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4366d00e-53a3-11e8-bdec-c70a6fc821e6	Agatha Christie: Queen of the Murder Mystery	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/agatha-christie-queen-of-the-murder-mystery	Agatha Christie was a great writer of murder mystery novels and is probably the best selling author of all time. Listen in today to learn her story.	Agatha Christie was a great writer of murder mystery novels and is probably the best selling author of all time. Listen in today to learn her story.	Thu, 30 Apr 2020 15:36:04 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=15, tm_min=36, tm_sec=4, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=121, tm_isdst=0)	51122773	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. 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 Bryan over there. And this is stuff you should know. I don't know if we're going to be able to get used to Jerry being around again. Is she fired? I don't think so. She may have fired herself, though. I don't think so. I have better things to do than hang out with you cool cats and kittens. Well, and it's kind of like, what's the point of just sitting there? And I can't imagine any more boring than listening to us on Headphones. Wait a minute. That's our show. Yes, there are people doing that very thing right now, Chuck, and you have just mocked their existence. Oh, I just meant for Jerry's sake. Yes. Jerry's not a fan. No, she's not. Or a listener. So I have a question for you, Chuck. You ever read a book? No. Don't be ridiculous. Chuck. Have you ever met Agatha Christie? Yeah, I met her when I was three. Oh, really? Do you have much of a memory of that encounter? A little bit. She was nice enough. She signed my murder on the Orient Express copy, first edition. Wow, that's got to be worth some money. It's pretty neat. Yeah. Do you still have that? No. I did some spring cleaning here a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't even recycle or put it in a little free library. I just threw it in the trash. Didn't you say once that your brother has like, a copy of number One Superman or something nuts like that? No. I thought he has something. Some valuable comic book. No. We must be confusing you with my other cohost, Chuck. No, we weren't big comic book people. We don't have anything valuable like that. I got you. Well, having met I get to Christy when you were a kid, I feel like you probably have a lot to bring to this one. I have never met her. Still to this day probably never will. And I have read a couple of her things and seen a couple of movies based on her stuff, but I would never consider myself like a rabbit egg with a Christie fan. But I do appreciate her work a lot. You picked this one why we have this series of books, children's books about awesome women in history from Frida to Coco Chanel to Amelia Earhart to Agatha Christie. And so I was reading this one the other night and thought, hey, let's do one on Agatha Christie that haven't read any of her work. Seeing a couple of her movies. Love the genre, though, as films. I've never read mystery murder mysteries, although I'm going to now. I started reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which I think was her first published work last night. And it's just great. She just sucks you right in. Like, she creates a lot of books, not all of them, but she creates what's called a cozy mystery with an S because it's British. And I'd never heard that term before until this article. But when I came across it, I was like, yes, I love that kind of thing. And that's exactly what I love about Murder, She Wrote. Like The Murder She Wrote where she goes to, like, Broadway or Paris or something like that. I can take or leave. They're fine, but it's the ones that are set in tiny little Cabot Cove that's just isolated from the rest of the world, and it's cozy and small and it's like a village and all that. Those are The Murder She Wrote that I love the most. And I think that's what I like about Agatha Christie mysteries, too, is they're very typically cozy mysteries. I've never seen that show. What? We had this conversation before? No, that would be seared into my brain forever. Now we have, because you said that the first time. Yeah, I've never seen it, but I'm a huge fan of murder mystery movies, especially cozy mysteries. Like, Clue is one of my favorite films. And this year or last year's, Knives Out was one of my top three or four films of the year. I've not seen it yet. It's still like $7 on Amazon Prime, so I haven't rented yet. I'm waiting for the price point to drop. I can loan you a couple of bucks if you need. All right, sure. It's still a lot for a rental. I mean, that's a lot. You think 399 is manageable? 