmarks of the Black Panther Party, that they were openly and armoredly protecting their fellow blacks from police brutality. That was one of their major roles. Yes. And the reason that they were allowed to have these guns is because one of their leaders, Eldridge Cleaver, found in the California law books that, I mean, they call it a loophole, but it wasn't really a loophole. It's kind of right there in black and white, as you are allowed to carry a gun on public property as long as it's not concealed. Right. Open carry law. And so they were like, all right, well, we have these guns. It says right here we're allowed to they would carry a gun in one hand a lot of times, and then this California Legal Handbook in the other. And they knew it by heart. They could quote exactly the code. And then obviously the cops caught on. The word got around what was going on, and it developed all the way to the California General Assembly. And when you see this documentary, it's amazing, man. The Black Panther Party marches through the building onto the floor of the California General Assembly wielding shotguns, loaded shotguns, and you see, obviously the white legislature just sitting there like, what in the world is going on? Including Ronald Reagan. Well, yeah, he was the governor. Right. And so Ronald Reagan was the governor at the time, and he is, in that documentary, quoted as saying, like, anybody who thinks carrying open loaded guns in public is okay is out of his mind, and ultimately signed an anti open carry law that closed that loophole. Yeah. The Mullford Act. Right. So Reagan signed some gun control legislation, big gun control legislation, in an effort to curb those patrols by the Black Panthers. Yeah. Obviously you hear, all right, Ronald Reagan does this. You think? Where's the NRA? And so I looked up, I was like, what was just the climate at the time? Apparently in the late sixty s, the NRA, it wasn't until the late seventy s, nineteen seventy seven, when a guy named Harlan Carter took over the NRA is when they really stepped it up with the Second Amendment rights, the really more strict version of the Second Amendment. Right. So the NRA was silent, and obviously Reagan being very tough on guns, he had, I guess you could call it conversion in the 1980s as well. And then he and the NRA teamed up together and started saying things like, well, no, it's okay, you can totally have guns. Right. This also happened to coincide with the breakup of the Black Panther Party yeah. When the NRA and Reagan changed their stance on gun rights. Yes. One thing you said was that it was Eldridge Cleaver who noticed loophole. It was Hughie Newton. He was the one who really had that mind for law. Eldridge Cleaver was much more the militant revolutionary, and he was already a bit of a darling in the intellectual circles for a book of essays he'd written in prison called Soul on Ice. And so he joined the Black Panther Party pretty early on as their minister of information, in large part their official spokesman. And he brought an air of real credibility and legitimacy and got a lot of left leaning intellectuals and entertainment types. Like Brando was a big one who was in favor of the party and supporter. But they really started to pay attention to the Black Panthers when Eldridge Cleaver joined. Yeah. And his wife, Kathleen Cleaver was also one of the well, we might as well go ahead and talk about women in the Black Panther Party. Yeah, like most organizations at the time, it was sort of, from the top down, a male driven organization. And they did have Kathleen Cleaver and they had Elaine Brown, who was also sort of one of the higher ups. But it was still an even they admitted it was still somewhat of a chauvinistic organization. And most of the women didn't make it past what they called the rank and file, sort of operating the nuts and bolts secretarial work and just kind of making the thing go. On one hand, they did give women some positions of power, but never kind of at the top. Well, no, like you said, you named two of the big exceptions to that rule, but they were big exceptions. Like, Kathleen Cleaver was the first woman who was a member of the decision making body. And Elaine Brown took over as chair, party chair, like the top official, after Hughie Newton split for Cuba. Like you said, most of the women in the Black Panther Party were ranked and file. But it doesn't mean that gender roles were totally rigid in the party. Like, for example, you would just as often or frequently see women out armed doing patrols of the neighborhood, while men were the ones responsible for some of the survival programs, the community programs that we'll talk about. Yeah. Well, Brown said they tried that and had minor successes. Oh, is that right? Yeah. In the documentary, she said that was sort of what she tried to do is reverse some of the roles. And she said there was still kind of largely a sexist attitude and which was a problem within the organization because you can't be that true community organization if you have that oppression going on within your own group in a gender sense. Yeah. And especially if women are the ones who are doing a lot of the actual work. Like something like 50% to 70% of Panther membership was female. Yeah, at one point. So, yeah, you got to respect the people who are actually doing the work or else you got an arrogance problem at the top. Yes. And we should mention, too, that Kathleen Cleaver is a professor right here in Atlanta at our own Emory University. What? Law professor? Yeah, she went on to get a law degree from Yale. And after years of living in exile, which we'll get to. All right, so you mentioned the survival programs, and if you don't know what that is, you might be saying, like, what in the world is Josh talking about? They had their police brutality program. So that's kind of what made the news, was patrolling the streets with these guns, keeping the cops in check. And by the way, we should mention that they're the ones who came up with the term pigs as a derogatory term for police officers. Yeah. It first appeared in their newspaper and it caught them pretty quick. Yeah. So that was kind of what they made the news for at first. But I think especially Huey Newton realized early on that they can make a real difference in the community if they get these social programs going, that they're not being taken care of. Their schools are bad. These kids don't have access to good food, even. And they read that, scientifically speaking, that a good breakfast has a big impact on how a child learns throughout the day. So they started this breakfast program where they would give I mean, I think at one point, they were feeding, like, 20,000 children free breakfast around the country every day. Every day? Every morning. 20,000 children around the country who otherwise would have gone to school hungry and stayed hungry the whole day, ate breakfast because the Black Panther Party fed them every school day around the country. That's insane. Yeah. They started medical clinics. Free clinics. Called the People's Free Medical Center. They offered vaccines, testing for diseases, treated basic illnesses, cancer screenings. Basically, the social services that white America fully enjoyed, or I should say, white America of a certain class fully enjoyed and started offering up these programs, which kind of became one of the hallmarks of the party. They weren't just this militant group trying to keep cops and check any longer. No, that was as big, if not bigger, than their militant objectives. Is serving the community through these survival programs, too, right, absolutely. And they funded these programs largely through donations, which they would go out and solicit from the community around the cities. Right, yeah. And apparently, if you at least didn't give something, if you were like, no, I'm not giving you a dime, the Panthers would out you in their newspaper and call for a boycott of your business, saying, these guys care so little that they won't even chip in a dollar for kids to have a free breakfast. Yeah. Pretty serious organization going by this time. That was directed, again, not just at patrolling police and fighting police brutality, but also at serving the community. Yes. One of the cool things they did was they started the Oakland Community School. Yeah. That was Elaine Brown. Yeah. And it was kind of her passion project, and it was pretty much free to students. And they had small classes. They taught poetry, they taught foreign language and current events. They taught yoga, like all these things that the black community had never had access to black history is obviously a big part of it. They had Maya Angelou and Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders come in and speak at the school, and it operated for nine years, from 73 to 82. And Kathleen Cleaver has this one great story that she told on CNN about one young man who came to join the party because he wanted to get a gun and be on the patrol. They handed him a stack of books and he looked at them and said, I thought you were going to army. And they said back to him, I just did pretty good. Yeah, she dropped the mic right after that. Yes, she absolutely did. But that directly relates to, I think, point number five on the Ten Point Agenda, where it says that they want education for people that teaches them about themselves, that gives them a knowledge of self. It said that if a man doesn't have knowledge of himself in his position in society, in the world, that he has little chance to relate to anything else, which is exceptionally true. Yeah, so you've got all these programs, I think they had like 65 programs, what they called survival programs in place. And it wasn't until apparently these programs were starting to really roll and get the attention and support of a lot of people outside of the communities, even, that the FBI, led by Jagger Hoover, gave its full attention to the Black Panthers. And they said about trying to destroy the Black Panther Party. Well, yeah, I mean, Hoover, ironically, these social programs are what scared him the most, because he knew that that's how you're going to get white liberals on board on this cause, which is exactly what happened. As you said, they didn't shun the help of the white man by any means. They went arm and arm with these white lefties. Basically. You watch the documentaries, it looks like today, these college dudes with beards, they look like modern hipsters and worked arm in arm. And at one point they even got together who was the Appalachian group, the Young Patriots. Yeah, it's just like you see this video of these black militants, like, giving handshakes and hugs to these rural white people who all seem like they were like, we have the same problems and we can just get together. And it was just crazy, especially in today's climate all these years later, to see that happening back then. Yeah, I mean, they were in favor of anybody regardless, as long as they shared kind of the same sentiments or the same struggle. In 1970, Hugh Newton became the first black leader to ever publicly support gays and lesbians. Yeah, that was a huge deal, too. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, I mean, the point was, the problem wasn't race. The problem was this class struggle. And everybody of a certain socioeconomic status or who was a worker is being held back. You were saying Hoover was worried about those social programs. Yes. There's a quote from a letter that he wrote to an FBI agent who objected to targeting the survival programs as part of COINTELPRO. Yeah. Hoover said, you state the Bureau should not interfere in programs such as the Breakfast for Children because many prominent humanitarians, both white and black, are interested in the program as well as churches which are actively supporting it. You obviously have missed the point. And his point was that you don't leave those programs alone because they have support outside of the community. You target them because they have support outside of the community. That was the real threat. Way more than black men patrolling the streets with shotguns. That was a problem for local law enforcement, and the FBI was worried about it. But more of the point, they saw that as such a flashpoint, a potential flashpoint, that they could get the police to shoot and kill armed black men on the street with impunity they could deal with. That is what they understood was meeting violence with violence. What they didn't know how to deal with, aside from completely subverting it and sabotaging it, was generating goodwill throughout the community through these social programs. So that was the real threat to Hoover in his eyes. Amazing. So at this point, the party at the top had gotten a little the foundation had gotten a little loose due to a couple of things going back in time a little bit. A few years before, Huey Newton was arrested and convicted of killing a police officer, which, on one hand, it sort of removed one of the pieces of the foundation, which made it a little bit weaker at the top. On the other hand, it really got people around this free Huey Newton campaign. Yeah, that was Cleaver's phrase. Yeah. Free Huey. And again, the white liberals got on board, and it kind of swept the nation that basically Huey Newton was involved in a shootout with the cops and they thought wrongfully imprisoned and kind of railroaded through the system. In one sense, it sort of galvanized the movement. And another, anytime one of the leaders is operating out of jail, then that's not good. And he wasn't the only one. Actually, I think all three of the original Bobby Seal was in and out of jail a couple of times. And I think by this point, too, cleaver had fled the country to avoid jail and ended up in Algeria. He did so back in 1968 as part of a patrol. Cleaver and Bobby Hutton, who was the first recruit of the Black Panthers, and by this time was the treasurer of the Oakland chapter. They were part of a patrol that ended up was pulled over by two cops, and those two cops ended up dead, and everybody in the car fled, and Hutton and Cleaver fled to a basement where they got in a shootout for 90 minutes with police. The police threw in tear gas, and the tear gas, I guess, exploded and caught the basement on fire. So Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Hutton decided that they were going to surrender. So they came out with their hands up, unarmed, and the cops surrounded them and shot Hutton in the head, just executed him right there on the sidewalk. And Cleaver was taken to jail. He made bail. And right when he made bail, he was like, See you. Yeah. He split. He went to Cuba because Fidel Castro was a longtime and big supporter of the Black Panther Party. Sure, there's apparently still one of them shakur, I believe, who is living still in exile in Cuba today, who's a Black Panther. But Eldridge Cleaver. I just didn't like the climate. Ended up with Kathleen Cleaver in Algeria and formed the international chapter of the Black Panther Party. And that's where they would receive dignitaries from the North Vietnamese government or from Cuba or any kind of left leaning revolutionary group would come meet them there. And that was enormous because basically no other black liberation or black rights movement group had genuine, legitimate international support. The Black Panthers did. And in the eyes of the world, that boosted their credibility just through the roof. Oh, yeah. All right, so there's a bit of a I don't want to say power vacuum, but slight leadership vacuum because of the various top original founders being away from Oakland, either in jail or Algeria or in and out of jail. And it could have potentially been filled by a young man out of Chicago named Fred Hampton. And we will get back to Fred's story 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 Smalltown 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 to 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. All right. So Fred Hampton, by all accounts from this documentary and my research, seemed like he could have been the Bobby Kennedy of the Black Panther Party. Well put. He was vivacious. He was a great speaker. He would give these speeches and just galvanize people. He had a great personality, and he was really getting kind of the movement back on track again in a big, big way when he was pretty much I'm not even going to say pretty much when he was politically assassinated by the FBI and Chicago Police Department. Yeah, he was executed for sure. What was it? Yeah. December 4 is when the raid went down. So it's something like 04:00 a.m.. Sometime in the wee hours, the cops kicked in the door fred Hampton's house, or the house where he was staying. And 90 bullets, I saw 90, also saw 190 bullets were shot fired from the Chicago Police Department, and one bullet was shot by the Black Panthers. And that bullet was shot when the bodyguard to Fred Hampton his name was Mark Clark, was shot and killed and dropped the shotgun he was holding, and it went off. Yeah. And we should mention. Too. This was one of many. What they called raids after Hoover issued that edict that they were the largest and I'm sure there was an internal memo as well. Which we don't know about. But when he issued that edict that they were the most threatening group to the United States democracy. It was pretty much open season. And they carried out these raids all over the country. Where essentially cops would just kick indoors. Guns blazing. Shoot first. Don't even ask questions. Yeah. But this one was a little more even worse. It was even more pronounced because this was targeted. Yes, exactly. And it was targeted specifically for Fred Hampton. And it kind of falls in line with this part of COINTELPRO. One of the foundations of COINTELPRO was that it sought to prevent the rise of a black messiah that could consolidate the masses. And that was Fred Hampton. Right. Well, he definitely fell in that. It was MLK. So was Malcolm X. Right. Basically, any black leader that was assassinated definitely fell within that. And Fred Hampton did as well, for sure. So he was assassinated not by the FBI, but by the Chicago PD. But the Chicago PD were able to carry out a targeted rate because the FBI had supplied them with a map drawn by one of their informants of the apartment Fred Hampton was staying in. Yeah. And it was under the guise of they have a stash of guns in there, which they did have a stash of guns and ammunition in there. And that was the excuse they used to go in and shoot him in bed while he slept. Yeah. And if you are questioning whether this was actually an attempt on Fred Hampton's life, those 90 bullets that were fired, most of them went into Fred Hampton. And three people who were sleeping in the same bed as Hampton, where he was shot and killed, were not hit by bullets at all. Yeah. Including his eight and a half month pregnant girlfriend, who they grabbed by the hair and threw into the other room, tore her robe open. And the story of the cops was they knocked on the door, were denied entry. Then they opened the door, and there was a woman aiming a shotgun at them. Later on ballistics tests, they did everything and basically figured out that was 100% sham. All the bullets were found, ballistically to have gone into the apartment, none going out of the apartment, through the walls. And in this documentary, they interviewed a few of the people that are in there, and they were just like it was mass murder. They basically just came in and shot the place up. They examined the angle of the wound that showed that Hampton was lying on his back in bed from somebody standing above him. And in 1970, a coroner's jury ruled the deaths. Justifiable everyone got away with it but the city eventually. And the federal judge approved a $1.85 million settlement. But that wasn't until the years later. But the FBI, apparently the agent who was handling the informant who produced the map was so pleased with the results that after the raid that resulted in Hampton's execution, he, I guess, mailed J. A. Ger Hoover with a request for an extra $300 because he wanted to give the informant a bonus. Yeah, one of the bigger black eyes on American history, for sure. One of the other black eyes on the Chicago PD at this time was one of these raids was on the Breakfast for Children program where the supplies for breakfast were burned. Like the place was set on fire by the cops. Yeah. So, I mean, the Black Panthers are at, like, open war with the FBI and with the police department. The late 60s were crazy. Yeah. In large part because of this. Yeah. I mean, for sure. There was another big shootout, and this is all sort of coming to a head. If it feels that way, that's exactly what's going on. In 1969, there was another big shootout, and this was major, and I think it was in Los Angeles, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. It was the first time a SWAT team was ever used. Yeah, they employed the SWAT team, which was invented by the LAPD and 200 La. Police. And I think it was like six or eight Black Panther Party members were involved in a full on, hour long gun battle just right there in the streets. So things are coming to a head. Sort of the secret plan here by Hoover is working, which is he wants to fracture the party from within and so seeds of discontent and discord. So they had been, through the years planting informants in the Black Panther Party in the party, and they knew it. The Black Panthers did. So a lot of distrust. When, you know, who can you trust? A lot of this distrust happens even among the higher ups that were formerly, like, a pretty strong union. Right. And that happened for sure with the case of Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. When Huey Newton got out of jail, he was eventually freed, and it was a big deal. And they thought this was going to be sort of the rebirth of the Black Panther Party in the wake of the death of Fred Hampton. But he came out of jail and he and Clever sort of had different they always sort of had different priorities, but they managed to come together. But they were truly fractured at this point. Yeah, they were. Newton and Cleaver were, like, openly criticizing one another with Cleaver still in exile. But Cleaver had the entire New York chapter dedicated to them. And years prior, the Black Panthers had formed what was called the Black Liberation Army, but it was an army of defense until 1971, when, I believe, he was still in absentia. But Eldridge Cleaver said, hey, we're going to take this from defensive to offensive and basically create a new terrorist group out of the Black Liberation Army. And they started a campaign of violence against cops where they would ambush cops and just kill them. There wasn't any retaliation for police brutality. It wasn't self defense. Like, they were ambushing and killing cops. And it happened in cities around the country. And the fracture between the Black Panthers itself was so deep that Cleaver's faction and Newton's faction were assassinating one another. They were taking out each other's people. So it was a big deal. And the Black Liberation Army officially split from the Black Panthers. In yes. And of course, at this point, Herbert Hoover sitting back in his chair, choking on a cigar from laughter because this is exactly what he wanted, was this. Infighting so Newton gets out of jail. He's trying to get the social programs going again, but he also becomes addicted to drugs and by all accounts is sort of losing his mind and has become power hungry and has sort of lost the original calling that he had and has gotten sort of drunk with power and was not functioning mentally like he should have been due to the drugs. Right. So it was his big beginning of the flame out for himself and the party. Yeah, for sure. His downfall, definitely it didn't exactly mirror the party, but, you know, it was a herald of one of the founders was totally losing his marbles because he was addicted to heroin and cocaine. And he actually had a very sad end. He died during a drug deal on the street in 1089 in Oakland. But he said that he was committing revolutionary suicide by being addicted to drugs and basically killing himself that way. Yeah, some of the other ones had not quite as tragic but strange ends. Like Eldridge Cleaver. Right, yeah. When he returned from Algeria with Kathleen Cleaver, he became I think both of them might have become born again Christians and Aldridge Cleaver eventually became a registered Republican. I did not see that coming. I did not either, and I'm sure a lot of people didn't. Right. And then I mentioned the internal violence with one another, right? Yeah. There was a big turning point as far as public sympathy went. In 69, there was a guy named Alex Rackley who is a member of the New York chapter and is suspected to be an FBI informant. And it's still, after all these years, never come to light whether he was or not. But the Panthers had the idea that he was. So they took him to the New Haven chapter where he was tortured. They tied him up to a bed and poured boiling water on his body for days. And then eventually, I guess, he confessed. Although, if you ever listen to our torture episode right. False confession. Torture, yes. You can get a false confession pretty easy if you torture somebody. They took him out to the woods and shot him in the head and chest and left him. And when his body was discovered, bobby Seale had been in New Haven speaking at Yale, like, just hours before the guy was killed. So he got charged with the murder. This is one of the founders of the Black Panther Party on trial for murder. And during this trial, which he was acquitted, but a lot of the infighting came out, and the Panthers had managed to keep it out of the public eye and under wraps for up to this point. Now it came out in the trial. So people realize that there was a lot of schisms and fractures within the leadership itself. They lost a lot of public sympathy when they found out that they would carry out extra judicial justice on their own members. And it was a big thing. It was a big turning point for the party as far as the public was concerned. Yeah, like I said, they were sort of the two factions with Cleaver and Newton. Some people went with Cleaver, some people went with Newton. A lot of people left the Black Panther Party, period, at this point, because they either didn't know who to give their allegiance to or they just felt betrayed by this fracture and the party wasn't what they thought it was. So the numbers are declining. It's definitely in sort of free fall at this point. And Bobby sealed, decides here's what we need to do. We need to close down as many chapters as we can and pool the resources and the money and bring everyone out here to Oakland because I'm going to run for mayor. And we need to go all in on this legit push for political candidacy, because I think I can win. So they literally called up people on the East Coast, in the Baltimore office and New York offices, and said, Shut them down. Come out here to California. And we need to go all in on not only running for mayor, but on a massive voter registration campaign to register people in urban communities to vote. So I think in the end, they got like 50,000 new people registered to vote. And out of eight or nine candidates, he finished close enough in second to get a runoff. He got like 40% of the vote. Yeah. But ultimately lost in a runoff, in a narrow runoff and did not win, which sort of was one of the final nails in the coffin for the party because they had committed so many resources to try and get behind Bobby Seal's run for mayor. And he accidentally still lives in the Bay Area and is very much still an activist. Yeah, Bobby Seal is. Yeah, he was also did you ever see that documentary on the Chicago Eight? It was like animated. No, it's very good. Yeah. He was one of the Chicago Eight. And Seal, he actually went to prison. This is before it's mayoral run, but he did like four years, or at least was sentenced to four years strictly for contempt of court because he rejected that he was getting a fair trial because I don't think there was a single black person on the jury. And he rejected that he was being tried by a jury of his peers and he kept protesting in the middle of court. And eventually, at one point, the judge had him gagged. But he got like four years for that. Yeah, gagged is in literally chained to his seat with tape over his mouth. Yes. And that set off all sorts of protests in the streets. People want that judge removed. I thought that was that not during the Panther 21 trial. Was that the other one, Chicago? No, that was the Chicago Eight trial. Okay. And that was a different trial. Also, where did you ever hear the urban legend that Hillary Clinton got Bobby sealed off of murder charges? Yes. That came out of that Alex Rackley trial where he was on trial for murder and he was acquitted. And Hillary Rodham Clinton was nowhere near the actual trial as his attorney. She apparently was a law student at Yale still and was coordinating with the ACLU to monitor the trial. So she was there, but apparently had nothing to do with the defense. Got you. But that was an urban legend that came out of the 2000 senatorial campaign. Well, the Panther 21, I mentioned just quickly, that was in New York. The New York Chapter 21 leaders at the Black Panther Party were rounded up and arrested on conspiracy charges. And this is a really big deal because the New York chapter was one of the biggest ones in the country after Oakland, and people got involved and tried to raise money, like celebrities got involved and donated money. And at one point, I don't know if it still is, but it was the longest criminal proceeding in New York State history. It was a 13 month trial by jury, and they're all found not guilty and released. All of them were found not guilty? Yeah, the pan through 21. Wow. And that's jumping back in time a little bit. I just wanted to mention that. So there's a distinct legacy beyond just the look of the image or Black Power. And Black Power. We should also say, I think it was Stokely Carmichael who either coined that phrase or at least was the first to really kind of pick it up and run with it. And Stokely Carmichael is? Nonviolent Student Coordinating Committee. They got together with the Black Panthers early on, just in the popular culture, the Black Panthers live on. But there's even more of a legacy as well. Before he died, Eldridge Cleaver gave an interview, I think back in 1997, and he said that he basically blamed the gang violence that plagued inner cities in the 80s. He traced that directly to the death of the Black Panthers. He said that as it was, the US government chopped off the head of the Black Liberation Movement and left the body there armed. That's why all these young bloods are out there now. They've got the rhetoric, but without the political direction, and they've got the guns. Interesting. So he basically traces that directly to the Black Panthers being taken down. Yeah. You got anything else? Actually, I do. So we were talking about how there's a legacy there's not just a legacy of the Black Panthers. It's a legacy of brutality against black people that apparently is at least as bad, if not worse today than it has been. Chuck so the Tuskegee University in Alabama has records of all the linking that took place in the Jim Crow era, 1890 to 1965. And 2911 black Americans were lynched during those years. And the worst year of the Jim Crow era was 1892, and 161 people were lynched. In 2015, 258 black people were killed by police in the United States. So not a lot has changed. And it's possible that it's gotten worse. Yeah. But if you look to the Black Lives Matter movement, they have chosen the way of king and preaching nonviolent rhetoric for social change, rather than the Black Panther rhetoric of militancy and violent self defense. Yeah, I think a bit of the Black Panther Party spirit, though, is alive in the Black Lives Matter movement. For sure. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. That's all I've got. That's all I've got. Good one. Yes, I thought so, too, man. Do you ever see the movie? The one with, like, Mario van Peoples. Yeah, he made it. He wasn't in, I don't think. Okay. No, I didn't. I heard it was not good. Yeah. I want to see Malcolm X. I've never seen that one. Oh, that's great. Is it? Yes. Spike Lee's movie. Sure. Yeah. Really good. Okay, I'll check that out. Yeah, the Panther movie was I just read a few reviews today, and apparently the. Setup is pretty good with some of the history, but then it kind of goes off the rails. Okay. And not just goes off the rails like bad movie, but bad movie and not historically accurate or honoring. Like, they keep subject matter, dance scenes keep breaking out. But I do think that I was like, man, why hasn't there been a movie made about Fred Hampton? Yeah, he sounds like he's a pretty inspiring figure. Yeah. Seeing some of those speeches, like he had it going on. He said his one big quote was, we're not going to fight fire with fire. We're going to fight fire with water. Nice. I thought that was a good one. Yeah, that's a great one. Yes. That's black messiah talk right there. Exactly. If you want to know more about the Black Panthers, there's a bunch of stuff you can do. You can go on to the site@housetoforce.com and search those terms. You can go watch Black Panthers. Vanguard of Revolution. You can watch Black Power mixtape that has a lot to do with the Black Panthers. I haven't seen it yet, though. Have you? No. You can go to Emory University, I bet, and get in touch with Kathleen Cleaver and maybe offer to buy her coffee. Yeah, there's just a lot of really good articles out there that just search Black Panthers and there's a lot of eye opening history that you didn't learn in school. And since I said you didn't learn in school, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this addendum to rubber trade from the Elastics episode. Hey, guys, just listen to the one on Elastics. It was fun and informative as usual, but I wanted to call attention to a small, important omission. You were discussing the rubber trade in Latin America, and you only mentioned Brazil, although it was indeed the largest exporter of rubber in the area, the Amazon Basin and the Putumayo River Valley region in Peru and Colombia were also important sites for the production of rubber trees. Sadly, when you combine global demand with a natural product, the result is usually some form of exploitation. In the case of rubber, it came to a horrible extreme with the Peruvian Amazon Rubber Company, or as it was known in Spanish, the Casa Arana, named for Julio Cesar Arana, a Peruvian businessman that set up shop in the region, enslaved, tortured and mutilated indigenous populations to the brink of extinction in the pursuit of rubber. His crimes were documented and made public in 1913, but his business and atrocities only stopped when rubber production moved to Asia and he couldn't compete. This whole rubber bonanza is chronicled in the excellent Colombian novel The Whirlwind by Je Rivera. Today, the offices of the company, the Casa Arana, or Arana House, are being converted into a historic site where members of local tribes can gather and remember those atrocities in their own way, telling their own stories and their own words. This is one of those poorly documented, poorly discussed examples of genocide as a result of trade, at least in Colombia, every kind of economic bonanza is somehow tied to one massacre or another. So that's the downer I wanted to share. Nice. Who is that? From Bogota. Santiago. Santiago is the person who wrote it in. Yes. Thanks a lot for writing that, Santiago. We appreciate it. Yes, that's a good one. And this has been like an eye opening history lesson through and through, huh? Absolutely. If you want to give us an eye opening history lesson, we love those. So get in touch with us. You can tweet to us at Joshua Clark and at Syskpodcast. You can hang out with us on Facebook at Charleswchuck Bryant and Stuffyoushouldo. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyhoodnow.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. 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 all 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." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-11-02-sysk-global-warming-final.mp3 | How Global Warming Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-global-warming-works | It's a confusing part of climate change when it seems winter is as cold as ever, but as global temperatures creep ever so slightly higher, a cascade of catastrophic events will almost surely follow. The ball is in humanity's court. | It's a confusing part of climate change when it seems winter is as cold as ever, but as global temperatures creep ever so slightly higher, a cascade of catastrophic events will almost surely follow. The ball is in humanity's court. | Thu, 02 Nov 2017 15:38:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=15, tm_min=38, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=306, tm_isdst=0) | 57577715 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's the Chipper cheery. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. How deep. And there's Jerry over there. Say hi, Jerry. How are you doing, man? I'm well, sir. How are you? I'm pretty well myself. I'm feeling all right. Feel a little fit? Yeah. Yeah. You're a little sweaty, as you can tell, but I'm all right. It's gross. It is. I don't smell, do I? No. Okay, good. So, friends, listeners, countrymen, you're going to notice a little something different in this week's Feed tomorrow. This bears a little explanation. We are dropping episodes one and two of my new movie interview show, Movie Crush. We're dropping those into the Stuff You Should Know Feed, something we've never done here at the network. But I guess I'm the lab rat on this one. The guinea pig. The guinea pig, sure. Yeah, I guess either one, right? The guinea pig doesn't die. The labyrinth dies. Yeah, I guess so. Let's go with the guinea pig for sure, then. All right. Well, either way, we are dropping those into stuff you should know. Feed. And we wanted to alert you. So when you saw these new things, you didn't rebel against us. Like everyone hated you, too, when they delivered the world free album, right? Yeah. It's not a you two album. It's your new show. It's more important than any you two album. Oh, well, I appreciate that. Yeah. So, yeah, that's why they're there. And episode one is the great Janet Barney. We talk about the movie tron, and that's the nature of the show as I talk to people about their favorite movie. And episode two is Tignataro wow talking about the movie Mask. And that one is a very special episode, and I'll tease it with this. We recorded that interview or conversation rather seconds after she got the call that she was cancer free at the five year mark. Oh, wow. So she started crying at the beginning, and I didn't know what was going on. I gave her some time. I was freaking out, and it turned out to be good news. And I explained that all at the onset of the episode, but it turned out to be a very special experience. Man. Chuck you're like Barbara Walters. I didn't get it out of her. It was just weird timing. Yeah. But anyway, those are in there, and it won't happen every week, but I would love for you to subscribe. Well, yeah, that's the way to get it, right? Yeah, just subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts. These are a couple of gifts, a little gym. That's right. And I appreciate your support on it. Yeah. Well, way to go, man. Congratulations. I speak for me and the rest of the world when I say we are looking forward to this. Thanks, dude. And I'm going to have you on as a guess. It's going to be very strange and awesome. Yeah, I think it'll be neat. I'll start crying too. Do you know what your favorite movie is that you would pick? I got a couple I think I could choose from. Sure. All right, well, hold on to that then. Okay. And we'll just pick that up later. Okay. Well, congrats again, man. Thanks, pal. Shall we warm the globe? Yeah, all right. So Chuck, I don't know if you've heard about this term recently, but it's been in the news lately, global warming. Are you familiar? It does ring a bell. Okay, well, just in case, for those people who aren't aware of global warming, global warming is what we're talking about today, and a lot of people confuse it or use it interchangeably with climate change, and it turns out that's not actually fully accurate. Global warming is a symptom of climate change as a whole, and climate change is a whole bunch of differences to the Earth's climate. We'll get into what climate is in a second, and one of those is global warming. Also, things like extreme weather events, increased drought, increased temperatures, sea level rises, all these things put together that's climate change, right? Or the results of climate change. Global warming is one of them. So global warming is climate change, but not all climate change is global warming. We just wanted to make sure we got that out of the way to begin with. Like the square rectangle thing, which I can still never keep straight. And I think the what, like every square is not a rectangle, but every rectangle is square or the reverse of that, whichever it is. I've never heard that before. What? I even aced geometry the second time I took it, it was clearly a class that didn't care about squares. Yeah, I guess not. I mean, they always talked about rectangles, but squares were never brought up. Yeah, I think it's I'm not going to dig myself a hole there. It's probably best. So global warming, if you want just a kind of a straightup definition, is the science community defines it as this and they should know. Yeah. It's a significant increase in the climatic temperature over a relatively short period of time as a result of activities of humans. And by increase, in short, we're talking like one degree Celsius in a couple of hundred years is global warming. Right? Because the effects of climate are so pronounced on such a with just small incremental changes. That is climate change something that if you just look at it on paper, you're like, that's nothing. Who cares about one degree? Actually, the point of global warming is that when you have this increase in global temperatures, a whole basket of events starts to take place. That's climate change. Like global warming is related to climate change. Right. It can trigger other climate changes. That's right. And you hear a lot of numb skulls talking about weather as if it is climate. Right. Like a very harsh winter might come, and they'll say you have global warming. Right. That's a great numb scope. It's not the same thing. Weather is local. It's short term. Climate is long term. It's not even like the weather over a period of a year or even a couple of years. We're talking about generally predictable average weather conditions in a region over a long, long period of time. So you can safely say in Green Bay, Wisconsin, it is cold in the wintertime. That is the climate of Green Bay and that Midwestern region as a whole. Right. But if it snows in February of next year on a Tuesday, then that's just the weather. Yeah. Or if it snows in Miami once, then that's not a reputation of what climate change means. That is a weird anomaly, and those happen. Yeah. And this is a grabster and strickland Co joint, by the way. That's why it popped off the page, if you noticed. But one of the things they wisely point out is what you just said, that, yes, some weather anomaly happens like that. Even if it happened three years in a row, I think a lot of scientists would pay attention to why it snowed in Miami three years in a row. Right. But if it went back to normal or something like that, that would not necessarily be climate change. That's just a weird occurrence. Right. Climate change is this change in predictable changes. Yeah. That can take, like, thousands and ten thousands of years sometimes, right. Most times under natural circumstances. And here is where we come to the current use for global warming. Right. Global warming can happen by itself naturally. The Earth basically, in its current present state, swings back and forth between glacial periods and inter glacial periods. So cool periods and warm periods. And for an ice age to occur, the global temperature only needs to drop by about five degrees Celsius on average. And all of a sudden, we're in an ice age. Right? Yeah. That doesn't mean the entire Earth is a big round cube. Wow. That's like a square rectangle, but not at all the same. Well, you know when you go to a fancy cocktail bar and they have those awesome round I want to say ice cubes again. Ice spheres. That's not what the Earth looks like necessarily during an ice age. No, it's just much cooler. And because it's cooler by, say, five degrees Celsius, a lot of stuff changes. It's the same thing as global warming but on the opposite end, right? Correct. Like, you have changes in migration patterns, you have changes in habitat for animals. Some things go extinct during the transition. Sea levels change. A lot of stuff happens. Right. So this is part of the normal process of the Earth, but the Earth kind of got it, like, hey, I've got this under control. I don't need any help from you humans. Sure. And when I do do this. This is the Earth talking in first person. When I do change from a glacial period to a warm period, it takes many tens and tens of thousands of years. Right? Yeah. You humans here again, this is still me, the Earth. You humans are really messing with my program here and accelerating the process. And you know what? I'll even give you a clue as to what you're doing that's making it so bad. Carbon dioxide emissions. Bam. Said the Earth and dropped its microphone and walked away. Yes. And then it went back and picked up his mic and said, and maybe stop littering. And then it dropped the mic again. We should talk a minute about a wonderful group called the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yeah, a lot of very smart people there. Oh, man. Can I just say to me, the IPCC is one of the coolest things humanity has ever come up with. Yeah. Because it's the world coming together, saying, we got a real problem on our hands. Let's get our smartest people together and create a database here of good science. Yes. And those people are specifically about actually more 2500 scientists from around the world meeting together in places like Paris, because why not? Right? Sure. They did this about ten years ago and came up with sort of a lot of distressing observations. We'll just tick through a few of these. As far as temperature goes, like we said, one degree Celsius can make a big swing. And what kind of changes we see on the planet? Between 19 one and 2000, the Earth warmed .6 degrees. So if you adjust that to 2006, it climbs up to zero point 74 deg. So about three quarters of a degree in temperature rise during that 100 year period. Right. There's a lot. It is a lot. And so a lot of people say, well, you guys just said the Earth tends to do this on its own. Maybe that's it. Well, actually, no. There's a lot of science that the IPCC has been able to come up with that shows pretty clearly that this is human cause stuff that's actually creating this increase in temperature. And again, it seems to come back to carbon dioxide. Yeah. Should we take over a few of these other observations? Yeah, for sure. Let me see. Here's a good one. The ocean's temperature has increased to at least depth of almost 10,000ft down. The ocean's temperature has increased. Yes. Not a good thing, because that's how glaciers tend to melt, is from underneath. That's right. What else, Chuck? Westerly winds have been growing stronger. Droughts have become more intense, lasted longer, covered bigger swathes of land. What else here? Precipitation is increased in the Eastern America, northern Europe, parts of Asia, but it's decreased elsewhere. Yeah. And we'll get into this a little bit. A little bit of global warming can mean longer growing and better growing seasons in some parts of the world, but devastating to other parts of the world. Exactly. I guess I let the cat out of the bag there. But we'll go over that again later. And how about this? The warming trend of the last 50 years is about double of the last 100 years. So what that means is the rate is increasing. The rate of warming is increasing. Yeah, actually, I think the IPCC has determined that each of the past 40 years has been warmer than the average temperature of the 20th century and that 2016 was the hottest year on record. And the twelve warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. Dude, you should see we'll get into some of the charts that you can find. And again, if you're even remotely interested in this, just go look up the IPCC stuff. And some of it you have to be a climatologist to understand what in the name of God they're talking about. But other stuff, especially if you read like executive summaries of studies and reports and stuff, that's meant for a non scientist specifically, often like policymakers to read and understand. Right. So the average person can understand that. And they have some really great stuff that's showing like all of the changes that the world is going through thanks to these increases in the global temperature. And again, some of the charts that they have are just stunning when you see them because it's like going along fine, going along fine, everything's fine. And then oh my God, what the hell just happened? Basically and it was the Industrial revolution. It was. But also, one of the things that they found recently, especially in the last three, four years, I believe, is that I think you were saying the increase in global temperatures, but also, again, the increase in carbon dioxide has really shot up over the last 50 years. From the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. I think they usually start at about 1750 to maybe 1800 at the latest, up to like 1950 or so. 1960. There's a pretty surprising increase, but it is just skyrocketed in the last 50 or 60 years. So they're seeing the science is bearing out the general theory of global warming, which we should probably talk about this theory of global warming. Right. Because like we said, it's not just a human cause mechanism. Basically, it's an already existing natural mechanism that basically keeps the Earth nice and toasty for life and water. It keeps us from being Mars. But we have started messing with it big time because of our contributions to the normal cycle. Yeah. So should we talk about the greenhouse effect a little bit? Yeah, the greenhouse effect is literally what keeps us from being Mars. It is a good thing when it occurs naturally because like you said, it keeps us on. It makes Earth habitable and lovely and nice for the most part. So Strickland and the gravestor, I'm not sure who came up with the car analogy, but it's a pretty good one. I agree. If you go into your car on a hot summer day and you get in your car, it's been sitting out the sun for a little while, it's a lot hotter than it is outside. It's kind of a no brainer, but you might not have thought about why that happens. It's not magic. What's happening is the sun that's coming into your car windows gets absorbed by the interior of your car, whether it's your seats or the dashboard or basically kind of everything in the car absorbs that heat. And that heat is then eventually emitted back out and radiated out from the seats and things like that. But it's at a different wavelength than that initial sunlight that came in. So some of it might get back out of the window, but most of it stays kind of trapped in that car. So the end result, the net net, as they would say in a corporate meeting, is that there's less energy going out than coming in. Right. So your car is going to get hotter. So pretend your car is the planet Earth, basically, which would be great. And the windshield is the atmosphere, right? Yeah. So that's the greenhouse effect in a nutshell, as it relates to the actual Earth, about 70% of the solar energy that is directed toward Earth stays on the planet. Right. And instead of it being absorbed by car seats and floor mats and stuff like that, it gets absorbed by the ocean or land or plants or you, right? Right. And so about 30% of that stuff that didn't make it through, it was reflected back by clouds, particles in the atmosphere, a bunch of other stuff. Right. But as you're sitting there getting warm by the sun, you actually have the potential to reemit that heat. And so that stuff starts to go back through the atmosphere, out of space. Some of that stuff makes it out into space, but there are other particles that take that solar energy, usually in the form of heat, and absorb it. And when they absorb it, they reemit heat and then they direct it back down to Earth and the process continues. And in some of that, some cases, some of the stuff that they reemit, they end up reabsorbing themselves so that there is more heat that's being trapped and sustained on Earth than is being allowed to escape back into space at any given time. Yeah, just like your car. Right. And again, this is like a positive feedback cycle that creates the atmosphere. It also sustains the atmosphere. It also keeps water here on Earth because water tends to heat up and rise, but then it will cool off in the atmosphere and fall back down as precipitation. And as long as it can fall back down in the atmosphere and nucleate around some of these particles that are trapped in the atmosphere, we've got water here on Earth. That's right. So it's all thanks to the wonderful, glorious greenhouse effect. Yeah. So that feels like a good place to pause. Let that soak in a minute. Like hot sun on a black car seat, like a warm chutney on your forehead. My God. And we'll be back a little bit to talk about these gases in the atmosphere that we're talking about here. All right, so we're back. I think everyone probably understands the greenhouse effect if you remember your hot car. It's kind of a nice, easy way to think about it. Sure. So when you were explaining the more like the Earth's version of that with getting absorbed, hitting things in the atmosphere, we're talking largely about three things. Carbon dioxide, methane gas, actually, four things nitrous oxide and water vapor. And there are a lot of others. But as far as stuff that really has the biggest impact on global warming, it's these guys. Yeah. So we'll start with CO2, because that's the one you hear about most often. Carbon emissions gets all the glory in the headlines these days. Carbon CO2 is colorless. It's gas. It is a byproduct of the combustion of organic stuff. And it makes up a very small part of the Earth's atmosphere point. And most of it that's up there has been there for a long, long time. It's from volcanic activity. However, we are pumping lots and lots of CO2, additional CO2. And remember, there's a delicate balance going on here as it is. Right. So like you said, Mother Earth doesn't need us adding to this. And we have been adding CO2 like it's gangbusters. Yeah. So remember when I was talking about how water turns into vapor and rises and falls back down? That's the rain cycle. There's also a carbon cycle where carbon molecules just kind of go back and forth between the atmosphere and the Earth. And apparently every year, 230 gigatons of carbon are released into the atmosphere from the Earth, from plants, from rocks, from us. And then about the same amount, another 230 gigatons comes back down and is locked into Earth from the atmosphere. Right. And it's like you said, Chuck, like a pretty nice balance. The Earth has got this please don't mess with it. But when we take carbon and unlock it from these carbon sinks, like, we bust up rocks and mining operations, we burn fossil fuels that have carbon locked into them. We cut down trees and burn those things as fuel. That releases more carbon, and it messes up that delicate, pretty much even exchange between the atmosphere and the Earth. Yeah. And that's a big problem because carbon has a knack for absorbing infrared radiation. So that energy that escapes the atmosphere, that's the form that it comes in. So all this extra CO2 means basically like your car, just an overall increase in temperature. Right. Not only does it absorb infrared heat and hang on to it, there's a lot of it. We just finally, in the first time in the history of the human race, all of humanity, not since the Industrial Revolution, but ever since humans have been around the Earth, reached 400 parts per million. Meaning that out of every million molecules that you just snatched out of the air and count, you're going to come up with 400 of those as carbon atoms, right? Yeah. Or carbon dioxide molecules. So that's new. That's a big deal. And the problem with that is not just that there's a lot of carbon dioxide in there, but it's like you said, the more carbon dioxide there is, the more radiative heat that comes back down to Earth, that doesn't escape into space, and the higher the global temperature gets. Yes. And just to put into perspective, 400 parts per million now, and that's 2017 numbers, I guess. I think in 2015, we hit 400. We're up to like, 404 now. So that preindustrial revolution was about 280 parts per million. So it is swelled by about 124 parts per million since the Industrial Revolution, which is pretty staggering. Yeah. And there's apparently a way that you can tell when you're actually measuring the carbon dioxide molecules themselves, where they came from, and ones that are introduced into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels have a specific signature that we can detect. And we have seen that as the global temperature has increased and more and more carbon dioxide has been introduced into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, so too has the concentration of that specific type of carbon dioxide. So there's a strong correlation between the fossil fuel burn carbon dioxide that we humans have put in the air with rising global temperatures. All right, moving on to nitrous oxide, which we did a whole podcast on this, right? Yeah. That was a good one. It was a great one. Mainly because of that tank that we had here in the studio. I know we're method podcasters that definitely enhance the whole thing. So in 2000 is another greenhouse gas super important. And we are not releasing human activity is not releasing nearly as much as we are CO2. But I'm sorry, N two absorbs a lot more energy, like 270 times as much as CO2. So that makes it something we really need to pay attention to. And we are paying attention to it. It just doesn't get all the headlines. No, it definitely doesn't. Just because there's so much less of it. Right. And whereas it takes like, tens of thousands of years for 20% of any given carbon dioxide emissions to leave the atmosphere, it takes about 114 years for a full emission of nitrous oxide to leave the atmosphere. Yeah. As far as manmade, it is also a byproduct of combustion. And a lot of fertilizer nitrogen fertilizer that they use on crops releases the NTU into the atmosphere as well. See, to me, all you have to do is seed the atmosphere with a bunch of hippies and let them huff all the nitrous oxide right out of it. Problem solved. That's right, because you've also gotten rid of this concert in the sky. Exactly. What else? We have? Methane. Methane is a big one, and this is super overlooked, but I remember hearing about this when people first started realizing, like, oh, that's a really big problem. There's very little amount of it. Whereas, like, there's 404 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These days, we can measure about one seven parts per million of methane, but it absorbs and emits thermal energy like gangbusters as well. Far more than CO2, I think. About 20 times more. And there's a lot of different places where it comes from. Like when we mine coal, it releases methane. When our ample herds of livestock fart, yes, they release methane. No joke. That's actually a huge contributor of greenhouse gases. Yeah, we talked about that. I feel like years ago in another episode. Surely we have yeah, another one. Chuck, was do you remember our plasma waste incineration episode? Sure. Well, remember, one of the things we talked about was that the average landfill gives off methane, and that's a huge problem, too. So, like, if you go to a landfill and you see that there's flames around it, they're actually burning that stuff off because the CO2 it releases after it's burned is actually preferable in that case to the methane just being allowed to escape. Yeah, it is bad news. And there are scientists who have even posited that maybe like tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago, that large scale venting of methane into the atmosphere, like if a big block of ice cracked open and unlocked a big methane bubble from under the ocean, that could have caused maybe a mass extinction because it was released so quickly into the atmosphere. Yeah. Like we're doing now, basically. Yeah, on a slower basis. I don't think anyone's saying that's going to happen. No, I don't know. I think that is a concern that as Arctic ice melts, the methane bubbles could be released, which would just be a nightmare on top of a catastrophe. That's right. There's another problem with methane, too, that in the atmosphere, it frequently converts to CO2. So it just not only contributes itself, it also contributes to the CO2 emission problem. There's also, Chuck, another thing called short lived climate pollutants SLCP. They don't get a lot of press either, but a lot of people think that if we focused on these, we could really see some real results in the short term. Supposedly, slcp's account for something like 30% to 40% of global warming, but they are particles like black carbon. Methane counts as one of them. Hydrochlorofluorocarbons. Nice. And they can live in the atmosphere from, say, like, days to tens of years, and then they go away. And if we really cut down on some of those emissions. We would see the effects of that very quickly. Wow. Yeah. So speaking of effects, I guess we should kind of talk about what this all could mean and does mean and is meaning. Sure. Number one, we can talk a little bit about sea level or sea levels. Glaciers and ice shelves are melting all around the world, and losing large chunks of ice like this can accelerate this warming because there's less of the sun's energy. We talked earlier about it being reflected by ice sheets and things like that. These reflective surfaces, less reflective surface means less is getting reflected away. So just at the very base level, that's going to be an increase in temperature. Yes. Also, depending on where the glacier is, it could contribute to sea level increases too, as we'll talk about yeah, we might as well hit that. Okay, so one of the things that I learned from this that I just absolutely did not know, but makes total sense, is that the Arctic sea ice, if it melts, it will contribute zero to a sea level increase. Yes. Interesting. I had no idea. But it makes total sense because it turns out that Arctic sea ice in particular floats on the sea. So it's already in the sea and it's already contributed to the sea level rise. If anything, if that stuff, if we went through an ice age and all that stuff frozen to basically a frozen land mass, then you'd see a sea level decrease. But the way it is right now, there wouldn't be a sea level rise if it melts completely. There are other places around Earth where the glaciers and ice caps are basically land masses. And if they did melt, then you would see a sea level rise just from that melted water. Right. Yeah. We're talking about Antarctica there. And the likelihood of Antarctica falling out is not great. Which is good. Well, not all of it, but there are certainly parts of it could. Yes, for sure. And then same with Greenland, too. Yeah. Greenland is a problem because it is much closer to the equator, so temperatures are higher there anyway. It's not like negative 37 degrees on average, like it is in Antarctica. Right. So I feel like I have to say that. So specifically Antarctica. Yes. And the other problem too, with this loss of ice, people might say, like, no, it's crazy. I see plenty of glaciers there still. But if every season a little more melts off than is replenished by snowfall in the winter, you have a net loss of ice. And then over time, if you look at it on a scale of a decade or two decades, or three decades, that's a substantial amount of lost ice. And that is what increases the sea level that leads to sea level rise. Yeah. So as far as the IPCC is concerned, they estimate that sea levels rose about a little over six and a half. Inches in the 20th century. It doesn't sound like much, but it is a lot like sea level. Rise in lowlying coastal areas can mean pretty bad flooding at just mere inches. They propose that if things continue to go this way, they could rise by as much as 22 inches, almost 2ft by the year of 2100. And, brother, if that happens, we're going to have to redraw the world map. That's true. I was looking, I was like, how high is Miami Beach? Miami beach is apparently just under 4ft above sea level. New Orleans is like 0ft. I think it's maybe at 2ft, basically. Yeah. There's a lot of coastal cities. Singapore, I think, Copenhagen. They're all very close to sea level or just slightly above sea level. And so, yeah, 2ft rise. I know the Maldives is frequently mentioned as being under real threat from sea level rise, but even if you don't necessarily live in a coastal area that's just 2ft above sea level, consider this. If the sea level rose just six inches, like they were saying, that means that when you have extreme weather events which go hand in hand with global warming and are part of climate change, where it rains really hard and there's more major flooding than before, then it's already working with an extra six inches than any flood that you've been used to before. Right. So the floods are much more extensive. And that's a really good example of how interconnected the global climate system is, where if one thing gets messed up a little bit, it has all these other widespread effects around the world on regions, too. Yeah, because I think they found that there are not necessarily more frequent, like tropical storms and hurricanes and things, but they are becoming much more intense. And that's the issue at hand. Yeah. And that one in particular has to do with the surface temperature of the oceans increasing as the temperature of the world increases, because that's where the storms, hurricanes and cyclones get their energy from, is from the warm surface of the sea. So if it's warm, you'll see them hit land and lose steam, and then when they go back over the ocean, they'll start to regather their strength. That's because they're over warm water again, and that's where they get it all from. Yes. Plus, there is I don't think we mentioned this yet about the density of water. No, I don't want to go anywhere near you. Take this one. Well, very simply, water is most dense at four degrees Celsius. So that's kind of a homeostasis of where it needs to be. Anything above or below that temperature and the density is going to decrease. So the overall temperature of the water is going to increase naturally. And this is not like human cause, but that will also cause the oceans to rise. That's just a natural thing. Right. Well said. All right, I'll just leave that one. But you park it right there. I'm glad you mentioned that though, because you don't see that really ever. No one ever mentions like, oh yeah, water is just going to expand as it warms. I've never thought about that one either. Or cools, I think. Right? Yeah. Or cools. It's a weird, weird thing. Weird, weird material. So let's take another break and we'll get back to explaining why global warming is a real pain. Alright, Chuck, so we talked about the ice caps melting, we talked about glaciers melting, we talked about sea level rise. Correct. People are out there saying like, that's great, but how does it impact me, a human? That's what I want to know about. Well, there's tons of ways because as technologically clever as we humans are, we are extraordinarily dependent on the Earth. So as this climate change happens due to global warming, we're going to see all sorts of problems. And we already are starting to see problems. Yeah. So we did mentioned earlier that if you live in a temperate area, if you got like four kind of lovely seasons, like let's say Atlanta, Georgia, for instance, you may have a longer growing season, you might have a bit more rain. It might be actually good for the crops here in Georgia in some ways. But other parts of the world, less temperate zones are going to see big temperature increases, way less rain and longer droughts. Worse droughts, bigger deserts. It's not going to be so good for those places. No. They apparently have found that every trillion tons of CO2 it contributed to the atmosphere raises the global temperature average by about three quarters of a degree Celsius. Wow. And then they went and correlated that each one degree Celsius increase in temperature equals an evaporative increase of about 7% to 15% here on planet Earth in the soil. Right. So as temperatures increase, there's going to be less water in the soil, which affects crops and leads to things like droughts and even desertification as well. And man, every time I throw out one of these terms, I'm like, we did an episode on that. We did an episode on that. And droughts. Yeah, we've been dancing around this one for a while. We have. I'm glad we finally tackled that, ma'am. Agreed. You're doing great, by the way. Hold on. So as the water evaporates from the soil and goes up and is locked into the atmosphere again, it's eventually going to come down. And when it does, you're going to have far more severe flooding and precipitation than you would have normally when it was just going up and coming down and going up and coming down. Like on its normal cycle. Yeah. So that's one way that it can affect you because while it's turning to droughts, you got wildfires. And then when the soil gets degraded and there's suddenly a lot of rain, you've got flooding and people get carried away in their cars because they think it can drive across a flowing river. That's not funny at all, by the way. I guess not. Just the way you put it was so one of the other devastating effects, and this one is kind of tougher to predict because we haven't really seen what can happen with our living human eyeballs. But ecosystems, and I think we did we do on ecosystems as a whole, or just have we talked about it forever and everything? I think it just popped up in so many of them. It seems like that. Yeah, we definitely covered coral reefs and things like that. We're talking about living ecosystems, and we all know they're very delicate, and the delicate balance of the ecosystem is what makes it worse. And we've talked to ad nauseam over the past nine years about how little, just little things can happen in an ecosystem that will create this chain reaction. It's all interconnected, and we don't know what might happen in terms of global warming in our living ecosystem. Sure, some animals might adapt, some might move, but there would also be massive amounts of extinction. Right. Coral reefs are already dying. We're seeing that with our eyeballs. Forests are dying off and turning to grassland. And it's not just like, oh, well, there they go. Now we have grassland instead of a forest. Let's make some hoola skirts. Yeah. Again, it's just that domino effect that we're going to see. No one knows what it's going to mean in the end. It's really troubling. Yeah. And I was like, well, how are ecosystems interconnected? I know they are, but how? So I looked up a good example and found salmon. So salmon are born in, like, little streams, and they end up, like, traveling down into bigger streams and eventually rivers and then estuaries, and then they actually go and mature out in the ocean, which I hadn't really thought of. And then when it's time for them to go breed, they swim back upstream, back into the rivers, back into the streams themselves. Actually, they go back to where they were born to breed and then die. And as they're doing it, they're basically acting as nutrient transport systems between all these different ecosystems each step of the way. Yeah. It's like a seed being scattered in the wind. Yes, very much so. But a seed that can actually come back home and bring all the nutrients that it gathered, like, out in the ocean, back into its home ecosystem where it was born. So it's pretty interesting. That's just a great example. Let's just salmon. So, yeah, the ecosystems are very much connected, so if something happens with one, it's going to have an effect on all the other ones. And like you said, some things will survive, some things won't. But the thing that I think most of us here on Earth are agreeing to agree about is we should probably do something to stop those extinctions as best we can, even if we'll probably survive. Yes. And this is a very USA centric show for the most part, because that's where we're based. We try to think outside that box as much as we can. And in the case of global warming, the poorest nations of the world are the ones that are going to be hit the hardest. They're the ones, in a lot of times in the less temperate zones that are going to be hit with more devastating crop loss. But crop loss is going to be a big deal all over the world. It already is. There's something called the Carnegie Institution that estimates about $5 billion in crop losses per year due to global warming is already going on right now. And farmers are seeing a decrease of about 40 million metric tons of wheat, barley, corn, other cereal grains every year. So just one degree Fahrenheit, an average temper of an increase could result in three to 5% drop in crop yields. Right. So it's a global issue. Sure, some of the poorest nations might be affected earliest and the worst, but it is going to touch every nation. It definitely will. It doesn't necessarily have to be the poorest nations. It can be the poorest people of rich nations. Oh, yeah, true. And it can be people who are very rich who end up living in areas that are hit. Like Houston saw a lot of increase in waterborne illnesses because of the flooding from Hurricane Harvey. That's something that they otherwise wouldn't have had to have dealt with. There's, like, that whole crop loss thing and starvation that it leads to. Like, there's a lot of ways people can be affected. And just like Salmon, we're connected to other people as well. Even if they are on the other side of the world and we're not really talking to them or don't really know them personally, we're still connected to them. So if they suffer a crop loss, it will affect us all. And if they die of starvation, it ends up affecting us all. Yeah. I really like this computer model thing. Did you see that? Yes, that was pretty cut and dry. So the IPCC, they used a computer model, and what they did was they tried to simulate climate change. And what they found was the only models that looked like today's climate that equaled, hey, well, this looks like what's going on today. We're models that included the human contribution to global warming. Right. When they did not plug in the human contribution, the answer that it spit out was, no, that climate doesn't look like what's going on right now. Right. So that is basically proof that humans are contributing to this. Right, exactly. Yeah. That combined with the signature of the carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning, all that jazz. Yeah. And we should probably get to this part. There's a tendency among naysayers to be like there's not even, like, scientific consensus. They're not 100% certain that it's us creating this global warming. Right. And so science has really kind of taken it upon itself in the last decade or so to address this and say, yes, that's true. There's basically no such thing as settled science. But there has been so much like. We've made it our business to create and conduct so much research and study all of this so closely over the last 10. 15. 20 years that we have basically come up with a scientific consensus that basically. If you take any scientists on the street. There is pretty close to 100% chance that that person is going to say. Yes. Climate change is real. Yes, global warming is happening, and yes, humans are causing it. Right? Yeah. Because they use words differently than we use words. And you sent this great article certainty versus Uncertainty colon understanding Scientific Terms About Climate Change. You know, it's smart when there's a colon for the average Joe or Jane walking around on the street, if you say the word uncertain, that means, well, you just don't know. Right. Scientists, when they use the word uncertain, they mean how well you might know something or not. Right. So that's a big difference. It sounds like word games, but there is no very rarely is there absolute certainty in science. So their job is to research and research and limit that uncertainty as much as possible now. And the uncertainty in their public broadcasting of that uncertainty has been used against them. It's been hijacked and used against them to fight doing anything about climate change. Right. So they have started to use especially if you go through, like, the IPCC's, like, policymaker executive summaries, everything that they're stating, they will put, like, how confident they are that what they're saying is true. They have a structure to that now. Right. And so most of the stuff that they're releasing in their reports has something like a 90% chance or greater of being correct. So they call it a very likely outcome or a very high confidence. And I've even seen something called an extremely high confidence, which indicates 95% or greater, and then the come on. Which is 99% or greater. Yeah. So there are five points which they have very high confidence in, quote about or even greater. So at least 90% or greater certainty that the following human induced warming influences physical and biological systems everywhere. Sea levels are rising, glaciers and permafrost are shrinking, oceans are becoming more acidic, and ranges of plants and animals are shifting. So that's between 90 and 100% certainty on those things. Yeah. They also say they're comfortable saying with certainty that the burning of fossil fuels and the clearing of forests release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. They say there is no uncertainty about that. They also say that they've learned that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere trap heat through the greenhouse effect. They say, again, there is no uncertainty about this and that the Earth is warming because these gases are being released faster than can be absorbed by natural processes. And then they say it's very likely, greater than 90% probability, that human activities are the main reason for the world's temperature increase in the past 50 years in particular. And so they're saying, like, we are scientists. We're the ones who are studying this. No, we can't say with unequivocal certainty that this is the case. But really, people, what more do you need? Like, we have studied this so closely. We are so close to 100% certainty. What's the problem here? Let's just get on board. And there was actually a study done in 2007 by this economist. It made the news cycle the same as Dr. Peter Cigaris. And he basically said, if you look at the cost of doing something and the cost of doing nothing, statistically speaking, it makes way more sense to take steps to mitigate climate change and be wrong about the fact that it was us humans than it would to take no steps at all and be wrong about actually, no, it actually was a human. Yeah. That's where I get I don't want to get too much on the soapbox. But I get angry that there are people out there that say. Well. There's that 10% or less chance. So let's just gamble humanity the future of humankind on that 10% or less chance because we don't want to get with the program and get behind green initiatives because there's a chance you're not 100% certain. That short sighting is just staggering to me. Well, plus also that it's been proven I've mentioned that book before, The Merchants of Doubt, that think tanks have been set up to basically influence public thought and point out, like, scientists aren't 100% certain. Scientists aren't 100% certain, and they're not looking out for you or the Earth or your family. They're looking out for their business interests because it's the fossil fuel industry. They're the ones who benefit the most from not taking steps against climate change. But even if you look at some of these fossil fuel industry companies, they're like, no, we should probably do something. We can figure this out. Even some of them are saying this now as of 2014. Amazing. So, Chuck, speaking of 2014, there was something big that happened. The Paris Accords. Yes. And in 2014, I think 195 countries came together and said, you know what? We're going to do something. We're going to do everything we can to keep the global average temperature from increasing two degrees above normal, two degrees Celsius, I should say, because that was kind of a largely agreed upon tipping point, that there would be a lot more extreme weather, sea level rise, we would feel the effects of climate change from a two degree Celsius increase in global temperature. And so they took this really interesting approach where they said, instead of us coming up with a multi government group that decrees stuff. We're going to just decentralize the whole thing. And how about every country come up with what their country can do on their own to fight global warming, and then we'll bring them all together and everybody will take a pledge and we'll go do it. And it was hugely successful. Like, out of 195 countries, 168 have ratified it. And the US had a pretty good plan as well, I think. We were going to pledge that we would reduce our climate emissions something like 26%, 28% by 2025, which would be a huge, significant contribution to fighting global warming. But we got pulled out of that one, I think, in 2017. That's correct. So now the rest of the world seems to be carrying on without us fighting climate change through their own decentralized plans. But that's where the United States stands right now. We have said we're not going to be taking part in that. That's right. But that's not to say that the citizens of the United States can't do everything they can on their own, in their own lives, by doing some of the following things. First and foremost, decreasing our carbon footprint. And I'm going to put out a call for us right now to go ahead and do one soon on carbon offsets, because we're a few years down the road from when carbon offsets first became a thing, and it's much more understood now. Didn't we do one of those? I don't think so. We've done them on Sunday. I know what it was. We talked about that kind of cap and trade scheme in the acid rain. Yes, we should do one of carbon offsets because they're much better understood now and then. It's pretty clear now, like, the best ways to go about doing something like that. Cool. So we're not going to cover too much here, but you can buy carbon offsets, look for future podcasts. But reducing your carbon footprint is the biggest thing. I mean, it's really simple. The stuff that generates the greenhouse gases, if we create less of it, that's a good thing. So you're doing that on a local level can make a big impact. If a lot of people are doing that, using less energy, obviously, is just sort of a no brainer period in life, like just being less wasteful, whether it's water or your lights that you're turning on or riding your bike instead of driving your car. All of that makes a big difference with electricity in particular. One thing we always mention is that even though it seems like your light bulb is fine, it's getting its power most likely from burning coal. So is that electric car that you bought the plug in for sure, yeah. And your electric car is only as good as the energy that it's where it gets its energy from. That's a whole rabbit hole into itself. Hybrids and electric cars and how green they are. But the research I did today roundly says that in the end, a hybrid, an electric car, has a much smaller carbon footprint than a combustion engine. Sure. And I know about the batteries and I know where they get the stuff. And this is considering all the costs that go into making these cars and what happens these cars over the years, there are a lot of smart people that put this all together and it's still a better option than a combustion gas engine. Right. But I'm not here to say go out and get a hybrid or an electric car. That's up to you. Well, that kind of raises one of the issues, too. It can be expensive to be eco friendly, which really sucks. You can also save money, though. Yeah. In the end. It's just the upfront costs are sometimes greater, which is a problem for people who can't afford a more expensive car. It's the same thing with food. The better your food, the more expensive it is. Which sucks, too. Yeah, but you can use less energy in your home and pay less of an energy bill. Yeah. No, there's plenty of things you can do, like it doesn't cost anything to recycle. Yes, exactly. And all this stuff like recycling, you think, well, I know that's good because there's no trash. But no trash means it's not going to that landfill and that means it's not releasing bad gasses into the atmosphere. This all affects your carbon footprint, recycling, to how long you take a shower because you're using hot water and that water has to be heated somehow. Yes. And I mean, if this has become like an issue for you, then make it one of the things you vote on, too. Like vote for people who care about this. And we'll make sure that regulations are put into place that fight climate change. It's a big one. There are politicians out there that care very much about this. Yeah, I remember after we pulled out of the Paris Accord, like a few cities said, we're still doing this. We're going to stick to it regardless. Yeah, you can do it. Your city can do it, other people can do it. The rest of the world is doing it. Except for Nicaragua and Syria, if I remember correctly. You remember? Yeah. If you want to know more about global warming, just step outside. And since I said that, it's time for listener mate. I'm going to call this so smart. I don't get it. But remember during the buildering podcast, we read a listener mail about we ask why you get sleepy when you read. Yeah, well, we had a chiropractor right in and he says he has the answer. And I don't know if this is right or not, but it certainly sounds good to me. So he's a chiropractor and he studied functional neurology in school and he said the answer is that when you're reading, your eyes move laterally as they scan the page. This involves the lateral rectus muscle of the eye, which is innervated by the 6th cranial nerve, the abductions. OK, so the abductions originates in the ponds in the brain stem. And what happens is that as you activate this nerve through reading, you also activate the ponto medullary reticular formation, or PMRF. One job of the PRMF is to dampen the sympathetic response of the interrogatorial lateral cell column in the spinal cord, which activates the sympathetic nervous system. In short, reading dampens the sympathetic response and relaxes you. Nice. I think that's the takeaway. I hope you find this interesting. I love your podcast. Use a lot of your knowledge. You teach for trivia Tuesday? That my coworkers and I play at my clinic. And that is from Dr. Michael Hilton in good old Washington, DC. Nice. Or the District. Thanks. Doctor. Michael, the chiropractor from DC. That's right. If you want to get in touch with us, like Dr Michael did, you can tweet to us at joshmclark or S-Y-S Kpodcast. Both me and Chuck are on Facebook and you can go to our official page at facebook. Comsteffyteanow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepporks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuff Youchano.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. 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, the free Amazon Music app, and listen today." | |
86b00024-3b0e-11eb-9699-23b619739df7 | How MRI Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-mri-works | At long last Chuck and Josh dive into the nuts and bolts of what makes the Wonder Machine so wondrous and find it actually lives up to the years-long hype they’ve given it.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | At long last Chuck and Josh dive into the nuts and bolts of what makes the Wonder Machine so wondrous and find it actually lives up to the years-long hype they’ve given it.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 17 Aug 2021 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=229, tm_isdst=0) | 40233651 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry is with us as we journey into the heart of the magnetic darkness known as an MRI machine, the Wonder Machine. After all these years of talking about this thing, I finally get it. I know it it's crazy. We've been kind of amazed by it and then a little bit turned off by it, but then we realized it's not the machine itself, it's the way it's being applied. And so we kind of came back to it again, and it nuzzled us, and it's boring, and it got kind of sexy. Yeah. And we're also guilty of the fMRI crime that now I kind of feel bad about. Is that a Queen Strike album? Yeah, maybe we'll just talk about that later when it's appropriate. What the Queen track album? No, the fMRI blunder that we've been making for 13 years. Sure. I feel like, okay, all right, we'll go over that. Fine. I don't want to mess anything up. Instead, we're going to mostly talk about the MRI, the Wonder Machine as it is, because, Chuck, we were always just amazed by it to begin with, but now that I understand it, I feel even more amazed by it. I'm proud of humanity for having come up with this thing. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing, and we'll talk about the history of it and everything in a SEC, but it's amazing that human beings got together with their cohorts and said, you know what we can do? The human body is made up of 60% to 65% water, so let's figure out how to use magnetic fields and radio waves to measure that water in the tissues of our body, and then we can map it, and then we can image it. Right. And so those initial people who said that were burned at the state because it was like the 16th century still. But when a few more hundred years passed, a few new people came onto the scene, and they encountered a completely different environment, one that was kind of nurturing of science and advancement and the idea that you could see inside the human body without cutting it open. And the person who won, what actually kind of interestingly turned out to be a race among researchers who were all trying to solve the same problem at the same time, independently, was a guy named Doctor Raymond or Domaidian, and he is credited as the first person to invent the fully functional human sized MRI. But he's one of typically at least three people who are credited with inventing the MRI, if that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, when he got in there in July of 1977, nothing really happened. And I think one of his colleagues said, hey, maybe you're too big for this thing. They put in a smaller person, and it worked for the first time it took about 5 hours to get an image. They named the thing Indomitable and if you look up pictures, it's in the Smithsonian now of Indomitable. It's one of these things that looks like a bare bones version of what it ended up looking like. It's like the MRI version of a Wicker wheelchair, I'll bet. Sort of. You didn't see a picture? No, because I suspected as much. I didn't want it to haunt my dream. Yes. I mean, it looks sort of like this big, donut. I think the difference in this one is that it shows and it may I'm not sure if it's Doctor Dimadian in the photo or not, but they're actually wearing some coils around their body. But there is a larger doughnut as well. Do they look like they're on craft work tour? Sort of. So there are two other people. Domadian was the first one. I'm glad that we settled on a pronunciation, by the way, and he was the first one to cross the finish line. But there were other two others who were working on that same problem. Paul Lauterburg and Sir Peter Mansfield. And like I was saying, they were all working independently on this problem. This thing that had been demonstrated in 1945 called nuclear magnetic resonance, which is that you can make atoms do really peculiar things when you put them in the presence of a magnetic field. If it's strong enough, it kind of snaps them all into attention. They click their heels and they say, yes sir, I'll get that pate for you immediately. And that's not how they normally behave. And so these guys, Demadi and Lauderburg and Mansfield all were like somehow, some way, there's a way to use this to use this nuclear magnetic resonance to look inside of the body. And that's what they said about trying to do. Yeah. And pretty early on they cut the word nuclear out of it and went with imaging. So MRI was born, I think wasn't probably a great time and maybe it's never a great time to throw the word nuclear into anything. Everything from nuclear power to nuclear bombs have a bad rap, quite frankly. Yeah, it gets even worse if you pronounce it nuclear. Oh man. And then there was someone else we do need to shout out a physicist by the name of Seji Ogawa or Ogawa. How would you pronounce that? Ogawa. And it's Ogawa. Any value you see in Japan just screams to be pronounced independently. Oh, really? They love it. CGE. That's what I would go with. Okay. I'm serious. I really think it is. No, I believe it just sounded funny. And so what happened while we're shouting this person out is because they discovered that if you have oxygen poor hemoglobin, it's going to react differently by this magnetic field that's created in the MRI machine than really good oxygen rich hemoglobin. And that contrast, you could basically eventually end up seeing blood flow. Like imaging blood flow. Yeah, because what Domadi and his cohort were doing were imaging tissues inside of the body. Ogawa said, well, actually, you can track the flow of blood in those tissues as well. Laid the groundwork for what became fMRI functional MRI, and then also, more importantly, magnetic resonance angiography, which is basically tracking blood flow and blood vessels in real time. Basically, yeah. And all this stuff was revolutionary because, A, you really nailed it on the head earlier. You don't have to cut people open anymore to see this stuff. We've had X rays for a long time, and they're great if you want to look at certain things, like your bones and see if you got a cracked rib or something. But when it comes to soft tissue, x rays were useless. We'll talk a little bit more about CT scans and why they're awesome in their own way, but still not, as, I guess, functional as an MRI. Well, plus CT scans. I didn't realize this CT's computed tomography. They use X rays as well. So you're still getting that dose of radiation from a CT scan, too. All right, so all that is just a lead up to say that the MRI just beats them. All those other machines stink. It truly earns the nickname the Wonder Machine. Boy, I feel like we should take a break before diving into this thing. Should we? I'm thinking hold on. Yes. I think this is a good spot for a break. Okay, let's do it. Okay, so we're back in a bit of an early break, but that's because we're about to get in the weeds with the actual nuts and bolts. Ironically, probably doesn't have any nuts and bolts. That's a good point. It's probably, what, heavy duty plastic ribbon? I don't know. It might just be, like large, solid, injection molded pieces. That's a good question. We should have learned that. But anyway, the metaphorical nuts and bolts of this thing, if you've ever seen one, they look like a big doughnut. You sit on a little it looks like a mortuary tray, and you get slid in through this hole in this tube. It's only about 24 inches in diameter. So they're not great if you are claustrophobic, but they do make machines that aren't quite they don't give you quite what you want with a closed system, but they're a little more opened up. Yeah, and I got the impression that they're starting to really kind of revisit those, because you can't produce quite as great a magnetic field or as powerful a magnetic field with an open system. But I think they're starting to figure out you don't necessarily need the most powerful magnetic field. So stay tuned for that in ten years. But the most important part of the whole MRI machine, obviously, is the magnet. That's what produces the magic, is this magnetic field. So that doughnut, that elongated doughnut that you're slid into in the tube that is the magnet, basically. And it's not like a magnet like you'd put on your fridge. It would suck your fridge into what amounts to a black hole, basically, if you got your fridge anywhere near this thing, it's a different kind of magnet. It's a super conducting magnet made up of coils, probably copper coils, that an electrical current is run through. And when you run an electrical current through a coiled set of metal, you can produce a magnetic field. That's great, like, fantastic. But to produce the kinds of powerful magnetic fields that they're producing in an MRI, you actually need a super conducting magnet. And that's just a whole another level. Yeah. I mean, if you want to create a very large and stable field and we're talking I think they measure magnets in is it or gauss? I think gauss. G-A-U-S-S. So gauss is the measurement. One Tesla is 10000 Gauss. So if you're looking at just a regular fly by night MRI Wonder Machine, you're looking at about roughly 1.5 tesla, or about 15,000 Gauss as far as the magnetic field goes. And that's compared to zero five for the magnetic field of planet Earth. Yes. Not zero five tesla, zero five Gauss compared to 15,000 Gauss. It's like 50 to 60,000 times more for your average machine. But they even make them go all the way up to ten tesla. Yeah. Which is 100,000 golf. Yeah. And the more golf, the more the prettier machine is just getting the prettier pictures are. Yeah. Another thing that I saw, though, is that they're figuring out that when you get past a certain Tesla of magnetic field, that matter. It does matter in that it actually gets worse, because you're picking up so much detail that you can't tell a bit from a bob, basically. And if you're a radiologist using terms like bits and bobs, you need to get out of the field and make room for somebody who takes the job a little more seriously. That's interesting. I wonder if that also goes hand in hand with the open machines and them saying that we don't need as much Gauss as we thought we did. I think it does. I think they're figuring out ways to get better resolution off lower power, because not only is it really expensive, I think a new machine costs about $1 million per tesla it produces. So if you got a ten tesla machine, which really at this point, from what I understand, you're just showing off as a medical center. You just spent $10 million on this one MRI machine in your medical center. But also, it costs a lot of money to run one of these things, because to keep this stable magnetic field going, you got to run a lot of electricity through it. And that's where the superconductivity comes in. Yeah. You got to have, like, zero resistance running through those wires. And they do this and I remember we talked about this in our are we running out of helium? I can't remember what it was called, but we did an episode on the fact that helium was in short supply. And one of the downsides of this, it wasn't just birthday balloons, was the fact that they use helium, liquid helium, to make these copper coils super conductive, and I think at the order of about 452 degrees below zero. So without that helium, I don't know if they're looking at alternatives or if there's a plan B or not, but they need helium. Well, remember in our Macy's Thanksgiving Day creative So I don't know if it made it in there or not, but they found like a helium supply that basically like and Macy's bought it. That basically expanded our supply of helium by some infinite amount. So we're like, flush with helium. That's true. I remember that. So I think we're okay, so the can was kicked down the road. Chuck, we don't need to worry about that. Yeah. We don't need to plan for the future like Y two K. Right? That's exactly right. Nice call out. All right, so you've got your big magnet. You also have gradient magnets. You have three gradient magnets, and those are not nearly as on the magnitude of the Big Daddy. These are about 180 to 270 gauss. And your main magnet is what's creating that main magnetic field that we're going to go over in detail in a second, the real stable one. But the other magnets create the variable field, which that's what you need to run it against the other one to make those images happen. Yeah. That's basically what you use to direct the beam, essentially as it works. Like if you need a shoulder looked at, it would be in a different location than your knee. Yeah. And you would say, well, actually, I need it a little to the left. And you would use these gradient magnets to move the magnetic field. And what you're really moving, from what I understand with the gradient magnets is a radio frequency pulse. Yes. And this is where it all comes together. You're using three different things. Right. You've got the magnet, and when you put hydrogen, when you put a body well, we're not quite there yet. No. You want me to do it now? Well, I mean, certainly was the anticipation on my part. Okay. Alright. I won't let you down, Chuck. So when you go into the MRI bore and you enter this magnetic field, the tube, I don't think we'd mention that true. Yes. When you go in the tube and you enter the magnetic field, the atoms in your body have what's called a magnetic moment, which means that they respond to very strong magnetic fields by abandoning their kind of random spin along their axis, their precession, and snapping in line along the polar ends of the magnetic field. And in the MRI, that's running lengthwise down the middle. So if you're laying on your back in an MRI tube, the magnetic field is going from your feet to your head. And that magnetic field causes the atoms in your body or the particles in your body that make up atoms to snap into line with that polarity. So all of a sudden, you have protons. In this case, as far as the MRI is concerned, hydrogen protons suddenly going from random spins to all facing your feet are all spinning towards your head, one or the other, but technically along the same line. Yeah. So some of those are, I think, in the biz, they call it aligning parallel or anti parallel, and they sort of cancel each other out, but there's always going to be more parallel aligned hydrogen atoms. And those are the ones that we're using to measure the MRI, basically, like everything else just sort of cancels each other out. And those leftover ones, and there's so many that you can have the cancellation of many and it still works. So I only saw this in the house that works article. Everywhere else I saw basically made no mention of the fact that, like, whether they were aligned towards your feet or towards your head, like, that mattered and that you were focusing on the ones that hadn't aligned. Like, I only saw it in this article in other places. Oh, you did? Okay. Kids science articles, they were all based off this House of Works articles. No, you could tell they were original. I was just teasing. You know I love kids science websites, Chuck. I can't remember which one this one was, but it was a good one. Okay. So regardless of which atoms you're focusing on, either the ones that are polarized from along the magnetic field or the ones that haven't been polarized, that polarity is being created by the main magnet, the superconducting magnet that has basically zero resistance because it's bathed in liquid helium and cooled to just astounding temperatures. Right now, when you bring in the radio frequency pulse, which is oscillating, it's turning on and off very quickly what was discovered over the last century or so before MRIs were ever even developed. But what forms the basis of the principle that MRIs operate on is that if you apply a radio frequency to a bunch of hydrogen protons undergoing their magnetic moment, you can actually adjust the way that they're aligned. You're kind of like pushing or pulling them out of alignment and they're kind of struggling against it. But you can overcome that with the radio frequency pulse. And so that's basically step one of the MRI is getting them knocked out of that polarity so that you can turn that off and basically gauge and measure them as they snap back into that polarity. Yeah. And that radio frequency pulse, it has to be the same frequency of those spinning protons. So if not, they're not going to be in resonance. That's where the word resonance comes from. If they have that same frequency, they can exchange energy with one another and they're on residence with one another. And when they turn it on and off, like you said, there's a moment where they snap back to attention, essentially, and it takes a little bit of time and a little bit of energy. And that energy is what they're basically trying to measure. Like that movement. Yes. And because the protons, the hydrogen protons, the reason they selected hydrogen protons is because it's so abundant throughout the body, it's far and away the most abundant atom in the body is hydrogen. You're going to find it in every bit, every nook and cranny of your body. That's another term radiologist should stay away from, but we can use it. The nooks and crannies of your body all are filled with hydrogen protons. So they know that a hydrogen proton and like, fat tissue is going to snap back into place and then release energy at a slightly different frequency and at a slightly different rate than the hydrogen protons making up water in the body or bone in the body or your hair on your shoulders or whatever. All of this stuff is going to just be just slightly different. And they basically know the data that comes back, what it's telling them is, oh, hey, I'm in a bunch of fat over here, I'm in some water over here, I'm shoulder hair over here. And this is the data that gets transmitted to the computer. That's measured by the computer that's running the MRI. Yeah. And that energy burst that it emits, it's at a very specific frequency named the Larmore Frequency, after an Irish physicist named Sir Joseph Larmore. He discovered this all the way back in 1897. And you will never need to know this information, but just in case you want to know the lot more frequency for hydrogen in this case is 42.58 tesla of magnetic force. I don't even know if that's like a cocktail. That's not even a Jeopardy question. Something that's a dark little pet you keep in your pocket that you pull out and, like, stroke every once in a while. Just reassure yourself that you are very smart. Yeah. Like LaVar Burton should be LaVar Burton would ask that question on Jeopardy and Ken Jennings would say, you got to be kidding me. Nobody cares. So you're pulling for LaVar? He's not going to make it. I mean, the other guy, somehow the executive producer of the show is sort of naming himself. Oh, really? Yeah. I mean, he said that he didn't make the call, but I don't know, man. I thought LaVar Burton was great and would be great for that show. I'm part of team George Stephanopoulos. Did he get yeah. Or Aaron Rogers. He did a good job. I didn't see that one, but he still got more football to play. I'm with you. Though, I think LaVar Burton would be wonderful. And from what I read, he really wants it, too. I just don't get it. And a lot of people are mad already, so I'm not alone. So the decision has been made. It's the executive producer now. It said that they're in the final negotiations, and now there are some people pointing to his past because this guy is an experienced game show executive producer. And they're like, yeah, when you run the prices right, you did some not so great things. So we'll see what happens. I don't know. What a dusty old crotch? I don't know. We'll see what happens. Let's bring humility back, everybody. Small doses is fine. That's right. And this has been game show soap opera Chuck and Josh. And speaking of go, listen to our live game shows episode, I think, from Denver. That was really good. Do we do one on game shows? Oh, my, yes, we did. That was a good one. All right, so where are we? We were at the Larmore frequency. I guess the one thing we need to mention to you talked earlier about the gradient magnets being applied to very specific parts of the body in the biz. They call those areas slices. So if you hear someone and if you're going to get an MRI and you're nervous and they say, get a slice of the shoulder, you're not getting a slice. The whole point is that of an MRIs that you don't get sliced. Yes. And one of the other advantages is that because you can move these gradient magnets all over the place at all different planes, you can get all sorts of different views of the same area top, bottom, side, underside, all the sides. And that's a huge advantage that MRI offers, again, without spilling a single drop of blood. Yeah. And I guess the final piece of the puzzle here is this is all well and good that this little magic machine works like this, but you still have to be able to have a doctor look at a picture of this stuff. The imaging part of MRI is just as important as the rest because that's what they need to assess your situation. And they do this through the magic of computers and math. And I think that's that right. We don't have to go any more into it than that. I don't fully understand it to you, it makes the image and turns it to a mathematical formula. Now, there's probably like 50 people on the planet who fully understand how that happens. All I know is there's a really expensive computer attached, and it's the one that converts all that data into a 2D or 3D image. That's right. That's all you need to know, really. Yeah. And then it ends up in the hands of a radiologist who basically says, oh, it's this, oh, it's a donkey, that kind of thing. Or increasingly in the hands of AI which has gotten really, really good at reading radiological charts, including MRIs, to look for weird anomalies. Because one of the great advantages of an MRI is those images it produces really can resolve water in the body. And one of the reasons that's important is because when you start to suffer disease, one of the almost universal symptoms of any kind of disease, malady or disorder in the human body is an increase in the amount of water. The thing is, the MRI is going to show you that. But you or I can't see that you got to go to school for many years and become a radiologist to say, that's just a little fluid build up or, oh, that's a tumor. It's tough to distinguish. It needs a human or again, an AI to make that distinction. But the MRI is going to give you the picture that will show you that thing that a radiologist could look at and say, that's water. That's a tumor. That's right. Pretty neat stuff. Like we said all along, the wonder machine. That's right. And that feels like a great time for break number two. And when we come back, we'll talk a little bit about our fMRI shame that I feel that you're not even aware of. Josh, right up to this. Prepare for our shame. All right, Chuck, why should we be ashamed? Because I think I remember things differently than you do. That's what I think it is. So here's the deal with fMRI functioning MRIs. They track blood flow and what they've long done in psychiatry and neurology since this has been invented, and we've talked about this a lot on the podcast, they will do an fMRI of your brain and they will show you pictures of certain things or have you react to certain stimuli. It can be an object or a word that they say out loud or whatever, and they see where that blood flow is going in the brain with the idea of like, well, hey, if you're getting that fresh blood right here in this part of the brain, that means that that's the part of your brain that is reacting to the stimulus. And the more I read about it, the more it seemed like that's a pretty good guess. And we don't really know what's going on with the neurons. This is just seeing what's lighting up. And I think where I feel bad is many, many times over the years, we've said, and then they showed them a picture of this and boom, this part starts lighting up. The case closed. And it's not as kind of bulletproof as that. See, this is where I remember differently. We've trashed that idea multiple times over the years. Did we? Yeah. Okay, totally. I remember specifically talking about one study where a guy put, like, a dead salmon in an MRI and then wrote a paper about what it must have been experiencing because some voxel showed lit up really? We made good as we went along. Yeah, totally. Okay, totally. We sniff that stuff out. We've been sniffing that stuff off the case since eight, man. All right, well, I don't feel bad anymore. No, we definitely trashed that over the years. And it was worth being trashed in that somebody figured out you can use this to a certain degree, and yes, you can see all this region's lighting up. But what they quickly found is that a region of the brain has hundreds or thousands of countless numbers of neurons involved in that area. And they're not all just doing the same thing. They're all performing different functions. They're all connected in different ways. And until we can get our resolution down on basically the individual neural level, there's zero point almost in putting someone in an fMRI and showing them pictures of whatever and seeing how they're stimulated, because it's all just guesswork somebody. Compared to phrenology, modern phrenology, you're just extrapolating huge things from very limited findings. And so we've figured that out very early on. That's been a long standing criticism. We definitely dialed into that. I feel better than ever then about our efforts. I'm so glad. Thank you for correcting that. Although one good thing about fMRI is that angiography, where you can track blood flow outside of the brain and extrapolate it beyond social psychology studies. If a social psychology study could even get enough funding to pay for an MRI rental, we had some social psychologists and husbands and wives of social psychologists to write in, and they were kind of mad at you. I think they're mad. Again, you should not be mad at are the inventors of the MRI because these things are really pretty safe. You are not being exposed to radiation, and that's a great thing. There have been not many incidences of mishaps with an MRI machine. One of the dangers of an MRI is obviously with the supermarket's is going to be metal. If you've ever had one, they're going to ask you and ask you several more times if you have any metal on your body. You're not going to go in there with your earrings. You're not going to go in there with even certain kinds of makeup has metal in it. If you have a pacemaker or aneurysm clips in your brain or if you're like me dental implants, you're going to want to talk to them about that because some of that stuff is still okay. It's not like it will rip a pacemaker out of your chest because they're smarter than that now. But if you have an old pacemaker, that might be a problem, right? Yeah. And even a new pacemaker can malfunction in the presence of a really strong magnetic field. It won't be ripped from your chest, but it might stop working. And you're not good. You don't want that to happen. But there are things like if you have metal anywhere on you, it. Will be pulled out of your pocket. Your pocket might be pulled right off of your pants. Basically, depending on whether it's one of those externally sold pockets or an internally you probably have a gown on anyway. Sure. But you could just be some schmo who likes to stand around MRI rooms and gained entry. One of the big problems is the actual medical equipment themselves. There's medical equipment that has been developed to be used in an MRI room, and then there's medical equipment that accidentally finds its way into an MRI room and ends up getting sucked violently into the bore. And that is really dangerous. There's actually some astounding pictures on the Internet. If you search MRI catastrophe, there's one, and I can't tell if it's real or not. There's a wheelchair that's sucked into the bore with feet sticking out from under it. I didn't see a corroborating story, but people have died from being hit by objects or pinned to the bore between a metal object and the bore. It's very rare. It's very infrequent, because people running MRIs tend to know what to look for and what questions to ask and what to look out for. But it has happened, and when it happens, it's got to be one of the most violent things you could ever witness. Yeah. About 20 years ago, there was a boy who was killed when an oxygen tank was pulled into the boar. But like you said, that's the kind of thing that makes the news the world over because it's so rare. I think every year there are millions and millions of MRI scans in the United States alone, and the FDA gets about 300 adverse event reports annually. And most of these are like, my skin burned, some because it got really hot. Because I don't think we mentioned the MRIs I've had have been very brief. Just a few minutes. You can be in there for like an hour or an hour and a half, and you have to lay completely still. And the sound that they make is just unnerving. It's like this digital clanging, and there are claxons and buzzers, and it's just not I remember I talked about it years ago on the show when I had my first one. It's not a relaxing scene at all. It's a little unnerving, even though you know it's safe just because of the noise. But it is safe. Accidents usually don't happen. Yeah, that noise. I forgot you had one before. I got a couple. Now, from what I understand, that noise is relative to the Tesla that the made magnet puts out, because when you put, I guess maybe the gradient magnets in there, they respond to that magnet, and that's what produces that hammering or clacking sound or whatever. And it can get really loud and give you tinnitus or hearing loss, even if they don't give you earmuffs. Have you still never had one? No. Let me just knock on wood there. How did yours turn out? Pretty great. Yeah? I can't even remember what the first one was for, to be honest. It was so many years ago. And then I had one more recently for my gut. Oh, yeah? Yeah, for my GI. They were looking at my GI flow, not flow below, looking for stuff your colon blow. They were looking for diverticula, specifically. And so I was in an MRI machine, and that didn't take very long. And I think they use dye for that one. That's another thing that we didn't mention, is I don't think they always use die as a contrast, but sometimes they do. Yeah. About a third of them, they use dye. And the dye seems to be, from what I can tell, the only truly questionable part about the MRI experience. Because when you come out of the magnetic field, your ads all go back to normal the way they were, and there's no long term effects. But apparently the dye they use is made of Gandalinium gadolinium, which is a metallic element, and they collate it so that your body doesn't stick around your body. You actually pee it out. It gets processed through kidneys in very rare instances. Some people hang on to it and it can cause a little bit of kidney damage, but far and away, almost everybody passes it. It seems to be the question is using dye when you give an MRI to a woman who is pregnant, because the woman will pee it out, but the little baby in uterus or in utero recycles the stuff that comes in there. So it will just be ingesting and peeing and ingesting and peeing that gadolinium until it's born. And that's not really good for the old kidneys. So apparently the FDA recommends that you err on the side of the mother's health. If it's like a medical emergency that requires an MRI for the mom, including die, the FDA and apparently the AMA would say, just go ahead and do it and roll the dice. But if it's not a medical emergency and the woman has to get an MRI, they would probably avoid using the die. Yeah, that was kind of one of the more interesting parts because you can feel it cold running through your body. Well, which is really interesting. And I got a taste in my mouth, like this kind of funky taste. Wow. That's really amazing. Yeah. Which is always a little weird. You mentioned pregnant women, though. But kids is another thing. MRIs, I think 90% of MRIs go to fully grown adults, and kids present a problem because kids are fidgety, obviously, and they're hard to keep still, and you got to start over if you want to get a good picture. So it's kind of been tough. And a lot of times they have to anesthesize a child to put them in an MRI machine, which anytime you're going under anesthesia, there's a risk there. And people don't like doing that in general if you don't have to. So there are some really smart people working on that, I think. A few years ago, there was an article about a Stanford pediatric radiologist named Sreusana Vasana Walla, and he was working on basically kind of making tailormade MRI machines for kids that are smaller and a little more open and don't have these huge bulky coils for their little bodies. That's amazing. What a great thing to do with your time, you know? Great. I mean, or you could just get on a podcast and run your mouth. Yeah, I think that's a less good thing to do with your time. But regardless, I think the MRI machine is still, maybe even more than ever, the wonder machine. Chuck. I agree. And it's cool to know how it works. And if you heard this and go in to get an MRI, it might arm you with a little knowledge. You can go in there and talk about what was that number again? The frequency 42.58 tesla of magnetic field applied. Just go in there and start throwing that around while you have your smartphone in your pocket. If you're about to get an MRI, this may be you a little less nervous about it. Agreed. Well, if you want to know more about MRIs, just do a little research or maybe go get one done. Go head up your doctor and say, how about an MRI? Let's check it out. And they'll say, okay, hop in. I could use the money. And since I said I could use the money, obviously it's time for listener mail. That's right. Before I read this one, I do want to shout out, we got quite a few emails on people who have the weird compulsion to equal out the crack stepping feet like I do. I was kind of surprised at how many people have that same thing going on. And other people I think I read one of them that said he also liked to chew and equal on both sides of his mouth. Quite a few people also had that, which I don't have. But it's nice to know that us crack steppers are I don't know, I feel united. Yeah. There's a whole cadre of you guys out there, it turns out. Yes. We're going to take over the world one day. I know, but I'm going to call this one from Rodney about reverse osmosis. Hey, guys, you did a really nice job on reverse osmosis. It can indeed solve the drinking water problem worldwide, as well as help solve some of the environmental problems in our industrial processes. You should also do a program on electrolytics. This technology can take salt and convert it to disinfectants that are used to treat water and kill microorganisms that make people sick. 9000 people die every day from waterborne disease worldwide. And this guy Rodney has a couple of companies that deal with this, so offered us up some technical assistance if we wanted to do something on that. Nice. Very nice. Thanks a lot, Rodney. Appreciate that offer. And congratulations to you for saving the world. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with us like Rodney did because you're saving the world or because you just want to say hi, it doesn't matter. We're fine either way. You can get in touch with us by sending an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, cast my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