499 and up. That's a lot of move law for a rental, if you ask me. Wow. Yeah, I'm taking a stand on this. All right, well, film professionals out there, please do not take offense to all your hard work. I have a question for you. I have one more question. Have you seen the Agatha Christie film adaptation of Crooked House that came out in 2017? No. I think you'll like it. It was big budget, but it also looks like British made for television. Big budget. That's great. Jillian Anderson. Dana Scully is in it. Okay. Because the Brits are nuts for her. Are they? Oh, man. She's like their favorite person in the world and has been for years. Don't know why. Nothing against jillian Anderson, but she just never hit it as big over here as she did. There Terrence Stamp, isn't it? Love him. Glenn Close. She's great. And I was like, this is really good. So I was reading little synopsis of it and all that stuff, and it seemed like it's widely regarded as one of her best, most ingenious and inventive works. Cricket House. Cricket House. I believe that's on Amazon Prime for free. Well, yes. Do you actually do the math of how much you pay for Amazon Prime to see how much you're paying for that movie? I don't want to do that. I just don't want to do that. Probably pennies. Why did you do that to me? All right, so, Charles, let's get into this because I know that this one could be a little long if we're not deliberate and I would say maybe considerate of our time. All right, well, it's an eight minute intro. So far, so good. Okay. She is perhaps again, it's kind of hard to tell with book sales because they can be a little dodgy, but she is often quoted or seen as the best selling novelist of all time. And I did a little check to compare. Like, I thought, well, Stephen King sold a book or two. Sure. They tag his book sales at about 350,000,000. Her 66 novels and 14 collected works of short stories supposedly have sold to the tune of 2 billion. I saw 4 billion in one place, and I think after you hit the billion mark, you can just start tossing around whatever number you want, I think. So, for example, we've had 70 billion downloads. Now I just decided, oh, great, that's a lot of downloads. But think about it. Stephen King, how many books is that cat written? How many has he sold all around the world? And it amounts to 350,000,000. And he's one of the best selling authors of all time. A lot of people say that Agatha Christie's numbers hit 2 billion. Like you said that's astounding. Yeah. That is a ton of books. I don't think our stuff you should know book will approach those numbers. No, you never say never, though. It's a lofty goal. Never say never. I also saw that she's the most widely translated author of all time, too. I buy that. I saw 45 languages. I was like, things a little low, so then somewhere else I saw 103. So let's go with that. So let's talk about this cozy mystery, or just mystery novels in general. They are very much formulaic, which Ed helped us put this together. Ed points out that's why people like them, because the familiarity and it's sort of a comfort food thing, like a good beach book. You know what you're going to get, right? Yeah. And there's surprises and everything woven in. I mean, the whole thing is meant to be a surprise. It's a mystery and part of the mystery and the allure of the mysteries that Agatha Christie not only wrote, but actually the whole genre she helped to develop is that you are ostensibly able to figure out who the culprit is in the murder. It's almost always a murder. And so there is surprise involved. That's the point. But there's also a tremendous amount of familiarity. And that's that formula you're talking about. And that's what really has sucked generations of people into this whole genre. And her 66 plus books. Yeah. So you've got that murder. You usually don't see this murder occur. She doesn't usually. And in general, in murder mysteries, you don't see the murder. That's kind of not the point of how grizzly or gruesome the act is. It's sort of all about finding that body. And I had a bunch of knives out things to say, but I don't see any of them now. Thank you. But then you've got your detective that arrives on the scene, and I will say this, knives out very much follows this formula. Very smartly. Okay, so you've got this master detective who usually arrives upon the scene, but they may already be there. And they are generally very eccentric and they always have these quirky sort of characteristics. In Christie's case, we have the very formidable Hercule perot. And then Ms. Marple. Jane Marple. In Hercule's case, he's Belgian and has this big mustache, and it's just sort of eccentric and Belgian. He's not French. There's something about being Belgian that makes it slightly different. Sure. And Ms. Marple, apparently, it's just a very ordinary and people underestimate her, and that's how she sort of wins the day. Yeah, because hercule Pois was a retired Belgian police detective. So he has some measure of authority still to question people and interrogate people as he wishes. With Miss Marple, she's just kind of a quiet old lady who sews and knits a lot. And she just has a very keen eye for detail and an interest in solving the murders that seem to happen around her. Like Angela Lansbury, basically. Yes. But rather than interrogate people directly, ms. Marbles thing is she just kind of quietly is there and people tend to confide in her and she kind of quietly helps them along and she gives them the rope to hang themselves with. That's how she interrogates people and figures out who the murderer is. Right. So you've got your setting in the cozy mystery setting. As you said, it's usually like an estate or a home, maybe a hotel, maybe. It might be a small English village. Orient Express obviously, is on a train. Another sort of confined space. By the way, have you seen Train to Busan? I confused that with Snow Piercer. I think I've seen both, but I can't remember which one is which. They're kind of very similar. But busan is zombies on a train. Korean film. No. Then. I think I've just seen snow. Pierce. Sir, you should check out Train to busan. If you think you've seen