42a68c9a-53a3-11e8-bdec-ff08dedac2bd | How Conversion Therapy Doesn't Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-conversion-therapy-doesnt-work | Conversion therapy is a misguided attempt by religious zealots to convert people from gay to straight. News flash - it doesn't work. Learn all about this abhorrent practice today. | Conversion therapy is a misguided attempt by religious zealots to convert people from gay to straight. News flash - it doesn't work. Learn all about this abhorrent practice today. | Thu, 28 Nov 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=332, tm_isdst=0) | 61004573 | audio/mpeg | "Well, you know what that bad trumpet means. What do you mean, bad? I mean bad as in Miles Davis was bad. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. We're announcing our live show at our annual trip to San Francisco Sketchfest. We're going to be where? We're going to be at the Castro Theater, our home away from home in San Francisco on Saturday, January 18. That's right. And I'm doing my third ever movie crush at Sketch Fest. Nice. And this is going to be a night time. I usually do a matinee, but this is the following day on Sunday, January 19 at 08:00 P.m., and it is going to be a piano fight on Taylor Street. And for all these, you can get tickets at the Sketch Fest website, or you can learn about tickets at our home touring home on the web. That is Sysklive.com, right? That's right. We'll see you guys there. 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. Guest producer. Josh over there. Don't be confused, everybody. There are more than one Josh in the world. It's nice to hear you finally admit that. It's taken a long time, a lot of therapy, a nice segue. It's like a short stuff. I'm like, let's get to it. Let's get going. Well, I have a COA to issue. You know what cracks me up is people who are still like, what does that mean? You figure it out and you can email. Eventually, some people will. Yeah. So my COA is just a personal COA that I'm going to try and just disguise my disdain for this entire topic. Okay. But I might not do a great job about it. Well, you've already shown your hands. All right, good. That's my COA. Yeah. I don't think there's too many stuff you should know, listeners who are probably into this. Yeah, but part of the problem is we'll see later in this episode, it's part of the problem with conversion therapy coverage in the media is that it has largely been fairly even handed and described as, like, this controversial therapy and not said, this scam and this junk science fraud perpetrated by zealots, super harmful. Yeah. So that's where I am. That stuck out to me, too, that in the late 90s, we'll talk about it, especially when it was treated even handedly, and it made me think, like, we should do an episode on that. Should the media treat all sides of an issue equally? And if it does, is that just perpetuate ignorance? Or if it doesn't, does that support fascism? Right. It's a horn. I really think we should do it. Sometimes it is. That's a good call. Thank you, Charles. I don't know how we I mean, I guess it could be researched. Yeah. Surely somebody's done a think piece on it that we can springboard off of. A think piece? That's right. That's what we do most of our research on think pieces. This is from one of our great writers, Julia Layton, and she put a lot of this stuff together for us. Yeah, she did a good job on this. So, like the additional histories you found out, though. Yeah, because we'll define it first and then we'll talk about some histories. But this stuff goes back way further than you would think. But what we're talking about today is called conversion therapy, reparative therapy, ex gay therapy, repetitive therapy is trademarked, by the way, we should say. Well, you couldn't hear it, but under my breath, I said more like TS. Yeah. It was trademarked by psychologist named Joseph Nicolosi Senior. So what conversion therapy is probably what we're going to mostly call it, though what it is is it's an alleged psychological theory and practice that is based on the idea that all people are born heterosexual. Right. And because of certain events, past traumas, usually traumas, typically, but also the family dynamics plays a huge role. People who would otherwise are meant to be heterosexual can be accidentally steered into homosexuality, and therefore it can be purposefully steered back. Right. Cured. Yes, cured. Being gay right back to the righteous land of heterosexuality. Yeah. And as you can imagine that this is a very popular with the fundamentalist Christian right. Sure. And, I mean, that's not even like a guess. Like it overtly is they have adopted and taken on the X Gay movement as basically one of the what's it called? An attempt pull attempt post. Sure. One of the planks in the Christian Rights platform for social change. Oh. It was officially part of the 2016 Republican Party platform, even that's right. Wait, the whole RNC? Yeah. Which has been called the 2016 platform has been called by far the most anti LGTBQ platform in the nation's history. Wow. I mean, yeah. If that's a plank in the party's platform, that's pretty significant. They don't throw just anything in there. No, they don't. So with the X Gay movement and conversion therapy, I saw it described, at least back in the late 90s, as front in the culture war. That's as strong and as significant as abortion. Like, the Christian right in particular has basically dedicated itself to stamping out gayness. And by converting gay people to straighten us, the problem is there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that that is even possible. Right. And the problem is, when you try and stamp out gayness, that creates a good beat that you can dance to. It makes that sound and they're like, no, stop stamping. Actually, I went to where should I say this? Sure, why not? Because it's the truth. I went to a church camp once when I was a youth. Well, I figured a story or two, they talked about stomping your feet to the music or whatever they're playing, and they literally said, don't alternate feet because that's too close to dancing. Wow. These are pretty mainstream Baptist church camps. It wasn't like I went to some snake handling thing. No, not at all. But I did a really good episode on that. Yeah, that was a good one. So, anyway, stomp your feet, everybody. Just don't alternate. So you stomp them both at once, because that's no, just stump 1ft. Just stomp your right foot. I was going to say that's. Just jumping lightly. Okay. So that's what we're talking about as conversion therapy. And like I said, it became part of the Christian Rights kind of philosophy and part of their culture war, the culture war they're fighting. But it goes back way further than that. And I think it was the late nineties when the right kind of adopted it, as a matter of fact, into the 19th century. There were people who subscribed to this, but they were all psychologists. This is back at the time when you could be a ghost investigator and say, I'm a psychologist. This is the time when you could say, this cigar reminds you of your mother. You know what I'm saying? Right. And you could be a psychologist. You could be a father of psychology at that point. Yeah. You dug up a great article from Historycom called Gay Conversion therapies Disturbing 19th Century Origins by Aaron Blakemore. Made a nice attribution Chuck. Yeah, well, Erin wrote a great article, and in it she talks about, in 1899, this hypnosis. Well, again, in the days where you could be a hypnotist and be a legitimate scientist at the same time, they're getting a stage shows or psychology. That's right. Maybe he was German, of course, and he claimed to have turned to gay man straight after 45 hypnosis sessions and some other therapies. And that's sort of the first evidence of what we would later call conversion therapy starting up. Yeah. Although I'm sure even before that, people they probably didn't call it conversion therapy, but if you were in a feminine man, you were no doubt probably beaten by your parents and shunned by your community. Right. I think one of the other things that's kind of a hallmark of this long tradition of converting people from being gay to straight or trying to, is this idea that there's something wrong with you if you're gay. Right. And that that idea can actually become hung up on the individual, the gay person, so that they actually do seek out help right. In becoming straight. But the problem is, in seeking that help, they're going to be frustrated, and they're ultimately probably going to be going to have feelings of shame, guilt, inadequacy, that they're not capable of helping themselves. There's something wrong with them. Why can't they just be straight? Kind of thing. And then if you're a minor and your parents are forcing this on you, then that raises a whole other can of worms of ethical dilemmas. Sure. But from the outset, there were probably people who sought out hypnotists and other psychologists for help. It wasn't just people walking around kidnapping gay people and taking them off the street and trying to convert them, right? It could have very well been some man that's like, wait a minute, I don't feel normal feelings because I'm looking at Joe out there in the field and things are happening, right? You know what I mean, doc? And they're like, well, come on in. Watching him swing that sight and take his sweaty shirt off, ring it over his face, that kind of thing, right. So just sit down and follow the wristwatch with your eyes or I guess the pocket watch. That'd be a weird technique. When you're on me, I'm moving my wristwatch. But from that same history.com article, she talks about some of the early attempts, like with electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomies. I think we even talked about some in the lobotomies episode. And they would give you a lobotomy for anything. Oh, sure. What about testicular transplantation? Right? Because that was a theory from a doctor, an endocrinologist named Eugene Steiner, who thought that your testicles were the root of the problem. Well, a lot of people did. Yeah. There was like you could have gay testicles literally, and they would swap them out for straight ones. Right. And I could not find any evidence one way or the other that any of these testicular transplants worked or were successful. I don't think they were, but I didn't see anything that said all of those failed or whatever, but what happened and they just shriveled up and fall off or something. You mean if it actually medically took to the body or yeah, that's what I mean. Okay. Did it convert them? Did it work? Right, yeah, no, that's the answer. But yeah, I didn't know that you could in the 1920s, testicle transplant successfully. That's what I'm saying. At some point, and we must have talked about this in the Michael Dylan episode we talked about but it wasn't a transplant, it was just a straight up removal, an orchieactomy I believe castration. But at some point, testicles have been transplanted onto a person successfully. When did that happen is my question. They probably did to a dog first. Right, but I mean, think about it, if it didn't work well, sorry, you're castrated now. Yeah. They probably didn't say sorry, though. No, but we took your gay testicles. The heterosexual testicles just didn't pan out. Right, but now you don't have any testicles, gay or otherwise. That's right. Some of the other awful techniques that they would use back in the day were chemicals that they might have to make you wretch and vomit. When you look at pictures of people of the same sex, it's called covert sensitization. Yeah. Or if you're cross dressing, maybe, same thing. Sure. Look in the mirror and be discussed it with yourself and wretch and vomit. Yeah. And very sadly, if you have, say, like someone you are in a relationship with that you love, they might show you a picture of that person and carry out aversive therapy or aversive conditioning. What's weird is you said these are things they used to carry out. From what I've seen, this stuff still goes on today. Yeah, some of it. So what we're talking about, though, back in the 19th and most of the first half or so of the 20th century, this was all like the domain of psychology. And then eventually gay psychologists and other straight psychologists, too, were basically like, this is wrong. The science is not adding up. This is just incorrect. Yeah. There were medical doctors, too, though. It wasn't just psychologists. Right, sure. Yeah. So eventually, in 1973, the American Psychological Association said, hey, big news, we're no longer going to classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. Right. And a certain part of the population went, yeah, it's 1972. Why did it take this long? Right, exactly. But that was a big deal. And at that point, psychology mostly abandoned the idea that being gay was a disorder of any kind, and therefore there was no point in researching how to cure someone of being gay. And so it turned its back on this whole history of conversion. Conversion. But it didn't fully die away. And I believe starting in the Christian Rights started to kind of pick up on it and kind of breathe new life into it again. That's right. Think we should take a break? Yeah. That's a robust and a half set up. Is that oh, I thought we were already into it. Oh, my gosh. No, it wasn't just the setup. It was more you're right. We'll be right back. All right, so let's talk a little bit about because there's a couple of schools of thought here, and I hesitate to call the ones and more bonafide, but there's conversion therapy that can happen at a licensed therapist office, and there's conversion therapy that can happen in somebody's basement or the basement of a church. I was going to say basement, too. Yeah. Or a room. Doesn't have to be a basement. I know, but a basement makes it sinister. It's probably why I said it. So there are two sorts of ways that can happen. We're going to talk a little bit about the first Way, the patented Way Reparative therapy, trademark by Joseph Nicolosi SR. That guy doesn't even get the Italian accent, man. And I don't blame him. He doesn't. Which we should say, by the way, in July this year, amazon stopped carrying his works on their website. Yeah. Because the one that's worked, they considered them they promoted fraud. That's right. Which will get to yes, which is interesting. But this guy is like a psychologist. Yeah. He's a trained psychologist who basically said, I'm going to take everything I learned and direct it toward curing gay people of being gay. Yeah. I don't know much about do you know much about his religiosity. I think he was Jewish. Okay. And born in Brooklyn, from what I understand. I read a really great article, not a think piece, but a memoir in the American Prospect. American Prospector from 2012? Yeah. This is different. They're gold by Gabriel Arana. Okay. It's called my Socalled ex gay life. It's definitely worth reading, but it's a great look at conversion therapy, but also is overlaid with his personal experience with it. Okay. At any rate, his contention was that, like we said, you develop homosexuality or homosexual feelings, at least because of the result of environmental conditions, childhood traumas, and they call it same sex attraction. SSA. And that could stem, in his opinion, from a few different things desire for adventure, peer acceptance, loneliness or boredom or curiosity, approval or affection for males. And a lot of this is centered on men, although it's certainly women have been involved in this as well. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah. But a lot of this over the years is making gay men straight. Oh, yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah. But it's not exclusive to that. No, it's not general rebellion, which is pretty funny. And then sexual molestation by another male. I think that the idea that that leads to being gay is very widespread in culture well beyond the Christian right or people who believe in conversion therapy. The idea that if you're sexually abused by a man or somebody of your same sex, you become gay, which is just wrong. But I think a lot of people still believe that. I know. That's what I thought when I was a kid. Yeah, that's right. It's not right. Well, no, it's utterly wrong. And the whole basis of Nicolosi's theory he takes back to a study from 1992 called Demography of Sexual Orientation and Adolescence. And this was an actual study from the Journal of Pediatrics that looked at patterns of sexual orientation to high school students in Minnesota. And what they found out was that younger teens in Minnesota in this study were more likely to express sexual confusion about their orientation when they were younger. And as they grew older, they were less confused about their sexual identity and orientation. Right. And that's a legit study, and I think that probably anyone who's ever been an early teenager and a late teenager can be like, that sounds about right. Exactly. But the extrapolation that Nicolosi did was what the problem is. Right. So Nicolosi was saying, like, yes, that shows that you're in a dangerous place earlier on, and that if a couple of things happen in a certain way, you can be veered off of this natural path toward heterosexuality, into homosexuality. Right. And also, more dangerously, that means we got to get them while they're young. Right. So one of the other things that he really based his practice on was this family triad of a domineering, over attendant mother, a passive, detached father, and a sensitive child. Boogie Nights kind of in that triangle, you would almost certainly have a gay kid if somebody did an interview, so he decided his career was intervening and that kind of stuff. But that in and of itself has never been proven to create gay kids. Whether you believe in conversion therapy or not, if you have a domineering mother and absent father and you're like a sensitive type who likes dogs even, it doesn't mean you're going to turn gay. Right. This is the basis of that, though, is that, yes, you will turn gay. And still to this day, this idea is allowed to live because science is never fully satisfied. The question, like, are we born gay? Do we develop being gay? And it looks like it's on a pretty strong track toward a genetic basis of homosexuality. Right. But it's still nothing's definitive. And so people can say, well, maybe we do develop an adolescence being gay, or whatever, because science has not filled this void quite yet. Yeah. And the way Nicolosi would write about this stuff and describe it as in a very sort of professional, innocuous type way, where a casual reader might say, well, this seems totally valid and above board. Yeah. Newsweek reader or an Oprah viewer. That's right. This is one of the things I think this is from one of his books, and this is how he describes a relationship from patient to therapist. The client has come to the therapist seeking assistance to reduce something distressing to him. And the RT psychotherapist agrees to share his professional experience in education to help the client meet his own goal. His own goal. The therapist enters into a collaborative relationship, agreeing to work with the client to reduce his unwanted attractions and explore his heterosexual potential, which, again, it seems very innocuous. And there are plenty of cases where a grown man or woman of their own volition goes and seeks this out. Right. But what they don't say is what happens many times is a parent forces their young child to do this. No, that's a big one. In the American Prospect magazine, the author was, like, in his early teens when he went to Nicolas'therapy, but he said everybody else in the group was in their, so it was definitely both. Yeah. But there's something here that's really important, because, like you said, if you just read this stuff, it does sound innocuous. It's all very much based on things like cognitive behavioral therapy, like stuff that works, which means that this works in a weird, twisted way, which we'll talk about, but not in the way it's ultimately meant to. It works in a bent way. Yeah. Do you want me to explain now? I feel like I should. I take issue with the word work at all. There are situations where it might prevent someone from acting on a homosexual impulse. That's what I mean. Yeah. But that doesn't change the nature of their sexuality. No. Right. And ultimately, preventing someone or training someone to not act on their sexuality is damaging in and of itself and causes all sorts of other problems, but maybe good enough for a really religious family. Yeah. Well, that's what I read, is that over time, as the Christian right adopted the idea of championing the ex gay movement, that part of that was accepting gay people who refrained from gay sex. If you were like, I'm gay, I'm never going to be straight. I tried, right. But I don't have sex with men, but I won't commit men. Welcome in church. Yeah. So what I was saying, though, is with Nicolas thing, there's something fundamentally wrong with it, and that if somebody came to you and said, I'm tired of being white or black or Hispanic or straight, I can't stand it. Yeah. You wouldn't say, oh, well, let's figure out how to make you not black or white or Hispanic or straight. Right. Let's figure out how to change you. They would say any therapist worth their salt would say, well, there's a lot of great things about being white or black or Hispanic or straight, and let's focus on that so that you can own your identity. Conversion therapy does the opposite. Yes. Let's figure out how to get the gay out of you. Right. Let's change your identity because this group of society has said that it's unacceptable. That's right. And that is an extraordinarily damaging position to come from, and that is the basis of conversion therapy. Yeah. And as we'll see later on, the AMA's official stance is that it is and we'll read the quote later, that it is a damaging prospect and creates real harm. An American prospector. So this approach by Nicolosi has four steps to it. The first one is interesting because it's the disclosure of the therapist's personal, professional, philosophical, and religious views on homosexuality, which includes, Nicolosi says, the gay affirmative therapist also discloses his philosophical views to the client. But from a gay affirmative perspective, does he just put that in there to cover his bases? No, it's true. Because you wouldn't send your son or daughter to a gay affirmative therapist to convert them into right. I think this is what he's saying. You've been to therapy before, right? Sure. Have you ever noticed that when you first session, the therapist tells you a lot about themselves and what they think about mental health or life or whatever? Yeah. And I'm always like, Wait a minute, what about my problem? Yeah, I thought we were talking about me. I'm getting charged for this. I don't care about your family. That's what he's saying that they do. But because this is about being gay, that's what they're going to talk about is their views or whatever interesting. They're going to share their opinions of it and that they think that there's problems with it. You know what my line is at the therapist, when they do all that stuff. I'm like, great, that's really interesting at the end. I'm like, you want to start the clock now? Right. Nice. Either that or I can pro rate. Number two of the four steps is encouragement of the client's inquiry. So basically asking the client the questions, examining their feelings to try and discover what lies beneath. Right. Number three, resolution of past trauma, if it is in fact one of the reasons they suspect this person has gone down the road to homosexuality. And then education regarding features of homosexuality, which includes everything from what motivates you to do this to, you know that if you are gay than this lifestyle ends in a very bad way for you. Right. There's a lot of physical harm, social harm. Emotional harm. Yeah. Right. So what's weird though, is like I can't nicholas, he's like a tough person to paint with just one brush. Even though I totally disagree with what he dedicated his career to, he doesn't seem, at least from what I've read, including that American Prospect article, from somebody who was a patient of his for years. Right. He doesn't seem to have been like any sort of evil man or anything like that. I don't know if he just thought that this was a real thing and he was really helping me or what. But for example, there's this one quote from Gabriel Ariana who said that he had been like experimenting with sexual encounters with other men as a teenager. And he said that he'd been meeting men off of the internet and he told Nickelosi like, he's like, I trusted the guy enough to share this in therapy. And he said that Nickelosi, he told me to be careful meeting men off the internet, but that I shouldn't dwell on it or feel guilty. He said my sexual behavior was of secondary importance. If I understood myself and worked on my relationships with men, the attractions would take care of themselves. I just had to be patient. Which is, I mean, that's a pretty great thing for a therapist to tell a patient, right? Don't dwell on it, don't feel guilty, just accept it, move on and learn from it or whatever. And then the second part right. That's where it goes down. Yes. And so the thing is, with conversion therapy, in most cases, Nickelosi is like he's almost a shining example in a weird way, whereas other people associated with it, it's very easy to paint them with just one brush. So we should talk a little bit about the argument against a little bit more about the argument against, which includes a little bit more history. We talked about the earliest stages of conversion therapy in the late eighteen hundred s, but it really kind of picked up steam in the United States in the when the civil Rights movement, when gay people started coming out of the closet more, presenting themselves more in public, gay bars popping up things like that. Stonewall. Stonewall, of course, which anytime something like that is becoming a little more accepted in the mainstream, there's going to be another side that really roots down and digs in. And that's sort of how the modern gay conversion therapy movement was born. Was out of homosexuality becoming more accepted? Yeah. I read a really interesting journal article from 2007 by Robinson and Spivey. It was engender in society, the journal, and they basically looked into the X gay movement, not necessarily the psychology community's basis of it, but the later on, the adoption of it by the Christian right. And they explained why the Christian right would be interested in that, and they were interested in it and dug in, like you said, because they saw homosexuality and feminism in particular as signs of a decadent society that would eventually cause us to crumble and collapse. This is according to Robinson and Spy. I haven't actually interviewed anyone on the Christian Right who believes this, but they are academics, and this was a peer reviewed journal that masculinity is the antidote to that. It's the antidote to homosexuality. It's the antidote to feminism. And that it was up to each man to be a strong leader among women and children and to be as masculine as possible. That's how you did that? Yeah, I heard sermons every Sunday. Well, not every Sunday, but I heard sermons on many Sundays where they were still saying, wives, submit to your husband's straight out of the Bible. Yeah. And like most of the antidote is, dads, you're being way too passive. You need to step up and be the leader of your family. But also, Moms, you can help by saying, oh, you have a question? Ask your father. I defer to your father. Go ask your father. And just being passive. Well, which goes back to that triad you mentioned earlier about the domineering mother. Passive father equals gaps. That's basically the basis of the whole thing, from what I could tell, is that at least among the Christian Right, that if the father is not the dominant and leading figure in the family, that's where the trouble comes from, and that can produce homosexual children. Interesting. Yes. So something we failed to mention as part of the AMA's change in APA, and this is an important distinction, is that homosexuality, they deemed a normal variation, not deviation, but a variation in human sexual orientation, and like other normal sexual orientations, can't be changed. In other words, you can't make a straight person gay any more than you can make a gay person straight. Right. Is what that equals. And because of that, as we'll see later on, that became the basis for this idea that conversion therapy is in essence of fraud. Right. Because it purports to do something that can't be done. That's right. Should we take another break? Oh, man. Really? They're coming hard and fast like men swinging sides and sweaty shirts on. The field. Yeah. Let's take another break, and we'll talk about what might happen in conversion therapy right after this. All right, Chuck. I'm excited about this part. You're excited about the horror show of conversion therapy? It's not all horror show. Some of it is just outright laughable. Yeah. So statistically, also I'm sorry, everybody. I want to say something too. Okay? We typically try to be super objective. This one is very tough. We have science on our side too. This was really hard for me to research. Yes. Nothing is ever hard for me to research. This one was it was like turning over a log and finding it, like, maggots writhing underneath. That was what researching this one was like. I just kept putting it off. I just keep leaving it and just going and watching The Office or something like that. Just anything but researching this, because it's super sad. It is. That children are taken at their most vulnerable time in adolescence when they don't know what's going on and they're told that they're wrong and they're sinning and they're dirty. That is a part of why it's sad. Another part to me of why it's sad is that the idea that grown ups would direct this much thought and attention and effort into slamming their head up against a wall to try to change someone else to the way they think they should be right. That's at least as sad to me as the children being misdirected like this because a kid can go on and grow up and be like, jeez, my family was super messed up. I'm really glad I don't speak to them anymore, because I'm much happier over here. Right. Well, that can't happen in the ideal circumstance. Sure. Or the ideal circumstances that the family is just like, hey, we're really screwed up. We're really sorry. Right. We love you no matter who you are. But the idea that there's a group, a social movement dedicated to just eradicating another group of people, I find that very hard to swallow. Yeah, agreed. So apparently, statistically, about close to 700,000 people in the United States have undergone conversion therapy, and we should mention that it's a real problem in places like Africa and Asia and South America yeah. Where you can still be imprisoned for being gay. Like, Uganda is a big place for that. Conversion therapy is, like, on the rise in those places and other places. Right. But we're talking about the United States in this case, 700,000 people. And like we said, sometimes it is with a licensed therapist. Sometimes it's done by a religious advisor in a basement or at a church. You know what that reminded me of is another thing we need to talk about sometime is exorcisms. Like church exorcisms. We've done exorcism. We did, like, straight up Roman Catholic exorcism. Okay. I'm talking, like, the kind that somebody does in the basement of their house. Got you. Because they're supposedly an exorcist or something like that? Sure. Back door exorcism. Basically black market. You'll see, you'll be like, oh, man, we should be talking about this. All right. I agree already. I trust you. Okay, so the AMA says that conversion therapy programs may utilize harmful psychological techniques. We were talking earlier about aversion therapy, and given chemicals, they can still be given noxious stimulus, and I didn't see exactly what that entailed or could entail. There was a guy named Robert Gilbert Heath who was the father of implanting electrodes into the brain to deliver shocks. And one of the things he directed that toward was curing gay people. I don't think anyone in their basement is implanting electrodes or whatever. Right. But there are things like giving people, like nausea inducing medications is one showing them pictures that might nauseate them and then figuring out how to associate that with masturbating, the thoughts of other men or something like that. Yeah, we should talk about a few of these. Specifically, all you have to do is look up on a search engine, conversion therapy, horror stories, and there are plenty of people out there saying what happened to them. Yeah, look up. Also, conversion therapy. Super happy, fun story. You're going to come back with almost nothing. Google zero results. There was one teenager who said that he was forced to wear a backpack with \u00a340 of rocks 18 hours a day to just signify the physical burden of being gay. One person's family gave them a fake funeral, closed casket funeral in front of him where they said that he died of AIDS. And they said their final goodbyes because he went down the sinful path pretending he wasn't there. Like that he was dead and in the casket. Yes. Talking about him in third person. That's right. His family one reported being told to strip naked in front of a mirror and say disparaging things about themselves. I just do that normally, though. Well, I did read one account where they basically said the whole idea is to break you down to nothing in the worst way possible and then build you back up again in the image that they want. So I get the impression that that is one route, but that is not necessarily what you're going to get at any place you go for conversion therapy. There are other ones that say that's the problem is we don't know because so many people don't talk about it. Right. There's some that you would go to that say, okay, we're not going to abuse you or anything like that. But the basis of our beliefs in this is that you are gay because either you had an absent father, a domineering mother, some combination of the two, or you always wanted to be loved and popular among your male peers and you didn't get that. So now you are misdirecting this need, this unmet need toward having anonymous gay sex on the dance floor with some dude in Miami or whatever. So we need to figure out how to meet that need and have you hang out with guys who will tell you how cool you are and how popular you are. Yes. Like tailgating or something. Kind of. And while we're at it, we're going to do that by accenting the masculinity. We're going to teach you how to be masculine so that you can hang out with dudes in the real world, and they will think you're cool. So things like, we're going to teach you how to change the oil in your car. We're going to teach you to sit without crossing your legs. No joke. There was a guy who can teach out a manspread on the subway. There's a guy who's kind of a prominent thinker. I saw him as a sexologist, maybe a Christian sexologist. Gerhard van den our deleg It's pretty great. I think I nailed it. He said that homosexual men need to unlearn avoidance of getting their hands dirty, doing manual work like chopping wood, painting a house using a shovel. I say, no thanks to all three, I chop wood. That's kind of fun. It is fun. And that not necessarily just, here's an axe. Start chopping wood, you're going to just suddenly become cured. But that is part of it. Right. And in this thought, this tech where they're not abusing you, they're not degrading you or anything like that, they're teaching you masculinity. And, manliness, that the ultimate aim and goal of that is to go get married and have a kid. Right. Or kids. Right. And that is a big part of conversion therapy. It was for a very long time, was saying, you might still be gay or whatever, but you're not really gay. You're now married and you have a kid. And that is what you're dedicating yourself to. That's right. You're a wood chopping, football throwing dude with a pencil thin mustache. Oh, no, not that. So in 1974, we should talk about George Rutgers. He was a psychologist who tested whether or not this was an effective treatment. And this wasn't his boy, but this was his client, I guess. Clients. A weird way to put it. Sure. This child was forced to go to this person at four and a half years old. This is a boy manifesting, quote, childhood, cross gender identity. And they said this is based on the clothes that this boy wears. And now, of course, looking at this, it was probably a transgender child. Yeah. Or gender fluid. Yes. I mean, it's hard to tell because this was 1974. And the way they wrote about it, it's hard to kind of piece it together. Yeah. And it's also like, just how much of this behavior did this child exhibit? It makes it seem like this is all the kid did, was act like a girl when he was a boy. What else was he into? It's just such a narrow picture of the subject, of course. So in the end, records did something super damaging. He trained the boy's mother to be the therapist. Here's what you need to do so this kid can get 24/7 therapy from you and basically punish feminine behaviors, reinforce masculine behaviors at all times. And they said that, hey, this is working because every time this boy gets punished for doing something feminine, he stops and chops wood or throws the football and gets a reward. So because he's four and a half years old, he's doing the things that their parents congratulate him for and reward him for. Right. And not doing the things that he's getting punished for. Exactly. The punishment is what stood out to me. It's just so sad that the mother was instructed to reject him, to basically ignore him when he acted like a girl, but not ignore him. Like, pretend it's not going on. Let him know that she is giving him the cold shoulder and that that's how he learned. Right. That is just devastating. It's heartbreaking. And what's heartbreaking is this was used as an example. Like, see, this works. This four and a half year old is now acting more masculine and is not going to grow up to be gay. And this child died by suicide at the age of 30. That's the end result of this road. That's where it ends up. And that's what I meant earlier when I said it does kind of work because it follows psychological techniques that actually work. But it works in like, kind of a bent way where, yes, you can train somebody, you can mold a four year old to behave in a certain way by conditioning them. It's possible you can get somebody to do just about anything like that. But the ramifications, the results, the damage to the individual's identity that will eventually come out later are widespread in sweeping. Yeah, and that's the point. That's why you shouldn't monkey around with somebody's identity using proven psychological techniques. That's what's so evil about the whole thing. Yeah. I mean, my daughter is four and a half. Had a hard time even getting through this stuff. And then also, if somebody this is the other thing, too. If you're a conversion therapy advocate or activist or practitioner and you say no, there are people out there who are distressed, who are experiencing psychological distress for being gay. Yes, that's true. I guarantee that there are people like that out there. But directing them toward working on not being gay is not the answer. Yes, go to regular therapy and learn to love that you're gay and go find a church that accepts gay people. There's step two. Yeah, because they're out there. Let's talk about the science of it, because we are so contributing to a decadent society. In 2009, there was a report from the APA task force on appropriate therapeutic responses to sexual orientation. Quite a read. And this was the actual final stance was sexual orientation change efforts can pose critical health risks to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Critical health risks, not emotional. I mean, it's part of emotional health, too, sure, but critical health risks. And if you read the review of research and peer reviewed literature and the findings of what it can result in, it reads like the worst pharma ad disclaimer you've ever heard. Depression, guilt, hopelessness, hopelessness, shame, selfhatred hostility, dehumanization, betrayal, social withdrawal, substance abuse, stress, sexual dysfunction, loss of faith, and suicidality. And on that last note, homosexual teens attempt suicide more often than heterosexual teens. And then among those homosexual teens, you're twice as likely to try that if your parents have rejected you and three times as likely if you have undergone conversion therapy. Three times as likely? Yes. Compared to a heterosexual team. That's right. Well, you have it. That was just the EPA. A bunch of different associations like legit, medical and psychological associations have come out and condemned in no uncertain terms conversion therapy. Right. And all of these condemnations basically follow two different tactics. One, there is no science backing up the idea that you can change somebody from homosexuality to heterosexuality. Right. And number two, there is science backing up the idea that trying to do that causes damage to the individual. So don't do that. And as a matter of fact, some countries and states in the United States have said, this is outlawed. You can't do this anymore, everybody. Which is really touchy stuff, because, again, the Christian Right kind of adopted it, and we don't really infringe on religious beliefs, but that's how strong these condemnations have been that they're saying, we'll kind of start to wade into that with this one. Yeah. And we'll talk about the legalities of recent years in a SEC. But before that, between the APA stance changing things a little bit, then through the where conversion therapy was really sort of hitting its peak, I think in America, there were a few high profile cases that were exposed that have helped sway things a little bit back to sanity in more recent years. Yeah. So before those high profile cases, and I mean right before them, I think in 1998, a coalition of church groups got together and sponsored an ad campaign, something like a $600,000 ad campaign, and things like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, all this. And this ad featured John and I believe, Anne Paul, both of whom were formerly gay, but were now ex gay and married and had a kid and said, gay conversion helps. And at the time, there wasn't a lot of ink on the other side saying, actually, this is totally discredited, and it captured everybody's attention. And this is when the Christian Right came in and said, we're going to make this huge push in the culture of war. And it really worked. That's when that Newsweek story came out. Yeah. They were on the cover of Newsweek. He was the leader of an ex gay organization called Exodus international. John park was right. And it brought a lot of yeah, he was the poster boy. Yeah. Exodus International in particular became one of two main umbrella organizations. They were kind of like I saw it put the spiritual version of the ex gay movement, and then something called Narth, the national association for research and Therapy of Homosexuality was like the scientific branch of the ex gay movement. Right. So Exodus international became a very well known prominent organization in the late ninety s. But within two, three years, it would basically be the poster child for how conversion therapy doesn't work. Right. Because John Paulk is gay. In 2000, just two years later, he was photographed coming out of a gay bar in Washington DC. At the time, he refuted that. He didn't refute that. He was there. He said what you always say. I didn't know it was a gay bar. I went in there asking for directions. No, I saw he went into use the bathroom. No, either way, I just read the article and then they were like, but you're in there for a couple of hours. Did you get the directions and use the bathroom? It clearly says blue oyster and neon. Have you not seen the police academy movies? That was the name of it in the police academy. Right. The Blue Oyster park in John Pawk, we should say, now lives as a gay man and is a chef. He's been on some celebrity chef shows. Is that right? Cool. And he is living his best life. He's living his best life from what it looks like. So he's no longer married any longer to Anne, actually, that I don't know, because there are some we'll keep going. I don't think he is, but there are a couple of people that are. In 2003, Michael Johnston, he was another person touted as an ex gay success story, founder of national, coming out of homosexuality day, he was found out to be having sex with men that he met online and infected them with HIV. Very big deal. And then there's Ted Haggard, of course, in 2006. I remember this. Yeah. He's a preacher and president of the national association of Evangelicals, or was at the time, I guess very much an anti gay leader in the religious circles. And this one sort of unfolded little by little, like, hey, this guy came out and said, this guy had a relationship with me for like three years. We did crystal meth together. And then Hager came out and said, so cliche. You know what, I have to admit I said I bought crystal meth, but I didn't use it. I threw it in the trash because I wouldn't succumb to the sin. Is that what he said? Yeah, he says he did buy crystal meth because I assume there was proof. And he said that he didn't use it at all. He threw it in the trash before he used it, where the other guy was like, no, we did tons of math and had gay sex a lot. I know you're talking about on, like, day four of us staying up. He, like, freaked out and threw it in the trash. But then he went back and got it, and the proof was that he paid for it by check, maybe? No, probably not. I don't think meth dealers take checks anymore. And then he was outed by having a relationship with an underage boys, a sexual relationship. This is Ted Haggard again. Yeah. And the boy sued, and it was settled by the church with a dollar figure. I think it was like 180 grand. And then finally in 2011, Ted Haggard comes out and is like, all right, so I did have a relationship with a boy, but we never touched each other. I just masturbated in front of them. I threw them in the trash. And in 2011, he said, you know what? I'm bisexual. I'm going to admit it. I am bisexual, but I am going to choose to live my life as a faithful heterosexual husband to my wife. I wonder if after he admitted that it came out as bisexual, what that felt like, if he felt like a weight was lifted or if the anxiety associated with it was just so much or what his wife knew or didn't know or thought about it. I'd be very curious to know what that, you know, what life has been like for him after that. I mean, he's a preacher again, because, I mean, more power to him. If he's like, I'm a Christian and I'm just not going to have gay sex, that's as much a personal choice as having gay sex. The whole underage boy thing, that's a huge problem that I think I'm hoping was addressed. But I wonder what his life is like now. Like I said, he's preaching again. I think in Colorado, he's probably a stuff you should know. Listener Haggard, right in. Yeah. We'd like to hear from you, sir. Do you want to talk about the law? Because right now oh, wait, there was one more. Chuck there's a big one. Who? Allen Chambers. Yeah. So John Paul, when he was outed cruising the Blue Oyster in DC back in 2000, he was running Exodus International. Yes. He was replaced a couple of years later by Alan Chambers. And about a decade after Chambers took over Exodus International, he said, I'm gay. I've been gay. Conversion therapy doesn't work. We're shutting down Exodus international. Yeah. And I apologize to the LGTBQ community. Yes. So within about a decade or so of the Christian right adopting the ex gay and conversion therapy pillar post as part of the platform for their culture, war, the biggest organization, one of two biggest organizations dedicated to conversion therapy, said, it doesn't work. We're sorry, gay people, for all the damage we've done. That's a pretty big turn of events. It is. Yet it still continues. That led to a bunch of laws that are trying to keep it from continuing. Yeah. And the laws are basically usually around minors saying you cannot force a minor to do something like this, not pay. The whole thing is outlawed. If you're an adult and you want to go do this, then that's up to you. As of 2019, this year, 18 states and Washington, DC and Puerto Rico have similar bands enacted. And also it's important to point out that those bands are about the legitimate scientific community. Like, you will have your license revoked, does not say anything about a preacher that you go to or a youth counselor or any sort of non licensed church there. Right. It's only scientists or licensed counselors or psychologists or psychiatrists or doctors, I'm sure, who can lose their license if they practice it. That's right. But yeah, that's because there's religious freedom, I guess. If you can still do that to minors, though, if it's a religious group doing it. That is what I'm not sure about. Well, it depends on the state. So there was a group or there was a counseling organization called Jonah and Jonah. Is this goldberg and Burke? Yes, they ran Jonah, which stood for I can't find it anywhere. I got to hear Jews offering a new alternative for healing. OK. They were not only found practicing in New Jersey conversion therapy, so they both lost their licenses. They were also sued in a civil suit by former patients for fraud and lost it's. Interesting. Think about it. Wait a minute. If this is not possible, you're charging people for it. Right. That's fraud. So they had like a three and a half million dollars settlement levied against them and lost their licenses, but then they just set up shop under another name, apparently the same year of the verdict in the civil suit. But for the most part, if you're a state and you pass a law banning conversion therapy to minors among medical practitioners or counselors, the courts are going to uphold that law. Yeah. It's been upheld in California and New Jersey. Most of the challenges are on the grounds of free speech. And the New Jersey, when they upheld the New Jersey, or maybe it was Maryland, the judge said, we're not infringing on your free speech. You can say whatever you want, but you can't practice this therapy. Right. That's different than free speech. You can believe what you want, say what you want, but you can't do this as part of your license therapy. It's the same thing. It's like if you carry out quack cancer treatment that is harmful, like you're poisoning your patients or whatever, and they lose the use of their arms and legs because of a treatment that you gave them for cancer that the American Medical Association has specifically said is damaging and harmful, you're totally going to get held accountable for that. You're lucky to just lose your license in that case. This is the exact same principle. Yeah, for sure. So because it deals mostly with minors or exclusively with minors, the courts have upheld it. But New York City actually is widely considered to have overstepped its bounds and actually misstepped in this kind of culture war about conversion therapy in banning the practice among minors and adults. Right. And that got New York City sued, and New York City was like, well, the Supreme Court has actually gotten pretty conservative lately. I don't know if we should test this. And they repealed the ban. Yeah. As a strategy. Right. To keep it from getting tested in the Supreme Court. Supreme Court could say, no, all laws against conversion therapy are unconstitutional. You can't outlaw it or ban it in any form. Yeah. And I think the Supreme Court already refused to hear one case which actually upheld the state's outlaw of conversion therapy. Right. Yeah. Very interesting. There's a movie I haven't seen yet called The Mis Education of Cameron Post. It's a 2018 film from the 2012 novel by Emily Danforth. I haven't seen it yet, but it's about a girl who undergoes conversion therapy, and it's Chloe Grace Moritz. Moritz. You know her? I do. I can't put the face with the name, but I know both. Yeah, you've seen it for sure. If you want to know more about arrested development, conversion therapy, all that stuff, you can, well, I guess start researching online, see what you think. And since I said, see what you think, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this complaint Pedantic Complaint. Okay. I write to complain. Josh, in the episode on historic districts, you kept referring to them repeatedly with the indefinite article and rather than a and historic district, I said, Anne. That's what he says. That sounds unusual. I don't usually do that. Really? I guess I was just being unconsciously. Correct? Is that correct? Yeah. So what's the rule? But I don't even know what I just said. That's the rule. That's the rule. What I say. Okay. I try not to exercise it too much. Okay, good. Only when I'm right. Joe says this I realize this, infuriating practice has become popular in recent years in the US. I feel passionately that it must be discontinued, especially primarily by those voices or attended by large audiences like you. You are no doubt aware of the letter H as a consonant necessitating. Jeez. Nice. The use of the indefinite article A rather than an citation. All grammar books ever. I should limit the scope of my gripe with an important caveat. Cockneys. They should probably continue to say Anne because they pronounce it historic. This guy doesn't even know that the rhyming slang episode is coming out. How weird. But, guys, that's not really what I write today. I love the show. I wanted to tell you I wanted to wait for a halfway plausible pretense to make the email a little more fun, which I hope this has been any chance on an episode of How Pet and Tree Works. Keep up the good work, Joe. He's spoken fun. Turns out he's good peeps after all. Yes. Is the ann before an H? Is that a thing? Is it? Yeah. I don't know if it's proper or not, but I understand where it comes from because the vowel that comes right after the H is usually so heavily pronounced in relation to how it's pronounced when it comes after other continents. Like an historic district and historic district sounds an honor. Which one sounds better? Like, I was bestowed in honor? Yes, the other way. But you wouldn't say dog vomit. In high school, I had a history teacher. That was great. It's really weird. Did Joe tell you to say that? No, I just thought of it because history teacher. I had a historic yeah, both work. How about this? We're both right, Joe. Try not to focus on such stupid stuff. I'm curious if I really want to know the rule now, because I know it's Constantine, but if people are saying it these days, is that just some sort of fighting the system? That's the Descriptivist way prescriptivist is like, no, it's this way. Right, Joe's? The prescriptivist here we're describing. All right. I think we've proven ourselves that maybe we should launch a side podcast called The Descriptivist. Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. Almost has, like a Civil War era folk band feel to it. We'd have to curly cues that one. That's fine. We're not going to do that. We could get fake ones that we just took on and offered publicity. Right, Scalp Mob? Right. If you want to get in touch with us like Joe did, have a little quibble, a little gripe or praise or whatever. You can go on to Stuffyoushineknow.com and check us out. Our social links are all up there. You can also 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 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. 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, Miffed 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." | |
Is the Dead Sea dead? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-the-dead-sea-dead | An anomaly of geography, the shores of Dead Sea form the lowest dry spot on Earth. It's been visited by millions, including King Herod and Cleopatra, all seeking the health benefits of this saline lake. Learn about this unusual spot with Josh and Chuck. | An anomaly of geography, the shores of Dead Sea form the lowest dry spot on Earth. It's been visited by millions, including King Herod and Cleopatra, all seeking the health benefits of this saline lake. Learn about this unusual spot with Josh and Chuck. | Tue, 03 Jul 2012 16:59:41 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=16, tm_min=59, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=185, tm_isdst=0) | 23778606 | 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 Capital One's top rated app, you can deposit checks and transfer money anytime, time, anywhere, making Capital One an even easier decision that's banking reimagined what's in your wallet terms apply. Capital One NA member FDIC 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 amazonandhalopets.com 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. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. And you put us together and throwing a couple of microphones, little Jar pottery. And you've got stuff you should Know. If you get my chocolate and your peanut butter, then we make a delicious extra large Reese's cup. Extra large is a lot of body hair. Yeah. You can pick that out, though. You can eat around it. You want to pick it up before you eat, though, because getting off the road. Chest hair. Chuck? Yes. Are you familiar with the Dead Sea? I am, and I really want to go get in it one day. Okay. I would like to, too. Yeah. Especially because I am particularly interested in what I've come to term geographical ironies. And there is no greater geographical irony than the Dead Sea because it's called the Dead Sea, but it's dying. Yeah. That's pretty ironic. It is. And sad. Well, yeah, that may not have come across in my flip tone, but I think it's sad. Yeah. And it's not called the Dead Sea because of its properties. I'm sorry? It is called the Dead Sea because properties. It's not called the Dead Sea because it's dying. No, but which makes it ironic after thousands and thousands and eons of years, people have been going to this awesome little spot forever. It's in real danger. And it's, of course, thanks to humans, and we'll get to that. But the Dead Sea is an example of a vanishing tourist attraction. There's a lot of places that have been listed and identified as this place isn't going to be around in 50 years, so if you're interested, you better go now. Agreed. The Dead Sea is definitely one of them. They think that by 2050, it's possible it won't be there. Whatever it is, there is not going to be anything worth visiting. Unless you want to go cry I think there is. And fill it with your salty tears. Maybe that's what we should do. Yeah. I don't even have the stat in front of me, but I believe I read today that it's falling by about a meter per year. Yes, that is correct. Is that right. Yeah. Which is scary because as everyone who doesn't live in the US. Knows, a meter is almost 3ft. It's over 3ft. It's a certain amount of feet. It's more than a yard. All right, let's talk about the Dead Sea as a whole. Well, yeah, there's a reason why you should care about this. This is a really interesting, unique place. It has some really awesome qualities to it. So herein we're going to describe why you should be sad that the Dead Sea is dying. That's right. It is. First of all, here's some unique properties of the Dead Sea. It is 1300ft, 396 meters below sea level, and it shores that surround it are literally the lowest points on planet Earth. The lowest drive point. Yeah. Right. Yeah, sure. It's not like the bottom of the ocean, but you're basically bathing in a lake, 1300ft below the ocean. And it is a lake. It's a terminal lake. It's not a sea terminal, meaning that water flows in and it doesn't flow out. The only way that water leaves it is by evaporation, which is super interesting. Well, that's what gives it amazing properties. Yeah. Break the news. Can I? For people that don't know this. Thank you very much. So you have water flowing it's main tributaries, the Jordan River, or for Bibliophiles, I guess. Bibliophiles. The river Jordan. Not the Jordan River. Yeah, sure. They like to flip that. And like you said, it comes in, but it doesn't go out. But it evaporates. Well, the Jordan River doesn't just bring fresh water into the Dead Sea. It brings a lot of salty brackish water as well. Big time. Okay, so because this is in one of the hottest places on Earth, the water evaporates pretty quickly. Right? Yeah. Otherwise it would be overflowing, which would be kind of awesome. Exactly. But because of this evaporation, the salt crystals are left behind, mineral salts. And so water that comes in, whether fresh or otherwise, it just increases in more and more and more concentration. Which is why the Dead Sea is one of the saltiest places on Earth. Yeah. And have you seen the photos of the huge accumulations of these minerals? I guess just various salt minerals. They look like sculptures almost in places. Yeah, it looks like crystal outcroppings. Yeah, it's about 250 sq mi. It is surrounded by the West Bank, Israel, and Jordan, which also makes it they're trying to get these neighbors to agree on how to best manage this place. And it's hard to get that area to agree on a lot. Yeah. So that's one of the reasons, I think that there are issues. It's hard to get these folks to the table sometimes. Agreed. All right, well put. Thank you. So you've got water coming in, you have water staying terminally. Did you know also Atlanta's original name was Terminus? I did. Which makes the Dead Sea a terminal, like you said. And the salt that's coming in is not like table salt or anything. It's actually well known for 35 mineral salts that the sea boasts, like calcium, bromine, potassium, magnesium, iodine. But the thing that makes the Dead Sea so significant salt wise is that the concentrations of this, because of the unique setup of the water flowing in and evaporating, it's so salineyanish, but compared to an ocean, it just the salinity of any ocean. Yeah. I think the Saltiest Ocean is somewhere between three to 6% salty and 28% to 35%. I generally see about 33% in the Dead Sea, which is 6% for the Saltiest Ocean. Like the kind of ocean where you yeah. On the highest level on the high end and like, five times that. Five, six times that for the Dead Sea. Yeah. It's amazing. As a result of this, people are like, well, this is just great. This is healthful. Yeah. What does this mean? It means a bunch of things. First of all, it means proven through physics and just general observation, you float with no trouble whatsoever because of the incredible density of the sea water in the Dead Sea. Yeah. And another fun thing you can do is go to Google Images and Google Dead Sea float, and you will see lots of pictures of people laying virtually on top of the water, reading books and newspapers. And it's pretty funny. Yeah. It looks like an illusion almost. It does. Yeah. It looks like it's been Photoshopped. That's right. So you've got the fact that you can float, but there's a lot of people who claim healthful benefits of the Dead Sea. And I was looking this up, like, there's entire companies like, what is the name of it? The Dead Sea Research Center. Dead Seaworks. There's a lot of, like, cosmetics, skin care products, all the stuff that are associated with the Dead Sea and that use Dead Sea minerals and all that. And they all boast all sorts of what appear to be snake oil properties. Emily used to sell Dead Sea mud masks, but she doesn't anymore. How come? I think the cost of getting the Dead Sea mud was cost prohibitive for her. Okay. And it wasn't a big seller. It was an economic decision. But it wasn't because it was, like, fraudulent. No. Okay. Well, I was looking. Okay. And I couldn't find a lot, but I did find some stuff where there have been studies on, like, Utah Salt Lake yeah, sure. The effects of that. And there's been some studies on the Dead Sea, and they found that it does have demonstrable effects on things like arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis. It reduces the symptoms of that fibromyalgia. Yes. Eczema. It's been shown to reduce that. And basically just generally improving the health of your skin. Yeah. Any kind of skin, like psoriasis or anything going on with your skin, it should help. Right. And these were studies that were carried out by, like, published in pure reviewed journals. So I mean, they're legitimate studies. Well, it's got 35 minerals. It's got to be good for you, right? And in very high concentrations. Sure. So it's not just the minerals in the Dead Sea itself. Like the mud is like you're saying Emily sold a mud pack. Yeah. Mud mask. Yes. You can just walk up on the shore in some places and scoop up the mud, and then, bam, there's your mud mask. And get that rich in nutrients. So it's not much of a surprise that people have kind of flocked to this as a natural spa for a very long time. Yeah. And I think even before I mean, they did it back in biblical days, even before we had all these studies, I think they realized some of the properties. Right. And apparently the sun there is filtered. The UV rays are filtered because of the atmosphere. Yeah. Is that right? The atmospheric pressure, because it's so far below sea level, it filters a lot of the UV rays out. So laying out is, I guess, better for you. Laying out. I remember that back in the day. Go layout. Yeah, exactly. Work on the tan. It's the layout. Do you lay out? Oh, yeah. I believe it. Which is basically just like napping or reading in the sun. Exactly. That's what it amounts to. Yeah. Like, I don't have, like, little goggles. Yeah. Or a stock. 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 an industry. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. 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. 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And then they of course also suggest optional psychological counseling and follow up consultation with a medical professional. Right. That's like a seven step special, right? Yeah, it's like good for the mind and body, right? That's what they say. But yeah, you can apparently travel to the area and there are plenty of places where you just show up and you're like, I have rheumatoid arthritis. And they say, okay, well, come with us and we're going to take you to the Dead Sea and put you through this procedure. Sulfur bath. Salt bath. Yeah. I think it's a lot like going to Battle Creek in the 19th century and hanging out with Dr. Kellogg. Oh, yeah. That Battle Creek. Yeah. Okay, sure. Yeah. That'd be kind of cool. Because that means we have a time machine. Exactly. What we do. Another property of the Dead Sea. And what this mineral and salt content does that we haven't mentioned is it kills everything, which is why it's called the Dead Sea. It kills almost everything. Almost everything, yes, you're right. Like there's no seaweed in there. There's no fish in there. No. There's no scum on the top of it. No, there's no nothing. Like when you walk into the Dead Sea, the only other living beings in there yeah. What does it support? Like tiny amoeba or something? Bacteria. Califilic bacteria, which means salt loving. And they're considered extremophiles because the environment they live in is so inhospitable to any other life that the fact that there's this type of bacteria that can live in there is pretty amazing. They're like akin to the same types of life that live near, like, sulfuric, 300 degree undersea vents. That's an extremophile. You should do an extreme of file podcast. We totally should. And we will. I think we should. I have some other little factoids I drew up, not myself, but I found when we said thousands of years, what we really meant was millions of years. I said, eons. I did you? Yeah. Okay. It's been around for about 3 million years and in the Bible they actually say that the Dead Sea will one day come alive and be full of marine life. That would be surprising. I'm not so sure if that's going to happen, considering the sailing content. Unless what they meant was one day it's going to dry out completely and they will open a marine park there or something, maybe, because that's about the only way it's going to happen. It's really bitter. It's not going to taste salty like table salt and it's kind of stinky. They used to call it the Stinky Sea hundreds of years ago, apparently. Did they really? That's what it says. And the Greeks called it lake because asphalt will rise to the surface. At times. The natural asphalt got you not roads that were built underneath 3 million years ago. And Cleopatra was a big fan. Cleopatra and King Herod built the town of Masada as, like a little Dead Sea playground for himself. Yeah, like a little resort. So nothing's living there except people. And it is dying itself, though. And this is when we come to, I guess, a sad portion. Well, not yet. You mentioned the Bible. Yeah, it definitely has ties to the Bible. Obviously, it's in a pretty biblical region. But the River Jordan is supposedly where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. Yeah. And it's also where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. Oh, yeah, of course. So from 1957 to 1958, this amazing goat herder found a bunch of Hebrew manuscripts. The same guy who invented cheese? No, this is a different one. That was France. What if it was the same dude? That was great. Timmy rogueford that invented cheese. That's right. This guy is a different one. Although I wonder if he's related to the rogueforth of France. Anyway, he found a bunch of scrolls of Hebraic scrolls that were written from the third century BC to the second century Ad. And they basically were just like, hey, here's what's going on in this area right now. We'll just write it down and hide them for posterity. And apparently, it's like one of the greatest archaeological finds ever as far as people are concerned, because it gave a real peak into this time when Christianity was starting out then. Sure. And I've read recently there's a lot of controversy over who they think wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yeah. And I'm not sure where they've landed on that, but of course there's controversy. Anything that old, it's not going to have a little author's signature on it. Right. So check. Now we get to the depressing part. I know, I was almost excited, but then I remember what we were talking about. The Dead Sea is actually dying, meaning the River Jordan is being diverted along the way because they need water in that area to support people in agriculture just being diverted via dams and things like that. To the extent that the Dead Sea is evaporating more than it's filling up these days, well, consider this. In the fifties, the Dead Sea used to get, like, 1.3 billion fresh water a day. Wow. Now it's 50 million. Yeah. That's a sharp drop. 50 million compared to 1.3 billion. Yeah. That's a lot of drop off. Yeah. So, yeah, it's starting to dry up really fast. Yeah. And luckily well, we'll see what happens. But luckily, there are people and organizations that are on this big time because of not only the cultural significance, but the Dead Sea, despite it being dead in the water, supports, like, a really vast ecosystem around it. And if the Dead Sea went away, that would not be good for this ecosystem. Yeah, but again, it's a tough one. I mean, people need to drink water. We've done a podcast on how long can you survive without food and water. And you can go a long time without food, but water gets you in a couple of days. Yeah, so that's a tough one. And a lot of people have said, hey, you know what? Let's just build a canal. The Red Seas over there. The Dead Sea is right here. All we need is, like, 135 miles of canal and we'll just flood the Dead Sea with Red Sea. People went. No, hold on. Let's go with something else. Because the Dead Sea salt content, mineral content, would be disrupted at that point and just wouldn't be what it is. Yeah, it almost sounds like they're like, we'll just let it die. Well, we'd rather it die than become less salty. Yeah, just another inland sea. Like, look at all those people out there floating, reading their newspaper, and all of a sudden they drop the moment they canal. Where are we going to do this? It is a canal pipeline. The project is called the Two Seas Canal, and it is fairly controversial on several fronts. One is that it's going to cost about $5 billion, which is not cheap. It would include a desalination plant to generate fresh water. And the good news, it would be a symbol of cooperation between these often worn countries that surround it. That would be awesome. So that would be good. But a lot of environmentalists are saying that it's a threatened lake. In 2006, it was the threatened lake of the year. I didn't know they had such a designation, but I guess it's good they did. Well, the global nature funded they call it that. Yeah. And one of their project directors said, we call it the threatened Lake of the Year in 2006, and we could easily do it again for 2010. Don't even make us right. Don't try to call my bluff. I guess they didn't know because it's 2012. Yeah. But they are proposing some alternatives. They're saying that the spokesperson for what is it? Friends of the Middle East. Yeah. Friends of the Earth in the Middle East. Friends of the Earth in the Middle East. The Israeli branch is saying, you know what? We can actually return a lot of water to the River Jordan through conservation and less agricultural use. Well, that's the case everywhere. I mean, remember we've talked about this before. 93% of agricultural water use, it goes to evaporation or runoff. It's so inefficient. Agricultural water use is so inefficient. And then even like here in our dear town of Atlanta, we have the leakiest sewer system in the developed world, and we lose tons of water every day to it. And it's just like, well, it's lost. Yeah. So a lot of environmentalists are saying some huge engineering solution is not always the best solution. I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'd love to see the Dead Sea saved, but I also want the people in the Middle East to grow crops. Well, yeah. And live. Agreed. So I guess right now, as it stands, no one's quite figured out what to do. Yeah. I think this year, actually, they have sunk quite a few million dollars into a pretty vast study on this canal pipeline project and seeing if it's the best alternative. Cool. So I guess we'll find out maybe later this year what they're going to do. I would say get you to the Dead Sea ASAP, because if nobody does anything 2050 cut off date. Yeah. And it's just going to get sadder and sadder if there's like if it's like the size of a swimming pool eventually and there's like two dudes floating in it. Yeah, that would be sad. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's it for the Dead Sea, right? We got to explain everything. That's it for the Dead Sea. Potentially. That's it for us in the Dead Sea. Oh, sure. If you want to learn more about the Dead Sea, you can type Dead and C into the search bar athouseauforks.com. And does that bring up what does that bring up? Man we got a few quick things to plug and then we will get to listen to mail. Okay, like what? 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 and overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that roll up their own sleeves. IBM, let's create learn more@ibm.com. 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 teletoc 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 Directtoconsumer 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 Tedoc. comStuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JDPower. comAWARDS. All right, so now listen to Ma'am. Yes. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this Antarctic reply, and it's not about penguins and polar bears, thank goodness. Although she did put that in there, but I erased that part. Shannon actually lived there for three summers. I was a technician at a terrestrial Arctic base in Alaska, and several of my co workers spent in the Northern Hemisphere working on Antarctica. Actually, she was in Alaska to get back. Yeah, that's north. That's right. The Antarctica south. That's right. We know that she had friends that worked in Antarctica. Okay. It's so picky people. From that experience, I can personally tell you that while life at the Poles is basic, it is far from primitive. Antarctica has stores, bars, saunas, and even a pair of ATMs. While many of these amenities are not available to tourists, it doesn't change the fact that Antarctic bases are designed for comfortable long term habitation. Also, there is actually a fair amount to do there. Every community has trails for walking, skiing, or snow chewing. The larger base just basically three kinds of walking. We have three kinds of walking to do here in the snow. The large bases have exercise areas. Scientists host lectures, holiday celebrations, and game tournaments. Cool. I imagine they probably play the little slide game shuffle board now. The shuffle board on ice hockey. Yeah. Curling. Curling. Thank you. The permanent bases have libraries. And honestly, there's always someone who has an interesting story to tell. The temporary bases, when they abandoned them, they just set the library on fire, I think. So then the most important part of polar life is the food. And this doesn't surprise. Usually when you're stuck like that, you take your food pretty seriously, because that's, like, the one thing that you can have. Right. Penguins are delicious. That's what she says. Actually, food is the lifeblood of any Antarctic camp or base, and the staff does her best to make sure that every meal is plentiful and delicious. On the medical front, at least on the American side of things, it's not nearly as basic as you described. In fact, many Antarctic communities have medical support that is comprehensive and available at towns of the same size that is available at towns of the same size in Canada or Alaska. The bases have equipment to do emergency surgery if needed, and they have ICUs capable of treating everything from burns to hypothermia. And if you need extra stuff, then it can be air drop. She said in the dead of winter even, you just want to look out. That's right. Look out ahead, above. All right. That is from Shannon, who has spent time in Alaska and knows a bunch of people there. That's awesome. Knows a bunch of people in Antarctica. Thanks a lot for that, Shannon. We appreciate it. Let's see if you know something about something we've talked about that we didn't talk about or just something you want to supplement. Something we've spoken about. If you floated on the Dead Sea, I'd like to hear that. That's a good one. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyhatnow, or you can send us an email 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? 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 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 leading brands. Find Halo Elevate at tech, co, pep Supplies, plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | ||
10 Big Cases of Revenge | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/10-big-cases-of-revenge | Who doesn't love a good story about comeuppance? Whether served cold or piping hot, revenge is an ancient idea -- and history is filled with acts of vengeance. Join Josh and Chuck as they trace the concept of revenge from the bygone days of Hammurabi to t | Who doesn't love a good story about comeuppance? Whether served cold or piping hot, revenge is an ancient idea -- and history is filled with acts of vengeance. Join Josh and Chuck as they trace the concept of revenge from the bygone days of Hammurabi to t | Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:01:15 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=17, tm_min=1, tm_sec=15, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=87, tm_isdst=0) | 42850086 | 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. What if you were a global energy company with customers in different places on different systems? So you call an IBM and Red Hat to create an open hybrid cloud platform. Now, data is available anywhere, securely. Let's create a hybrid cloud that can change an industry. 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. There's charles W. Chuck Bryant. That makes the stuff you should know. Jerry's in the other room. Yes. Being quiet as commanded. Yeah. How are you doing? I'm great. I feel like I haven't mentioned Jerry once in a while. She's got a character playing she's a character on our TV pilot. There's an actress playing her. Right. Although you thought to have that removed. Right. All over the place. I was like, we need less Jerry, less Gerry. Not true. That's not true. So revenge. I'm a big revenge guy. Oh, you are, huh? Well, no, that sounds bad. I'm a big comeupant sky and justice guy. Sideline root. When people get their come up and justice is served, it's a very satisfying experience for me. Well, friend, you would have done well to have lived in Babylon around the BC. Oh, yeah. With the gardens. I love that stuff. Yeah, they were hanging gardens. I would have been all over it. Yeah, gardens figured heavily, prominently in Babylon. Sure. Especially Chuck. I think you would have enjoyed living under King Hamu. Rabbi. Yeah, the code. He's the guy who came up with a code. We take it. That whole eye for an eye thing, that you would stand on the sidelines, like, take out his eye. Take out his eye. He took the other guy's eye. I'm not like that. Because people are going to think I'm some violent person. No, it can come in many forms. I know exactly what you're talking about. Like Shawshank or Brooks Hung himself. No, come up. It's against the warden. That's satisfying to me, to see that in a movie. I don't remember what happened to the warden. Refresh my memory. Well, he ended up boy, should I not spoil it? I think it's fine. He ended up shooting himself as the cops descended upon him. What did he do wrong? What did he do wrong? He held Andy there for years, knowing he was innocent. He had the guy shot and killed, who Andy had tutored to get his GED, who had information that would get his release from, like when NEA melrose Place or something like that. Allie McDowell. Yeah, I think it was Allie McDonald. And then he squandered money from what do you call it? Pension. Yeah, not squandered. He bet. No, stole money, essentially embezzled money from the prison coffers it wasn't the warden play by Burl Ives or something. I remember him as like a grandfather type, very supporting, nurturing fellow. No, he was played by that guy that can't ever play anything again because of that movie. Weird. I have a list of revenge movies we can go over later. Okay. Yeah, there's plenty of those. Remember, there's a whole exploitation subgenre, like I spit on Your grave. That's on the list. But anyway, back to the Code of Hamurabi we take for granted these days, chuck the I for an eye. But this is literally the beginning of that and the beginning of systemic, uniform, socially sanctioned revenge. Sure. That's the justice system. It's revenge. It's like you did something and we're going to get you back for that. You're going to be punished. It's revenge. Yeah. That's the whole basis of the justice system. People can hem and haw about reform and stuff like that, but come on, it's revenge. It's punishment, it's reason. I'm not saying it should or shouldn't be like that. I'm just saying right. You can dress it up all you want, you can do whatever you can to, but when you boil it down, I think is what we're both saying. The whole basis of the justice system is revenge. And the Code of Hammurabi is the beginning of this, and it's also the beginning of the eye for an eye thing. If I may, there's a couple like, the Code of Hammurabi kind of deals with stuff that people were dealing with at the time. Sure. And it goes far beyond, like if you kill somebody you're killed, it gets kind of specific. One of my favorites is if a fire break out in the house and someone who comes to put it out cast his eye upon the property of the owner of the house and take the property of the master of the house, he shall be thrown into that self same fire. So a looter, essentially, you get thrown into the fire you came to help put out and then basically shirk your moral obligation by stealing instead of helping fight the fire. That's my favorite. Also, there's a lot about runaway slaves harboring runaway slaves, stealing slaves. If you find a couple of slaves and you want to bring them back to the owner, the owner owes you two shekels of silver. It deals with inheritance law. If a son who inherits his father's land is still too young and can't take possession of his field, a third of the field will go to the mother who basically is paid to raise them. Although I think she's going to do that anyway. Sure, but it's a uniform code, especially dealing with revenge, right? Yes. I say all this to tell you that revenge is very old, Chuck. It is. And that's the code, I bet took revenge over the caveman who wronged him in very primitive ways, I'm sure there was always revenge. And depending on how evolved tuktuk's brain was, if he had a dorsalum striatum, why didn't I get that the first time? If he had a dorsal striatum, which governs feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction, he would have probably liked carrying out that vengeance. Because our pleasure center goes off when we carry out acts of revenge, especially when we think of it. But that's why sometimes we'll go to such great lengths to carry out vengeance, because it feels good. So I'm not a vengeance carry outer, because I don't really get wronged. Like, I've never had any huge wrongings against me. I would knock on wood at this point if I were you, just but I like seeing it played out mainly in movies. Do you like standing on the sidelines and shouting for the person's eye to be taken out? Yeah, that's me. Do you want to talk about some cases of revenge? Because it's one thing to just say, hey, that's great, that guy got his come up with. But there's some really legendary and some very grim cases of revenge in the history of humanity. And we have covered well, you covered ten in your article. Yeah, we're going to cover, what, seven, eight, six, something like that. We haven't done a top ten in a while. It's been a very long while. Actually. We've never done a top ten because we only cover six or seven. But we haven't base one on the top ten as well. Correct. I like the Spam King one. Should we start there? Might as well. He's number ten. Alan Rosky was known as the Spam King because he was an entrepreneur in Michigan who was one of the guys, the main dudes signing you up for all those spam emails that we all love. Before the.com bubble even burst, verizon had him in court for bulk email spamming. But, dude, he's got a rap sheet a mile long. I looked at this is before the spam thing in the 90s, he had all sorts of insurance felonies, real estate. Yes. He's just kind of a hustler kind of dude. Very much. It's a good way to put it. But he got his comeuppance in the way of a junk email of his own when his address was leaked online and then really leaked online. Well, the whole way it came out was there was, I think, the Detroit Free Press, maybe one of the local papers did a spotlight, like just kind of a soft touch spotlight on a spacious 8000 square foot home yeah. That you paid $700 for. Because it was Detroit. Sorry. This one was on you, man. I was just going to leave destroyed alone, but go ahead. Yeah. So this guy is showing off this man who's been referred to as, quote vermin and quote scum yeah. Is showing off his 8000 sq ft. House built on bulk email and spam. I bet he regrets that. And somehow I couldn't go back and find out. His address leaked in the article. It basically gave away his physical address. Right. And that was it. The trolls got him. The trolls got him and signed him up for basically everything under the sun. As far as junk mail, like physical junk mail goes, which we've done. Wow. We did podcasts in junk mail. Remember that? We did remember where to get rid of it. And that one guy was like, no, we're employed by junk mail. So the peak of his junk mail receiver ship, he was getting hundreds of pounds and he was everyday. Yeah, he was pretty upset. I mean, I saw interviews with him today where he was like, I'm being harassed. And he was trying to get quotes to do something and they were just like, no, come up. I wish we had a trombone. Yeah, we should spice it up a little. Jerry, a trombone, please. Thank you, Jerry. All right. Did we cover him? Well, he's in jail now. Yeah, he's inmate 19593. Wow. You did your research. Because that was not in the article. We could send him a letter to Morgantown Federal Correctional Institution. Yeah, he was jump. Was it insider trading or he created a pump and dub scheme. Some sort of penny stock manipulation scheme is what I wrote. Yes. And he's still in jail? Well, it was 2009. He got a 51 month sentence. Yeah. But you know, sometimes that doesn't mean much. Like time served. You're free. He's still there though. He definitely made some cash doing bulk email. It was clever at the time. It was just annoying. Yeah, sure. But hey, we all got Viagra out of it, so we did. I didn't get mine. 47 Ronin. Okay. Yeah. So my nephew's middle name is Ronan, and I'm still not convinced that my sister and her husband know what Ronan is. I have a friend who named his kid Ronan. Does he know what Ronan is? I'll have to ask him. He's a fan of the show. Well, what's his name? I don't think he spells it this way, though. I think he spells it with an A. What's his name? Braxton. Braxton. Do you know what Eronin is? Answer us when we text him. Yeah, I don't think he spells it the same way. Well, let's tell everybody Ronan is a masterless Samurai. Yes. At this point, I feel like possibly if you really want to do some digging, press pause on this one, or just mark down your time code, go back and listen to our How Samurai Work podcast. That was a great one. Excellent episode. Yeah. And it will help you along with the rest of this. But if you don't feel like doing that, go back and listen to it anyway later on. But we'll give you the crib sheet. Basically, a samurai is pledged to the death to a single master, a Damio. Right. And that involves the samurai protecting the Damo with his life. That involves the samurai carrying out vengeance if the Damo is wronged or murdered or anything like that. And this is a lifetime contract. This is a lifetime affiliation. Remember, they're the opposite ninja, which is also a really good episode, too. They were just the hired guns, right? Yes. If I remember correctly, the Ninja were samurai were very loyal. Yes. Military advisors. Just cool guys. They had huge hammer pants, too. In this particular case of the 47 Ronin, during the Ado period, which is the early beginning of the 18th century in Japan, a man named Asano Naganori had some Ronin assigned to him, or that he had taken on 47 of them. And Naganori was headed to Kyoto to hang out, which was the capital at the time. And he saw a man he didn't like. And still to this day, no one's quite sure. I was going to ask you that. No one knows. Okay. No one has any idea what the problem is. But these guys have beef, basically, as Biggie Smalls would have put it, they threw down, did well. Yeah. Naganori pulled the sword out and slashed at the man. Didn't cause any harm or whatever. But this is Kyoto, the seat of power in Japan, and he's just taking a swipe at some guy in front of everybody important. And in Japan, this is a really big deal. Well, yeah. So much so that they decided that he should commit supuku, which we have covered before as well. Was that a separate one? No. What was that in? Was that in Samurai? Yeah, I think we really went into graphic details. Yes. We talked about the steps of supuku because it's very specific. Right. So, again, go listen to that episode. And he did commit supuku. Here's what I don't quite get. Why didn't the guy, Yoshi Naka, who he attacked, why didn't his Ronan come after? Well, he was dead. Why didn't his Ronin come after? He wasn't dead. No. Naganori is now dead. Right. So why did his people feel the need to take revenge when he's the one that started it? That is an excellent question. And that's what led to the deaths of the 47 Ronin. Okay, so let's talk about the story, and then we'll go into that. Right. Okay. These Ronan basically hung out and waited two full years. But you know what they say. What? Revenge is a meal that serves cold. Very nice. One of my favorite things. Is it really one of my favorites? Oh, yeah. I just think it's witty. And you think a lot about revenge, don't you? No, I just like that saying. It's a good one. You know, it's true. I'm with you. Like, two years later, they don't know what's coming. Yeah. And those Japanese winters get pretty cold. So two winters had passed by the time the 47 ronin decided to go pay a visit to the other guy. And they went and Yoshinakea was the other guy. They went to his house, staged an attack on his compound, found him in an outhouse, and said, hey, we will give you the chance to commit supuku here's. The same dagger that our master killed himself with. Right. They sat there and stared at him, and they gave him a beat and then said, okay. And they cut his head off, and they took his head in a bucket and took it to their master's grave. Yeah. Well, they cleaned it up. Do they? Yeah. Apparently they washed it for some reason, I guess. Well, they're very tidy. Sure. They're very tidy people, the Japanese are. And they took it to their masters grave and showed him the head and said, Here you go. And then they took it to the bakufu, the ruling council, and said, we're turning ourselves in. And the bakufu is the honorable thing. Yes. Maybe there's a lot of discrepancy about what was the right thing to do or what wasn't even at the time and still today. Right. But the bakufu said, okay, go kill yourselves. You have to wear down to 46 here. One supposedly was killed in the attack, whatever. But 46 Ronan committed suicide themselves. A lot of people died because this guy slashed at the other guy. Now, there's many schools of thought in this act of revenge. The ronin should have immediately gone to Yoshinakea's house and killed them. That may have gotten them out of the sentence to commit supuku. Another school? What is that? No waited. Yeah. If they had been like, oh, well, let's carry out this vengeance right now. Got you. Another school. Thought is that they shouldn't have done anything, that the bakufu had made a decision that their master had to kill himself and they had to abide by it. Sure. The samurai didn't see it that way. Well, that was their code, though it's not exactly the law of the land. No, it's true. And I think that connection between master and samurai supersedes anything that Vancouver came up with. But the last one, the hardest one for me to swallow, but it's possibly correct, is that the 47 ronin or the 46 should have, after they took Yoshinaka's head, committed supuku themselves right there. And that is a grave act of cowardice to turn themselves in because it showed that they possibly hoped for a slap on the wrist. Interesting. Or at the very least, the cutting off of their wrists. Wow. Style is what that is. You point out the 47th? Ronan Terasaka. Kichiman. There are reports that he was young and pardoned because of his age and that he lived to be 87 or he died in the attack. And I think there was more than 47, but there were 47 that assembled two years later and carried out revenge. Right. I believe. And there have been countless stories and movies and stuff about the 47. Ronan yeah. Including the movie the 47. Ronin there you go. All right. Big revenge, man. That was a roller coaster ride. Should we cover the Huguenots the massacre? That one's pretty grim. I will go over it real quick. I like the last line of it. Did you? I went back and reread it. I was like, that was it. Yeah, we'll nugget it there at the end. We'll save it. 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. 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. During the Protestant Reformation, there was a lot of stuff going on in France, mainly. A lot to be lost. As in 50% of the real estate in France allegedly was owned by the clergy. Oh. Catholic church. So they had a lot at stake. When the Protestants came to Colin, they were like, I don't know about you guys, maybe we should kill you. Yeah. There was a big problem. There was a big rift between the Catholics and the Protestants, and it was largely over land power. Sure. Because if it's all controlled by the Catholics, it's hunky door for the Catholics. But then now, if you have to divide everything in half. It's kind of a problem. So by 1572 in August in Paris, it was a hot one, and there is a huge wedding between a French Protestant aristocrat right now, a French Huguenot aristocrat, and a Frenchman. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And this was not a marriage that was endorsed by the Papacy at all. No. It was already really controversial. It was a huge, huge affair on the social calendar. And so Paris was swarming with both Hugonauts and Catholics that were there at this wedding, possibly the most awkward wedding of all time. Like sworn enemies in the same church, right. Yeah. The marriage goes off without a hitch, as far as I know. And almost immediately after, Charles IX, who is the King of France, a devout Catholic, said, why don't we just take this opportunity to kill the military leader of the Hygieneauts since he's here in town? Yeah. And they did, and let's not stop there. Let's just keep killing people. And over the course of a week or so, I saw all kinds of numbers. Sure. Well, they didn't keep very good records in the but legend has it that the rivers in Paris were so full of dead bodies that they could not eat fish for months because of disease of dead bodies. Thousands, tens of thousands of French Protestants murdered, tens of women and children do 100,000. It started with the one guy then, that moved throughout Paris. Any Hugonaut found was killed, and then it spilled over into the countryside where basically the French king, Charles the 9th, carried out genocide against the Hugonauts in France. So that was a big deal. Yeah, sure. All right, moving on. We're skipping over, I want to say Dave Carroll, as per Chuck's request. Yes, but you can read that in the article. We're skipping Aaron Burr because you can hear about him, or you may have just heard about him in our dueling podcast. Yeah, good one. And let's go to Dr. Holly crippen. Oh, we're doing him? You want to skip him? No, that's fine. You take him, though. Okay. I thought we agreed not to do him. Okay. Dr. Holly Harvey Crippen was a homeopathic doctor in London, had a concert singer, wife named Cora. He's a pipsqueak. Did you see his no. Is he tiny? He's a pipsqueak. He was mad because he's small, and apparently he didn't like his wife's voice because he took up with another lady. She found out about it and said, you know what, jerk? I'm out of here. I'm the one that has the money, taking it with me. And after that, she went missing, of course. He says, hey, I'm going to take my mistress. I'm going to move to well, I'm sorry. He sold her jewelry first. He told everybody that she was on a concert tour in Los Angeles and died there and was very easy to figure out. Goodbye, Cora. So he set sail for the US. With his new mistress. I don't know if they were married. Probably know his new wife and the friends of the wife started saying friends, of course, started saying, Wait a minute, this is pretty shady. Somebody should look into this dude because we think he has blood on his hands. He was arrested when the body turned up in his cellar and hanged. However, in 2007, many years later, because it was 1910, they found forensic evidence that found out that not only was that not his wife's body in the basement who he was convicted of and hanging for. Yeah, but based on the evidence, perhaps a man, not even a woman at all. So they think possibly Crippen may have murdered this other person and gotten caught for that because his wife went missing and they think they murdered her as well and just disposed of her body. He did, yeah. He supposedly acted alone or he didn't kill this man, but he did kill his wife and ended up getting hanged anyway as an act of vengeance beyond the grave. Right. For killing his wife. Or he didn't kill anybody and was hanging wrongly. Right. Just vengeance twisted all up. What is wrong with you? Okay, let's do Lorena Bobbitt. This is a good one, because this is in our immediate memory. The crazy, 90s, grunge, flannel and dismembered penises flying out a car window. That's exactly what happened. John Wayne Bobbitt was not a model husband. No. And I really want to stress this, because I was like, well, when I was thinking of this, lorena Bobbitt was the first one that came to mind. Sure. And then I did a little more research. I was like, Good God. She had a really rough life. She was allegedly the victim of a lot of spousal abuse, physical abuse, mental abuse. She was an immigrant, and her husband supposedly used that against her to manipulate her, to keep control of her. She didn't speak great English at the time. And there was allegedly a lot of marital rape in that marriage as well, including the night of well, I don't know when it was, but it was 1993, when supposedly Mrs. Bobbitt said that her husband, John Wayne Bobbitt, came home drunk, assaulted her, and then raped her and then passed out. Apparently, this was one in a long string of these encounters, and she had had enough. So she got a knife, and while he was asleep, Chuck cut off more than half of his penis. A significant portion. More than half. And although, if you ask me, 5% would be a significant portion. 5%? That's like a Ziper accident. Yeah, but nothing needs to be going on down there. No, I agree. I'm saying in general. I mean, I'm not saying he did or didn't deserve it. I'm not weighing in on that. No, I see your point. He was a big jerk. I'm not saying people should do this. Of course. No, I feel like we should stay out of this little pool right here. Yes. Because if you do do the research and you do start to kind of see where she was coming from, she was the butt of many a late night joke for years. She just became a punchline. But if you look into her story, it was horrific. Yeah, it's very sad. Anyway, about 03:00 A.m., she takes this dismembered member and drives out into the night with it, at some point rolls down a window in the passenger side and just throws it out into the grass. And by some incredible luck, a sheriff's deputy managed to find it looking exactly like there was a missing child or something like that. There was a multi tens of thousands of dollars search party out looking for a dismembered penis in the grass, and they found it. That's the craziest part to me. Right. It's pretty crazy. And they reattached it, put it on ice, reattached it. She says she didn't remember it. She said she was later on, she said she was driving with the member in one hand and a knife in the other, and she said she went to turn the wheel and realized she needed a free hand and that's why she tossed it. Yeah. She went to court. She went to trial, and I can't remember what her charge was. It was one of those very clever old time 18th century charges. You shall be charged with penis cutting. I think that was the charge. Okay. She was found not guilty for reasons of temporary insanity. She snapped after years of abuse, and they said, you're fine. He was acquitted for assault charges on her, but he went on to be convicted later on for more domestic abuse on another wife in 2003. So they divorced in 1995. Here's the crazy thing. In 1994, he was in a pornographic film called Uncut. Yeah. He was in more than one. Oh, was he? I just knew about the ones. Yes, he was in one called Franken Penis. Okay. I thought Uncut was the one. I thought Franken Penis was the name of Frank and something I thought I remember that well. There's one called Uncut that came out in 1994, and Vince Neil and LEMAG are in it, plays a bum, and Vince Neil plays himself. Yeah. He was also in a band called the Severed Parts. No. Yeah. So he was clearly trying to make some money off of this incident, which goes on to show even more about his character. Right. Lorena Bobbitt went in a different direction and founded a women's abuse nonprofit called Lorraine's Red Wagon, which is an aid organization. And she has a little girl. Now, I don't know if she's remarried, but I believe she is with the father and has a little girl. And she was actually brought to court for attacking her mother after this too. Is that right? Yeah, she was let. Go for that as well. I didn't run into that one, man. Nothing's ever black and white, is it? No, it's all gray. Josh. It's all gray. The next one is fairly close to black and white as far as revenge goes. Chuck yeah, this one is pretty good. Come up and let's hear buddy anthony Stockleman in 2006, was put in prison for molesting and murdering a ten year old girl named Katie Coleman. Horrific incident, his come up, and it came right away in the case of you're going to jail for life. And it wasn't like there was a lot of didn't he do it? Apparently it was a slam dunk case. There were red carpet fibers that matched the carpet in his mom's house found at the scene. His DNA was on the body and on a cigarette butt at the scene. And an eyewitness saw Katie Coleman riding in Anthony Stockman's pickup truck that day. Yeah. So he copped a deal to avoid the death penalty and went to prison for the rest of his life. Went to prison. And unfortunately, he went to prison with Jared Harris, who was a burglary inmate serving time for burglary. And also Katie Coleman's cousin. Yeah, because they had a different last name. Indiana board of corrections missed that. This is Katie Coleman's cousin. Yeah, because they would look to avoid areas like that. Sure. Okay. I don't know the rules. I would think there would be protocol for that kind of thing. Yeah, I would think so. After a couple of months, stockleman shows up one day for breakfast with a fresh tattoo carved into his head that says katie's revenge. And very, very big, prominent block letters, like his entire forehead is covered in this amateur tattoo. Did you see it? Yeah, I think one of the guards ended up posting that and got in trouble, posted the photo. So the board of corrections looked into it, said, oh, we can't implicate the cousin, so who knows who did it? And that was that. Yeah, well, no, he actually served extra time for assault. Oh, they got him. When I wrote this, they still hadn't. They were like, we can't find any evidence that it was him. They got him. I'm sure he was like, fine, tacking on, he was going to kill him. He did one of those deals where the dude looks up and all of a sudden this guy is in a cell with the door closed behind him and put his hands on his throat and said, I'm either going to stick you or I'm going to tattoo your forehead. And he was like, tattoo? I don't know if he actually gave him the choice, but he had a prison tattoo gun that he ditched in the trash, and I can find pictures of it online. Thanks for the follow up stuff, man. Sure. That's awesome. Well, not awesome for Jared Harris. Not the actor Jared Harris. By the way, it's under richard Harris. Anthony stockwoman. No, I mean Jared Harris is the cousin. Oh, yeah. But he's not the famous actor son of Richard Harris. Jared Lido. Okay, we're up to our last one. This is all we're doing. This is number six, I think, right? Yeah. Which one of these you want to do? What do you have? I got Dachau. And what's the other one? James Annesley. Let's do Dachow. Okay. Am I saying it correctly? Sure, you say it. I'll see if I'm saying it correctly. Well, people just say docao. Okay. Yeah. You're sort of over to it a little bit. This is one that Quentin Tarantino probably got some inspiration for his movie in Glorious Bastards. And it was in Shutter Island prominently. Tarantino is doing a slave revenge movie next. No, I didn't know that. An escape slave. In fact, you could argue that most of his movies are revenge movies. Yeah, like almost all of them. Reservoir Dogs is revenge, except executing Tim Roth and the cop scene. Oh, yeah. With the ear. But that wasn't really revenge. No. Kill Bill. Total revenge movie. The Car Win was revenge and Gloria's Bastards was revenge and now the slave run away. Pulp Fiction. Was there any revenge in there? There was more redemption than revenge. Yes. I mean, well, revenge against the rapists. Oh, yeah. That was big time revenge. Calling some pipettin. Yeah. So there's been elements of revenge. Let's at least say that. Okay. Okay. So back to World War II. Did you know that Quentin Tarantino and Alan Ball, the writer of 6ft under, have an ongoing feud that Tarantino brought the law into? Really? Apparently, Allen Ball and his husband or partner, one of the two raised tropical birds in their Los Angeles home. Sounds nice. And they have an aviary, and apparently it's not fully enclosed. And Quentin Tarantino, who lives next door, has to hear birds squawking all day and can't get any work done. Really? So he's, like, going to court to basically get the courts to tell Alan Ball to tell the birds to shut up. Interesting, isn't it? Stored one another? Well, I know where that is then, because I used to work for a director that supposedly lived a few houses down from QT. Oh, really? Because when I went and picked him up, he was like, hey, you know who lives right there? Quentin Tarantino. And I guess Alan ball on the other side. Yeah. Who do you sign with? I'm a big fan of both. Oh, yeah? I love Alan Ball and Tarantino. I don't think you should keep birds in captivity, so I'm going to go with Tarantino on this. All right. 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? 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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 now back to world war two. Finally. All right. Dacow obviously was one of the sites of the atrocities committed against the Jewish people at their prison camp there. Awful things happened. And when the American soldiers of the 45th thunderbird army infantry division showed up to take that camp, they exacted a little revenge. Well, they had a huge impetus. There was what was called the death car, the death train, which is 39 rail cars that were on a rail line that were parked basically just inside the camp walls. And they were literally overflowing with the dead and dying, I think, almost 3000 corpses spilling out of these rail cars. And that's what these guys came upon. The members of the thunderbird army infantry, the 45th thunderbird division found this and apparently just snapped in. What's the worst army infantry atrocity carried out by any allied force supposedly in world war II. And this is pretty atrocious. Well, I mean, basically there are different reports on what went on. I tried to look at a bunch of different ones, but we do know that they at one point lined some SS up against the wall, mowed them down with machine guns. So unarmed, by the way. And this is also duck cow is the site where a lot of SS officers came to surrender. They weren't even in the camp. This is like, oh, the Americans took this camp. I want to surrender. I'm going to go surrender. Right. And they were executed. And apparently one report says that some of the US. Soldiers gave some of the freed inmates guns and like shovels and things and said, have added fellows, and they exacted their own revenge. Some of the Jewish inmates they would have fewer problems with. Yeah, of course. But apparently General Georgia's Patton had no problem with any of it. Some of the people there, some of the army guys, the US. Army guys, I would probably say the lion share had a problem with what was going on and complained, filed report, and there was a classified army investigation that said, yeah, this happened. And there were about 28 unarmed Germans that were executed at Dacow that day. And here's all the evidence patting through the stuff in the trash and said, you guys go home. Forget this ever happened. But one copy was put in the National Archives. It was mislabeled, and it sat there until 1987, and no one had any clue about it until the Boston Globe did, like this four or five part series on the DoCAU massacre in 2001, and that finally brought it to light. Wow. Yeah. So that's number two. Well, they weren't labeled in order of importance. They were just ten. Right. It even says in no particular order. Yeah. Because it's kind of sick to say, like, this is the best, or this is the worst. Exactly. In cases like this, I did go to Film School Rejects, though, which is the fun website, because I just started thinking about revenge movies. It's a common theme, and they listed. This is their top ten. Commando. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. Gladiator. Yeah. Friday Jerry. Laughter friday the 13th. Yeah. Well, those kids watched her son drown. Yeah. Oh, that's true. Been her one of the granddaddies of all revenge movies. I never saw it. Good one. I am ben her like that. Yeah, that one. Star Dogs is crazy. We were just talking about the other day. It was disturbing. Kill Bill One and two. Yeah. Once upon a time in the west. I never saw that one either. It's supposed to be awesome. That's a good one. The Virgin Spring, which I have not seen. That was a Bergman picture. Okay. And The Godfather, which I didn't really see that as a revenge pick. Revenge. Yeah. And they said Death Wish is the number one. Yeah. But they didn't have Old Boy on there. Oh, wow. Yeah. The ultimate revenge movie. That's as revenge as a kid. Yeah. So then I trolled some other top ten list and some of the other ones that made the list. Memento. Mad Max. Carrie great revenge movie. And Gloria's Bastards, obviously. The professional. The crow hard candy. Okay. Which you should see. I will not be confused with Jawbreaker. I'll bet you ever seen that movie. No, I didn't see that. It was good, surprisingly. Yeah. I spit on your grave. Irreversible that one was pretty hardcore. You me like that movie. I haven't seen it yet. Irreversible yeah, she said it's really good. It's really tough to watch, but she said it was a good move. It is. Well, it's a rape revenge, so those are always the best. What about last house on the left? That's a rape. That's like the rape eventual. That was next on my list. Or was that before or after I spin on your grave? When was I spin on your grave? Does it have the date? No, I don't have the dates because last house on the left, I think, was 1972, Munich. Oh, yeah. I spit on Your grave is like 81. Was it? Yes. Munich. That's a great revenge movie. Star Trek two Wrath of Con. No. Really? Yeah. Unforgiven. Pretty good one. I mean, great movie, but I wouldn't throw it in the super revenge category. Sure. And then taken with Liam neeson. I enjoyed that. I did, too. I just can't get past Liam Neeson as an action star. He has a set of very specific set of skills, and they make it unwatchable. All right, so that is revenge. And it's best served what with Liam Neeson? Piping hot. Yeah, that was like six of ten. So there's more for you to go read. Housetepworks.com. The article I wrote, just type in biggest revenge or even probably just revenge in the search bar housedefirst.com. And that's going to bring up this article. So do that. And I said search bar, which means the type of listener mail. Or is it? It's not quite yet. Chuck, we should tell everybody about Kiva. Man, we did it. We did what? We met our goal in this million dollar march. Yes. $1 million in loans over the past three months. Less than three and a half. And it all started with a little jab at Colbert Nation. And they're just like, we left them in the dust years ago. I know. When you watch that video, it's so quaint. We're like, first one to $100,000. I know. I remember. Everybody was like, there's no way you're going to make it to $100,000. Crazy. That's a million dollars loaned by our Kiva team. It takes a village job. We are proud of you guys. Thank you. Yes. Seriously. And I guess let's just keep going on. Let's double down. Yeah. Thank you to Glenn and Sonia, as always, for helping us set our financial goals. And we'll have a new one coming up soon. Yeah, we're not like Aaron. We got a million forget it. We're done, right? We're going to bed. Everyone pulled their money out, right? Go party. No, don't do that. Okay? That's for December 10, 2012. Okay. All right, so back to it. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this cannibalism. It's been a while, but it's about cannibalism, okay? And I like to read good, smart ones. And this is one of those guys. I'm a biology undergrad at University of New Mexico. Go, Jeez. What are they? Go fighting Aztec, let's say. I bet you're right. One of my recent projects was a computer model attempting to answer some questions regarding disease transmission through cannibalism you close the podcast with speculation about the origin of cannibalism in humans. Materialism versus idealism. Though both of these arguments are compelling, they both seem to ignore just how young the human species is. The prevalence of conspecific necrogphagi. Necrophage. necrophagy. Let's say necrophagy. That sounds good. Yeah, man, I had that all worked out, too. Eating the flesh of the dead in other species provides evidence that cannibalism is significantly older than us. And the prevalence in near species like chimp suggests that it may be a trait we've had since we have been a wee nice. Yeah, lobsters are big. Cannibals are they dirty things? Spiders of the sea. The materialism versus idealism argument takes on all new facets. When applied to chimps, materialism doesn't hold very much water, as chimps are pretty well fed on fruits, and catching smaller simeons is far easier and arguably adequate nutrition. Idealism begs the question of just how much chimps care about that sort of thing. Are they expecting some gain other than nutritional value, like spiritual, or even just striking fear to the hearts of enemies? Are they even capable of this? My guess, which is just a guess, is that they kill for territorial reasons and then simply don't want to waste a large quantity of delicious. Dude, that's what he thinks. Maybe we started that way and some cultures just held onto the practice, applying spiritual reasoning after the fact. And that is smart. And that is from Micah. That's Micah. That is smart. From New Mexico. And it was New Mexico State. Golden gophers. No, that's Minnesota. The bear cats. The New Mexico State bear cats. No. Eagles. Hold on. No, that's our school. Georgia, if you had your interest piqued by Micah's assessment of cannibalism, you might want to go listen to our cannibalism podcast. We did an episode on it a while back and it's one of our favorites. Pretty good. And let's see what else. If you have a great revenge story, we want to hear it. Yeah, there's lots of Internet revenge going on. I was going to talk about some of it, like people who post none and all that. Oh, I know what you mean. I don't like that. Like, oh, my boyfriend wrong me, so let me do photoshops of him in a bikini and make it a meme. I don't know. Okay, so I guess we're going to avoid everybody because we don't want to upset Chuck, because we know he'll lie and wait for it to come up. And you can send us a cool story of revenge. Non internet, please to us at Twitter. Our handle is syscast or on Facebook at facebook. Comstuffyshenko. And you can send us a plain old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join House department 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. 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." | ||
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215462342838sysk-grassoline.mp3 | How Grassoline Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-grassoline-works | Could switch grass become the car fuel of the future? Learn more about alternative fuel in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Could switch grass become the car fuel of the future? Learn more about alternative fuel in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Thu, 17 Apr 2008 18:13:06 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=18, tm_min=13, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=108, tm_isdst=0) | 5278212 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from howstopworkscom you're getting smarter. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke work. I'm a staff writer here@housetuffworks.com, and with me today is my trusty editor, Chris Paulette. Chris and I don't always see eye to eye on what should or shouldn't go into the article, but I can tell you one that we both agree on and find fascinating. It's an article that I wrote and he edited called Can We Fuel Cars With Grass? So, Chris, why don't you tell the folks about this article and what it says? Well, basically, switchgrass is one of the feedstocks for a biofuel. And of course, that's something that pops up in the news all the time now, is ethanol or biodiesel. But instead of using corn, which is something, of course, that people and animals eat, or sugarcane, which is delicious. Oh, yes, absolutely. But very hard to find in the continental US. Sure, we can use switchgrass, which is a great source of cellulose, which is the substance, I believe you told me that cell walls are made up of. Basically what they do is they break it down and make it into a fuel, just like you refine oil into gasoline, except you can't find fossil fuels just anywhere where possibly approaching peak oil, as you mentioned in another one of your articles. And so this is something that might be grown all over the world and lots that aren't good enough to grow crops on. It might be a really good solution. Well, not only that, switchgrass has the wonderful trait of being able to improve soil where it grows. Like you were saying, it grows in these marginal scrub lands that can't be used for farming anyway, and it actually improves the soil. So you grow some switch grass in an area for about a dozen years, and next thing you know, presto change that's arable farmland now. So it would definitely help Africa out quite a bit, which is one of the regions where it can grow wild too. So tell us what switch grass is, specifically. Well, switch grass is, as its name suggests, a grass. It's not particularly pleasant to look at. I think some people consider it invasive and more like a weed than anything else. Yes, farmers especially. Yeah, I didn't even find this out. Do animals eat switch grass or is it just something that's irritating to I think it's generally irritating. It's used in some circumstances as an ornamental grass. Some types are, but I think ultimately it was clearly put on the earth here to be used as cellulistic ethanol. Well, I suppose that it's one interpretation of it. It'll be interesting to see what happens with it because right now it's very expensive to refine switchgrass into cellulosic ethanol. And of course, every proponent of every different biofuel has a reason why we should be using theirs. But one thing, Josh, that I found out recently, since we published the article, is that converting fields to be used for biofuels, for example, to grow soy or corn or sugar cane or palm, can actually be more trouble because in the conversion process, it can release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. I read an article in the New Scientists that said 10,000 Brazilian rainforests converting that over to grow biofuel stock crops that would actually release 700,000 carbon dioxide, which is amazing. You have to use biofuels for years, hundreds of years in some cases, to recoup the carbon debt that you do by converting it. So it seems like switchgrass might be a great solution to that problem. Switchgrass is an excellent solution, but I don't think it's the only solution. You can't grow switchgrass in Indonesia. You can grow palm in Indonesia and make oil from it. And sure, there's a carbon debt, and that is something, clearly, that we're trying to get around, is to put any more carbon or any other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. But I think maybe more important than climate change is war and regional autonomy. Imagine if Indonesia didn't have to import any oil from anywhere else. They were energy self sufficient. Imagine if the US were energy selfsufficient how much more peaceful would the world be, do you think, Chris, if we all grew our own energy supply? That's true. It makes regions more stable. There are fewer things to have political conflicts over. Sure. And I'm not pointing fingers, but wars are fought over oil oh, sure. And all sorts of other resources. Well, thanks for joining us this week. You can read. Can we fuel cars with grass? On HowStuffWorks.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@houseworks.com brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?" | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-12-13-sysk-dyson-spheres-final.mp3 | Will We Find Evidence of Aliens by Their Engineering Projects? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/will-we-find-evidence-of-aliens-by-their-engineeri | In 1960 physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that in the hunt for alien life, we should search for evidence of massive engineering projects that encapsulate stars with solar arrays to harness their energy. Could we humans ever make one ourselves? | In 1960 physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that in the hunt for alien life, we should search for evidence of massive engineering projects that encapsulate stars with solar arrays to harness their energy. Could we humans ever make one ourselves? | Tue, 13 Dec 2016 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=348, tm_isdst=0) | 44381109 | audio/mpeg | "San Francisco. The SYSK treat. Yes. San Francisco, Oakland, the entire Bay Area. And dare I say, all of Silicon Valley. Yeah. We love you. And we're coming back to Sketch Touch Fest this year in January. Yeah. We're going to be there on Sunday, January 15, at 01:00 p.m.. A very rare afternoon show. Yeah. And we will be ready to go. So you guys better be drunk from the night before or getting drunk for that evening. However it crosses over, I think it will be proof positive that we endorse afternoon drinking. Yeah. A couple of drinks, maybe. Sure. Maybe Bloody Mary. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah. We're promoting our show. Oh, that's right. So we're doing that show on January 15. You can go to the SF Sketch website to get tickets, and it's awesome. It's a great comedy festival. Lots of awesome shows that weekend and for the following weeks. Yeah. So I encourage you to buy lots of tickets. Just buy ours first. Yeah. And hurry. Hurry, because they're selling out fast. No joke. That's not a ploy. That's not a marketing ploy. No, they're really selling fast. We get emails every time. Guys, you told me to hurry. I didn't hurry. I'm shut out. And since this promo is petered out, it ends right now. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstepworkscom? Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. Their foot on the button. And that means this is the podcast. The foot on the button just waiting to cut us off. Yeah. That's what no one knows, but Jerry has a kill switch at her foot for all of our profane tirades. Yeah. It would kill us if she ever pressed it. That's right. That's why they call it that. But she's not very good at it. I've noticed. I've noticed, too. Some stuff slips by. Yes. I told her she's like Keith Richards of podcast producers because he can't use guitar pedals. So he's known for that. Is that a thing? Well, I mean, I don't know how known he is maybe among guitar players, but he just plugs right into the amp. It's pretty great. Oh, I see. And he was on Mark Marin's podcast. It was a great interview. And Marin pure Keith Richards, and he was just basically like, I have a hard time standing upright. Like, I can't mess with trying to press foot pedals. That's Keith, man. Yes. Very pure. Yeah. And by pure, I mean pure heroin. Pure China. Yeah, he's clean now, but is he really that's astounding well? No, I mean, he doesn't do, like, hard drugs anymore. I got you. I think he drinks and smokes weed. I got you. But it's come on. Yeah. Actually, Marin smoked his first cigarette in a decade in that show with him. Oh, that was smart decision. He was like, I have to. How can I not? Yes. He easily could not have done that. I'm disappointed. Did he really? Yes. Keith Richard offered him a smoke, and he's like, sure. Yeah. I mean, I see that. But at the same time, I also see not smoking. Listen to you. I know. I'm being judgy wagging your finger. So, Chuck? Yes? Have you ever used energy? Yes. Well, you know, when you're using energy, most likely you're using something like a fossil fuel. Right. Yeah, right. Like gasoline or natural gas or something like that. Stuff that comes from decomposing dinosaurs. Yes. Okay. The problem with using decomposing dinosaurs, as most people know, is that it's essentially a non renewable resource. There's no more dinosaurs to decompose any longer. And even if there were, it would take tens of millions of years for them to decompose into fossil fuels for us. Right, right. Even if we had dino DNA and we could make new dinosaurs just to kill them and watch them decompose, which is something we would do if we had the capability. I guarantee it. Oh, sure, right. But we don't have that capability, as far as I know. No one is working on that track right now, I don't think. Just Steven Spielberg. Right. Maybe someone at Rutgers. So we have to come up with energy sources that we won't eventually run out of. And obviously there's like, wind and solar. And as far as solar power goes, from what I understand, we're actually doing pretty well right now. Right now, we use something like zero 1% of the sunlight that reaches Earth to power our world. So there's a lot of room for growth potential. Sure. The thing is, I also saw that if we keep growing and our energy consumption keeps growing at something like 1% a year, within 10 years, we'll be using more than the entire amount of sunlight that hits the Earth can provide. So we really need to come up with something else. Yes. The problem is, even if we harnessed all of the energy here on Earth, we would very quickly outgrow whatever energy it provided. So some people have said, well, why don't we just go straight to the source? If the sun is such a great source of energy, but it's shooting that energy out in directions other than the Earth, the stuff that is starting toward the Earth doesn't make it very frequently. Let's just go to the sun and basically strangle the life out of it to get energy from it. Right. Great idea. And one of the first proposals of it I don't want to say serious proposal, because although it's been taken seriously over the years and almost been interpreted like scripture, it was a thought experiment to begin with. It's something called a Dyson sphere. Yes. Well, I guess we should introduce the man. Not that we have him here. That would be awesome. He's still around. Yeah, I know he's an old dude, but we're talking about Freeman Dyson, not to the maker of the vacuum cleaner or the bladeless fan or the bladeless hair dryer. Is that really a thing? They have a Dyson hair dryer? Yeah. You know what? I was so disappointed when I found out what the bladeless fan was. Why? Have you seen those? Yeah, you can stick your hand through it. It's amazing. Well, I know. And I was like, Is it magic? Like, how in the world is doing this? But it's got a stupid blade. It's just housed in a casing. Yeah. So there's a terrible name for it, and then it just channels it up and squirts it out the front. The Dyson invention that always got me was the air blade hand dryer. I think we've talked about this before, where you stick your hand down in there. I love those. Yeah, but they're so filled with germs that actually, I was in a bathroom the other day, and they have an air blade now that just blows downward onto your hands, and it's actually I'm like, okay, now I'm satisfied with this invention. Well, you know, you're not supposed to rub your hand on the air blade itself. No, but it's so close. It's like you're playing Operation. Like I'm trying to remove a funny bone or something like that. It's almost impossible not to hit the sides of the thing. You're big meat hooks are just rubbing all over everything. Yeah, it is gross, believe me, because I walk out just crying with my hands held in the air every time I go to the bathroom. Well, you and I have a very big thing about airport bathrooms. Had the worst one of my life at Boston Logan on our last tour. Oh, yeah? What happened? It was just not up to snuff. First of all, the door and this might have been just this one bathroom, but the doors to the stalls, none of them secured. They've been ripped clean off. Well, they were there, but the locks didn't work. It was just I basically had to push my hand against it, which grossed me out. Yeah, that's not okay. And then the gap when the door was shut was like, two or three inches big. Like you could fully just look in and say, how are you doing? How's your poop? Yeah, that's the Mr. Peepers model. It's just not acceptable in this day and age to not have complete privacy in there. I mean, I agree with you. Again. I'm going to Reiterate. I think there should be one stall for an entire bathroom so that no one could possibly sit down next to. But barring that, one sold to rule them all. Exactly. But barring that, though, what we have in our office is acceptable. It's a good second. There's like a complete wall in between you. There's a complete wall in front of you and a door that's securely shut. Yeah, it's a water closet. Yeah, I guess it is. Like, you're full of water flow in there. Oh, man, I knew we were going to get distracted by poop. Yeah. This isn't even the porta potty, I would say. I know. All right, so sorry. Back to Freeman Dyson, not the vacuum maker. He was born in England. He worked most of his career he's retired now, but worked most of his career as a physics professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, not Rutgers. He was a civilian scientist with the RAF in World War II. Cool. I went to Cambridge, then Cornell for grad school. This guy's got some bona fidel and then he's been in the news recently by being one of the more prominent scientists as a climate change skeptic. Oh, is that right? Yes, and not like a complete skeptic. Like, he does believe that I believe what his stance is. He does believe that it's manmade, but he doesn't think we have enough detail about all the variables for these computer generated models to be accurate. I see. So he's basically saying, like, this is not the end of the world. And in fact, he thinks that increasing levels of CO2 can be a good thing for humanity ultimately. How so? I don't know. I didn't get that far. He's like, it gives you a pretty good buzz, maybe. I don't know. It's pretty interesting, though. He's like, I think starting about six to ten years ago, really started making the news with his somewhat controversial because he's a brilliant man and all these other scientists are like, wow, he's such a smart guy, but he's so wrong on this. But then other people are like, no, he's totally right. That's pretty interesting. Anyway, so that's who he is. And he, in the 1960s was reading a book from 1937 called Star Maker from science fiction author Olaf Stapleton, and he saw this thing called A Light Trap from this book. And this book also had predicted things like virtual reality, and it's kind of pretty much a landmark Sci-Fi science book. And he said, hey, this light trap sounds like a good idea. I'm going to rip it off. Yeah, he did. And he actually, I think, a paper that was published in Science in the Journal of Science in 1960, and it's really short. Did you read it? Yeah, yeah, I think it took up two pages in science out of like a thousand or something like that, and that volume. But he basically said this would be a great thing, as you say, to rip off for a thought experiment I'm working on. Right. Because just very recently, something called Project Ozma had been created and that was they started to search the sky for extraterrestrial intelligence. It was the first setting, and they were looking for radio signals, still are, but Dyson was saying, well, hold on a second. If you're going to start looking for extraterrestrial beings, like signs of intelligent civilizations, you should maybe start looking for these. And they came to be called Dyson Spheres because he was the first one to popularize it, even though he got the idea from Olaf. Yeah, he actually said he thought a stapledon sphere was a better name, but I guess not good enough to actually use it. Right? Yeah, he said it once. Right. Very quietly. This Dyson Sphere, it was originally created as, again, a thought experiment. He didn't talk about how to construct it necessarily or anything like that, although there were some follow up correspondence after the letter first came out. But almost immediately, people started thinking about how you would create one of these things, this Dyson Sphere. And the whole point, we should say, basically, at its basis, a Dyson Sphere is an engineering project, a megastructure that initially was thought to be basically a hollow sphere that you built around a star, for example. We would build it around our sun. Right. And the whole point of this thing is on the inside of the sphere, our solar arrays, so that all of that sunlight, like we were talking about earlier, that gets wasted, as far as we're concerned, is captured and converted into usable energy for us. And Freeman Dyson's point was, if you build one of these things, you're going to capture light. Light won't get out, but infrared radiation, heat, thermal heat will escape. And so if you're looking around the skies for aliens, look for something that has a tremendous amount of, like the infrared radiation of a star, but isn't putting any light out, and maybe you just found an alien civilization. That's how it began. But people started trying to figure out how to make one of these things almost as soon as he published that letter. So the one thing I don't get was he saying that, look for this because other civilizations out there are using the Dyson Sphere. He said that it would be likely that this would be an invention they came up with. Okay. Got you. Yeah. All right, well, let's go. Should we go to this Nikolai KardashianE real quick? I think we can't put it off any longer. It's pretty interesting. In the 1960s, there was an astrophysicist named Nikolai Kardashev, and he was a Bond villain. Actually, he wasn't, but he should have been. He had this idea that there were three classifications of civilization, type one, which is basically, we have learned how to harness all the energy on the home planet, like everything you can possibly harness here on Earth. And you would think, well, that's probably us. We're not quite there yet. A really smart dude named Michio Kaku, not a Bond villain either. He said, in the next 100 years or so, maybe 200 years, we might actually be a type one civilization. Yes. Like you said, every bit of geothermal energy, every drop of sunlight, every bit of hydroelectric power, all that stuff, every potential bit of energy is being harnessed by us. That's right. Yeah. We're nowhere near that right now. I think Kaku's assessment is a little rosy. Oh, wow. And I can say that because he was on our TV show sort of. Well, he was, yes, he appeared on, but he didn't interact with us in any real way. Exactly. He has no idea who we are. None. So type two is the next, of course. And that kind of civilization would understand how to harness all of the energy not only on your own home planet, but the energy of a star in its own solar system. Right. That's where the Dyson sphere comes in. Yeah, that's what we aspire to do one day. Right. Maybe a million or so years from now. And then type three is just kind of like following this logical progression. Right. And that's harnessing all the energy of all the galaxies or the entire galaxies, not necessarily all of them. Yeah. I think the second stage, the type two civilization, would be either the hardest to get to or take the longest to get to. Right. And that's because when you build that first Dyson sphere, your technology and your energy efficiency and your productivity is going to just shoot forward exponentially from that point on. Once you build that first one, you can start building more and more and more, much more quickly. So you jump from a type two to a type three civilization pretty fast compared to how long it took you to go from a type one to a type two civilization. Yeah. I think it's like any product, even that first one is tough and then you can scale it. Well, we'll get to the robots here soon. Okay. In fact, let's take a break. I'm getting a little psych. Chuck, we'll talk a little bit more about the sun right after this. All right? When I said the word sun yeah. I thought that was odd. No, it's not. I honestly have no idea where you're going with this. Well, you do. You're being coy. Most people out there, most long time listeners, know that our sun podcast was one of our biggest struggles and would have been our biggest achievements had we done it right. It's the biggest pity applause we get for the sun. No, it was fine. You tried. Yeah. Good for you for trying. But let's talk a little bit about the sun. This stuff I can deal with at least. Okay. As far as it's immense power and energy, and I love that our own article has some of these comparisons. The sun can generate five times 123. Think that that is a typo. I think that it's supposed to be five times ten to the 23rd power. Oh, you think? That's the only explanation I have for that. That doesn't make sense. That's a really small number, actually. Yeah, I agree. It'd be like about 5200 HP. Yeah, that's five times ten to 23. It's got to be. Someone just got lazy there. Seriously, I don't know how to do the little 23 thing right. I don't know how to use SuperScript. What am I like? A great editor. SuperScript. That's what it is, right? SuperScript And subscripting. Right. So let's put it this way. And this one is the one that cracks me up. The sun has enough energy to melt an ice bridge 2 miles wide and a mile thick from Earth to the sun in a single second. In A Single Second. That's Pretty Good. This is the only article I think I've ever seen an ellipse in. The author was like, wait for it. In a single second. Yeah, I don't even think they did the ellipse right. Isn't the Ellipse supposed to be right after the letter? Or is it their space? I think there's supposed to be a space on either side. Oh, really? Technically, yeah. I've been doing these wrong men. Well, Don't Feel Bad. This thing says five times 1023 HP. It's All Good. All Right, what Else? 1000000000001 megaton bombs going off every second if you war like. And then finally one single second of sun action, whatever that is, is enough to power our Earth for a half a million years. That Drives It Home. It does. But it also gives you an idea of just how primitive we are, energy consumption wise. It's crazy because we're really worried about running out of our non renewable resources. But we use such a minute amount of energy that the sun could power the energy use we use currently for half a million years in 1 second. Yeah, that's Nuts, Right? So that also kind of takes your mind, though, too. And this is, I think, one of the buttons that Freeman Dyson pushed. It makes you realize, like, holy cow. We could do some really amazing stuff if we could capture a significant amount of that power that the sun puts out, even an insignificant amount. Yeah. Really? You keep iggy pop going for, like, another 100 years. So like you said, the idea behind the Dyson sphere is this structure. He originally proposed a hollow sphere and kind of referred to it as a shell. But I think now, I think he went on to make it a solid sphere. He actually said he was. Really what's the opposite of clear? Convoluted? Fake. Yeah, I guess a little convoluted. He didn't really go to the trouble of spelling out because again, remember, this is a thought experiment that had to do with finding aliens, not an engineering schematic. So he used some very it was vague. That was the word I was looking for. He was using some vague words. We're like. Wait, what are you talking about? What Is This Sphere? Is It Cohesive? Is it like a solid body? Is it hollow in the middle? What's Going On? And he came back and said in a letter, a follow up. He said, no, there's no way you could build something that would go around our sun. That would be a solid body that was hollow in the middle. It couldn't be a cohesive hole because the rotational forces, the shear forces and the gravitational forces acting on it would just obliterate it immediately. Yeah. It would just be mechanically impossible to make it like that. So he said maybe you would make something like a bubble or a swarm or something like that. Yeah. And he said in the letter, I've enclosed some bladder acid. Put it on your tongue. You're going to love this. Is a dynamite, and call me in an hour. It might make a little more sense. Yeah. Our own article points out that one of the first downsides, obviously, if you surround the sun completely, is that sunlight I know we'd be harnessing that energy, but sunlight provides a lot more than just energy. Oh, yeah. Like it makes us happy. Yeah. People write entire songs about how sunshine makes you happy, like John Denver did on his shoulders. It would be a global bummer if somebody enclosed the sun. That's like supervillain kind of stuff, right? Yeah. Okay, so that's a problem. Another problem, though, is that if you're going to build something like this, and Dyson even suggested the size of it, he was saying it would need to have a radius, so a radius? Not even a diameter, half of the diameter. A radius that was two times the distance of the Earth to the sun. So this thing would be massive. Which means that it would also enclose the Earth, too, right? Yeah. Like, he wasn't proposing to just go up and create this tight ball around the sun. Like, it would be much further spread out, and it would actually encompass the Earth's orbit within it. Oh. So it would be like, this is mine, it belongs to the Earth, and no one else can get any sun. Yeah. It would block off the stuff outside of two times the distance of the Earth's orbit. So there's a couple of planets out there that would get the old screw job, but the ones inside twice the distance of Earth's orbit would really benefit from it. It's very selfish. Yeah. But the other problem is, too, Chuck, is I imagine things would get pretty hot pretty quickly inside this thing. So the Earth would be destroyed yes. To get around this. And a lot of people, I don't think, got it immediately. He said, well, you just live inside the Dyson sphere in the outer shell of it. Oh, sure. Make it habitable. Yeah. Right. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. But what you were saying about just the sheer size of it, there literally aren't enough raw materials on our entire planet to make something this big. In fact, in our entire solar system, there probably aren't enough raw materials to make a structure like this. No. And not still try to inhabit it. There's just no way. Yeah. Some people say, though, in Freeman himself. I keep wanting to call him Freeman. Like that's his last name, but I just end up sounding like I know I'm on a first name. He was saying you might be able to build something like this by disassembling Jupiter. That Was His Suggestion. Oh, really? Yeah. He said, Disassemble Jupiter and put it back together. And you could build a Dyson sphere that had a radius twice the distance from the Earth to the sun and make a solar array of it. Must have been some good acid. Yes. Good For Him. All right, so I think we're both in agreement, and most people are in agreement, that this severe idea is not at all tangible, not as, like, a cohesive whole. No, it just remains in the realm of thought. Experiment. So Why Bother? Well, that's the interesting thing. To Me. It basically is kind of like he meant it as a thought experiment. It's been brought out of the realm of thought experiments. And, yeah, we're in no way, shape or form capable of doing this, but a lot of people have tried to figure out how to do it, and I think it's one of those things that's like, yeah, it's theoretically possible, but we're nowhere near that level of capability right now. Well, I think his other ideas that he came up with, though, are decent. Oh, like the swarm and stuff? Well, yeah. I mean, let's get to that. He himself even said the sphere is probably not very realistic at all. So why don't we do this? Why don't we think of different machines, maybe that are independent of one another, that actually circle the sun, collect this energy, and then beam it back to Earth. Right. So to him, his initial idea was that sphere. And then what it came to be was that the sphere was like this umbrella term for these different, slightly more realistic ideas like the swarm or the bubble. Right. So What's The Swarm? Well, the swarm. Maybe they are in different orbits. And, like, the swarm, likens it to bees. Like instead of gathering pollen, they're just around the sun, moving around, gathering energy and power. Right. Those might be habitable, too. Right. And they're like they're solar arrays that are satellites that are moving around on independent orbits of one another. That's Right. The way that they would make a Dyson sphere is there's a lot of space in between them? But if you step back a few orders of magnitude further back into the other parts of the galaxy or the universe, it would appear as basically a whole sphere around the sun. Yeah, sure. So it still falls under that category. Right? Yeah. He had to keep that sphere thing because of Branding. He didn't want to lose that. He's like the genie is out of the bottle. They're like, you really don't need it to be a sphere. He's like, it's got to be a sphere. So those satellites are actually would be called statites. Well, no, if they were the bubble, they would be statites. This guy's got it wrong. Oh, really? I thought the solar sales could be the satellites now. So what I saw the difference between the swarm and the bubble was that the swarm has the satellites in orbit around the star and they're in their own orbits, not interacting with each other. Oh, I got you. A bubble is where the satellites are in a fixed position relative to the star. So those are the satellites. Right. So they're just kind of hovering outside of the star, not in orbit. Okay. Just kind of hovering instead. And then those are the two, and then the third are the solar sales. Correct. Well, you can make a solar sale or you can make any of them with solar sales. And I don't know where that guy got that. Yeah. Do we do a whole episode on solar sales? Yeah. So, I mean, it makes sense if you get a bunch of these solar cells orbiting the sun, you might think that you could harness the power and send it back to Earth some way, right? Exactly. You could use that with any of these. Like, whether it's a bubble, whether it's a swarm, whatever you're doing, and if you, like you said a second ago, made them habitable, then all of a sudden you have a recipe for survival for the human race if earth ever becomes untenable. Right, correct. Or we can't TerraForm Mars. We can go live on these things. When we think about living out in space, my brain immediately goes to the cramped, tiny tin can conditions of the ISS. These things don't need to be like that. I mean, if we're creating Dyson spheres, we're going to be advanced enough that we could build some really luxe satellites and statites as solar rates to go hover or orbit around the sun, right? Yeah. They could be huge. So big. In fact. That Dyson was saying. This doesn't have to be an engineering project that's carried out by a central global government that's directing the whole thing. That as our energy consumption and energy needs continue. Nations could take it upon themselves individually to create these solar sales that are habitable. Put them into orbit independently. And just through the desire to preserve one's own life. Would make sure that their orbit wasn't going to intersect with somebody else's orbit who was already up there. And just organically. A Dyson sphere in the form of a swarm or a bubble could form on its own just by self interested nations developing this technology basically independent of one another. Well, he had some far thinking thoughts. Far thinking. Should we take another break? I think so. All right, we'll do that, and we'll wrap it up a little bit with how to get this energy back to the home planet. All right. So earlier you talked about dismantling Jupiter. With a socket set, a couple of screwdrivers. Mercury is another planet that people have talked about as potentially harvesting. The good thing about Mercury a couple of things. One is that it is near the sun. Yeah. So who needs it already? Yeah. So it would make it proximity wise, it makes a little bit of sense. And I think this Oxford University physicist Stuart Armstrong is who proposed this. And one of the other great things about Mercury is it has a lot of great raw materials, namely iron, that we could use. Right. And he actually suggested that we could disassemble Mercury fully in basically what amounted to a 40 year stretch. I thought you can say 30 days, I could do it. Right, exactly. If a contractor tells you you can take mercury apart in 30 days, don't trust him. Agreed. No, this is in basically 410 year stretches combined equals 40 years, obviously. But I think his point, Armstrong's point, was that you don't have to disassemble Mercury as a whole and wait until it's fully disassembled to put it together to start creating a Dyson sphere. You can disassemble and then start reassembling as you go. And once you start getting one bit of it online, it's going to help power and create better efficiency to harvest and reassemble the rest of Mercury, like we were talking about earlier. Yes. And not only that, but you could use that energy, all of a sudden, there would be super computing like you've never seen, space travel would get faster. All these technologies that we can't even think about yet would be growing at exponential rates. Right. And I mean, that's the point when you're like, well, what would we do with all of this energy every second coming off of the sun? Who knows? We cannot conceive of the stuff we could do with that amount of energy yet, but I guarantee it's not going to be using, like, charging our smartphones. It should be for some pretty neat stuff, I guess. So the other cool idea is that, holy cow, how many people would have to take part in this kind of project? Just literally the labor force you would need. And I think Armstrong is the one who said, well, you could use robots, actually. And with the same idea that once you get some of these robots going, if they could self replicate and build themselves, then you can just kind of sit back and watch the paint dry on Earth and all these robots are up there just building themselves and working and working and doing everything for you. Exactly. I don't know if it was his point. Someone's point along the way is that when you build that first Dyson sphere, all of a sudden it's just going to keep going and going and going faster. It's going to spread at an exponential rate. So you would go from a type two civilization to a type three civilization pretty quickly. And as a matter of fact. You would also. If this project was carried out by a centralized government. It would spread so quickly and so far in such a relatively short amount of time. Something like going from that first Dyson sphere to colonizing an entire galaxy in something like a million years. That even if it was a centralized government involved at the beginning. They would very quickly lose control of the colonies because they'd be so spread out and there'd be so many of them that they would just basically become self sufficient and spread over the galaxy. So the reason this is noteworthy is that if you found one Dyson sphere, you would probably find millions or billions or trillions of them in just one section of the universe. Right. You probably are not going to find just one Dyson sphere. You're going to find a Dyson galaxy, a type three civilization. And that's what they're looking for by sifting through some of these old sky surveys. And they found a couple of candidates, actually, in the last year or so, I think. Oh, yeah? Yeah. There's a couple of surveys that have found stars, and they have, like, typical star names. One is KIC 846-2852, which is a sexy name. Yeah. And then the other is Epic, which I'm pretty sure they call Epic 204-27-8916. Right. Wow. And Epic was discovered by the Kepler spacecraft in 2014. And the reason these things are noteworthy is because there is some sort of weird transit pattern where the light dims, I guess randomly or not necessarily on some sort of set schedule around these stars. And you would say, well, that's probably just a planet or something coming in between it. Well, yes, they thought about that already. And normally a star will dim by about 1% when a planet sized object comes in between you, the observer, and that planet. These things are dipping in the case of KIC star 22% and in the case of the Epic star 65%. Right. Okay. They have no idea what could be massive enough to dim those two stars that much. They haven't encountered it before. There's a couple of theories. One of them said a swarm of comets. Somebody else said, well, you could very easily go from a swarm of comets to a swarm of solar arrays. So maybe these are evidence of Dyson spheres. Yeah. I mean, it's possible. Well, it's kind of fun to talk about robots building themselves and them doing all this work up there. One of the big problems is we're not nearly I mean, we have robot technology now, but nothing close to that at the present. And as this article points out, that it would have to be so advanced, these robots would have to be operating without fail up there because they would be by themselves or be able to fix themselves and fix problems. Like the intelligence would need to be so far advanced, like, we can't even imagine what that would be like? No, but I mean, even if Michio Kaku is off by 100 or 200 or 500 years, that's not that far off. If we can harness all the energy on Earth, we should very quickly improve as far as our technology is concerned. So who knows? Maybe those robots aren't that far off. Yeah. One other thing that I saw from this, though, was when Freeman Dyson was talking about disassembling Jupiter, Chuck, he said that it should take roughly 800 years worth of the Sun's energy output to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. Well, that's not bad, but do you remember how much comes out of the sun in a second? We're like, Whoa, that's so much. We would need 800 years worth of that to disassemble and reassemble Jupiter. Not only do we not have the capability of building a Dyson Sphere, we don't even have the capability of disassembling Jupiter. We just don't have any way to harness that energy which creates this kind of chicken or egg dilemma. We almost need a Dyson Sphere to create a Dyson Sphere at this point. Yeah. Somewhere. Freeman Dyson is laughing on acid. Somewhere in New Jersey. One of the other big issues is, okay, let's say that you could even do something like this and harness this energy to get it to Earth is another big problem. If we want to make it actually usable, some people said we could laser it over, but the problems with laser beams is, after about a mile, you're going to lose a lot of efficiency with it. So good luck with that. Microwaves have been floated out there, but microwaves, even though they're more effective further out than lasers, you're still limited to about 100 miles, which will do us no good. Right. So what's the answer? I don't know. Yes. I don't have one either. I guess one of the easy ones is, well, just inhabit the solar arrays. Go inhabit the Dyson Sphere Stop being so precious about living on Earth. Yeah, that's true, which makes sense. But I like living on Earth. Yes, but would Earth 800 years from now be worth living on? It depends, Chuck, whether it be skipping to school and skin and knees and spelling bees and all that. Still? Because if so, then why yes. I don't know what you're talking about. It's another Simpsons reference. Okay. It's the one where Principal Skinner came back. The real Principal Skinner. Yeah. Great. He goes, if you think skin and knees and spelling bees are corny, well, then Mr. Corn me up. That's right. That's when they introduced. We'd like to introduce a principal Skinner. Principal Ski more Skinner, arm and Tanzanian. Yes, that's a great one. There's one other thing. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I got one more thing. So there's that whole idea that Dyson came up with to search the skies for this imprint where there's a lot of infrared radiation, but no visible light. There's a problem with that because this guy came along. His name was Robert Bradbury. He's a futurist, I think maybe a science fiction writer, right? No, Robert his little brother Robert Bradbury said, well, you know what? If you really wanted to make these Dyson spheres efficient, you'd make them in the same manner that those Russian nesting dolls are made. Like a matrouska, right? Yeah. So you'd have the internal sphere and then outer spheres going around it, catching all that lost heat energy and turning it into usable power, which is awesome, because you'd have basically 100% efficiency as far as the Dyson sphere was concerned. But if you're looking at the stars, you would see nothing, because not only would there not be visible light, there also wouldn't be any infrared radiation. And Freeman Dyson just tongue his head, went into his room, shut the door, and laid down on his bed for a while. The end. Yeah. Well, if you want to know more about Dyson spheres, you can start with this article on howstep works.com by typing Dyson sphere into the search bar. How Stuff Works. As I said, and since I said how stuff works twice, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this. We helped the lady out. Hey, guys. I hope this email finds you well. I've been listening for only a short time, but it becomes so addicted. I've already binged about half of your episodes offered on Spotify. I think she meant pains. I know. We're on Spotify, by the way, and you can bing us all you want from that platform. Like many others, I absolutely adore your show. I came across the podcast after a very upsetting event in my life. Save you the sob story. Just say. I was going through intense grief. There was something about your kind voices, strong intellect, and raunchy humor that gave me a thirst for learning and a new purpose in life. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. Do we have raunchy humor? Sure. I didn't realize that. Oh, I think she picks up on the that's like cheating, Chong. The sideways comments. We're like the new cheats. And Chong, I thank you a billion times over for just being who you are. The podcast was a large factor in saving my life. Don't ever underestimate or doubt what you do, and know that there are people like me out there soaking up every word. Sincerely, Cheerie, B. Thanks a lot, Cherry. That's nice. I like fearing that we help people. Yeah, it makes me feel good in my belly. Yeah, we appreciate the compliment. It's very nice of you to take the time to write in to let us know. And you can let us know that you think we're the tops by tweeting to us. I'm at Josh Clark, and there's also an official SYSK podcast, one you can hang out with Chuck@facebook.com Charleswchuckbryant or Facebook. Comstuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast athousepworks.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. 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." | |
3f92f098-5461-11e8-b6d0-db0afb8d9019 | Selects: How Circus Families Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-circus-families-work | Don't be confused - this one is about actual circus acts made of family members, not the controversial comic strip. Step right up to this classic episode. | Don't be confused - this one is about actual circus acts made of family members, not the controversial comic strip. Step right up to this classic episode. | Sat, 03 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=93, tm_isdst=0) | 42534537 | 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 NA member. FDIC 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.com sisk, 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. Hi, everybody. Happy Saturday. Hope you're having a great weekend. If you want to learn something about circus families, you're in the right place, because this is a throwback. Select episode to July 2, 2015. Circus families. Believe it or not, it's a thing. Great, rich traditions all over the world with circus families fathers and mothers teaching sons and daughters, aunts and uncles teaching nieces and nephews how to swing on trapezes and climb ropes and do flips and ride motorcycles. Here we go. How circus families work. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. It's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry, which makes it the flying SYSK. Flying Stefanies. Nice, man. Boy, see? Look at that. Took us, what, 7 seconds, maybe even months to come up with the best name in the history of podcasting circus teams. Yeah, we'll go back and look at the timestamp after this published, and we'll know for sure. But I say less than 7 seconds. The flying staffinis. Yeah. Good job, man. All right. I guess we can retire. We've hit it big. Yeah, we have. You could make some money being a circus family, I learned. Yeah. I have no idea about cost, so you will delight me, because I think everyone well, not everyone. I think some people, when they go to the circus, they're like, what's that guy make for throwing knives? Oh, I have no idea what they make. It's just the impression I got from this research. Got you? And I thought you had some hard numbers. No, you're the stat, man. Remember? I know, but people don't you know, it's rude to talk about money, so people don't share these things these days. That's why I'm not saying anything. I'm just telling you the impression I had. They're always strutting around with goblets full of really expensive wine. Circus families. Yeah. Every time I think we're all circused out. There comes another topic. Well, we have yet to do how circuses themselves work. We will do that one day. So we've done all of its components, every last one after that. Well, it does have interesting history. So we will save that then. Yeah, I do want to do how circuses work. And we should also say, I don't want anybody to have the impression that by talking about circus families, we are endorsing circuses in general. I have serious issues with some of them, for the most part because of their treatment of animals. Yeah, but a lot of them don't use animals at all anymore. Well, not a lot of them. Some of them don't. I have no problem with those circuses. Yeah, like I remember the Big Apple Circus. They have a dog thing. Well, dogs. I mean, what are they going to do anyway? A horse thing. And I think that was it. And horses love to show off, so I'm okay with the Big. Yeah, but they wouldn't show like an elephant. Right. Which is funny, because apparently an elephant is equal to a family Circus performer. Oh, yeah, I saw that. I should say circus family performer. Family circus is totally different. Yeah. This is a little frustrating to research because I kept getting lots of circular cartoons that weren't funny. You don't think they're funny? Okay. They're terrible. They're not funny. I think they're charming and heartwarming for me. Yeah, sure. Jeffy wrote on the wall. Right. Not funny, but it's cute. Their little hair and the nose. They're cute. I have a brief segue here. Initially, that reminded me I was just at Max funcon, the weekend retreat of Jesse Thorne and his podcasting empire. Everybody loved you. That picture of you and Hodgman and Justin McElroy's kid. Yeah. Baby Charlie. Yeah, very cute. Yeah, I think people love babies. Hodgman, who doesn't even particularly like kids, was like, Give me that. Baby Hodgeman likes kids. At least he likes his own kids. Yeah, sure. So I was just there. And first of all, let me recommend the Super Ego podcast. Very funny. Improv podcast featuring Matt Goreley and Paulo Tompkins and Mark McConville and Jeremy Carter. You could have stopped at Paula's Thompson. Yeah, right. But one man in Province, it's not the best. He can do it. I bet he could. Yeah, he does. I've seen it. So, anyway, long story short, we were playing this game one night where we were naming comic strips, and the comic strip Mark Trail came up. Oh, man. Do you remember that? Well, it wasn't even trying to be funny. Well, no, it wasn't funny at all. But it wasn't even, like, interesting. It was literally like, what a beautiful sunset today. Right. That was it. Or tracing the trail of a hawk in the sky, like through eight panels. Yeah, I thought it was refreshing in a little ways. Like, you'd just make it all through a hilarious spasm of Laughter after Funky Winker Bean or Hagar the Horrible. And you needed to wink. Chill out. I couldn't remember that one. So you'd like read the Mark trail? Yeah. And then you go at it again and just laugh and laugh and beatle Bailey with just taking stitches. And then maybe you come down a little on Mary Worth apartment at 3G, back up on wizard of It. Back down with Brenda Starr. Right? Yeah. That's the way you do it. But Mark Trail, I don't want to knock it too much because I believe it, like, taught kids about nature and conservancy and stuff like that and how to follow a Hawks Trail in the sky. It didn't belong in the comic section, but I don't know. In fact, it was a comic strip. Yeah, a lot of those comics were like, they started out or a lot of things started out as comics. Like Lone Ranger comic. Oh, really? Sure. The comic strip or comic book? Because some have been both. Well, the bolster my point. Let's say comic strip. Okay, great. And it might have actually started out as a radio show, now I think about it. Hey, that worked out well. I was thinking, how can we kill some time here before we do circuses? That's how. Family Circus. Tangent. So family Circuses. Yeah, circus families. When I first started researching, I was like, what a weird thing to be in a circus family. And then I thought it might be weird to be in one, but not weird that there are circus families because it makes total sense sure. That it's the family business. Well, that's how circus has largely started out. Yeah. Very familial. It was like some patriarch of a family would find out that, hey, I'm kind of good at juggling. Why don't I try doing it while I stand on the back of a moving horse? Sure. And they'd go, Holy cow, I'm actually doing this. And they'd say, well, let me see what happens when I toss my sons in the air instead of juggling batons. Juggle my sons. Yeah. If I set their hair on fire using some sort of safe flammable material that will burn but not burn the sun, say. Yeah, like have a flame retardant cap. Sure. Then all of a sudden, you've got a circus family. And these people would start out by, you know, the whole family would get involved. And this is a time when there were much larger families than there are today. And they would form their own mini circus and travel around. And as circuses became more and more established and entrenched and divided among some very big names, they started basically freelancing for these things. Like, they go on a tour or a couple of tours with a large circus for a couple of years, and then they go off and get on another tour or something like that. But they would form these family acts and that's how circuses originally got started. Yeah. And apparently the more you look at it, the more it makes sense. They're on the road a lot. And if you want to spend time with your family, get your family in the family business, because then mom and dad aren't on the road doing their equestrian act. They are bringing the kids along and teaching them, and all of a sudden they're the writing staffinos. Right. And they're spending time together. I read a few interviews with people in circus families, and apparently if you were not from a circus family, this quote from Big Apple Circus guest director Steve Smith said, for those of us who didn't grow up in the circus, there's always a feeling as if we're on the outside looking in on what they call, quote, being circus. Yeah. Like if you're born into a circus family and you're in the circus, you have automatic prestige. You're part of a dynasty. And that's being circus. Yeah. It's like real police. If you're a fan of The Wire, sure, there's cops and there's real police. Yeah. But like, if you were born into being police, which a lot of cops are also another family tradition job. Yes. I don't know if little podcasters are going to come along. We're not at that point yet where there's been a generation removed. Not yet. Maybe a little Charlie MCE. Roy will be a podcast. Maybe. And then they say marrying inside the circus also makes a lot of sense because where you're going to meet people, but probably fellow performers, other circus families and not towners if you're not like you and I are towners. Yeah. Aka slackjaw Yoko's. Yeah, sure. Hey, look, that thing on fire and jump through it. Yeah. There's a pretty neat article on PBS called Being Circus Life in the Family Business about being born into a circus family. It seems like a pretty cool life. I mean, they go to school on the road and I think it's like one big family because they say if you're in a trapeze act, you can't be mad at your dad who is catching you in the trapezac tonight. I think you got to, like, drop you. Yeah. Well, you can't go into performance, a dangerous performance, like the globe of death harboring any animosity toward your siblings. Right. So you got to work this stuff out. They're tight knit people. Right. And it seems like the custom is that once you are done performing as a member of a circus family, there's a non performing job for you ready and waiting in the circus elsewhere. Like an administration or something like that. I thought you were going to say, break a deal, face the wheel. Long standing tradition in the circus. I know. Welcome to Bartertown. I watched that not too long ago. I told you. I think I watched the whole Mad Max trilogy. Yeah. The quadrilogy now. Well, yeah, I think it's still the trilogy plus one. Like, Durham is our plus one on the Northeast tour. Yeah. The lousy people of Durham. Get it together. Durham. All right. So you want to talk about some of these famous families. You marry into it, you're born into it, and then before you know it and it seems like they always have a lot of kids, too. Yeah. Like seven children. Because you need seven to complete a pyramid. Exactly. Is that why? Probably. If you think you need help tending to the farm, imagine having, like, a circus act. Yeah, that's a good point. And some circus families also kind of expand, especially once they form a troop, they'll expand the family act to include non family members. Sure. They're members of the troop. They're not members of the family. But for any outsider, they're like, oh, there's like, three dads here. Yeah. But they take the traditional blood oath. I think they can cut themselves with an elephant tusk still attached to the elephant. Yeah, that's right. And then they do a trapeze act. That's got to hurt. Yeah. So let's talk about the Clarks, one of the earliest British circus families. Any relation to you? Probably. Can't you tell? Sure. You see me on the high wire. I have. You're quite skilled. Yes. The Clarks go all the way back to the very first circus because a man named Philip Ashley is credited as being the inventor of the modern circus in the late 17 hundreds. Right. And he heard about John Clark, who is a horseman, and a lot of these people are horse people. Yeah. It's a good way to start in the circus, to be good on a horse. Exactly. John Clarke was good on a horse. He caught the attention of Philip Astley, and in the early 19th century, they started a circus act. Yeah. It was an aerial act. At first. It seems like any time you're good, then the Ringling Brothers will come a call in at some point. Yeah. For sure. To snap you up, because they are the greatest show on earth. That's right. One of the ways also to cement your family act as a dynasty, in addition to having multiple generations that stay in the circus, is to create some new, thrilling move that no one else has done before. Yeah. Like the Clarks are credited with coming up with the triple back. Somersault in the Clark family dynasty actually broke up because of World War II. World War II, interestingly. Had a really direct impact on a lot of circus families, and the clerks were among them. So the men went off to war. I'm sure some of them died. The ones that returned were like, I've seen too much to go back into the circus. And it was up to Ernestine Clark, who was a great granddaughter of John Clark, I believe right. To carry on the family business. Yes. Single handedly. And daughter of Ernest. Her name was actually elizabeth Laura. But she looks so much like Ernest. People call her Little Ernie. Yeah, she eventually went by Ernestine. I guess she was like, I might as well just make this a little more feminine. It's like a family circus trip. And she did soldier on after World War II, like you said. It's so crazy to think about these famous people going and joining the army. Well, Elvis did. Yeah, elvis was in the army. I know. He was also probably, like, more protected than Prince Harry is. Sure. But he was still in the army. Sure. And famous athletes. Can you imagine? Like Justin Bieber is in the army. It's a fight in the Middle East. No, I really can't. Just doing his duty. I cannot. As an American, it's just a different time. It's just mind boggling to think about the mindset back then. Do you know I got my haircut recently by the guy who created the Bieber haircut back in the day? I swear. Is that why you went to him? No, I didn't find out until partway through. And I was like, Please don't give me a beaver. Please don't give me a which was the sweepy in your face. Yes. Wow. Yeah. So he was beaver Stylist yes. Early on and gave him that haircut. Isn't that cool? I guess. Then I was like one degree from Justin Bieber. I think we all are. I don't know if you found this. I thought, this is pretty amazing. The clarks performance group early on were called the clarkonians. I thought that was pretty good. It's weird. It's so funny. Like, for some reason, if you're a circus promoter, you're like, that name is not nearly Italian enough at an ine or an one or something on the end of it, even if it doesn't work like Clarkonian or as we'll hear about later, the Haginees. Yeah, that's senseless. It is pretty senseless. But you can thank circus promoters for coming up with those horrible hybrids of names. Yeah, I think there's a rich tradition in Italy. So it sounded fanciful. So Ernestine carried the torch. She finally left the circus in the 1950s and had a husband that was a parttime circus performer, part time actor, and her little girls. Who he was. Barley Baer. He was the mayor. And Andy Griffith. Oh, no way. And if you look up his credits, he made appearances in everything. Like, you would recognize him immediately. Interesting. He's been in everything from three companies to the Golden Girls. He was just in everything. Oh, wow. That's pretty awesome. Bewitched. Yeah. Did I say? Three's Company? Yeah, he did. I'll say it again. So she married the famous actor, and then her daughters became trapeze artists, carrying on the family tradition. And Ernestine eventually became the first daughter to follow her father into the International Circus Hall of Fame. Nice. And I have a little clip here. Do you ever read the old New York Times articles sometimes the PDF ones. Oh, it's the best. The ones with 18 different headlines? Yeah, you just basically read the headline that says several headlines, actually. So this is about Clark. Ernest Clark in New York City and Madison Square Garden. And the first headline is Trapeze Man noted for twist and air. Ernest Clark of Ringling Circus turns at right angles and leap for life. Line. Line. Broken rib brings panic. I'm sorry. Pain line. And then riding action during triple somersault starts sweat of agony. All right. And then in the article, it says, clark's feet is apparently in defiance of all the laws of mechanics, for he turns his body in the air and appear wet at right angles to its line of flight with no other leverage than that he can exert by a thrust of his shoulders. That's some journalism. It is. And then later, when they're describing him, he says, Clark is a small, almost slight man, but with a large, wonderfully developed chest with a great heart beating inside. Old New York Times articles are just the best, I would say all old newspapers, period, New York Times, they knew what they were doing. Yeah. You can access that stuff today pretty easily. Pretty neat. You know, I looked up what that line and staying alive means about the New York Times. Don't make a man. Is that in the song? Staying Alive. The New York Times don't make a man. Oh, I never knew that's what they were saying. Yeah. So what does that mean? It means basically at the time, that if it wasn't in The New York Times, it doesn't matter. And this is about a man whose life still does matter, even though it's not worthy of being reported on it in The New York Times. Who John Travolta or the character yeah, I can't remember his name. Tony Manera. Right. I think it's Scarface. Tony Marinara. Was it Tony? It's probably Tony. I think it's Tony. So that movie was based on an article in New York magazine, and it turned out that the guy who wrote it made the whole thing up from beginning to end. I think I heard that made it up crazy. Yeah, but it's still worth reading. Who cares? And especially if you know that he made it up, you're like, how did anybody buy this? It's kind of like on the spot reporting is just done by a handful of people. Sure. And he found this guy that worked in a hardware store in Brooklyn yeah. And then was there was able to almost omnisciently track the people that came into this guy's orbit. It's funny that the editors were like, wow, you did a really good job here. Not, you're a fraud. Who cares? When I hear things like that, I'm like, Just say it's fiction from the beginning. It's still interesting. Yeah. It's like when the guy, the author wrote about his drug rehab, james Fry. Yeah. That was a great book. And I remember at the time when I came out, I was like, man, she just called it fiction. It's a really good book. But I thought I followed that story and thought the same thing. Why would you say that? Every word of this is accurate? Yes, it doesn't make any sense. We will get back to circus families, believe it or not, right after this message. 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. 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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. Teedoc 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 T-E-L-A-D-O-C comStuff. For JDPower 2021 award information, visit JD. Power if the Family Circus the circus family can get in front of a show promoter, they can have some sort of control over their own name. Sure, the change that comes to it. And that is the case with the Hobsons. Robert Hobson, who left England for the US in 1868 and started a circus family act. Yeah, acrobats a family act. That's right. And apparently he was noted for tossing his sons about like Indian rubber. I don't even know what that means. It means he was basically throwing his sons all over the place and they're just landing places. Well, no, I get that, but I don't know what Indian rubber is. I think that they were very pliable. Okay. Got you. So with the name change, they were originally Nelson, but changed their name? No, it was Hobson first. Oh, it was? Yeah, changed to Nelson. Man, it gets confusing. Right. So he called themselves Professor Nelson and Sons. Right. The sons who we talked about like Indian rubber. Right. But it's not like Nelson's no better than Hobson. It's just strange. Yeah. He changed it supposedly, allegedly because he wanted to pay homage to a former stage partner that I guess had died or moved on or whatever. Well, that makes sense. I couldn't find the person's name, whoever the Nelson was, but it was an homage. Well, maybe he wanted some anonymity as well. Yeah. But he's probably on the run from the law. Sure. So the Nelson became the Great Nelson family because they followed that tradition of needing more people more quickly than they could reproduce. Right. So they brought in other performers who weren't family members and they became the Great Nelson family and then ultimately the Flying Nelson, which is what they became famous as. The Flying Nelsons. Yeah. And here I thought the cool little factoid about them. In the early I'm sorry, late 1920s, granddaughter Hilda was hired to teach Lawn Cheney, the actor, how to walk the high wire in a movie called Laugh, Clown, Laugh. And then all of the Nelsons were in a movie called Circus Rookies in 1928. So they still continue, I think not as the Nelsons, but they said their ancestors. Some of which still perform. Yeah. They basically retired mostly by 1935. Yeah. But then some carried on. Sure. What about the Flying Wallendas? These are the ones that everybody knows. Everybody's heard of that. That became part of the lexicon. Yeah. The Flyingwlendis yeah. And funny enough, the Flying Wilendas actually got their name from a newspaper headline that dubbed them that because four of them fell from a high wire yeah. In Akron, Ohio. And they said they're the flying villains. Yeah. They said the quote was the valendas fell so gracefully that it seemed as if they were flying. But I wonder like there were other Flying nelsons Was this the first one, I wonder, the Orlando's? No, because the Flying Nelsons were called that long before the middle of the 20th century. I think it was a natural word to apply to a circus family that did acrobatics. Right. They're flying. And they definitely did acrobatics. Man. They cemented their legacy for the seven person chair pyramid wait for it. On a high wire. No nets. No nets, no harnesses. Very dangerous. So dangerous, in fact, that Carl Willnda, who was the patriarch at the time, died at age 73 from a fall on the high wire. Yes. They had a lot of tragedy when they had the pyramid collapse in 1000 962. Two people died and Carl's son Mario was paralyzed. Carl goes on to die. They had a sisterinlaw who fell to her death in 1963. And then in 1944, they were the group performing when the Hartford Circus Fire broke out. Oh, really? So their act was going on. These tents were made of they were coated in paraffin wax at the time. Probably kerosene to keep it waterproof. Right. Paraffin wax is highly flammable. So it's kerosene. So it's kerosene. And little tent sidewall started, and during their performance, a band leader spotted it. And apparently, and they should tell everyone this, the song Stars and Stripes Forever is a warning signal to the circus performers. Oh, really? He said, start playing that. And that signaled like, big trouble is ahead. And 166 to 69 people died. It didn't. It only have one point of entrance or exit, I think. I don't know. I know that some of the exits were blocked because they had, like, the ramp set up for the lions and stuff to come through, like portals, so they couldn't get out that way. So you might be right. Yeah. That was one of the deadliest fires in US. History. That's a bad fire. Yeah. There were a bunch of circus fires, I read about two or three, I would guess, if you have huge canvas tents, a lot of hay on the ground. Yeah. And they're coated in a flammable material. Yeah. And everybody smoked. Sure. Like cigars. Yeah. And then they still don't know. There was a guy that claimed responsibility as an arsonist, but they don't think he did it. He was mentally ill. He was an arsonist. Just not that time. Just not that time. So the Linda had become synonymous with circus tragedy. Yeah, absolutely. Strangely. But they also hasn't overshadowed their accomplishments there in the world. The Guinness Book of World Records for the world's first and only ten person pyramid on a tight rope. Greater. Several of their family members died doing this, and they went on to not only redo it, but to add three more seats. Three more will end up yeah. That's crazy. So they set a world record, and then Nick Wylinda, who has been on Discovery Channel before, I believe he walked over the Grand Canyon. What channel? Discovery Channel. Have you heard of it? Got you. I think he was the one who walked over the Grand Canyon. He definitely walked over Chicago in between two skyscrapers over a 600 foot drop. Yeah. Man, that stuff is just nutty. Which is 200 meters. Crazy. Yeah. On a high wire without a net, you could put a net at the bottom. It's not going to do anything. We talked about this a little bit recently with the movie coming out about man on wire, the tightrope walker between the Twin Towers. How does the wind not just knock them off? Well, that's what that polls for, to extend their point of what? Balance point. Center of gravity. Yeah. I mean, I knew it helped him balance, but it just seems like the wind could be so fierce, like the. Wind blows me over just walking down the street. I've seen it. I frequently have to help you out. That's how you found most of your lucky penny. Yeah, it's a good point. I hoovered them all up. All right, are we on to the Hagenis? Yes, we are. The Hagenis, which started out as the Hodges. Not good enough. Let's make it more Italian and add ene to the end of Hodges. Yes. Which is what a promoter did to that lovely English surname in the late 19th century, and they have been around for a long time. 350 year ancestry of circus performers. Yeah, it's not bad. It isn't bad. I think that's the oldest in here. The Linda went back to the late 18th century. 1700. Yes. I think the Hygienist might be the oldest one in here. This one lady I saw that was interviewed, I can't remember her name, she was a 12th generation on one side and 7th on her father's side. Man, that's serious, being circus. Yeah. So with the Haginees. Chuck yeah. They were really good with the horse equestrians. Yeah. They had their own in particular, Harriet, which was one of Albert Hajini's. Well, I guess he wasn't the founder if it went back 350 years. But in early Hageni, early 20th century Hageni or late 19th century, his kid Harriet would somersault and dance on the back of a moving horse. Which is weird, because I've seen that before. I've seen footage from the 40s or 50s. So I wonder if I was seeing her, because there's probably not that many people walking around on Earth who can do backflips on a horse. That's a good point. But the really notable thing about the Hageni's is what they did in retirement. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. Tom and Betty Hagini from Indiana. Peru, Indiana. Not to be confused with Peru, the country. Peru. Peru, yeah. They retired in 1956, and businessman there said, you know what? Why don't you come and work with some kids and teach them, like, your craft? And that began well. You just like, leave it alone. Seriously. Retired. You're a welcome man. No, because we didn't put one out. Get off a property that began what is now the Peru Amateur Circus, in which kids perform, like, ten performances every summer. And it just sounds like a neat little program. Yeah, and it's not that little. Apparently tens of thousands of people show up for it. Yeah, a little. And it's actually going on July 8, 11th, the 18th. Oh, nice. Yeah. Around I don't know exactly when this one's going to come up, but it will be in time. So if you find yourself around Peru, Indiana, go check out the circus there. July 11 to 18th. Chuck we got more, don't we? Up our sleeves. Yes. More enemies. And we will talk about them right after this. 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. It's 2022. When things look different, like doctor's 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 Teletoc 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.com stuff. For JD Power 2021 award information, visit JDPower comAWARDS 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 at. 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. Yeah, don't just take our word for it. Head to squarespace. Comsosk 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. Fysk, you remember you said, Chuckers, that a lot of these families started out as, like, a great equestrian family? Sure, the cognac are probably the premier equestrian circus family around. Yes. They began in a teenager named Leopold Cognaut, and they were Hungarian. He did the old, like, right out of a storybook. He said, I'm running away and joining the circus. Yeah. That's another way to found a circus family. Go start your own. To run off to the circus. Yeah. And start having kids. Yeah. And then you won't be circus, but your kids will be circus. Yeah. It's got to start somewhere. Exactly. And it all starts by running off to the circus. That's right. Of course, he might have married into circus. Yeah, he probably did. He could have. So not only were they equestrians, and of course, when we say equestrian there, it's always bareback riding tricks. Almost. Yeah. But this article actually features a member of the Cognauts, Tina Cognate, who was competing for the US. In the 2012 Olympics. Yeah, sure. She got out of the circus and said, what's something super snobby I can go do? Is it dressage? I don't know. That's not snobby, though. It's actually beautiful and amazing. Yeah. I don't want the equestrians. You don't want them after you. Is that a hornet's nest? Yeah, it's a hornet's nest. They're on horses, for God's sake. They can run faster than you own a horse. So like most performers, john Ringling of the Barnum and Bailey Circus caught a hold of them in 19 seven said, you're coming to America. And they performed there for a little while, but then said, you know, we're going to go back to Europe and we're going to start our own circus. No, that's just a circus. An American style circus and Wild West show. Yeah. It's good on them. Yes. I think it's hilarious. So they're like, okay, I get it now. They're going to go crazy for this in Europe. So the equestrian part of the show is really big in Europe. And then, which was the family, the Clarks world War II put a dent in all of Europe. And so they said, well, I guess we got to go back to America now. Yeah. And then they kept performing and eventually stopped. At least. I guess the family legacy was to create equestrian centers. Yeah. So they weren't circus performers anywhere anymore. But it's almost like this equestrian family had a brush with circus notoriety and then leverage that. Yeah. And then just continued on as an equestrian family, which is pretty neat. Probably make more money in equestrian. And then Arthur Conyat, who's one of the sons of the founder, Leopold he's in the International Circus Hall of Fame. Nice. So there you go. They're not doing too bad. All right, we got a couple of more here. Do you know how to pronounce this one? T-O-G-N-I-S-I would say Tony's. Tony. That's what I was going to say. Tony Marinar. Yeah, that's right. They are another Italian family in Circus Dynasty. And the original founder, Aristide Pony. He said he was a student. And he said, you know what? I'm done with school and I'm going to go perform a circus, open my own, have eight kids so I can open my own circus. Yeah. I get the impression that he decided he was done with school. Oh, yeah. So he ran off to the circus. Did you have the impression whether his wife was a circus, was circus family, circus performer? I don't know. Well, she was after they got married, they had kids and set up their own circus. And it was such a success that in the King of Italy or the King of that part of Italy, because when was Italy unified together in a single country? Was it under Mussolini? Oh, boy. I don't know. It wasn't that long ago. Yeah. Well, King Victor Emmanuel III created or said that the circo tony was the circumnasinalle. Yeah. And that ran for a while. Again, a circus fire hit the Circo, Nazi and Yeh, and from that, .3 of the sun split apart and formed three different circus factions. Yes. That fire spread them far and wide. I guess so. But they are noteworthy because not only were they a circus family, they were really smart inventive engineer types and made a lot of advancements in the circus itself. Like the tent. Yeah, like the big top tent. Yeah. They came up with that. Yes. They came up with three different design. The round couple in the 1940s, the Oblong in the hugely famous round couple of quarter pole free in the other sons, too, invented collapsible seating wagons and a metallic mesh cage that I don't know if that's the globe of death or not. No, that's the uris as it came up with the globe of death. All right. So the metallic mesh cage he invented must have just been like, I don't know, for animals or something. Probably, yeah. Point is that they were inventors and made some money doing that stuff, like designing tents and the like. And one of the things that we haven't really kind of hit squarely on is the fact that if you're born into a circus family and you are raised in the circus, from what I've read, you're very rarely pressured into being a part of the family. It's more like this is your reality. So you start doing gymnastics and acrobatics at an early age and you're surrounded by it. Yeah. And then eventually age six, seven, 8910, you end up being a part of the family act and then the circus at large. But it raised the question to me, like, about that 10,000 hours myth. Is it just from practicing this stuff at an early age, or is this just the result of some people who are born acrobats coming together and producing offspring that are born acrobats themselves? I don't know. It's a great question. It is a good question. I wonder how many times it's happened that you're in a big circus family. You have, like, seven kids, and six of them are in the circus, and one of them is like, I want to be a city planner. Yeah. Probably not much. No. We got one more. We do. The Urinals, who did come up with that Globe of Death in 1912. That globe? That metal globe the motorcycles in yeah. That was invented in 1912. Yes. I had no idea. I went back, I was sure that this thing was probably invented in the or seventy S. I was going to say seventy S. Yeah. Seems like a 70s thing to invent. Totally. Yeah. All the way back to 1912. That is nuts. So the actual Globe of Death was a 16 foot diameter metal mesh orb. Yeah. And the idea is, if you haven't seen one of these, a, just look up a video real quick. B, crawl out from under that rock you live in under. And then C, when you put multiple motorcycle riders that just gun it and fly around this thing without hitting each other. Right. Ideally, yeah. And they would add people who are juggling fire in the center of the globe. Sure. People are riding around it going up to 60 miles an hour, apparently. And the Urine is in particular were the first to feature female motorcycle riders. The first to feature two female motorcycle riders, because how are you going to top the first one? Put in two. And there's one where Jody Uris, who does a neck spin, you know that thing where, like, you just have a harness attached to the back of your head and you spin around. Yeah. So you vomit. Right. Yes. They had her doing that with people going around her on their bikes in circles. Yeah. It's really impressive. I mean, the precision is ridiculous. They're still doing this act today. I saw another family. They don't have the market cornered on the Globe of Death. But they invented it. Yeah. They failed the copyright or Trademarket, I guess. But I did see another family that was I think they had, like, eight motorcycles in this thing. It was ridiculous. And one where they actually brought the globe apart to where there was a gap that they would be jumping or riding over. It was suddenly filled with crocodiles. No, but these people crashed when was it? Every couple of weeks. No, I looked at there was a crash not too long ago. It was in April of this year at the Washington Fairgrounds. And there's actually a YouTube of it. It's not, like, remarkable. It just at the very end of their thing, they all just sort of run into each other, really. But it was a fractured leg and some broken ribs. But other than that, everyone was okay and got right back up on the horse. Iron Horse. The Iron Horse. The steel horse. You got anything else? No. So that's circus families part of our never ending quest to explain absolutely everything there is on planet Earth and beyond. That's right. It's one of them. If you want to know more about circus families, you can type those words in the search bar. Howstepworks.com? And I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mayo. I'm going to call this we misspoke on something in the Bridges episode. Oh, I did. Chuck, I take full responsibility and we like to point these things out. Do you want to set this up? Yeah. In the Bridges episode, I talked about the Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse. Remember you made that Lionel Richie joke and all that stuff? Yeah. In 19 8100, and I believe 114 people ultimately died from this thing. And I said that it was because they were dancing on the skywalk at the time. Totally not true. There was a TDANCE going on in the lobby below and people were standing on the skywalks looking at it, and the skywalk apparently in the design. There have been a change in design that nobody did the numbers and crunch the math on, and this thing could barely hold up its dead weight. And then once you had a few dozen people on it, the fourth storey skywalk collapsed onto the second storey skywalk and both of them collapsed onto the ground. Got you. It's crazy. If you look up the Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse and look at some of the images, just the destruction is amazing. Wow. All right, so I guess you just picked out we heard from a few people you picked out. Probably the nicest one, I would imagine. It's what we usually try to do. Hey, guys, I wanted to point out your explanation of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency collapse. Sighted the wrong cause. The collapse was due to a change that was made to the initial design. Two walkways were supposed to be supported by long, continuous threaded steel rods. From the ceiling design was changed to two separate rods. It should be noted that the original design was determined to hold only 60% of the minimum building code load, and the way it was built would only support half of that. Not enough. Not nearly enough. One bridge failure that should be mentioned is the Quebec Bridge crossing the St Lawrence River. This bridge collapsed twice when it was being built, and it's cited as a reason behind the idea of registering and licensing engineers to practice something that is a standard throughout the world now. And that is from Taylor, who is a geotechnical engineer branch of civil engineering that deals with soils, rocks and foundations. She said, or he, I don't know which, that I make sure the ground can support the structure. Thanks a lot, Taylor. It's a pretty neat job, I guess, and very important. Yeah, and thanks for the email. We appreciate that. And I went back and looked to try to figure out where I got that info, but I swear I did not make up. Don't you hate that? Yes. I've been called out on stuff that I've read and I couldn't find the source and it's still wrong, but it's maddening. It's like I know I didn't just create this out of my own brain. So we believe each but thanks to everybody who wrote in and said, hey, dude, that is absolutely wrong because we want to make sure we get it right. So if we got something wrong that you want to point out and correct us on, let us know. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushouldnow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyhoodnowcom STUFFYou 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 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 are you looking for an escape? An immersive getaway experience? Well, there's a place for all your wildest dreams. 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Body Language! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/body-language | Body language is how you communicate without words. Some say it bears more impact in communication than speaking words. Learn about how you say what you say could mean more than you think. | Body language is how you communicate without words. Some say it bears more impact in communication than speaking words. Learn about how you say what you say could mean more than you think. | Thu, 07 Jan 2016 14:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=7, tm_isdst=0) | 36675148 | audio/mpeg | "This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building your website today@squarespace.com. Enter offer code stuff at checkout and you'll get 10% off Squarespace build. It beautiful. Hey, guys, we are going to be live in person and not just disembodied voices, but just standing there, hair and all. Clothes on, most likely. Probably. Yes. From the waist down at least. Right. We're like reverse Donald Ducks. Yeah. Are we going topless? I guess. I never forgot he just wore a shirt now. Yeah, he didn't have on pants. Wow. Anyway, we're doing a live show. That's right. We're doing several live shows for our warmer Climes winter tour. And we're sold out in San Francisco. Boom. San Diego, Capelo and Austin. So you guys are on our Christmas list for next year. Yeah, you are. But there are still tickets available in Dallas and Atlanta on a different list in Birmingham, birmingham and New Orleans. You can see there, man, we're all over the map. That's right. So just go to Sysklive.com powered by Squarespace, as is our tour. Yes. And go check it out, man. We'll see you in January, right? Yes. You got any other tidbits? No. Okay. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. It's charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's in the house. We're back to basics. Yeah. We're doing a social sciences episode. I mean, we're all right, man. We get to tear it apart. You believe in body language? Sure. Watch this. You're winking and shouldering and nodding your head, and you're loosening up, and you're doing some weird biting things. What did I say? You said I'm feeling silly. That's exactly what I was saying. How about that? Yeah, it said I've had a diet Mountain Dew and I'm pepped up. Oh, okay. That's what I was saying. I missed the now I'm crashing. And he's down. You're doing good. Yeah, I'm hanging on by thread. Are you sure we can make it through this, man? You can do this in your sleep. Okay. Don't go to sleep. It would be so boring. You could theoretically do this in your sleep. Yeah. Okay. I got you. Yeah. So body language, it is a thing. When I was researching, I was like, this is junk science. There's no way this is real. And I could not find anything that just said, yes, body language is obviously junk science. Apparently. It's very well established and well reputed, I understand. Yes, there is such a thing as body language. It's rooted in evolution. It's basically evidence of evolution from an animalian ancestor. But the idea that you can read somebody, especially like, that facial coding system, it just struck me as really, like, junkie. Yeah. I could have sworn we had done this one when I we did micro expressions. Yeah. We did that in, I think, 2009. And I don't remember how I weighed in on it back then. So I'm just going to start a new yes, it may be a different take. I have no idea. People grow and change. Their opinions evolve. Well, here's what I think. Of course body language is real, and it can tell you a lot. Can tell you a lot. But you can be misdirected very easily. Sure. And, I mean, we'll get to it, but I found some stuff from a former FBI guy even it doesn't say it's junk science, but he's like, you can fool somebody, too, if you're a sociopath. You know about body language and micro expressions. Yeah. Apparently, it's a myth. That's how I get by. Apparently it's a myth that not having eye contact means deception while it can. His whole point is they've done studies over the years, and habitual liars and antisocials in psychopaths have the most eye contact. Probably because there's that myth. Yeah, exactly. So it's like a self fulfilling myth. Yeah. Ted Bundy was probably like, I got to make great eye contact with everyone looking into your soul. Otherwise the jig will be up. Right. And I won't get to kill people any longer. My favorite thing. Right. There's a lot of myth there's that one myth also, where you look up into the right or up into the left of your lying or recalling I can't remember we debunked that in something here or there a while back. Yeah. I think body language is fun to talk about and study, but when you're convicting someone as a jury based on micro expression yes. There's where the junk science comes in. For me, it gets a little dangerous, and not just with body language, too. We need to do a whole episode on forensics in general and just how junkie the science that most of it is based on. It's basically the only thing that's left standing is DNA, and even that can be wildly misinterpreted. And we're using this to execute people, and there's a big problem with it. So I think we've arrived at my problem with it. It's junk science when you apply it for, like, law enforcement yeah. As fact. Yeah. Agreed. Okay, so can we be done? This is the other thing that got me, too. Albert Mehravian. I totally nailed that guy's name. I bet the H is silent. I bet it's just merabian. Notorabian anyway, doctorabian back in 1981 said that in the first four minutes of meeting someone, our facial expressions account for 65% of the impression we make. 7% of that impression comes from our actual words, while the remainder of the information comes from our tone of voice. Yeah, I think is what made me think, like, no, this is all BS. Yeah. Because it sounds who can say that? You can't. Maybe in 1981, you could get away with that crap. Not in 2015. No. 16. Yes. You lived in the past. Yeah. Merabian, he was probably one of the first researchers to study this in the 1940s out of UCLA and I agree. You can't just break down percentages. I think what he really means to say, if I may speak for him yes. Is facial expressions and tone of voice count for a lot of what you're getting out of a person, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that. And Word account, maybe for even less than those two things combined. I think people would agree with that, too. I think it's when you quantify it 7%. He just said that just because it sounds authoritative. Yeah. Because he fed it into the percentage maker 3000. And that is not to miss the point that communicating inadvertently is something that we all do through body language. Sure, yeah. There's a great quote I ran across on a Psychology Today post. The quote comes from a 16th century Scottish mathematician named John Napier, and he said, if language was given to men to conceal their oh, you found it too. Yeah. It's about as good a quote of body language as you can come up with. You do it, Chuck. No, you already have it. You do better. 