it all with the zombie genre, then think again, dude. That's saying something, because that genre has gotten a little tired. Hey, let me ask you this. I know you've seen it. You had to have Ozark. Oh, sure. Just started it. Yeah, I'm a couple of episodes into the latest season. Okay. Yeah. You mean I just started at season one, and I'm like, all I want to do is sit around and watch Ozark. It's amazing. Yeah, I love it. That's like Hartwell, you know? Oh, no, I didn't know that. Yeah, smart. I've tried to get Bateman and Laura Lenny on Movie Crush and it's always think, you know, hey, you're getting responses. That's a big step forward. It's nice to be told no and just not ignored. Yeah, right. All right, so you've got your setting with Agatha Christie. She did include her travels in some of her later novels when they became, like, super popular, but it was still not like a globetrotting, like James Bond kind of thing. No, that's the point. So, like, in an espionage thriller, something, the locales are all over the place and the character is constantly moving. And these cozy thrillers, like, even if they're in an exotic locale, they're still set in a small part of that exotic locale. That's right. You got your suspects. They are questioned by the detective. They usually all have a motive. They usually all have the means because everyone in a great novel like this, everyone's got to be a suspect from the beginning. And then you can kind of quickly whittle or slowly whittle that list down. Right. And here's the thing. What I was saying, with the kind of mystery that Agatha Christie wrote and really established, you are part of the mystery. Either the investigator or the detective has an assistant that they explain things to, very much like Sherlock Holmes and Watson. Sure. Or if the detective is working solo, say, like Ms. Marble ms. Marbles might write a list of suspects and their motives and little clues down as part of the narration, and you're let in every step of the way. So you're part of this working towards solving the mystery. And as it's very frequently put, it kind of pits you in a competition with the author to see if you can figure out who done it before the end of the book. Yeah, I mean, that goes back to Encyclopedia Brown. The whole point is to try and figure that stuff out. Right. Man, I love those. Those are so great. Encyclopedia Brown. I remember he busted one dumb kid who did something bad. I can't remember. Was it Bugs meanie oh, man, good memory. It may have been bugs. Meaning, was he kind of a big dumb o food who'd, like, beat up on Chipmunks? I think so. Okay. He busted Bugs once because Bugs had tears coming out of the outside corners of his eyes. Like a freakazoid rather than the inside corners. That's good. But see, the great thing about those books is that a twelve year old doesn't really necessarily always pick up on those clues. Oh, I did. I wasn't that great. I'd be curious to see if they would stump me now. No, I mean specifically with the outside of the eye thing, but yeah, no, I'm sure there are plenty that I missed. But you cried a lot when you were a boy. Right, I knew while staring in the mirror. And so then at the end, to wrap up the little genre sort of summary, you've got this great ending, usually where everyone's gathered together and the detective kind of walks everyone through the big reveal of exactly how the killer did it. Right. And in her case, when the killer is revealed, they didn't turn around and shoot them in the face. Like it's usually pretty nonviolent. They would be wrestled to the ground or arrested, or maybe they might run away and you hear later that they had killed themselves or something like that. Sure. There was rarely a grand finale where they would be pressed to death in front of a crowd. Nah, who needs it? That's it. Like bing, bang, boom. That was when you started on page one of an Agatha Christie novel. You knew exactly how everything was going to play out. And then one of the other things is, because this thing was so formulaic, there was also room for the author to kind of play with you, the reader, in using things like bluffs and red herrings, which I think are basically the same thing. But the idea is that the author, in this case, I could have said Christie would say something like, early on in the book, a suspect would come running out of the house looking shaken and pale, and you, the reader, would be like, well, that's just way too obvious. She's not going to point out who the murderer is at the beginning of the book, so I can disregard that person or this very obvious clue or something like that. That was just kind of part of the interplay between author and reader. But then it could go even deeper to where she would say something like, well, I know that you think that this is too obvious, so I'm going to actually make this the actual murderer. Which she did in some cases, which was like a double bluff, apparently. You could just keep going on and on and on. Sure. But it was this kind of wrestling match or maybe slap fight between Agatha Christie and you, her reader, which made the whole thing all the more delightful. That's right. And Ed takes great pains to point out that she did not invent this genre. There were people like Arthur Conan Doyle, obviously, and Poe before her that sort of established some of these rules. But she was very popular. She's very good at what she did. She wrote about what she knew. And we'll