16th century Scottish mathematicians. No way. I'm not Sean Connery reading this. If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, then gesture's purpose was to disclose them. That's perfect. Not bad. That was a dead on John Napier. It's not as good as my crystal fault. Yeah. So Napier makes a pretty good point, like yeah. Language has all sorts of structure and can be mastered. Body language, much of it is just inadvertent and we don't even realize, necessarily, when you're picking up on it, you just get this weird gut feeling that, no, I don't trust this car salesman, or I want to give this car salesman all my money, depending on the body language. Yeah. And it's pretty clear that this started a long time ago. Like it predates language. Right. Because who wrote this, by the way? This is a Patrick Kiger joint. Oh, Kyger. Yeah. Kyger says, rightfully, that in tuktuk's age, you didn't have a lot of time to suss things out, like up close and personal. Once you got close enough within striking distance, you can be stricken. Yeah. You might already have that club upside your head. Right. Or that rock in your face. So you need to judge someone's body language as they approach you to survive. Yeah. So body language makes sense. And you would also presuppose that since we are descended from animals and animals clearly do engage in body language, that body language would be older than language. Although this article says that language didn't exist until about 100,000 years ago. That's under dispute. Really? Possibly as much as a million years ago, people were using some sort of verbal communication. Oh, wow. Yeah. And Neanderthals apparently also had language. Probably. Interesting. It is pretty interesting. I'd like to do one on animal communication. Have we not? I think we touched on it here and there, but I know there's a lot of things like cats purring and tails wagging on dogs that are misinterpreted, or like a wolf growling. I think that means compet me talk to misinterpreted as a warning. Come take the steak out of my mouth, if you dare. Should we take a break? Sure. All right, let's take a quick one, and we're going to get back and explain a little bit more about what one researcher calls thin slices of experience. So Joshua said something about thin slices of experience, and I'm not talking about the roast beef line at the buffet, which is great. Thin slices of the carving station. Yeah. You ever worked at carving station? Have I ever worked one? Yeah. I've hung around one long enough that I basically should have been paid, but I was just eating. What, do you wait for the next roast to come out so you can get the end cut? No, I've never been into end cuts, whether it be a loaf of bread or a cut of meat. Oh, really? Like a prime rib and cut? Yeah. No, Daddy. That's good. Isn't it all salt? Maybe that's why I love it. You like the salt? Yeah. To me, it's like the closer you get to the middle, the juicier it's lower cooked. Yes. And a little rarer in the middle. Right? Obviously. Yeah. So I think that's my problem with the end of anything. It's undercooked or overcooked about why people don't like to eat the crust. Because it's called crust, and that might be part of it. If, like, 100 years ago, they named it like the butterfly. Yeah, the butterfly slice, people would have been fighting for it. The butterfly slice is delicious. Yeah. Have you ever heard George Carlin's little take on that end slice that everybody always goes past? They're like, I'm not going to eat that. That's the poison piece of bread. I'll leave that for my family to eat. Wait, I guess the end piece isn't called the crust, though, is it? The crust is what's around, but it's all crust. That's the problem with it. Okay. You know what I mean? Sure. It's nothing but crust. Yeah, not butt crust. It's nothing but crust. I think the other weird man, this is a juice. You're so juvenile. This is a strange tangent. I think the other problem with the bread in pieces is that eating one in piece with a regular slice is a little weird. Yeah. But getting that other slice off the tail end is not very feasible or efficient no. To make two crust pieces. No, but that frequently is the last sandwich that's made out of the loaf because that one end piece has been hanging around, and then it finally works, and then you stick some turkey in it and weep quietly while you eat your terrible sandwich. Man, thin slices. Where were we? From experience? Yes. This is a professor of psychology named Nalini from Tufts University. Shout out to my buddy Robert Shahade from high school, okay? He works at Tufts. Speaking of, you know, there's a kid with, like, a really huge hit single out right now from your high school. Really? I think your high school is shown in the music video. It's watch me whip. Watch me nene. It's riedan. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. Stilento. So I'm no longer the most famous person for my high school. You were until about six months ago, and I will be again in another six months. Maybe. It's a pretty catchy single. It's a hot track. No, actually, we had several professional athletes that are much more popular than me. We had a professional punter, actually. You never told me that before. Yeah, we've had a few. There's a baseball player. We had a punter. Travis Trip went to my high school. Shut up. Really? No. See, that's big time. Yeah, I don't have any. Like superstars Luke Bryan went to Yumi's High School. Man, you guys, where'd you go? Beverly Hills. 902. Now. Oh, boy, here we go again. Thin slices from Tufts University. Well, let's talk about the Thin slices thing, man. You said earlier that it would be very advantageous, evolutionarily speaking, to be able to read maybe the rough intentions of some other huntergatherer 100,000 years ago. Read the room, like, from a distance before they could hit you with a rock. Right. If that was their intent, sure. Well, just as much you want to be able to walk through the world and be threatened by stuff and to make snap judgments about it based on things like body language. Yeah, same thing. And this is what the Thin Slices has to do with yeah. They're just those first few seconds when you meet somebody. And, I mean, some people may just call it a gut instinct about somebody, but what you're probably doing is reading body language. Right. That's what that gut instinct is. Yes. And those things are processed and generated, and I think the limbic system where emotions and feelings are processed in the brain. Yeah. Limbic system, from what I understand. That's right. Which she thinks, and I agree with her, that might explain why we have such a powerful gut instinct about some people when we first meet them, because it's tied to emotion. Yeah. And the whole point is this guy will cut your throat if you turn your back on him, right? Probably not, but in our modern context, it's inflate the price of the car you want to buy if you're not careful. Yeah. It's a totally different things, but it's based on the same principle. It's all based on body language. And we're able to make snap judgments that we can't even stop and really analyze what it was that person did or what it was about them. We just know that we trust them or don't, or we feel comfortable around them or not we fear them or we don't. Based on this body language. And what this professor is saying is we have a very ancient part of our brain that is responsible for processing this stuff. Yeah. And I think, just for me, personally, I think if you try to focus on that too much, then you're not doing yourselves any favors. Like, let it be an eight. Well, yeah. There's some people who coach this kind of stuff that apparently say no, do all sorts of crazy, weird stuff, which we'll talk about later. Yeah, agreed. But what you're looking at, there are three different categories, I guess. Innate learned in some that are both hybrid expressions and postures and things that you do. Like, for instance, you're born with, like, you can blush. That's an innate thing. You blush. You don't mean to blush, especially when somebody is staring at your cheek. Yes. I don't think you can make yourself blush. Watch this. So just think about hot things in your mouth. Tighten up your core. So that's the innate side. Learned would be things like hanging someone, a bird out the car window. Right. Because everyone knows what that means, depending on where you are and you've learned it. Yeah. That's not something you're bored doing. Yes. I got your diaper right here. A photo of a baby accidentally shooting a bird is one of the great things. Sure. Can we agree? But it's accidental. There's no meaning attached to it. That's what you think. And then there's hybrid gestures that are like, shrugging is a really good example. It's something you naturally shrug. Right, right. But it's not contextual until you learn what to attach it to. Sure. You're not born being like, right. Or you cry. But you've also learned that crying can get you something maybe, right. To get out of a traffic ticket or something. Sure. Or to gain sympathy. It can chase your parents off to the bar crying. Yes. One of those. And then, Chuck, I said something about how flipping somebody bird everybody knows what that means. It does depend on where you are. Sure. Because there is especially with learned. So I think innate body language is virtually universal stuff that you couldn't possibly control. I can't remember why I read it, but if you take a bite of something putrid and you make that horrible, like, disgusted face, like, oh, my God, I'm about to vomit everywhere. Everybody who's watching you doesn't have to go, Give me that, and then take a bite and taste it themselves. Right. They can look at your face and be like, I'm not going anywhere near that piece of feces that guy just took a bite of. Yeah. That's how we all learn not to eat feces. Yeah. But there's also the human thing where you're like, oh, God, smell this. Right. That's the person who wants everyone else to suffer like they just did. But everybody else has just been communicated to by that innate face, that nasty face that you would make when you eat something disgusting. And again, that evolutionarily that protects us in that respect. Yeah. So that's universal. Sure. But it's the learn stuff that's culturally dependent. Yeah. Like, for instance, they have a few examples in the article. Smiling in the US might mean in the United States might mean you're happy, apparently. In Asia it might say, I agree with you. Those are close. It could also cover up embarrassment if they're embarrassed for you or something. That you might smile. Yeah. Is that why everyone's always smiling at mears? For me? What else? Eye contact varies from place to place. Here in the United States, someone might think you're listening and, like, very keyed into what you're saying, are you Ted Bundy? Or You're Ted Bundy? Or if you're in Africa, maybe it might be disrespectful to look someone right in the eye. Yeah. And I looked around to find out what part of Africa, because I hate to leave it like that on this massive continent. Right. Do not look people in the eyes. Everyone said some parts of Africa. Everywhere I looked, no one specifically said in the Congo, it's considered impolite or aggressive or something like that to maintain eye contact. It's definitely in Japan. Yeah. If you make eye contact with somebody, you are saying, I'm your superior. So if you are socially or say, business wise and inferior to somebody, you're averting your gaze and it's respectful. In the US, you shake hands and you make eye contact and you just climb the wrong right there. Unless you're Prince. And then he's like, Nobody can eye contact with me. Is that for real? Because he likes to do things that just mess with people for fun. I think 90% of the stories you've heard about Prince are not true. What about him playing basketball? He's like, a really good basketball player. That says Charlie Murphy. Well, I believe everything Charlie Murphy says. I found some more culturally bound stuff. What else? Thumbs up in New Zealand does not mean, like, right on. Does that mean thumb up your butt? Pretty much. Really? Yeah. You don't want to do that. Similarly, when you make, like, the peace sign, as long as you're not showing the people in the back of your hand. Sure. In England. Yeah. And in Australia. And I believe New Zealand, too. Like that movie Bad Taste, the cover of it, I think Peter Jackson's first or second movie. Oh, right. The cover of it's. Like an alien going like that. And I'm like, what's two? Yeah. Why is he showing me the number two? Then? As I grew up, I learned to understand what that was. What else you got? In some cultures, nodding means no. Like, nodding yes actually means no. Like in Greece and Bulgaria. Oh, wow. That could get you in trouble. Yeah. And in Mexico. Mexico. This is what I found. Mexico, Haiti and Spain. It is perfectly normal to go to a waiter, which I do. I don't do it to waiters, but I'm a kind of person. That's how you call someone over and get their attention. You may also make kissing noises at them. To a waiter? Yeah. Really? Yeah. So I go to Mexico, I need my check, and I go, I guess, according to this thing that I read, which seemed pretty legitimate interesting. Yeah. What was the website? I don't remember. I'll definitely send it to you to post, but it was like it was researched material to be used by business people around the world. If it was a hoax, then they did a pretty good job fooling me. Got you. All right, well, let's take another break, and we'll come back and we'll talk about deciphering some of these nonverbal cues right after this. All right. So language is a very precise thing, or should be or can be. Body language you would think is just all over the map. But there are actually some categories that some brilliant social scientists have come up with. Yeah. And I think they make sense. Yeah. Basically, they've broken it down into five categories or five types of nonverbal communication and body language. There's emblems. It's like hanging a bird. Yeah. Or shaking your fist or something like that. Something that is very symbolic of something else that you can also put into words. Right. Who shakes a fist at someone? Some people do. Okay. Yeah. Because it's saying, like, that middle finger, and then you're really aggressive. Okay. That's very aggressive. I'm just kidding. I never flicked someone a bird. Oh, really? Oh, yeah. Like in a car or something. No way. Yeah. Apparently it's really dangerous. Yeah. That's why I do it. I think it's just I mean, I would get mad and say things, but I don't know who that person is. Yes. It could be a psycho. Yes. Then you're getting chased or you're getting shot at by someone because you just had to shoot a bird. Yeah. We talked about this in the Road Rage episode. Yeah. I wouldn't hang people. The bird. That's not smart, by the way. I want to update on that. I've been improving more and more behaviorally even since the Road Rage episode, and I was already on the right path then. So you're doing good behind the wheels. You're doing so good. I feel like I'm about the same. Well, you've always been that way. I get mad. One time you rode with me. I think it was the first time you ever rode with me. And I started yelling at somebody. You're like, really? You seem genuinely surprised. And I remember thinking, like, this was wrong, abnormal. Well, that was probably because you were, like, sending an email with your left hand and driving with your knee and had a coffee and the other I've gotten so much better. That's good because you value your life. I do. It's great. Emblems after Emblems illustrators, which like shaking your head as far as emphasis to emphasize something you're saying, right. Like, no. Sure, you can just say no, but the person doesn't really mean that until you shake your head while you say no. Especially if you do it slowly. You're really saying, like, do not ask me again. Yeah. Boy, I never thought about that. The slow one really does mean something different. It does. It adds, it bulks it up. Regulators. I think this is in a conversation to let someone else know that maybe, all right, it's time for you to talk now. Or it's time for me to talk. Right. Or it's time for us to stop talking. Like looking at your watch, just getting walking away. Yeah. That's body language. Yeah, I guess it is. It definitely speaks volumes. There's adapters, which I guess have to do with the person listening or I guess anybody, either one, making themselves more comfortable. Like, when you're in a conversation with somebody and they just kind of shift in their seat. Like settle in. Yeah. Now they could be doing it differently, where they're fidgeting they're shifting in their seat uncomfortably. Like, they can't get comfortable. That's just something totally different than somebody who's just, like, settling in. Just making themselves more comfortable. Right. Or I guess if you're having a conversation and someone just sits up on the edge of their seat, that kind of says, we're done here. Sure. I'm about to get up. Yeah. So please say something. Enclosure. Yes. Especially if you sigh while you do that too. And then there's affect displays. And these are the ones that most people think of when they think of body language. These are the ones that like, where you make that face when you eat something putrid or your shoulders go up around your ears when you're scared. All of a sudden. Yeah. If you're mad. It's emotional based. Emotion based emotion. Yeah. Like your eyebrows furrow. Right. There's just so much body language. I came across this one guy from 1978 and M. Argyle. No idea what the M stands for, but in 1978, Professor M. Argyle, a researcher of body language, said that there's probably something like 700,000 words in the body language, human body language. I have no idea how he or she came up with that. That seems high, but it's fun to throw out. There junk science. Yeah. You could say anything back then as far as, like, social psychology. Yeah. Misinterpreting body languages. We talked a little bit about that. That is very easy to do. They have one little anecdotal story about a woman who was a consultant that I think she was pitching in the CEO of a big company. And the guy just sat there, basically with his arms crossed and didn't emote at the end, was just like, thank you. And she thought, Well, I've blown this one. And turns out that is just the way that guy is. The jerk. I know, he loved the presentation, and if he hadn't liked it, he just would have left, is what the partner said, I think. Yeah. So you can easily misinterpret body language. I guess it could be dangerous. That's part of the problem. It can be dangerous, especially when you apply it to law enforcement. Like Paul Ekman. We talked about him heavily in the microexpressions episode because he basically studied micro expressions through facial movement, facial muscle movement, and figured out what each one meant. And he came up with the Facial Action Coding System, the FA CS, which apparently the FBI and other law enforcement agencies use to tell whether you're lying or you're hiding something in an interrogation. Misreading that that's dangerous. That's when it becomes dangerous, for sure. Yeah. This dude I was talking about, Joe Navarro, who was a 25 year vet at the FBI, he's written a lot about body language, and he's one of the ones that warns about the myths and misreading things. But he wrote a whole article on shoulders, and he said everyone's always talking about the face and facial expressions. He thinks you can read a lot into the shoulders of a person, whether it's slumping or bowing up. And then he actually talked to criminals over his entire career and said, what do you look for in a victim? So if you're looking to not be victimized, you might want to avoid these things. Okay. Looking frail or weak or not athletic. Yeah. Work out. Yeah. Or just try and carry yourself like you're not frail or weak. And I think that's a lot to do with the shoulders situational awareness, which is a big one. If you just look like you have your head in the clouds. That's one for me. Target what you're in your head about something. Sure. Yeah. And then the way someone swings their arms, like, vigorously or real subdued. Not at all. Like on that one episode of Seinfeld. It was at Rockhill Welch. No. It ended up as Raquel Welch, but it was Molly Shannon. Yeah. She swept Elaine's desk. Just clean, man. Yeah. I love Molly Shannon. She's one of my favorites. She's fantastic. So the arm swing and basically what these criminals would say to them over and over is, silverbacks don't go after other silverbacks. They go after the weak ones. And they said, it's the same with criminals. So I keep those shoulders straight, and I was like, what a silverback? I forgot. This sounds like a criminal corporate buzzspeak. Silverback. That's the local soccer team. How do you not know what that is? Is it? Sure. That's what I thought. Yeah. What else? We got? These people that try and coach you, we're going to mention them nut jobs. I don't think they're nut jobs, dude. Okay. The one person who emerges as a hero from this article says, be very careful in trying to pay attention to your body language and speak consciously through it, because. You're going to have massive problems. That's not what body language is intended for. So the people who say no master your body language and use it to communicate, you're going to come off as a creep, right. An aggressive, weirdo, corporate creep if you do that. Well, yeah. If you're making a presentation, it's hard enough to get the words right. Yeah. So if you start thinking, like, about every single movement you make and how that conveys I agree. I don't think you're doing yourself any favors. Or like, if you go to, again, a car sales car lot. Right? Yeah. And you're like, I'm going to make sure I look very defensive and aggressive, so I'm going to go rigid, and my shoulders are going to go up. The car selling is going to be like, that guy's walking like a robot. I'm going to take him for a ride. You could conceivably speak through your body language more. I don't dispute that. Right. You can become more aware of your natural body language, too. I don't dispute that either, but when you focus on it and use it as a technique to manipulate other people, I have issues with that. Well, here was one idea I didn't think was terrible. If you do a lot of public speaking, then maybe watching yourself with the sound off. Sure. I didn't disagree with that one either. That's not a terrible idea, I think. As a matter of fact, I was like, maybe I should try that. No, don't forget the other technique that was brought up was called mirroring. That means, and this just sounds crazy to me, this is when you actually try and mimic the person you're talking to, mimic their body language and expressions to, I guess, to make them feel more comfortable to you. People are attracted to themselves as the basis of it. Okay. So when you mimic them, they feel more relaxed around you. I really like that person. I like the cut of their jib. I can't put my finger on it. But they're actually mimicking your own body language. If you're leaning against the wall, they're going to lean against the wall, too. That's disconcerting. It is. That's nuts. You shouldn't do that to people that's manipulative and weird and just be yourself. How about that? Yeah. I think this quote sums it up. Trying to use body language by reading a body language dictionary, it's like trying to speak French. By reading a French dictionary, you can list off all the non verbal cues in the world, but if you try and learn the body language, quote, unquote, because of that, then you're just going to end up confused or you're going to miss something you actually said. Yeah. And plus, also, context is huge, too. Like, if you're just watching somebody's body language, like a hawk and a conversation, you don't necessarily know that person's baseline. So what is by definition, is body language dictionary a red flag right. Doesn't necessarily mean it's a red flag with that person. Like if they're yawning, are they bored or are they nervous? You got to have context and you can't just read people like that. It's stupid. Go with your gut. Sure. But I don't think you should actively try to read it if you want to, go ahead. I don't care. Yeah. I'm not going to. I did read an article with one woman who was an expert supposedly and she did talk a lot about the baseline. She's like, that's the most important thing. You got to know how someone normally is. Are they twitchy? Yeah. Then if they're twitching, the conversation, that's normal for them. Right. So it doesn't mean that you can't trust what they're saying. Right. Then it just means that they're a little awkward. Yeah, like me. You got anything else? No. Friends. There is body language and if you want to know more about it, you can type these words body language into the search bar@housedeforce.com. And since I said friends, it's time for listener mail. This is a question actually I said we'd answer on the air. Hey guys, been listening for quite a few years and you've seen me through a lot of years of growth out of high school and into my own as an adult. I have a question that's been a challenge for me recently. I'm studying permaculture quite intensively and parts of the study are pretty depressing like climate change, species lost and unfair trade. I try to reflect positives only to my clients who are trying to grow their own food because I'd rather encourage them to sustain themselves physically and emotionally then feel guilty or trapped into changing a lifestyle. I realized that having the opportunity and time to focus on ethical choices, the luxury and want to avoid shaming people. I think this approach is good for my own well being because tackling issues bigger than myself seems more harmful than productive. But like you, part of my job is education. So the question is how do you guys deal with darker topics that you cover? I really appreciate the way you do it and I would like some insight and advice how you prevent these topics from weighing too heavily on you and still live a life of enjoyment yet conveying topics honestly. And that is from Annalese in Australia. I think my answer is when we cover something like dementia or HIV like we recently did, we're always going to have humor in there respectfully and in the right ways because that's what we do. Plus also that helps when we're getting this stuff across. It's not like we're causing dementia, we're just saying like, here's all the information that we found on this, here's everything you need to know about dementia. And I think the thing that allows us to go from light hearted topic to a very dark topic to whatever is that we're putting it out there as objectively as possible or as unbiased as possible trying to. We're not passing much judgment on it, depending on the topic, but for the most part, we don't really pass too much judgment on it. And I think that allows us to talk about anything. Yes. And as far as taking it home, we do something that's a big bummer that it really impacts me. It'll bum me out, for sure. Yeah. But just like anything else, I think knowledge is key to the more you know about something, the less scared you might be of it. Yeah. You just go work it out. Yeah, that's great. Me too. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me or Jerry or anybody who we could conceivably pass a message along to, right? Yeah. You can tweet to us at Xysk podcast. You can join us on Facebook.com STUFFYou know, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housesupportc.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushotnow.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 podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today." | ||
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-04-18-sysk-corsets-final.mp3 | How Corsets Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-corsets-work | Sure, we're doing an episode on corsets. Why do you ask? | Sure, we're doing an episode on corsets. Why do you ask? | Tue, 18 Apr 2017 07:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=108, tm_isdst=0) | 36698974 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke with Charles w charles chuck Bryant and Jerry jerome Roland To. So it's stuff you should know. Yeah. Jerry wore her swan Bill corset today. Yes. She looks like a freak of nature. I'm nervous about this one. Going to go ahead and say that. Don't be. Really? Yeah, I'm nervous. Well, here I am to relax you, Chuck. Let me pat your beard, give you a little nap. That didn't help. Does it make a big worse? Yeah. This one I don't know. I mean, the history and stuff is interesting, which I assume we'll talk to first since we don't plan this stuff out. Sure. But we're all with the live and let live thing, and I certainly have no problem with a lady or a dude that wants to wear a corset. Yeah. Or anybody. Okay. What's wrong? But when I started reading about the Guinness Book lady and I went to her website and watched the YouTube, it just kind of freaked me out a little bit. Kathy Young. Yeah. We'll talk about her later. But it kind of crossed the line to me to, like weird obsessions yeah. With physical appearance. Sure. But then I think about, like I'm not going to condemn anyone for getting all kinds of weird plastic surgery either, if that's your thing. I just want people to be happy. Right. But I think that extreme lacing is one thing. It's called also well, extreme racing, I think is the general preferred term. Right. Tight lacing. Yeah. It's a perfect example of you're harming nobody. This is strictly your body. It's yours to do what you want with it. Have at it. Yeah, but what if it's in the like because men say that's the only way a woman will be attractive. And what's different is it different than footbinding? That, to me, is sad. And that's part of a larger issue. You know what I mean? Like, if you're doing it because you want to catch a man's attention or something like that, who knows? We're not pop psychologists. I know. All this makes me nervous. I did actually. I had a conversation with Holly from missing history. Stuff you missed in history class. She's probably wearing a corset in her time. Yes, she has. And she actually defends corsets, too, because I thought, well, it's like the Western equivalent of footballing. She said, no, my friend. Okay. It lacks in reality, in actuality, a lot of the sexism associated with footbinding. Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. And of course, it's in reality and truth, in the 19th century and before were very much chosen to be worn by women for their own tastes, sometimes not out of spite, but contrary to what the men in their life might want or desire. So it's actually a feminist article of clothing, although Madonna certainly made a case for that. Sure. So did Vivian Westwood, but it's not as bad as you're thinking. I think I do feel bad now. Do you? Yeah. Good. I just don't want to make people feel bad. I want people to feel good always. I want everyone to feel good. That's my problem. Yeah. And we should say if you're wearing a corset right now and it feels bad, everything I've seen in my research says you need to loosen that thing because it's not supposed to hurt. Well, yeah. And even Kathy Young, who, again, we will talk about. But she's a Guinness record holder because she formed her waste into the size of a jar. Mayonnaise. Literally. Yeah. Gallon size mayonnaise. The thing I read said an average jar, but I don't think it's correct unless you those photos on her site, though, look. Photoshopped. Yeah. Okay. But she said that all the advice she gave was you go slow. If you want to train your waist to be smaller, which you can do, don't dive in and just start doing the extreme lacing right away. No, there's work into it. There's something called waste training. Yeah. And it's not necessarily the ultimate goal. Of course it is. Which can be a verb, but it is a kind of a parallel subculture of the corset. And culture and voice training is simply where you are basically through the use of corsets and pretty tight corsets over a period of time, usually about a decade, you are reshaping your body mechanically. Right. You're not actually losing weight. Although a tight fitting course that acts something like a gastric bypass surgery without the surgery because you just can't put as much stuff into your stomach as normal. Sure. But the waist training itself, it's a reshaping. It's not actually making you lose weight. So what it's doing is taking inches out of the middle and sliding them down to the hips. And all of this, the whole point for courses from the beginning, of course, it's to the world record holding course, it wastes is to amplify existing female body features. Yes, that's the point. That's right. The word comes from an old French word, C-O-R-S meaning body. And here's the history TADA, which oddly came three quarters of the way through this article. If you go back in time, in the way back machine to the days of ancient Crete, there were women who I think even before Crete, there were women who tied ropes around their waist to make their waistline look slimmer, accentuate maybe the bust and the rear end. Right. They were doing that a long time ago. And then an ancient Crete people think that they are historians think they're the first women that actually wore something that you could call a corset. It was a garment that shaped the body more than 3000 years ago. Right. It covered the I think the waist and the hips. And Cretan women went around bare breasted so they would have their breasts, like saying, hey, everybody, how's it going? And then below that was the corset. Okay. And I would imagine that it probably enhanced the breasts as well. Yeah, sure. If you're cinching everything up like that. Probably acted sort of like a pre brazier support. And lift. Yes. See? I'm so uncomfortable. Yeah. Hey, man, we did one on female puberty that was easier than that. We can do this. Oh, really? Yeah. Science. This is I see you make a valid point. So if you go forward a bit to the Middle Ages, for the first time, these undergarments came out in something called the heavy stay, and it was very much an outerwear, but it kind of accomplished the same goal. But it was very decorative and pretty. But I don't think that lasted too long. They went back under the garment in the 18th century. Right. And then up until the 18th century, most things that were part of the corset family tree or predecessors, of course it were conical. No, they were tubular. Totally tubular. And then once we hit, I think, about the 18th century, what we start to see today, as, of course, it began to emerge where that's conical? It's cone shaped. Yeah, right. From, I guess, the 18th century on, corsets were like a pretty much a mainstay of fashion, if not the basic ingredient of women's fashion from about the end of the 1700s until World War One, basically. Yeah. It wasn't like some weird thing today. They're still in fashion today in certain cosplay and costumes in the fetish world and burlesque and stuff like that. Or just plain sexy time. Sure, regular old sexy time. Right. But the stuff I read said it was no, like, more of a strange thing than, like, a woman to wear a bra today. Right, exactly. It's just a regular fashion accessory. Yeah. And as we'll see, it was kind of essential depending on the clothes you're wearing. Depending on the period. Yeah, that's true. There was a real movement. And when I was saying. Like. Some men were saying. Like. You shouldn't be wearing corsets. And women said. TS for you. Pal. I'm still wearing a corset. There was actually a big movement that came out of. I guess. The 19th century. The late 19th century. That was spearheaded by two brothers. IRA and Lucian Warner. And they came up with an alternative to they actually were anti corset crusaders. They were both doctors, and they basically said, if you can't beat them, join them, but let's try to create a corset that's less problematic for women. And the idea that corsets were problematic for women can actually be traced back to a 1793 medical article by a guy named Doctor Samuel Thomas. Von somarineg and von Summerring basically made up a lot of the myths about corsets that we know today. That they can cause scoliosis. Sure. That they can mess up your liver, that they can lead to permanent deformation of your body and your internal organs. It all kind of came from this. And 100 years after Von Summer wrote his article, the Warner Brothers got in and said, we're going to come up with a health course. Yeah, but they definitely can change. There's something called visceral optosis or Glennard's disease, which if you do the tight lacing long term, your organs can actually sync and shift away from where they should be. Right. So that's something that can happen. That raises a really good point, man we should delineate here. Wearing a corset, normally, even when you're doing weights, training should not result in that. There is a definite line where if you are getting into extreme corseting, then, yes, all sorts of medical problems can happen, but just about every corseting site out there on the Internet will warn you about going past that line. And in fact, there's a good site by orchard courses. They sell courses. They have a really extensive site. They know their stuff about corsets. They actually say one of the ways that the body can be deformed is if you're an adolescent girl wearing a corset. Right. Your ribs can develop improperly. Yeah. Because you're wearing corsets. They say girls under 18 shouldn't wear corsets. Yeah. So then along came this guy, and we should mention, too, that when these two Warner brothers were they in the United States? Yeah, they were out of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Okay. I was going to say Vrner. Maybe a generation or two before, probably. So they also changed around the same time. At least I think we have not mentioned yet that the corset has to and we'll get into all the parts of the corset. But one of the things that keeps it rigid and stiff in the old days was baleen whale. And actually it was a teeth. Right. Even the call that whale bone. Yeah. And they would use this to make the course, it's stiff in place, keep everything where it should be. But around that time in the late 1800s, they were overhunted, became really expensive. So they said, all right, forget the whale teeth. Let's put in steel in 1894, which I'm sure that was quite comfortable, right? Yeah. Women were wearing these like, every day. But as we'll see when we talk about manufacturing course, one of the points is to make it as comfortable as possible, this very uncomfortable contraption. But, yeah, they started to use steel. And even today, you'll find steel incorsets sure. That are meant for like, waste training or something like that. And then, like I teased a moment ago, along came this guy named Charles Danny Gibson. He was a graphic artist in the Victorian times, and he became very famous, and a lot of artists that came after him emulated his style. But he became very famous in the 1890s for creating what was known as the Gibson girl. So what he did was he drew all these pictures of these ladies who are I mean, some say it was, like, the first ideal of American attractiveness for women, and they wore these swan bill corsets, which made these were even more extreme. They would make you kind of stick the bust out and stick your rear end back. And if you just look up Gibson girl, I mean, you've seen these drawings before, right? It's like America's first cheesecake drawings. I don't know what a cheesecake drawing is. It's like a Gibson girl. Okay. Or a Vargas girl is another little more modern one. Well, supposedly you're an American boy. You've seen them before. Apparently, his wife and her sisters were his inspiration. The sister part is weird. Yeah. They said they were all pretty. Okay. And he was celebrating. He said this was not a woman, but it was a thousand women, as his quote, got you. And supposedly the Gibson cocktails named after him, but I'm not sure if that's true. Oh, that's great. Good for him. Guy named pickle onions. Yeah. Put in martini. Right. Call it after me. Tell me how it happened. He was actually working from a corset that was invented by a doctor inez ghosh saro terrible. Who created this course at the straight front, also called the swan build corset. And the whole problem with it was and Charles Dana Gibson is criticized for popularizing this because it's so bad for you. There's no question that the swan bill corset is really bad for your posture, because the thing that it forces your spine into is just totally unnatural. And apparently that trend only lasted for about a decade during the Edwardian period, the first century of the just ten years of bad backs. And then pretty much right after that, not right after, pretty close, of course, it suddenly just went away because world war I had such a sweeping change on the world. It created social upheaval. And one of the things that came out of this was women said, you know what? We're done with corsets. I'm a flapper now. I need to do the Charleston. Can't do the Charleston. And of course, it and the whole fashion was just different looking. It was and the idealized body was different, too. So prior to that and throughout basically history, the Venus body type, which is the fertile women curves type, sure was replaced by the Diana type, which is the more athletic type that now has been in fashion basically ever since world war I. That basically killed the corset. But the modern bra and slip and all of that stuff came out of the death of the corset. They were like, we still need something. We still want to corset anymore. Okay. I think one of the reasons all this made me uncomfortable is just all the categorizations over the years. Yeah. This is the ideal woman, and she's called a Diana, and this is what they should look like. Yeah. Gross. To me, that, to me, is like a whole other podcast. Sure. Because plenty of women buy into that and they don't feel bad about themselves for buying into it. They say, oh, yeah, this is what I find attractive, too. Anyway, during this time in the Roaring 20s, there were the course of tears that were just like, oh, no. Well, how about this kind that you can still wear? It's not like the other course, that you can actually dance on them. It sunk. It did. And it basically stayed that way for the rest of the 20th century. There was a brief resurgence. Christian Dior brought it back in the it was kind of akin to that swan Bill Corset. Oh, yeah. And then it went out pretty quickly. And then in 1982, Vivian Westwood had a show called Buffalo Girls, her collection for 82 83. And it brought corsets out. Who was she? Vivian Westwood. She's a famous designer, kind of punk fashion. And she brought horses out from underneath the clothing and made it basically into a shirt. It was outerwear. Now, was that when Madonna got on the train? That was about six years later. And that was John Paul Gotier that designed that very famous corset with the conical bra that would take your eye clean out. Yeah. What was the video? I don't remember. I can sing the song in my head. Sing it now. You know the one vogue. Okay. That was a Vogue video, right? I think so. Okay, we'll find out if it's not. But that was John Paul Gotier. And from that point on, the course, that is basically stuck around, sometimes a little more predominantly, sometimes a little more in the background. But it's basically been a fashion accessory that you could conceivably wear out in public in the west ever since. Yeah. I mean, it sticks around these days. Like, you see costumes and stuff like that. And then occasionally, I guess, if you're in a swinging nightclub, you might see a lady in a corset. Sure. Or maybe a man. Yeah, we'll talk about that after this. How about that? So, Chuck, you teased men wearing corsets? Teased? Literally. I never teased a man for wearing anything except those dolphin running shorts. Those are great. Get back in your time machine. I saw The Boy in the Bubble for the first time. Have you ever seen that movie? Yeah. Travolta. Yeah, I never saw it. I watched the Rifttracks version of it. Oh, well, that's the only way to do it for me to a lot better. Yeah. Where did that come from? I think he's wearing dolphin shorts on one of the scenes. And I was like, Those are dolphin shorts. Yeah. We're talking about men wearing them. Apparently. This article makes it seem like it was fairly normal, but from what I saw in the 19th century and from what I saw in the 19th century, if you were wearing a corset and you were a man you're probably suspected as being gay. Okay. And so here's where this kind of patriarchal view of corsets does definitely hold fast. Okay? If you were like a straight establishment type male, you probably did not cotton to men wearing corsets and didn't want to associate with any guy wearing corsets because you didn't trust him. He's probably gay. But if you were in favor of your wife wearing a corset, she better be wearing a corset, or else she wouldn't be viewed as a proper woman in normal, polite society. Got you. So it's not fair to say, like, that myth about the corset being a part of the patriarchy is not true. It is true in some ways, but it's not like women were forced to wear corsets throughout history. They dawned it in particular on purpose. And one of the reasons why women wore corsets was because it also served as basically the thing that held up all of their really heavy clothes. Yeah. You couldn't just slip into one of those dresses in Victorian times. No. It had a certain shape that required a certain form to put it on, and that course, it would help your body morph into that form, basically. Yeah. There was a low bearing structure that you wore under your clothes, a load bearing beam. So I don't think we really described how these things were kind of how they came together. Yes. There's some people out there like, why is of course, it well, jeez, did we not even say that? Not in so many words. All right. Well, it's a garment, and it's usually pretty short, and it's like a belt. Not a wide belt, but a tall belt. It's like a vest that doesn't go over your shoulders. Yeah, but some of them could go over your shoulders. Well, that was the health corsets, I think, that did that. All right. They lace up in the back. We mentioned the whale bone, which was actually the teeth of the baleen as these reds. And they were put in what we're called boning channels, which were just little sheets, basically, where they would slip these things down in. And it's like if you've ever had to wear a back brace or something, it's very much like that. And like, Andy Warhol had to wear one of these after he got shot by Valerie Salon. Yeah. For the rest of his life, who went on to write the Scum manifesto. You ever read that? Yeah, I thought she wrote it before she shot him, now, did she? We should do one on that whole scene. Yeah, we should. All right, we'll do that. And then they were made out of this cotton fabric called cotill coutil. And it's still used today, of course. It's because it doesn't stretch, has very high thread count. It keeps all those boning channels and rib or, I guess, bones in place. Right. And you have to understand, like, this whole thing, this whole mechanism that is the corset is basically defying physics at any given point in time. So you have to have some really strong stuff involved in the manufacture of it. Yeah. So what else you got? You got on the front part where it meets you have a bus, and that actually needs to be pretty strong as well. Right. So usually that's wood or metal, maybe bone originally. And it was two flat pieces that basically went up and down alongside a seam. And most people are I don't want to say most people i, for a very long time thought that you put the corset on and then laced it up and you put it on and then laced up the back. Right. Yeah. Put it around yourself like that. It's actually not the case. You were doing it all wrong. I had it all wrong. When you put on the corset, you've already got it laced and you're putting the front together. You're putting it around yourself and then fastening the front at the bus. Yeah. But then you tighten the license. You don't lace it tight and try to put it on. Exactly. You just have it kind of pre lace, like your shoes. Yeah. And the lacing kind of confused me, too, actually. We'll get into that. Well, first of all, we need to finish the front. There was a flattened part on the stomach. A lot of times it was decorative. Called a stomacher. Yeah. It was very lovely designs and embroidery and stuff. And that had the added benefit if you were trying to adjust your shape of keeping your stomach flat. That's right. So what else are there any other components to the corset that we haven't mentioned? I don't think so. Just the lacing. Okay. So we'll talk lacing now, then. You're ready? Yeah. So traditionally in the west, in Europe, the method of lacing was basically like you would lace a shoe. It's called bi directional lacing, where you just alternate from one hole to the other diagonally. Right. Okay. That's typically what you think of when you see a corset. That's probably what you're seeing is bi directional icing. If you look at Italian paintings from the medieval era, you're probably going to see what's called ladder lacing. It's all right. Angles, right? Right. So you go from one hole down and then over, and then maybe up, and then down again, then over and then over, and it forms a ladder. The name is pretty appropriate for that one. And I wonder, was this just to make it look different? I would guess that had something to do with it, but I would also imagine that it had to do with somebody was like this. Actually, this doesn't loosen during the day very much because I also saw with the bi directional, what you would create not at the bottom or at the top, but sort of in the middle of where it lays these bunny ears. Right? And that was for women because a lot of times in the movies you've seen, like, Downton Abbey, like, the lady holding the bed post and then her ballet, or I guess were the females called valets valet ballet girls. The lady who helps them dress would be like, cinching this thing down so tight, and they'd be like, breathe in, sucking your breath. But these bunny ears allowed women that didn't have a personal dresser to tighten it themselves. Yeah, and apparently that was fairly normal for women wearing courses. They usually put them on themselves more often than not. And those bunny ears were just two loops of lacing at about the thinnest part, the narrowest part where you had some slack. And then when you put your corset on, you wrap it around you. You fasten the busk, the buttons on the busk, the front, and then you just pull back, tighten it. Done. Right. And this is, again, ideally after you have visited your course of tier because apparently, like buying a bra, guys don't know this stuff. It's apparently tough to get one that fits just right. What? And so you need to get professionally fitted. And the off the shelf thing doesn't work for a lot of ladies. Right. And that was the case with corsets for a very long time. You had to go to a corset here to be fitted for one. And it was expensive, from what I understand. Right. Probably today there are, I guess because of mass manufacturing, it's a lot easier to make corsets that are fairly close to what a large number of people would use. But the fit is still extraordinarily important. And apparently, from what I well, I should say from what orchard corset says, women tend to miss or to underestimate the length that they need. So that leads to a lot of discomfort. Of course, it's too short for their body. Got you. I don't mean to buzz market or anything, but just based on my research, orchard courses, if you're getting into course, sitting there might be a pretty decent place to start. Well, you might get a little treat in the mail. All right, let's take another break and we'll talk a little bit more about Kathy Young and some of the myths about corseting. So I think we did mention after corseting went out of fashion, golds came along like everything has kind of been replaced by something else that does something similar. Sure. And like, men these days have those, I guess, spanks for men, almost like these tummy shirts that dudes can wear, the damn merino that suck everything in. Yeah. And it's all fools gold because what lies beneath is still there. Right. I guess if you're trying to impress people who will never see you without your shirt on, go nuts. But Kathy Young, we mentioned a few times, she is the Guinness record holder, and she started waist training at the age of 48. Yes. It seems a little late to get into it. Yes, I thought so, too, but she got into it big time. And you were saying earlier, I think, at the beginning of the episode, that this is not something that happens overnight. If you're doing waste training, it can usually take, it seems to me, about a decade before you get the results you're looking for, which is a waste that the average five year old could put two fingers around. Well, she said that her goal was never to earn an award, and again, it's called her. And she holds that record now at 15 inches, 38.1 CM. So that's for living on a living person. There's actually a woman who holds the record for the narrowest waist, ever narrowest corpse, 13 inches. Who is she? Her name, my friend, was as follows ethel Granger, 33 inches. And 1939 was what her waist was measured at. And she obviously trained her waist yeah. Over again, about the course of a decade. So did you go to Kathy Young's website? Did you see the YouTube? No, I think that's where I got a little freaked out, because on her website, she has an FAQ section and people are writing in. A lot of people were just like, I think you look great, and give me some tips here and there. And that was all well and good, but then there was one where this husband was like, I'm waste training my wife. And just hearing that made it sound like I was a maker. He'd have a dog bowl? Yeah. It made it seem like something that he was making her do. Right. Which may not been the case. It may have been the wording, but it just freaked me out. And he says, right now, I've got her up to 18 hours a day, but I'm really looking forward to go 24/7. Can you give me some tips on how we can accomplish this? Because she does 24/7. Except for when she showers. Kathy Young does. Okay. She's always in a corset. Right. And she gave tips and everything. And like I said, the way this guy was talking, it just seemed a little creepy. Yeah. No, that is creepy. Sounds like a huge jerk who needs to be set straight and probably get his butt kicked by a larger dude. Right. But also, Chuck, you may also be witnessing a BDSM couple sure. Coming up for tips or whatever. No, you're right. That's just the reality. And if they're both equally into it and into that dynamic yeah. Neither one is psychologically suffering or physically suffering from it, then, hey, sure. But it could also probably even more likely be just, the guy is a jerk. That was my instinct. But you never know. Yeah. And the other thing, if you go to YouTube, there's parts Kathy Young parts one through six, and they are five minute videos of her in different lingerie standing in front of. A white backdrop while her picture was being taken. And her husband, she's silent the whole time and just kind of turning around and stuff. Right. And her husband is just sort of very calmly talking about it and describing her waste and what she did and the techniques used. Right. And he's an orthopedic surgeon, so there's a chilliness to it. It's just creepy, man, as you will live on the subject. Like, go watch one of those videos, and yeah, that's exactly how it sounds. And you just hear the photograph going, and that's the only other thing you hear, like a house plant. It was just all just weird. Yeah. But then again, she feels great about herself, and that's what she wanted to do. Right. I'm not saying he forced her because there were rumors because he was an orthopedic surgeon that he had removed some of her ribs, which is one of the big myths of supposed myths back in the day. Right. And I believe it was a myth because they said back then surgery was very dangerous. You would have to be one of the least risk averse people on the planet to undergo elective surgery to have ribs removed in the 19th century. Yeah. So that's, by all accounts, very much a myth. Yeah. Same with Maryland. Manson I think, too. Oh, sure, I remember hearing that one. But she said that, no, my husband didn't remove any of my ribs, and it's all natural and she's into it. She's very proud of it. So I don't want to yum. It's the same thing with corseting in general. I think just to assume that men made women do that really takes a tremendous amount of agency away from women. Like, they're just completely vapid shells that are bossed around by their husband. Regardless, you know, I know it's a fine line. Sure. So you want to bust a couple more myths? Sure. It's what we do. We're known as mythbusters. So one of the things that I saw, it's hilarious in this article, it says that there's the myth of the Victorian wave who fainted at the drop of a hat because of a lack of oxygen from wearing a corset. And at the bottom of this paragraph, the author says, no, it wasn't that. It was malnutrition and not being able to breathe very well. Right. Because of eating. Yeah. Is that it? Are there any other myths? Yes, that's it. Those are all the myths. Now. There's plenty of other ones. There's actually a pretty cool article on Collectors Weekly written by Lisa Hicks about corset myths. And again, you should probably, if you're getting into this kind of thing, go check out, well, a bunch of sites, but also check out Orchard Corsets. Again, I have no financial stake in them whatsoever, but check it out. Go to orchardcorsets. comJOSH. Yeah, since I said Orchardcorsett, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this thank God that episode is over. Hey, guys. I just finished episode on pain scales and I find it fascinating when humans try to put an objective score on something very subjective. Not sure if you came across this info on your research, but I thought you'd be interested to know that we use pain scales in veterinary medicine as well. It's even more challenging because obviously our dogs and cats can't tell us verbally and certainly can't draw happy or sad faces. And that's the saddest thing of all. Yeah, our assessment is based completely on behavioral behavioral cues and body language. For instance, I'm sure everyone would know a happy, pain free puppy if you saw one sitting square looking you in the eye, ears perked up, wagging his tail. Because dogs are very stoic, higher pain tolerance than even Chuck, it can be very hard to tell when they are feeling pain. Both of my dogs got sick recently, so I got to see this in action. Like, they didn't act sick for a long time and then I was like, you guys are sick. That's why they recommend, like if your dog is vomiting, take them to the vet. Because it's really tough to tell if your dog's bad off norm just by looking at their behavior. Totally. Or if they don't eat all of a sudden, because most dogs, or at least all the dogs I've had, eat ferociously. Or if their head comes off that too recently. It's 1980s. It was why they believed the animals didn't feel pain at all. Isn't that crazy? In fact, you would still encounter veterinarians who don't believe in giving pain meds for surgery and other injuries in animals. Do you remember what kind of talked about that in the animal rights episodes? Oh, yeah, that's nuts. It is nuts. This line of thinking is obviously known to be wrong now. And we have come a very long way in the last 20 to 30 years giving better pain control to animals in our care. Google Dog Pain scale. You'll find a large variety of different pain charts for animals. Keep up the great work. We are eagerly awaiting a live show in St. Louis that is from Michael Richards. Thanks a lot. Michael Richards. We appreciate you writing it. Are we coming to St. Louis? Maybe. All right, it's on the table. Yes. I think we're going to do some shows this year, folks. So look out in the future. Look out. We'll see you there. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us on SYSK podcast and Joshua Clark, you can hang out with Chuck on Facebook@charleswchuckbryantandfacebook.com stuffyhado. You can send us an email to stuffpokast athouseofworks.com. As always, join us at our home, on the web stuffyshop.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." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-02-28-sysk-free-speech-final.mp3 | How Free Speech Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-free-speech-works | Freedom of speech and the press are values vital to American democracy. But the First Amendment doesn't really define free speech, and plenty of expressions are restricted. Learn all about the ins and outs of this cherished right in today's episode. | Freedom of speech and the press are values vital to American democracy. But the First Amendment doesn't really define free speech, and plenty of expressions are restricted. Learn all about the ins and outs of this cherished right in today's episode. | Tue, 28 Feb 2017 08:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=59, tm_isdst=0) | 61668278 | audio/mpeg | "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. The papers have been shuffled. They're plum and true. It's time for stuff you should know. The podcast. You know, it's not plumbing. True my gut. Anything in my house, all of my house had those gross, cheap, hollow core doors. No, they're not doors. I mean, they function as doors. If there's air in your door, then it's not a door. So one by one, I've been replacing them with wood solid doors. And I went and did that for our bedroom, and, man, oh, man, was it frustrating. Oh, hanging them because they didn't want to hang. It's the worst. Like, nothing straight. Yeah. Like. Oh, that looks good. And then it goes to shut, and it's like, whack. Well, I'm sure it was straight 100 years ago, and then over time, the house settled in, and now it's doing its own thing, so I had to shave the door in so many places, it looks like a Dr. Seuss store. Oh, cool. You should plant one of those weird Dr. Seuss palm trees in your yard to really complete it. It's called marijuana. So I'm glad you just said marijuana, Chuck, because you have every right to say the word marijuana in this country. Free country. You can say the name of a plant. People do say and have long said this is a free country. I can say whatever I want. Free speech is one of the basic hallmarks of what makes America a free country freedom of speech. But America is not the only country that enshrines a freedom of speech protection in its charter. Yeah. There are varying degrees of it in many countries. Right? In some countries, there's not very much. In other countries, there's a lot. In the US is arguably one of the leaders, although some people point to Europe and we'll talk about those later but some people point to Europe's free speech protections and say, those people know what they're doing. Right. In the US. If you look at free speech, you go to the Bill of Rights, typically. It's a great place to start, bill, great guy. And you'll find in the First Amendment of the Constitution, which is the first part of the Bill of Rights, it says in there specifically that Congress will make no law. Right. Abridging the freedom of speech. It's as simple as that. It doesn't say unless speech says this, unless somebody says that, unless you really don't like the guy. It's absolute. It's an absolute protection of freedom of speech. Yeah. And that goes on. I think it's pertinent to mention abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people to peaceably to assemble Founding Father JFK and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. I'm sorry, that wrong. That was Ted candidates. We're all very important. Sure they are. Yeah. Right. To assemble. It's a pretty important one. Well, yeah. And because we had just left a country on independence from Britain, who at the time was like, no, we very much want to squash any dissenting opinions about the ground. Exactly. And people are getting thrown in jail for that kind of stuff. In the colonies, they were trying to quash a rebellion. And that's a pretty important part of it. If you're a monarchy, an absolute monarchy that wants to keep the rebels in check, you just say you can't say certain things, and if you do, we're going to throw you in jail. It has a freezing effect. Yeah. Or their weird punishments. Like when they said, Stick a sock in it, they went, yes, okay. And they went, no, really? Stick a sock in it by law for eight months, Governor, and tape it shut. Sure. With my dirty sock in your mouth. My dirty 18th century sock. Yeah. My wool sock from my wet boots. Quickly, though, I think we should point out that as we were going through this, I realized you could have an entire podcast called The Ins and Outs of Free Speech. Yeah. Like a series. A whole show. You have a whole show about it, not just an episode. So this is an overview, as we do, that is going to pick and talk about various court cases over the years, rulings and writings of judges that are pertinent. But, man, it's deep and wide. Yeah, it is. Especially considering that, again, when you go to the Bill of Rights, it just says, congress can't pass any laws that abridge the freedom of speech era. They're like, Why does he keep writing era? And Chuck, not only, though was it this retaliation of reaction to the British monarchy, it was also a big part of Enlightenment thinking as well. The protection of freedom of speech was a huge aspect of the Enlightenment, and obviously the United States was founded during the Enlightenment, and as part of the Enlightenment, it was an Enlightenment experiment. Right. Yeah. Like, we don't want to restrict thought or expression. Right. And some might say that if Britain hadn't been so intent on squashing dissenting opinion, then we might not have been so Enlightenment aside, so heck bent on ensuring those rights. So maybe it all worked out for the best. Yeah, I think so. And Britain came around. Right. You can still get that sock thrown in your mouth, can you? I don't know, man. It's on the book still. I just don't know if they do it anymore. The socks are much nicer now, though. That's right. They're all happy socks. So since you have this very broad protection of freedom of speech right? Yeah. Then there's nothing more to be said about it. Anybody can say anything they want. Not quite true. It isn't true. Yeah. Because we have three branches of government here in the US. We do, yeah. It turns out. I thought that was just one. You got the executive branch. This is the one I think you're thinking. Then you have the legislative branch, congress, which is actually separate, and then you have the third branch, the judicial branch. Yes. They are equal and important branch. And with the congressional legislative branch, they pass laws. People go out and break laws. Sure. People get convicted. People appeal their convictions, and in some cases, those convictions and the laws are questionable enough or interesting enough that it will eventually make it to a high enough court that the court will rule on whether or not that law holds up to any constitutional standard. Yeah. Over time, freedom of speech has been shaped and expanded and paired away by the courts here in the United States. Yeah. Maybe more so than any other kind of segment of law. Or maybe not. But I'm going to just as a complete armchair attorney, I'm going to say that perhaps free speech has been challenged more and whittled down and defined more than maybe any other aspect of law. Yeah. Because one of the big things that the courts did with freedom of speech was to really expand the definition of speech. Yeah. It's not just words that come out of your mouth or even right. No. It can be a T shirt that says, F the Police. Or it could say, yeah, hug the police. Sure. Somebody might find that offensive. Who knows? Thank you for coming to my rescue distance. It could be a billboard. It could be a pamphlet you hand out. It could be an act, symbolic act. Flag burning. That was a big one. Remember that in the 80s? Absolutely. Or refusing to say the Pledge for Allegiance. That was in, I think, World War II. Yeah. Which is actually now protected. Because free speech can also mean the freedom to not speech. Yeah. Because up until, I think, 1943, when the Supreme Court ruled on it, kids were being forced to say the Pledge whether they wanted to or not, and the Supreme Court said, no, we think freedom of speech is really freedom of expression. And if you don't feel like saying the Pledge, you're free to express yourself in that way. Yes. And as you'll find throughout the show, we'll kind of probably say this over and over. Freedom of speech doesn't have a lot to do with something you might find offensive or repugnant generally. The US decided on protecting that right. Regardless of whether or not you're offended or you think it's awful. And that's kind of what makes America great in a lot of ways, is, you know what? Who are we to decide to legislate morality, essentially? And we'll get into all this with obscenity and all that stuff and pornography. But even when it comes to, like, I don't want to say the Pledge because of this reason, the courts have said, you know what? That you're right. This is america, and we may not like it, but that you're, right. Yeah. And the whole reason behind this, too, it's easy to just take it for granted, especially if you were raised in the United States, that you have that right. Who cares what the basis of it is? You can say basically whatever you want. But when you really dig into why the founders sought to protect this and why it's been upheld and defended so much over the years, is because the idea is that if you are free to speak your mind without fear of being put in jail or killed or beaten by a mob, that you are going to introduce new ideas to the marketplace of ideas. And through this you're going to have an exchange with other people. And a lot of times it's going to be contentious and it's going to be ugly. But over time, things can evolve and get better and change for the better through this exchange of ideas. And to ensure that the engine of cultural evolution continues unabated, you have to have the free exchange of ideas. And to have the free exchange of ideas, you have to have protection of free speech. Yeah. Because if not, you have the government being the one saying, well, no, here are all the ideas. Right, exactly. And don't worry about having any of your own. These are the ones yeah. In a lot of cases, those things can come across as really great idea. Sure. Here in the US. Up until the, I think the mid fifty s or early 60s, there were laws on the books where it said, you can't speak ill of groups. Like, you can't say anything about Jewish people or Muslim people or any group. You can't say these things. It's called hate speech was not protected. Right. It was called group libel. And that actually sounds pretty good in a lot of senses. Like, yeah, we shouldn't be talking trash about entire groups of people because it can lead to problems. But that same prohibition on speech came to be exploited by white Southerners who were in power in the 50s, who said, Martin Luther King, he's trying to incite violent social change with his radical ideas. Somebody needs to put a duct tape over that guy's mouth. Right. Stick a sock in it. He doesn't have the freedom to say this. And actually our right to say hateful things about other people was a direct result in the United States of the civil rights movement being protected by the courts against white Southerners who sought to squash their speech. So hate speech is due in part to Dr. Martin Luther King and trying to advance civil rights in a weird turn of events. Yeah, it really was. And in Europe, and we'll talk about this a little more, like you said, some people say they have nailed it. They don't protect hate speech. And you can't deny the Holocaust publicly, and you can't say, you know, Jewish people, you know, XYZ, or this group of people are like this, right? Some people say that's kind of right on the money. We have taken a different tack here in the US. Right. And Europe does that because they have a pretty recent example of what can happen if you do have freedom of speech and that a totalitarian government can hijack that freedom of speech and use it as propaganda to incite hatred amongst an entire population, or even, as this one author put it, to prepare them for extermination, just basically saying, like, hey, everybody, get those guys. They're the reasons you don't have jobs. They're the rapists. They're the people who are going to kill you and steal your family's wealth and well being. So get rid of them. Turn on them. And that's the whole point of saying nobody can incite hatred through speech in these European democracies because the state has done it before. Yeah. And we all see what happened there, right? Should we take a break? I feel like that's a good intro. Sure. Broad allencompassing, passionate Allencompassingly. All right, well, we'll come back here in a minute and get down to the nitty gritty of some of these court cases. Okay? All right, friend. So if you want to go back a little bit to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Son of Sherlock, one of the famous justices in the United States in a lot of ways, but very specifically because everyone has sort of heard the old thing that you can't yell fire in a movie theater and say, that's free speech, because that will in the case of 19 case Schink v. United States, charles Shink was arrested for distributing material, basically, that said, hey, the US. Draft. Military draft is BS. Don't do it. Fight against it. Right? And they said, you know what? That's espionage, actually. And that went all the way to Supreme Court. And they did not protect that right, because in the words of Oliver Window Homes, they said, did the words create a clear and present danger that they will bring about substantive evils congress has a right to prevent? Right. And that's sort of in line and later on in that same ruling is talking about yelling fire in a theater as an example. You can't do that because that'll incite panic and people get stomped. Right. And in this case, this kind of set the precedent for or the tone for all free speech cases to follow is weighing the individual right versus the public good. Yes. Or in this case, the individual right versus creating some problem or evil, as he put it, that Congress has a right and an interest to prevent yeah. A danger to the country. Right. In this case, really what they were saying was they were suppressing criticism of a government program, the draft. But Homes was fine with that. But within a year, I think he saw his test. Does it present a clear and present danger being used in a way to squash dissent, when a bunch of anarchists who are just generally advocating the overthrow of the government rather than need to do this on this date, at this time, they were convicted under the test that Homes created. So he took what was called the great descent and actually dissented against his own former test and said, no, it has to present a clear and present danger. Present meaning like it's about to happen, or, you know, the time that it's going to happen, and it's a clear danger, like this is what's going to happen. Because this person said that. Right. So that ultimately became the format for what we'll talk about in a little bit, which is inciting violence. Yeah. And that's not to say that the ruling there, like you said, was about a clear and present danger, not necessarily the fact that Charles Shank was against the war, because we have a long history in this country of being able to be a wartime dissenter and talk about it and be protected. During the Vietnam War, there was a man who had he went through an L. A. Courthouse, and he had a jacket that said, F the Draft, but it was really spelled out. It's so ironic that we're censoring ourselves in this one, but it's a family show at the draft. And as you will always see here, these people are, like you said, usually arrested, convicted, and then that's when they're well, maybe hippies, you never know. And then that's when the courts take it up and potentially either protect or don't protect the speech. Right. In this case, the court said, no, you're within your right because someone could see your jacket and then not look at it. Right. And that's a good point. Like, you can just look away from the guy's jacket. Right. You can also not take the pamphlet that the guy is handing you. You can also not rent the movie that you find offensive. You can also turn the TV station, you can also turn the radio down. You can also not go to the website. You can turn our podcast off to me. Well, you shouldn't, but you could. To me, the alternative of not receiving some speech that you find offensive, like being able to get away from it, that, to me, is the ultimate test for whether speech should be restricted or not. And since you can, in virtually any situation, get away from speech, except maybe Skyriding, we should probably really regulate Skyriding. Pretty toughly. You can look down at the ground, but I guess you could. Yeah. So as long as you can get away from it, or more to the point, shield your children from it, I don't see any reason for it to be entailed for Skyriding. You would have to argue in court that it is such a delight to children that they can't help but look like you would have to physically restrain them and put blinders on them. Exactly. And that's unreasonable, your Honor. Right. You could write a curse word and then do a drawing of Barney, and that would satisfy that. Is Barney still a thing? I think Barney will always be a thing. I don't know. So over the years, like we said, a lot of court cases that have kind of whittled away and defined not whittled away, shaped, molded and shaped. Yeah. So Marvin Olmar ran an adult book business, and what he did was he sent out mailers. He likes to send out a mailer. And these mailers would show up at houses where my kid might read it or someone easily offended might read it, or not so easily offended might read it. And there was a mom who this was her adult son. Yeah, it was a mom and her grown son, who's the manager of, I guess, the family restaurant, is pretty childlike. Maybe his eyes are burning. I don't know. Maybe his mom just treated him like a kid. Who knows? But they said, you know what? This guy shouldn't be mailing these randomly to just whoever. We certainly don't want it, so we're going to call and complain. Yes. And Marvin Miller ended up getting arrested for obscenity. Sure. And this is huge. This turned out to be a huge case. Yeah. I went all the way to Supreme Court and yeah, it was what you call a what do you call that landmark? Watershed. Watershed. Yeah. I couldn't think of it. I was like, we did a podcast on it recently. It's an Indigo Girl song. That's right. It was a watershed case. Miller v. California. And I'm going to say v. Instead of versus. I think we talked about that before, right? Sure. It makes you sound more legale easy. Yeah. And everyone likes being legally easy to like I said, the Supreme Court heard the case, and they found that his speech did not qualify for protection. But here's the hitch. They didn't rule on the obscenity. They ruled that, hey, we were protecting kids, and you can't just mail this stuff to a house. Right. Because kids live in houses. And so it was inappropriate content for children. And what it did as well is it specified a test for defining obscenity, which boy, over the years, this has been a really tough thing, and it seems like over the years, the courts roundly don't want any part of that. No. If there's one thing, too, that as far as restricting free speech goes, that drives me up the wall, it's obscenity. The court should not have anything to do with obscenity. Mostly they don't want on it. Right. There's this great quote from Hugo Black, who, as of this podcast, has become my favorite Supreme Court justice of all time. He said in Michigan versus State of New York. I wish once more to express my this is my Hugo Black, by the way. I wish once more to express my objections to saddling this court with the irksome in an inevitably unpopular and unwholesome task of finally deciding by a case by case, site by site, personal judgment of the members of this court what pornography, whatever that means, is too hardcore for people to see or read. Yeah. Basically, they were tired of sitting in court and looking at pictures of obstaciality, at the very least, and ruling on this stuff. Right. What about this one? What about this one? What about this one? The thing is, they were looking at pulp books. Like, Michigan was a guy who had a publishing house of pulp books that showed, like, BDSM or lesbianism or masturbation or whatever on the cover. He's like, this is actually pretty nice. Right. They're like, It's a perk of the job, but we shouldn't have to do it anyway. Yeah. And so the idea that the court is ruling what is obscene and what is not, it's legislating morality. Just clearly, it's legislating morality, and I don't think the court has any right to that at all. But they have they have a long tradition of it, and over time, they've actually come to protect pornography. Yeah. With the exception of child pornography, which you're going to be hard pressed to find anybody who argues for freedom of speech as far as child pornography goes. Sure. And then obscenity, which is the three pronged test to determine what's obscene, came out of that Miller v. California case. And it says this it says that if the average person using contemporary community standards can look at something and says that this arouses the period interest yeah. Meaning sexy time. Yeah. That's prong one. And you have to satisfy all three of them. Is this patently offensive sexual content? Yeah. Or patently. Either one. I say patently. And I got that from Mr. Burns. Oh, well, I say patently, like Mr. Burns does. Yeah. And then the final one is a big one. Whether the work taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, or potentially or political or scientific value. Right. That's subjective. Extremely subjective. It literally says if it's artistic right. Who says what's art and what's not? Yeah. And very famously, Justice Potter Stewart, the very famous line when asking about obscenity or pornography, said, I know it when I see it. Right. But they have long said, like one of them said, we may be trying to define the indefinable. Yeah. It is indefinable. Sure. You ask 100 people what pornography is, and you'll get 100 different answers. And so, as a result, some courts have said, yeah, this community, these jurors decided that this is obscene. So people go to jail for depicting sexual acts or something like that. That some jurors in that town found distasteful. Yeah. Because America has long had a very puritanical hangup with sex, annuity, violence. Bring it on. But nude bodies, shame. Cover that up. I think that's probably my issue with it, too, is we're super. Like, we'll expose kids to violence, extreme violence at a very young age. But sexuality, hey, you wait until your parents are dead. Yeah, I understand. Wonders for the therapy industry, though. Sure. It's true. So hold on, truck there's one other thing. The other problem I have with defining obscenity is that there's no national standard. The courts even said it would be impossible to come up with a national standard. Yeah. So if Miller had been tried in a community of swingers who are, like, into that stuff, he probably would have gotten off. Yeah, right. Yeah. But because he was tried in a community that decided that, no, this is obscene, it was deemed obscene, whereas in another community, it may not have been deemed obscene, that's no test. Well, yeah. And that became a big deal at one point because basically the law said that community standards are like, you can't have a national standard because what someone thinks in Skokie, Illinois, is not what in Sin City, Las Vegas. They have an entirely different definition of obscenity and pornography. Right? Yeah. And they're right. Yeah, I guess they are. Right. Which is why, to me, it's one or the other. You either get rid of anything that could possibly be considered obscene or you allow it all. So obscenity. It's obscene. It is. Well, we'll get more into obscenity, too, but there are a lot of other facets of free speech that you might not really think about. In 2013, there was a case, Bland v. Roberts, where there were these two dudes that work for Sheriff's Department sheriffs are elected. They were running for office, and they were fired for commenting and liking on an opponent's Facebook page, which this gets into in the digital age and Internet age, a whole different slew of questions to be answered. And they appealed that case and won actually. Yeah. Blanv. Roberts as a result, Facebook likes are considered protected free speech under the First Amendment now. Yeah, but ironically well, maybe not ironically, but Facebook and social media in general, you can also it's at their discretion whether or not they take something down. And you can't say, well, it's free speech. And that's like, no, this is our private room, essentially. This is our home. Right. And inside a private home, you can tell someone to shut up. Private home, private companies, social media platform. Like, if you show up to work in a f the police shirt, they can fire you or tell you to change it. And if you say, no, this is my free speech, to go, no, this is my business. This is not a free speech. So I like the mall, remember? Yeah, that's right. Poor Victor Gruen. And here's the thing, too. This isn't really a section in our notes, but you're riffing. I get kind of riffing here. I get kind of bugged. These days with I think a lot of people have the notion that freedom of speech means also freedom from consequence, and those are two different things. Like freedom of speech means that you are not going to be or you might even be arrested and convicted, but eventually it will be overturned. You'll be vindicated. But if a business or a comedian or a TV show does something that people find offensive or provocateur YouTube yeah. And someone wants to pick at them and shut them down or boycott them, and they cry, free speech, it's like you said that you got away with it. You're not in jail. Doesn't mean there won't be consequences. Well, yeah. The right to protest is enshrined in the same amendment, free speech. Yeah, but I think I hear a lot, it seems like more and more these days where people whine about the consequences of their own free speech. Right. And that's not enshrined in the Constitution. They're very likely will be consequences. Right. People will hate you. Maybe. But it's like you said, though, it's there to protect the unpopular opinion. There's this guy who's an expert on free speech at Penn State, I believe he said we have a First Amendment to protect unpopular expression or the minority viewpoint because we don't need a Constitution to protect what the majority thinks. The majority takes care of itself. It's good point. It's the people who everybody else hates and what they have to say that is protected by the Constitution. Yeah. And Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman, in a very unharvard, law like way, said, if your feelings are hurt, then that's your problem. Snowflake. You didn't say Harvard like JFK Harvard. He didn't say snowflake I was kidding. No, but what he was pointing out was basically the sentiment behind free speech in the United States that as long as you are not physically harming somebody, emotional harm is whatever, it's not even going to register. Well, although that one article you sent, that Oped there was the guy that argued that emotional harm was worse than physical harm right. And had a longer lasting impact. Yeah. So there are two sides to every argument there. Well, that's one of the reasons why Europe has said no hate speech. It's harmful. Yeah. Like, even if it isn't physically harmful, it's emotionally it's an intellectually harmful. It's not good. All right, so we've dabbled in obscenity, and we'll talk a little bit more about it. But one of the other things that you can have insulting speech, but there's something called fighting words that is not protected, and it can be difficult to determine. And again, over the years, the courts have tried to do so. But in 1969, there was kind of a landmark case, brandenburg v. Ohio, where Clarence Brandenburg was at a clan rally in Ohio and said, we're not a revengent organization, but if our president, our Congress, our Supreme Court continues to suppress the white Caucasian race, Please. It's possible that there might have to be some revengeance taken so they shouldn't to the jail him for grammar. Right. Revengeance is, of course, not a real word, and neither is revengent. Although I think it's in a video game now. Someone said no. Yeah. I don't think it's called that. Revenge. Two parentheses. S-I-C. Right. What does that stand for again? Sick. I can't remember. That's so sick they got it wrong. Right. I can't remember now. I think we would know this. Yeah. Somebody else send it in. People tend to write it after the stuff we write. We don't usually use it ourselves. Yeah. It's funny, though. I have this thing, just the weird, quirky things that everyone sort of does in their head in life. Whenever I see sic written in an article, I always try and think of what word either they got wrong or were replacing in the article to make more sense. Well, no, they use it to because if it's a misspelling or if it's not a word, it's basically the writer or the editor saying, this guy got it wrong, not me. Yeah. Or am I thinking of a different that's just when they put it in brackets and they put, like, there or something like that, the person lets it out. Sick. Also goes in brackets, but it's basically saying, I'm aware that this is misspelled. Yeah. To show what a dummy this guy is. I think I do it in both cases. Like, if it's a made up word, I'll try and think of what they meant. Or, like, the other one where there's just a parenthesis and they just basically add something to make it more sense. Right. I try and think of, like what did they say to begin with? It's a weird thing. No, I know what you mean. In my head right now, I have for your eyes only. I thought you go away. You're trying to figure out what I'm thinking. The brain does some terrible stuff. I have that in my head now, too. Because you came in singing it. Only why? Doesn't make any sense. It doesn't. I haven't heard the song in decades. A week long earworm from a song you haven't heard in decades. Was it a dream? I don't think so. You dreaming about she and Easton again. That was a good movie, though. Was that the Connor you want on it? No, that was Roger Moore. Are you sure? Yeah, sure. I think it was Sean Connery's last one. All right, I may be right here. Go to the map for that one. All right. Getting back to Brandenburg, the clan member who didn't know how to talk right. He didn't talk good. He was arrested for advocating violence, and he won. Supreme Court decided in his favor. And thus began the long history of the United States saying, you know what? The client wants to have a rally out in the public town. Square and they apply for their permit, you got to let them do it. But again, the clan's hate speech being protected was lumped together and came out of the civil rights movement freedom of speech being protected as well, because they were like, well, hey, man, Stokely Carmichael says that we got to take control from the whiteies, rise up and take control. That's hate speech. And the Supreme Court says, you know what? You're right and that's protected. Right. So is what the clan saying, or Illinois Nazis and Skokie. Right. Second time Skokie has made an appearance in this episode. Yes. Why not a third? How about a third? The usual suspects. That was coming anyway. I think what you're saying is, as a result, hate speech has a decades long tradition of being protected at any and all costs, unless you are using it to incite violence. And that ties in to that original prohibition on free speech that Oliver Wendell Holmes came up with, is that it presents a clear and present danger. So rather than using that specifically to incite violence, you basically have to be saying it's not enough to say, like, we black people need to rise up and take control of the United States and if it has to be violent, it has to be violent, but we can't live like this anymore. Right? Yeah. If Stokely Carmichael is saying something like that, or Malcolm X is saying something like that, that is protected speech. Even though it makes a lot of people or it made a lot of people uneasy to hear that kind of thing, and they said, hey, they're trying to start a race war, it's still protected speech. On the other hand, if you said or Stokely Carmichael said, everybody needs to go get their shotguns and we're all going to be here on Tuesday and we're going to take the streets Tuesday afternoon, that would not be protected because he would be directly inciting violence. Yeah. What are the two things that violence has to be likely and it has to the advocacy for violence has to be directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action. Right. And then it has to be likely to incite or produce such action. So it has to be happening at some point that you can point to next Tuesday something that's not vague or indefinable, like, we should do this in the future if we're not granted greater rights. So it has to be something specific and it has to be likely to produce that effect. Right. So if somebody is a great order and the people they're telling to get their shotguns, all own shotguns at home, that would probably make it likely. And then a few years after that case, another one, hesville, Indiana from 1973, defined imminent a little further and it said an advocacy of illegal action at some indefinite future time, that's protected. Right. So likely and imminent. Yes. Interesting. All right, well, let's take a likely and imminent break. And we'll talk more, even more about obscenity after this. All right. So did you see the movie Carnal Knowledge? I didn't. I thought for some reason I was like, body Heat is not that old. That's what I thought the movie was. Wouldn't that a sexy one? Body heat was quite sexy. I never saw that one. Very good movie. What's it kathleen Turner. Kathleen Turner. That was Brian diploma, right? I think so. Yeah, I think so, too. She's also the star of one of my favorite all time movies, which is The War of the Roses. Man, that is a great movie. I can watch that movie a thousand times and not get sick of it. That's a good one. All right, so Carnal Knowledge was the Mike Nichols film with Jack Nicholson, Candice Bergen, and Art Garfunkel, of all people. What is Art Garfunkel doing in there? He sings in a falsetto throughout. It's very nice. All the lines are in sing song. No, he acted in it. He was good. Was he good? Yeah, it was a great movie. Was he like? Paul Simon good. Well, he's acted, too, here and there. Really good movie, though. I mean, like I said, it was Mike Nichols. It was not like porn. Right. But it was just a very frank movie about sex and relationships. Like, Nicholson plays sort of what you would think kind of a womanizer. And Art Garfunkle is a little more tender and not as big of a womanizer. Okay. Trying to decide how to put all this tinder, and it kind of just follows them in three points of their life from college to middle age and their sexual exploits. Anyway, it sounds kind of boring. Just a really good movie. Is it? Yeah. And very famously in I think it might have started in 73, and right here in Albany, Georgia, there was a theater manager that was arrested for showing that movie in his theater. Oh, is that where this case comes from? Yeah. And he was arrested and convicted of distributing obscene material. It's Jenkinsv Georgia. Right. Jenkinsv Georgia was a court case. And of course, the Supreme Court ruled that Cardinal Knowledge was not obscene. And I think in the ruling they said, It's Mike Nichols, for God's sake. He's like, what are you thinking, precious treasure? Well, they said that basically your opposition to the state of Georgia making us so proud, is that there's nudity in it. And it's like, a lot of nudity. They were like, that's not enough. It's not patently offensive, sexually explicit material that has no artistic value. Yes. It fails the Miller Test is what it's called. Yeah, I guess it would fail the Miller Test because if you pass the Miller Test, it would be obscene. Right. It's a weird way to look at it, I guess, here in the modern age, like I said, with the Internet, opened up a whole host of issues with free speech and notably the Child Online Protection Act, Copa. Yeah, that was a big deal. Very big deal. Copa was legislation that was introduced to protect kids from online SMUD. Right. But on the other hand, freedom of speech advocates said, no, this is the start of regulating the Internet. The Internet is a free, open Wild West, and it should not be regulated, so don't try to regulate it. And again, everybody said, except for child pornography. And the person talking said, yeah, except, of course, child pornography. Don't be stupid. Well, Copen never actually went into effect. It went through three rounds of litigation over the years. And basically one of the big things that the Court would say back was, there are protections that parents can put in to restrict their kids from this stuff, and that's enough. Yeah. That's a huge thing. Like, the court really tends to not like government overreach and tends to restrict it whenever it comes about. Right. Yeah. And this was really tricky because what they were trying to do was apply federal law to community standards for a global product. Right. And that's just talk about complicated law. That's very tricky. Yeah. So the Court struck it down in part because they thought it was overly broad. They said that what the government was considering offensive material would not pass the Miller test, so that was overly broad. And then they also said, yeah, there's alternatives like parental controls that are widely available, can solve the problem that the government's looking to solve, which is restrict kids from pornography, but without restricting anyone else's individual liberty. Right. So they said, See you around, Copa. And Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a concurring opinion this is a good quote, too, to read the statute as adopting the community standards of every locality in the United States would provide the most puritan of communities with a heckler's veto affecting the rest of the nation. Right. Basically saying what many have said was, this is an impossible task, so don't even try. I wish they'd take that idea with obscenity as well. Well, and here's the other thing. When they struck down Coping, this is another really good quote, and this one from US. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. Not Lou Reed, but Lowell Reed. Lou Reed said, Take a walk on the wild side. Lowell said, Maybe after a nap. Lowerell said, and this kind of sums up for me, I think he said, Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm the First Amendment protections which they will, with age, inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection. Right. So basically, in trying to protect these kids, we've restricted their free speech when they become adults. Very interesting. Yeah, it's true. You know. Yeah. The courts do you go with obscenity? I'm great with it. The courts have also kind of shaped freedom of speech or protected freedom of speech by saying, yes, certain types of speech are not protected. Obscenity child pornography, fighting words. Fighting words. And then liable is another one. But one of the ways they further protect it, even when they're restricting it, is to say not everything that you say is liable is actually liable. Right. I think it more has to do with SLANDER's words. Oh, is that what it is? Yeah. Okay, so with libel laws and I would guess slander falls under the same laws, right? No, but with libel laws, it's really difficult to prove liable. Right. Because the person printing the libel information, which is basically you're defaming someone's character. And that's a really old, longstanding prohibition. I think even back in ancient Greece, they had a certain amount of freedom of speech in Athens, classical Athens. But even that was restricted as far as talking trash about someone's character. Right. So that's a really old idea that you shouldn't put fake stuff about someone's character reputation out there. And if you do, then they have recourse. But to prove that that person said something libelous, they have to have had malice of forethought. They had to have known that what they were printing was wrong or untrue. Yeah, that's the key. It has to be untrue. You can express an opinion about somebody sure. And say someone is a big poopy pants, but you can't say someone's big poopy pants who did X, Y and Z if that isn't true. Right, exactly. Yeah. And so it's really tough to prove liable. Right. So it is unprotected speech, but it's also protected in that it's not very broad, it's very narrow. And then part and parcel with that is satire and parody are also very much protected in the United States, thankfully. And we have Larry Flint, Hustler publisher, to thank for that. Yes, people versus Larry Flint is a very good job of spelling out that case. But very famously, he went to war with the Reverend Jerry Falwell because he had a cartoon in his Hustler magazine. That was an unflattering sexual depiction of Jerry Falwell. No, it was a fake Campari ad. It was a spoof Campari ad. But it was a cartoon, though. No, not the one I saw. Oh, really? I saw, like a I'm sure he had drawn I'm sure he had that, too. Yeah. But what the court case was it was like a Campari ad, and there was like a Campari ad campaign where people talked about the first time they had Campari or whatever. And Jerry Falwell's was he and his mother got drunk on Campari and had sex in the outhouse. And that was actually how he lost his virginity. Right. Jerry Falwell didn't like that. No, of course not. So he sued Larry Flint. And Larry Flint won that case. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Yes. There was a 1988 case, and they said, no, this is parody. This is satire. It's protected. If any reasonable person sees it and would know that it's not true. It's protected. And Larry Flynn said, Drawer, no reasonable person would see this. Right. Perfect. Yours is better than mine. That was good. Oh, yeah. How was that going? Yeah. He sounded like Woody Harrelson doing Larry Flint, which is right on the money. In my head I sound like a muppet tenor doing Woody Harrelson doing Larry Flint. Great movie. The muppets people versus Larry Flint. It was a great movie. Yeah. Anyway, thankfully, satire and is protected here in the US because we have a long, rich history of political cartoons and rich satire that can really make a difference. Like, you see what's going on with starting out live right now. Right. It's like they've had a long, long tradition of political satire and most times that opening bit they do is political in nature. Yeah. And it's nothing new. They've been doing it forever. It's true. I don't know. I just think it's really start, like, poking at that and The Onion and some of the great satirical publications. That goes down a bad road. Agreed. So, Chuck, one of the things that's coming up now that we're connected globally is this idea that what we talked about at the beginning. The US has very broad free speech protections. Some other countries don't. There's like the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Right. Yeah. Some of that has some free speech protection in it. Not everybody signed on to it. And a lot of people think there will never be any way to protect freedom of speech worldwide. Right. Normally up to say the wasn't that big of an issue unless, like, Salman Rushdie published a book or something like that. Because each country had its own standards and what was said in one country typically stayed in that country, even if it was offensive to another country. Right, sure. The two didn't quite know that the internet is here. What's said in one country can be carried immediately to another country and the offense can be taken. And this went out of hypotheticals and in the real world, well into the real world back in 2012 when a guy named Nakula, Basali Nakula, released a 14 minutes video called The Innocence of Muslims. Do you remember that? I don't. It was extremely incendiary. If you were a Muslim, you were going to be offended by this because it basically said the Prophet Muhammad was a fraud. It had him as a philander, a womanizer, I think a pedophile. And the people who were in it were scared to death because of the reaction. There were riots around the world. Once it was translated into Arabic and released, what did they think was going to happen? I don't know. I don't remember if the person was a provocateur on purpose or if these were their real beliefs on Islam. Regardless, they were Egyptian American, so the video was protected, even though elsewhere in the world they were literally rioting in the streets and people were dying because this video existed, they were so upset by it. But in the US. TS. And as far as I know, it's still up on YouTube. Right, right. Because it's protected by free speech. Well, that's a great example of should the US. Have the freedom of speech that is going to cause harm in another country now that those two countries are connected via the Internet? Right. There's no easy answer to that. That was basically a rhetorical question at this point. But it's one that I think is going to have to be decided more and more. And what goes to the heart of it is blasphemy in this case. Yeah. Blasphemy specifically means insulting God or any religious or holy person or thing. It means different things in different religions. Sure. It's actually still illegal in some states in the US. I thought the last one was struck down in 2007. Oh, was it? Okay. Yeah. Maybe up until 2007. Had laws until 2007. That's right. Again, 2007. Yeah. But the last conviction for blasphemy in the US. Was in 1928. So these were laws that were sort of on the books that no one did much about. Well, there's a dude in Little Rock, Arkansas, and he was an anti religious atheist. This is the 1928 one. Yeah. White supremacist who had an office. And in the office, there was a sign out front, I guess it was a storefront office, and it said, evolution is true, the Bible is a lie. God is a ghost. And he got arrested and convicted for blasphemy. Yeah. So, again, this is 1928, and there were blasphemy laws on the books until 2007. That's crazy. Yeah, it is. It's really surprising to think that the United States ever had blasphemy laws, but they were fairly recent. Yeah. And when it comes to religion, like, the United States protects Westborough Baptist Church and they say you can go out and you can have offensive messages on signs at military funerals if you want, because it's the United States, and we allow that. Yeah. And so I think that kind of brings up that one oped you're talking about from The Atlantic, that free speech isn't free. What's the title of it? Yeah. What's the guy who wrote its name? Garrett EPS wrote it. Yeah. And he makes a really great he didn't even make a case. He just kind of presented both sides well. And what he did was here was the quote, and I think you're right on the money with that summation, because he said, repressing speech has costs, but so does allowing it. And the only mature way to judge the system is to look at both sides of the ledger. Right. It really kind of says it all. Yeah. And he's basically saying, like, it's not enough to say freedom of speech exists because we have free speech in the US. America is a free country. You have to examine why, and you have to defend it or else it's just a privilege. And privileges are always subject to attack, but actual freedom should be defensible. And so he says we need to defend it, especially based on another op ed that he was actually talking about by a law professor from Fordham, fain Rosenbaum said, no, there are actual harms to speech. It does cause emotional harm that can, in some cases exceed physical harm. It can be longer lasting. It can have a greater impact on more people at once. And so why do we allow hate speech in the United States? And Garrett? EPS doesn't have the answer. He just examines the whole question, I think. Really? Well, yeah, I thought it was interesting. He makes a point that the same laws that allow for strides of civil rights and feminism and gay rights groups over the years are the same laws that protect the people that have done them such harm over the years. Right. And like you said, you got to look at both sides of the ledger. It might cause harm, and there is a cost to it. Right. But ultimately, the freedom well, in my opinion at least, outweighs those harm. So there's this guy named Jonathan Roush who Garrett Up quotes, but he wrote another op ed that I read, and his idea of why freedom of speech, including hate speech, is important is because he says that if you suppress speech, you're suppressing thoughts, right? So if you suppress hate speech, it's still going to be there. It's still going to be boiling under the surface. People are still going to quietly, subtly trade in it, but you can't refute it. If you allow hate speech, it can be refuted loudly, publicly, and then from that. And he makes the case that this is why the gay community has made such strides in the last few years, because of the vicious homophobia that was publicly hurled at them, that they stood up and said, you know what? This isn't true. You know what? We deserve this. Right? You know what? We're not pedophiles. You know what? We should be able to adopt and shot down all this stuff systematically. And America was watching this back and forth and gave people one public sentiment just through logic. He was saying, if you didn't allow that hate speech in the first place, there wouldn't have been that position to address that hate speech and prove it wrong. Yeah, because you can't suppress hateful ideology. It's going to exist. Sure. So allow the speech so it can be publicly refuted and just SmackDown. Yeah, I think that's probably the best explanation for freedom of speech I've ever heard. Good way to close, too, man. Thanks a lot. Jonathan Roush. You got anything else? No, I don't, but a little tease before listener mail, we're going to have a couple of very intriguing follow ups to recent questions. Okay? All right. Well, if you want to know more about free speech, just start talking. And since I said that, it's time for whatever Chuck's got up his sleeve. Yeah. Before I read the listener mail, two things. On a recent show, we asked about our old buddy Sarah, the amazing fan, and then our old buddy Sam. The summer of Sam, weirdly enough, we come into the office and Sam's parents dropped off a letter to us. Sam wants to be an intern here. So he's around. He's in college doing great and wants to enter and wrote us a letter and we're going to try and get him in here. Oh, yeah. And he wouldn't be our intern specifically. It'd be for how stuff works. Right. We're going to burn a lot of currency to make sure he gets his job. Yes. I hope it happens. It'd be great. It was good to hear from him. It sounds like college is going great. His resume was stacked, buddy. Nice, Sam. And the other thing is, I don't know if you saw this because I did the Facebook, but Catherine Mary Stewart oh, yeah. Of Night of the Comet played the older sister Reggie and was also in The Last Starfighter a Weekend at Bernie's. Weekend at Bernie. And was sort of the darling in the nineties and is still an actor today. Does theater work and stuff and movies and TV and radio parts. She does it all. She got in touch with us. She listened to the mall's podcast, posted on Facebook that we shouted her out, and also her hometown, Edmonton Mall. And I was just knocked out and told her to email us. She emailed. I think she lives in New York. And I said, hey, listen, next time we do a show at the Bellhouse, I want to act out Weekend at Bernie's list. Yeah, I'll play the dead guy and you and Josh can just puppet me around now. I was like, come and bring your family. We'd love to guest list you. Maybe you can hop up on stage and we can chit chat for a minute. Nice. I took the liberty of doing that. That was very nice. You're like, no, you can't get on stage, right? We have to edit that part out. I just thought that was very cool. Yes, very cool. Thanks for writing in. Catherine. Mary Stewart. Yes. And boy, she's found the fountain of youth. She looks exactly the same. Oh, yeah. And Sam, too. He looks exactly the same. Like 20. He looked like he did when he was 17. Well, thanks, dudes. Oh, we haven't even done listener mail yet. No. So listener mail. I'm just going to read it. It's called? Would you rather I feel bad for Jerry? She's not going to know where to put the list in her mail. Time in that's all right. Hey, guys. Just finishing listening to Soil It and thought I had a surefire argument starter for you guys. Josh's rant about the pros and cons of cooking and sharing meals. I don't rant reinforced my position on the subject. I'd like to know what you think about it. Here's how you play would you rather and it's not the sexy one. Okay. You get to, forgo one thing that humans need to do in order to live, either eating, sleeping or breathing. You can do the thing that you choose to forego, of course. You just don't need to in order to live. And you remain neutral in terms of pleasure or discomfort caused by the lack of the necessity. So you don't feel hungry, you don't feel sleepy, you don't feel asphyxiated. Seems like a stop out to me. So he wants to know, what would we rather do without? Mine is easy. I would easily not breathe. Yes, breathing. It's like a no brainer phone head question. Who would say, like, I don't want to eat. I get a lot out of breathing. I'd have trouble getting that one out. Well, Andrew said he wouldn't eat. That's the answer to that question. He said, I would always forego eating because of the money it takes to feed myself and the waking hours I would save. Yeah. I mean, that's the two things with food, time and money. Yeah, but you get so much pleasure of it, breathing, sure, it's free, but who cares? Especially if you're not going to die from not breathing. In this situation, this weird fantasy world of his, I say anyone who chooses and this is Andrew talking I say anyone who chooses to forego sleep is a dummy. Sure. Because not only are you not saving on food, you have to entertain yourself for an additional five to 8 hours a day. You argue there, though, is you could get more done. Sure. Sometimes I do wish that you had to have to sleep sometimes. I also enjoy sleep, too, he says. Plus, I could eat socially every now and then under these terms if I wanted to. Right. But who would just take a nap if you don't feel refreshed afterward? Yeah, I would. I love to sleep. Sure. And then the non breathers are just like deep sea diving and exploring volcanoes and stuff, I guess. Oh, I didn't think about that. Perk. Yeah. You just go swimming all the way to the bottom forever. Yeah. So it's clearly breathing is the answer. It's not even a subjective question at this point. No, we've proven it. Yeah. All right. Keep up the good work. That's from Andrew. Thanks, Andrew. You keep up the good work, too. Nice. I just want to say you're a sucker for not eating, though. Yeah. If you want to try to stomp us but fail at it, like Andrew did, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshonow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@housestepworks.com, and as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.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." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1231970250116hsw-sysk-redheads.mp3 | How Redheads Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-redheads-work | Redheads are supposedly fiery, passionate people, but is there any truth to these stereotypes? Find out what studies have to say about redheads -- and if they'll really go extinct soon -- in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Redheads are supposedly fiery, passionate people, but is there any truth to these stereotypes? Find out what studies have to say about redheads -- and if they'll really go extinct soon -- in this HowStuffWorks podcast. | Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=15, tm_isdst=0) | 16089901 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetop workscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And I am Chuck Bryant. Hey, Chuck. How's that? It was good. Good. Yeah. I'm working on my radio thing. I like it. Your voice is smooth. Smooth is spider silk spun from goats and milk. Nothing. Right. So, as you know, I am a huge fan of Dr. Verner Hobbermill. I did know that. Did you do? Yes, but I don't think anyone else did. Wow. I'd never told anybody that before. Is it that obvious? I just had a sense my T shirt isn't. Well, for those of you who don't know who Dr. Habermill is, he is a sex researcher at University of Hamburg in Germany. Hello, Germany. And Dr. Habermill did a study that I read about recently on the Daily Mail. So basically, I'm just letting it all hang out here. I followed the careers of clinical sex researchers, and I read the Daily Mail. But there was a study he did that I ran across where he compared the sex lives of redheads with the sex lives of brunettes and blondes. And he found, just statistically speaking, actually, sadly, he did pose an idea of why. We get to that in a second. But he found that redheads have a noticeably much more active sex life than any other people with any other hair color. Interesting. The thing that kind of got me was that the same goes for people who dye their hair red. Really? And get this. The esteemed doctor said that women who are in a committed relationship and dye their hair red. Right. That is a really big red flag to the guy. Oh. That they may be stepping out. They're looking, right? Yeah. So Emily ever done that? Yeah, she went read a little preferred time. When was this? I think it was before we were married. Okay. Exactly. You're like, I knew my kid looked like the mailman. Right? Yeah. So where are you getting at here? Here. Are you ready? Yeah. So the doctor basically says, well, redheads have a fiery temperament, and they're very passionate, which is just so shade. It is. And it's not necessarily true. And the more I looked into it, the more I realized that redheads are among the most maligned and stereotyped people of any hair color. Red headed stepchild and blonde. The phrase red headed stepchild. Red headed stepchild. Did you know also that there was actually twice there's been this big news cycle about redheads going extinct? Yeah, I've heard about that. 2005 and 2007. Yeah. Which is not true. No, we just should say that right away. No, there was one in 2007 that's the most recent one that said that the Oxford Hair Institute, which sounds so official. Yes, it does say that redheads will be extinct by 2060. Right. Because of the recessive gene that carries red hair. In theory, that could die out. You want to get into genetics to you? I'd prefer not to, but I think we have to. Let's do it. Okay, let's just give a brief overview. Redheads, that's a phenotype. Right? It's a physical trait. You can see it, you can sense it. Their genotype, the genetic trait that makes them redheads is a recessive gene. Right. It's a mutation in the MC One R gene. Yes. And that is the melanocortin one receptor gene. Right. Okay, so the MCR One gene is responsible for a certain pigment productions. Right. And redheads actually overproduce a red pigment called pheomelanin, which gives them the red hair and they under produce eumelanin. Eumelanin, right. Which gives them a pale skin. It's a darker brown. It's a brown pigment. Right. Which is under produce and it's actually a genetic mutation. It is. Did you know that? I did. Okay, so like you said, it's also receptive recessive. Right. Which means it can skip generations and then reappear much later. Yeah. You or I could actually have a mutated MCR One gene. Right. Although neither one of us has red hair. Sure. We'll never know until we have kids with red hair. If either one of us comes up with a kid with red hair, it means that you and your wife both had this recessive gene. It got together and the kid had to have this mutated gene. Right. Because of the chromosomal contributions by the parent. Right. Or it means infidelity. Again, it depends. It depends on what Emily did back when she dyed her hair red. Right. Although you probably know by now, right, if she had a child. Yeah, I've been around the whole time. Okay, good. All right, so they are not becoming extinct. Not true. No. They could, though it would take something on the order of an evolutionary bottleneck. Right. Which, as we all know, would basically make all of us mouth breathers. Right. Because of all the rampant familial inbreeding that it would take to expand the genetic pool. Again. Sure. It's entirely possible if everybody who had the recessive gene, that MCR One mutation, if all of them died out, there goes redheads. Technically, that's the case with everything. Exactly. Now, there may be a higher likelihood in an evolutionary bottleneck, or it might take less of an evolutionary bottleneck for redheads to die out because it is rare. Right. But yeah, they're definitely going to be around beyond 26th. Yeah. I know quite a few redheads myself. I know virtually none. I'm actually trying to think right here. I can't come up with a single red head. Yeah, I know a couple, actually. We don't have anyone on staff either, do we? This is going to drive me crazy. Well, of course, Candace, our old Candace girl partner. I don't know. She's the reddit of heads. She really is. And you know what? She kind of proves the good doctors, too. She is fiery. She's spunky, girl. She definitely is. Okay, so redheads are going to be around for a while, including Candace, I imagine. Yes. Thankfully, yes. And they are, as we said, my very shaky thesis for this podcast are much maligned. I've got another piece of supporting evidence that redheads are often mistreated. Yes. I know where you're going here. Do you? Yeah. Okay. So you want to tell them about this study? Yeah. It turns out that and this is a cool little fact that you can share with your friends and family, redheads actually require more anesthetic when undergoing surgery. Yeah. And apparently the medical establishment, especially among anesthesiologists and anesthetists, this is common knowledge. Right. But there hadn't been an actual study correct. Quantifying this before 2002. Right. And these University of Louisville researchers conducted this kind of cruel, little archaic maybe. Yeah. When I read this, I thought, there's got to be a better way to find this out, but maybe there's not. Yeah. So what we're talking about was this Louisville study. They took 20 female subjects. Ten brunettes, I believe. Ten redheads. Yes. All of them were on virtually the same menstrual cycle, which ruled out any hormonal explanation for this, because apparently hormones can contribute to your susceptibility or rejection of anesthesia. Correct. And they gave them all the gas. Right. They gave them what is a desk, which is a general anesthetic gas, and they knock these women out, and then they got medieval on their asses. I looked this up. They used bilateral intradermal needles to deliver the electric shock. So basically, they were poking these women with needles and delivering shocks, electric shocks into their body to see if they would react and feel pain. Yeah. Because when you're unconscious, it's much different from sleeping. When you're unconscious, your pain gateway is shut down, which is why they do it for surgery. You don't want someone digging into your chest cavity and be able to feel it. Right. And it's it's a different state and actually scary enough. We don't fully understand how anesthesia works on the brain. We don't know enough about the brain. We know it works. We figured out, I guess, through trial and error, patients dying left and right, what the right ratio is for the average person. Right. Yeah. It's a tough job. Very. The highest insurance premium. That's what I've heard. Yeah. And they also make some pretty good coin. Definitely. Yeah. So if you're thinking of trying to get into the medical field and you want to make a bunch of money, go anesthesia. Right. And gas as redheads. Exactly. Okay, let's get back to this. Right. So they're sitting there delivering shocks to these redheads and actually brunettes. Everyone in the study was treated equally cruelly. Right. And they're delivering shocks, and they would decrease the gas or increase the gas, depending on the reaction, until they stopped getting pain. Reaction. Right. So then the other really kind of startling aspect of the study was that one of the researchers described the shocks as intolerable to a conscious person. Right. So these weren't like, little, like, oh, I just like the nine volt battery. Right. These are electric shocks that you would be like, you come at somebody who did this to you if you could move. So they just keep shocking over and over again. And then they wrote down the ratios, and they came up with, as you said, redheads need 20% more on average. 20%? Yes. Which is pretty substantial. It is substantial, but what's the deal? Why? Well, before we move on to that, just quickly, I wanted to point out that another study a couple of years later said that the same thing happened to men. So if you're a man out there, you're going to need some extra gas. It's not just for women, but because we don't know exactly how anesthesia works. We don't know exactly why this is true. Yeah, they've just finally linked. Right. They said there is a link, but we're not exactly why that link is there. Well, which is the MC one R gene is what we were talking about earlier. That genotype has been linked directly to anesthesia for the first time. Exactly. So why? What are some of some of the reasons they've given? Well, yeah, they don't know for sure, but they have one explanation. That gene is also involved in hormones that stimulate pain receptors. Which would make sense. It would make sense. Kind of obvious route, if you ask me. And I believe that another one that said that the pigments themselves actually caused an increase in pain sensitivity. Yeah, I think that was the one where they said there's such an abundance of this pigment. Right. Things like to go bind to other things in our body. And they're looking for something that maybe the pain receptors in the brain are similar to the pain receptors that these pigments would normally attach to. Right. So it overstimulates the brain. It makes me more sensitive to pain. So either way, if you're a redhead, I feel bad for you. I don't like pain. Yeah, but being redhead is kind of cool. It's like being left handed. I wish I was a left handed redhead. Wow. Instead, I'm just a right handed Burnett. I know. We're just kind of average guys aren't average dudes. There actually is one other good thing that came out of this study. It may actually spur development of a kind of anesthesia that's tailored just for redhead. Interesting. That's called pharmacogenetics. You heard of this? Yeah. Okay, so it's basically designing drugs, tailoring them to somebody based on their genetic makeup. Right. That makes sense. It does make sense. It seems like it would be safer. It definitely falls into that controversy about genetic testing, though, doesn't it? Yeah, true. So it's kind of a fine line, like keep red heads out of pain or choose only blonde haired, blue wide children in the future, right? The boys from Brazil? Eventually. Weird stuff. You know what I would call that if they actually do manufacture this? What? They call it red gas. Nice. That's what I call it. Nice. Yeah. You couldn't call it red death. You'd have a terrible market share. Wouldn't believe. Red gas is pretty good. Yeah. Nice windshield. Well, look for red gas in the future. And if you want to know more about redheads and anesthesia extinction, that kind of stuff, you can type those words in in any kind of clever combination in our handy search bar@housetepworths.com. And don't go anywhere because Chuck got something for you. I think it's called listener mail. Listener mail time. Yeah. Josh, we're back here mere seconds later, and I have an exceptional listener mail here. This is what I have titled it. And I have to keep a little folder of exceptional mail. And I've been holding on to this one for a while. And you might remember this from our buddy Greg Storken who wrote us a top ten. Do you remember that? Yeah. Wow. This is one of our first names. This is Titillating and Arousing. I'm going to give Greg his due. I'm not going to read all ten, but he basically wrote a top ten reasons why he's obsessed with stuff you should know. So I'm just going to go over a few of my favorites. You purposely leave early for work and then take side streets along the way simply to have more time to listen to your new episode. Nice. So this guy's furthering his commute. Yeah. You hum the jazzy theme song as you go about your day, which I do as well. You have more fun learning from Josh and Chuck than you did from your super hot organic chemistry professor, which is awesome. It is. A little piece of you dies when you hear the theme music fade back in, signaling the end of the episode. Pretty sad. And his number one reason was you have a full fledged man crush on Josh and Chuck. Man crush. And we bring this up because we've had, oddly, quite a few men write us and say they have man crushes. I know we're super hot organic chemistry teachers. It's just weird. But the man crush phenomenon is a real thing. I know you have quite a few bromance. Yeah, I know. Actor John Leg was zamo you're very hot for him. I don't like to talk about it. I hope one day that I will meet John Legozamo. I'm not really holding out hope. I don't want to touch him or anything. It's more just like being next to him, you know what I'm saying? To have him punch me in the sword and be like, hey, Josh, how's it going? I think that's what a man crushes it really means is what you want to do is you want to go out and have a beer with us. I have a tremendous, man crushing George Clooney because I want to go hang out with George Clooney and talk about basketball and drink a beer. It's underrated these days. But there is such things. Platonic love. Yes. If you kissed me, I wouldn't. That's not platonic. Yeah, but it's George Clooney. It would be a good story. It depends on how forceful the kid was, right? True. Okay. And how shaving he was. Well, if you want to tell Chuck or I about your recent romance, or who you have a man crush on, or you want to send us a top ten list and by the way, Greg, you can expect a T shirt for that top ten list. Definitely. Send us your size and your mailing address to the email address you're about to give. Actually, you've already got it, so just send it again, will you? And if you want to send us one for the first time, you're not quite certain who to address it to, what email address you need to ship it off to, you want to send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by the Reinvent 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you? Yeah." | |
3f2e3bc6-5461-11e8-b6d0-1f547e80caee | SYSK Selects: How Book Banning Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-book-banning-works | If you want to control the masses, control what they read. After all, books are seeds that germinate new points of view. As a result, the struggle against banning books is contentious and continual. Learn more about banning books in this classic episode. | If you want to control the masses, control what they read. After all, books are seeds that germinate new points of view. As a result, the struggle against banning books is contentious and continual. Learn more about banning books in this classic episode. | Sat, 24 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=298, tm_isdst=0) | 30335565 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, its me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Select, I've chosen How Book Banning Works, which is an episode we released all the way back in 2012. But it is as pertinent today, sadly, as it was back then. I hope you feel inspired to go out and read a book that somebody didn't want you to read because you can enjoy. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is stuff you should know. Just my little best anchorman move. Yeah. Getting the papers all in order, reading the prompter. Why wouldn't that be great? I don't feel so funny these days, man. Well, we need to get the teleprompter writer to juice up your jokes. I agree. Everyone knows that. Right. We don't actually make any of this stuff up. We had somebody write the show and we read it. This is a very wellrehearsed practice labored podcast. That's right. I think this is the second of two good topics today. Yeah. Part one, asexuality part two, banning books. Yeah. What do they have to do with each other? Nothing. I thought I saw a common thread, and now that I've looked, I've forgotten it. But there is something. Discrimination, maybe. I guess so. Maybe we'll find out. It'll pop up. Possibly. It will be like the Pewee secret word of the day. Oh, yeah. Isn't that what it was called? I think so. Man, that guy was cool. So you got an intro property for this, Chuck? Yes. Are you familiar with the last week of September? I am. You are through it before? Yes, it's after the third week and before the first week of October. That's exactly right. Yes. It just so happens that that very week is Banned Book Week. Did not know that existed. Well, it does today. It does? Yeah. Have you ever heard of banned book week before? No. I have. I've seen like, the subversive displays outside of B. Dalton booksellers. Right. And basically the whole point of it is like, hey, people have tried to ban these books, so make sure you read these because it means that there's somebody out there who doesn't want you to. That's right. Hey, look what I've got. I've got to kill a mockingbird over here. Yeah. That's tempted. Yeah. So the whole point of Ban Books Week is to celebrate intellectual freedom. That's right. Because there are people out there who would take that away from you if they could. Yes, we know it. You go back and listen to some of our podcasts. There's certain words that were beeped out because the man has a under his thumb. Thanksgiving. Yeah. So I would strongly recommend it's coming up. By the time this thing gets released, we will be in September. That's right. We should probably post something about Bay and Book Week when it comes. Okay. Yes. September 30 through October 6, actually. So it's really the first week in October this year. Oh, that's weird that they would put it the last week of October. Yeah. The first week of October. Yeah. Or last week of September. Yeah. It was confusing for a second. Let's talk Bambooks, man more than 11,000 books have been challenged since 1982. Josh that's just since 82. I was reading about the Catcher in the Rye. It came out in oh, man, I wish I knew. It came out in either the late 50s or the early sixty s the late 50s or 1960s, because in 1960, a teacher who assigned it to his class for reading got fired. Really? Yeah. It's one of my favorite books. Yeah. And it's one that I've reread several times over the years, and it always takes on a little different meaning depending on my age, which is interesting. Have you read The Kitchen's Companion? No. We got that as a gift, right? No, I haven't read it yet. It's pretty neat. It's just like footnotes and extrapolations and explanations. Like, this guy went into the world of Catcher in the Rye and made footnotes of the whole thing. It's actually thicker than The Catcher in the Rye 1951, by the way. Okay, so 51 if in nine years somebody lost their job because they assigned that book to read, well, that's pretty common. Usually, with book banning, it comes out of the public school system. Yeah. And so libraries, though, right? Well, it's usually school libraries, no less. A public library. Public library. So if you go on the Internet and you look for banned books, you're going to find a lot of confusion. There's this body called the American Library Association, and a lot of people think that they're in charge of banning books. It's absolutely the opposite of the truth. The American Library Association is basically the librarian's lobby, and they're committed to no censorship whatsoever. Yeah. Ask any librarian, and they're going to probably be in favor of not banning books. Right. As a matter of fact, the Ala maintains the Library Bill of Rights, and in this Library Bill of Rights is a provision for the free access to libraries for minors, which basically says this we have a bunch of books that we're not going to make any judgments on. Right. We have a book that you don't want your kid to read. It's your job as their parent to monitor what they read, and you can decide what they read or not, but that's it. Right. Your opinion doesn't extend to anyone else's kids. So that means that if you want to ban a book, we're going to tell you no, because you're responsible for your child, but not everybody else's child, too. Which means, in short, that the Ala doesn't censor books. Right. This is a big deal because this happens a lot. There's 110 challenges, you said since 1982. Since 1982. And I think there were in 2011. There were 326 challenges last year. A few of these are The Color of Earth series by Kim Dong hua and the reasons why. Nudity sex education. The Hunger Games trilogy. Yeah, my mom's having a baby. A kid's? Month by month guide to pregnancy. We certainly don't want our kids to learn anything about that. No. Especially not with mom. Brave New World by Huxley Insensitivity. Nudity racism. To Kill a Mockingbird, like we mentioned, Harper Lee's classic because of offensive language and racism. Those are just a few of the nine I'm sorry, ten most challenged books of last year. Right? You'll also find in just about every list the most challenged series since 2000 is the Harry Potter books. They received Dayton 3000 challenges, and that was from up to, I believe, like 2008 or nine now of 2010. From 2000 to 2010. Yeah, they received 3000 challenges, and it was because it had Satanic overtones or undertones one of the two or mid tones. People challenging it felt at least. So for the most part, when you see a book being challenged or banned, it's because people are concerned about its influence on children. But as you've seen, the American Library Association says, hey, man, there should be free access to information for kids. Yeah. Julie Blooms Forever is one that's always on the list, too, for that reason, because it deals with young girls burgeoning sexuality and the confusion and the awkwardness and the thrill that comes along with that. And that one is what? That was a great description. Was it? Yeah, from a 41 year old man with a beard. Well, dude, that was 14 months. Girls and boys are all like, you know, we're all scared and awkward and thrilled. So how do you do this, man? How do you issue a formal challenge to a book? And what does that consist of? What does it mean? It means that you have gone to a library, a single library, and said, I want to challenge this book, and the librarian decides whether or not to ban it. So it's as simple as that. That's how book banning works. And you don't even have to use such lofty language like, I want to issue a challenge. You can just say, like, this book needs to be taken out of this library. This book is filth. This book is pervasively vulgar. That's a big one. And the librarian, at that moment, decides whether a book gets banned or not. And for the most part, they err on the side of not banning them. But when they say, okay, let's take that book out, that book has just been banned. So it doesn't mean that a book has been banned. It doesn't mean it's been banned across the country, although some countries have banned books in its entirety. Entirety. But in the US. And in the modern world, it usually means that somewhere in the United States, there's a group of people whether it's kids in a school district or people who are served by a public library who don't have access to a certain book because one person found it offensive and convinced the librarian to make the decision for everybody else based on that person's objections. That's a band book. Yeah. Person or person, a lot of times it's a group together with a list even, and they'll rally the troops and say, come on out from your homes and let's get together and submit a list. And the librarians, like you said, most times, will say no because they generally have the courts on their side if it gets to that point. Yeah, for the most part, the courts like to defend the First Amendment. Yeah, but I mean, think about that pressure, especially if, like, you are a school librarian and the school board is telling you, like, hey, don't forget we employ you, and we're telling you, sure, remove this book. And the librarians like, no, TS. That's against the First Amendment. Should we talk about some of the laws? I think we should. Let's talk about it. Do you want to talk about the history of it? Yeah. Who wrote this one? I think this is Congo, too. I don't think so. I don't know. Yes, it was a freelancer. Okay. Basically, since the days of Socrates, they've been trying to ban teachings of some sort or the other. He was heavily scrutinized. And back then, if you wanted to ban something, you just burned the few copies of it that existed. Right. There was no problem. He was made to drink hemlock for what he thought. But, yeah, if there's two copies of a book in existence and you get both copies and you set them on fire, done. Problem solved. Consider it banned. And then what happened? What came along? Well, the printing press. And all of a sudden, you had to officially try and ban a book because there were too many to gather up and burn. And you remember the Star Chamber starring Michael Douglas. Did you ever watch that? No. Okay. They were the real star chamber. There was a real yeah. Okay, so the real star chamber that was, I think, created in stewart, England. Stewart era England. Man. I probably shouldn't even say that because I'm not sure. In England in the 17th century, there was a group of judges that were in charge of they were, like, the elite judges. Right. The Censor Board basically was one of their roles. And then Henry the 8th came along and got rid of them. But he started his own kind of censorship with licensing laws that basically said that the state had the opportunity to censor things before they were even published. So that was one of the earliest forms of straight up book banning. Book censorship. That's good point. That happened a long time ago. 1982 Board of Education island Trees School District VP Code yeah, that's a mouthful. They said basically that you couldn't remove library material just because a school official doesn't agree with the ideas. They said that the books on their list were, quote, just plain filthy. So they wanted them removed. Yeah. Some people said, no, we're going to sue you for that. Well, the Supreme Court said so basically, it has to be pervasively vulgar, I guess is why they use those words. That's what they can actually ban a book if who finds it. That I think society basically that's easy to figure out. Well, for the most part, as far as books go for banning a book, really tough to do once it reaches the Supreme Court. They're going to be like, no, it's a book, put it back. It's obscenity. That's not protected at all. Right, well, because the kicker there is the number three rule that they decided should be used to determine if something is, I guess, filthy was, it could contain no literary, artistic, political or scientific value. And that's the one where you can pretty much say, claim any book has value. Like that. That's how we have hardcore pornography, though. That's right. So you can say this is art. That's true. So that case, that 1982 Island Trees case or PECO case, I don't know what they call it that was a really big deal because it took place in a school library. And basically the Supreme Court said school libraries are special places. Schools are places of inquiry. And so their repository of knowledge, meaning their library, has special protection. We understand that you're worried about the children's minds being corrupted, but you don't get to decide that this is information that's out there. And as long as it's basically not like hardcore pornography, child pornography, obscenity, it has every right to be in there under the First Amendment. Amen. It was a big deal. It was a big deal. So it was 1988. I remember this one because I was on a newspaper staff at the time. Oh, yeah? And I got interviewed for the news. Oh, yeah? Like the local news came out. Hazelwood School District v Cuer Maya. That was very famously when high school newspapers basically were said to not have the same rights as, like, if you were an adult running a newspaper, and it was not a form of public expression. So schools could, in the end, kind of censor what was going in these things, at least in, like, school curriculum. I thought it was in the paper. In the paper, too. I'm sorry, I thought you meant in these things, meaning libraries. Yeah, no, in the newspapers, for sure. But it was extended into classroom curriculum, too, like that, which was a big deal. Yeah. Do you read that article about Texas? Yeah, let's get to that. You want to? Yeah. Okay. So Texas has this very controversial textbook review committee that wields a lot of power because Texas is the biggest textbook buyer in the country. And so if you're a textbook manufacturer and one state is ordering most of your textbooks, you're just going to print one and send it to everybody. Yeah. It's basically Texas and California are the two states that wheel the most power because they spend the most dough, because they have the most school age kids, basically. Right, exactly. So they basically say what Texas decides goes in their textbooks. Goes in the textbooks for a lot of other states as well. Not just Texas, right? Yeah. I looked at the expense of a textbook, and I think one of the manufacturers said something like several million dollars can go into a major biology textbook, I bet, because of the illustrations and everything that goes into it. And they're like, we can't make one of these for Texas and one for other states. It's just everyone's going to get Texas version of the truth. Exactly. So Texas has this committee that is largely conservative that starting in, I think, 2009, basically held hearings on revisions that they wanted to see done. The social studies curriculum. These are elected people, too, by the way, which is important because apparently a lot of them can buy their way right on that list. Okay. So social studies, you've got history, sociology, economics, and a lot of the stuff that they were adding in there were like, I guess, kind of slanted everything a little more toward the idea that the founders of the United States were Christian. That one of the things they wanted to get in there was not just Martin Luther King's nonviolent civil rights protests, but the Black Panther's violent civil rights protests were another one. Yeah. And if you're a conservative, you're like, well, okay, I agree with a lot of what these people are saying. The problem is what they were saying was that there's a liberal slant to academia and that they were taking it upon themselves to correct that by putting a conservative slant. Yeah. One of the other amendments was to cut Thomas Jefferson from a list of figures who inspired revolutions of the late 18th century and 19th century, and they said, let's replace them with Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin instead. Another one in economics, they wanted to add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, champions of the free market economic theory, to the list of economist studies. We talked about Milton Friedman, basically, he used Chile as a laboratory for Reaganomics before Reagan was president, to trickle down economics. Yeah, I remember that. And then one of the ones that was shot down by Democrat Mavis Knight wanted to introduce an amendment requiring students study the reasons for the Founding Fathers protecting religious freedom by not saying one religion is good above all else. And that was actually struck down. They said, you can't put that in this book. Right. She was a Democrat who introduced it. Yeah. The conservative said no. Well, they basically vote along party lines. So the vote was ten to four or whatever it is. So it was a big deal. It was one of those things that kind of went underreported and underestimated, but there's a really good documentary out there that came out, and I think 2009, may 2010. Yeah, the Revisionaries. Yeah. And I think it's up on Netflix streaming right now. It is. Scott Thurman yeah. And I saw it was a trailer, but it looked pretty good. Yeah. I mean, it was a big deal. It's not just like some people in Texas want to change some textbooks. It has national implications. Right. It's an infowar, basically. And that's what book banning is based on in a lot of ways as well. It's like if you can remove a different viewpoint, especially when it's being presented to kids, then you can keep that viewpoint from taking from germinating in their emerging mind or worldview. Absolutely. And so books like Daddy's New Roommate Gets Banned? Yes. About a boy whose dad has a new boyfriend. Now he's a divorced dad, and his new roommate moves in as gay, and Sarah Palin herself asked for that to be removed from the library when she was the mayor of Wastela, Alaska. Oh, yeah, I remember that. And that guy came out and said, that woman is my mortal enemy. Really? That was his response. And thanks for the press, is what he should have said. I guess so. In the meantime, in Texas, mary Helen Borlanga has tried repeatedly to get Latino figures included in textbooks as role models for the large Hispanic population in Texas. And she's been repeatedly denied to the point where in 2010, she stomped out of a meeting saying they can't just pretend this is white America and that we don't exist. These aren't experts, these aren't historians. They are just rewriting history. So pretty hard words. Yeah. You want to hear some other challenged authors? Let's man. Because there's challenges all over the place, apparently. Judy Bloom, of course. Robert Cormier or Cormier. Did you ever read I Am the Cheese when you were growing up? No. Or The Chocolate War. I think I read that one. Great books. Banned many times. J. K. Rowling. She is, like I said, she is, I guess, of the devil, because a lot of people have a problem with the Harry Potter books. Katherine Patterson. Bridget stephen King. Maya Angelou. Can't have any of that. Yeah, the Alabama State textbook Committee said that. I know why the cage bird sings. Encourages bitterness toward white people. R. L. Stein, who is sort of like a Stephen King for kids. Yeah. Goosebumps. Yeah. And I think I actually worked on one of his little TV shows, the Nightmare Room. Oh, yeah. Was it Nightmare Room? I think so, yeah. Back in the day. And John Steinbeck, of course. Yeah. In 1989 of Mice and Men was banned in Chattanooga because Steinbeck was well known for his anti business attitude. And then Alvin Schwartz was number one. And he wrote one of my favorite sets of books, scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Oh, really? I never heard of those. Oh, man, they were scary. With the most ghastly illustrations you've ever seen. They're awesome. And are those band just because they're scary and ghoulish? I guess so. It's probably Satanic, too. Got you. So we were talking about how if a book is challenged, if it gets to the Supreme Court, supreme Court is probably going to rule in favor of the librarian who said no. Yeah, but that's not the case with obscenity. Like obscene literature. Like, it is specifically excluded in US. Case law from first amendment protection. And that's kind of emerged over the years, starting in 1873 with the stock laws. It basically said, like, you can't sell obscene literature in interstate commerce. Right. And then people are like, okay, well, then we won't or don't enforce it, or whatever. It just kind of went enforced or unchallenged for like three quarters of a century. And then in the Had Roth versus the United States, where all of a sudden we're like, wait, we need to start explaining what obscenity is? Because you can't just say it's just whatever. Right? That's what they started as though, like in the 50s, they basically said, obscenity pornography, basically is what that means is utterly without social value. That was a big quote. So that basically was a mark against anybody who's pro obscenity, right? Right. And then in the 70s, there was one called Miller versus California, and this guy basically sent out a mass mailer, Chuck, of an advertisement for his adult magazines. So everybody got them old people, kids, housewives, businessmen, everybody went to their mail that they opened it up, and there's like, basically obscene advertising. Right. And so California arrested the guy and it went to trial, and the Supreme Court said, okay, yes, obscenity is not protected, but we need to say what obscenity is. And they came up with this three point test called the Miller Test, which has that one prong you were talking about earlier. Yeah. The third one is no artistic merit, basically literary, political, or scientific value, which is probably the terms that they nailed this guy for. Yeah, if it was just a flyer of pornographic ads, right, he couldn't really say no. This is literature. Right. Like, check these out. The other two involve patently offensive sexual conducts or appeal to prayed interest when taken as a whole. There it is. That's what connected asexuality period. Yeah, but the big point with those, Chuck, is that the period interest is local. So basically, like, if everybody in your town would be offended by this, then that's the local judgment. That's for that standard. But then the scientific, artistic, literary standard is national. Right. So if your town thinks it's science, but your town doesn't know what it's talking about, that's not a standard. Right. So that's obscenity. But the good thing is, if you are trying to ban something as obscene, the burden of proof is on you to prove this thing passes all three points of the Miller type. That is true. And that's a tough burden to get past in a court. I'm surprised that more book banning fans aren't trying to infiltrate the library community. You know what I'm saying? I think they do, constantly. Oh, you mean some librarians? Yeah. I don't know. I mean, if that's where the power is, I think the librarians like, really the library industry, it's very powerful, and if they find out that you're a wolf in sheep's clothing, they'll kill you. Boy, have you ever talked to librarians? Chris Poete here is a librarian. They're really passionate, passionate people. It's almost like a public service in a way, because I'm sure they don't make a lot of dough and they just all really believe in knowledge and protecting protecting freedoms. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Go, librarians. Yeah, go give your local librarian a pat on the back today. Yeah, give them a hug. Ask them first and then give them a hug. And if they say no, don't give them a hug. Right. Just shake their hand and politely nod. Yeah, maybe a curtsy and that's great, Chuck. I like the curtsy. All right, well, if you want to learn more about band books, we suggest you go to the Ala site, I believe Ala.com. And then you can also write in band books in the search bar how stuff works.com. And it's going to bring up this really great article. Finally, it's time for listener mail. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this disco fever from Diane in Kentucky. Okay. Hey, guys. Your disco episode brought back fond memories for me. In the summer of 1978, I was in my early twenty s, and I've just made it from the sticks to the big city. New York City. It's a big city. I had very little money. The city's infrastructure was crumbling, and that's kind of what we pointed out, the bad economy. And I was separated from my boyfriend by a continent. A bigger obstacle in those days before cell phones and the Internet and reasonable airfares. Like, that was back when a long distance relationship was like, serious. Yeah. Remember those days? Like, is it long distance? Don't talk too long. It's long distance, right? Yeah. Now it's like, what? Yeah, I forgot about that. Or 1010 to 20 or whatever. Like certain times of day or cheaper or something. No, there's like a number you could dial, like real cheap. Long distance. Yeah, I remember that. I was questioning the decisions I had made in my life, and it was pretty much a struggle for me. But I had disco. I would go with a guy friend to a place on Third Avenue that was more or less the equivalent of an applebee's with disco music and a dance floor, complete with disco ball. It certainly wasn't what you would call a disco tech or a cool place by any stretch of the imagination. But she was broke and we could order the cheapest thing on the menu and spend the whole night dancing. I was completely oblivious to any social or cultural implications of the music, but just knew that it was cheap entertainment and so much fun. Yes, the lyrics were silly and the beat was rather unimaginative, but coming off the area of Vietnam Watergate and a plethora of social upheavals, that was the great part of the appeal. Dancing to disco and laughing at the lyrics was play. It was easy to learn the moves, and much for her, not for me, and much more fun than the mindless dancing which attended rock music, which I like to listen to. But let's face it, dancing to rock music is pretty boring, pretty fast. I don't know if I thought it was the best disco song, but one of the most fun and exhilarating and aimlessly silly for me was Donna Summer's MacArthur park. Still brings a smile to my face just thinking about it. I didn't know Donna Summers did MacArthur park. They had to listen to that. And that was Diane Rally in Louisville, Kentucky. So glad we could bring back some good memories there for you. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Diane. And we've heard from a lot of people who are like, guys, you're saying that if I hate disco, it's because I'm homophobic. Don't be stupid. No, we didn't say that specifically. We said, if you hate disco outright with a burning passion, but for no real reason. But you can't really tell why it's getting to you like this, maybe it's time to step back and examine it. He also said that there's plenty of room for people who just don't like disco, just don't like the music, and it doesn't mean you're homophobic. So lighten up and listen more clearly. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck, you can tweet to us twitter to suskpodcast. You can also join us on Facebook.com. You can also read us the riot act via email to stuffpodcast@housestuffworks.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." | |
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Tue, 19 Jan 2021 13:31:11 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=13, tm_min=31, tm_sec=11, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=19, tm_isdst=0) | 43731998 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out there lurking like an internet weirdo. And this is stuff you should know. Yeah. I got a question for you. Okay. Have you ever been to a Michelin star to restaurant? Yes. I don't know if I have or not. Surely you have. I don't know. I mean, I've never sought one out, sure, but I may have accidentally done it. Yeah, it's possible. There's enough one star restaurants out there. That is entirely possible. You've been to one one star? Actually, I've been to a three star restaurant once. Definitely. Yes. Well, it was for a very special occasion. Yumi is. In my engagement, I contacted our friend Hodgman, who was kind enough to contact his friend Adam Sachs, who's a restaurant critic who pulled some strings to get me reservations at Danielle in New York City. And it was a three star restaurant. It was amazing. It was just totally amazing. Yeah. I think I went to Atlanta is not on. And we'll go over all this in this episode, but Atlanta is not covered under the Michelin guide. Right. But she explains why Bacchanalia doesn't have a star. Yes. Bacchanalia or Staple House, I could see having a star. I haven't been there. Staple House is the best meal I've ever had in my life. What kind of food? It's a tasting menu. You like wings mostly. Yeah, wings, ribs, other things you can taste. It sounds pretty good. It's very renowned in Atlanta and around the world. Like people fly to Atlanta to go to Staple house. It's that good. And it's really something else. It's the best meal I've ever had. And from the food to the service and the Ambience, it's a five star night, regardless of what Michelin says. There's what my Yelp review is. But doesn't that say everything about Michelin, that the highest honor you can get is three stars? It's like everybody else is going for five Michelin's. Like, three tops. Yeah, but as you'll see, their star rating came out long before the Internet existed. Exactly. So you might be like, Michelin? I've never heard of that guy. But there's a tire company called Michelin out there, and we are here to tell you that they are one and the same company that the tire manufacturer is also the publisher of the world's most renowned restaurant guide of all time. Yeah. And once we explain it, it's one of those things that at the same time you say, oh, well, now I guess it makes sense. But also still very weird. It is. But it's literally the Michelin Man is part of this guy. Yeah, there's cartoon tire man, if you're like. Oh, you know, this is pretty haughty stuff. No one of their symbols is the Michelin Man licking his lips and making the OK symbol. So let's all maintain a little bit of perspective here. Okay, yeah, absolutely. With the connection to the tire company, I think it's a pretty satisfying explanation. But all the way back in what was it, the 19th century for sure. I believe 1889, andre and Edward Michelin started making tires, and they were making bicycle tires, I believe, at first, but they ended up making tires for just about everything, including trains. I did not know that there were ever tires for trains. Yeah, like rubber tires. Rubber tires for trains. Just had no idea that that ever existed. Maybe it's one of those things where they tried it and it failed spectacularly, but it's still worth remarking. I don't know if they're still around or not, but these guys started making tires at a really good time because around that time, in addition to bikes, you also started to need tires for your car, and the Michelin brothers were there for it. Apparently, France was, like, one of the early hotspots of the auto manufacturing world around the turn of the last century. Yeah. They built more cars than anyone else between 1890 and sort of the mid to late 1940s, and they sold a ton of tires. And the Michelin man himself debuted in 1898, which is pretty remarkable. And there was I think it was Dave Ruse, right? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah. Dave can point you. And if you're in a place where you can look this up on the Internet, just type in Bobandom B-I-B-E-N-D-U-M which was the original name of the Michelin Man, which comes from a Latin toast attributed to Horace. Nonsense. Now is the time to drink. And just look up the poster, type in BA Bindimposter, 1898, and you'll see what is exactly a very creepy poster of an early Michelin tire man. It is very creepy and sort of like it is. It's like, what is wrong with all the people at the table? There's something terribly wrong with everybody. But apparently Bindim is still his name in Europe or Bib, affectionately. Bindim debuted little, actually, before the time of the Guide. The guide first made its appearance in $1,900. And the reason why the guide ever existed, as far as the Michelin company is concerned, is because the Michelin brothers were looking for a way to sell more tires by getting people to drive more. And they figured, well, if we make a guidebook saying, hey, you got to check out this place in Lyon or Burgundy or champagne or sparkling wine, like all these different places in France, then they'll actually go out and take road trips to these places. And that was the origin of the Michelin guide, was to tell people about all these different spots and to let you know about them, and maybe you should go check this out. Yeah. So it was first given away for free when it debuted. Like you said, we're just sort of listing restaurants where you could go. But eventually, in 1926, they started recommending restaurants and is where the star system was finally debuted, which is One Star, a very good restaurant in its category. Two stars excellent cooking worth a detour or three stars exceptional cuisine worth a special journey And I really think they missed a big opportunity by not rating these one to four tires. Instead, they did one to three stars. But as Day points out, if you'll notice, what they're saying is, hey, this restaurant you should really drive to from your Michelin tires a lot, right? Yeah. Maybe lay some rubber and do some donuts on the way. Totally. So that language is still in use today. Those are the current explanation for stars as well, even though the point isn't to get you to use up your tires, probably. But they do still signify the same thing, where like a three star restaurant. To the Michelin editors of the Michelin Guide, is it's worth the trip in and of itself? Like it's worth getting in a plane and flying to a different country to eat this meal at this restaurant and then getting on a plane and flying back. That's basically what a three star Michelin rating means. That's right. The first one outside of France was in Belgium in four, and then it kind of spread through Europe with other guides. North Africa, they did publish an English language version in, but it was just for France. Still, America didn't get its first guide, and this is very surprising to me, until 2005, when they started their guide to New York City, because they were like, the only good food in America is in New York. Yes, and not only that. Only good French restaurants are what is in New York? They took a lot of flak for that first one. In its defense, they hadn't put together a team of American inspectors. They had used some of their existing European inspectors to go over, and they have no idea what they're doing, aside from French cuisine, apparently. So they did just basically put an American guidebook out to the best French restaurants in New York. That was the first American guide. But they have since, as we'll see, really kind of kept pace a lot more since then. Yeah, they've tried to. The Modern Guide has more than 40,000 restaurants in 34 countries. Here in the States, you have New York, they cover the state of California and then the cities of Chicago and Washington, DC. And that's all as far as the US. Goes so far. And they sell these things now. They've sold 30 million of them over the last 100 years. And then next year, they are going to hit Moscow. They have them for Tokyo, Hong Kong, sort of other places all over the world now, like you said, because they're trying to I think shed and we'll talk more about this, but shed a little bit more of that stodgy snooty only French kind of thing. Right. Which is why they're releasing a guy book on topeka next year as well. Great. So if you open up one of these Michelin guides or go online, it's all online as well, too. When you hear about three stars, there must be a tremendous amount of detail explaining why and all that. That is not how Michelin guides work. There's a tremendous amount of work and effort and thought that's put into the kind of rating or symbol that a restaurant gets in the Michelin guide. But the guide itself is basically like, just trust us. Here's one star, or two stars or three stars or no stars. Here's a little write up about the restaurant, what you can expect the chef and what the chef is known for. And in a couple of paragraphs, they make or break a restaurant around the world. Yeah, if you don't know anything about it and you just pop it open like you said, you could get confused by all the weird symbols that it uses to convey their qualities. We'll get into some of those in a minute. But the star is obviously the highest honor you can get. The criteria. There are five criteria to judge these restaurants. For stars, it's only about the food. It's not the decor, it's not the service or the ambience or where it is. It's literally just the food on the plate. And these five criteria, which are quality of the ingredients, mastery of flavor and the cooking techniques, personality of the chef, the harmony of flavors, and then the consistency between the visits. I also saw value for money. Is that not one? I didn't see that anywhere except in this thing that we were given. Did you see that elsewhere? I saw that that would make much more sense for the Bib Gormand, which we'll talk about. Yeah, I got mine from an interview with an actual New Yorker one. Okay. Yeah, I missed that part. So when you put all those criteria together, and again, like you said, they're just talking about the food, but they're talking about the food to the point where a three star rating means that that restaurant puts out, consistently, over time, technically, scientifically perfect food. No matter what you order, and no matter what time of day, no matter what day of the year, no matter who you are, you're going to go in and get a perfect meal every time. That's what a three star rating is. And there's a lot of criticism of those criteria, as we'll see. But it really is a remarkable thing that they're basically saying, like, this is a perfect meal no matter what you order. That's kind of hard to find in other industries. You're not just like, this is a perfect shoe that I'm wearing. It fits this weird five boxes of criteria that are being checked off. No matter what shoe, what model shoe, the shoe is going to be perfect no matter what. You don't find that everywhere else. Yeah. I really love that symbol or that analogy. Thank you. So there are only 128 three stars worldwide. There are 459 two stars and 2486 one star restaurants. Very famous man chef named Alain Ducas. How do you pronounce that? I think it's Alan de Chase. I think there's so much French in here that I'm going to murder. But he has 36 restaurants, and between them, 20 Michelin stars, including three star restaurants, which is quite an accomplishment. And I think we should take a break, maybe, and then we'll talk about some of those more weird symbols in the guide. Does that sound good? OOlala, stuff you should know. So the Michelin Guide is most well known for the stars that it gives. Right. And we should say, even being mentioned in the Michelin Guide, it's not like a comprehensive listing of restaurants in New York. These are the most noteworthy restaurants in New York, and then the starred ones are the best of the most noteworthy. So just being in there is an honor. But I guess it's kind of like recognition that there are some restaurants out there that are still really good and that you should still go check out. They just don't necessarily check the boxes of the five criteria of a perfect meal every single time, but it's still definitely worth checking out. They came up with other criteria, and they found the first one, I believe, which came out in 1955, was the Bib Goreman that we mentioned a minute ago and Bib being, again, Bibendum or Michelin Man. This is like his faves. Totally. As evidenced by him licking his lips. Give me the okay symbol. Yeah, so you're right. It started in the original symbol was a little red R, which stood for R-E-P-A-S. French for meal. Not going to pronounce it Rapas. Rapass. Rapas. Rapas. Bib Goreman means good little restaurant. And it actually comes out it's in the regular guide, but it also comes out as its own separate guide. Oh, yeah. The Bib Gourman Guide after the Michelin Guide is published. And these are good quality, good value cooking. And the idea is that you can go to a Bib Gorman restaurant and you can get what they say is a three course meal. I also saw one of the inspectors say, like, a main course, a dessert and a glass of wine, but kind of like, three things for about $40 per person, which they consider a good value. And that is if you're talking, like, really good stuff. And 3365 restaurants right now are listed as Bib Gormans. Yeah. So it's kind of like, anybody can pick that up and be like, let's see where we're going to go to dinner tonight. Basically, you can drop $40 a person at, like, outback pretty easily. So that is pretty remarkable that they blooming onion go for these days. I guarantee it's eleven or $12. You think? Sure. Let's look right now. You talk. I'm going to look up how much a Blooming Onion is. I got to say, I haven't been to an Outback Steakhouse since, I don't know, probably two decades. But that bloomin onion is blooming delicious. Yeah, for sure. Bloom and delicious. Yummy. Made a joke while we were on the road the other day about how we should go to Outback, and I was like, yeah, Blooming Onion would be pretty good. But it turns out it was just a joke, and we didn't end up there. How was that for an anecdote? Okay, it's good until the part where you didn't go and get one of those Blooming Onions on your road trip. Right. So you can get yourself a Blooming Onion for $8.99. I stay incorrected. All right, that sounds about right. With tax, though, you're approaching ten. Yeah. And if you want a regular size cheese fries, it's $11. But you got to get some extra sauce with that Bloomin Onion. So that probably pushes it over ten. Yes. Unless that's a freebie. I don't know how they work gallon size. Were you thinking the Bloomin Onion was going to make an appearance in this episode on Michelin stars? I did not. I give that four tires, though. All right, so another symbol they have is the plate Michelin. How are you going to pronounce that in French? Lafayette. Yeah, Laceyette, that sounds about right. Okay. This is a symbol of a dinner plate flanked by a knife and a fork. This debuted in 2016, and this is just good cooking. It means it doesn't have a star. It's not a Bib Goreman, but they call it, quote, simply, good food. I'm not entirely sure what the distinction is between the plate and the Bib Goreman rating. It I think it's money. Okay, so this could still be expensive. Or is it cheaper than the Bib Goreman? No, I think the Bib gourman is specifically cheap, and the plate to Michelin can be pricey, but it's not good enough for a star. Just not good enough for a star. It's like a Substar rating, I guess. Substar, but more expensive than $40 a person. Okay. Otherwise it would be a big Goremond. One other way to kind of understand the big Goremand is we'll talk about the inspectors a little bit in a minute. But apparently the ratings are they use a hive mind kind of thing where they'll have different inspectors go to see what they think about an inspector's rating of a restaurant. And then they kind of pull them all together. And the average is what the restaurant gets. That was one explanation I saw. And by proxy, the Bib Gore mon is, say, like, one inspectors. If you happen to be talking to a Michelin inspector and said, what's your real favorite restaurant in this town? They'd probably give you a big Gormand recommendation. Not necessarily. Everyone in the Michelin organization would agree that it deserves a star or three stars. But this one inspectors like, this is really, honestly, the best restaurant in town. Right. And then they would take you into an alley and strangle you to death. Because you're not supposed to know who I am. Right, exactly. I'm so sorry, but you know too much like The Talented Mr. Ripley at the end. Oh, spoiler, was it? No, it doesn't matter. Okay. You have the Green Star, which debuted just last year in 2020. That is restaurants and chefs who are practicing sustainable gastronomy sourcing locally, reducing waste, renewable energy in their restaurants. Then you have the Covet, or covers, and that is based I think the food has got to be good, too, but it really has to do with ambience. You can get one to five covers, which means if you really want to go to a special, like, romantic dinner or something, you might want to look under the cover section. Yeah. And to make it even more arcane and obscure, you can have five covers. But if it's in black ink, it's not as good as a few covers in red ink. Yeah. A little confusing. So if there's a place that has five covers in red ink, it's their most charming, splendid atmosphere of any restaurant they've ever encountered. But, yeah, surely it has to do it takes the food into account, too. They're not going to send you, like a slot bucket. That's really charming. But whereas the stars are just the food, this kind of takes into account the ambience more. Yeah. And then they started you can see symbols for different specialties in different regions. Like in Spain, they'll have a little toothpick and wine symbol for tapas, like the best tapas places in the UK and Ireland, they'll have beer mugs for the best pubs. If you see little grape symbols, that means someone might have a really good wine list or a cocktail glass, obviously, for good cocktails, or a sake bottle, stuff like that. So if you see all these little symbols, obviously, I'm sure there's a legend. Yeah, legend. It explains all this stuff. But we're here to do that for you. Yeah. From what I can tell, you have to be basically a trained Michelin inspector to decipher some of this stuff once it gets real deep, you know. Well, we've been saying this word inspector without explaining that, and people are probably going, why do they keep talking about detectives? Right, but we're not talking about detectives. We're talking about inspectors, which is their word for reviewers. Yeah. Actually, I don't even think they call them they call them anonymous restaurant. Oh, no, they do call them inspectors. I'm sorry, I misread. And that makes a lot of sense, too, because there is this definite haughtiness to this whole thing. But at the same time, from what Michelin has finally started to choose to reveal about its inspectors, they do seem to actually be worthy of such a kind of haughty title. They are typically trained and have real life experience in the hospitality industry, the restaurant industry, hotel industry, and they will train and actually go through this kind of vetting process for about a year. Basically, that also includes an apprenticeship, because this is not the kind of thing where you can be like, oh, these are the five criteria. I totally understand this. It's a lot more nerve wracking than that. And also, if you ask me, the best way to lose love of food would be to become a Michelin restaurant inspector, because it sounds like a lot of not fun work. Yes, I would much rather just go enjoy a meal at a restaurant than have to review it any day of the week. Yeah. There's a cool article I read from Forbes from 2019 by Carla Allen deo called The Secret Life of an Anonymous Michelin Restaurant Inspector, where they talked to this woman who is an inspector, and they remain anonymous even when they're interviewed, which, as we'll talk about in a bit, is happening a little bit more over the past ten to 20 years. But she talks about the rigors of the process, and some of them are trained Somalia, some of them were chefs, but they're all in the restaurant industry at some point, and they get there, obviously, their travel and hotel and their food all covered. I was trying to find the pay. I saw some guesses that it was maybe close to $100,000 a year to eat about 300 meals a year in these restaurants. Yeah. To not be allowed to eat, at least if you're reviewing the restaurant with a spouse or any other friends, like, you're supposed to be in there alone. You got to take these pictures, which people do that a lot now any day, so that's not going to make you stand out. But the thing that I saw was that the hardest part, at least from the point of view of this one inspector, was maintaining your anonymity, because I think they said you're allowed to tell your closest family members, but really no one else. And in this day of social media, I don't know how much of a social media presence you can even have. It'd be a giveaway if you were, like, in New York again, ate these ten meals out this week, right? I'm in Paris now. I'm in Los Angeles. Now I'm in Chicago. Now I'm in Tokyo. People would kind of catch on, I think. Yeah. I think you're supposed to just be a lot more kind of plain James, I guess. Never heard of foot that way. But I think I just came upon something to where you're just kind of unremarkable and not really noticeable, but at the same time, you're not sticking out because you're so unnoticeable, and you just kind of have to live a life of anonymity, not just at work. But in general, like you're saying, it's a bit of a grind. It sounds like a big grind, like ten meals a day or ten meals a week, very frequently, lunch and dinner. And we're talking, like you said, tasting menus or prefix menus, where they're eating, like, multiple course meals. I saw that New Yorker interview with Maxim, or M is what they nicknamed her, the Michelin Inspector. And I guess they order as many courses as the restaurant offers. So if they have soup, salad, appetizer, mane pasta, dessert, you would be expected to order a dish off of each of those courses for lunch and then go do the same thing for dinner five days a week, three weeks out of the month, all year long. It does sound like a grind, for sure. Yeah. By yourself. Eating by yourself, it can be kind of liberating and fun, but after a while, that is one of the loneliest things you can possibly do. And the other thing, too, is if it's frowned upon for you to bring a friend or a family member, I guarantee it's frowned upon for you to just be sitting at your phone. So you're just sitting there like a total weirdo by yourself at dinner, enjoying paying attention to the salt shaker, basically, is what you're doing. Yeah. Enjoying a world class meal. It does not sound fun to me at all. It's just one of those things. I'd just rather be an everyday person and just enjoy it on that level. Like, I feel bad for people who are so into making movies that they can't enjoy a movie anymore. It's the same exact thing. You're like, I just want to be a regular guy at a three star restaurant sitting there looking at my phone. Right. I want to be able to be on Twitter the whole time. All right, I think we should take another break and then we'll talk about this all sounds rosy, but we'll talk about some of the criticisms right after this. All right, so we've talked about the kind of sun. Well, did we sing praises? Well, they are definitely well trained and all that, but the thing is, with their inspectors, michelin has always been the term. They're famously anonymous. They really, like, you were saying, go to great links to hide their people and their identities. And a lot of people are like, well, who are these people? Are they actually qualified? And that's kind of caused a lot of controversy in itself. Yeah. And I kind of mort singing the praises of the guide itself, but it's all become sort of controversial over the years, and there's been a lot of criticism. Levied, like you mentioned, first of all, the inspectors, there have been some things that have come out over the years. There was a book written by an inspector after they left the job called The Inspector Sits Down at the Table by Pascal Remy, where Pascal said, they're not nearly enough of us. They are way fewer. We're not going to these restaurants as much as we should. There have been restaurants that said, hey, I was knocked down a star, and I know for a fact that no one even came into the restaurant this past year. No inspector came into our restaurant, so how do we get not back a star? And there's kind of a general I think within the industry, there's a general feeling of this thing has too much importance over and too much hold over us as chefs and as restauranteurs. And we're kind of beholden to this book to the point where people I mean, there was one chef who took his own life, bernard Lucio, who lost a star. He had famously said, if I ever lose my stars, I will kill myself. And in 2003, that happened, and he shot himself in the head with a shotgun. He very much was suffering from depression. So we're not saying this is all at the hands of the Michelin guide, but it just sort of hammers home the stress of trying to achieve and then maintain these stars. Yeah, it goes both ways, right? Like, if you don't have the stars yet and you're just starting out, you want to get them, or else people are going to be like, well, I thought you were like an up and coming superstar. Where are your Michelin stars? Yeah, but then once you get them, it's just this albatross around your neck trying to keep them. And the guy whose restaurant you, me and I went to for engagement, Danielle Boulerd, I believe he actually took he took a kind of a cool attitude to the whole thing. He had three stars, and he got knocked down to two after I had been there. But he was basically like, look, we make a lot of changes to our menu, and sometimes it's stuff that we want to lock in and put on the menu. Other times, it's us just messing around, but our customers seem to really like it. And so if that means that we're not putting out perfect food every single time, but we're being more creative and spontaneous, I'm okay with that. Taking chances, that was a very rare attitude from what I saw. More likely, if you lose a star, you openly weep, like Gordon Ramsay did when one of his restaurants, the London in New York City, lost two stars. It had two stars, and it lost them both from one guy to the next. And he wept. Apparently. He won't talk about it if you ask him about it. That is much more the reaction to Michelin stars than Danielle's response, which is kind of like, I'll take it or leave it. It just kind of ruined your life one way or the other. And I think a lot of people in the restaurant industry really resent that. This anonymous group of people whose qualifications they're. Not even sure of hold that kind of sway over their lives, over their entire careers. Yeah. Actually, now that I think of it, emily and I stayed at the London one time, and I think we ate breakfast there. There you go. Two stars. Yeah. I'm not sure when it was as far as the stars coming and going, but yeah, so we ate there. Another sort of rarity was in 2017 when French chef Sebastian Bra said, hey, Michelin Guide, can you remove my stars and take them out of there? And there's a couple of interesting quotes. He said, after 20 years under the banner of three stars, I wanted to find serenity, freedom, and independence. But three stars represented a form of permanent and growing tension for me, and today, I only want to be accountable to my customers. So too much stress. And he was like, I want to experiment, and I want to try different things, and I don't want to necessarily live or spend the rest of my career just trying to maintain these stars. And by all accounts, it was a pretty liberating experience for them. Yeah. Again, that also is very rare for the most part. It's like your career is about trying to get and then trying to keep those stars. And just the kind of the frustration that goes along with it has made a lot of people level accusations toward the Michelin Guide, including that they hand out like, that one guy's, Expose said that they hand out stars or maintain stars among some of their friends, like very famous French chefs. That is absolutely not fair. And there are definitely plenty of people out there who just go to these restaurants so that they can brag about having gone to this restaurant. And that probably makes up a substantial part of the chef's clientele or the restaurant's clientele. And I would guess if you're a chef in this area, you probably hate people like that even though they're coming to your restaurant, they're just being Dbags. That's why they're there, to just show off what a DBAG they are. Can we say that? Yeah. And I bet you half of those people say, like, oh, my God, one of the best meals, and half of them say, I don't know why this thing is three stars. Right? Exactly. Yeah. So there is that to it where people are like, there's too much sway, or these people even like, being fair about this. And then the star system attracts people who are just there to say that they ate at a restaurant and aren't actually enjoying the food all that exists. But it really seems over the last century that the Michelin guide has, like, it is legit. Like, if you go to a three star restaurant, you are probably going to have the best meal that you've ever had in your entire life. That's probably true. And that in and of itself, legitimizes it, or at least lends credence to the idea that generally it's a legitimate, if not crushing, the rating system. Yeah. There's been some other controversies over the years. In 2019, there was a lawsuit filed by French chef Mark Varat, who said, my restaurant, Maisante, how do you pronounce that last part? Not Boise, Idaho, but I think boise? Mesante. Boise, yes. All right, let's go with that. He was downgraded from three to two stars. He said, quote, It's worse than the loss of my parents, which I'm sure his parents were like, mercy for that. And apparently the word on the street was the inspector accused the kitchen of using just a very common English cheddar cheese and a souffle dish that he served, sakura blue. He was really mad. He said, I demand to see that report. Michelin says, I don't know who you think you are, but you better watch it. You're going to lose all your stars, buddy. But you can't see our reports. He filed a lawsuit. It became known as cheddargate. And then the case was thrown out when they couldn't produce evidence that it actually hurt his business. It actually helped his business because of all the publicity. Right. So that report thing actually shook me as surprising. I saw that they will share their reports. Really? Yeah. Obviously, it won't say what inspector came from or anything like that, but that restaurants who want to improve or get a starbuck or whatever and want to know what happened, they will share the report. So I didn't understand that maybe what I read was wrong. But the Michelin Guide has responded to this kind of, like, criticism and bad publicity. The suicide of what was his last name? Liza. Yes. In 2003 was really a dark cloud that hung over the Michelin Guide. The criticism for basically rating the best French restaurants in New York and their first American guide, all this stuff really amounted to some bad press for the Michelin Guide. And it kind of evolved in the 21st century to become a lot more worldly, a lot less Francocentric, a lot less stuffy, and to expand. And today, actually, the country or the city with the largest number of stars among its restaurants isn't Paris, it's Tokyo. Yeah. How about that? I should say Tokyo. I've been saying it wrong. Yummy says, oh, it's not Tokyo. Tokyo. It's Tokyo. Yeah, I've been saying it wrong for 49 almost 50 years. Yeah, I'm catching up to you. 44 for me, because that was my first word, actually. Yeah, I will run back I've been saying Tokyo since I was in the womb. So, yeah, it's opened up to Asia. It's expanded in the US market, like we mentioned before. In 2016, they awarded their first ever star to a Hawker Stall, which is Singapore street food, which is really cool. It was Hong Kong soya sauce, chicken, rice, and noodle. Which, man, that thing got a start. And I just want to go there right now and eat it. Me, too. The other thing I want to eat is in the 2020 edition to Taipei, they had a takeout only street stall that has one thing on the menu, which is a steamed pork bun with ground peanuts and cilantro. They've been serving this for 60 years, and they gave that a bib gourman whatever metal. The licking lips and okay, the licking lips guy. Yeah. I want to eat that pork bun more than anything I can think of. The thing is, Chuck, is the thing that I hate almost as much as waiting at a red light when there's no cars coming from the other direction is standing in line for food. I hate that I feel like such a chump, such a sucker. And after X number of minutes, it is not worth it. It doesn't matter how good the food is, it's not worth it. Because I also usually don't like the people I'm standing in line with, like, a certain kind of, like, food fan or the stand in line for an hour and a half. They're also probably the ones that brag about the number of stars or whatever. Yeah. So there's a lot I don't like about that. And it turns out Michelin has heard my concerns and Jiro Sushi, the sushi point that they did the documentary about. After that documentary, you could not still, to this day, I think that documentary is from, like, 2009 or ten to this day, you cannot get in to Jurors. It's a ten seat sushi bar that's probably the best sushi in the world, and you just can't get in it's. Sorry. TS. You have to basically be ahead of state or celebrity these days. And it was a ten seat, three starred three Michelin starred sushi restaurant in a train station in Tokyo. And Michelin took its stars back because they say the guide is meant for any person to be able to go to these restaurants, the restaurants they recommend. Anybody should be able to get into, like, yes, some people are going to spend a much more substantial portion of their annual salary than other people, but you should be able to get into this place one way or another, and with zeros, you just can't do that anymore. So they actually took their stars back. They said, Giro, we wish you the best of luck. Not that you need it, but you don't need the stars, and you can't really have them because the average person can't get a seat in your place anymore. Yeah. You know what this episode has really made me want to do? Eat. Eat in a restaurant. Yes, dude. Yes. This is very cruel to put this one out right now, in retrospect, because all I want to do is eat in a restaurant, man, so bad. Just a good multi course meal starting out with, like, a martini or drink a blooming onion in there somewhere. Maybe a side of ranch. I mean, like, yes. I cannot wait. It will happen again one day, man. I know for sure. Okay, well, since Chuck said for sure, that means of course. Everybody, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this. We've gotten a few of these lately, but this one I tagged about a month ago from people who have finished their stuff. You should know Journey nice and listened to all the episodes. Hey, everybody, I've done it. It took me two years of listening anytime I was driving, and I have to drive a lot for work, but I finally gotten through the entire back catalog, going all the way back to how grassoline works. Those first episodes were so not very good. Yeah, I don't know what I'll do in between new episodes now, but I wanted to say thanks for the many hours of learning and laughing and what has to be hundreds of Simpsons references. My favorite episode was either nuclear, Semiotics or the Atlas Past Mystery, but I need to thank Josh for introducing me to Teddy the Beaver. Oh, yeah, Teddy the baby beaver. Or no, he's the one that built like, the damage in the doorway of the bedroom, right? Oh, what's that? I think so. He was so cute. So cute. The greatest moment in the show, however, was during what I recall to be the Beagle Brigade episode when Josh predicted covid 19 by talking about someone's getting a disease by eating a bat. Yeah, a lot of people say I predicted that. I called out a magazine article that I read that predicted it. I don't know if I particularly predicted it, but thank you for that. And I don't even know if that's the origin of kobi. Now, isn't that sort of in dispute? I don't know. The last thing I heard was that it was either a penguin or a bat. I've heard that more than anything. You know what I'm saying? Well, you're going to the wrong websites, buddy. I guess so. You need to find the truth. That's right. Oh, God, I'm stuck. Cartoon sweat, he says. Also. Sorry, Chuck, but sharknado can suck it. I wish to know for sure, but my mind was blown away when Josh said it. Thanks again for all the hard work, and I look forward to twelve more years worth of episodes. And that is from Kyle in Phoenix, Arizona, who I guess went to our live show there. He's a great live show on Kellogg, by the way. I remember that Phoenix show. That was a good one. That was a good show. I think that's the one where we got Lassos. Oh, it absolutely was. I still got that thing, kathy with a K. That's right. I love that Lasso. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of Iheart Radio for more podcasts. My heart radio visit the iHeartRadio App Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1231785949601hsw-sysk-urban-explorers.mp3 | What are urban explorers? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-are-urban-explorers | Urban explorers investigate abandoned structures such as hospitals, grocery stores, warehouses and underground systems. Tune into this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the rules, legality and appeal of this fascinating hobby. | Urban explorers investigate abandoned structures such as hospitals, grocery stores, warehouses and underground systems. Tune into this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the rules, legality and appeal of this fascinating hobby. | Tue, 13 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=13, tm_isdst=0) | 16123346 | 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 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.com sisk 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. Chuck, say hi. Hi, Josh. This is stuff you should know. You put Chuck and I together in a room and press record and you get Stuff You Should Know. Just like that easy. Yeah. We should put like a star twinkle in there. Chuck? Yes, Josh? Have you ever passed by, like, an old store, something like that, and you just felt drawn to go look in the window and just kind of peer in? It an old store that's closed down now. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry. An old unused store of some sort, like an old grocery store, and you look inside and really it's just kind of like some pillars that hold the ceiling up. Maybe if you're lucky, a couple of shelving units. That's about it. Right? I do I'll get into this a little later, but I'm way turned on by this subject we're going to be talking about today. Really? I'm way into it and I've done. It turned on. Oh, yeah, sure. Intellectually. Okay, I got you. That's a weird thing to be turned on. Okay, well wow. My whole intro is just shot. Let's talk about urban explorer. Sorry to derail you. No, you're fine. You're fine. OK, so we're talking about urban exploration, right? And let's just give a little background here, little definition right here. Well, urban explorers are people that it doesn't always have to be urban meaning city. It's basically when you go and explore any abandoned structure. Correct. Almost always abandoned. Almost always abandoned. Yeah, structure. And you see what's there. There are some ground rules. You're not supposed to take anything. No, there's some real codes of conduct that have cropped up that are like, really strict. So basically you've got urban exploration really kind of starting in earnest in the 1970s. Right, right. In San Francisco. Yeah. This group called Suicide Club, and I'm not entirely sure, but I think Ken Kesey was a member, and they used to go tour, like, old utility tunnels and old hospitals and stuff around San Francisco. They also used to do I think this is where they got their name during storms, they jump into San Francisco Bay, and apparently there was one sea wall that had some heavy chains linked to it. So they'd hold onto the chains and just get whipped around. By the way. Yes. They did other weird stuff. They had, like, dinner parties on Golden Gate Bridge. Yeah, that was really cool. And also, you can even go a little further back than that. In the 50, students at MIT used to tour, like, underground steam tunnels on around campus and everything. But most people credit Suicide Club is the people who really started to do urban exploration. Right. But it took about 20 years before it really started to catch on. And so you got the all of a sudden, there's that code of conduct, the code of ethics. Right, right. Which were well, like I said before, you're not supposed to take anything. What I thought was interesting is there's an old saying with camping and wilderness exploration, which is take only pictures, leave only footprints. And it's like the exact club. Yeah. And it's the same thing with urban explorers. Even though a lot of people would just say they're just Raddy old buildings, they have a lot of respect for it, it seems like. Yeah. And there's a lot of people that they have to contend with. I mean, you have homeless people who find these radio buildings to provide shelter. You've got people who I've never understood the compulsion to spray graffiti, especially when you suck at it. I've got a can of black paint, and look, I can write. Right. It just looks awful. Now, if you're a graffiti artist, totally different. Right. But just spray painting something for the sake of spray painting it. I don't understand it. Especially if your tag sucks. I don't think you should do it. I think you should either work on your tag or just quit altogether. Right, okay. So they've got all these other people that actually probably kind of give them a bad name, urban explorers. And when I say them, I'm referring to a vast network of people who are either totally independent, loosely, or very tightly knit. Right. Thanks to the Internet. Yes. The Internet's really helped, which is probably why it started to really take off in the 90s. Yeah, that makes sense. And these people are just like you said, they're drawn to abandoned or unused or neglected man made structures. Right? I am. Yeah. But they're not the ones who are doing the graffiti. No, that's because that's against the code of conduct. They don't break things. You can't use wire cutters to make it past the fence. Yeah, I like that one. You certainly can't kick in a door or anything like that. I read about one guy who found this old mining office. It was like a 19th century office, and he found these reams of really personal personnel files. Way more personal than you, I would hope my personnel file is. And he just sat there and read them and quietly put them back. I think he found some x rays and things there, too, of, like, people with black long and just really interesting stuff. But he didn't take anything. They put him back where he found them. So that's another one, too. So all of this stuff kind of forces you to get creative, right. And how you get in, how you get in, but also what you're doing while you're there. If you can't take anything to show your friends, that logically leads to documenting it. Right. And there are tons if you go into flickr and type in urban exploration, urban explorer, urban anything about urban, whatever, as long as it has to do with UE, it brings up some really cool stuff. I haven't seen that. Oh, you got to. And of course, my favorite website of all time, forgotten Detroit, which I make you look at probably, what, once a month, even though it hasn't changed in a decade. Right. Yeah, that's the same thing, too. One of the aspects of urban exploration is to document this crumbling present that's actually very much rooted in the past. Right, okay. So what have you explored? I'm curious. Well, I don't know when this all started, but I was really young, and I thought most boys were like this, but I was way into exploring things. My dad's photographer, he used to take my brother and I out to the country in Georgia to photograph old barns and things, and my brother and I would always explore these barns. I guess that's kind of how it started. And there's something about a large I'm not sure you could probably study me clinically, because anytime I'm in a large, empty building, I get really excited. Like, it doesn't even have to be an old abandoned building, but I've taken a tour of, like, a stadium, let's say Sanford Stadium at UGA when no one else was there. And being out there with no one else, there's something about it. I don't know. It thrills me. Really? Yeah. So, I mean, have you gotten into this a little more? Have you taken it to well, yeah, when I was about 13 or 14, my family used to vacation in Florida and Pensacola, Florida. And there was an old fort there. The campground called Fort Pickens, 1843 is when this thing was built, and it was in service until about 47. And we made torches just like you see on TV with the stuff the cloth wrapped around the end and the battery there on the beach. You could sneak through the bars they're like prison bars. And my brother and I did this, and we explored all these rooms and tunnels from the Civil War. Guy had stuff, like, scratched on the wall and painted on the wall. Was it like a prison? I don't really know. I actually look today to try and find out exactly what part of Fort Pickens we were in. I think it was the Battery. I don't think it was a prison. Okay. But they would have the bar, so obviously the enemy couldn't get in to their stuff unless they were 14 year old boy enemies. Right. So we explored the heck out of Fort Picnics, and it was really cool. And then I did it again probably about eight or nine years ago in Atlanta. I lived in some warehouses on the west side of Atlanta, and my friend and I got into one that was empty and kind of boarded up, and we found all these old blueprints for Marta or subway system here for when Marta was first being pitched to the city in the all these old plans and blueprints and letters and things like that. Sweet. Yeah. Wow. So I'm way into it. I mean, not way into it. I'm obviously not in a club, and I don't do this regularly, but when I have done it, I just think it's really cool. Do you have a handle? I don't have a handle. Okay. I didn't take anything now, and I didn't know that was the rules. I just didn't want to disturb anything. It sounds like you are a true urban explorer. Yeah, so I've done it a few times, and I would do it again at the drop of a hat. I mean, if someone knows a place. If you called me up on a Friday and said, hey, man, I know this empty shopping mall that would go in a second. I'm glad you said shopping mall. There's one that actually I want to plug another site, UER, a Canadian urban exploration resources site. And they basically allow people to post documentation of their own exploration. And there was one that I was looking at in Atlanta. I think I showed you, too, of the old Avondale Mall right near where I grew up. Whoever did that just did a spectacular job of documenting this mall. It was clearly in its heyday in the 80s. Everything's very pastelish. Right. There's, like, huge mirrors everywhere. It is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen in my life. And now it's gone. Yeah, there's a Walmart there, which is another point of urban exploration, as far as I understand. You're catching a last snapshot of something before it dies. Right. Because we inevitably tear just about everything down. Right. And this is keeping it for posterity, not in its form of when it was in its peak or functioning, but almost like after it's aged. And right before it dies, you're kind of capturing that one last look yeah, I guess. It's at this point that we should say we do not recommend urban exploring because it is, in fact trespassing and it is illegal. So we're not saying you should go out and urban explorer just because your friend Chuck ends. Not only that, it's very dangerous. It can be. By definition, a neglected building is a dangerous place. Right. There are such things as billing inspectors, but they only inspect functioning buildings. Right. So if you take the function out of the building, there goes the billing inspector, and you have no idea where you're going to fall through a floor or have a floor fall on you from above, which would make it a ceiling, I believe. Right. Actually, someone passed away not too long ago. Is that correct? Yeah. In Australia, there are some kids that were exploring a sewer system and there was like a sudden storm, and the storm water just came hard and fast, swept them off their feet and pinned them against a grate where it was exiting into the ocean, and they drowned, pinned against this grate. It can be very dangerous. It can be. So, yeah, I think that was a good move, Chuck. I think our legal department is really going to appreciate that. Don't listen to me. Exactly. Listen to me, but don't do what I say. 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, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create Learn More@ibmcom consulting 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. 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The other person I've ever met who saw Session I brought that up for our asbestos article because it's an asbestos team in the movie that go into this abandoned mental hospital. Very creepy movie. Yeah, it is very creepy. But that's filmed at Danvers. Okay. And there's another place, it's in Massachusetts, and it's an abandoned insane asylum, which is just creepy enough. But this thing is huge. Old Gothic architecture. Old Brick. I would love to walk through that place. Well, there is one that's similar that you could walk through, which actually technically takes it off of any urban exploration list. Because one of the things is that it has to be off limits to truly be urban exploration. Right. There's a place called Waverly Hills in Kentucky. It's a tuberculosis sanatorium, and I think it was around for 30 or 40 years. And in that period of time, 60,000 people died there. It was bad. They have, like, this little morgue that's still there, the white tile. There's, like, old hospital gurneys everywhere, old tiny wheelchairs. It is beyond creepy. And that's actually open for tours. I think there's a couple that either bought it or bought the rights to give tours there. So that's cool. Waverley Hills in Kentucky would be a good place to go if you're into that. I love it. I think part of it has to do with being scared. I like that feeling. It's exhilarating feeling to be somewhat frightened. I'm not talking scared out of my wits or anything. I don't like that. But there's something about an element of danger of being scared and being some large, dark place alone that just I don't know. I get a kick out of it. I agree. Well, you and your brother take your own advice. Be careful if you're going to do it. And if you did, don't say that we told you to do it. Exactly. Okay. Well, that's urban exploration. And this is listener mail. Okay. So, Chuck, what do you have for us? Josh have a couple of quick corrections this week. Oh, good. We're not always right. That is a lie. We do the best we can with facts, but sometimes we think of things on the fly and don't exactly have it at our fingertips. So we have a couple of corrections in our podcast about which one was it with the magic bullets? Where's the best place to get shot? You talked about Kennedy. Yeah. And you mentioned that you thought it was a senator who was shot with JFK in Dallas, and of course it wasn't. And you should have known this one, texas Governor John Connolly, who was actually in the car with them. Why should I have known that one? Because that was a big event in our nation's history. I agree, but wow. I'm not scolding you, but I didn't know it either. So what am I saying? Who's that from? That was from Dave Barton. Thanks, Dave. Dave. And then Kerry Klinger, who is a dentist here in Atlanta, actually says she wanted to comment on the inconsistency with the one about the FDA and herbal substance regulation. We compared Tylenol over the counter Tylenol to Tylenol three, which you need a prescription to get. And the reason you need a prescription is because Tylenol three is regular Tylenol with codeine added, which is a narcotic. I don't even remember saying that. Can we play the clip real quick? Exactly. Think about how you perceive Tylenol. Sure. And then how you perceive Tylenol three. That stuff with coding. Right. Which is pretty much like 800 milligrams of Tylenol. Something like that. That's from Kerry Klinger. And like I said, she's a dentist and she said it's not a matter of a difference in dosage. It's a much different drug with a narcotic in it. And so it's subject to regulation. And she says that she prescribes it whenever she takes a tooth out. And I'm actually in the market for a dentist. I've got one for you. Well, I want to go to Kerry Klinger here in Atlanta so I can get some codeine. That's awesome. You're med seeking, you realize. Well, I'd need it in case I had a tooth out. Have you noticed we're huge in the dental community? We are. That's two letters from Dennis. Yeah, that's weird. All right. Well, thank you to Carrie, Klinger and Dave. Thanks, Dave. And if you want your letter read, make sure it's witty and clever and send it to stuffpodcast@howtoffs.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 chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-01-20-sysk-lab-grown-meat.mp3 | SYSK Selects: Lab-grown meat: Order up! | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-lab-grown-meat-order-up | Since Winston Churchill predicted we'd grow meat in a lab by 1981, researchers have considered doing just that. And thanks to the current work of about 30 groups, we may be only years away from mass-produced artificial meat. But will anyone eat it? | Since Winston Churchill predicted we'd grow meat in a lab by 1981, researchers have considered doing just that. And thanks to the current work of about 30 groups, we may be only years away from mass-produced artificial meat. But will anyone eat it? | Sat, 20 Jan 2018 13:57:36 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=13, tm_min=57, tm_sec=36, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=20, tm_isdst=0) | 25269067 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I'm choosing the episode on lab grown meat. It first aired in December 2012, and it's good to check in on these things. We've made some progress in the field to, but we still have a very long way to go before there's a lab grown slab of meat in every pot in every house in America. So let's step it up, people. And also keep an ear out for Gabor Four. GAX such an excellent name. It actually rivals Gancho Ganev as the possible future name for my horse. Enjoy. Welcome to stuff you should know from houseteporkworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this here is stuff you should know. The podcast welcome the Enveno bill coming. Where is that from? The producers on an in Cabaret. Is that from something? Yeah, I think maybe Cabaret. I've never seen it. I don't know. I just saying welcome in different languages. So you're feeling good right now? I'm feeling better now that we have gotten the condom podcast out. The way I was a little bit sweaty during that one really got me all worked up. So now we can talk about lab grown meat. What a great one to punch. Jerry's kicking. We are talking lab grown meat, man. Yeah. We're talking about possibly the future of humanity or what the future of humanity will eat. And this has kind of been a big thing ever since 2001, which we'll get to in a second. Let's flash forward by flashing back to 2008, when Peter the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals posted a $1 million reward to the first researcher that could come up with labgrown, aka. In vitro, aka. Cultured meat, that was commercially viable, meaning it was for sale in ten states by June 30, 2012. That didn't happen. No, it didn't happen. But PETA is very excited because they said in October 2012, the first taste test of in vitro hamburger took place. And I think we know who that was, don't we? Was that the man? I believe it was a guy named Gabor Forgacks. Yeah, that's a funny name. But he is one of the leaders in the lab grown meet. He's basically one of two. There is a Bill Gates and a Steve Jobs in the in vitro meet game. And Gabora foregax. I take it as the Steve Jobs. Yeah, he's from the University of Missouri, and he's a tissue engineering specialist, and he has a company called Modern Meadows. Great name. It's one of the better company names I've heard of in my life. Yeah, it really fits. It's not too clever. I hate the ones that are too, like, nod in a winky. Right? Like Robocow. Yeah. Is that another one? No, I just made it. Oh, see, that's awful. That's great. I channel my inner John Strickland. That's very good. I just pictured Strickland, like, just sticking his head in the door and saying, Robocow. So anyway, Modern Meadows is his company, and their aim is to get this stuff tasty enough and cheap enough to make it a viable solution for either people who want to eat meat but have reasons to not, or to help solve the impending hunger crisis. Not impending. It's kind of already here. Right. And apparently it may not have been Forgax. It could have been, I don't know. But Forgax definitely did a taste test himself earlier in 2011. He went to a TEDMED conference and talked about his synthetic meat and then ate some on stage, which is kind of weird because it's like yeah, it's kind of weird. I guess if you were, like, hawking hot dogs or something, you would eat them in public. Sure. So it's not that odd. It seems at first blush. It sounds a little bit of a carnival barker feel to that, though. They say that every great scientist is one part BS. Skinner, one part PT. Barnum. Yeah. Well, that's a principal Skinner said. Oh, really? Yeah. On The Simpsons? Yeah. That's good saying, though. I like it. Yeah. The other the Bill Gates? Or was that the Bill Gates? I think forgax is Steve Jobs. Okay, so the Bill Gates is Marky Post from Night Court. From TV night. Court right. Oh, no. Mark Post from Mastrich University, which is in the Netherlands. Right. It's like these two universities get their researchers swapped. Seriously. Mark Post is in the Netherlands and the University of Missouri. So weird. It is weird. Maybe they did an exchange program or something. So Post is a vascular physiologist, and they say that they're not competing now, and if you look at their stuff, they're coming up with two very different means to the same end. Okay. Eventually. But who knows? Maybe they're friends. I would imagine it's a pretty small community, the synthetic meat community. Yeah. They're probably on each other's speed dial, I bet. Right. And there's supposedly only about 30 groups working on this right now. But what's mind boggling is just how much of an impact a breakthrough, a real breakthrough. And by breakthrough, it was like you were saying forego said, like, you have to get it cheap and you have to get it tasty, and then you have to get the public to eat it. Yeah, but how much of a real breakthrough that would be if someone were able to do that, it would be tremendous and potentially solve a lot of problems that are impending. So this idea is not new. The idea of creating lab grown meat, the Churchill thing. Yeah. You don't think that's exactly what we're talking about? Oh, I guess so. Plus, it's Winston Churchill. He's one of the coolest people of all time. That's true. In 1931, before he was a prime minister, churchill predicted that by 1981, quote, we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium. Right. And he was off roughly by 20 years. Not bad. No. And he may have mass produced like we'd be doing that by then. 50 years in 2000 and 120 years after his prediction or the deadline of his prediction. A guy from Tuoro college. I've never heard of them. I don't know. New York Toro College. T-O-U-R-O Never heard of it either. Well, his name is Morris Benjaminson. His dad's name is Benjamin. He came up with this idea to take goldfish muscle cut fresh out of a live goldfish, which is pretty bad for the goldfish, and then thrown into a VAT of nutrient rich fetal bovine serum, which is wow. I wonder, why use goldfish? That's what I don't get. Why didn't he use, like, tilapia or something someone might want to eat? I don't know. Maybe that was the only thing that was handy. There's an office goal. He brought it in his little plastic bag. Yeah. Wow. And instead of eating it live, for his fraternity prank, he grew some more. He actually grew 14% more of what he put into this fetal bovine serum. Yes. The cells divided, they were live, which is big, but the serum coaxed it and continuing to divide and again formed 14% more mass than was originally introduced. More mass, or did you write this? No, this is Patrick Kyler, as Patrick puts it, 14% worth of additional flesh on the chunks. Yeah, I like math better than flesh on the chunks. Flesh on the Chunks is good. That's a good band name. Yes, it is. So this guy has this bit, and he's like, holy cow, it worked. Let's eat it. So he tried to he started to fry it up with a bit of lemon, olive oil and garlic and pepper. Right? Yeah. Makes great sense. And no one would eat it. I would have tried it. I would have, too, actually. I don't know if I would have tried goldfish if it would have been something else. The goldfish is still a big turn off. So his initial thought was, this would be great for astronauts if they could eat goldfish, or, I guess, fake meat out in space. That was his original thought, was astronaut use. Isn't that what everybody thinks? Whenever you think of something made in the lab that normally nature produces, it's like, oh, well, astronauts will go bonkers for this. Well, apparently Benjamin should have the same idea, like you said. But as news of this got out, PETA and other animal rights organizations were like, whoa, whoa, wait. What did you just do? We are full supporters of this idea because, again, people for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Sure. When you eat a steak, when you eat pork or bacon or ham, all these things come from an animal. It's often lovable animal, but people still like to eat them. People still get nutrients from them. So if you take the idea that an animal, a live sentient animal, suffered and died so that you could eat it and still eat it, man, that's the bonanza right there. It is. At least for people who object to eating meat out of cruelty and still want to eat meat. Object on the grounds of cruelty to eating meat. Yeah. Good. In 2008, though, in Norway, they had a conference, first time ever on test tube meat, and they released a study saying, you know what? We could potentially manufacture the stuff for $5,000 a ton, which would make it competitive on an economic basis with real meat by 2012, which is right now. There are about 30 different research teams working on this, but like we said, I get the feeling that post in Igor what was his name? Gabor. Gabor. Definitely a deleting edge. And I did a little calculating here, Chuck, if you don't mind. I found how much it cost in Illinois in 2007 to raise a pound of beef. Okay. And it was something like $65 a pound, right. That's how much it costs to raise it. Right about now, it's about 288 a pound for ground beef retail. Okay. That's like, a markup of, like, 4.5 times, right, for Chuck, or are we just talking? Okay. Yeah. Got you. This is just rough back of the envelope kind of stuff. If you took that $5,000 in vitro meat figure and that's how much it cost to manufacture and then also did that same 4.5 times mark up, you come to about $11 a pound, which is pretty competitive. Yeah. Because think about it. You're paying that much for filet, right? Yeah. If this were marketed correctly, it would seem even cooler than filet. Sure. Most of the it tasted good. Yes. And people pay a lot of money for Kobe beef. Most times they're not even getting coba beef. You know about that whole thing, right? A lot of times. It's a big scam. I could see that because, I mean, who knows? There's probably a handful of people in the world who could differentiate the taste of Kobe beef from other beef. Yeah, exactly. Even, like, really renowned restaurants are serving what they call Kobe beef. A lot of money. It's not Kobe beef. That is messed up. It is messed up. That's like a lobster. The price of lobster is, like, in the basement right now, and restaurants are still charging as much as ever for it and making tons of money. But the lobster men are just getting, like, the short end of the stick because there's a huge supply of them right now. Yes. But in lobster. One of those where they usually don't say market price on the menu. Isn't it usually. Like. Just straight up. Whatever it'll say. Market price. Even if it does. And they're still charging you a bunch. Like what market price used to be when the price of lobster actually was high. I wonder if you could come in with some numbers and say. No. No. That's not market price. Apparently, you can argue with just about anybody. Really? Yeah. And often when, you know, our buddy Julie was in Maine, she vacations in Maine some, and she said they're like giving her lobsters on her last trip. Yeah, like, here's 20 lobsters. Like, we don't want them to go to waste. Right, julie of stuff blow your mind. No, julie Smith. Okay. A producer. Yeah. There you go. TV. Yeah. It's because there's, like, a huge boom in the lobster population. Yeah, man, I love a lobster roll. Boy, we got really off track here. All right, well, there's synthetic lobster. It's actually cod. Right? Imitation crab meat. Yeah. That's not synthetic, though. It's imitation. Yeah, imitation. Big difference. All right, so the Dutch team, headed by Marque Post, they are using cow stem cells to create this meat. So they culture the stem cell little petri dishes, put it in a small container to produce muscle cells. It sounds kind of gross. And they form little small pieces of muscle, about 2 CM long centimeter wide and a millimeter thick. And they say that it looks a little more like calamari than any kind of a hamburger. And the taste initially is pretty bland. Right. And the reason the taste is bland is because it's missing a lot of essential ingredients to meat. Like blood. Blood. Fat. Yeah, blood, veins. And it says as muscle cells, but muscle fibers that you're eating. And do you know that it was only within the last couple of months that I realized steak is muscle mass? Yeah, they told me that you were shocked back then. And I was like, what do you think it was? I hadn't really thought of it. I thought it was its own thing. Like, there's fat, muscle, meat, and then steak. Yeah, that's really what I thought. And then I don't know why I was thinking about it. I think I wanted a steak, so I was thinking about a steak, and I thought too hard and all of a sudden realize what a steak was. Right. But it's not just this muscle. It's muscle fibers, it's fat, it's blood. It's like all of this stuff comes together, and they're going to have to really lick that before they can make this stuff commercially viable. Absolutely. One of the ideas that Modern Meadow is using is to use a 3D printer to spray what they call bioink, which is muscle cells and stuff like that, to build up. They spray many layers of this stuff to build it up into more viable meat option, which is pretty cool. 3d printers. Pretty awesome. Did you hear about Japan's photo booth? They're opening the world's first 3D printing photo booth. So you go in and you come out with, like, a little statue of you or you and your lady. That's cool. Nice. Yeah, I would do that. Totally. What would that cost? I don't know, but I would guess a lot at first. Sort of like in vitro meat. All right, so what are the other hurdles here? It's tricky. As you said, it's a mix of fuel and salt and minerals and hormones, and this is just to grow the cells that are healthy enough to survive. That's not even talking about getting it to look like a steak or a hamburger patty, because like you said, it's not just a very complex group of stuff in there. Right. It's not just, like, muscle. And that's it. And it's extremely expensive right now. I think we kind of touched upon, but Mark Post said that his hamburger, the first one that he would ever make, would cost about 350 grand. Yeah, but he's looking for a celebrity chef to cook it to kind of drum up business and Gabor Fogaks. Right. That's his last name. Foregac. He was saying his modern meadow stuff would be between 57 and $180 a pound. Right. Which, like you said, is competitive with Kobe. Yes. Forgac sees this as I don't think he sees it as like, hey, this is going to be the everyday solution. He sees it as a niche industry. Right. He also said that his first product is more likely going to be leather because it's not as regulated and it's a little easier to accept for the public at large. He also was saying that as far as creating food goes, like, our imaginations immediately jumped to building a steak, building a hamburger, building like a pork chop or something like that. Right. He was saying probably the first stuff that we're going to see is going to be, like, flour. And he pointed out in this one CNN article we read, like, you don't eat flour. Flour is in everything that you eat. And he was saying, like, this will be stuff to create meatballs with or pate it's. Like, instead of taking a chicken and chopping it up and then using it in that pate, you would use it more as an ingredient rather than, like, the steak on the plate. Exactly. At least for now. Makes sense. This could potentially be a great thing for many reasons, one of which is not the least of which is that lab grown meat would have about 78% to 96% fewer greenhouse gases, 99% less land, obviously 82%, 96% less water. And 18% of the world's greenhouse emissions come from the livestock sector right now. And, you know, from what? Well, gas and gas. Yeah, exactly. Two types of gas. Yeah, like, we have big methane problems from cow poop and gas, and then all the gas used to obviously take care of the industry thoroughly. And that is plus, it's also just a lot more energy efficient. We use 100 grams of grain to produce 15 grams of meat. That's a 15% efficiency because what are you doing, Chuck, when you feed something something, right? Yeah. You take the energy found in a plant and feed it to an animal, there's energy transfer, but you lose 85%, apparently. I was thinking with lab grown meat, the energy efficiency will be like 50%. That's awesome. Yeah. And some of the other costs to grow a pound of beef. Regular beef necessitates 2500 gallons of water, \u00a312 of grain, \u00a335 of topsoil, and the equivalent, energy wise, of one gallon of gas to grow a pound of meat, just \u00a31 of ground beef. Right. So you've got a lot of people abstaining from eating meat because of the animal cruelty aspect. You have a lot of people saying it's just socially irresponsible to eat meat and then you have people who well, I guess that's it. Right. That's the only reason people don't eat meat. Yeah, well, people like my wife who don't like the taste. Okay, well, this is not going to appeal to her at all. No, but you were saying like, that environment or ecological consumption that it takes to create a pound of meat, apparently they think that meat production is going to have to double in the next 40 years because of increasing incomes around the world. Typically, when your GDP goes up, your consumption of meat goes through the roof. And China and India are on the way up and they're thinking that meat is going to get in higher demand to help satisfy that not enough land. Right. Like right now, I think it said 70% of dry land on the earth is used for either grazing or some factor of livestock. 70%. Right. So what are you going to do? There's not that much more land left to just use for cattle. Well, what they would do is the price of meat would just go up and up and up. Yeah. It would just come more scarce, I guess. Yeah. But as the price of meat rises, the economic sensibility of lab grown meat will become more viable. True. Because, I mean, right now one of the things is so cost prohibitive, aside from the fact that it looks like calamari and it tastes bland. Yeah. They said it potentially could be healthier too. Jason Mathini, Director of New Harvest it's a nonprofit research.org, and they said that it would have health advantages because it's easier to control pathogens in a lab and fat content could be systematically controlled, making it healthier. Like, we're going to put this layer of fat in with our 3D printer because you need the fat. That's where a lot of the flavor comes from. Definitely got to have fat. And then you just got to convince people once it gets cheap enough and tasty enough, like you said, the third hurdle is like, eat fake meat, people. Right. You'll like it, trust me. I think the big lesson is to not call it something like Soylent Green. Modern Meadows is perfect. Yeah. I wonder what post the name of his group is. I didn't see. Did you? I don't know. I would taste this, just I wouldn't pay $300,000 for a hamburger. No, but I would taste it just to see what it tasted like. But I don't know, it sounds kinda gross to me. I would try it, but a lot of people say that eating meat is gross. They sure do. So before you send in those emails, let me cut you off. I understand that. Good going, Joe. If you want to learn more about lab grown meat or any kind of things like that, you should check out the Innovations channel on how stuff works. It's pretty awesome. Go to House Stuff Works homepage and you will see in the top navigation bar. Innovations is one of the channels that we have. Click on that. Or you can just search for lab grown meat in the handy search bar house. That works. And I said handy search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this mentorship email. Hi, guys. My name is Colin and I've been listening to you guys since the Viking episode. I've never really been diligent with emails, but I always wanted to write in. I'm in my senior year of high school and involved in a class called Independent Study Mentorship. This program works like an internship for high school students. We're responsible for finding a mentor in whichever career field we are interested in. We do hands on work with our mentors, and throughout the year we compile a portfolio that will eventually be a binder filled not with women, but with everything we take part in and research throughout the year. It will end up about as thick as a good sized dictionary or two. My whole reason for writing you guys is to thank you for doing the podcast. I've been able to get by without research for about a dozen or so topics for essays and projects because you guys usually cover far more than my school curriculum does. I've even been moved up to several advanced classes. Wow. Thanks to you. Keep on doing what you're doing. It's great. And if I happen to get a mention at the end of an episode, I'd be pleasantly surprised. I've always kind of wanted to mention there you go, Colin. That's all you need to do is ask. Yeah, well, you have to ask and excel at school because of us. Yes. And he says, feel free to mention my name if you find this worth mentioning. And yes, I did say you all because I'm from Texas. And everyone from Texas is required to inform everyone else that they are from Texas. That's true. Is it? Oh, yeah. All right, well, calling from Texas. Good luck with your mentorship, buddy. And I think it's the marketing, he said, and drop us line. Let us know how it went. That's awesome. Yeah. Let's see. What do you want to ask for, Chuck? Oh, would you eat in vitro meat? Let's get that debate going, huh? Sure. And you know what? We're going to cover factory farming because I got a lot of heat because I went off on bull fighting and a lot of vegetarians said, well, how can you go off on bull fighting and eat meat? So I'm going to make up for that by doing, like, a factory farming podcast. Well, it's free. Can I do it too? You can sit in. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffynow, and you can send us a good old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstough works.com." | |