talk about her life coming up in a little bit. But these manor houses in these estates and these English villages and even the exotic locales and these train trips and things were things that she actually experienced. And a lot of people are great at making stuff up, and a lot of people are great about writing what they know. And it seems like she was really great at writing what she knew. Yeah. And for some reason, either it was the time or maybe because of her I'm not sure it was kind of a chicken or the egg thing, but she happened to write about stuff that a lot of people wanted to read about. These small English villages and quaint mannerisms of the upper middle and upper class English society set in this period of time. And for some reason, it just captured everybody's attention. And apparently when she started expanding, I think after World War Two, to some slightly more exotic locales like Egypt or Mesopotamia for, like, Death on the Nile was a very famous win during this time. Or the Orient Express, that really catapulted her into superstardom. International superstardom. Too. Yeah. I don't have a super firm read on the history of literature, but I get the idea that this is sort of aligned with the beginnings of pop lit, and I call it the Beach Book. I don't know if there had been a ton of stuff like this that was just sort of pure comfort food and entertainment up to this point. Yes. I'm not sure either. Nothing that I'm familiar with, I can say. But they were very entertaining books. They were humorous, a very dark sense of humor, great dialogue. All these verbal joust between the detectives and the suspects is really key to that genre. Something knives out did really, really well. It was one of my favorite scripts of the year, maybe my favorite script. Wow. But just really good, sharp writing. And it's sort of no accident that she became so hugely popular. No. And that's something like if you're not really familiar with Agatha Christie and you just kind of look her up and passing, one of the things you'll be confronted with is that a lot of people, a lot of critics say she was a hack. And what they're talking about is that formula that she followed to almost like a soullessly rational degree. That was the formula. That's what she followed. But that really misses, like the fact that she had a really great eye for detail and the dialogue. Like you were saying, she was a good writer and she could just crank workout. I think during the decade of the twenties, she wrote a book a year. It might have even become more prolific later on in the too yeah. And she was a business person. There's nothing wrong with saying, wow, people love this stuff, and they sell a lot. And although it took a while for that to happen, as we'll see, but there's nothing wrong with any of that. I think people that call our hack can go fly kite. Yeah, go fly it with extreme prejudice. Should we take a break? I think so, man. We'll come back and talk about her life. Great. Okay, Chuck. So Agatha Christie was born in 1890 in England in Torquay, which I always wanted to say tango, Devonshire. Sure. And it's in the southwest of England. So Torque is kind of like devonshire is like our Arizona, basically. That's my impression. I think it is very much like Arizona. Right. The legendary Devonshire cactus. Right. Which stalks the moors. That's right. And she was one of three kids, and I think her older brother and sister were both at least a decade older than her. So she had a very solitary childhood, which appears to have made her fairly happy. She didn't go to school. She was raised by governesses and educated by governesses. Spent a lot of time reading and just hung out around her family's estate. Yes, they had some dough. They were not wealthy wealthy, but they were definitely upper middle class. They got an inheritance from her paternal grandfather such that her dad didn't need to work. Apparently she is on record as saying that her dad wasn't around much. Didn't really impact me once much. So he can go fly a kite as well. Right. A lot of kite flying. And she loved being out in the garden. I get the impression she wasn't, like, reclusive or anything, but she very much enjoyed time with herself alone, but also had friends and stuff. When she eventually did go to school once her father passed and they couldn't afford that governess. Right. But she was a very shy person. The novelist Joanne Kasella says that even as an adult, she was so shy that sometimes she wouldn't go into shops because she would have to interact with the shopkeeper. She's a navalist. How many nautilus are the life of the party? And super outgoing. You have never met Philip Roth. Apparently. I don't know. You kind of picture like the Stephen Kings just locked in an attic somewhere and not like, well, let me write a little bit, then I'm going to go to a party. Right. Go play some pick up basketball and maybe volunteer at the local food bank after. I don't know. It's sort of solitary pastime. Sure, there are examples of extroverted authors, but I think she kind of fits the mold that you generally think of, especially for a lady mystery writer. Yeah. And, you know, I think not only fits the mold, the more I learned about her, she made the mold basically everything we take for granted as far as writing and mystery writing goes, she basically made it up. It's pretty impressive stuff. Yeah. Like we said, she did some pretty to us. Dumb dumbs in America seem like exotic traveling trips, but if you lived in England at the time, it's no big deal to go to Egypt and check out the pyramids. If you had a little dough, that was a pretty common vacation that you might take. So she did stuff like that, and she was exposed to exotic locales and used those in her work. In her very first novel, even Snow Upon the Desert, she wrote when she was, like, 22 or 23 years old, I think. And she had a hard time getting published at first because she was a young woman. Yeah, she was rejected out of hand. And apparently also she started writing because her sister told her that she probably wouldn't be able to write a mystery novel, which I love. So she did. She wrote the what was it? Snow on what? Snow upon the Desert. Snow upon the Desert. And she was very young then. And in between the time she wrote Snow Upon the Desert and the Mysterious Affairs Styles, which would be her first published book, I believe she wedged a lot of life in there in the form of getting married to a guy named Archibald Archie Christie. And one of the things about Agatha Christie is that she wasn't a born writer, even though she did write as a younger person, like you were saying, she just didn't want to be a writer as a kid. And she ended up writing really seriously after she and Archie Christie got married because Archie Christie wasn't particularly wealthy and couldn't necessarily care for her himself. So she started writing to make money, which some people suspect is the reason she got into mystery writing in the first place, because it was a very, very popular genre, even though it makes sense. So she had the skills to pay the bills, it turns out, right. They were married in 1914. He was kind of promptly sent to fight in the Great War in France, and she worked at a pharmacist at a war hospital during that period. And this is where she learned a lot about potions and poisons and pharmaceuticals and things that she would there's a lot of poisoning that goes on in her books. And later in her career, I think she actually would consult with doctors and stuff like that because she wanted everything to be really medically accurate. But early on, she learned a lot about this stuff from her work in the pharmacy, which is kind of cool and ghoulish. You know, she's like, how exactly would a person die from this bottle that I'm holding? So, yeah, and apparently most of the deaths in her books are poisonings. And like you were saying, like, you rarely see the person die. They just come upon the body. And most of the times, the poison body, sometimes there was violence visited upon them. But for the most part is a body that was found poisoned to death. Yeah, and that's a good vehicle for a mystery novel because there's no murder weapon per se. I guess there's the poison bottle, but it can often be very vague, a poisoning death. Like, could it have been a heart attack? Like, you have to kind of suss out at first whether or not it was even a murder. It's not like an obvious thing where there's a bullet hole in their chest or something like that. Right, yeah. So poisoning is what she went with, typically. It's another example also, Chuck, I think, of her writing what she knew, too, at least writing what interested her. And she wrote in, I believe, 90 now, during World War I while she was working at the Dispensary and Archie was off flying in France, I believe she wrote The Mysterious Affairs Styles. And that's the one I started reading, and I don't understand how it was rejected at first, but it's a really interesting book just right out of the gate in that it pulls you right into this little country English estate and all the people on it, and you realize just after a couple of pages that you're already invested in them, which is pretty amazing. This is like, not her first book, but it was her first serious work that wasn't published immediately. It wasn't published until 1920, and I think even after it was published, it wasn't an immediate catapult to success for her. But it was a remarkable first book to be published. Yes. And this is the one that introduced the world to her chief detective for a lot of those novels, Mr. Pois, like we mentioned. And later on they asked her why he was Belgian, and she said, Why not? Basically, right. I don't think a whole lot of thought went into it. It turned out to be a really good choice because he had this kind of interesting accent, and everywhere he went they were never set in Belgium, so everywhere he went, he was this sort of strange foreigner that would come into town with this accent that no one quite understood, and he just had this sort of larger than life presence, I think, because of that. So it turned out to be a really smart choice. Yeah. He was also a well known dandy who was very vain about his appearance. And he apparently said in one of the later books that he plays up his foreignness and his dandiness to disarm suspects when he's interrogating them to make them take him less seriously than they otherwise might. Ah, man, I want to talk about knives out so much. You cannot I appreciate you not doing that. So she had a daughter, we should mention, in 1919, named Rosalind, and that's the only child she ever had. And it was in 1920 or a year later that they finally did publish The Mysterious Affairs Styles after she agreed to change the ending. They said, we don't like poor revealing all. This evidence in court. So she changed the ending. They said, Great. That's