20df7944-121b-11eb-85ed-9794374986e3 | Short Stuff: Tooth Fairy: Not Real | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-tooth-fairy-not-real | Today we break down the history of everyone's favorite home invader, the tooth fairy. | Today we break down the history of everyone's favorite home invader, the tooth fairy. | Wed, 10 Mar 2021 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=69, tm_isdst=0) | 12405496 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck. There's Jerry. Ghost of Dave Kushan is hanging around here somewhere and that means that this is short stuff. And in fact, Dave is not a ghost. I'm mistaken, Chuck. He is tooth fairy. That's right. Dave is very much alive. Don't worry, everyone. Short Stuff producer Dave is not a ghost. No. You could astrally project yourself and still be what I would consider basically a ghost. I think being dead is overstated as a reason for being a ghost. It's overrated. Yeah. So we're talking about the tooth fairy. And the reason I thought of this is because my daughter has not lost a tooth yet. She's coming up on six years old with those baby teeth and I'm just waiting. It could have happened by now and it can happen at any time. And I was like, all right, I got to get up on the latest research on the story that I'm going to need to tell the lie that I'm going to pound into her brain and how much money these kids get these days? A lot. How much do you get? I got like a quarter. I got a quarter too, which apparently is like 1930 level. I know. I also got a quarter for giving up my pacifier. And only later did I find out, like, my sisters had gotten things like an Easy Bake Oven or something like that, and I got bought off for a quarter. I'm still to this day a little upset about that. Now. How old were you when you gave it up? Like 1213? It all depends on the kid. My daughter gave up her Pascal really early, so she didn't even know what money was. There you go. That's the way to do it. She just didn't like it. Yeah, that was actually 13 was approaching the age where I also would have traded my pacifier for a pack of smokes. Right? You're like, give me one more year, I got to suck on something, right? I never connected the two. So the tooth fairy is pretty interesting in that since people had children all over the world through antiquity, there seems to be weird little stories here and there about traditions and things that you would do with the tooth. It seems like it was never just like, well, that happened. Let me just toss it out of here. It could have been some little ceremony, could have put it in a fire, but this was not like the tooth fairy as we know it. No, but it is, and we'll talk about it in a minute. But there are rituals all over the world of what to do. It's not like it just goes unnoticed. The tooth fairy is one of the most all American supernatural beings there is. And as American lives not even old, it's not even an old one. Apparently the tooth fairy that is going to eventually come to visit your daughter that is running around this very night handing out dollars for teeth invading is basically true, although you could make a really strong case in court that putting the tooth under the pillow could be construed as an invitation into your home. But that tooth fairy, that particular being, that entity is from basically the mid 20th century America and is very new and very young for being a supernatural entity. Yeah, I think there are a couple of references. There was one from 1908 from the Chicago Daily Tribune in an editorial that valued a contribution from the tooth fairy at a nickel. I think in 27, there was a short play with the tooth fairy in it from Esther Watkins Arnold. Okay. I saw there was also a kids book from the 20s that was an English version of the 18th century French tooth fairy kind of thing, but the tooth fairy was a mouse. Okay. Come into play, though. The tooth fairy, like, really kind of hit the zeitgeist in the guess. Yeah, it sounds like it. Okay. And then apparently the whole thing broke wide open with a Colliers magazine article in May of 1949. Yeah, that's not that long ago that parents have been lying to their kids about this home invader who would leave money to avoid prosecution. That's right. I mean, it is kind of weird. Is there any explanation that you've run across so far as to why the tooth fairy wants teeth? That's something that no one ever taught me. No, I looked a lot of different places, and there's just not a lot out there. It's pretty interesting. There's no weird origin story. I mean, we could make one up if you want to kick that thing off, let's do that. Let's just take the Cabbage Patch Kids origin story and just replace it with tooth fairy. Yeah, or maybe the tooth fairy builds this fantasy land out of children's teeth. Sounds horrific. It does. It sounds like the teeth monster from what was that? There was a weird Canadian TV show. No, that was weird in a different way. I will come up with the name of it, but it was basically a bunch of urban legends that they blew out into an actual narrative over the course of a season. It was pretty interesting. But there was a monster made of children's teeth, and it was Khuri. I'll send it to you. You can show it to your daughter. All right, well, let's take a little break, and we'll come back and talk about kind of some of these strange rituals and traditions all over the world right after this. All right. So we mentioned that depending on where you are in the world throughout history. There have been these interesting traditions when it comes to your children losing their first teeth in a lot of different countries afghanistan. Russia. Mexico. New Zealand there is a mouse or a rat involved whether or not you put it in a box for a mouse or put it in a little mouse hole like Tom and Jerry style. And I think the whole thing there was it was a wish that the tooth would grow back to be as strong as a rat's tooth or a mouse's tooth. Yeah. Which makes sense. Yeah. And that's called the transference wish that an anthropologist might call sympathetic magic, which I think is a pretty good band name. So wishing that your child's tooth grows back like a rat's tooth, I would be one of those careful what you wish for kind of situations, if you ask me. That's true. Most of people do. Well, actually, there's actually supposedly nine things, including everything from throwing the tooth into the sun, which that's got to be hard to do. Not possible. Much more easy is to throw it into a fire. Sure. Like that. Between the legs. Huey Lewis style. Little weird. Onto or over the roof of your house. Yeah. I saw a lot of Asian countries do this. Okay. So one of the things I saw was that a lot of these rituals, pre tooth fairy rituals, were often wrapped up or tied into burial rituals of that same culture. So does that mean that there are cultures out there that throw their deceased onto the roof of the house? You think maybe it's like a sky burial kind of thing? I don't know. I don't know. I was being funny at first and then pulled it out into something really thought provoking at the end. What else do people do? I think a lot of people bury them. Right. Or hide them, and maybe that's where we got under the pillow. I don't know. And then this one probably has nothing to do with the dead or the deceased, but there's one where the mother or the kid or you make a poor animal swallow the tooth. Oh, God. And talk about a rite of passage, because that's why all of these cultures have a ritual surrounding the loss of the first tooth, because that's basically the first rite of passage any kid cognizantly goes through. And so cultures tend to make a big deal about it. But imagine your culture having you swallow your baby's tooth, and then you pass it as the mom. That's got to provoke some sort of a mixed bag of emotions. Yeah. For some reason, that was the first thing that came to mind when I saw that mom sometimes swallow baby teeth. Tooth going on from that little vignette. So it seems like when it really became the tooth fairy that we think of in America, it came about at the same time that Disney was putting out movies like Pinocchio and Cinderella, two movies that each featured these benevolent fairies who granted wishes, and I think it may have just been the public consciousness. And we borrowed, like we said, from other cultures that maybe buried their teeth or hid their teeth into the under the pillow thing and an exchange for money. Yeah. And the money thing still seems confounding, like a fairy coming for your teeth. That's pretty cute. And it makes sense that Disney would have influenced it based on the time. But the money thing supposedly dates back to 12th century Norse custom, which was that you would pay a tooth fee to the kid who got there who lost their first baby tooth. And rather than them putting it under the pillow or there being any supernatural being who came to collect it, you just hand the kids some money or whatever, tell them to go away now. So I think those combined to form this modern incarnation of the tooth fairy. Yes. And what's the going rate these days? From what I saw, it's about $3.70. Which means there's some weird parents out there who are right at the median who leave $3.70 under their kids pillow in exchange for the tooth. But that also means that there are plenty of parents out there who are leaving, like, $10, who are skewing the average upwards. And don't email me because I know median is not the same thing as average. I guess Emily and I need to do some soul searching to find out what the value of this tooth is, because it can also be an opportunity to teach kids have no idea what things cost. They think everything is free. So it can be an opportunity to teach them about disappointment. Yeah, about disappointment. About the value of money and what this might buy. Or maybe you can save it or save part of it. I don't know. But the introduction to money and income kind of starts with the tooth fairy. It's pre allowance. Yeah. Well, I read that there was from a folklore that said the reason why this tooth fairy is an American invention and gives you money in exchange for something you're teaching your kids capitalism. It would just make total sense. Yeah. I mean, she's got piggy banks, so we'll put change in there occasionally, but that's about it. As far as money goes, she thinks everything costs nothing. Well, you can teach her the value of a human tooth now, and she'll go the rest of her life thinking she can get about $3.70 per tooth if she really tries at it. I think if I tried to do 370 on the nose, emily would just be like, Are you kidding me? Put a fiverr in there. It'd be hilarious. Hey, report back when it happens, will you? Yes. And I also want to quickly shout out Janet Barney, one of our good friends here in the industry podcaster, and one of the co founders of SF Sketchfest and host JB Club. Yeah, JV Club. Great show. I think I had no tooth when I was first a guest of Janet's JV club live at Sketch Fest. When I got home, she sent me and Janet is one to just send people funny gifts like this. She sent me a little tooth fairy pillow. That is very sweet. Yes. Because you can get an actual pillow. Right. That's special for pocket fairy. Okay, that's great. Yes. Well, that's the tooth fairy. Unless you got anything else, do you? I got nothing else except three fake teeth. You can get some money for that. Almost a little over $10. Chuck Aaron Cooper would pay $15. Yeah. There you go. And since Chuck's Aaron Cooper, then of course that means short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your of favorite shows." | |
8dcb2bb0-ba8a-11e8-a624-db59e98edc1a | Short Stuff: The Santa Claus Association | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-the-santa-claus-association | If a con man manages to make needy Christmas wishes come true is he still a con man? (Also, Merry Christmas!) | If a con man manages to make needy Christmas wishes come true is he still a con man? (Also, Merry Christmas!) | Wed, 25 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=359, tm_isdst=0) | 12678847 | 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. Hi, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry over there. Let's get jolly, because, buddy, it is Christmas Day. Wow. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing. It's not to us, but it is to us. Sure. Think about it. Yeah. Well, anyway, merry Christmas, everybody. Yes. And Merry Christmas to you and Jerry. And thank you for the lump of coal. You're welcome. And Jerry, thank you for the red wagon. Yeah. Thank you for my Ferrari. Jerry. Wow, I got the wrong red wagon. Yeah. You got a Magnum, Pi. Red Ferrari. Yeah. It's pretty awesome. Amazing. Thanks again, Jerry. Anyway, since it's Christmas, Chuck, we have a special Christmas themed short stuff. Indeed. And it's about something called the Santa Claus Association. And if you want to ever learn more about the Santa Claus Association, make sure you put those words in quotes in your search engine because there's a lot of different Santa associations. This is a specific one that we're going to talk about. Yeah. And also add New York to that search. Yes. Because that'll really narrow it down to really? Well, so the Santa Claus Association we're talking about has its back story about the turn of the century, the last century. Okay. And in New York City, in the United States, really? The US. Postal Service had a way, a technique of dealing with little children's letters to Santa. The furnace. They would destroy them. That's right. They would send these letters to the dead letter office, and they would eventually be destroyed. Or in the worst case scenario, return to the little sender. Oh, wow. Isn't that awful? And it was even stamped Return to Little Cinder. Yeah, they had a special stamp. Right. Tiny. And it has, like a reindeer on its back with XS for eyes. Right. So the popular press, the media, as we call them today, and the public said, this is wrong. There's got to be a better way to do this. What if, like, charities could get their hands on these letters and then they can fulfill these wishes because Santa is busy. He doesn't really have time for the letters. Maybe some grownups could intervene. Grown ups. Yeah. All right. And so they said, that was great. And the Postmaster General at the time, in 19 seven, said, that's fine, I'm commanding all post offices in the United States to just hand over letters to Santa to any charity that wants to fulfill them. I wonder if the Postmaster general's just like, oh, God, with these letters, like, I'm trying to do a job, right? Yes. That was the impression that I had. They did not want to be in the Santa mail business anymore, and this is a godsend for them. Okay. Everything worked pretty well for the charitable organization Society of New York. The Cos actually took it upon themselves to start investigating the backgrounds of some of the letter writers to Santa, and they went to their houses unannounced. Is there a little Timmy who lives here? Basically, yeah. And let's see the crutches that you mentioned in your letter to me. And they actually determined that some of these letter writers weren't quite as needy as they made themselves sound in their letters. They determined that one little girl already had a doll. Oh, boy. Anyway, this is enough to get the Postmaster General to reverse his decision in 1980 said, no, we're sending him back to the dead letter office. That's right. That outburst or that outcry the public outcry against that was even worse than it was before. So then finally, chuck, we've reached the end of the backstory. 1911, the Postmaster General, the new one, said, from now on, to infinity and beyond, the United States Postal Service will hand over letters to Santa to any charity that wants them, which is great, but in New York, no one stepped up for two years. And by the time 1913 rolled around, it seemed that there wouldn't be a Santa again to fulfill these children's wishes in their letters to Santa in New York City. Yes, that's right. And it was all over the papers. Headlines like mailmen disowned Santa and Santa Claus is tardy. Saint took over the streets. And on December 8 of, I guess, 13, edward Morgan, who was the New York City's postmaster, who also had more important fish to fry, right. He got a letter from a guy who was a customs broker named John Duvall Gluck, Jr. And he said, Let me run this thing. Hand it over to me. And Morgan said, Great. He did just get this off my plate. I'm really happy to not have to deal with this. Gluck had no kids. He was not married. And the story was that he was a kind hearted man who wanted to do something with his life, and he saw this as an entree into that world. He also had some pretty impressive credentials for somebody who steps up and says, I'll handle the Santa business for the post office from now on. He said that he was a special representative of newspapers, a famous tariff expert and investigator, and a member of the Secret Service. None of those things were true. Yeah. I mean, the name of this article that you found was the Con Man Who Saved Christmas yeah, that was from History Extra. So that should tell you kind of where this was headed. Yeah, this guy was lying to begin with. And the story just gets even more interesting. Should we take a break? We should. All right, let's take a break, and we'll tell you about Gluck right after this. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? 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He made up all of his credentials and all that. But with the Santa Claus Association, he actually did do something genuinely good for once. Yeah, he did. He started this organization, and it was described as bottom up, which is a good way to describe it, because the donors and the people who did this were New York City residents. They were the real people. He created the app, basically. Right? Exactly. That got people in touch with other people, got these letters in the hands of folks that had a little extra money. In the case of H. Vanderbilt, he only chipped in $10, apparently, which is still only, like, a couple hundred bucks today. I looked it was like 275 skin Flint. I was thinking, we have a pretty good idea these days after looking at the inflation calculator for so many years, and that one definitely stuck. So people were volunteering. A lot of people were from clubs and organizations, but many just regular, average New Yorkers who didn't have a lot of money themselves sometimes. Right. So imagine this if you're a New Yorker, and you feel like your city has literally turned its back almost literally turned its back on needy children by ignoring their letters to Santa, even though anybody could take it and fulfill it. Having Gluck step up and say, we can do this and create the Santa Claus Association. Yeah. It just filled the city with pride. And they started throwing money at the Santa Claus Association faster than it could use it. Yeah. I think that first year, they answered the request of 28,000 children. That's Astounding. That is super astounding. And they kept doing this for another, like, 15 years or so, and he kept asking for a little bit more money. Like, hey, at first it was, Let me cover the stamps. Sure. Just the stamps, man. Yeah, exactly. And then it was envelopes. Just a few envelopes. And then it was, how about some money for the gifts? And then he said, how about this? Right in the middle of Manhattan, let's build a Santa Claus building. Yeah. He said that the unusual nature of our work kind of demands that we have our own space to work in. Yeah. Was this just sort of being rubber stamped the whole time? Because it seems like he just kept getting more and more funds. Yeah. The way that this History Extra article puts it is that the optimism, the post World War I and Jazz Age optimism really kind of created this sense of like, we can do anything. Everybody's great. Of course, the guy who's running the Santa Claus Association is fine. Have you heard jazz? Exactly. We can definitely pay for a Santa Claus building. Have you tried a jazz cigarette, too? Try one of those. Is that like what Brad Pitt smoked once upon a time in Hollywood? Probably. What was that? Oh, no. Acid dip cigarette. It was just pot marijuana cigarette, I think is what they call it today. Got you. Yes. And they're like, have you seen this new movie, Reefer Madness? It's amazing. You're going to want to jump out a window. You'll be so excited. So eleven years in is when the first Macy's Christmas parade happens, which would eventually become the Thanksgiving Day Parade. And it was all just sort of coalescing with catalogs and things like that. And everyone's notion of Christmas was just getting more and more commercial and more in the news, and it was just a big, big deal. Yeah. Christmas became huge. Like the Christmas that we understand it today. That's right. It happened during this time, and it happened during the time that Gluck Santa Claus Association was handling answering the needy children of New York's Christmas wishes. That's right. But enter bird collar. New York's Commissioner of Public Welfare. His motto was, hey, I'm not the bad guy here. Probably. So he was charged with going around to the unregulated charities of New York City and closing them down, asking to see their financial records. Including what, Chuck? Well, including the Santa Claus Association. Yes. But in addition to the Santa Claus Association, he would investigate block parties that were raising money for the neighborhood because they hadn't registered as charitable organizations. He was that kind of guy. You got to make sure the money is going in the right place. Yeah. So he said the Santa Claus Association still fishy. I'm going after I mean, Gluck said, go. Yeah, he did, because he didn't keep great records, which turned out to kind of save him because he didn't have much documentation. He could not be convicted of a crime when they found tens of thousands of dollars just unaccounted for. Basically, yeah. That's 19 $20, by the way. That's right. There's no $10 donation. I think a dead giveaway that this might have been a fishy operation was that the headquarters of the Santa Claus Association was in the back of a steakhouse in Manhattan. I tried to find out what steakhouse. I could not find it. I did, too. The closest I could find was it was in the Woolworths Building, but that's it. There's no name for it or anything like that. I wanted to know because knowing New York City, it's still there. It's not I didn't know if it was, like, a Keynes or something. No, the Wolverine Building is still there, but I'll bet it's somebody's trillion dollar apartment right now, right. And still thinks of dead beef. Gross. Like we said, Gluck could not be convicted, but they said, you are definitely not in charge of this Santa Claus Association anymore. They took away his letters, and he left for Miami, which is I mean, talk about a surefire way to cement yourself as a con man. He's like, I'm off to Miami. But the good news is they didn't start sending letters back to the dead letter office. Pretty soon, the US. Postal Service would undertake Operation Santa Claus, which we've talked about in a previous Christmas edition, ironically, not based on necessarily, but I think Gluck system was sort of an inspiration, closely following it, for sure. Yeah, they were like, okay, the guy went to Miami. We understand who he is now. That's right. But it was a pretty good idea, so we're going to stick to it. And still to this day, rather than the Santa Claus Association handling things, it's a committee of postal employees that are now the app that connects children in need and the donors that want to help them out on San and Claus's behalf. It's wonderful. And, yeah, hats off to Alex Palmer for that History Extra article, among one of several. Well, Merry Christmas, everybody. That is it for the short stuff. Short stuff away with sleigh bell. 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." | |
How Quantum Suicide Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-quantum-suicide-works | In this episode, Josh and Chuck tackle a mind-melting topic: quantum physics! They ponder subatomic particles and various quantum theories, focusing specifically on a thought experiment called quantum suicide. | In this episode, Josh and Chuck tackle a mind-melting topic: quantum physics! They ponder subatomic particles and various quantum theories, focusing specifically on a thought experiment called quantum suicide. | Tue, 03 Aug 2010 16:47:35 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=16, tm_min=47, tm_sec=35, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=215, tm_isdst=0) | 30718557 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun 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, 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, brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W. Chucker's Bryant. Son of Mrs. Bryant. Yes. She kept the name. Good for her. I like your mom. Yes. Have you met my mom? Yeah, I met your mom at the Love Your Mama, appropriately enough. That's right. Yeah. I thought you said your name was Josh Clark for a second there. If that was off the cuff, I'll accept that I did. I just made that up. That was great. It's not written down anywhere. That is great. Chuck said that because we're going to be talking about quantum physics today. And quarks are it's my understanding, Chuck, that they are the fundamental basis of matter. Yeah. They make up hadrons, which you may know that because we talked about the Large Hadron Collider. Yeah. Up until about, like 30 seconds ago, I didn't know why it was called the large Haydrack collider. Yeah. Well, there's six quarks. Josh they are known as flavors, which is kind of cool. It is cool. Up, down, charm strange top and bottom. And apparently charm strange top and bottom. You can only be produced with a big collision. Like the Hadron Collider. Okay. Like a large Hadron collider. Yeah. And there's also antiquark, too, which is like the opposite. Yes. Those are the quarks that smoke cigarettes and wear leather jackets. Exactly, Chuck. Quarks exist on their particles. They're matter. Right. They're the building blocks of matter. That's what I understand. So they exist on the subatomic level, smaller than atoms or below atom, depending on how you like the word sub. Yes. And they exist in this weird world, the quantum world. They bump elbows against photons, which are my favorite subatomic, I guess, particles. Okay. And plenty of other weird, strange it's like this odd parade of physical things. Right. I don't like it there. I can understand why you don't. Because it's a very disconcerting it is an uncomfortable world. The very comforting ideals and principles of Newtonian physics, which are what goes up, must come down. Reality. The sun's going to rise tomorrow depending on whether or not you're robert Hume adherent. Sure. David Hume adherent. Just these things that we can depend on, we've come to depend on since Isaac Newton, his breakthroughs. Sure. I learned a lot about myself reading this, actually. Did you learn that you get angry easily? No, the whole notion of, like, stepping outside reality disturbed me. Yes. And what's even more disturbing is that this universe is envisioned by some very smart people. Yeah. Or I should say what I perceive as reality, by the way. I just want to clear that up. Nice. Okay, so, Chuck, we've done one on the large Hadron Collider, right? Yeah. And this is hated that one, too. This is just like this huge, fancy, multi billion dollar machine that's new. That's still going. Right. Back in the 90s, they didn't have these Large Hadron Colliders to rely on to actually see and measure and detect things on the quantum world. They had to use their imaginations. Physicists did. And specifically in 1997, there was a physicist who used his imagination for what's called a thought experiment, where I do like that idea. Yeah. This guy's name is Max Tagmark, and he is awesome. He was at Princeton at the time. Now. I think he's at MIT. Smart guy. And he came up with a thought experiment called Quantum suicide. And will you allow me to explain it as follows? Please do. Okay, so you are a guy, and you're sitting in a room, and there's a gun pointed at you, at your head. I don't like where this is headed. Kill shot when you're looking at the barrel. Right. And the gun is a little off. I mean, it's a normal gun, but it's hooked up to this newfangled machine. Right. And this machine is set so that it measures a cork. It measures the spin of a cork. Right? Right. So let's just say for simplicity's sake, although you've already said this isn't true, let's just say that a court can only spin clockwise or counterclockwise. Okay? Okay. This machine is set so that every time the person sitting in front of the gun presses a button, the quark is measured. If the quark is measured with a clockwise spin, the gun is not going to go off. It will just be a click. Okay. Right. If when the guy presses the button, the cork is measured and it comes up with a counterclockwise spin, the gun is going to go off. The trigger will be pulled. Yes. The bullet will exit the chamber. It will travel several feet across the room into the head of the man sitting in front of the gun, and he will die, guaranteed death, like it's a kill shot. Okay. What's weird is that in this quantum suicide thought experiment, max Tegmark figured out that if this guy pressed the button every single time, he's going to hear a click, click, click. No matter how many times he presses it, no matter how long he tries this, all he'll be aware of is this clicking of the gun. Because he lives. Yes, he lives in every single scenario. How can that possibly be? Let's go back to the beginning. The first time the guy pressed the button. Okay? Yes. What happened in another parallel universe is the gun went off and he died. Right. Okay. So with that first experiment, the universe split into two. One where the gun went off and he died, one where he just heard a click. Right. Now, if we follow the one where he heard the click, every time he presses that button and the quark is measured, the universe splits into two, but he's only aware of the one where he just hears a click, because that's his real one where he's alive. And if he died, he clearly wouldn't understand that, because he'd be dead. Yes. So part one of mine, Melts, just started. I think that's the quantum suicide thought experiment. Yeah. I like it. It's pretty mind boggling. Absolutely. And it's used to well, it's pretty exemplary of the kind of goofy, like you said, mind melting ideas that are brought up to explain quantum physics. Right. Yeah. Which you have to do. You have to use thought experiments because it's unpredictable at that level. So you can't use, like, a regular scientific method. Right. And one of the reasons why it's unpredictable is because when you look at, say, a quark, if a quark only had a spin of clockwise or counterclockwise science, quantum physicists have found that when you observe a quark one time, you'll observe it, and it's spinning clockwise. The next time you'll observe it, it's spinning counterclockwise. Or even more unsettlingly, they found that photons, the smallest packets of light, you can look at a single photon at one point or measure it, and it's a particle. You can measure it the next time, the same photon, and it's a wave. So this is kind of like somebody running, walking, and swimming at the same time in different directions. Right. Like you said, it's uncomfortable. That what they're finding on a quantum level. So what you got, Josh, is a chaotic situation, and that's sort of how it exists now. But as you pointed out you wrote this, I should point out, and this is a performer. This one has done really well, right? Yeah, you should tout yourself. But sometimes scientists think that the more we learn that some order will fall into place on the quantum level, at some point. Well, hopefully, yeah. Me theory after theory. Either that or else. Yeah. It's like the laws of Newtonian physics just don't apply on a certain level, right down to they just apply on the specified level. Sure. One of the fundamental tenets that has long been debated is the idea of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. Right. Yeah. So one of the things early on in quantum physics in the 20s, there are a lot of guys who are trying to explain why these weird things were showing up. Right. Well, inconsistent, at least. Right. Yeah. And one of the early guys, one of the early physicists was Vernon Heisenberg. Yeah. Mexican, wouldn't he? Yes. We're heisenberg and he came up with this explanation, or this, I guess he pointed out, like, a major flaw with quantum mechanics is that when we observe something, just the act of observing something, we influence its behavior. Right. Yeah. This is where I started to get a little hinky with this. I understand it in concept. Like even shining a light on something that's small will cause it to change, but it gets a little more philosophical than that. Well, yeah. Like simply looking at something will affect the outcome. That's a really great point, Chuck. Quantum physics has a lot of philosophy and logic tied into math. It's not just straight up math. There's philosophy to it. Right. It sort of appeals to me on that level, but it doesn't make it easier to understand for me. Well, this is how Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle was explained to me once. Let's say you're blind and you have this ball, a heavy ball that has a lot of bounce to it that you've learned to basically see with. You know how a bat uses sonar? Yeah. To bounce back the wave to find out how far they are from something. Sure. Right. Let's say you've learned to kind of do the same thing, but with the ball. Right. And you know that there's a chair across the room, and you want to figure out roughly how far away the chair is. So you throw your ball at the chair, and you manage to hit it, and the ball takes a second and a half to come back to you. Sure. And after being pretty good at this, by now you know that the chair is about 30ft away. That's how long it takes for something for the ball to get back to you in a second and a half with about as hard as you threw it. Right. What you've just figured out is the position of the chair or where the chair was when you threw the ball at it. Right. The problem is you've just influenced the behavior of the chair. You just threw a ball against it, so you sent it careening off into space, and now you have no idea where it is. Yeah, I get that. I get the ball moving the chair. What I don't get is looking at something well, on this level, consider this, okay? With photons, remember the smallest packet of light, my favorite quantum particle. Sure. There is a nanomachine, which is a motor, and it's operated by shooting light at it. So these packets of light that have no mass and no charge, the particles we're talking about are so small that a photon, a little packet of light, can actually influence them. So we use light to see, say, right. Let's say just and this is a very basic elementary explanation, but we use light to see if we have the light on there's. Photons just bombarding something. Right. So if a photon can hit a particle, we know where its position was when we turned the light on, but we don't know where it is now because the photons are sent it careening elsewhere. Right. Which delves back a little bit into the philosophical. Like you walk into a dark room and you don't know where the chair is until you turn the light off. But did the light move the chair? Right. That's exactly right. That's what smart people have to say about quantum mechanics. I don't get it. Okay, I got it. But you do get it, because you just no, I get it. Perfect. No, I get it. I was just kidding. Right. Okay. All right. So that's Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and that's been something that's kind of provided a conundrum for quantum physicists, and not everybody is bought into that. Right. Well, and that's why they had to dream up the thought experiment to begin with. Right. Okay. So if just observing a particle means we affect its behavior, well, then maybe we should use thought experiments, especially pre large Hadron collider physicists. This is their thought process. Right. So this is why Tegmark came up with the quantum suicide thought experiment. But he came up with the thought experiment to prove another quantum theory called the Many Worlds Interpretation. Yeah. Hugh Everett, fellow Princetonian in 1957. I know he was stoked, like, because 40 years, people were kind of like, eh, I don't know about this many worlds thing, until your guy came along. Your guy? Well, I've actually chatted with him. He's a good guy. That's right. Didn't you? And he provided a picture. It was like 40 years, right? Yes, 1957 and 97. Exactly 40 years then. And it supports quantum suicide. The mini worlds theory is for each possible outcome to an action. The world copies itself, it splits into a copy of itself. Right. And it's simultaneous, and we have absolutely no power over it whatsoever. It's a process called decohesion. Right. So, Chuck, this universe that we're in right now is going along smoothly because there's no choice or option. Right? Right. But let's say I'm deciding whether or not to take a sip of this coffee or not. Just making that decision. I didn't just now, but there was a decohesion when I made that decision not to. Right. Because in another universe, another parallel universe now exists where I did take a sip of that coffee. Well, yeah. And the key here is that you don't know that this other universe has been created. Now, you want to imagine that you can look over to your right somewhere and you see yourself drinking the coffee, right. But you can't. We're not cognizant of that universe. It's branched off. They're no longer cohesive. Right. And that supports the quantum suicide thought experiment perfectly. Well, that's what Hugh Everett came up with to explain why a photon could be both a wave and a particle, right? Right. The unsettling part of this is with Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, we're in charge. We look at a quantum particle and we affect it. Right. Wait, that was with whose? Heisenberg Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. With the many worlds interpretation. We're just observers, right? Yeah. Parallel universes happening all over the place. So let's say I was the guy who decided I wanted to find out if there was such a thing as quantum immortality, that I could just sit there with the gun and actually carry out this thought experiment and see right. And consider this. It's entirely possible that if somebody did do this, they could live forever and only they would know. Right. You know why? Because as an observer under the Many Worlds Interpretation, you're just along for the ride. You sort of have to accept that, don't you, if you support this theory? Well, yeah, that's the basis of it, sure. So let's say that I was the guy who sat down in front of this gun and started pressing the button, right? Yes. And you're sitting there watching me maybe drinking a root beer, waiting for that fire. Yeah. Eventually it would happen because you're not doing anything. You're not making a decision. I'm making the decision. You're an observer, a bystander to my decision of pressing that button. Right. And then that word predictability comes in probability. Probability. So eventually, just based on the chances of a coin toss sure. That you're going to be witnessed to that cork being measured, running counterclockwise and the gun going off and me dying, I don't want to see. And after that, the universe can't possibly split anymore because you're not making the decision. I'm making the decision to press the button while I'm dead. I can't make the decision to press the button anymore. So then the universe has stopped splitting for you. Right. So that's pretty unsettling because we have no control whatsoever over anything. I would chalk it up to free will, whether or not I'm taking a sip of that coffee. But free will doesn't exist if the universe is splitting into two to accommodate every possible outcome. And just imagine it splitting into more than two. What if there's more than one outcome for a decision like many worlds? Okay. Right. So this is the Many Worlds Interpretation, and that's how quantum suicide basically proves it. By saying if somebody sat down and did this, they would become immortal, it shows that the many world's interpretation is theoretically possible, which is what it seeks to do. Right, right. And that's sort of the new kid on the block, right, when it comes to explaining this. Yes. Not like the Copenhagen interpretation. Yeah. Let's take it, Chuck. Well, that's the one that's been accepted and still is in a lot of circles, but the one that had been accepted for the last century, basically. And you pointed out, too, that this whole thing is really only about a century old or so. Yeah. I believe it was Max Planck in 1900, which is basically founded the field of quantum physics. Yes, which is very new on that scale. Newton came up with his stuff in the 18th century. So this is, I guess, the newest field of physics. Right. So the Copenhagen interpretation, Josh, is Neil's Boar, actually, in 1920. Right. And it says that a quantum particle doesn't exist in one or another, but it exists in all states all at the same time. Right. And the state of existing in all possible states at once is called coherent superposition, or just superposition. Right, right. And the total of all those is the wave function. Right. So remember I said this is like this is like running, walking, and swimming all at the same time. Right. So the state of running, walking, and swimming all at the same time is called a superposition, and then being able to run, walk, and swim as possible states. That's the wave function. That makes you an ironman. It does. But it makes you, like, the optimal Iron man. Right. You just finished the race immediately. Yeah. Everyone else is finished with the running part, and you're, like, dripping wet with your bike on your shoulder. Right. Nice. Yeah. So bore. He proved this this whole Schrodinger's cat thing. This is a little funny. And Schrodinger supposedly designed this to sort of show how silly it was. Right, he did. But at the same time, he was a serious quantum physicist, and he was a huge rival of Heisenberg, actually, and heisenberg said Schrodinger's ideas were crap. Oh, really? Yeah. Is that the word he used? Yes. And I can't remember what Schrodinger had to say about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but they didn't like each other. All right, so Schrodinger's box, can we describe this? Yeah. And if you didn't get this, this is to the Copenhagen interpretation what quantum suicide is to the many worlds interpretations, the thought experiment designed to theoretically prove that it's possible. Okay. People are like, can't you just talk about ticks being on nether regions? So much easier. All right, Schrodinger's cat and this should point out this is a theoretical experiment. He didn't really do this. Right, but he could. Well, he sure he could have. So what he did was he got a box that you can't see into, which is very key, as you'll find out. He put a cat in there. Theoretically, he put some radioactive material in there, and then he put a Geiger counter in there and like a little device that would if the radioactive material leaks out, it would smash this poison in there and it would kill the cat. Right. If the Geiger counter sensed radioactive decay, it would trigger this hammer that smashes the poison vial, killing the cat. Right. But that's just a clever way of setting this up. It's really not important what he did. I like being clever. It was very good. But the point is he did it within, like an hour or so, where it's still possible, like, the cat didn't starve to death, right? The cat could either be alive or the cat could be dead. You don't know because the cat is sealed inside this box. So in theory, the cat is both alive and dead. Right? And the other part about that hour is that he determines, say, like over an hour, there was a 50 50 chance that the radioactive material would decay or would decay. So the Geiger counter had a 50 50 chance of detecting it. And this is where I have a big problem with all this stuff. Yeah, well, it's like you pointed out in the article, too, and it's what made me think of it. The tree falling in the woods. Would you really hear it? I've hated that since I was a little kid. I think it has to do with how your brain is wired, because whether or not the cat is alive or dead, just because you don't know the answer doesn't mean it's both. Well, that's to me, as an English major musician type in this, though. So the cat being alive or the cat being dead, right? That's its wave function. Those are the possible outcomes. And since the box is sealed off, like you said, it's very important. You can't see in it, you can't detect anything in it, right. The cats in a superposition of both life and death. The point is what Schrodinger was saying in this and how it supports the Copenhagen interpretation and is actually more like the Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle than Schrodinger would have liked to admit. Right? We, the observer, force the outcome, okay? By observing it. We open up the box and the cat is either alive and we see that the cats alive, right? Or we open up the box and the cat's dead and we see the cat's dead. The point of Nils Boers Copenhagen interpretation is so these things exist in their superposition, and when we observe them, we force them into basically a choice. We collapse their wave function or we collapse their superposition and now they're alive cat or it's a dead cat. But it's because we observed, and until we observe, they're in this state of all states at once. That's just where I and like I said, it's got to have something to do with your brain, because my brother was a big math guy, right? And he used to tutor me some, and he could never understand how I didn't get math. Just like I don't understand how they get physics on that level, but I don't understand how someone can sing on key, because to me, you hear the note and you just replicate it. You know what? I understand what what a brain cramp feels like right now. So Chuck, again, the great thing, the comforting thing, the thing that allows me to sleep at night about boar's, aside from Barry, the part about boar's theory that is comforting is that, again, it's up to us, right. We can't look at a cat and see it in a state of life and death simultaneously. Right. We force things to happen, and at the very least, things make sense to us in that way. Right. With the many worlds, again, we have nothing to do with it. It happens on its own. decohesion happens, like, instantaneously, whenever there's a decision made by conscious being. And even worse so, time is not linear. It exists in, like, these jumps and starts and branches. And so for every decision ever made by any conscious entity that includes rabbits. Chuck right. Yeah. The universe is split into every possible outcome. It's like lost. It is. And it's the basis of not just lost, but, like, a lot of other there have been a lot of other works. What was that one third Contact you sent me? It looks like a student film or something like that. Yeah. There's some pretty cool little short films, though. Yeah, just because it's so mind boggling. And the great thing is that quantum physicists seem to have a little bit of a sense of humor, or at the very least, they're well aware that what they're saying is just completely nuts. They're like, hey, don't kill the messenger. We're just trying to figure out what the hell is going on here. Right. Schrodinger called his cat experiment quite ridiculous. Yeah. And Nils Bore had a great, great quote, didn't he, Chuck? Yes, josh he said that anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. Right. That says it all. Right. It does say it all. And I think also what it did was it bought quantum physics some time. Right? Yeah. It's like, you go figure this out. Well, we really go figure this out. Well, I'll come and explain it to you. You got a little clever there on the last page, which I appreciated when you said that there are these different theories, and when you're talking about quantum physics, and a lot of them contradict each other, and maybe if you believe in this kind of quantum stuff, maybe they're all right. Right? Yeah. Maybe the ones that contradict each other, they're both right. Depending on what universe you're in. Depends. If you're many Worlds Interpretation devotee, then yeah, that would be that would be so quantum. Yes. Super quantum. That's so raven. We should be wearing tron outfits right now. I saw that trailer the other day, man, before inception. Looks really good. Yeah. Although I got to say, I liked inception, but it could have been better. I enjoyed it. I did, too. Christopher Renown can direct and write the crud out of a movie. Yeah, but how much of it, though, is that no one else is making anything even remotely watchable. Yeah, you're right. Wow. He came along at a good time, didn't he? Yes, he did. So that's quantum suicide. I can't wait to see the listener mail on this man when the physics goes right in and I'm not making fun of them, I mean, it's really enlightening. They take it really seriously. Oh, sure. It's awesome. Yeah. And don't forget, Chuck, we met somebody in New York at the knitting factory, I believe, who is a quantum physicist who explained to us, like, how we screwed up the large hadron collider. Yeah. So if you're out there, I can't remember your name. Remind us. Was that the hadron the collider dude? No, they're a comedy troupe. Much different. Hadron the collider. They have a podcast. Check it out. I guess now what? It's time for listener mail. Do you have something? I do. All right. It's time for listener ma'am. Josh, I'm going to call this cool kiva wedding. Okay. Can I throw something in first, please? There's something we've overlooked. Too many episodes have gone by, in my opinion, but we need to put this out there. Remember Sean from Virginia Beach? The cubicle guy? Yeah. Who just was like, I've listened to everything. And there was no origin of hippie rob. Right. Well, we put the call out for everybody to let us know where hippie rob first appeared, in what capacity, and we got a great response. First one to write in was emmy. Emmy. Thank you for writing in, Emmy. But thanks for everybody for writing in. If you go back and listen to how squatting works and listen to approximately the 250 mark, two minute 52nd mark, you will find the origin of hippie rob. Yeah. And if you want to show up, he also shows up in about the same place in the earthquake podcast, too, and elsewhere. But those are the two largest chunks of the hippie rob saga he's peppered through. Isn't it funny that this dude is just out there existing somewhere and has no idea? It's like in another parallel universe. Exactly. Wow. You're welcome. Josh, this is from Jana in Minnesota, and she says, josh and Chuck, I'm a huge fan of the show. I wanted to share a story with you. My husband and I recently got married June 19, 2010. So mazda talk to that. You know what the reception when people ding the glass to make newlyweds kiss. I'm not sure if it's a tradition in Georgia. Or not. It sort of is. I think it is. We didn't do that. We had paper cups. No one heard it. Did you really? No. We did have a budget wedding, but we didn't have paper cups. Plastic PBR in a bottle. That's very classy. Thank you. Everyone else starts to also ding their glass and then you have to stop eating and kiss my husband. And I didn't like that idea. I don't either. Something about the annoying clanging sound didn't sound like fun. Plus, it's really demanding. Yeah. You can't make me kiss. That's what I would have said. I was obstinate in my own wedding. So we decided that people had to put money in a jar to make us kiss. Great idea. All the money placed in our jar would be donated to Kiva. Fantastic. Through the stuff you should know the micro lending site team. The micro lending site. We have socially responsible micro lending sites. Yes. We should also spell that because we get called out because it's such a weird word. It is. Kiva.org. Yeah. And then teamstepynow. Yeah. If you want to donate for our team. So she said it wasn't the biggest fundraiser of all time or anything. They made about $50 in kisses and they were happy to donate. So that's two loans right there. And I just thought it was cool that we've been included now in someone's wedding day and wedding night. Can you remember that other one? I guess I'm waiting on us to cause a divorce. That would bring this full circle. Yeah, I know. We helped somebody through divorce. Can we get an email from somebody who's getting divorced? I don't know. Maybe. I think we have. And thank you. Who is that? That was Jenna from Minnesota. Thanks, Jenna and husband. Congratulations on your wedding. And if Chuck and I have hastened the end of your wedding or have been present at the birth of your kid or whatever, any major life event, we want to hear about it. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstafworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Want more housest? Stuffworks? Check out our blog on the Housetofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you sharks, the most famous and majestic apex predators on earth? Introducing Shark Week. The podcast. I'm Luke Tipple, the marine biologist and shark expert with over 20 years experience in the field. I'm going to take you on a dive with me. You are going to learn a lot about sharks. And you'll also hear exclusive interviews with the stars of Shark Week to get a behind the scenes look. Listen to Shark Week, the podcast on Apple podcasts spotify or wherever you get your podcast. 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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c357b54a-5460-11e8-b38c-0bbfdbe8a96a | SYSK Selects: How the Donner Party Worked | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-the-donner-party-worked | Did they or didn't they? There is plenty of written evidence that the ill-fated Donner Party resorted to cannibalism - except there are no bones. Learn the details of one of the worst disasters of the early West in this classic episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Did they or didn't they? There is plenty of written evidence that the ill-fated Donner Party resorted to cannibalism - except there are no bones. Learn the details of one of the worst disasters of the early West in this classic episode of Stuff You Should Know. | Sat, 22 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=173, tm_isdst=0) | 36077493 | audio/mpeg | "Hey there, friends. It's me, Josh. And this week I've selected for SYSK Select, our episode on the Donner Party, which was pretty grim. I mean, we all know about the Donner Party, but once you start to learn the details of the the whole thing, it's pretty grim. Anyway, I guess I would say enjoy this normally, but yeah, okay, go ahead. Enjoy this episode in a grim way. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always. It's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And that makes this stuff you should know. How are you doing? I'm fine. Good. How are you doing? I'm great, dude. I watched PBS today at work, which is always fun when you get to watch TV via the computer at work. Yeah, I paid for it. Yeah, man, I remember. I watched The American Grindhouse once at work while we were doing the exploitation. Yeah, I did do, actually. It was awesome. I watched the PBS American Experience, which is an awesome show. Been around for years. Oh, yeah. And I watched there, obviously. I watched the one in the Donner Party. Oh, is that the one you watched? Yeah. Got you. I just saw there was one on the Johnstown flood, though. I wish I would have known. I would have watched it. Oh, yeah. I mean, I'll still watch it. I still want to learn. You only watch PBS at work for money. Yeah, you're right. I was doing a little research and I came across something called Hufu or Hufu. A play on Hulu? No, a play on tofu that's designed to taste like human flesh. Oh, I was going in an entirely different direction. No, this is about cannibalism now. Yeah, there's a big media push on it. It made the Daily Show. All sorts of articles came up about hoofu. There was a spokesman, there was a website, and it was the tofu that tastes like human. Gross. They were saying the reason why they're doing so, anthropologists could better understand their subjects when they were investigating cannibalism. And there's plenty of people out there who just wanted to try it. Well, how do they know? How did they flavor it like human? It turns out the whole thing was total farce. Got you. But if you still look today, it was on the Snow Sport. It's not definitively old. Yes, but no one's ever had it. And apparently while you could access the website, you couldn't buy it. You got an error message whenever you tried to check out or whatever. But it was pretty funny that everybody got taken on that. I thought I'd mentioned that. I just did. Yeah, I did, too. And if you look in the Urban Dictionary, there's no mention of it being fake or fictitious. Oh, really? Yeah, I think I'm loathe to say it, but it was Wikipedia that initially said it's fictitious to me, right? I feel dirty. Yeah, but Chuck, we talk about hoofu or hufu, depending on what region of the country you live in, to talk about the Donner party, which is one of those very rare instances in the history of humanity where we can say pretty much without doubt, people ate other people, and they did so under some of the most horrific circumstances that humans have ever endured. This group of people went through holy hell. Yeah, it was pretty rough. I can just keep going for the rest of the episode, how bad it was. I learned a lot from this article, a lot of new, surprising stuff, but it's pretty cool. Did you know that it took two years when it should have taken six months? Not true. What are you talking about? It took one year. Okay. Yeah. Well, did you know that the Donner party was originally the Donner Reed party? And the Reed party split off and made their way without event onto Fort Sudden, California? No problem. That's not true either. What are you talking about? Yes. This is not the best article on our site, I must say. And I read it and then I did my own research and was like, wow, how did you miss some of this stuff? We'll get to the bottom of that and we'll make sure it gets changed. Yes, I've already sent an email, actually, about that. Did you? An angry one. Well, just like, how could this be on our site? It's so wrong and it's so easily figured out. It's not like rocket science. It's like it took two years. Now look at a calendar. It took one year. So a caddy one? Yes. Okay. It was a little caddy. Well, let's talk about the donor party. Let's talk about what's known, what's not known. So Donna Reid Donner was a wealthy farmer in his 60s. Reed was an Irish American businessman, had some dough as well. He financed the trip. Oh, did he? I believe so. Okay. But George Donner was the official guy in charge. Yeah, James Reed thought that he was going to be in charge and kind of was in a way, but they did elect donor the captain because Reed turned off people with his RV. Essentially. He had a macked out wagon that everyone else is really pissed off about because it was double decker and it had a stove in it and it had bunk beds, and it was like, apparently made a big commotion among the other people because they're like, who is this guy with his big wagon? This is even before the Chuck wagon was invented by Charles Chuck Goodnight. You want to go ahead and tell that story? Well, there's not much to tell. Charles Chuck Goodnight was a cookie on the wagon trails, and after the Civil War, he had gotten very tired of not having a decent meal. So he bought an old government wagon and converted it into a kitchen, which became the first chuck wagon named after him. Yeah. And from that, if you follow it further and further, you get diners and food trucks. Chuck wagon. Yeah. Very nice, Josh. Very slick. So the Donner Reed Party, like a lot of people back then, said, you know what? You know where it's at? This place called California that I've heard so much about. And this is prior to the gold rush. Yeah. There was a movement toward populating California, basically resting control of California away from the Spanish, just through sheer numbers, by having a bunch of white folks show up and basically saying, mexico, you can't control this land anymore. It'll be too expensive and costly. We're taking over because we live here now. That's right. And Lansford Hastings was one of the main dudes behind this movement. He was an attorney from Ohio. He went to California, 1842 and dreamed of wrestling this land from Mexico and governing California himself. Well, he dreams. He did so with a guy named John Sutter who was a German born Swiss immigrant who had taken Mexican citizenship oh, really? To get a charter, a land grant from the Mexican government. And he used it to form New Helvetia or New Switzerland. Aka. Fort Sutter, which is now Sacramento. German Swiss, born with Mexican citizenship. Yes. I love it. Who is a trader. Only in the 1840s can you do stuff like that. Exactly. Only in California. But Hastings will come back up in a very big way because it's pretty much all his fault. Got you. So they basically set out for California in May. Well, they set out from Springfield in April, but Missouri in May is when they had the whole gang together. Right. The big wagon train. So we're going west. We're following the California Trail. Everyone goes that way. Everyone actually, that year made it except for the Donner party. Oh, yeah. All the immigrants going to California checked in okay. Except for these sad folks. And it was really all because of one fateful decision, to tell the truth. They were just like any other wagon train, just like any other pioneers. They weren't trailblazers. They were following trails that they learned of. And they were well equipped. They weren't stupid. No. But they did make one faithful decision, like you said. Hastings what is his first name? Lanford. Lanford Hastings comes up in a big way because a lot of people laid the disaster, the calamity of the Donner party at Hastings feet because he was also a trailblazer. And he came up with a fanciful thing called the Hastings Cut Off. That's right. A shortcut, essentially. Yeah. He wrote a book called The Immigrants Guide to Oregon and California, which Donner had on the seat of his wagon. And there was a very brief sentence about the shortcut the Hastings cut off that was supposedly going to cut off about 350 to 400 miles a full three weeks off of the trip, which is a big chunk for a six month trip. That's definitely worth the trip they cut off. The problem was Hastings had never taken this route himself and had certainly never taken a wagon over it. But that didn't stop him from claiming that all of the roads were high and hard and level, but there was plenty of water and grass for the livestock and that there were no aggressive Indian tribes in the area. Yeah, he basically painted it out like a pleasure cruise because he was trying to get as many people as possible to California. He actually would go and hang out on the way to Oregon on the Oregon Trail and be like, you don't want to go there. You want to come down to California. Yeah. He would lead people. Yeah. So this is why he came up with the Hastings cut off. And it was a dangerous gamble. And the Donner Party said, well, we want to shave three weeks off of our trip. Well, yeah. Part of the Donner party went left. Part of them went right. The part that went right did just fine. And you don't hear about them. They're not the donner party any longer. I don't know what they called themselves, but it wasn't the Reeds. Got you. The Reed stayed with the Donners and they left. Went on to Fort Bridger, Wyoming. They were going to meet up with Hastings there, and they got there a little late, and Hastings was no longer there. But he sent a message. He left a note somewhere along the trail along the Hastings cut off saying, this may not be as good as I thought. You should probably turn back. Well, yeah. And before that, this other dude named Climbing was headed east from California by way the Hastings cut off. And he said, don't go this way. He said, you're never going to make it alive. Your wagons aren't going to make it, and you probably wouldn't even make it, so don't go that way. But they continued. They continued. They found the note. And when they found the note, reid spent five days looking for Hastings. To kill him? No, to talk to him about what the deal was. He just said he wanted to talk to him. Yeah, he wanted to kill him. He did find him, actually, and he didn't kill him. And Hastings said, I'm not coming back with you to Lead. Sorry. But, hey, I'm up on this high bluff, and there's another route, and that one looks a lot better. And so they went that way instead, which was still the southern route under the Great Salt Lake. But it was not a good move. And that's what started the beginning of the end for the Donner Party. 2 miles a day. Yes. At that point, in 36 days, they went 16 miles, which is horrible, considering that they averaged about 12 miles a day. Normally, they ended up going an extra 125 miles. And it added three weeks to the trip. Rather than subtracting three weeks to the trip, they also lost four wagons, which is a big deal in a wagon train. Yeah. They lost a lot of oxen of their cattle as well. And that's where they lost some of their first members because essentially they were in the desert. Yes. 80 miles stretch of desert on the trail. Yes, the salt desert. So you got the heat during the day, and then it was very cold at night. And this was in August. This was like they eventually met back up with the California trail, but they thought, oh, man, that was rough. But now we're all set because we're back on the original trail. So that time that it took them, I mean, the extra three weeks, wasn't it? That wasn't what did them. And they were going slower than they predicted. Yeah. And it's important to know right here during that Hastings cut off route where they started to encounter, like, a lot of hardships, they sent this dude named Stanton. He was a bachelor from New York, and he was one of the only single dudes there. They sent him out for provision. So he took off for a period of time and did come back with five mules loaded with food and two Indian guides, Lewis and Salvador, to help them out. So they weren't a part, like the article says, of the original wagon train either. He came back with the provisions with Stanton. During this time, Reid got in a fight. It was basically the first incident of road rage. His wagon became entangled. His big RV wagon became entangled with a guy named Snyder. They fought. Reid killed Snyder with a knife. They had a little kangaroo court first, said they should hang him and then said, no, you know what? Just pack your stuff and get out of here. And so he did. The next day, without his family, he left. He was like crazy. There's two stories going on now. You've got the Donner party and the Reed family. Then you've got Reid, who goes on his own, makes it to California, actually just fine. Well, he was no worse for the wear, at least, so wow. The drama is high already. Yeah, the drama is high. The amount of time, all the setbacks, all the problems that they encountered conspired to put them back on the California Trail after that disastrous Hastings cut off and right at the eastern edge. So that would be the Nevada side, maybe. Yes. Of the Sierra Nevada mountains in November at the first snowstorm, and it was a pretty bad snowstorm, and they thought, we can't make it through these mountains in the middle of winter. It's November. Let's just hunker down here. And it would turn out to be one of the worst winters, one of the harshest winters on record that they were unknowingly hunkering down for and they made camp two very famous camps. There was the Donner Camp at the edge of a little lake in the area, truckee Lake. And then there was the Alder Creek Camp which apparently was founded because of a broken wagon wheel 6 miles back. They're back along the trail and that's where the two groups camped in the Donner Party. If I may, a reading from the diary of one of the members of the Donner Party. Oh, wow. November 1. Act like you're surprised. November 1. It was a raining then in the valleys and snowing in the mountains. So we went on that way three or four days till we came to the big mountain or the California mountain. The snow was then about 3ft deep there. There was some wagons there they said they had attempted to cross and could not. We set out the next morning to make a last struggle but did not advance more than 2 miles before the road became so completely blocked that we were compelled to retrace our steps in despair. When we reached the lake, we lost our road and owing to the depth of the snow in the mountains we're compelled to abandon our wagons and pack our goods upon oxen. So this is early November and they are in bad shape and basically the wagons can't even pass anymore. No. They set up these camps and like, we got to hunker down for the winter. And ultimately they ended up in an area where there was, through the winter 30ft of snow. Not over time. Like that was the snow pack was 30ft deep. Yeah. I mean, it's still one of the worst winters on record, like today. Not just for the time. Right. And this group of fairly greenhornish people from back east are settled down in one of the most dangerous spots in the country at the time, at least climate wise. Yeah. Meteorologically dangerous. Provisions started to run out. Another diary entry november 6. We have now killed most of our cattle having to stay here until next spring and live on poor beef without bread or salt. It snowed during the space of eight days with little intermission. After our arrival, Mr. Curtis remarked that in the oven was a piece of the dog and we could have it raising the lid of the oven. We found the dog well baked and having a fine savory smell. I cut out a rib, smelling and tasting, found it to be good and handed the rib to Mr. McCutchen, who after smelling it sometime tasted it and pronounced it a very good dog. Apparently that was Uno, the donor's dog or the reed's dog? It was one of the main uno met that fate. Yeah. I didn't read that. He was delicious. Well, I imagine if you're dying of starvation anything is going to be delicious. They ate their shoestrings. They ate the kids would sit in front of the fire and pick off pieces of the hide skin rug and eat that. And then they eventually ate the hide from their roofs of the cabins because they were actually cabins at the lake. Yes. There were no cabins at the creek. No. But they weren't much help against this kind of snow. In fact, apparently they were completely packed in at one point and couldn't even get out of the cabin. Wow. It was like the thing that happened to Mr. Burns and Homer Simpson. Yeah. Was it the camping trip or was it the ski trip? It was the corporate retreat. Right. Well, that was a good one. They also they boiled their blankets into, like, kind of a pasty glue, apparently. Yeah. You said they're shoelaces, right? They ate their shoelaces, yeah, because I think they were made of, like, animal height or something. Bark, twigs, anything they could get their hands on. Anything that might have any kind of protein they were eating. Yeah, they boiled the bones so much for soup that they became just brittle. So they ate the bones of the animals because they could bite into them. Wow. So it's pretty rough. Also, it should go without saying, they ate their pack animals. They managed to hunt for deer, which is pretty good in 30ft of snow, to hunt deer in the middle of winter and successfully hats off to them for that. Yes. They got other things. They got birds here and there, like ducks and owls, and I think they got a wolf one time. So they were able to forage here and there. But it's a long winter. Everyone's clearly starving by this time, and the writing is on the wall to the parties at these camps. So they select a group of well, the strongest people, including the two Indian guides, and I think it was the strongest 15 people, equipped them with homemade snowshoes and set them out to walk across the Sierra Nevada mountains in the middle of winter with almost no food. They had six days starvation rations per person. And they were called the Forlorn Hope. That was the name of the group. Yeah. Or the snowshoe group. Yeah. And I just want to point out that this is some of the most beautiful land you'll ever see in your life. So it's not like they were in a gulag in Siberia. This was, like, gorgeous Sierra Nevada mountain range in this lake. It's absolutely amazing. So it must have been a bitter pill to be that close. So they're only, like, 150 miles away at that point and just stuck and dying, I think even beyond the beauty, the fact that they were 150 miles from their destination, dying, like you said, that's rough. It was the Forlorn Hope group where cannibalism first came up because they all ran out of food very quickly and apparently six days in. A guy named Charles Stanton. You mentioned Stanton, didn't you? Yeah. He was a bachelor, one of the early heroes. He was saying, hey, you guys go on without me or take me with you as provisions, maybe. And everybody said, no, we can't do that. It's crazy. Stop that. And they left him to die, right? Yeah. A couple of days after that, they thought, hey, maybe Stanton wasn't so crazy. Let's figure out let's explore the possibility of cannibalism. And they did. They discussed it. And apparently at first they decided that they were going to draw lots, draw straws, and then whoever is, like the custom of the sea, whoever drew the shortest straw was going to die. And whoever drew the second shortest straw was the person who had to kill him. And this one guy I can't remember his name drew the straw, the shortest straw. But nobody had the heart to kill him. Yeah. So they kind of just waited instead for the next person to die. Yeah. They agreed. They proposed dueling to at one point, like, let's do a shootout. Whoever dies will just eat them. But it was very grim. Another reading, perhaps? Yes. This was in December, actually, right before Christmas, sadly. And this is from the snowshoe group. The fort. Lauren hope. In this melancholy situation, they consulted together and concluded they would go on trusting in Providence rather than return to the miserable cabins. They were also at this time out of provisions and partly agreed, with the exception of Mr. Foster, that in case of necessity, they would cast lots who should die to preserve the remainder. So it's coming. They know it. So I think a couple of days after they started talking about cannibalism, the first guy died. His name was Antoine. Yeah. And Antoine was eaten by the Forlorn Hope group. He was the first one, but definitely not the last. No. There was a guy named Jay Foster. Yes, he was the next. And the lady named Mrs. Foster cut the meat from his bones, boiled it, and served it to everybody, and everybody ate. But the one thing that was agreed upon was that relatives wouldn't eat. Relatives. Right. So there was a guy named Jay Foster who died next, and he was butchered and cooked and served by a lady named Mrs. Foster. But one of the things they agreed upon was that relatives wouldn't eat relatives. Right. But apparently his father was part of the Forlorn Hope group, too. Yeah. He wasn't having it. And then things apparently started to turn on the two Indian guides who the group started discussing murdering and eating them. And one of the other Forlorn Hope group said, hey, we're talking about doing this. You guys might want to take off. So the Indians apparently had trouble believing it at first. They finally said, oh, wait, that's right. You guys are white men. I forgot you totally would do that. And they disappeared into the woods. Yes. But they were later found. They tracked them by their blood. So apparently they weren't in great shape and they found them. This is where it gets a little hinky. Some accounts say they found them dead and ate them. Some accounts say they found them alive and passed out, basically, and they shot them both through the head and then ate them. Either way, they ate them, even though there's no anthropological proof. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah. So all these events take place over 33 days, the Fort Hope. Yeah. And I imagine the cannibalism it came in starting on day nine, no, day ten or eleven. And then after that, they had 22 more days of this. And they finally made it to Fort Sutter and said, hey, we got big problems. We need your help. Let's start sending out some rescue parties. How many was it? Like, seven of them? Yeah. Seven made it of the original 15. Yeah. All right, so that story is going on. You still got the Donner party back at the camp by the lake in the river, and you still got Reid, who made it to Sacramento to Sutters for it. He tried to get supplies and men to take back to rescue his family, and the Mexican American War prevented that from happening. He was essentially forced to kind of join up that effort, and he couldn't get any of the men anyway because everybody was fighting in the war. So he would later go on to be part of the second relief party that went to go find them. So we'll pick that up when we get there. Right. Because meanwhile, while the Fort Lauren Hopes engaged in this horror in the woods, the same stuff is going on back at the camps on the eastern edge of this year in Nevada. It took a little longer, I believe, but eventually people started to eat the dead that had died of starvation. Right, that's true. So, like I mentioned, there were some rescue efforts. There were four groups that went from California because word got back and they even started writing about it in the paper in San Francisco that these people were stranded in this year in Nevadas. So February 5, there was a quote we concluded we could go or die trying, for not to make any attempt to save them would be a disgrace to us and to California for as long as time lasted. And that was one of the members of the very first relief group. Of seven men, \u00a350 of provisions headed out. But Reid was a part of the second group. Right. The first group didn't leave for 13 days after the Fort Lauren Hope came to Fort Sutter. And then yeah. Reed led the second group. So 21 survivors were brought back by the first group, 17 by the second group. The third group rescued four, and then they had to leave four people behind, including a guy named Lewis Keysberg. And when the fourth group came back, lewis Keithberg was the only person alive suspiciously. Well, yeah. He was accused almost immediately of murdering the other three people and eating them. He was said to have been discovered surrounded by the disfigured and cannibalized corpses of the other three people that in the frying pan, there was, like, lungs and livers, buckets of blood, basically. He was in this crazy place that he had created himself through cannibalism? Yes. They say it's completely off his rocker at that point, but the big kicker was that there were three uneaten oxen legs and that when asked, he said that oxen didn't have a very good flavor, so he had resorted to eating the other people, but they had died of natural causes, he hadn't murdered them. So when the rescue party comes and gets them, keith Berg has kind of kept their arms length like no one's talking to them. They don't want to have anything to do with them. When they made camp one night, he apparently was looking at the snow and saw, like, a little piece of cloth and tug dad. It was in the snow, tug dad. A little harder, a little more. And all of a sudden, jars loose. His dead daughter. The corpse, the frozen corpse of his dead daughter, who he had last seen sending off with his wife on the third rescue party. Wow. So he had it pretty rough one way or another. Yeah. He sued for defamation later on. Right when he got back. Yeah. The court awarded him one dollars and demanded that he pay the court costs on top of that. So he lived the rest of his life pretty much a hermit. Well, yeah, he was derided as a murdering cannibal who enjoyed it. He denied that the rest of his life. And other people deny too. First they would say, like, yeah, we resorted to cannibalism here and here and here. Then later on, some of them would say, no, we didn't, actually. That was just sensationalized. Well, yeah. There's a big question of whether there actually was cannibalism in the Donner Party or if it was all sensationalized and fabricated by the newspapers. The big question is, if the Donner Party hadn't resorted to cannibalism, why would they lie? Well, the answer to that is they wouldn't lie about resorting to cannibalism. And the reports are probably true, but in the great tradition of William Errands, you need to see it to believe it. As far as cannibalism goes, sure, most people don't genuinely dispute that the Donner Party did engage in cannibalism, but the problem is there is a lack of forensic evidence. Like you said, they ate the bones. And bones of animals like the dog, uno horses, deer, foxes that wolf. All these bones have been found at the camp sites, but they haven't found any human bones. Right. So there's a lot of explanations for that. We know for a fact that some people who came upon these scenes after the Donner Party left ordered. Like these things to be cleaned up and buried. Make sense? Other people have suggested that the Donners didn't try to process the human cadavers like they did the animal bones, kind of very gently, so they wouldn't have left butcher marks on the bones. Right. And then others say that if they didn't cook the bones like they did the animal bones, and those bones would have disintegrated a long time ago. Right. Then lastly, the argument against that is that these things of Cannibalism, like you said, happened here and here and here and here. We only know of one legitimate Donner site that's been excavated. The others haven't been found. They can't find them. Oh, really? Yeah. So it's possible there is evidence out there and it just hasn't been discovered. But the point is, why would these people, if they did actually say this and these are the journal entries why would they say that they engaged in Cannibalism if they hadn't? Exactly. So Reed, in the meantime, made his way back with a second relief group, was convinced that his family was dead, but was very surprised and relieved to find that they were alive. So can you imagine this reunion that happens when his two year old son was still alive? Eight year old daughter? Yeah, they were one of two families that didn't have any deaths. Yeah, the Reed suffered no deaths, and I believe the Breeze did not suffer deaths. All of the donors died. Every single one of them. Well, which is pretty sad. And out of the group, I think two thirds of the women and children survived, two thirds of the men died, and everyone over 50 died. Yeah, that was 50 was pretty old back then, I think. Sure. Especially for those kind of conditions. So there you have it, the Donner party. Basically, what that did was halted a lot of immigration to California for a while until word of gold came around, and then they said that was it. Screw it. I'll take my chances. It was like a year before the first goal rush. And then there was the Movement of 1849, the big goal brush of 1849, and that was that. I think the Reed wife sent a letter out afterward that was like, don't be afraid to come out here. Just don't take any shortcuts and hurry. Basically don't listen to Hastings. And Hastings was like, the whole time, dude. He was being cursed, like, on a daily basis. He was vilified and cursed. That pretty much scrapped his reputation as a trailblazer and anyone to be trusted. And that was the end of him. I couldn't find anything up about the rest of his life, but I know that he was pretty well disgraced by that. He went on to be, like, a merchant, and he lived in a life after that, but he apparently was remorseful for the rest of his life. Sure. That's Langford Hastings. I guess if you want to know more about him. You can type his name, L-A-N-G-F-O-R-D-H-A-S-T-I-N-G-S in the search bar athoustoforks.com. And it will, coincidentally enough, bring up this article on the Donner party. And I said search bar athousedoforks.com. Right. This soon to be changed article on the Donner party. And since it's going to be changed soon, maybe give us a minute. Yeah, but I said housestarforks.com and search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. Yes. This is Back to the Future, Josh. Okay, Josh, chuck exclamation points. I just listened to the Zero podcast and heard your cries for help from across the ages. We all heard you guys go get into the Wayback Machine, but I think only few of us realize that you never came out. I could tell that something had gone wrong by the tone of your voice. As you near the end of the show, I know that you are trying to send us a message. You are stuck in fifth century India. I hope you have found somewhere safe to bunker down. Do not try to fix the Way Back Machine on your end. Jerry and I are working on a way to fix the broken flux Capacitor remotely and bring you back. We hope to hear you return to us on a podcast soon. And one final warning, do not, under any circumstances, use the Wayback Machine while you are still strapped inside the Wayback Machine. The last thing we need is an Inception style time travel within time travel scenario. And that says Max Prince. God speed. From Max Prince Assistant to Dr. Emmett Lethrop. Doc Brown. Nice. A little bit of fun there. I've been enjoying the heck out of the SOG paneer that I've been eating morning, noon and night. Oh, yeah, man, I can't get enough of this lava. Yes, if you have a bit of amusement for us, I found that highly amusing. You can tweet to us at syskast. You can hit us up on Facebook@facebook.com, and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuff. You should know the is production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works. For more podcasts myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple podcast us, or wherever you listen to your favorite show." | |
How Surfing Works | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-surfing-works | You know the Beach Boys and you've seen those Hang Ten shirts with the little feet emblem, but there's a lot more to surfing than appears on pop culture's surface. From learning how to pop up on the board to the physics of how waves form and break to the | You know the Beach Boys and you've seen those Hang Ten shirts with the little feet emblem, but there's a lot more to surfing than appears on pop culture's surface. From learning how to pop up on the board to the physics of how waves form and break to the | Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:10:53 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=17, tm_min=10, tm_sec=53, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=50, tm_isdst=0) | 47317228 | audio/mpeg | "Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, chuck Bryant, and it's stuff you should know. Just the same as it always was, I guess. So how are you doing? I'm good. I like your hat. Right. To hang tin, that seems like probably a very difficult thing to do, but not that great. Not that cool. It's super difficult. I can imagine. I don't think it's super cool, too. It's old school. You remember Spuds McKenzie had that hang 20 or hang whatever poster. No. Do you remember Spuds McKenzie? Oh, yeah. Well, that dog could surf, according to the posters that I've seen. People still call those dogs Buds McKenzie, too, after all these years. Yeah. What kind of terrier is some sort of pit bull terrier, but it's like a Stratford shire, I think. I have no idea. It is a terrier, though, for sure. Yeah, because they go after rats and mailmen. So, Chuck? Yes? Can you guess when the first recorded description of someone surfing was? What are you going to guess? The well, I know what it is. I'm going to tell you again, though. It was 1779, in fact. Did you know that? I did. So that was the one you're going to guess? That's the one I said to you. Everyone's a winner. And it was. As you know. I guess. By a guy named Lieutenant James King. Who at the time of the writing. Had just very recently become the captain of the HMS Discovery because his captain. James Cook. Very famous explorer. Had just been killed by the Hawaiians because he had taken their chief captive in order to force them to return a boat because he surfed in their waters. And localism was rough. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. And apparently the tradition among Hawaiians, as far as localism goes, it was pretty serious and always has been. It's always been that way. It's very stratified out there. Yeah. But anyway, so James King, he first describes this site of people riding these long wooden boards, catching a wave and riding it on in, and it kind of established or set the precedent for Hawaii as the originator of surfing. But what's pretty cool is one of those instances where Europeans came in eons after something had started and actually got it right. Because Hawaii was in almost all likelihood, the place where surfing was born. That's right. It had started in polynesia. They had, like, kind of belly boards, I think they call them, but they didn't really ever stand up. It was the Hawaiians who first stood up. Oh, really? So Hawaii is the cradle of surfing, of modern surfing, and, man, did they ever do it. Yes, they sure did, and do to this day. Yeah. Well, they're carrying on a very long tradition. They are, yeah. Like we were saying, you mentioned localism and I said it was stratified out there. There are actually places in Hawaii where if you weren't a member of the ruling class, you didn't surf there. And if you did, you got in huge trouble. Oh, sure. Like King Kamehamehameha was a Hawaiian chief. Very famous one. That's the club that Magnum hangs out at. It's named the King Kamehameha Club. Yeah. And he was noted for being, like, a really great surfer. Did you know that? I did not know that. Never heard of the guy. Actually, king Kamayama, that's pretty much the only Hawaiian chief, like, I'd ever heard of. Probably from watching Magnum. Really? Yeah. But he was a great surfer. And eventually surfing became known as the sport of kings. Yeah. Because of that. Because the chiefs surfed, and they were pretty good at it. And their social status was exemplified by the length of their board. Oh, yeah. So the longer the board, the higher status you had. Exactly. A commoner or a king. Yes. And you could be a very good surfer and not be part of the ruling class. But you're still pretty well revered. And actually you're called a kahuna. Nice. You're a surfing expert, so it's a big kahuna. Yes. That was a fat surfing expert. Okay. A lot of those guys are. Yeah. It's like one part of the world where you can be a big old fat guy and lay around on the beach and you're like King Daddy and have face tattoos. Do they have those too? Well, the minority do. I think they serve. Okay. Yeah. I thought we were talking Polynesia. Polynesia. Okay. I think. Oh, man, I hope so. Let's talk some more surfing history. Okay. They were surfing big time in the late 17 hundreds. Standing up, pushing up, doing all the modern moves. Well, not all the modern moves, because they were pretty much long boards back then. Yeah, long boards. But it was a huge part of society. Still is. But they likened it in this one article too. Like baseball was in the US. How it was in polynesia. Oh, yeah. And even though it's all just to guess how it evolved, we have no idea, really, because Polynesians, there's really no certainty about their movement around the Earth thousands of years ago. So we're all just sort of guessing at this point. But Mark Twain surfed. Yeah, he did. He didn't have a very easy time with it. He tried it, at least. Right? Yeah. In 1866, he published in his book Roughing It. I tried surf bathing once. Everything was bathing back then, I guess so. Sun bathing. And then I think just bathing was when you started going into the ocean even though you weren't washing your butt. Right. Or maybe you were, because no one really bathed back then. Sure they did. I tried surf bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it. I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too, but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three quarters of a second without any cargo. I guess he was the cargo. Right. And I struck the bottom about the same time with a couple of barrels of water in me. So Mark Twain's first experience was probably like many people's first experience with surfing. Mine included. Yeah. And so Twain visits Hawaii at a time where there were a lot of Americans hanging out there and they were growing a lot of pineapples. And since Hawaii wasn't a state, there are a lot of tariffs against those pineapples. And a couple of guys, two cousins with the last name of Dole decided to overthrow the Hawaiian chieftain so that they could get the US. To annex Hawaii and get these tariffs lifted. And as a result of this and missionaries coming and cooks people and all that, the Hawaiians had dwindled from about 800,000 by the time Cook showed up to like 40,000. And surfing kind of went with it, the interest windowed. But there were some people still surfing. Right. And just enough so that there was a resurgence. When Mark Twain was doing it, he was probably like, I guess the second white guy ever write about it. But the third white guy, Jack London, was the one who brought surfing into popular culture. Really? Yeah, he visited Hawaii. Awesome. And he hung out in one of the ways that he helped spread surfing was just by writing about a guy named George Freeze. Yeah. He basically invented modern surfing and was a heck of a lifeguard, as were a lot of the early surfers, it seems like. Yeah. We're great swimmers, great lifeguards, great surfers. Duke Kahana Maku, he was a five time Olympic swimming medalist. Yeah. And he traveled Europe and everything and gave swimming exhibitions. And maybe the first guy to play beach volleyball, too. Is that right? He has a great restaurant. And supposedly one of them invented the little backboard, like the rescue board. Oh, yeah. Even though that's debated. But some people I think it was Fritz Frieth. Yeah. Friedman. But he was the first dude to stand up. Do good moves. I think his boards were shorter. And all this was turning the century stuff. Right. Like when those guys were surfing and they were surfing on long wooden boards, really long, like 10ft, 16ft. Imagine trying to maneuver one of those. Well, you don't really. But they were the first ones who said, hey, we can kind of change these boards and make them maneuverable. So they were the first ones to figuratively and I guess literally shape modern surfboards. Oh, did they create the shortboard? They started to they started to make changes to it. It wasn't just a flat plank of wood any longer. Nice. So in the 20th century is when the shortboard came along in earnest and they added things like they made them lighter, of course, which helps. Easier to manage the new shapes helped with stability, and then they started messing with the fins too, which I guess we can get to here in a minute. Okay. But the fence make a big difference. There's a lot of stuff that the fence affects. I guess we can go ahead and go there. They impact stability, feel, drive, maneuverability, and you can have all kinds of things from like a single fin to up to five. Even though I get the impression that five fins is a little obnoxious, kind of like training wheels. Well, I don't know. I think two or three fence is what you're looking for. Well, it depends what you're trying to do. The angle of the fin is called the toe, and that's the angle in relation to the center of the board. So it can be cocked a little diagonally or just straight on. Oh, okay. If it makes the board more responsive, the closer the front of the fin is to the center of the board. So the closer the more it's angled, the more responsive it's going to be. And then you have the can't that is the angle in relation to the bottom of the board. So if you have no can't, it's just straight up and down. It's not angled at all. Okay. It's going to be super fast. If it's angled, it's going to be more responsive. So it all changes depending on how many fens and how deep they are, how big they are, what the angle is on, how you're going to drive this thing. Basically, it can be foiled on both sides or have no foil. More foil gives you more lift. Okay. It can have a rake, which is how far back the fin curves. So if it's like a super shark fin, it's going to be different than if it's a little more just straight. Small rake is faster, but again, not as maneuverable. Flex stiffness, it can be really super stiff or have more flex. To them, stiffness is stiff. It's not as forgiving. But I think if you're like a better surfer, you're going to want more stiff. And then the base length, the smaller the base of the fin, the tighter the turns, the height and the depth of it's taller, it's more stable, but it's not going to be as maneuverable. So some of them are removable now? Oh, yeah, some of them are set in, but they make them now where you can actually remove the fins, which is great for traveling and storage. And I guess if you just want to mix things up a little bit. But yeah, there's a lot of work that goes into that's. Just the fins alone. That's just the fins on the bottom. Yeah. Because I always wondered until I looked into this, like, why is that one just have one fin? Why does that have three? Why are those fins huge? Why are those angled? It all matters. It all makes a difference. Yeah. And it really just depends on what kind of like when you're buying a car, it depends on what you're looking for. We have the addition of Finns. You can thank Duke and George for that at the very beginning, but they kind of popularized surfing on the west coast, and the west coast took over. And then about the early 60s, thanks to things like gidget and the beach boys, surfing just exploded. Right. And now we have just, I guess, the change from surfboards in 1912 to 2012 in that 100 years is just incredible and exponential. Sure. And it hadn't changed much for the 1000 or so years leading up to 1912. Right. So everything is kind of took off in the 20th century. And now you can basically categorize the kind of board that you're holding or surfing on as either a short board or a long board. Right. Well, I mean, yeah. And then there's dozens of other boards within those categories. Right. But yeah, those are two big categories. So, like, if you're pretty good at surfing, you're probably going to use a longboard. Right. It depends on what you're looking to do. Okay. But if you are a novice, the long board is not the good one to start out on. Well, I mean, it's easier to stand up on because it's large and more stable, but you can't maneuver it and cut back and stuff unless you're, like, super good. Right. And I guess akin to either, like, driving in the big Cadillac down the highway or being in your little sports car. Yes. Okay. Which you could learn to drive on either one of those. Sure. Learn all along board. It depends what you're after. I would be a longboard guy now. Would you? In my earlier days, I tried surfing. It was like I tried the shortboard and tried a hot shot. Well, it's just that was the thing. But now I would get up on the longboard and just stand there, like walk up and down, hang in, do all that good stuff. Have you ever seen one of those frankie and a net beach movies where they're surfing and they are just literally standing there with their arms out, moving side by side? Awesome. In the back, it's just the green screen behind them. Yeah. And longboards, you can get a couple of people on them and two or three people if you're good. Yeah. And you just stand there and wave your arms. I decided, apparently, from what I've seen 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, 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 homepage and enter code stuff. Okay. So you've got long boards, you got short boards, you've got the fins, the sides of the surfboard, the rails, impact, how the thing moves. Sure. Whether or not it's curved, the bottom, the board, the bottom of the board, the rocker, if it's curved or not. And how much it's curved, I imagine makes the board a lot more maneuverable, the more convex it is. Right? Yeah. And then you've got long boards, which are about 9ft long, up to 12ft long, which is just crazy to me. Like, you could fit three people on there. Pretty comfortable. Yeah, I've seen a lot of people on a longboard, like when they do the tricks and stuff. Yeah. I can't name a number of people, but I feel like I've seen at least four or five people get up on a long board. Yeah. And then you got fun boards. Right. These sound like the most fun. What's the Funboard? It's kind of like in between a long board and a short board. And it's fun. It's best for tricks, I think, if you want to really kind of shred or whatever. And also, I should probably say, I have no idea what I'm talking about here because I've never heard I think people have understood that by now. But the shortboard is obviously better for that because you can shred the wave. Right. But in a long board, it's harder to maneuver unless you're really good at it. But a Funboard just kind of falls in between those two. Like, you can kind of rest and relax and just stand there if you want, but you can also maneuver. Right. That's my impression of the fun board. I have to look into it. I had never heard of the Funboard. Oh, you hadn't? I had really? Yeah, I really, genuinely have believed you. One thing I did know what I was talking about. So back in the day, they were all made of wood. Now you can still get wooden surfboards. In fact, I think a lot of the purists can still get, like, the sweet handmade wooden surfboards. Sure. But mostly these days they're going to be what's called pop outs, mass manufactured. They pop out of a factory mold where they get the name and they're either polystyrene or polyurethane covered in fiberglass and resin, but you can still hand make those two. Obviously. You can get kits or you can pay thousands of dollars for some dude in California or Hawaii to hand shape your own sweet little board. Yeah, Tracy said the surfboards cost between $150 and $500. I think that's when you're shopping on Amazon.com. Yeah, I found some that were pretty awesome for less than $1,000. Like, the vast majority are less than 1000. I was kind of surprised because I thought she was way off, but she went off by that much. No, and I think you can spend over a thousand, like, anything. If you get like, the sweet dude right hand makes them and he's loan for it, then you're going to pay a pretty penny. But I mean, I even came across one of Proctor surfboards and they do custom boards and even those were like less than a thousand. It's pretty neat. That's nice because that makes it an egalitarian sport. You think so? A little. I'd say this is a little pricey. It definitely is. But I'm saying at least it's not like the gap between the poor man's surfboard and the rich man surfboard is not 1020, $30,000, it's $1,500. Yeah, I guess so. That's what I mean. Yeah, you can easily be priced out of it, but you can still get a decent surfboard for what, a couple of $100? Yeah, I had about a surfboard for $50 that I just kept for in college because I thought it was cool to have in the corner of my living room and I took it to the beach a couple of times and it sucked. Does your bedroom look like a Pottery Barn teen catalog scene? I've never seen that. Frequently. Have surfboards stood up in the corner? No, it was just Chuck's Silliness in the day. So did you say that stuff made of polyurethane? Yeah. And it's covered in a resin? I did in fiberglass, which makes it light, it makes it buoyant. But I can also imagine that if you get hit by one of these things, it hurts bad. Yeah. I mean, they're lightweight, but you whack somebody in the head with it. Or if you get stabbed with it, they're sharp on the front and sometimes on the back. I would never buy a sharp surfboard. I'd just be afraid of it. What would you do? Get one that's more rounded. You get a boogie board, which will get an inner tube. Okay, so you've got your surfboard. Another really important thing that you have to have, you have to have all this other stuff aside from the leash is kind of superfluous. It's nice. It's an add on. You have to have wax because polyurethane resin bound surface tends to be slick, especially when you're standing on it in the water. And you can use wax to basically create like a traction surface for your feet. Yeah, it helps for sure. And they're also not like, completely slick on top, like, where you stand. They'll have the I don't know what's not sandpaper. Or maybe it is sandpaper. Okay. I was glassed into it to help out a little bit, but not always. Again, surfers are very particular about what they like and what they don't like. And there are all sorts of choices and is Doctor Zog sex wax? Like the wax? Or is that just the wax that guys like me have heard of? I'm sure that was the stuff that we were as teenagers. That's like saying the Sundam lotion guy. Panama Jack. Yes. It's like saying, Was Panama Jack like the lotion of choice I got you? I think it's sort of like that. But Panama Jack was the lotion of choice. The T shirt of choice, for sure. Yeah. Rolled up sleeves. Oh, yeah. So board shorts. Tracy Wilson wrote this. Tracy points out board shorts are sturdier versions of swim trunks. Right. I didn't know that. I guess they're beats up well, they have a tie, so it's not just like, elastic. Yeah, that's the difference. It's got a strong tie. They usually don't have elastic. They are sturdy. I just think they don't come off as easy. I think they're designed not to. Got you. Because that'd be embarrassing. Sure. Rash vests. Those are just like the little short sleeve Oakley shirt that you wear that keeps your and she says it helps prevent chafing with impact with the water. May be true, but if you've ever been on a surfboard, your chest, it gets a little chafed as well from the sand and stuff like that. Yeah. So that protects you there. And then, of course, wetsuits when you're cold or if you're in the Pacific Ocean, which usually year round. They're wearing wetsuits out there. Yes. I guess the wetuit is probably not superfluous. I mean, depending on where you're surfing, you have to wear a wetsuit. Yeah. And you're either a regular surfer or you're goofy foot, which means which foot do you put forward? If you put your left foot forward and your right foot back, it's just standard. And then if you turn around and put your left foot back, you're known as a goofy foot. Same with skateboarding, too. Yeah. And I don't know if well, surfing led to skateboarding, some say. I think it directly led to skateboarding. Right. And I don't know if that's a slag to call someone a goofy foot or to be a goofy foot or not. I think it probably was originally. But so many people skate or surf goofy foot now. It's just like a term. It had to be a slide because they would have called it, like, cool foot or something if it was super cool to do it that way. Or if, like, a really popular guy named Tom had done it, they'd be like, well, it's Tomfooted. Well, wherever you put your foot in the rear, that's the one you want to have the leash attached to. And that is not superfluous either. You want to have your board attached to your ankle because if you fly off, you don't want to have to go swimming too far to get it. Sure. And it also can if it's attached to your foot and you're having trouble, you can grab hold of your surfboard. That's another good reason. Help save yourself, perhaps. So how do you learn to surf, Josh? I think one of those things that it's easy to learn how, but very difficult to master and it takes tons of practice. And I want to give a shout out to two. We got a lot of that history from a site, from an article written by a guy named Ben Marcus. And the article is called From Polynesia with Love. Good stuff. It is good stuff. And then the surfinghandbook.com has this whole section called Beginner Surfing Tips and they have everything you need to know. They're so friendly. And one of the things that they just kind of put out is like this mantra, just go into this whole thing knowing that you're not going to be good right away, that you're going to fail, and just try not to get frustrated. And certainly if you start to get so frustrated that you don't want to surf anymore, they say, like, take a break, like it's supposed to be fun. It's circular. You don't get so uptight and basically don't come in like you're going to just be a champ right away. It takes tons of practice and a lot of the practice starts on land. Like practicing the pop up. Yeah. I had the opposite experience that you described, which was easy to do, hard to master. I had a really tough time doing it at all. Oh, really? Yeah, I did. And everyone in my little group that had never done it, none of us could stand up on that first day at all. Well, then. Oh yeah. Just looking at it on paper and thinking about what you have to do, it's not that much to it, but being able to do it, mastering it, too. Yes. It's tough for me. I can imagine. And it will be for me too, eventually. You can try it. Sure. Basically, when I say it's kind of easy, there's just a few steps. Basically, you want to swim out. You paddle out on your stomach to the breakers, right? Yes. And this is where the waves are starting to turn into white caps. They're breaking. When you get to this line where all the surfers hang out, what's it called? The line up. That's where all the surfers are hanging out waiting for the wave. Right? Yeah. Talking philosophy and music and how to beat up people who shouldn't be there. You want to go in a curve because you don't want to get beat up and you want to avoid the waves. And basically it'll make it easier to paddle out there, and it's easier to not get beat up from getting in another surfer's way. So when you get out to the lineup and you're starting to catch a wave, you want to be facing the shore. And as a wave starts to swell, as the swell comes in and starts to break, you want to be right on top of it, right in front of it, right? Yeah. And you're paddling really fast, trying to catch the wave, as they say. Yes. I think that's even in bold, it is catching the wave right before the wave starts to break, or as it starts to break, like maybe to your right or to your left, you do what's called the pop up, right? Yeah. You do like a push up, and then you pop your feet underneath you, and now you're standing. Right? Well, that's the process. And you can apparently get onto your knees and then get onto your feet, and it can work, but apparently you don't want to learn to do that because it's a really bad habit and it's going to keep you from really surfing. Well, right. So what you want to do is push up with your hands and then put your feet underneath you and stand up in kind of a crouching position. Sure. And now you're surfing sideways. Yeah. Crouching position. And then that's it. That's all there is to it. Yeah. My favorite part when I tried it back in college and stuff was when you're sitting out there with the other dudes and there's no surfing involved. When you're just like sitting there feeling cool and popping up and down with the surfing guys. Right. I used to do skateboard like that a lot. A lot of standing around and talking, just sitting down on the skateboard. It's called a dimple, but because of the grip tape eventually would just kind of form a little pattern in your butt. You actually ride at the skateboard sitting down? No, you're just sitting there talking shop with the other thrashers. So when you're going out, you mentioned that you want to go out on a curve and not like, go with this thing straight on. Yes. If you've never done this and you don't have anyone teaching you how, it can be very frustrating because you will paddle out and the wave will bring you back into shore over and over, and then eventually you're just going to go to the beach bar with your surfboard and stuff looking cool. Right. But what you want to do is what's called the duck dive. And this is on a shortboard as the wave approaches before it's like cresting and falling on you, you just want to push down on the board and go through the wave and come out on the other side. And if you do this right a couple of times, then you'll be behind where the waves are breaking and you're all good to. Go. You're maneuvering yourself out of the way of most of the force of the wave. Yeah. And the duck dive, I think you actually roll upside down on what's called the turtle roll with a longboard, but I bet you can duck dive with a longboard. Maybe not. I don't know. I wonder about that. But yeah, with the turtle roll, you roll underneath the board and then pull the nose down, right? Yeah. That's the turtle roll. Yes. Duct dive sounds easier. Turtle roll sounds more fun. I've never been on a longboard. I should try that. So let's talk about waves, man. That's funny because I'm kind of like, we're finally at a point where I know what I'm talking about. Yeah. The physics of waves. Right? So, yeah, you can't surf without waves. And if you really want to surf, man, you have to understand what you're dealing with, like what you're riding. If you're going to shred a half pipe, you better understand the physics of wood. Right. So if you're going to hit the Bonsai Pipeline, by the way, we were talking about duck diving and all that for these huge mavericks, like near San Francisco at Princeton by the sea, the Bonsai Pipeline, most of these dudes and ladies are being towed by, like, a jet ski, right? Because they're just too big. You can't be like, see that 50 foot wave? I'm just going to duck dive. You will be duck tone fee if that happens, right? Yeah. You get towed out there by, like, a personal watercraft, right. So we're just going to cover what your average west coast surfing waves. Okay. So if you're out to sea and some wind suddenly whips up, you're probably going to see some white cats, right, which is like, basically like froth, just the water being battered around by the wind. But there's also going to be little crests that form. Right. And these crests give the wind a little more service area to work with. And all of a sudden you have what is called a peak. Yes. And this peak starts to travel away from the direction of the wind. Now, we're not talking about just like a nice little breeze or something. We're talking like hurricanes, typically to form a good sized wave. But any wind could conceivably create a wave, right? Yes. So when this peak starts to travel away from the wind, it actually expends a little bit of its energy, and it goes from this kind of choppy wave to this nice rounded thing called the swell. It doesn't look like there's much to it. The reason it doesn't look like there's much to it is because it's actually really deep at that point. Right. So you get a bunch of these swells lined up as they get closer and closer to shore, and they start to make contact with land at the bottom. The ones in front started to slow a little bit. The ones in back start to catch up, and sometimes they combine into large swells, right? That's right. They get together, essentially going in the same direction, and say, hey, come on, let's make a big wave. Right. And it's called constructive interference as far as wave physics goes, right? Yeah. What's cool is if you look at a wave from the side, it looks like just like what's called a transverse wave, like something like you're looking at an EEG or something, the wave length the trough and the crest are up and down, but they're moving from left to right or whatever. Left to right. Yeah. But really what a wave is doing is actually an orbital wave where all of this motion is actually making a circle as it moves along. Right. These are the molecules, actually. Yeah. But you can make an animation where you could trace the movement of the waves, and it'd be like this is kind of a big circle that goes from the back of the wave to the crest into the trough and then back down again. Right. So that's a wave. And as it gets closer to the shore, it starts to slow down. And when it hits land, the force of land or the immovability of land and the force of the wave combined to push the wave upward above the water surface. Yeah. And then the front of the wave starts to slow before the back of the wave, which means you have a wave breaking because the back crashes over the front. And if you have a really steep bit of land, you're going to have a really steep crash. It's going to form a barrel or a hollow wave. If the slope of the land that the wave runs into, the swell runs into, is a little more gradual, you're going to have what's called a crumbling wave that just kind of breaks slowly in a kind of a nice, gentle pattern. Yeah. It's what happens when water meets land. So if you've ever seen a wave 100ft out in the ocean, it means that there's some sort of shallow reef right there making that happen. Yeah. Because the wave is about 1.6 times depth. The height of a wave is right. It's depth is 1.6 times its height. Okay. But if you're riding a six foot wave, which has a lot of power to it, that's still only, what, less than 10ft of water that you're dealing with out there. That's a lot of water. Yeah, it is. But, I mean, that's still pretty shallow, and you can hit the bottom when you're surfing, I think is the point. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the shape of the land under the ocean makes a big difference in what kind of waves you're going to get, obviously. So that's why the surfing really good. Surf spots in the world are few and far between, especially if you're looking for the big giant daddy. There's only a few spots on Earth that you can encounter those. Right. So wind obviously pays a big difference, not just in the formation of the wave, but in how it blows onshore offshore. What you're looking for, ideally, is a gentle offshore wind blowing toward the wave. If it's an onshore wind coming from the ocean toward the beach, it can be a little rougher to deal with as a surfer. Yeah, well, great days with the gentle offshore wind. That's when the surfers hear that on the radio. They get up early and go out there at daybreak. Is that the best time to surf, day break? Well, I mean, there's all different times, but yeah. Or maybe that has something to do, too, with tides. Well, not with people just having to go to work, but I just see people on the PCH all the time, like, super early morning and then in the evenings. That's pretty cool. Yes, but maybe it has something to do with the best waves, too. Yeah. Because surfers will blow off work. Sure. If the best waves are at the Inbra, that's where I'm going. Right. I've seen a summer school and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I'm familiar with surfing. So we were talking about actually had any surfing, did they? Sure, they did. Really? Sure. Really? Summer school definitely had shots, like establishing shots of people surfing. Okay. I don't know if they actually showed any in Fast Times originally high, they're in the Valley. There wasn't many waves. Okay. But Spacoli, of course, was a surfer. Yeah. Big guy. Well, and at the end, that was the great ending. He rescued Mick Jagger from drowning oh, yeah. While surfing. That's right. In the little interview with Stew. And what do you do? Hired Van Halen to play his birthday party or something. TV. I know. He won some sort of competition. Well, the competition was saving Mcjagger's life. No. Yeah. It's like a trophy or something. In the dream sequence, we're talking about the power of waves, right? Yeah. Did you know that a cubic meter a cubic yard, basically a cubic meter of water? That's not much, man. We're talking like this. That weighs a ton. What do you mean, it weighs a ton? It weighs \u00a32200. So if you took a box that big and put water in it, it would weigh \u00a32000? Yes. Really? Yes. At four degrees Celsius. It's very specific, as you remember from the metric episode. Like they calibrate like that. Right. But yes, it weighs a metric ton. A cubic meter of water weighs a metric ton when, like, a gallon of milk just weighs, like, a couple of pounds. I don't know. I looked it up, though. I swear I looked it up, and I actually double looked it up because I thought the same thing seemed like a lot. But, yes, there was a lot of loss. When that comes crashing down on you, it's kind of a thing. And there's different kinds of wipeouts but apparently the worst kind of wipe out, which I think Tracy described as falling off of your surfboard, is called going over the falls. And it's on one of those hollow barrel waves that are just very powerful because they hit land really quick and break really quick. And when you get caught in the lip, that part where it's breaking at the top, it trips you up and basically throws you right in front of the wave at the trough. So you have, like, the full force of the wave just doing this orbital wave right over you. You're like in a washing machine at that point. So falling in, falling off your board, wiping out is one danger. Yeah. We should probably talk about surfing dangers. I want to alert people to these things because they're out there. Have you ever been caught up in a wave like that? Yeah. It's scary, man. But you don't know what way up well and you feel completely helpless. Like, Mother Nature has got me and is throwing me around like a little rag doll and I am completely helpless to do anything about it. Yeah. Do you feel like you're six? It does. No matter how old you are. And if you're six, boy, that's really scary. So rip tides are dangerous. And that's one of the things that is at play there. That is the water returning to the sea. And that retreating water can be a fast moving current to make you really far out to sea before you know it. So they advise you. I've always heard, like, swim perpendicular. No way. Parallel. Always get this confused. To avoid the rip current, swim perpendicular to the shore, away from the shore until you pass out. So that can be kind of scary to pull the rip current. Oh, yeah. You can also hit stuff underwater, like we said. Sure. If a wave is out there, whatever its height is, I think times 1.6, that's how deep the water is. So you can very easily, especially in a heavy wave, get thrown to the bottom. You can get thrown on a coral reef or hit by another board. Yeah. Which brings us to surfing etiquette, because it can be very dangerous to run into people and because really great surf spots are few and far between, that means that there's often a lot of people out there. Yeah. So there's kind of two informal rules of catching a wave of who gets precedent. Right. I guess first one up or first one or closest to the break. Right. That gives you the right of way. Yeah. And everybody else has to get out of your way. They should. And if they don't, what happens to them? Well, if you're in a nicer area, people might say, hey, bra, that's not too cool. Here's how it's done. Right. Or they might just drag you to the beach and kick the crap out of you and break your board. And throw it in the back of your car and put you in that car, that happens. And regardless of what beach experience you have, they're probably going to call you a kook, too. What a kook? That's somebody who doesn't follow surfing etiquette. Really? I bet you'll hear other words, too. Sure, but I'll bet kook's in there. So are we at localism? Yeah, I think so. I wrote an article, Why the Surfers Have Gangs, and it's a thing, and it has been a thing for a long time. I know most people think of surfers as like the Zen spouting, easygoing, philosophical beach dudes, and a lot of them are like that, but a lot of them are not. Surfing has been tied to violence over territory for many years, and that is because, like we said, there are only so many surf spots in the world. And when dudes like you and me get all excited to go try it out, we're taking the limited amount of space and waves that exist for them. That's why I'm going to try in Dubai first. In Dubai, at the Wave Machine, I think if you're taking a class or something, they know to go to a place where you teach classes and everyone else knows don't go anywhere near the classes. Right. So that's a good thing to do. But surf gangs has been around for decades, and localism since the 70s has gotten kind of bad in some areas, and the boogie board is a big reason why. Because all of a sudden, this thing was invented for all these little kids to go out there, and they can ride waves without any experience or technique or skill whatsoever. And they don't know the rules, and they don't care. Right. And their parents don't care as long as they're not in their hair on the beach. So thanks to the boogie board, the violence picked up in the there are well established surf gangs, even though you won't hear them call that. No, they call themselves, like, families. Yeah. The wolf pack in Hawaii on the north shore of Oahu. They're just a family, but they can also be pretty violent. Russell Crowe narrated a documentary called Bra Boys blood Is Thicker Than Water about Australia's. Braw Boys. And they were some tough dudes since the 1960s, some of which have spent time in and out of jail. The Abertons and brothers. In fact, I think one of the Aberts and brothers made the documentary, but if you ask them, they're just protecting their area and something sacred to them. Yeah. Don't be a kook. Don't be a kook. Southern California. I know San Diego has long been noted for localism. Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know that. The Silver Strand locals. The SSL and the Oxnard Shore Locals. Are they're from San Diego? No, those aren't. Okay. The pierpoint rats in the these are just some of the notorious surf gangs. They have run into cops. Some people have been beaten to death in 2007 in La Jolla, a surfer was beaten to death. Hawaiian surfer was killed in a fight in 2008. So this stuff happens. And if you go out to surf, just don't be scared, you know? Like, these people are going to hurt me. But it's definitely cool to try and ingratiate yourself somewhat, right? Bring them maybe, like, some homebased cookies or something out to the lineup, ask questions. There's probably some nice guys to be like, hey, dude, you should probably do this. And steer clear of the red hot chili peppers. Run across them in a lineup. You want to get away because they are bad dudes as far as surf gangs go. Is that a real surf gang? Don't you remember in Point break, what were they? They were like a surf gang. They were like the rival surf gang that were they really in the movie? Yeah. I don't think I knew that. Yeah, that was early on for them. That must have been their formative days. Yeah, definitely. That was in the 80s or early 90s. Was that early ninety s it was maybe like 90, 91. And he directed that was Catherine Bigelow. That was one of her first movies. I didn't know that. Yes. That's a great movie. 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 we should point out tracy points out that surfing, it's pretty cool. Not many sports have spawned a musical genre and a film genre like surfing has. There's not a lot of songs about basketball outside of, I guess, Grandmaster Flash and maybe Run DMC, but people aren't writing songs about football or croquet. Yeah, there's no croquet songs, but if they are, they're from, like, the it's not good. Surf music was a huge thing, though. It still is in a lot of circles. And then, of course, the movie is Point Break what's your favorite? You ever seen Big Wednesday? No. Good movie. Have you seen surf? Nazis must die. I have not. That's a good one. Is it? Is there actually surfing in it? Yeah, there's a lot of fights on surfboards and people shooting one another with Uzis on surfboards. Big Wednesday is a classic. Blue Crush is a more recent one that covers the ladies. Yeah. And Emily loves that movie, by the way. And then there's some great documentaries. The old Endless Summer movie was really great. And then Endless Summer two was not bad. And then there's recently more recently, Stacey Perova made one called Writing Giants, which is awesome. And another one called Step into Liquid, which is really cool, too. Yeah, I think that's like number two or something like that on, like, the best. Really? Surf movies after Endless Summer. Yeah. Well, Endless Summer, that stuff was cool, but that was old school. And today they have the technology to get inside the tube and go underwater. And it's like the footage that gets pretty amazing. It's very neat. Thank you. GoPro. You got anything else? No. Cool. I can't wait for you to try it. That's the next thing in this podcast, is for you to report back of your experience. Okay, I will go. Do I think we can if you spend a day or two, you'll be able to get up and go, I'm surfing. Look at me. I'm frankly in the Net, but I'm surfboard. It's crazy what you're doing, though. You are standing on top of a plank of fiberglass and riding water. It ain't easy. No, I'm sure it's not. And I already can just feel my ankles getting banged up on the surfboard. Do you have good balance? Are you good at stuff like skateboarding? I'm not so bad with balance, surprisingly, for my size, I can stand up on one leg. This balance? Yeah, you'll be okay. You'll be able to surf a little bit. It'll be fun. I'm going to go in there with an attitude suggested by the Surf guide. Have fun. Yeah, it's going to be fun. Yeah. I'm not one of those people that gets all aggravated if I can't do something like that. You don't get aggro, bra? No, man. What's the point? I quit doing it before I got aggravated. Well, that's good. That's very helpful. I'm more quitter than I am aggro. If you want to learn about surfing, and I mean, like, pretty decent amount about surfing, you can type that word into the search bar athowstoughfworks.com and I said search bar. So it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this black museum. Remember we talked about that in the death mask of I still want to go. I was really hoping somebody would write in and be like, I can actually get you in there. No one did. No, but I bet if we really push for it, we could well, let's start pushing. We have lots of fans in the news. All right, guys, just got done listening to your show on Death Mask. Heard you mention the Black Museum and you said they should make a movie about it. I instantly had a flashback of listening to a radio show by the same name when I was a teen, although it was in the early 90s. My local Am radio news station. I would air old radio dramas in the late evening and I would tune in occasionally. One of my favorites was the Black Museum. I went and looked it up. The Black museum was a 1951 radio crime drama based on real life cases from the files of Scotland Yards black Museum. Orson Welles was both host and narrator for stories of horror and mystery. So the show would open with Horse and Wells speaking from London, big Ben Chimes and then the Black Museum repository of death here in the grim stone structure on the Thames, which houses Scotland Yard in a warehouse of homicide where every day objects a woman's shoe, a tiny white box, a quilted robe, all are touched by murder. So that sounds pretty cool. I mean, an Orson Wells, too, like him saying things like that. Really? Sure. Chuck Bryant saying something. It's not going to have the impact of an Orchan wells it's not bad. But what does Chuck so there you go, guys. Maybe someday somebody will make a TV show about it or a movie. And for now, you can go on the Internet and listen to the old episodes. 51 of them can all so that's awesome. Big fan. Looking forward to seeing your TV show soon. That is Dan from San Diego, which I believe means Wales. No, it doesn't. What does San Diego mean? It means Saint Diego. That's right. In Spanish. I would not quote anchorman and ruin this G rated podcast. If you have some, I guess, additional information for something that we've talked about or if you can get us into the Black Museum, we want you to get in touch with us. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comsteffyshno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, or you can hang out with us online at our house stephyshhnau.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstopworks.com. Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. 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 Poolsite, 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 earlier on Amazon Music download the free Amazon Music app and listen today." | ||
How Scabies Work | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-scabies-work | Scabies is a contagious skin disease with a bad reputation. Tune in as Josh and Chuck discuss this itchy condition -- from the mite that causes it to common cures -- in this episode. | Scabies is a contagious skin disease with a bad reputation. Tune in as Josh and Chuck discuss this itchy condition -- from the mite that causes it to common cures -- in this episode. | Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:39:51 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=17, tm_min=39, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=63, tm_isdst=0) | 19970727 | 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, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant. Yes, you can call me Montezuma. Yeah, Chuck's been a tad under the weather. Yes, he's been out green Koolaid, right? Yeah, it's been awful. As most of you may know, we got back from our Guatemala trip, and apparently Montezuma's revenge can strike after you return. Yeah. Because right when you got back in the airport when I got back, I was like, I can't believe I didn't get sick. And then, boom, the next day. Yeah. I was pretty vigilant about maintaining a watertight seal in my mouth when I was showering and being like, a fat smoker. That's more difficult than you'd think when you're washing your face or hair. So yeah, I think that last night out that you declined to go on drinking rum on the rocks. I bet it was the ice in the bar. Dude. Did you drank ice? I did. There's your problem, buddy. Yeah, it was fun. It was worth it. I'd do it again. Jerry had the ice as well, and she's fine. Yeah. All right. Okay, moving on. I'm just going to come out and say it. My friend Mitch Head scabies. I was going to ask you why you picked this, and I knew there was some reason. I was just praying that it wasn't you. It wasn't me? No. Okay. But after reading this, it turns out that the deep, deep shame that Mitch displays whenever he talks about the scabies sure is maybe a bit misplaced. Yes, it is. Not necessarily because he is gross and has poor hygiene or promiscuous. Or promiscuous. He may be those things. I don't know. No, he's not. But it has nothing to do with Scabies. Right. Which sounds gross. They should change the name. If they want to get out of that realm of grossness, they should not call it Scabies. Well, they would have to change the name of the mite. That creates the problem of scabies. The Sarcoptes Scabia. Yeah, that's where it comes from. But I mean, that's such a cool name that they're never going to change Scabies. True. They may call it, like, sex rash. Right, right. Or dirty Rash. Yes. They could call it one of those, but they'll probably stick with Scabies instead. Right? Yes. So my dirty, dirty friend Mitch, it turns out, wasn't so dirty. And he's one of about 300 million people annually who come down with Scabies worldwide. Yeah, a lot more people than you would think. Yeah. Because no one talks about it for reasons that we mentioned. Right. Yeah. I think it's a lot of times. Equated with lice, when you catch Scabies, you can be a very clean person, because the mite, the Sarcophasis Scabby eye, what happens is the female burrows down into the skin and once she's down there, no soap or water is going to do anything. Yeah. You can do your, what do you call it, the steel wool shower. Soap and water. Yes. You can do that until the cows come home and you're still going to have the females under your skin laying eggs. Right. And that's your scabies outbreak, buddy. Boom. So the reason why scabies are so successful at infesting human beings is because once a female scaby enters your skin and digs down and by the way, I strongly recommend going on the site to read this article if not for the first image alone. Yeah, the little model of the scabby. Big full color. Grossness. Yeah. So the female scabby burrows into your skin and begins to lay eggs. And the eggs actually mature. They reach sexual maturity within like 14 days, and so they start doing the same thing. So all it takes is one female scabies mite to create an infestation under your skin. Problem is, you don't really notice for up to a couple of months, usually a couple of weeks after the first one gets into your skin. Yeah. That's where you really get in trouble, because not only can it really be manifesting itself in your own skin, but you can be spreading it to your family. Anyone that's in contact with you, sexual partners, obviously. Right. Yeah. Because it takes prolonged close contact. Right. And that can be through spending the night with somebody. It can be through sharing a towel with somebody, betting you shouldn't be sharing anyway. No, no reason. No. Another one is if you like bar. Let's say I wanted to borrow your one of your nice sweaters or your fancy socks that you wear. Which ones? All your socks are fancy. My Sock Ninja socks? Yeah, sock Ninja socks. You wouldn't have to borrow that because the very magnanimous owner of Sock Ninja sent us both some socks. Sydney that's right. But if we were to share clothing, which we don't do, then I could pick up your scabies sure. And be itching like crazy. Yes. After a couple of weeks. You know the itching is from I do, but I want to hear it. Is a reaction from the mites and their feces. That's really gross, because, I mean, if you're a mite, you got to poop somewhere. And if you're burrowed under somebody's skin, that's where you're going to poop. So, yeah. You have an allergic reaction to that. Yeah. And that's the biggest symptom that you're going to know that you have scabies, is a rash. Big time. Itching right. You're going to have kind of a pimpley like reddish bump area that forms like a larger rat. Right. But each one of those bumps generally represents a mite. Yes. The average adolescent who has scabies has about eleven, and they could be mistaken for other things, like mosquito bites. That's why they're misdiagnosed sometimes, too. You know what the dead giveaway is? For scabies, though. What's that? Well, there's two of them. Sometimes there's a trail along your skin that actually represents the burrow that the female might have dug into you. The r1 dead giveaway. Is that your itching gets worse at night. Yes. Right. Scabies are photophobic. They don't like the light, and so once the sun goes down and the lights go out, they really become most active. So if you have like a little pimpley rash, that itches like crazy. But really itches at night, my friend. You have scabies. Yes. And if it's on your wrist, we should talk about where you can get it anywhere on your body. Right. But for adults, the wrist is most common, and then the elbow, armpit, waist, buttocks, between the fingers, and then the penis and the nipples. Penis scabies have to be the worst cavities of all. Yes, I can't imagine. That's all I have to say. I just can't imagine. Well, kids actually, Chuck, get scabies in slightly different areas. Like you said. Adults, you listed off the adults with kids, it's common in the scalp area. The face, right. Neck, palms, face scavenge, penis Gabies, which is worse. I wouldn't want either face cavities. Obviously people are going to see, so it might cause some embarrassment. I put all of my money on penis scabies being worth. Okay? I'm done with that. Chuck, josh. Crusted scabies, is that where you're going? Yes. Crusted Scabies, aka Norwegian Scabies. Yeah. I wonder where it makes you wonder what the hell is going on with the Norwegian. No, they aren't as common, which is a good thing because it's infinitely more gross, I think. It's very severe and it's identified by thick crusts over the skin. And each of these crusts can contain millions of the mites scaby mites. Right. Remember we said the adolescent, the average adolescent with scabies has about eleven female scaby mites. Right. If you have Norwegian scabies, you have, like you said, millions under your skin, you're in big trouble. You're highly contagious. Sure. But they may not itch. No. And that's one of the reasons why you don't get the scabies rash. From what I took from the article, you get the scabies rash in large part from scratching like from scratching your skin over and over again. Exactly. And you don't get that rash. And one of the reasons why people who get Norwegian scabies don't have that kind of rash and instead get scaly skin is because it infects people in large part who can't itch physically like the paralyzed, the paraplegic. So sad. Can you imagine, though, like, it's not being able to but would you have sensation? That's a good question. Someone will probably write in and tell us. Yeah. So, Chuck, one of the reasons why scabies are so insidious, you might say, is because they spread fairly easily, and because the moment that female scabby starts laying eggs, you are contagious. Right. But you don't know it. Right. Because, like we said, it can take weeks and up to a couple of months for the symptoms of first appear. But the whole time you're being invested and invested and invested. Right. But you're still contagious and it spreads fairly easily. So places where people live in close quarters, prisons, nursing homes, institutions for the criminally insane, shutter island. Right. They can have scabies outbreaks fairly easily. Yeah, I would think so. What happens if you suddenly have a pimple rash on your penis that starts to itch really badly at night? Well, after you shriek in terrifying pain and shock and horror, you should go to a doctor, obviously. First things first. And the doctor will most likely prescribe a scaveny, prescription strength scavicide. And this is usually topical. It will be like a lotion. Let's say you have to put all of your body lay around for like six or 8 hours with this lotion on your body and hopefully that will clear it up. Yeah. The mosaic just readily prescribed. Gave a side is called Elmite or Elimite. Very clever. Most farmers companies. There's another one called Lindane. Okay. And both of those are pharmaceutical topical Scabicides. Right. And both of them you have to leave on for hours, usually overnight. And then when you wake up, you wash it off. And usually both are effective after one treatment. The horrible thing about scabies is the itching can continue for a couple of weeks after. So you're still freaked out like it didn't work. It didn't work. Right. So you really have to kind of white knuckle it after you cover yourself with your stuff and kind of hope that it worked. Well, you can do stuff about the itching too, though. And we should point out that, like calamine lotion and these things that you would get for poison ivy or something that will help the itch, but that doesn't do anything to eradicate the scabies. No, you need to want to punch it. Same with cool baths that's prescribed to help alleviate the horrible itching. But yeah, it's not going to do anything to eliminate the scavenge. Right. So you've got a couple of pharmaceutical options. What's more, since it is very easy to spread, you shouldn't be the only one with the linda or eliminate. All of your family members do the same treatment. Your bedding should be doused in gasoline and set on fire. No, not true. At the very least, it has to be washed on the hottest settings. Yes. Sanitized. We have a sanitized setting that we use quite a bit at our house. No, not for scabies kills, anything. We have animals, they'll pee on something. So we'll wash it on you. Yeah. And you can also take it to a dry cleaner. And when I read that line in this article, I started to think, yeah, that's true. Dry cleaners actually have fairly dangerous jobs. Like the stuff that gets brought to them. Yeah. If you're bringing your scavey's infected clothes, scavenge infested clothes to your dry cleaner. What else is some other guy bringing to them? I know. Wow. Yeah. I never really thought about that. So you've got your family on lockdown. Everybody is covered in ointment. The bed is on fire in the back. Right. At the very least, it's unsanitized in the laundry. And you realize, you know what? I'm not really the kind to use highly toxic pharmaceutical ointments. Right. What options does a person like me have? Josh? There are a couple of options. There is something called the Neem tree, native to India, and extract. It's a paste made from extract from that tree. And in studies, and this isn't just little offshocks home remedy, they actually done studies and found that it's 97% effective and it's not toxic. So that's a good option. Yeah. A little closer to home. Tea tree oil. Yeah. Well, that's the one as well. We have that in our house. We use that a lot. That's a great antifungal. Antibiotic. Antibacterial. It's good for a lot of stuff. Right. But if you're going to use it in some sort of ointment, you want to dilute. Dilute, as adherence to Dr. Bronner are familiar with, because it will burn your skin. Yeah, you want to be really careful with that. Actually, the stuff we use I didn't think was too diluted. It's strong. Right? You want to dilute it yourself? Well, we don't. Do you rub it on your skin, like, in large portions? Not large portions. Like, I'll have, like, a pimple, and Emily will put, like, some tea tree on it and try it out or something. So just like a little dabble. Do you, as they say, nice. You can also use sulfur. Yeah, I saw that. Sulfur Ointment, that's good for treating kids if you want to slather your kids into toxic chemicals. Another study found that the sulfur Ointment was just as effective in treating children with scabies as the prescribed Ointments. Right. So it does work, but yeah, most of the other folk remedies out there aren't going to do anything but alleviate itching. Right. Well, which is good, though. Oh, yeah, you want that, too. But you also want to get rid of the scabies infestation. So, Chuck Josh, true or false scabies strikes all races indiscriminately. True. False. Really? For some reason that no one knows yet, african Americans are not nearly as susceptible to scabies as everybody else. Well, good for them. Isn't that cool? So that's one less thing to worry about. Oh, that's good. Chuck, true or false triggers and scabies are the same thing. False. That's right. Chiggers are different. Well, no, they don't burrow under the skin. That is a false that people think they do. They actually feed on top of the skin. But they do dig into the skin, inject you with something to kill your tissue. And necrotic enzyme. And necrotic enzyme, yeah. Basically, they vomit that on your skin to kill the tissue and then they feed on that tissue. Right. And everyone's had chickens. If you've been, like, to the beach. I don't know that I have before. Yeah, you probably have. If you've been, like, camping in the woods, you probably had chicks. Yeah, well, they got a bitch and feeding process. Yeah. It's gross. And it's, like, crazy, too, how many people out there are scratching right now. Did you notice that when you're reading the article? Did you? Itch a little bit I'm itching right now. Yeah, it's like the contagious yawning one, right? Yeah. Contagious itching and then chuck, true or false? False. Right. Good going, man. Did you have one? Yeah. Scabies means you're a dirty person. Oh, false. Yeah, of course not. Okay. Doesn't mean you're promiscuous. No, Mitch. Although they do point out that intercourse is a common way because that means prolonged physical contact. Well put, Chuck. Yes. Very tidy. Thank you. Also, it means in a lot of cases, if you're not just some jerk, that you are sharing the bed together, too. And bedding, as we've seen, is one way that you can get scabies. And maybe sharing a towel, maybe. So if it's like a sexy next morning as well, or if you're a very clean person yeah. Afterward. So that's scabies, I guess, right? Yeah. When was this he's going to murder me, by the way, for this? Was this recently? No, it was a while ago. Then he's all good. Yeah, he's fine now. Did he get escape aside? I'm sure he did. Yeah. He's a clean guy. Right. He's not dirty in any other way either. Good. As far as I know. Does he know where he caught it? No, he won't admit to knowing where he caught. We're going to get emails from people that are going to say, you know what? I had scabies, and don't tell anyone, but I hope Chuck through this, we've gotten the point across that if you've had scabies, don't be ashamed. If you know somebody who has had scabies, it's not that big of a deal. Go see a doctor, because that's one reason it can get worse. Because you're so ashamed, you'll try to knock it out at home without going to get the scavenied. So just suck it up. Doctors have seen it all. They definitely have one in a million shots. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, if you have more questions about scabies or you want to see a truly, truly cool picture, type in Scabies in the handy search bar. HowStuffWorks.com. Since I just said that everybody you know, it means it's time for listener mail. Yes, it is, Josh, and before I read this, I do want to say quickly so the emails will stop. We have been schooled and we know now that Amish people love their walmart. Yeah, everybody knows that. We didn't know that. Apparently, in theory check. There's no amish in Georgia. In theory, the Amish want to support the mom and pop that is within their mindset. But apparently they dig the walmart because hundreds of people have written in and apparently in Lancaster, we've also corrected on how to pronounce that they have buggy sheds at the walmart in the shade where they can tie up their buggies. Really? The horses can relax. That's nice for the horses. And they said that they're in there with the digital cameras, like, looking at them. Have you seen the moose playing in the sprinkler? Is that code for something? No. It's so cute. Go on YouTube and type baby moose playing in sprinkler or something like that. I have to see that somebody in the backyard just has their sprinkler out and these two baby moose are running through. It's really cute. It's crazy. All right. On the listener mail. This is from Stephanie in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Yes. Not Ottawa, Canada. Hi, Josh. And Chuck and Jerry. I'm a regular listener of your awesome podcast, and I just finished listening to the podcast on braille. I am totally blind and have been using braille since the age of four. Awesome. I thought you made a lot of good points and asked some really interesting questions. To answer one of those questions, braille you generally see in public places, that is, bathrooms, ATM machines, et cetera, is contracted or grade two braille. At least here it is in Canada. In English, braille, there are no contractions for numbers, so they could be read by a user of any system. Despite the fact that grade two braille is more commonly seen, I think it is good to begin with grade one braille, especially for children, as it ensures that they will have the ability to spell later on. When using contracted braille, you don't spell out words full length. You wouldn't learn how they were spelled if it weren't for grade one braille. Another thing I thought was interesting was the lack of braille on the currency in the US. Yeah, here in Canada, there is actually a braille system on the currency. We don't have the numbers, but a different number of full braille sales on each bill. So, for example, the five has one full sales, the ten has two, etc, etc. I have noticed, however, that despite the effort, the braille eventually becomes faded and unreadable. So braille currency is a good idea in theory, but it only works in the short term and blind people are back to folding bills before too long. So thanks for the interesting insight. I look forward to listing the more. And that's from Stephanie. Thanks, Stephanie. Insight from a blind person. Yeah, we're weighing in on the grade one or two or both debate. Absolutely. If you have an exciting email for us about anything at all I can't think of anything right now. Right, Chuck? Can you anything itchy? That's a good one. If you have an email for us about anything, itchy why don't you wrap it up and shoot it over to stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Want more housestuffworks? Check out our blog on the housetofworks.com homepage 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. 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." | ||
2a8a8584-3b0f-11eb-a672-b3865297e593 | Littering: Not Cool | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/littering-not-cool | The history of litter is in lock step with the history of disposable packaging. Learn all about this nasty habit today.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | The history of litter is in lock step with the history of disposable packaging. Learn all about this nasty habit today.
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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. | Thu, 10 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=41, tm_isdst=0) | 51162872 | 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 a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here. This is stuff you should know. You were headed right towards something brilliant, so you stop yourself. Yes. I didn't have anything, so I just let it die right there on the still in front of everybody. Hey, before we get going, we want to plug a couple of podcasts from our colleagues. Yes, I had a hand in both of these. Nice. Congrats. Sure. I think it's probably the last thing I'll have a hand in ever. Why is that? Are you dying? No. I mean, we're all dying. Nothing imminent, but I don't know. The door doesn't often knock for voice acting, although you never can tell. But I did a piece of voice acting for Lethal Lit season two premiere. If you don't know what lethal lit is, technically, it's called Lethal Lit colon a Tig Taurus Mystery, season two, and it just debuted yesterday. Season two did, but it's great. It's like a sort of an old school Nancy Drew detective, teen detective type of thing, but modernized. It's got a little more punch, but it's still family friendly. Little more punches seen, a little more bite with the emphasis on the middle. It's really great. Yeah. So it's the kind of thing, from what I understand, that adults can enjoy, but it's also geared towards younger listeners too, right? Yeah. I mean, they say it's like Nancy Drew for Scream fans. Oh, cool. But the people who make it are awesome. And Heather Einhorn created it a couple of years ago when I was still doing, like, development stuff. I met with her and she rang me up a couple of years later and said, hey, how about doing a piece of voice acting for the season premiere, season two? And I did, and it was so much fun. I got to really get a juicy character acting type of thing. I can't wait to hear it, Chuck. I'm not just playing me. That's great. Even when you played you, I thought you did a good job. You're a much better actor than you give yourself credit for. This was a lot of fun, though. I wish I could do more of this kind of stuff, but I don't, like, pursue it. But anyway, it was a lot of fun. So you can hear me in season episode one of season two, which is out now on the Iheart network. And then our buddy Joe Rendazzo has a new show that's out. Tell him the name. Doctor Sex. Reese. It is not family friendly. No. You could have just said Joe Randazzo and that would have gotten that across. Not family guy. He is one of the great comedic geniuses of our time. But he's not family friendly. No. No. So it's blue comedy. It's very funny, but you don't want your kids listening. But it is about a Collins show. He's a sex therapist who has never had intercourse and that's kind of all you need to say. And it's Joe. Yeah, it's great. I mean, you have me at Joe Randazzo. Yeah. And that's out now, too, right? It's already out. And I don't think I ever mentioned in lieu of listener mail one week I was going to mention it, but I forgot. Remember when I said I wasn't very into Calvin and Hobbes? Like I never read it. He left me a voicemail driving with his three children where they sounded like a fire torch wielding angry mob, screaming at me about not getting into Calvin and Hobbes. I told you I'm going to share it with you. It's very funny. Like his kids sounds like it's like Lord of the Flies level upset. His kids aren't family friendly either. Chuck really funny. But anyway, Doctor Sexaries is already out and then Lethal, a tig tourist mystery season two, dropped yesterday. Well, congratulations to everybody. Congratulations. I think most of all to you, though, for appearing on Lethal lit. It was fun. I wish I could voice act a lot. I have a feeling you're going to get a lot more requests starting now. We'll see people be like, who was that guy? I'm not going to reveal anything about it. Okay. I did a very small part on Squid Billies a few years ago. It was never released with me. Yeah, that's like our kiss of death. When you have us on your talk show, it gets canceled within a month. No, it wasn't canceled. I think our friend Dave Willis replaced me. I don't think I was very good in that one. At least he did it quietly. I never followed up with him. I should have asked, but I was ready to go in there and do some good, like Redneck voice because I do some good ones. And he said he's like, no, I just want you to just kind of be you. And I'm like, oh, Dave. He just gave me a soda pop and sent me on my way. Right? Oh, you got a free soda pop. We love Dave and Squid billy So no shade there. Okay, so welcome to the podcast for everybody who just fast forwarded through all that and got to the part where we started about littering. How about that? Yeah. And this one was one of my picks. And I very simply thought of it recently because I was driving down the road in 2022 and saw a fully grown adult human throw a bag of trash out their window, followed by a cup of fast food soda filled with dip spit. So two different throws out of the car, and I just thought, My God, who does that? And let's see if we can find out. And you ran him off the road? No, I was just so upset that it's just so weird to see. I want to do now. I'm really working on not letting things trigger or flood me, starting in my 45th year, finally. Yeah. And I'm very curious how well I would deal with actually seeing that. I'm doing okay hearing about it right now. I'm a little jazzed right now, but I got it under control. Actually seeing it, I don't know how well I could contain myself. I was ticked off, but I try to let things go quicker so it's not like hours later, I was still like, oh, that guy, that's good. Because you know what? You can't change that guy. No, you can't. You can just run them off the road. Yeah. Or find them if you're a government. Sure. I mean, if you had tried to find him, he probably would have laughed in your face. Although, I'm saying he it's just as possible. It turns out, Chuck, at least if this had happened in 2009, that it could have been she, too, huh? Yeah. Statistically speaking, that is true. But I saw this guy's ugly face. I'll bet he was so ugly and stupid. I'll bet his whole family was so stupid. I've been so mad if he was handsome. Handsome. Smart people don't litter, typically. Unless they're don draper. I wouldn't know. All right, let's do this litter, right? Yeah. I think it was a good pick. One of the things that I love about this episode is it's kind of mind bending. One of those Bernasian surprises is wedged firmly inside this episode's topic. I'm sure I know what you mean. Oh, sure I do. Okay. I was like, oh, God, that's like, four pages of this stuff. No, I know what you mean. I forgot who Bernard was. I was thinking about the sauce. You're like it? Sounds good, but confusing. Should we start with the word yes? I thought that was a good place. Also, shout out to Dave Ruse for helping us out with this, as always. As ever. Sure. So the word litter with one T came from Old French and Middle English meant a bed with two TS. It was like a portable bed that if you were, like, a king or somebody, you could travel around on one of these. And I guess that's where a rescue litter comes from. Exactly. Okay. Because I've always thought that was such a weird word for it. It is very weird. It doesn't really make any sense, but the use of the word bed for litter makes much more sense because it comes from our friends down on the farm, our farmer friend. Yeah. You're talking about scattering hay. Yeah. Like, if you scatter hay for an animal to sleep on, particularly like livestock or something like that, you would call that their litter. And there you have it. That's where it comes from. Like littering food out of your car derived initially from being a kind farmer and scattering hay for your little goat. Yeah, because along the way, somebody equated, like, scattering stuff on the ground that you wouldn't normally want on the ground with people throwing their trash on the ground. So litter became used as litter. What surprised me is that this started way back in the 18th century. I would have thought it was a much more recent phenomenon, but no, it isn't. Yes, they found something from a novel in 1788 that referenced the word litter as litter. If she is cutting a piece of gauze or paper, she's sure to make a litter all over the room. Yeah. So like a mess. It was a literary reference to litter. So that's where the word litter came from. I like the stories or the etymologies where there's some really great theories because nobody quite knows, but I find those less satisfying than the ones where it's like, here it is. Here's your answer. Fishbowl. Yeah. Littering was not as big of a deal here in the United States and I imagine in other parts of the world, but we're talking mainly about the US. With these stats. But until the because we were generally a culture of reusing things and there were not nearly as many disposable things. A lot of glass and, you know, Emily talks about her grandparents in middle Ohio in the 1940s and fifties, and they reused a lot of stuff. And it wasn't like because of the green movement. It was just like people reuse stuff. Things cost money, and if you weren't, like, wealthy, you reuse things. Yeah, I mean, that was even if you were wealthy, you typically reuse things. Like if you got milk, you would leave your empty milk bottles out and the milkman would come along and replace the empty bottles with filled up bottles and it would take those other bottles, clean them and reuse them. That was just how you got milk. Whether you were wealthy or poverty stricken, it didn't matter. And that was just the way that society was up until the post World War II economic boom. Where thanks to a lot of technology that we developed during the war. All of a sudden we had packaging that we could produce really cheaply and really efficiently and no way to make a bunch of money off of them. Off of it until some enterprising. I guess. Beverage companies and disposable packaging companies got together and said. We've got to figure this out because there's a lot of money being lost by this deeply inefficient reused economy that we've got. Yeah, and I know I've mentioned this once before, but I'm just 50 years old, and we could get milk in the store, but we also occasionally would go to a dairy nearby and bring milk bottles. It wasn't the milkman coming to your house, but we would go to a dairy and pull up and get our milk exchanged. And the other relic from the 70s that you probably remember, too, that younger listeners might be shocked to hear is the Charles chips, dude. Oh, that canister chips. Yeah, you would get potato chips, charles chips delivered, and you would give them your big metal tin full of potato chips. And it wasn't like, oh, it was a tin with a bunch of bags of little chips. No, it was full of potato chips. And you would get your potato chip delivery. It's crazy to think about that. We never had that. I remember the schwann delivery person, and then prior to if you want to bottle water, it meant that somebody showed up at your house with, like, a five or ten gallon jug of water and you had a little water dispenser that was bottled water before, and those were all reusable. Yeah, we'll probably speak ill of single use plastic bottles of water. Well, I think you should. I think any sensible person sees the disposable packaging that really kind of drives a lot of our economy, and a lot of the products that we buy is really problematic. And litter is just one aspect of it, but it's a pretty big aspect of it. But I think what we're saying here in total, to begin, is that litter is actually a fairly recent phenomenon starting in maybe the dave also points out that not only were we reusing things and just not having as many disposable items, but there weren't trash cans all over the place back then either, like there are now. And there weren't signs that say, hey, it's weird to throw stuff just on the ground when you leave. And he did reference that madman episode, which is very funny. I remember when it happened. The drapers were on a picnic and they got up afterward and Don threw his beer bottle in the woods, and Betty shook the litter off the blanket onto the grass in the park, and then they got in their car it's hysterical. And just leave it there. Yeah. The one that always gets me is the anchorman thing where they're all eating McDonald's and walking and they just all throw their trash. Yeah, there was a time when that was I don't know if it was ever acceptable, but it was certainly not. It is now. As far as you were shunned, not frowned upon, but it didn't take very long for people to say, this is objectively ugly. Like, even if you're not taking the environment into account, which they certainly weren't at first, but in like the there were still people that were like, this looks terrible. And there are even like farmers apparently in Vermont were complaining that people are just throwing their glass bottles out the window because, by the way, even though you could still reuse some of the stuff, the companies producing these goods that were in disposable packaging, they are encouraging people to just throw this away. Like there was what's the name of that podcast? Or that NPR show through line. They did a really great episode on what we're talking about here, the development of teaching people to throw stuff away. There were actual, like, ads and commercials and PSAs that taught people like, okay, when you're done with this, just throw it away. You don't have to figure out a way to reuse it or wash it out or you can just throw it away. And people had to be taught that, which kind of goes to show how unnatural the whole thing is. But my point is that even at the time, Chuck, there were people who had problems with littering from the outset, even if it wasn't like a massive thing at that point, like a society wide issue. Yeah. And God bless Vermonters. You mentioned the farmers there with a broken glass for their cows. But they sponsored and got past the first, what would be known as bottle bills when in 1000, 953, they banned throwaway bottles. And this is where the writing was on the wall for the beverage industry in particular was like, oh, Vermont, they're a bunch of hippies. Sure. But we can't let this catch on and get our product banned. We'll be in big trouble. And I guess we'll take a break, maybe, because that's a great cliffhanger sure. And dive into our Bernasian nightmare. Right? Let's do it. All right. We'll be right back. 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. Are you looking for an escape or a relaxing getaway or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building? Or you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a MILKSTAKE flaming flamer's chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquilium house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis as an investment opportunity? Would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling who's? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only burgers in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway hulu. Check into your obsession. Hulu subscription Required terms apply visit hulu.com for plan details 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 we're entering that Bernasian nightmare now, Chuck. It's like a giant Goya painting of corporate interests. This one's tricky because it is a Bernasian nightmare, and we're talking about the creation of Keep America Beautiful. Yeah, I have very mixed feelings because the whole thing with Keep America Beautiful is a lot of big beverage companies got together dixie cup, CocaCola Owens, illinois Glass Company, american Can Company. And they said, all right, we got to fight these bottle bills. And the way we're going to do it is through a PR spin to tell everybody that it's their responsibility to not litter. And in a way, it's sort of an evil plan, but in another way, I'm like, yeah, you should be individually responsible to not do that. Right. But then also, beverage companies also have a responsibility that they completely shirt. So I get it, but I also think people have a personal responsibility. You know what I mean? I think that's a very sensible way of looking at it, because I agree with it fully. Okay. Yes. There's nothing wrong with them coming up with Keep America Beautiful and teaching people to not litter. And then in conjunction with that, actually putting those garbage cans out and putting, you know, creating, like, a public service campaign that taught people, like, don't be a litter bug. If you litter, you're unpatriotic. They basically use every angle they could think of. The problem with it that everybody has an issue with when you find out about this is that it was the motivation, the intent behind it. It wasn't to beautify America. It was to keep the train, this disposable packaging train going. Right. Like, hey, everybody, stop throwing the stuff on the ground or else we're not going to be able to make this anymore. But even more than that, they'd they took the spotlight off of the question, why is there so much disposable packaging to begin with? Why don't we go back to reusable stuff that was working? And these companies are like, no, we are making 50 times more money with this disposable stuff because you guys are buying way more. And then it put the spotlight onto the individual person. It said it's your responsibility. Stop asking about disposable packaging and just start focusing on your civic duty to not litter. Yes, and you sent me an article that had an interesting bit, and we'll cover some more stuff in this time period. But by the early 70s, some more of these bottle bills were happening, and they weren't so much banning things, but it was like, hey, let's incentivize people to come back and turn in their knee high grape bottle for $0.05, which I also remember doing when I was a kid. Me, too. Me too. And in 1974, California was considering a bottle bill and cap. America Beautiful was like, whoa, this is big time. Because that's a huge economy out there. And they actually publicly opposed the measure for the first time. And there was a leaked story about the chairman of the American Can Company, william F. May, called bottlebill supporters Communists. Yes. And this is when the EPA pulled out and a bunch of environmental groups pulled out of Keep America Beautiful. And we're like, oh, the light was kind of shining on them for the first time. Yes. These guys aren't really environmentally conscious. This is strictly green washing for them. It was the first green washing attempt. And it was super successful, too. Yeah. They spent $14 million over a five year span in the early ninety s to defeat a national bottle bill. So Keep America Beautiful does some great work, but you got to know what goes on behind the stuff. That's absolutely true. And that's good that they are doing good work, because they are basically the sole source for data about littering in America. At the very least, they're the most robust source. But as Dave puts it, it's bankrolled by corporate interests. But the people conducting these studies are actually like environmental engineers, and they're disinterested bodies insofar as they're still scientists, although they're being paid like they're not cooking the books. No, I'm just writhing right here. I just want this to be clear. Like? Should I hate keep America beautiful or not? Right. But I don't, because they have had a huge effect on littering demonstrably, a big effect on reducing littering and teaching people not to litter. It's just, again, for their bottom line. So that's the problem. Right. And they are still the number one largest anti litter organization on planet Earth. So there's something to be said for that. And they've had many ways to get their message out there over the years. I think their first little mascot was Susan Spotless, who shamed litter bugs early on. And then I don't remember what episode, but very on and stuff early on and stuff you should know. We talked about what it was known at the time, the Crying Indian PSA. Do you remember why we would have talked about that? I don't. Eleven years ago. I cannot. I have no idea why that would have come up. Well, what was the deal with that? It was sort of fake on many fronts. Right? It was. I mean, one of the big things was that Ironized Cody, who was known for a while as America's favorite Indian, was not Native American by any way, shape or form. He was actually a Sicilian American actor. That's a big one that people definitely at the time didn't know. And that was problematic. Not just because this guy was Sicilian, but that also the Native American that was being used in this ad. The very image of the Native American was just totally co opted by this corporate group to, again, shame you into not littering for you to feel bad. Not them to feel bad, for you to feel bad for littering. And also, the other thing that I thought that was a big critique of it is that if you'll notice the Native American ironised Cody or the character doesn't speak, he's spoken for by a narrator and so he stands mute, which I saw as a testament to his powerlessness. Yeah. I mean, if you don't know what we mean, you can find it on YouTube still. It was a minute long commercial where it showed this Native American in full sort of traditional garb paddling a traditional Native American canoe through what looked like the Kaioga River in Ohio. I know it wasn't there, but it couldn't have been any more industrial with this sort of war chant kind of music playing in the background. It was kind of wrong in many levels through today's lens. But he's getting more sad as he sees how poorly the water is treated in the shoreline. And then he finally gets out and a bag of fast food is tossed from a car and explodes at his feet with seemingly an entire order for a family of five of fast food. It's so much food. It's like there's no one eat anything out of that single tier. Once you see his face yeah. They pan up and his face is there and he's crying. Which may have been fake as well. Right? Yeah. I think it was a glycerin concoction. Yeah. So yeah. What's not great in today's view was, like, award winning and groundbreaking back in 1971 when the ad came out. And it had an effect. It had a huge effect. The ad council who helped produce that PSA apparently had to send out replacement reels because the original ones were getting worn out because they're being played so often. As the long standing anecdote goes, it rained forever, too. Yeah. I can't remember last time I saw it, but I definitely saw it on TV at some point as a cognizant person. Right. So it was created in 71, and I remember seeing it throughout the 1970s. And if you're like, Was it really effective? Stop and ask yourself if you feel guilty at the thought of littering or the act of littering itself. And if your answer is yes, it's because the Keep America Beautiful group did a really good job putting the personal responsibility of not littering onto us. Yeah. Which, again, it does make sense. It's just a shame it couldn't have been sort of a hand in hand type of approach. Right. The Park Service also got into it, too, Chuck, with Woodsy the owl. Did you see that clip I sent you? That ad? Yes. I used to love woodsy. Sure. How could you not give a hoot? Don't pollute. Yes. I got a Woodsy sign at my camp. That's cute. Yeah. I like the 70s version. Have you seen the updated version? I don't think so. He's kind of buff. He looks like he could beat you up. He's almost, like, buff in the way that Ned Flanders is buff. Like a wholesome buffness. That strangely menacing. Weird. A buff owl. Yeah, great point. The other thing that Keep America Beautiful was successful at was lobbying for litter laws. And so now there are all kinds of fines for both littering and the most reprehensible kind of littering, which is dumping. One of my favorite bands of all time, Granddaddy, has a song called Broken Household appliance National Forest, where Jason Lightl is a big outdoorsy guy and their lyrics are about a forest just littered with appliances and animals living in them. And it's not like it's Monishing tongue in cheek, but he's sort of like, it's got a nice home for a bunny inside of an oven door and that kind of thing. But dumping is just there's a spot in my neighborhood where people will still dump stuff, you know, it's like if you find a spot of woods with a creek, like you might find a couch in there one day, it's awful, right, that's dumping either, like, \u00a3500 is usually the standard, or a certain size, like so many cubic feet or something like that. But it's like trash plus, basically. And that's the ones where you can get a really big fine or even jail time. I think in Tennessee, you can get up to six years for dumping. Good. And in most states, if you dump for commercial purposes, like you're a junk hauler and you go dump in the woods, no matter how much or how little you dump, you can get jail time for that in a pretty stiff fine. I think in Maryland, it's like $30,000. And of course, it should be that way. The problem is, I think the fine for littering is either not enough to deter people who do litter still or it's unevenly applied, apparently. Like Jaywalking, remember we talked about in the Short Stuff episode that. Jaywalking tickets are not distributed equally among the races in America. Yeah. Same deal with littering, right? Yeah, same thing. So they can take your driver's license. If you litter from a car in certain states, you can have your vehicle taken away. I think that's only for dumping, not like throwing your fast food out the window. No, but they should take your car. Yeah. I mean, I guess if you drove your car to the woods and had \u00a3500 of McDonald's packaging in your car, they could take your car. We do have a lot of statistics, though, and Dave gave us statistics from two years, 2009 and then 2020, and we'll explain why in a second. But in 2009, their big study said that there were 51.2 billion pieces of litter along America's roadways alone just on the side of the road. That's more than 6700 pieces of litter per mile, and 90% of that was less than four inches. And I think 38% of that is cigarette stuff. Cigarette packs, cigarette butts. Yeah. Old dip cans. I think lighters falls under that tobacco product category. So tobacco products are far and away the most littered thing, but cigarette butts are far and away the most littered part of tobacco products, too. Yeah. And I think cigarette butts are the last hold out for people who ordinarily wouldn't litter. That justify it. Like, I will see cigarette butts flying out of a car with an environmental license plate. I've seen it, and I'm just like, what is going on here, green daddy would be so mad at you. I think people justify it. Well, a lot of cars don't even have ashtrays anymore. Like, I think you have to request one. And people don't want them stinking up their car, so they'll just throw them outside. It's true. It is true. There's just no way around it. I can't tell you how many cigarette butts I lived in my lifetime. You had major pen out, though, my friend. You have paid your penance. I probably threw fast food out the window when I was 14. It's shameful we're more involved. Well, thanks for letting me off the hook. I feel great now. You're like, you fast food trash up, you monster. In what year? I can throw out hundreds of thousands of cigarette buttes. We'll talk more about the negative effect of tobacco products, but the other year, Dave sentence was 2020, and it said, oh, look, things have decreased by 54% from 2009, and cigarette butts even dropped from 18 billion to 5.7 billion. I believe that. Well, a lot of people, not as many people smoke, so that makes sense. But it was also during the pandemic, like, the height of the pandemic. Right. And nobody was driving. So I don't even know why they did a study that year unless they wanted to sort of shine the metal on their chest. That's what I think. So because you'd have to be silly to conduct a study like that and not think like, oh, these results are going to be skewed. Everybody in the middle of 2020 knew any data that came out of 2020 was going to be unusual. Okay, let's get out there and count from scratch. Exactly. Let's show everybody that this disposable packaging thing is not a problem anymore because I hear them getting mad about it again. I wonder how they do that. Do they discount a certain number of miles in different places and then extrapolate it? So I know in the 2009 methodology, I believe they used the same one for 2020, but they selected 240 different roadway segments. Okay. They did 300ft by 15ft segments. So basically, right along the shoulder of the road for quite a ways, 240 of those in different parts of the country. And they literally counted every piece of trash, and they divided them up into two sizes, four inches and bigger, and then less than four inches. And again, in any category overall, cigarette butts were far and away the most. But if you then go take it down to the four inch or less category, it's like all cigarette butts, basically. But that's how they did it. And then they did the math and extrapolated to the amount of roadway in the United States, and that's where they came up with those numbers. So any stretch of road that you're driving down in America on each side has probably about 67, 6800 pieces of trash just sitting there. I mean, I know you already said it, but I think it bears repeating. Great. If we wanted to break down percentages more, you have paper litter was about 21.9%. Part of the big problem there is what's called instant litter, which are those dumb free newspapers and flyers that nobody wants. Yeah, but somebody, like, put some effort into laying it out and designing it even. It's just sad for them to a certain extent. But nobody wants it. It's true. I mean, it's a job. Sure. Instant litter, though, that's a good TV character. Or movie characters, like, what do you do for a living? I'm a copywriter for instant litter. Feel great about that. Yeah. That sounds like a character from Reality Bites. Yeah. Plastic is another obviously, big problem. They come in in third at 19%. That's surprising. Yeah. I mean, it was that much or that little. Yeah, I thought that percentage was a little low. I thought it's share would probably be more, wouldn't you? Yeah. Because plastic isn't just a plastic bottle. That's an obvious thing. But any tiny plastic gum wrapper, any little piece of plastic is counted as plastic, obviously. Frito's wrapper. That's plastic. Plastic film. That's not foil. No, it's shiny. Mylar plastic film. Yes. Like a balloon. Exactly. You can blow it up and take it to your kid's birthday and say Happy birthday. Here's a frito balloon chump. Almost 6% metal, about 4.5% glass. And then a 4.2% is organic. Litter, which we should talk about quickly, because a lot of people think I could just throw my apple core and my banana peel out the window and you shouldn't do that. No, this is something that, like, I could have guessed, but I would still once in a while throw like, an apple core or something out like that. Well, do you want to share why we shouldn't do that? Yeah, there's a lot of reasons. One, and this is why I did it, I thought it was quickly and easily biodegradable and compostable and that at the very least, if it wasn't eaten, it just went away pretty quickly. And there was a study done in Grand Canyon National Park where the scientists used to hike around the park, buried, like, an orange peel, a banana peel. What was the other thing? Like a Kleenex, I think. Chewing gum and a Kleenex. And left them for six months and came and dug them back up and nothing there was basically no change. Like, the banana appeal turned like, dark brown or black. That was about it. They had not decomposed at all. So that kind of like, does away with it. And yes, it was in the Grand Canyon, so I'm sure in like, the Florida Everglades, it would probably decompose more. But the point is, it's not decomposing in any really quick manner. And then secondly, Chuck, apparently, if the other thought I had where it's like, well, you know, an animal would love this apple, they don't, and even if they do, they shouldn't really have it anyway. Right, yeah. And just a quick correction, she didn't actually bury it. She left it out in a cage so it was exposed to the elements where animals could get to it. She did both. There was a second part where she buried it. I was setting you up for the first part. Okay, well, the first part is yeah, she left it was an open cage. It's not like they were trapping animals. But I think the point is no animals were eating it, or at least not as much as people thought, but it's not good for them. It teaches them to hang around roadways and near trails and stuff like that, instead of getting their regular, natural, organic diet, like, deep into the woods. Right. And it looks bad that black banana peel is going to be there for a while. Yeah, it's true. One of the other problems with litter that the impact it has on wildlife, there is an estimate that's kind of bandied about all over the place is that about a million animals a year die from litter. I believe in the United States alone, a lot of them are aquatic animals. We talked about like ghost fishing. That definitely would qualify as aquatic litter. But also, like, if you throw a bottle out or something, an animal might crawl in there and it can't get back out. There's a lot of dead animals that you'll find, like, trapped inside a can or a bottle, which is a really direct harm that your litter can leave on wildlife as well. For sure. I think the takeaway here in terms of food is just like just don't throw anything on your walk or out of your car. Nothing. Pack it in, pack it out, and you're all set. You've done everything right. Yeah, it's true. I mean, I'll never throw an apple core, an orange peel, or a banana peel out anymore. And you know what I always say, there is no apple core. Eat the whole thing. I know. Well, then I would throw out my uneaten portion of apple that I could eat if I were crazy. Throw away the stem and the seeds. Maybe a new apple tree will grow in its place. Yeah, I would love to grow an apple tree. I love apples. Should we take Joshua apple seed? Should we take a break? All right, we'll be right back with litter. 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. Are you looking for an escape or a relaxing getaway or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building. Or you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a MILKSTAKE flaming flamer's chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquilium house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis as an investment opportunity? Would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling hoosa? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only murders in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway hulu check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription required terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. 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. The other thing that Keep America Beautiful does is they try and figure out who these people are. They've done phone surveys. In the 1960s, I think 68 in the telephone survey, 50% of Americans said that they littered. 15% said they did in 2009. Take that for what it is. It's a phone survey. And then they also sort of scope out areas near convenience stores and fast food restaurants and city sidewalks, and they just look at behavior. And in 2009, that same study, they found it was close to 10,000 disposal behaviors that they looked at, and 17% of those were litter behaviors. And 81% of those litter behaviors were on purpose. Yeah, they call them notable intent. Like, I'm throwing it out the window. It's not something that flew out of my car by accident. Exactly. The way that they came up with notable intent was was there like a garbage can and easy access or was there like an ash can and easy access that was visible and the people saw it and just didn't use it anyway? A significant portion of people who litter just litter. They just do it anyway, even though there's plenty of trash cans or ash cans right there. And then the other percentage, the other 15% of people who littered did it in the context of their not being a trash can nearby or slightly less acceptable that there was one, but it was really far away. It was all the way over there. Well, and the other one, too, is what fell into context. And this is something it fell into context. And this is something you sent some other stuff about people more likely to litter when they see other litter. Yeah, like, this place is dirty. Anyway, there's people that study this stuff, the psychology of littering. That study I found was, I think, from 1990, if I'm not mistaken, and these social psychologists, celdini Reno and Cal Grin, they basically set people up by taking them to a parking deck. And the parking deck was either heavily littered or it was spotless, right? So those are two variables. And then in each instance, the people saw somebody litter one of those instant litter flyers in either a heavily littered parking deck or a non littered parking deck. And then they were sent back to their car, and their car had that same flyer, right? And so they would see whether the people would litter based on having seen somebody else do it, and then whether it was a clean place or a heavily littered place. And they found that seeing somebody litter in a heavily littered place made them much likelier to litter. But that the people. This is I think the most interesting thing, people who saw this person litter in a clean parking deck were far less likely to litter. They were the least likely to litter. So, like, seeing somebody else violate this social norm strengthens an individual sense of responsibility to not violate that norm themselves. It ticks them off and makes them less likely to litter. Interesting. Yeah. So if you have already littered place, it's going to attract more litter. Litter begets litter. Yeah. I sort of littered recently, in a way, on my way into the SEC championship game here in Atlanta. We were like everybody was walking with their beers toward the stadium. And there was one part where they funneled you through what I guess was our Marta or subway systems property. And so there were people there were like, you can't take this through there. And everyone was like, oh, jeez. And there were probably 1200 beer cans on the sidewalk right there, because they were saying, Drop it right here. Didn't have cans or anything. And then on the way out, every single one of those cans was gone. So they cleaned them up during the game. And it was, I guess, part of the plan. But it was very strange to just throw your beer can on the ground because you're being told to. Sure. Litter do it. Yeah. And also everyone power drinking at the end, like a bunch of dopes. Right. But knowing somebody is going to clean it up also influences the likelihood that you're going to litter. It increases the likelihood you'll litter. Yes. Like a park that, you know, is maintained or whatever. Yeah. For me, it was always a movie theater until somebody was finally like, you still just don't leave it there, just throw it away. The trash can is right on the way out. Yeah, exactly. Before they had the big, prominent trash cans, like, they had small, slender little trash cans. I did that for many years. Yeah. I wondered about that today. If people would be more responsible in movie theaters if they didn't clean up between movies. And you walked in and saw a bunch of old garbage right. And you're like, oh, what's that doing here? And if they said, Sorry, we're not cleaning up. We're not your parents. Yeah. There's like a poorly handmade sign from somebody that says, this office is not your parents'house. You got to do your own dishes. I was always good at movie theaters because I've always had a guilt of and Hodgman talks about it a lot, is being aware of the work you leave for others. And I know, and I even had people to be like, they come in here and clean it. And I was like, well, that's one less popcorn bag that they have to clean up. Then it's like, it's fine. People would argue with me for doing it. Yeah. And you should never encourage somebody to litter anyway. It's true. Yes. I don't think I would have told you to just go ahead and litter. Who knows? I just thought it was weird. But I think to answer your question, though, based on the studies I've seen, the more litter you found in a movie theater, the more likely you'd be to just litter on top of it. Well, I guess that makes sense. So it could be self defeating again. You want to make a strong social norm against littering and then you want to keep places clean. And then in that context, if you see somebody littering, you're far less likely to litter. That's like the perfect storm of non littering from what I saw. Yeah. But I have one more thing, Chuck, about that 2009 keep America Beautiful study. You said that you were hanging around, like, convenience stores and stuff like that, so they would observe some people littering. I think they observed like 23 people littering. No, they observed like almost 2000 I can't remember what the point was. No, okay, I'm sorry. I got this. You ready? Yeah. So they would actually do these interventions, I think they did about 100 of them, where they would go up to people in the convenience store or in the parking lot or whatever and just ask them about littering. And some of those people, I think 23 of them, they had just seen litter. And they didn't go confront the people about littering. They just went and surveyed them and pretend they hadn't seen it. So they would ask everybody, have you littered within the last month? And like eight of those 23 people said, no, I have not littered in the last month. Even though the study person had just seen them litter, they lied about it. So it makes you wonder about the veracity of that phone survey you mentioned earlier. I wonder if they said, no, I haven't littered in the past month, except for just what do you say, sir? Nothing. Nothing to button up the cigarette butt thing. They are plastic as well. They're not biodegradable. They're made of cellulose acetate and they take decades to break down. And it's also tobacco products, which has nicotine and arsenic and heavy metals and all kinds of nasty toxins. And those get in the soil, those leach into the ground, those fall into a waterway. Those get made into a bird's nest, and it's poison. There was a researcher that did an experiment where they put one cigarette butt and a gallon of water, and that was enough to kill half of the fish inside. Just a cigarette butt floating and dissolving in there. Right. And not just from the plastic, from the nicotine, the heavy metals, the arsenic, all the stuff that gets trapped into a used cigarette butt once a full cigarette has been smoked through it. Yeah. Kills the fish, kills half of them. If you're the person with the Keep America Beautiful sticker on your car and you're throwing your cigarette butts out the window. So you don't like the smell, just do a little soul searching. Dave turned up a company called Green Butts that has come up with truly compostable cigarette butts made of manila hemp and flax and I think, cotton. And they have it so ready that tobacco companies would simply have to buy them and put them in their assembly lines, make no change whatsoever. And apparently it hasn't taken off, I'm guessing because of cost. That would be my guess, too. Yeah. If you want to fix littering, stop littering. It's step one. You can go a step further and pick up trash. Yeah. We have a program in our neighborhood, like an official program, where neighbors get together, like, once a month and do it, and I donate my pickup truck to haul the trash away, and we pick stuff up on our walks all the time. And the Swedes invented something called plogging, which is where you take a bag with you when you jog and pick stuff up. So pick stuff up if you can. I do that sometimes. Not every time. Baggy with you on a walk. Yes. More like a grocery bag. And I think there's still bottle deposit laws here and there, too, right? Yeah, there's like, ten states that have it, which I mean, that's good. That's definitely a start. Ten states in Guam. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to leave you guys out. And that's a good way to go. It's getting back to reusable, and the fact that that structure is already there means you can easily adopt it in other states. You just get it started. And some of those states probably used to do it before, but I think the upshot of the whole thing is, like, until we do something about the source of litter, which is actually disposable packaging, until we do something about that, we're always going to have a problem with it. Like, it's just never going to go away. Yeah. Because even if you don't mean to litter, sometimes it just happens. Like, if you're a garbage truck or you're hauling your trash in the back of a pickup truck and some of it flies out, that counts as litter, and that happens quite a bit. So we need to start focusing more on the supply side, not just the consumer side. I flung a Christmas tree out of the back of my truck the other day under the middle of Memorial Drive. That's litter. I pulled up to a stop light, and the people were honking at me next door, and I was like, what? They said you dropped your tree back there. I went, oh, thank you. You're like, well, go get it. I'll wait here. Yeah. And Memorial drive is busy and fast. What a way to go out. Getting hit by a car, pulling my old Christmas tree out of the street. Merry Christmas. There's the headline. Little known podcaster dies trying to do the right thing. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Don't litter. That's it. That's a good one to wrap it up with. Chuck. And since Chuck said don't litter, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this funny bone follow up. Okay. And this is from who is this from? A doctor of physical therapy has answers. Chuck has said when he goes to get a massage and the massage therapist rolls something up and down, then his hand curls up. And you were thinking this had to do with the nerve. Actually, it's because of a length tension relationship with the flexor muscles in your arm. The tendons of your forearm muscles are very long and run through the carpal tunnel to allow tension to be applied to the tendon when you want to bend your wrist. This also means, however, that when enough pressure is applied to the muscle belly I love that term. It causes a motion similar to a muscle contraction that allows for the wrist to bend. You also question why cubital tunnel syndrome and tennis elbow weren't called the same thing. Because they're very different. Cubital tunnel syndrome refers specifically to the ulnar nerve being and trapped by tissues or swelling within the cubicle tunnel. Whereas tennis elbow is actually an injury to the extensor. Tendons in your forearm is a tendonitis. I see. I would explain that for sure. Samantha the doctor of physical therapy in northern Wisconsin. Muscle Belly. Am I dreaming? Is that really what was just said? Muscle Belly. Our new band. That's pretty like daft punk. Just the two of us. That's right. UB. Muscle I'd be belly. They're like sparks. Yes. I love how into sparks you are now. I was just listening to number one song in heaven album before this cleaning up. I think they're touring now again. They are as a matter of fact. Chuck. And they're coming to Atlanta. You going? I don't believe we're going to be around to make it muscle belly. If you want to be like Samantha and let us know some great new term plus a bunch of other physiological information. We love that kind of thing. You can send it to us via email at 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 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 sourcing grief mediums plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com." | |
41caeaaa-53a3-11e8-bdec-e3a7bb58e4e9 | What is perfect pitch? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-is-perfect-pitch | Perfect pitch, or absolute pitch, is when you can sing a note with no reference from other notes, perfectly on key. Is it an asset? Chuck says yes. Learn all about this musical rarity today. | Perfect pitch, or absolute pitch, is when you can sing a note with no reference from other notes, perfectly on key. Is it an asset? Chuck says yes. Learn all about this musical rarity today. | Thu, 06 Jun 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=157, tm_isdst=0) | 40984733 | 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. Hello there. It's me, Josh, and I'm doing my live show, the End of the World or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Humanity on June 19 and 20th in Minneapolis and in Washington, DC. Go to themiricaltheater.com for Dctickets and theparkwaytheater.com for tickets to the Minneapolis show. I'll see you 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. F. That was nice. And there's Jerry Roland over there. The jairister rolling on as always. Don't look at me like that weirdly. I said f. What was it? I don't know. See, you don't know. This made me think a lot about me and singing in pitch and stuff and made me think about you and singing in pitch, too. Yeah, because I tried. I know I don't have absolute pitch, but I tried. I was just like, well, let me test myself. And I went to the little quiet room here, and the only way I knew how to test it was to think of a song I know that starts in, like, C that I know how to play and sing. Give me a C. And then I sang a C. And then I hit the play button on the YouTube clip of a C, and the C was way higher than I was singing it, but I think I was in just a different key. It wasn't like, off, like, oh. It was like, oh, that sounds like a C in a different octave. Okay, the way all that works is confusing. Have you ever heard of Charlie Pouth? No. So yummy, found this guy. She watches the John Mayer has an Instagram TV show every week. I did not know that. But I know he's big on Instagram. It's actually pretty good. Well, he went so far as to create a show. Good for him. He had a guy named Charlie Pooh. And Charlie Pooh has maybe the most perfect pitch of anybody on the planet. And there's videos of this guy, like, hitting a note, and he's like, here's enough. And, like, he's got a what would you call that thing? A little magic machine that shows you exactly what the pitch is. Okay. That thing, it just peeps. Like, the needle just goes right to s or E or whatever. And he's not even looking, and it's just out of nowhere. It's really impressive. Does you mean like John Mayer? That's all I've been making sure he actually has become a fan of John Mayer. All right. His show is actually worth watching. Yeah. Current mood. Got you. So we're talking about perfect pitch or absolute pitch. And that is we're going to define it right away here, unlike us. And that is to do like the poof does. Poof. I know. Which is if someone says, hit a C with nothing to compare to, I can just belt out a C. Right. Or recognize a C if someone says what? Notice this. It goes both ways. It's a double edged talent. It's a double edged talent. That's what absolute or perfect pitch is. So you might say, like, okay, there's some aliens walking around among us, and this is how they show themselves. They're able to produce a note at will. Right? Yeah. But really, if you step back and The Grabster put this article together for us, he did a good job. He did. He went to great links to point out that having absolute pitch, or what's also called perfect pitch really is kind of useless. Yeah, I don't know if I agree with that. He went to such lengths, I began to wonder if The Grabster is actually jealous of people who had proven it. Well, he makes the point quite a bit that it doesn't help you write a song. It doesn't make you any more creative. Is that what it sounded like when you're reading it? A little bit. And that is quite true. It does not. But make no bones about it. If you're a singer in a band, having perfect pitch is an asset. Right. It might be annoying to your bandmates. Right. I saw this video of these two Japanese kids, and it was annoying things that people with perfect pitch do. Oh, really? And this one kid was annoying the bejesus out of another. Yeah, I could see that. It's got to be an asset. I would guess so. Sure. Well, let me give you an example of relative pitch that it gives if you're in the shower. If I'm in the shower and I start singing some Morrissey song, let's say it starts out pretty normal, but there's some high notes in there. Maybe if I really stretch, I can hit. Once I get to those high notes, I can't even come close. The reason why is because I started in a higher key than I should have because I had no reference point whatsoever. And I just started singing Big Mouth strikes again. Oh, no, wait. That's way too low. Right? I couldn't do that. I'm like that. Sounds perfect. Yeah. I actually do a pretty good Morrisy. Oh, yeah? Let's hear it. No, I can't do it right now. My voice is all podcasted out. I'm not going to humiliate myself on air. I'm sorry. I'll do it for you. Later in the shower. Yeah. I'll be like, you got some soap. You have some soap on your arm. I'm sorry. That's my morrison. All right. So we should talk about reference, relative pitch and having a reference point. You can be a great singer and not have perfect pitch. It is right. In that it's not like, oh, you don't have perfect pitch, you're probably not going to be a good singer. Or you do have perfect pitch. You're like, such a great creator and songwriter. Those don't have anything to do with one another. But if you've ever been to see a vocal group sing like Star Land Vocal Band, never seen them. But Emily, my wife, was in show choir in high school, so that's exactly what they did. I believe they had piano accompaniment. Sometimes it was acapella. Yeah, but if you see an acapella group, you will almost always see a pianist hit a single note before they start playing and hear that. Or they might have, like, a crat tuner, which is one of those little things you hold up to your mouth, like a round harmonica. I heard it was called a pitch pipe. Yeah. I mean, it's a type of pitch pipe. What did you call it? A crat tuner. That's probably like saying Band Aid or something. For Kleenex proprietary epidemic. Yeah, I think so. I love that they're all kind of pitch pipes, but this is a little cool round one. It's like a round harmonica. I know what you're talking about. Yeah. And they usually wear it like a medallion around their neck, the choir director. Do they? I've seen it. Okay. So they would either blow into one of those pitch pipes or they would hit a piano key and the choir would all know in their head they would have that reference point. Then it's like, all right, here's where we start with our barbershop quartet song. Right? That's either the first note of the song yes. Or the key that the song sung in. But either way, once they have that and they're like, hey, or whatever, they can sing the rest of the song in key relative to that note. Right. That alone, to me is impressive. So even relative pitch is impressive to me, let alone absolute pitch. Well, I mean, everyone has relative pitch, I guess. But if somebody's like, here's an A boo, I'd be like, what do you want me to do with that? Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, sure. I wouldn't be able to necessarily keep up with the rest of the song just because I heard the first note. Yeah. I almost feel like, yeah, but you know the song, so once you have your starting point, you're good, I guess. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. I learned and practiced it. Think about any Schmoe could do this. I was inquired, but we always had piano accompaniment, and the piano led the song I don't remember a single song we did inquire that started with just the vocals. Acapello. It was always like a piano intro, so you know exactly where you are. I was just trying to come up with a song that starts out like that. Bohemian Rapidly. Sure. You know what's funny? I was just thinking of the other Queen song, I Want It All, which I believe starts off is that Queen? I thought that was a Burger King ad. It's a Burger Queen. Oh, yeah. All right, so relative pitch. That's the deal. I feel like we should cover some more. Like, I feel like the other half of this episode should be tone deafness. We did one on tone deafness. No, we did. I swear to God. We did one called Is Tone Deafness Hereditary? And we talked about how in the Philippines, if you sing my way in a tone deaf way at karaoke, you may get stabbed because people have been stabbed before. I don't remember that one. You don't remember that? Not at all. We talked about tone deafness, for sure. So your plan just fell apart. Yeah, but I mean, there's a lot of I never study music theory, so I'm an air learner as far as guitar and all that stuff goes. Did Jerry just prove you right? Yeah, she just faced me. But it gets a little like, convoluted when you start talking about keys and octaves and half steps and whole steps and stuff like that. The thing that calms me down is when you talk about science. Right. So let's talk science here. Okay. When you talk about pitch, pitch is all relativity, right? Yes. You're talking about one note in relation to another note. Is that other note higher or lower? That's really what pitches right. It's the gradations of notes and relations to one another. Right. Okay. If you look at what you're talking about scientifically, you're talking about a sound wave. So really what you're talking about is the frequency of a note is what gives it its A or its B, or is it C sharp or something like that. And there is a whole step between an A and a B, but there's actually a half step in between. Okay. You know all this? I do. Okay. How am I doing so far? Am I explaining it right? Yeah. I mean, like, if you sit at a piano, a half step is the very next key, whether it's black or white. And a whole step is skipping a key and going to the second key. But I thought there were some stretches where there are two white keys together, and that was a full step, which are called natural tones. There's no half step in between those notes. That's not how I understand it. That's the piano demo I saw. Yeah. And the other thing that struck me too I never knew this before, ever, you know, like, there's a B flat and a c sharp, or actually, I think it'd be a B sharp and a C flat. Same note. Yes. The whole reason those things exist and it's a half note sharper or flat is but the whole reason it exists is to tell you which way to go on the scale up or down a half note. Yeah, I'm trying to think about in band, you can play an A, and if you move that up 1 bar, that's an A sharp, but that's also a B flat, because B would be the next thing up from that middle point. Right. So I never really knew there were rules for why you would refer to it as an HRP or a B flat, from what I understand, is to know. All right, you want to go down so you're going down to A sharp from a B, or you're going up to a B flat from an A. Interesting. I think I probably just got it wrong. I bet we're mangling so many things here. What we're talking about is what's called the Western musical scale. It's a twelve note scale, and it's made up of ten octaves that humans can hear. And if each note is a specific wavelength, a frequency of a sound vibration, that's the same every single time, and A always has the same frequency, and B always has the same frequency. If you double that frequency, you've just gone up an octave. Right. And that scale repeats itself and ascends or descends going into higher, lower octave. So good people with perfect or absolute pitch will be able to hear any note at any octave on that scale and say, oh, that's an a seven, or a B six sharp. Right. Just from hearing it. Or they'll be able to reproduce. So it's not like they can just memorize twelve notes. They can memorize twelve notes over, say, ten octaves. They can recognize them. Yeah. And if you're someone who plays instruments by ear and sings by ear and can't read music, you really appreciate two things the simplicity of people who write three chord major songs, and then the complexity, even though it's frustrating, of like an Elton John. So like, if I sit down to play guitar to an Elton John song, I look up the chords and the words, and nine times out of ten, I'm like, I don't even know this chord. Oh, really? Yeah, and I got to go to a chord book and figure it out. Okay. He did all kinds of crazy chords. That's really interesting. Diminished minors. I mean, minors are simple enough, but it was still in the Western musical scale. Or were you incorporating tones from other musical scales that weren't? No, it was still the Western, but instead of playing an F, it would be like an F sharp minor, 7th or something. So what is minor and major then? Well, minor is the status of all keys. A minor, that's the final type preference. So you won't get it. Thank you for explaining it, though, and not just letting all the listeners right in and laugh at me. I don't know how to explain. I mean, A minor is a variation of the major, but it sounds completely different. Okay, it does sound more sad if I played you an A and an A minor and a B and a B minor. You go, oh, we need to get a piano in here for this one. Oh, I don't play piano. Jerry, can we expense a piano? Maybe we should take a break while we go get a piano. Let's do it. Okay. 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 an industry. IBM let's create learn More@ibm.com are you looking for an escape or a relaxing getaway or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building where you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a milk steak flaming flamers chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquillum house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis? As an investment opportunity? Would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling Hoosa? Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only burgers in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway hulu. Check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription required terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. All right, so one thing we should say, Chuck, when we're talking about apps, I'm sorry. Absolutely. Do you feel like people are keeping up with this, or are we just throwing out so much random information? A little both, I think the music majors are really just like, oh, guys. Oh, Lord. Nobody likes them anyway. But for normal people, you think that they're like, oh, okay, now I understand what pitches because that's really the goal here a little bit. We're not explaining anything to music majors that they don't already know. Yeah, that's true. And we're actually mangling the stuff that they do know. Right. One thing we can say that's pretty easy to understand is. Though. Is that perfect pitch is a bit of on a sliding scale. It's hard to define. Like. It's either perfect or not perfect. Because you have a range from tone deaf to perfect pitch. And you may be way closer to perfect pitch and may even say I have perfect pitch. But not have. Like. Absolute perfect pitch 100% of the time. Right. When tested. Right, exactly. So it's not binary. Right. It's not one of those you have it or you don't have it kind of thing. Yeah. And it's suggested, and we'll talk about it a little more, that everybody has some level of absolute pitch. It's just some people are way better at it than others. So much so that they seem like they have perfect pitch compared to everybody else. Yeah, I'm not sure I understood that part either, but we'll get to that. Okay. And it's interesting to note, too, that this even if you do have absolute pitch, you might have trouble identifying the same notes at different octaves. You're not supposed to. You can't call yourself a perfect pitch person. Yeah, I guess so. Right? Yeah. You have to hang your head in shape, but that's tough. Identical notes at different octaves are tough. And it results in some weird phenomena, like the shepherd tone, which is really neat. Yeah, it is. If you've ever been to a Christopher Nolan movie, specifically Dunkirk. Did Dunkirk use it? Oh, yeah. Throughout. Well, he uses it all the time. Okay. Like the sound of that motorcycle. It had a specific name, but the one Batman rides with the two big fat wheels. The Bat Cycle. Yeah, I think that's what it's called. Okay. I think it had another name, didn't it? Or no. Well, maybe I'm thinking of the Adam West bat cycle. I don't think so. But he uses that sound. It's called the shepherd tone, and it's basically several tones from different octaves layered on one another. The highest tone gets quieter, the middle tone stays loud, and the base tone, ascends in volume. And if you play them all together, it's this mental trick that your mind can't process. And it sounds like something that's either going up or down into infinity, basically. Right. But it's really just the same thing on a loop over and over again. But it sounds clearly just going up and rising in pitch constant for infinity. Yeah, it's really interesting. Really tension creating. It really puts you on edge. Not like nails on a chalkboard on edge, but more like what's going on? Exactly. The stitch is still going on. Exactly. And shout out to Roger Shepard from Stanford. He's a psychologist in 1964, who I guess discovered this audio illusion. Also, another shout out to Diana Deutsch, who was a researcher for Audio Illusions, which are really interesting. It's like the sound version of an optical illusion. Pretty cool. And reveals a lot about how the brain processes information. She has a site, I guess, at UC San Diego that I want everybody to go to right now. Pause the pause the episode and go to deutsch deutsch dot UCSD.edu psychology slash pages. And here's where it gets tricky. PHP question mark lowercase I equals two one, two. Why didn't you get a URL shortener for that? I don't know. Just do it and thank me later. But she has these audio clips that show how when you hear something spoken over and over again enough times, the same thing over and over again, it turns into music to you. It turns into being sung interesting. And the way that she has it laid out and demonstrated it is the most mind blowing thing I have heard in ages. I loved it. I went, Right? I was like, you mean you got to hear, like, I'm watching John Mayer. Shut up. John Mayer's talk. Who seems better than him? This Diana Deutsche lady. Wow. I'll have to hear that. That's pretty cool. You're going to love it. Yeah, you will love it, Chuck. Awesome. Okay. It has really nothing to do with perfect pitch, but it is just kind of one of those things where it's like, this is worth mentioning to the world. Okay. All right. So there's this guy named Nicholas Slunimski who's a composer and a music lexicologist and a conductor. He wrote in his autobiography about having absolute pitch, basically how, like, it was a party trick when he was a kid. And then when he went to school, to music school, of course, he kind of thought his s didn't stink because he had perfect pitch and they didn't have to work as hard. And he was a little snotty about it, I think, from what I gather from Ed Summation. And apparently while he was off, just like, I've got perfect pitch, all his classmates are actually busting their butts and working hard and actually writing really good music. And he fell behind and was like, how could I be falling behind? I have absolute pitch, right? And he's just leaning on that too hard. He was so he had kind of a moment of inspiration where he's like, oh, I actually have to put in the work, too. I think this is where Ed was kind of getting that. It doesn't actually help. Right? It's good. It's a neat thing to have. You can't write your own ticket, though, in the music business, right. Because you have perfect pitch, it doesn't help you be any more creative or anything like that. And as a matter of fact, Lemansky points out in that autobiography that there have been plenty of people who are just master composers like Chaikovsky and Wagner. Neither one of them had perfect pitching. Yet you'd be hard pressed to find somebody who's like those guys were hacks. Sure. They were pretty good, and they didn't have perfect pitch. So you can do quite well in music and not have perfect pitch, especially if you have one of those little round harmonic. As you were talking about Lenny Cravitz harmonica pitch pipe. It's hard to tell how many people have perfect pitch. You hear one in 10,000 a lot. But as Ed points out, it's kind of hard to find any reference for this that really is accurate or legit. Yeah. I think you ran into that same thing where you see the same info on the Internet in the same way everywhere. It means that it's probably not real. I think so, because it's got to be more than one in 10,000. Well, he said he found one that found about 4% of the population has it. So it'd be 400 out of 10,400 times greater than what was previously thought. That's right. And you are more likely to have and this is where it gets interesting of like, where does it come from, nature or nurture? You're definitely more likely to have perfect pitch if you start your training in music before the age of six. Yeah. There's a critical period for the brain where it's just mush, waiting to be molded into smarts. So things like language, foreign languages, music, basically anything you can think of that requires talent that not everybody can do, kind of falls into that critical period where if you start to learn that early on before age six, you're going to be able to learn it way easier than somebody who's an adult trying to learn it. Yeah. And so perfect pitch shows up way more frequently in kids who have musical training and exposure specifically to the Western music scale at an early age than it does to people who were not exposed to it. Yeah. And also if you speak a tone language fluently and definitely natively, you're more likely to have absolute pitch. Tone languages, every language has a little bit of that when people inflect in English, different things, different tones that can be different meanings. Oh really? Oh really? Oh really? Good morning. But we have nothing on like Mandarin, Chinese or Cantonese. These are real tone languages where your tones can indicate like the same word can have five, six, seven different meanings depending on your tone. Really interesting. Yeah. So people who speak tone languages are more likely to have absolute pitch than people who don't speak tone languages. Right? Yes. Okay, so that raises a really good question then. There's one other big clue here, and just because we have the clues doesn't mean we figured out, I don't think we said there is still no full understanding of why some people have absolute a perfect pitch. Yes. But it also appears more frequently in the population of people with autism. Right. They tend to have more frequency of perfect pitch than people who do not have autism. Yeah. And the same with I know it correlates to like, supposedly photographic memory, if that's the thing synesthesia, which we've talked about, and Billy Joel's synesthese. I didn't know that. Yeah. So that might have something to do with his abilities. So actually, two explanations I saw for people with autism is that it's believed that they process information piecemeal rather than wholesale, which would explain, rather than hearing, like, the whole musical composition, they hear the individual notes. So it would be easier for them to be acquainted with the individual notes. That makes sense. Or they just are more developed. Their sensory input is way more developed than people without autism. Those are the two competing theories for why people with autism have perfect pitch. More interesting. Yeah. All right. Well, the whole question that we talked about is it nature or nurture? That's sort of a debate that's still going on. And it's hard to study this stuff universally. First of all, this seems to apply almost exclusively to the Western music scale. I think so. Right. Because that's what you're doing. You're saying that's an A? That's an F. Here's an A. And what you're talking about the notes on the Western music scale, they think that people who have perfect pitch can detect notes that are more nuanced than the full step or the half step of the Western music scale. But I didn't see anywhere where it's like, yes, this translates everywhere into any music scale. So it doesn't seem to be universal from that outset to begin with. Okay. Yeah, for sure. And the other thing that I thought was interesting you talked about this at the beginning, about labeling the sensory input. It's like they throw the letter C on that wavelength, basically. Right. It's no different than saying, well, that color is red. Yeah. It's just a label that was created. It was right where it is. I saw an analogy for this where if somebody with perfect pitch, if you analogize it to somebody who could pick out color, they could see a blue wall in somebody's house, then drive to the paint store and pick out that same blue from the wall of samples. Oh, interesting. It's basically the same thing. But there's a big clue there with the fact that most people like that's pretty refined. But most people can look at something and say, that's blue, that's green, that's red. Because we were almost around the world to a child trained from a very young age to recognize and identify and name colors. Right. Not everybody gets that kind of training around the world with musical notes. Right. But where they do, like in Japan, where far more children are trained more universally in music, they have found much more prevalences of absolute pitch there. Okay. Which makes sense. Right. You're exposed from a very early age what is an A? What is an F? You're hitting that critical period. But that really reveals something important here, too, Chuck. Not every kid in Japan has absolute pitch. Sure. Just like every kid in Japan can tell you what blue is or what red is. They can't necessarily all tell you what an A is or what an F is. Right. They just can't. So that suggests that there is perhaps some genetic basis to it. Not everybody can learn absolute or perfect pitch. All right. I think that's a good place to. Break and we'll talk more about your family jeans and perfect pitch right after this. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of 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 up their own sleeves. IBM let's create. Learn More@ibm.com It automation. Are you looking for an escape or a relaxing getaway or a reprieve from the hustle and bustle of it all? Well, we know just the place. Maybe you want to solve a murder in your building. Or you're just all about that paper boy. Perhaps you want to watch Hollywood's biggest monitor. Or you crave the thrill of a classic American story about horror. Or is your stomach grumbling for a MILKSTAKE flaming flamer's chip? Would you love to quench your thirst with a delicious Tranquilium house smoothie? Did you see blood analysis? As an investment opportunity, would you wear one of Dave's wooden shirts? Do you smash glasses whilst yelling who's? Ah. Well, then there's a place that has everything you love, from Atlanta to the Kardashians to only birders in the building and everything in between. Hulu is your entertainment. Getaway hulu. Check into your obsessions. Hulu subscription. Required terms apply. Visit hulu.com for plan details. All right, Chuck, you said something about jeans. I'm wearing them. You're always wearing them. I'm wearing dad jeans. Are they? They're a little dad genie now. What are dad jeans? Those look like normal jeans to me. That's because we both were cool in the same era, which is 20 years ago. So what faded? His dad jeans? I think it's more cut, a little baggier. I'm just too old to wear straight up skinny jeans. Too old? My thighs are too chunky. Yeah. You know, I feel about skinny jeans. Sure. I like that. Almost all jeans now are a little stretchy, though. They are. It's like they put elastic in them. Yeah, every fabric is a little stretchy. Now it feels like I'm like, oh, my size 30. I never knew that. Alright, so genes absolute pitch does tend to run in families. Okay, so clearly it's genetic, right? Well, no, not necessarily. Everything that I gathered here is that we just don't know. There's probably some genetics involved and a lot of nurture involved. So that was the old view, and I think it's still kind of predominant that this explained absolute pitch. If I may take this one. Yeah. That you were born with the genetic propensity toward absolute pitch. Yeah, like if you're Lucy Waynewright, our friend. Sure. And her mom and her dad are both professional singers, right? The Wayne. Right. It's no mistake that Lucy, Martha and Rufus are all professional singers. Right. There's a genetic component. There for sure. But the other way to look at it and this is the reason why the nature versus nurture debate hasn't been settled. It's also quite possible that just because Lucy was exposed to music from a very young age exactly. Including the critical period, it could have nothing to do with genetics and could have everything to do with environment. Right. So the thing that everybody settled on is it's probably both that you have a genetic propensity toward it. And that if you are exposed to the Western musical scale at that critical period before age six. And then you learn later on. Like. Oh. My parents will actually be kind to me and talk nice to me if I show off in front of their friends that I can do an A off the top of my head. Then that reinforces that. And that develops into absolute or perfect pitch later on in life. Yeah. Is that the part where the child has to see value in it in order to kind of and I guess that's true with anything. If the kid doesn't see value in something, they're not going to work toward that. Right, exactly. See, neither one of my parents can sing, really? My sister can't sing, but my brother and I can both sing. Oh, I've heard you. It's like Angels. Scott sings better than me, of course. Oh, I know. Does that go without saying at this point? It's interesting, though, how that works, because we weren't super exposed to music either. A little bit, but not like my parents weren't big music people that were like, oh, man, we got to listen to this record. Yeah, he checked this track. Yeah, that just didn't happen. So we were discovering music on our own. But I wonder if my brother gave me the nurture side, maybe because he was singing and we were in choir and he was giving me records and stuff. I could totally send an early age. Yeah. I mean, that's nurture right there. It's just not coming from your parents, but it's still nurturing. I'm just fascinated by talents, period. And Michelle and Scott can both draw. I can't draw at all. And, like, how that stuff? My mom is an artist. Oh, is she? Yeah, that's right. The mural. Yeah, she was a professional artist. And it's just like, I can't draw a stick figure. Right. It didn't get passed out. And it's funny when I say that around my mom, she's like, oh, you can draw. Remember all the Bill the cat stuff he used to do? And Opus, the penguin from Bloom County. It's like mom, I was tracing Right? She's like, well, that takes talent. I'm like she's like, no, it really does. I never knew she said tracing takes talent. Yeah. That is a sweet man. You got a sweet mom and a great brother. But I'm just fascinated about talents, especially having a daughter now and, like, is she good at this is she not going to be good at this. I don't know. Some of the stuff you can nurture, but some stuff you just got to wait and see. It's an age old, old question. I think that anybody who's like it's 100% nature, 100% nurtures off. Either way, it's got to be a combination of the two. We did that episode on Epigenetics that basically proved it's both. It shows how it's both. Yeah, it's got to be both. I would say absolute pitch falls under that. Well, and with absolute pitch, too. It's interesting because the way I read this is that people can learn it with practice, I guess, even later in life. Yeah. The thing that really caught my attention is there's a drug called Valproate that AIDS in neuroplasticity, which means you learn better. You can restructure your brain to learn new stuff at a later age. Yeah, I had never heard of that. I had neither. Apparently that treats epilepsy, bipolar disorder and migraines and can help you sing better, literally make you smarter, is what I'm getting. The other thing I took issue with is that they said much like an American learning German, age 40, will never be as fluent as someone born and raised in Germany. Is that true? Yeah, I think nativeborn speakers always have an edge up on, I think I don't know, I figure if you really immerse yourself, you moved to Germany, like you could learn it just as good, right? Maybe. And I've also heard that you're never truly and this may be one of those dumb things here in elementary school, but you can never truly be fluent if you don't dream in that language. And I don't know if that's true or if that's an old wives tale. I've never heard that. You haven't? No. I've always heard that, like, after a certain age, you can't dream in a foreign tongue. Well and thus you are not, quote unquote, fluent. That sounds made up. It sounds like playground stuff, like the barcode being the number of these there is one last part that I thought was really fascinating. There's a larger part of this debate that the fact that there are people walking around with absolute pitch and not everybody has it suggests something that we may have a part of our brain that is left over to sense and detect music and differences in music. And that to some people, that suggests that music, singing specifically, actually predated language in our development, our evolution. I could see that totally. Yeah. And the example used is that a series of sounds was early communication. You're like, sure, which means he got me. Yeah. Or Tuck Tuk is saying, big mammoth is coming this way. That was clearly a look out even before you said it. I was going to say look out. But if you really hear what I did there, that's singing in a way, right. It's a tone and eventually over time that could be kind of systemized categorized where it's standardized. That's what I was looking for, one of those guys where that's just what your group says, and your group gets bigger and bigger, and that spreads and eventually turns into words, something more nuanced. So it makes total sense. The other reason I saw that made sense to me was that if we were running around nature, we heard birds calling when we heard cats growling or something like that, we may start to imitate those things with your clicks and whistles and all this stuff. They sound natural much more than, like, language does. So it makes total sense that song would have come before language. Yeah. I think there's an innate tonality in words and preords. Yeah. Preorder. I don't know, because otherwise it just would have been a series of grunts and clicks and things like very staccato and short. Yeah. It's almost like with the first person born, it was like, well, how do you do? And that was like the first person to ever talk. And that was the first sentence ever spoken. Yeah. It's a great question. If you want to know more about great questions like absolute pitch. Well, and friends, we want to direct you to our beloved website that we put a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into how stuff works. They got a lot of good stuff for you there. Okay. And since I said okay, it's time for listener mail. Actually, can I jump back? Jump back. Jack. We didn't talk about people who supposedly had perfect pitch. We'll throw some names out real quick. Oh, man, I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. That's all right. Sorry. Michael Jackson supposedly had perfect pitch. And there's a story this is from Mental Floss, by the way. All right. There's a story from Will I m. Who backed Michael Jackson up in a song and said that he warmed up for 3 hours to sing a five minute song. 3 hours of me. Me. Wow. Mariah Carey supposedly discovered she had perfect pitch at the age of four. Elephants. Gerald. I love this story. Apparently, she was so dead on that her band would warm up to her voice. Wow. The other way around. That's really cool. That's pretty cool. I love that lady. Ben Crosby, his travel partner, said that sharing a train ride, he would snore and pitch to the train whistle. That's like the Three Stooges. What do you mean? Florence Anderson of the Brady Bunch. Sure. She's a singer as well. Mozart? Sure. They assume Beethoven, although that was never on record. Paul Schaefer, the world's most dangerous band. Yeah. Jimmy Hendrix, as the story goes. Hendrix, when he was first learning guitar, could not afford a guitar tuner. So he would go to a music store, strum the open strings, and then go back and tune it to what he remembered hearing. Wow. And he learned guitar at age nine or something, maybe even younger. Right. And then Yani yani was even tested on Dateline. Someone playing random keys, and he nailed it, apparently. Of course it's Yanni. I always confused Yanni with zombier. Oh. One was a panfluter, and one was a pamflute Greek god. I thought they both played the pam flute. No, Yanni was a composer of big flowery arrangements. Okay. He made pan fluted up every now and then, but I don't think that was the champ. He wasn't shy with the pam flute, but yeah, I got you. All right, well, I think I already said the listener mail thing, so let's jump right into it. Yes. All right. Actually, Woe Chuck, before we get into it, let me add something here. So you remember our friend Lol Hutchinson, who sponsored our yes. Well, Lol didn't include the name of her shop that she donates 20% to, the David Sheldrick wildlife Trust. Okay. And she emailed with it, so we got to share it. Yeah. Let's do. You go to etsy. Comshoplowllhutchdesigns L-O-W-E-L-L hutchessigns and buy her turned wood, and some of that money is going to save elephants. That's awesome. Okay. And much easier than the San Diego State URL. It worked, but it didn't. Everybody. All right, here we go. Everyone. I love it when we get a little bit of kismet happening. Sure. Hey, guys. I heard the episode of what happens when the government mistakenly thinks someone is dead. You mentioned that you are having trouble finding info on why the postal service would be reporting a death to the government. In an amazing coincidence, I actually just had to do that the very same day that that episode dropped. Wow. I work as a mail carrier in New Rochelle, New York, and I can confirm that we are responsible for reporting deaths. And in some cases, it's a bit more common than you think. Procedure is actually quite simple. When a government agency, usually the IRS or Social Security, is having trouble reaching an individual, they send a special form to the post office responsible for delivering that person's mail. The form asks the mail carrier knows the whereabouts of that person. I imagine the first thing I would say is, like, I don't know, I just deliver mail there. Yeah. Wildly stressed whether they moved or whether they're just ignoring the government's calls and letters, or in some cases, they have unfortunately passed away, the carrier will try to find out where that person is, what they use them as investigators? Almost. That's crazy. And if they don't already know and they will fill out the form to be sent back to the agency. Well, if I or one of my co workers informs the agency that the individual is deceased, then we get a coupon. For now. I'm just kidding. Then they have officially been reported as such, and it is the responsibility of the government to confirm this information with next of kin. Wow. That is from Tom LONGi, the government's, like, you know, your mom's postal worker and things spreading rumors. So thanks, Tom. And thanks for delivering mail to New Rochelle Rochelle in New York. Nice. Rochelle rochelle the musical. That's right. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Tom. That's pretty cool you heard that at the same time you were doing that. We love that kind of thing. Amazing. Would you call it kismet? Yeah. If you got a little bit of kismet going on, let us know. You can go on to stuffyouinno.com and find our social links there. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcasts@iheartradio.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 leading brands. Find Hill Kilo Elevate as Petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores." | |
8d94cd40-ba8a-11e8-a624-a7aa94b4433c | Short Stuff: Dead Bodies and Airline Codes | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-dead-bodies-and-airline-codes | Did you know there are airline codes for pilots and flight attendants? And some of them have to do with dead bodies on board? Learn all about it today! | Did you know there are airline codes for pilots and flight attendants? And some of them have to do with dead bodies on board? Learn all about it today! | Wed, 28 Aug 2019 13:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=240, tm_isdst=0) | 13241840 | 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. Hello, and welcome to Short Stuff. Short Stuff. The podcast is so nice. I said it twice. Okay, there's Chuck. I'm Josh. There's Jerry. Let's get going, everybody. I've eaten up a lot of time here. Yeah, here's the thing with the Jim Wilson airline code, everybody. Supposedly it is the American Airlines code for a dead body on a plane, right? And when I first saw this and I thought that would be a cool idea, little did I know that it would have been a podcast we don't do yet called Almost No Stuff. It would have been like 45 seconds long. So we started trading things and we're going to talk about shipping dead bodies and about other airline codes and other fun stuff like that. Almost no Stuff. But I don't know if it's quite true or not. It seems that American Airlines, according to this author, is Jim Wilson airline code for a dead body on a plane from our former website. Howstep works.com? Still around, still kicking? Still doing it? Still going. Everyone go check it out. Yeah, they got in touch with American Airlines and they're kind of denied that that was the truth. They said, who told you that? But it seems like it's very much the truth that that's their code. Yeah. Here's the thing. The whole premise of this urban legend possible truth thing is that you would ever be in a situation where you're on a plane and some flight attendant needs to tell another flight attendant at the back of the plane that there's something going on with the dead body and they can't just walk down the aisle. It's like, oh, no, I got to let you know now. But even still, like, that would have anything to do with the flight attendance, anything to do with the cabin, because all dead bodies are shipped in the cargo hold. They don't prop them up in like, 26 C. They fly them a certain way. So there's no reason for them to have a code like Jim Wilson to denote that there's a court being transported on this plane. And yet the strangest thing is that it really does seem like they did have that code. Like you were saying. It's possible because even though they deny it now. The impression I have is that they somewhat recently. But not in the immediate past. But in the memorable past. Did call it Jim Wilson service. And then they just discontinued it and called it what sane people would call it would be like. Carefully and tenderly moving human remains. Because you don't have to have a code name for something like that. Yeah, this was a little frustrating because I wanted there to be a cool origin story. No, and there's not. But apparently there is a page or at one time there was recently on the national funeral directors association website right. That very much did say or does say, instructing their members to use the American Airlines cargo Jim Wilson service. Right. Yet American Airlines is going, I don't know what you're talking about. I never heard of that. No. And there's a site called Jim Wilson, I believe, Jimwilson.com it might be.org, where it's just a single page and there's some links and quotes that kind of support the idea that it did exist if it doesn't still, there's a Wall Street Journal article from 1987 that specifically says that that is the code for this type of service. Handling non cremated casketed human remains. That it's. Jim Wilson service. And they quote a funeral director saying that we say that because it's much better to say something like that than what it actually is around the Bereaved family, which, again, I don't understand that guy's logic at all. Doesn't really make any sense. But, I mean, it was in the Wall Street Journal in 1987, so that definitely lends some support as well. But was it specific to American Airlines? I believe it was. I think it's always been associated with American Airlines, which makes it even more potentially correct. Yeah. I found out that other airlines supposedly say HR for human remains or abbreviated, I saw him as well. The home service. Yes. What does that stand for? Human. It's short for human. Oh, okay. It's like you got comfort plus sky, human remains, that whole thing. Well, I guess differentiates it from human resources, which is commonly what you think of with HR. Just HR and all those great meetings that companies always have about HR. Sure, exactly. And human remains. So maybe we should take a break because we did dig up some stuff about how you can transport a dead body because you don't think about it. You could die on vacation in another state or another country, and we'll tell you about that stuff 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 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. Hey Chuck, before we get back to this, I have one more piece of fishy evidence. If you search on your favorite search engine, whatever that may be, I certainly don't condone one over the other. Although I use Firefox as a web browser, I avoid being like the plague. If you type in Jim Wilson American Airlines not service, not human rights, no nothing. Just Jim Wilson American Airlines, you will find it takes you to the American Airlines Human remain site and it Rick rolls you. It does Rick roll you for sure. Wow. So it just directs you right to there it does. There you have it. Right. So at the very least, your favorite search engine is in on this whole joke. That would be pretty cool. And there's also one other part to this joke too. There's a LinkedIn profile for a guy named Jim Wilson at American Airlines. And does it say, is this avatar like a skeleton? No, it's like a normal person. Okay. Yeah. Well that's probably him, I think. So that's it for Jim Wilson. Here's the deal though. If you do have the need to transport a deceased loved one or yourself, like if someone else is dealing with that, obviously, although you could probably pre arrange this, what you're going to have to do is work with probably two funeral homes and funeral directors because you got to get someone on the front end and the back end. You can't just, from what I can tell a you know, you can't do it at the origin flight. Like you got to get a known shipper. That's what it's known as. The funeral homes and directors are approved as these shippers. But you can't just then say, I'll just pick them up at baggage claim. You got to get someone to do that behind the scenes and that's going to be a funeral director as well. Right. So you need a funeral director on each end and that's going to cost you. It's probably not super cheap. No, it depends. I mean they have in here anywhere from 1500 to 15 grand if it's international. It all depends on the weight, how far you're traveling. And obviously you can do it by plane, train or automobile. But the plane will be the most expensive. Yeah. And train is pretty cost effective. Driving the Cadaver, the corpse, the human remains yourself is the most cost effective. Can you do that? You can do it, but you have to follow all the same guidelines and laws that any funeral director would have to follow. And you might not know all of them, but if you're really research heavy and you want to have a story about how you drove your dead aunt across the country and your station wagon, you can do it. The problem is, with driving in particular, you're going to go through a bunch of states that might have different laws about transporting human remains, some say has to be embalmed. Well, what if your aunt wants to be cryonically preserved? Right. Well, you can embalm somebody like that, so you have to go around that state. It's just probably way better to hire a funeral director to help with that because they know this stuff and they know how to handle it again, it's just pretty expensive. Yeah. And here's something I never knew. Sort of one of the macabre sides of travel insurance. You can pay somebody to take care of this just in case, I guess. Insurance. If you're I don't know, if you're on the road for a couple of years or you're going someplace really dangerous, or maybe if you're an ill health and you don't have to travel, or if you plan on dying by your own hand, sure, I suppose you can do that. That's a really good point. I wonder if that's something that people who, like, travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide take into account. Surely they do. Maybe. I mean, apparently it costs less than $500 is certainly a lot cheaper than a $15,000 international shipment. Exactly. Yeah. I saw as much as $25,000 for international shipping of a body. You often have to have documents translated because you have to have all your documents, everything from your passport to the certificate that says you were involved, everything. It can get very costly. So, yeah, $500. I wonder if the travel insurance people have gotten hipped to this thing, though. I don't know. Everyone's always got their hand out, so it's not like you can even put a casket directly into the cargo hold. It has to sit in a specially made tray that is built by a company that also charges money for that. Right. And one of the early manufacturers of air trays supposedly was the Jim Wilson Company. Supposedly. Supposedly. If you really want to do the right thing and do it cheaper well, I say it's the right thing is you will have cremated remains much more cost effective, much easier to ship. You can carry those yourself, even if you have the right receptacle. Yes, you can. And so if you are going to fly with cremated remains, a lot of airlines will let you carry them on, like carry on luggage. But that means they have to go through the X ray machine, which means you have to have, like you can't use a lead lined earn because TSA will be like, you can't come on with that, and we're not allowed to open it. Now there's a New York Giants lineman. I'm not sure what position he plays. His name is AJ. Francis, who just blew up Twitter putting I can't remember. I guess it was TSA on blast because they went through his luggage and he had checked the bag with his mother's cremated remains, and they opened up the bag and got his mother all over his stuff in his suitcase. What? He went berserk. Of course he did. The TSA had, like, a different story about it. They said that they packed it carefully and wasn't their fault, but he wasn't buying it. So if I were transporting a loved one's cremated remains, I would definitely carry it on. Wow. But you need to have, like, a special wood box or something like that. Sure. All of my animals are in wood boxes. Right. At least temporarily. Like, you can get a nice earn on the other end, but just don't try to transport them through TSA with that. Really nice earn. Yes. I like the wood box. I'm not a big earn guy. Okay. I thought you were making fun of me. No. We have these very nice hand carved wood boxes. That's very nice. Not into the urines. Very nice. I do have a little something more, though, on airline secret codes, because I think everyone knows that you can't just get on the intercom as a pilot and say, something awful is happening. You need a little lead time to deal with stuff sometimes. So there's something called code bravo. Apparently they use that to distract passengers from real danger so they can kind of take care of things on the down low. $7,500 means your plane has been hijacked, supposedly. So if you hear that no good. 7500. Yes, the number 7500. Oh, man, I'm going to not be able to not listen out for that constantly on every flight. Now. Do your pilot announcing that, folks, we got ourselves a code 7500. They were like, what? You don't know what that is? And that's probably for the best. So just sit back, relax, and we will probably blow up any time now. It's one of my favorite things. Is it? It's your best impression? It's my impression of a pilot doing an impression of Chuck Yeager. And then there's 7600 or 700. That means, respectively, radio failure or general emergency and then the status of all code Adam, which you'll also hear at shopping malls or wherever. And that's when there's an incident with a child named after the Adam. That was Adam Walsh. Yeah, adam Walsh. We got anything else? Nothing else. No more codes? No, that's it for this short stuff on Jim Wilson. Who knows if it's real or not. I guess if we all make believe that it is real, we can make it real. So let's do that. And in the meantime, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of Iheartradios how Stuff Works. For more podcasts cast My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows." | |
Was Mesopotamia the Cradle of Civilization? | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/was-mesopotamia-the-cradle-of-civilization | In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck discuss the reasons why Mesopotamia is often considered the first civilization. | In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck discuss the reasons why Mesopotamia is often considered the first civilization. | Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:56:55 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=20, tm_min=56, tm_sec=55, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=61, tm_isdst=0) | 26237900 | audio/mpeg | "Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, as Charles W, Chuck Bryant. Me, chuck Is and I are going to get to the bottom today of whether or not Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. I like that. Straight ahead, we're going to find out if that's the case. I think it is. Do you? Yeah, sure. There's a lot of evidence. You wrote a compelling argument for it, I believe, my friend. Can I set the scene? Yes. Okay. So, Chuck, around about 110 years ago, okay, humanity did something you could say significant. Okay. We abandoned our hunter gatherer ways, which entails jumping out of trees onto gazelles and butchering them. Small tribes picking berries. No more than 30, apparently. Oh, really? Anything over 30, you have too much interpersonal conflict. Really? And so I guess through trial and error, our early ancestors figured out that you couldn't have more than 30 in a banned that 31st dude started killing people every time. Right? Yeah. They're like, there's always one out of 30. Right? And then they're like, oh, wait, got you 30. That's good. That was 100 gatherer joke. Yeah. Those never get old. All of humanity's history, hunting and gathering, wandering around, that was it. Yeah. And then 11,000 years ago, during what's called the Neolithic Revolution, we stopped, we settled down, and we started raising crops. We turned to agriculture, which led to well, not sitting around, clearly. There was a lot of work to be done, but not moving around a more sedentary, stable environment. Right. And it changed everything big time from this. In fairly quick fashion. Civilization developed, city sprung up. What? Yeah. And what we have now today all goes back to that period 110 years ago where we adopted agriculture, right? Yeah. So that leads one to wonder, okay, well, what was the first civilization then? It leads me to wonder. Yeah, me too. Which is why I wrote this article. And you did a fine job, sir. Is it just living in cities, Chuck? Is it just creating a village based around agriculture? Is that your civilization? Huh? No, Josh, but it does take a village. That's what Hill says, and that's what I say. Okay. It takes a village, Josh, and let me break it down. It's funny for me to tell you, even though you wrote this. It's a little awkward, don't worry. But a civilization is I like the way that one writer put it. If culture is behavior, civilization is structure. Right. There are certain things that have to be present. Yeah. So we're talking a class structure. Upper class, usually. Religious leaders were the ruling party. Is that right? Religious or political or both? A lot of times both back then, right? Sure. And laws would be nice. That's an indicator, right. Living in one place, obviously. Yeah. That's another indicator. Like a city religious and economic structure. Right. So like trade, commerce, that kind of thing. Right. Is there anything else? That's pretty much the basics for civilization. Okay. But it doesn't always have to be a city. But it just kind of made sense. That's how it's always been. Yeah, because civilization has always been tied to agriculture. And agriculture means you have your growing crops and you have a bunch of people tending to these crops. So they're all living in the same area and generally they're all sharing this land in some way or another, divided up. So that's a city. Yeah. It did give them more time, though. Like I said, it was hard work. But it clearly gives them more free time than, say, hunting and gathering when you're constantly on the move. Not necessarily. Oh, really? Yeah. Remember one of my heroes, Doctor Jared Diamond. He wrote that essay. The greatest mistake in the history of mankind. Or humankind. Yes. The greatest mistake in the history of the human race. Yes, Dr. Screech. Right. He argued that, no, like you spend 4 hours out of your day hunting and gathering and the rest is leisure. I don't have anything to tend to. Well, it was his big argument that agriculture was a huge mistake. Well, what's the deal, though, with you saying then that science and art sprung out of the free time from the agricultural lifestyle? I'm very glad you asked that, Chuck, because this is a very important point. Okay. And that stood out to me too, when I was back rereading this article. Because of the advent of civilization, we were able to pursue things like science, pursue things like math, create calendars and astronomy and all that, because there were people who were toiling on behalf of others who weren't toiling to say the ruling class were the ones who created science, who dealt because they didn't have to toil they didn't even have to go hunt and gather. They had nothing but free time. Exactly. Okay, that makes sense. Well, you mentioned the calendar and time that was specifically the Babylonians, which is part of Mesopotamia. Right. They invented minutes and seconds. Right. You get it away. Did I? Yeah. Well, come on. I'm kidding. To you. Mesopotamia. Let's go ahead and let the cat out of the bag. Okay. They were the first civilization. Yeah. You'd think they had everything right there. Modern day Iraq, is that right? Yes. And I think a little bit of Iran between the tigers and the Euphrates River. Very fertile land there, wasn't it? It was thanks to the early farmers because they rerouted the water. Is that right? Yeah, it was fertile around the rivers. Sure. But these guys were building canals like 20 miles out and founding cities where they ended so long ago. That's amazing. Yeah. This is about 4000 BC. The Mesopotamia really started to grow up. And Mesopotamia is Greek. I believe for land between two rivers tigris and Euphrates. Right. And it was actually a series of independent, although affiliated city states, syria, Babylonia and Sumatra. Sumer. Sumer. Samaria. Right. I've seen both ways. Sumer and Samaria. Okay. But remember, in ghostbusters gozo is a sumerian god. Really? Which one was Gozo? Gozer. Yes. Okay. The lady in the suit. Was that a suit? It was some kind of suit. I got you. All right. So, Chuck, like you said, that one scholar, Matthias Tomsack, said that if culture is behavior, then civilization is structured to that behavior. That kind of underscores the point that we had certain things, certain elements that form the basis of civilization floating out there in the ether. Like hunter gatherer tribes engaged in religious ceremonies and rituals, and there were some sort of structure to their bands from time to time. If there was a shaman present, he probably ran the show. Sure. Or she. So there were these elements to civilization, but it was in Mesopotamia where they all came together. Right. And they were structure eyes. Wow. Organized. Yes. I think that's the word you're looking for. You know what was also really cool, I thought that you pointed out, was were they the very first people to actually write things down on tablets? Yeah. And this kind of shows how you would think, like, oh, well, the Mesopotamians really had everything together. Right. And they were like, we're going to build humanity. Yeah. We're going to write books. Because books are important. They didn't know that. No, not at first. So, yeah, in Sumeria, the first writing came about why, Chuck? Well, like you point out here, it's very boring things that they were keeping track of on written record, which like tax records and accounting records. Right. But that makes sense. They were smart enough early on to keep track of their financial business with a permanent record. And necessity is the mother of invention. They needed to keep track of their stuff, so they created writing. But then that writing led to the phonetic alphabet, to where now things could be depicted where there was no picture for them. Right. It wasn't just like cow sun Mountain. Right. I think you just insulted somebody. In ancient Egypt, they could actually express abstract thought for the first time on paper. Well, not paper, but clay tablets. Right. And that led actually to Gilgamesh, which is thought to be the first literary work in the entire world. Do you ever read it? Really? Yeah. So it's a real thing. Yeah. I mean, I know it's a real thing, but it's a real book with the plot. Is it fiction? It is fiction. Although there was supposedly a real King Gilgamesh. Okay. And yeah, it's really interesting because it kind of depicts the struggle at the time between going towards civilization or remaining huntergatherers mountain, pretty much. You have Gilgamesh. Right. It's all about the city. Sure. And he runs into inkido. I've heard it both ways, too. Is that your COA now? I've heard it both ways. Right. And Inkido is like this wild man of the woods, and Gilgamesh meets him, wrestles him, and basically is like, hey, you're my best friend now because you almost beat me. Let me take you to the city. So it's as much about Gilgamesh as it is about him. Taming Inky, do, bringing another human being out of the woods and into the city interesting, out of our past as huntergatherers into civilization, because not everybody just subscribed to it at once. And a lot of people believe that Gilgamesh is symbolic for this transition at this point in human history. It's the city mouse and the country mouse. Yeah, exactly. Pretty much. It's a struggle that still goes on today. Yes. It's weird, but yeah. However you interpret it, gilgamesh is arguably the first work of literature on the planet. Right. And that came from Sumeria. Okay. Which was Mesopotamia. Right. All right. So that's a strike in their favor. You know what else was? Religion. Organized religion. It wasn't the first time it had happened. Right. But the fact that they were all in one place all of a sudden, instead of hunting and gathering and having your own little religious ideals in small pockets of 30, all of a sudden you had large numbers of people worshipping the same gods. Right. And you had these people at the top of this religious hierarchy. They were in charge. Yes, they were in charge because they were the ones who knew what the gods were thinking, and they could be like, this god utu the sun god. Right. Or Goser. You didn't want to mess with Gozer, but let's say Gozer commands you to bring me a bunch of emmer wheat. Right. And I'm supposed to eat it, and you're supposed to sit there and watch and not say anything. And that's why I'm a fat cat. But that's the hierarchy. These priests had control immediately over these people. Once organized religion started. Yes. And that led to moral codes of conduct, which eventually would lead to regular law, which is another little strike in their favor. All these things are coming out of Mesopotamia, right. All forming a picture. Josh, there's also some very overtly. Well, no, there's some other great advances they made. We talked about the calendar. Apparently, the Babylonians were the first to actually mark time beyond the sun's down. Really? Yeah, they came up with seconds and minutes. Right. They created a calendar, and then this, in turn, gives rise to astronomy. You can't have astronomy without a calendar. And math, right. Eventually, yes. So science is coming out of Mesopotamia, too. And art. Yes. Actually, people have been creating art for 10,000 years at that point. Right. Yeah. That's pretty cool. That art was one of the first things that humans tried their hand up. I mean, think about the prehistoric drawings and the caves in France. Sure. Which ones? But of, like, the people running around hunting bison. Right. And they were also telling stories too. Right, sure. But isn't that art? Yeah, man, look at you. What a sensitive guy. So Josh was at all like super awesome ideas that they were laying down on humanity. Surely they did some harm. Right? Definitely. Because with advancement, it's hard not to step on a few toes along the way. Right. And once you say, I've got this group subjugated, but that group over there has got a lot of emmer wheat. Right. That I want too. So I'm going to amass an army and you guys are going to go subjugate that other group. So war slaves, expansionism, all of this stuff came out of that too. Sure. And the other thing too is disease and I guess plague, now that you have or not plague, what would you call it? Epidemics. Yeah, an epidemic. Since you have people all living in one place, it's much easier to pass that thing around. All of a sudden you have an epidemic on your hand. That was another point Jared Diamond made. Like you can't have an epidemic if you just are living in groups of 30 that don't really contact one another. Doctor Screech. Exactly. So, Chuck, it's pretty clear Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization. Although there are some other comers. There are definitely some settlements that have been discovered that are Neolithic that show signs of some sort of cohesion. Sure. Let's see. There's some along the Yellow River in China that are pretty old. There's cattle Hoyat, which is one of my favorites. Yeah. Southern Turkey, they had temples of worship shrines, they had art, they raised livestock and farmed. And they had about 10,000 people together doing this. Right. But what strikes me is you point out that they didn't have a hierarchy or social stratification. Right. But that's a 10,000 people back then with no hierarchy. It's communism. Well, it's hanky is what it is. It's utopia. I bet it didn't go so well, though, especially in those early savage times. Sure. Or else it did. They could have ended because of climate change or whatever. That's true. Or maybe they actually did have a social hierarchy. It's just not evident to researchers yet. But if they did, really what they were lacking was the social hierarchy that would have made them a civilization. And they had a good 3000 years on the Mesopotamians. What about Ghanaep? That's in Turkmenistan. Yeah. They sound like they meet the thing they farm, they build canals, palaces and traded. You know what kept them out? Again, I think it was the hierarchy. Oh, the class structure got you. And isn't that sad that class structure is one of the bases of civilization? Yeah. And think about this, Chuck. We're talking about how civilization keeping tax records gave rise to phonetic alphabet, which gave rise to capturing abstract ideas, which led to fiction. Right. So you can see how civilization at one point when we all of a sudden are starting to settle down. There's a world of opportunity, of choices available to us, sure. But with each block that we built upon and cemented, we also built our own. We built ourselves into a certain worldview that we can't it's tough to see out of sometimes now these days. You see what I'm saying? What were the choices that they made? Could they have been like, well, we're going to go with cattle hayek and not have a social hierarchy? Right. But now, having a social hierarchy in class, it means that you're a civilization. You can't think of it without that. And there's also a lot of benefit to studying early civilization or what constitutes a civilization because it sheds light on our own. Like, today, we have class structures. We have a ruling class that distributes wealth based on economic policies and tax breaks. And it's tough to see it like that because you just think it's Barack Obama, John McCain. But this is really you can look at it in that detached manner. Like, this is a this is the class structure, and this is how they dole out the goods, and they don't dole it out equally. You know what Bob Marley said? Lively up yourself. Well, he said a lot of things. Don't know your past, you don't know your future. That's true. Right there. True, dad. I don't think he was the first guy to say that either. But, Chuck, there's one question that remains unanswered. This is awesome. Tell me this is an awesome this is pretty awesome. Why did we start farming? Well, Josh, there are different theories, but the one that you found that I love is from an archeologist named Patrick McGovern, and he believes that once humans got their first little nip of that sweet alcohol from what, fermented fruit or grain or something by accident, probably the first time. Sure. Once they got that taste of intoxication, they would stop at nothing to recreate it. Yeah. And he contends in a book, Uncorking the Past the Quest for Wine, beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages, that the Neolithic revolution happened in agriculture was born because people wanted to grow things to make alcohol. Yeah. And it makes a lot of sense, Chuck, because if you think about it as huntergatherers, we had food already, and we had figured out that you could live in bands of 30 or less. Sure. There isn't necessarily an urge to live in civilization. We're tied to a sedentary lifestyle through agriculture, but it leaves that door open. Like, why would we go, well, I've got some food over here, and I have tons of leisure time, but I'd rather stick right here and spend all of my time farming for food? But this McGovern hypothesis about alcohol providing the basis of agriculture, it makes a lot of sense. That answers that question. Well, that's the age old question in our archaeological circles, is what came first, beer or bread? Yeah. So you're growing these crops. What were they doing? Were they making bread with it or were they making beer? They were making neither. They were actually making a fermented combination of meat and some sort of fruit wine. Yeah. About 10% of alcohol. Yeah. Is that what they said? Yeah. Not bad. And we're talking like 7000 BC, 9000 years ago, again, along the Yellow River in China, people are making this some sort of fermented alcoholic beverage. And they were so clever about this, Chuck. You have to have some sort of malt sugar to allow the fermentation process to take place. Right. So what did they do? This is what they did. They had obviously no knowledge of chemistry at the time. None. So they would prehistoric humans would mix clumps of rice with their saliva in their mouth. They chew it up, break down the starches and the grain in their mouth and convert it into malt sugar and then spit that up into the home brew. And apparently all the yeasty foamy stuff would float to the top. And they would use these really long party straws, crazy straws, to drink the alcohol from the bottom of the thing. And they still use similar jugs to drink out of in China. Yeah. So there you have it, bro. Yeah, it's closed. It's like making booze 9000 years ago. And McGovern would know. He's a molecular archeologist. Right. He pretty much pioneered the field. And if you have an old pottery shard that you want analyzed, you take it to him. And so he started noticing time after time that with all of these shards of pottery, he kept finding tartaric acid, which is an acid present in wine. Right. And he would find some other stuff too, actually, in gonadi. Right. He found some vessels or he was asked to analyze some vessels and he found a beer, a natural contaminant of beer. And he also figured out that these little scratch, these cross hatch scratches in the bottom of a pottery were designed to absorb this contaminant, which occurs in crystal form so it would just sink to the bottom and get stuck in these cross hatches. So he's like, wow, these are beer bottles 4000 years ago or 6000 years ago. That's awesome. You know what else? What? Sumerians, which was part of Mesopotamia. Right. They worshiped the goddess of fertility, Nina Hara, and they consider her to be the inventor of beer and the goddess of fertility too. That's pretty funny. That's funny because I thought Paul Masan was the goddess of fertility. That's good. And also, Josh, we're saying how the Sumerians wrote down things on clay tablets. Some of the first folks to do that, they actually wrote down the recipe for beer was one of the things they wrote down. So they had like, the first brewer's handbook, basically. Yeah. They had tax records, Gilgamesh, and a good beer recipe. What else do you need? I don't know. That's pretty awesome. And his hypothesis is also backed up by the really rapid spread around the world of fermentation. Right after this, I think the Chinese shards that show that fruit and meat mixture are the oldest. And then after that, it kind of spreads fairly quickly. Sure. Yeah. Pretty cool. And if you look at their staple crops that constituted early agriculture, you can brew from all of them. Yeah. There was some corn millet rice. What beer company was that? Some beer company had found some ancient recipe for beer and they were able to recreate it. Sweet. Yes. I wish I could remember the name of it. Someone will tell me. It's not flag porter, is it? I don't know. Maybe Flag Porter. It's grape beer. I'll look into it. All right. Well, Chuck, that's about it. We still haven't quite gotten to the bottom of whether Mesopotamia is the cradle of civilization or not. I say yes. What's your say? I say yes. But as you point out, scholars still debate what is a civilization in the first place. So who are we to say? Yeah, that's about it. I don't even recommend reading the article. We pretty much covered it. But there is a search bar@households.com. They lead you. All sorts of cool stuff. How about listening to mail? Josh, this is a long one, but it's worth it. Okay. Because this is one of the best ones we've ever gotten. That's two full pages. Well, 16 points for my old eyes. Okay. Josh and Chuck. Strange as it may sound, I actually discovered a secluded tribe a few years ago while I was sailing solo around the world. Somewhere around New. ITU in the South Pacific. I was hit by a huge storm. Snapped my mask like a matchstick and treated my boat like a bathtub toy. He had to strap himself in the boat so he didn't get watched overboard. Gets tossed around for what seems like days, ends up washed ashore like a castaway. Not like a castaway. He was a castaway as a castaway. The little Marianne was his boat. It was completely wrecked. And that was probably a mistake to name it after a gilligan's island. Sure, you're just asking for it. And so he did not know how long he'd be marooned. And turns out he was there for about a month. Well, cast away on an island. So listen to this. On the beach, a cargo container washes ashore from China. He was able to open it up eventually, and there was a plethora of Chinese consumer goods. Looks like dollar store type stuff. He said that's when he noticed behind me. I turned and saw 50 mostly naked people standing on the beach and more emerging from the jungle. I was apprehensive. I had seen no signs of civilization and I thought I was alone on the island. They approached me and they started to chant. As it turns out, they were singing to me. I was dumb struck and they formed a semicircle around me, enchanted what sounded like Joe from sue. This is amazing. Yeah, this better be real. If someone sends in, like, a snopes thing, then I'm going to be really pissed. They started holding out their hands and gesturing for the stuff in the container, so he started passing it out, obviously to be like, here, I have things for you. I come in peace. He said it was like I was Santa Claus. And this is their first Christmas. They were tearing into everything. It turns out he had been washed ashore on an island inhabited by a cargo cult, and I was the first white person they had seen for generations. The last ones were during the Second World War and had left behind modern conveniences like metal pots and knives and some broken walkie talkies who the elders used to communicate with each other. They learned how to use these walkie talkies. He said he lived among them for about a month until someone finally came and rescued me. I was revered as a living god. They waited on me hand and foot, and the shaman would hand me a walkie talkie occasionally and began chanting into this all I chanted into mine. It always made him laugh and seemed to heighten his status in the tribe. The rescue boat finally came. They held a going away party for me ceremony, and he later discovered the island had been a staging ground for military ops during World War II. And the military had won the hearts and minds of these natives, so they weren't aggressive toward white man. And the chant they greeted me with on the beach, turned out, was a derivation of Joe from USA, which is what their forefathers have held. Soldiers. There is no way this is true. You don't think so? It can't be. This is from Barry. And Barry says, it was nice being treated like a god for a little while, made for a great vacation. And he brought me back and said it was true and that he still never completed his round the world trip. Yeah, that's the best one ever. Definitely. Okay, even if it's not true, the creativity barry, someone writes back and says, that was on a T shirt. You're really upset. I forgot about that, man. That kid took us, didn't they? Yeah, the Haiku kid? Yes. We took him behind the woodshed, didn't we? Yes. So if you have a non lie email that you want to send us, you can ship it off in a cargo container to stuff podcast@housethepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Want more housetoftworks? Check out our blog on the housedefworks.com homepage. 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." | ||
441253c0-53a3-11e8-bdec-27b50503cc0f | Frances Perkins: Influential and Unknown | https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/frances-perkins-influential-and-unknown | Frances Perkins was an incredibly influential American yet is virtually unknown. What did she do? A lot! For instance, Social Security was her brainchild. And that's just the tip of the old iceberg. | Frances Perkins was an incredibly influential American yet is virtually unknown. What did she do? A lot! For instance, Social Security was her brainchild. And that's just the tip of the old iceberg. | Tue, 08 Sep 2020 09:00:00 +0000 | time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=252, tm_isdst=0) | 42663769 | audio/mpeg | "Hey, everybody. I don't know if you've heard, but we have a book coming out. Finally. Finally, after all these years. It's great. It's fun. You're going to love it. It's called Stuff You Should Know colon an Incomplete Compendium of Mostly Interesting Things. Yes, and it's 26 jampacked chapters that we wrote with another guy named Nell's Parker, who is amazing and is illustrated amazingly by our illustrator Carly Minnardo. And it's just an all round joy to pick up and read, even though we haven't physically held in our hands yet. It's like we have Chuck in our dreams so far. I can't wait to actually see and hold this thing and smell it. And so should you. So preorder now. It means a lot to us. The support is a very big deal. So preorder anywhere. Books are sold. 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 this is stuff you should know. The Amazing Unsung Woman Edition, volume two. At least no more than two. What number would you say then? I don't know. But I tell you what, if you want to take a vote on maybe one of the most under sung while at the same time being most influential Americans to ever live, neil diamond. He was very sung. I know. I'm not a big fan. Anyway. You would be hard pressed to overlook Ms. Perkins. Yeah. Ms. Francis Perkins. Totally agree. Had never heard her name before, had never even known she existed. But yeah, the more you dig into it, the more it was almost a crime that this woman was virtually written out of the history books. Yeah. And if you are one of those people who was unfortunate to not be able to work right now during quarantine and the effects of Kobi 19 and you are not lucky enough but deservedly enough receiving unemployment insurance, you can thank Francis Perkins for that. That's right. And every single person who's getting a check as measly as they've gotten lately is getting one because of the system that Francis Perkins set up. And what's really, I think worth noting, too, is this is exactly the kind of situation that she got this past for, that she helped design this for. Totally. Because there's a quote I can't remember exactly where the quote was. But to paraphrase it. It's basically like we need to always keep our eye on the long term and plan for the worst case scenario. While. Yes. There's a lot of immediate needs that we need. But there's always going to be something that comes down the road. And if we have planned for it. We're way better off. Just imagine how disastrous it would be on top of the current disaster if there wasn't such a thing as unemployment insurance. And this is how we found out that we really kind of need it. Yeah. It would be Dark Ages stuff in this country. Yeah. So if you have gotten your unemployment insurance check and it has helped you thank Francis Perkins somehow. Yeah. And we want to thank how stuff works. It's where part of this research came from and some other places. But notably, and I want to shout this out because this is a library intern at the FDR Library who wrote a paper called honoring the Achievements of FDR Secretary of Labor Jessica Brightman. This is really good stuff, and she's a library intern, and we want to shout her out. Yeah, she did great. She was, at the time I imagine she's moved on from that internship after she turned that essay in. Yeah. I bet you're pippy she did. So Francis Perkins was born Fanny Coralai Perkins in Boston in 1880. But her relatives and her ancestors came from Maine. And it's kind of funny here at the beginning of this, How Stuff Works. She's so undersung that even residents of her hometown of Damariscotta, Maine, didn't seem familiar with her legacy. I think that says more about Maine, right? They're like, we don't need to help her put on airs. Well, then, just like, I don't ask, I don't tell, whatever. She lived here. Great. Good for her. I want to say also, before the residents of Newcastle bust a vein in their forehead, she's also cited as a native of Newcastle, Maine, and they're right across the de Marskata River from one another. I think she's from Newcastle. So is this like an Adidas Puma thing? Maybe. Except imagine if neither town knew what shoes were. That would be a pretty accurate analogy. Oh, boy. I love the Mainers. Yeah. She came from really, like, died in the wool Yankee stock. Her family came over, I think, in the 1680s. Her family had built an outpost during the French Indian War. Her grandmother, who had more of an influence on her, she said, than anybody, had a cousin who she was close to, who founded Howard University and fought for the rights of newly free African Americans. She came from a long line of people who cared about other people, and yet, surprisingly, her parents were very conservative. They were in favor of helping the poor, but not mingling with them. Helping them, like helping them by sending some money or something like that. Okay. And they produced a child. Fanny Francis. She changed her name, I think, in, I don't know her twenty s or thirty s. She was the opposite way. She was like, no, people are people, and they all deserve help, and there's a lot of injustice in this world, and I want to change it myself. And she's one of those people who actually did enact tremendous change for all the right reasons. Yeah. She said, people are people, so why should it be? You and I should get along so awfully. Which one was that? Depression mode. Depression Mode. Oh, baby. Hey, that's Emily's Jam. She probably has that tattooed on her body somewhere. In fact, none of my business. We're both doing that silly. And I never do these things on Facebook, but I have time now. The top ten most influential albums. And I was like, which one are you going to pick? New order or Japsh mode for her. Because that's a tough one. Well, I mean, she's got ten to choose from, right? Yeah, but I think for her, those two are so inextricably tied that it was one or the other. I got you. And she went to Push Mode because they were first and thus probably more influential. Depression mode is before new order. Yes. I mean, technically, if you count New Order as an outcropping of Joy Division, then they were first. Well, Joy Division was different, though. It was pretty different. Different enough that they might as well be two different bands, which they were. You know who we need to give us the judgment call is Frances Perkins, who apparently would not have enjoyed our banter. She was very much known as, like, a dower, serious woman. But from what I can tell, that's actually a public persona that she wore to get men to take her seriously. Well, who can blame her? Because we'll see later on about her. It's no accident that she's lost a history in many ways. Yeah, but what she was also was highly educated. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 19 two, where she majored in chemistry and physics, even though she made her name in economics, which means she was a very well rounded human and had a very large brain. And apparently she had made it all the way through college. In her senior year, I think she attended an economics lecture by Florence Kelly, who was a huge wage justice crusader. And that just changed her life. Yeah, big time. In 19 this is post college, she went to Philly and she became General Secretary of the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association. What did she do there? Well, she was in charge of investigating employment agencies that were fake and that preyed on women, immigrant women specifically. And she had to sort of deal with the dregs of society in that job and did so very successfully and then decided she wanted to keep her education going. So while she was in Philly, she went to the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania because that's super easy and light learning. And then after that, she went to Columbia, where she earned Ma in Social Economics in and we should say, like, she's getting all of the schooling, but at the same time, she's also set herself off on a what's that like, learn while you work program called internship, I guess. So that's not exactly what I'm looking for, but yeah, I mean, it makes sense. So she set herself up on a real world internship program. So while she was in Philly working for that bureau, she was investigating those fake employment rackets. She was on the ground doing this stuff, like carrying out these inspections, investigating factories, like taking notes and like in the early twenty s. Yeah. Basically, while she's studying this stuff, she's also outdoing and seeing the stuff firsthand that she's learning about, which, from what I can tell, she really kind of digested and held onto, and it just kept driving her for the rest of her life. What she saw. I think that's called the school of hard knocks. It is. But she enrolled in the Wharton School and the School of Hard Knocks at the same time, which is pretty impressive. That's right. And after Columbia, after she got that Masters, for two years she served as Executive Secretary of the Consumers League of New York. And this is where she really felt her life calling to improve wages, improve working conditions. Because this was 1910 through 1912, and things weren't great in factories at the time. We could do a podcast on I don't know what the focus would be necessarily, because we've done labor unions, but just labor conditions. Yeah, maybe so. Eye opening, but this is one of the things she did. There's very few more depressing words than these strung together. She improved working conditions for children. That was one of the things she did. I know. And that was at the Consumers League of New York. And she got there and was like, yes, I've achieved one of my first goals, which is working directly with the same Florence Kelly who gave the economics lecture that changed her life years before Mount Holyoke. That's right. Yeah. So she was one of those ones who said, I want to do this and then we'd do it, and then we'd move on to the next thing. Yeah. She wouldn't stand around and wait for the statue to be built in her honor. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So we take a break. Yes. All right, we're going to take a break and talk about a pretty devastating fire in New York City that changed the course of her life right after this. What fire, Chuck? I'm talking about the Triangle Shirt. Waste fire in Manhattan. Sort of near Washington Square Park and Grinwich. Right next to Washington Square Park. Yeah. In Greenwich Village. I think it's an NYU building now. It is. And I tried to pinpoint if that was the building where I actually had my film classes. Was it? I don't know. I can't quite tell. We got to know Chuck. I'll see if I can find out. But a shirt waist was a woman's blouse is what they called it at the time. And this was a factory that made women's blouses. If you worked there, you were probably a young woman. You might be an immigrant. You would work about 52 hours a week. Oh, I saw 12 hours a day, seven days a week. What does that math turn out to? Let's see. Wait, I can't do math out loud. Let's say between 52 and 80 hours a week. No, it was way more than that. Twelve times 84. Yeah, that's what I said, 84 hours a week. But even that doesn't sound that big. Twelve hour days, seven days a week, just to keep your job. Right. So I saw 52. Either way, they made between seven and $12 a week making these blouses for women, which was not good even back then. Yeah, it wasn't good. And because this was a factory in New York in 1911, they had the doors locked, they had the staircases locked. They thought it prevented theft. If you remember what happened to locked doors and stairwells in our hotel fire episode, the same thing happened here on March 25, 1911, when the Triangle Shirt Waste fire started because they think of a match or a cigarette, but thrown into a waistband. And everything in there was flammable, practically, that wasn't metal because of all these fabrics, like highly flammable. It went up really quick. It's one of the deadliest US. Workplace disasters of all time. To this day, 146 workers died, 123 of which were women and girls between the ages of generally between 14 and 23. The oldest was 43, but that was kind of an outlier. And 62 of those people jumped to their death in front of full view of New York City, including Francis Perkins. Right in front of Francis Perkins. She didn't jump to her desk. No. She's literally witnessing one of the turning points in history as it happens, seeing women, teenage girls, jump out of the 9th floor of this building because it's on fire. And not only is she witnessing a fire that will change history, she is one of the people that will force history to change because of this fire, the fate or the destiny that put her a block away from this fire when it happened. It's just astounding to me that she was there because she went on to be one of the people who said, this is never going to happen again. And under her watch, it basically didn't. It was the worst that it ever got, and it never got that bad again. Because of the safeguards, she forced the state and then later on other states and the federal government to adopt. Yeah, I mean, she was already kind of headed down this road anyway. She was already part of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, and because of this fire, which I don't think we said, she was just having tea across the park there, ran over and saw this. One of the things she saw at one point, there were 20 people that had managed to get out a window onto a fire escape, one of those tiny little flimsy New York fire escapes. And all 20 of those people, the thing collapsed and they all fell to 100ft to their death right in front of her face. Yeah, we need to do an entire episode on that, at the very least, just to shame the two owners who were just totally responsible for all those deaths. Yeah, absolutely. But this was sort of just the way it was. I mean, not absolving them, but she saw this as part of the bigger problem. Not like these two owners are responsible, but she was like it was an indictment of the system. Yeah, it was, but at the same time, those guys were particularly nasty. Exactly. For sure. They weren't average by any means, from what I understand. No, but what was average was the fact that they didn't have fire codes. And she's the person that brought that in. By the time she was in her early 30s, she had called for and successfully called for exit signs, occupancy limits, sprinklers fire escapes, unlocked doors and stairwells, how wide the doorways had to be, depending on your factory floor. Like all these sort of common sense things. Like, a lot of people saw this stuff happen and saw this incident that day and were horrified. But Francis Perkins said, no, I'm going to change it. I'm a woman in 1911, and I'm in my early 30s, but I'm going to make this happen. And she did. She did. She was appointed to the New York Committee on Safety under the recommendation of Teddy Roosevelt, which says a lot because that means she'd already made a name for herself in her 20s in New York City politics to the point where Teddy Roosevelt would say, like, you really kind of need this woman on there. And then let's not forget the fact that the operative word here was woman as far as society was concerned at the time. And this legislation that she got passed through in New York, or that she helped get passed through in New York, like I was saying, it became a model for other states and then eventually the federal fire codes because of this, largely because of her efforts. And she made a name for herself. She had already made a name for herself, but this really kind of helped cement her name. And she started working closely with a guy named Alfred Smith, who was an assemblyman from New York, but she won his respect pretty easily, I think they worked on this New York Committee on Safety together. And so when he became governor, she kind of rose along with him. She was appointed by him to New York State's Industrial Commission, which made her the first woman to be appointed to a state government position in the country. And with her $8,000 salary, she was the highest paid woman to hold any office in the United States at the time. So she became important pretty quick, but she became important to everybody. This is really important to remember by hard work and heart, which is just a wonderful combination like, amazing things happen from people who have that combination. Yeah. And she ingratiated herself to these male politicians a couple of different important times in her life. And the first one was Alfred Smith, like you were saying. So she rose along with him because he knew he was like, man, I don't care if she's a woman or not. She works harder than anyone I know and she gets the job done, so I'm just going to bring her along with me and not just works harder. She was known as a policy expert about worker safety and wage justice by this time, too well, yeah. I mean, I talked about her very large brain in her higher education. She was super, super smart. Like I said, she majored in chemistry and physics, even though her real love was econ. Are you kidding me? No, we're not kidding at all. No, it's very much true. So, like you were saying, she first kind of rose to prominence with Alfred Esmith, who, from what I could tell, I didn't get to research him very much, but the stuff that I ran across, the references to him, he seemed like a genuine true believer crusader in justice, social justice as well. So they were like a good pair. And he made it as far as New York governor. He ran for president and didn't win. And when he didn't win, he, I guess, lost the governorship and was succeeded by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And so Roosevelt came into power in New York as the governor of New York, and Francis Perkins was already there and already built up a reputation. And Roosevelt recognized the kind of person she was pretty quickly, because a lot of people are you can give a lot of credit or a lot of vilification to Roosevelt for his New Deal policies, depending on your political stripes, but if you admire him for it, as I think most people should, it wasn't just him. One of his great talents was to recognize talent in others and to bring those people together and then enact policies based on their expertise and their recommendations. And one of those people was Francis Perkins, starting when he was governor of New York and then also when he became president too. Yeah. So when he came into his governorship, she had already been named and was the chairperson. Called it the chairman back then in 1926, of the State Industrial Board. She was doing a great job there. And then in 1929, FDR appointed her as the industrial commissioner of the state of New York. And what happens? The stock market crashes, the Great Depression hits America like a punch in the face. And she was the one who stepped in and got in his ear and said, you know what? I know that we have to feed people right now, and we have really immediate needs, but like you mentioned earlier in the episode, she thought about the big picture and long term goals. She said, we need to really take swift action here. So with her help, they created a committee on employment. He appointed her the head of that, and then when he was elected president in 1933, he said, you know what? I'm going to point you to be my Secretary of labor. That was huge. I've been working with you for 20 years. I trust you, and you're going to do a great job. And the public roundly said, what a woman in the cabinet? They really did. She was the first woman to serve it as a cabinet member. I mean, women had just gotten the right to vote about 1312 or 13 years before. You couldn't vote until she was 40. I know. It's not easy. And yet she held public appointed offices and still couldn't vote, but wasn't allowed to vote for her boss. Right, exactly. Yeah. So it was a really big deal that FDR appointed a woman to a cabinet position in an important cabinet position, too. I mean, it's not like there's any necessarily unimportant cabinet positions, but Secretary of labor is pretty big. Yeah. Especially then. Right. And especially at a time when this emerging superpower took a huge punch in the face and got knocked on its butt like the rest of the world by the Great Depression. This is important stuff that they were trying to figure out on the fly. But he chose a really great person who wasn't really accepted at first, not just by the public, but by virtually anybody. The labor unions weren't happy she was there because she had a background in social work and policy now. Yes, but she eventually won them over just by virtue of what she did. Like the labor movement was on the ropes at the time. The Progressive Era ran from, I think, 1890 to about 1920. So by the time 1930 comes around, it's dying off the labor movement. But under her leadership as the Department of Labor Secretary, she revived it. And by the time she either died or left office, I can't remember, I think a third of all Americans were members of unions. Yeah. And pre of the union stuff like kind of right after the Great Depression hit, one of the first things they did together was created the Civilian Conservation Corps, the CCC, which was a really big success, one of the big early successes of the New Deal, in that they said, you know what? We have this workforce of these unskilled unmarried men, and let's get these guys worked in conservation. We have this vast areas of rural land and natural resources, and let's send these guys out there to work on this stuff. And they did. And it provided a ton of jobs to the Civilian Conservation Corps. It did. And it also helped reinforce and build out America's infrastructure, too, because they had all this labor that the government was putting to work doing it. Right. Yes. So she was in charge of overseeing that. And one of the other, I guess the next big thing, I think it was before Social Security was something called the Wagner Act. And the Wagner act. I think you mean the Wagner act. The Wagner Wagner Act, depending on your persuasion, it gave workers the right to unionize and the right to collectively bargain. And one of her roles was to go out and promote this stuff, not just to other members of the government or members of industry, but to individual Americans, too. So in 1933 alone, she gave 100 different policy speeches in just that one year on New Deal projects promoting them. And one of the speeches she gave I don't know if it was in that year or not, but she went to Homestead, Pennsylvania, right across the river from Pittsburgh, where Carnegie Steele was headquartered. And she was going to inform these workers about their newly won rights through the Wagner Act. And Carnegie Steele and the local government would not give her any place to hold this meeting. They wouldn't give the Secretary of labor a place to talk to voters. So she and there's apparently a famous picture of her leading all of these steelworkers on foot to a post office. She's like, oh, I can think of a place where I can assemble legally, and that is the post office. So she gave her speech on the grounds of the Homestead Post Office to thousands of steel workers, informing them that they could legally unionize and bargain collectively for workers rights. That's amazing. I feel like we had to have talked about her in our unions episode. And if we didn't, shame on us. But also shame on the fact that she probably didn't pop up in our research, which is one of the problems. Yeah, mostly the second one. All right, pass that buck. Right? The buck stopped over there. Well, we're making up for it now either way. Okay, Chuck. So we were saying at the outset that if you got an unemployment check, thank Francis Perkins. Or if you ever get an unemployment check, if you even like the idea of the fact that an unemployment insurance policy is out there for you in case you ever need it, thank Francis Perkins. And the reason you thank Francis Perkins is because she basically oversaw the creation of the legislation that became the Social Security Act of when I say oversaw the creation of that legislation, that was it. She was the head of this Cabinet level committee that was assigned the task of coming up with a social insurance policy, a social safety net for the country. And they came up with this within six months, this full policy report, within two days of delivering the report, FDR turned around and unveiled the Social Security program idea to Congress. And another six months or so later, maybe eight, passed into law. Yeah. And, boy, we should do one on Social Security at some point. I agree. I think we have, man. I'm really positive. Yeah, it really rings a bell. Go ahead. I'm looking at it. Well, now, I'm going to have our little assistant over here check that. Can you go and check on that? Okay. There. On it. Who is Tommy Chong? Like we've ever had anyone that worked for us. That's the funny thing, is when we get emails over the years, they're like, well, to Josh and Chuck and Jerry or whoever on your staff is reading this. Yeah, it's pretty much us. Yeah. Well, we're reading these emails while we're having to sweep up the studio. Well, I want to be fair. To be fair, we work for a big podcasting network and there are a lot of people that help us get stuff out in the world, but we have never had, like a Stuff You Should Know staff of eight, people who only work for us and research for us and all that stuff. And I feel like it really shows in the podcast. I'm glad you said that, because I felt like I was patting ourselves on the back for a second there. You dashed that very fast. Sure. Self deprecation, Chuck. That's our specialty. That's right. So Social Security, what we're talking about in general, everyone knows what this is, is basically a system where younger, hardy people working hard in this country help out older people, retired people, perhaps disabled people, people that have had work related accidents, people who wear funny hats, people who wear funny hats and pay into this system. Ideally, and we're not going to get into the weeds here, that would come on our Social Security podcast. But ideally, then when you are old or in need, then you have that same money waiting for you because of the younger generation and the younger workforce. Right. That's the brilliance of the whole thing, is it's a transfer payment system to where you are directly funding the people who have retired now, but it's on the premise that people behind you are going to fund into this to support you later on. It's beautiful. It's a genius idea. And apparently FDR sent her Francis Perkins to study the British system of unemployment insurance even before he was president, back when he was Governor of New York, and he became the first public official to commit to developing an unemployment insurance plan. And it was at the persistent behest of Francis Perkins that he did that. Yeah. And it's not like he didn't run for office with Social Security on his list of things to do. Well, yeah, that's the thing. A lot of people say, if it weren't for her, no joke, this stuff probably wouldn't exist, certainly not in the form that it does now. And that's not necessarily fair. There were programs that had Social Security type programs among the states, including unemployment programs, but they were ad hoc. They were patchwork. Most states didn't have them. And the beauty of the federal program is they're basically like, okay, states do this, but we're going to oversee and organize it and help fund it. Yeah. And it's not like I was saying that all the FDR was not a champion of it or was just lazy. He had a bunch of stuff going on, and he had a bunch of irons in the fire. So he needed her to come in and say, hey, listen, this is all great because we're in a tragic situation right now. Like, we're trying to put out a fire, but what I want to do is make sure another fire doesn't happen in the future. Yes. And that was, like, her whole thing. We do need to make sure that people get peanut butter sandwiches because their families are going to starve. Yes. These immediate needs have to be met, but we also simultaneously have to plan for the future, too. It was just this persistent drum that she beat, like, we're going to continue to have problems with plan for them now. The level of visionariness in this person was you just don't see that. I can't think of too many other people who have come and gone in the federal government, in the United States, at least, that had that level of awareness of looking down the line that far rather than just four years out to the next election. Yeah. And also we talked about some of the things she did earlier in terms of her career, in terms of fair labor practices. But once she was Secretary of labor, she had real teeth to make real change. And during her tenure, she helped craft the Fair Labor Standards Act. She helped establish minimum wage laws, maximum work hours laws, and she finally said, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't make labor for children better. Maybe we should not bring our children to work and make them work. So let's just get rid of child labor all together. And you can make the case, Chuck, that she is the woman who gave America's kids the concept of a childhood. At the very least, she extended it by many years. Totally. I've got another amazing fact about her. She, I believe, is the first cabinet member who Congress ever sought to impeach. Oh, really? Yes. I'm almost positive that's correct. I know that they did try to impeach her, and they failed in the impeachment. Not just the conviction they couldn't get enough support for articles of impeachment, but it was because she refused to deport an Australian longshoreman who had successfully organized a general strike in San Francisco. And the anti Communist elements in Congress suspected that this guy was a Communist and wanted them out. And she said, I don't think very highly of this guy. I don't really agree with a lot of what he stands for, but I don't think that you have really good evidence, and I think this is all retaliation for the strike you organized, so I'm not going to deport them. And you might say, well, what did this lady have to do with deporting? Apparently, back in the day, the immigration the power of immigration or control of immigration was up to the Department of labor. So the Secretary of labor was also in charge of immigration, which really kind of gives you an idea of where America's immigration policies, where their mind was at, that it was about importing good workers or also controlling who came in to keep competition for jobs down. Totally. So she was in charge of immigration, which, as we'll see later on, she used to great effect. Is that our cherry on top at the end? Yeah, I think so. Okay, that's a good idea. It's the kid with the last question in Q and a man and not the drunk guy. I hate that guy. So when FDR passed away in 1945, she was the longest serving labor secretary and one of only two cabinet members to serve the entire length of his super long presidency. And she held over into Truman as well. He was like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, so you're welcome to stay, which you don't see a lot of that anymore. Yeah. She published a biography of bestseller about FDR called The Roosevelt I Knew. And here are a few other sort of career feathers in her cap. She was the head of the American delegation to the International Labor Organization in Paris. Truman appointed her to the US. Civil Service Commission, which was a position she held until 1953. And she basically accomplished every single one of her goals while she was Secretary of labor, except for one thing she went in there wanting to do, which was universal access to health care. Yeah, which is kind of a bummer, some people might say it's a bummer, some people might say good. Sure. She also played drums for docking for a brief time. For a little bit, she did it all while wearing a frumpy tricornered hat. That's right. And then after that, she did what a lot of people in public policy do. She went on to teach and lecture at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She did that until she was 85 years old, when she passed away in 1965. Yes. There are a couple of other things to throw into. Both her husband and her daughter suffered from what we today call bipolar disorder. She cared for them their entire lives, that little thing. Yeah, right. Can you imagine? No. While she's doing all this other stuff, she made sure that they were cared for, took care of them directly, herself. And one of the other things I think is worth mentioning. Too. That before FDR became president. While she was working in New York. She was already known publicly before she became Secretary of labor because she was the first public official to call Hoover out on his BS when he was downplaying joblessness numbers. Unemployment figures. And just general terrible economic news and pretending things were way better than they were. She was the first person to step up and publicly contradict him and made national news for that. Wow. And again, this is a woman doing this in like 1930. So just that alone makes national news. But she was also calling him out on his BS. And one thing that we have to say before you finish with the cherry on top truck is she had guys figured out. She had a folder called Notes on the Male Mind. And she would just take notes on guys and men that she worked with and just kind of try to get an understanding of them. And she realized that the way to get male colleagues to treat you normally or maybe even respect you is to remind them of their mother. Wow. That's what it takes apparently to get a guy to treat a woman with respect at work. Well, and we mentioned why she's under sung. History is written by men. We all know this. And a lot of those New Deal histories in the didn't even mention her, which is just staggering that you can write a history of the New Deal and not mention Francis Perkins. It's just like a black eye on any author that did something like that. It almost seems malicious in a weird way. Like, I like to think that that's not the case, but what other explanation is there? It's nuts. It's weird. So the cherry on top here at the end is World War II. World War II was not a cherry on top, but she was watching Hitler do his thing in Germany and got really worried. She's like, man, that guy's cranked. She was read about antisemitism and everything that was going on with the violence there and she wanted to help German refugees escape. And at the time, the Coolidge administration and the immigration laws that came through his administration were really tough. And Americans were very fearful that relaxing these laws would increase the job competition and that Americans weren't going to have these jobs. And she said, you know what? I don't agree. The immigration services under the Department of labor and so I am going to put some quotas down to get some of these refugees here and to aid them. And she did that to great success. Yes. She made sure that about at least 55,000 Jewish German immigrants made their way into the United States through the Department of labor immigration quotas. And another, I think 200,000 people in general were rescued from Europe as World War II was starting to develop over there. Because of her, just on top of everything else, she also saved a bunch of tens of thousands of Jewish people from Hitler in World War II. Amazing. Amazing. Chuck, I guess that's it for francis Perkins. That's it. Well, if you want to know more about Frances Perkins, go start reading about it, because there's even more detail to her life than we captured here and she's worth reading about. Very admirable person. Since I said admirable, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this helping a helper. And this is from tony says this. Hey guys have been sewing face masks for almost a month now, and I'm close to my 1000th mask. Nice. It's a lot. I have given and donated to friends, family, coworkers. I'm a 911 dispatcher, by the way. Health care workers, retail workers, delivery people, postal workers, and other essential workers. And people wearing funny hats. People wearing funny hats and complete strangers. Now that face masks have become mandatory here in San Diego, the need has grown substantially. And through all of this, you three have been with me and keeping me company, too. Well, yeah. Okay. She wasn't talking about Tommy Chong, I'll tell you that. Old episodes and new have entertained me through the tedious hours of cutting, fabric, ironing, pinning and sewing. I started listening to your podcast while I was in the Navy and soon introduce you guys to my husband, who is still in the military. We have both listened and learned through the years together. Thank you for continuing your show and helping the helpers of the world. Side note, love the 911 dispatcher episode, and thank you for clearing up the pizza order myth. Second side note, I wrote my master's thesis on the use of body worn cameras by law enforcement, and I decided to focus on that topic after listening to that awesome episode. Neat. Yeah, it's pretty cool. All three of you are thanked and mentioned in the thesis. Even that's cool. When I'm tired and don't want to sew anymore, I think of this quote for Mr. Rogers. Head down. When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping. Go to them and they will help you. And that is from Tawny. And that's a great quote, Tawny. I'm going to use that in my own house. It's kind of like if you're afraid of flying, watch the flight attendants. And as long as they're not freaking out, you're fine. It's the exact same thing he's saying. When the s goes down, there's people helping. So that's always good. God bless Mr. Rogers. And you, too. Oh, man. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Is it Tony? Tawny. T-A-W-N-Y-I couldn't tell if you were just putting a little mustard on the Tony. No, like Tony catain. Sure. Yeah, from the White Snake video. That cultural icon. Well, thanks a lot, Tawny. I apologize for Chuck calling you tawny Katan. Okay. Can I apologize for you, Charlie? Sure. Okay. Well, I'm going to do that if you want to get me to apologize for Charles. Let's see if you can do it. You can send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, and send it off to stuff. Podcast@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." |
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