when she went on to publish that novel every year for about ten years. Right. Very big books, but they were popular. But she wasn't like a superstar internationally at this point yet. No, not yet. Again, she really catapulted later on because she moved to some of these more exotic locales. But one of the things that cemented her legend as a mystery writer, in addition to all of the work she did, in addition to her prolific miss and her extreme talent at this formula that she had worked out was still today is considered an unsolved mystery. In fact, it was featured on a 1994 episode of Unsolved Mysteries, which I just randomly happened to see recently. And she disappeared. There's a whole subplot to Agatha Christie's life that was really surprising, especially compared to how boring and normal and just kind of plotting with D's instead of t's her normal life was. The fact that she has this grand mystery plunk down in the middle of it is pretty impressive. Yeah. So here's the backstory. She and Archie were not meant to be together. As it turns out, he revealed that he was having an affair with a lady named Nancy Neal, who was a friend of the family. And obviously that was the end of their marriage. So at the end of 1926, they decided they were going to take a trip together, a weekender. Archie went to be with his friends instead. And then she vanished into seemingly thin air. They found her car near Rock Quarry with her fur coat and her driver's license there. And no Agatha Christie. No. And her car wasn't just near the Rock Quarry, according to some reports. Like, one of the wheels is hanging over the edge of the cliff and still spinning. Right. But she was gone. They couldn't find her. And so within a couple of days, this massive search, depending on who you ask and depending on when you ask them, 10,000 plus people were searching for probably more likely a couple of thousand, which is still really remarkable for this tiny little area in the southwest of England at the time in 1920. So that really kind of demonstrates she was already a wellknown writer. She wasn't legendary yet, but this disappearance is the mechanism by which she becomes legendary, I think. And this goes on for a good week, I believe. Right. When did she disappear? December. What? I think December 3 is when they were going to take that trip. So she was gone almost two weeks. And by gone, we mean just vanished. She left behind that car. She left behind the driver's license and the fur. Like you said, she was gone. Her husband had come to be known to have asked for a divorce already. So people were like, well, did he bump her off? And she's a mystery writer known for generating stuff like this. So even at the time, some people were like, is this a publicity stunt? Because it's a pretty good one if it is. Sure, it worked. And there was a band at this place called the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Yorkshire, which kind of just sounds like a bit of a Kellogg Brothers type of joint. Have you seen a cure for wellness? Well, we talked about that in that podcast. I can't remember. Have you seen it? I never saw it. Have you? Yet I still have not seen it. You're not missing that much, but it is pretty interesting. It's worth seeing at least once. I might check it out. Okay. But anyway, they had a band here because what Hydropathic Hotel does not have a house banned? And they came forward and said, hey, that's Agatha Christie lady, she's been staying here for a week. She's been in the electric light bath cabinet and getting yogurt enemas and having a grand old time. They went to the cops, and the cops went to the lead detective and said, no, she's been murdered, and we're trying to find out the killer. I'm sure of it. Eventually, this detective said, well, let me tell her husband, and husband Archie went out to check it out. On the 14 December, there she was. She was in seclusion. And that was sort of the end of this mystery. It wasn't so much a mystery by all accounts. It seems like she went there because she had fought about or maybe tried to drive her car into that quarry and kill herself because she was upset about her marriage ending and then it didn't happen, and she just kind of goes on a walk and ends up at this place. May or may not have invented an amnesia story, or it may have actually happened to some degree. She didn't talk about a lot. So we don't really know exactly what went down with the amnesia. She said that two years later, she gave an interview with the Daily Mail, apparently explained the amnesia by saying she'd hit her head on the steering wheel. But in the same interview, she says that she'd let go of the steering wheel. So she basically said, like, I attempted suicide and it didn't work out. I hit my head on the steering wheel and I wandered off and I had amnesia. But they think that it was just a family cover story to save face, this amnesia story, and that really she had attempted to take her own life and hadn't succeeded and now regretted it and was embarrassed by all of this because the idea that there were thousands of people looking for I think it probably never crossed her mind when she wandered away from her car. No, I remember she was a very shy person, so all this attention was very hard on her. So the family just came up with this cover story that she had amnesia. So it didn't even bother asking. And Archie and she stayed together for another year or so, and then their divorce finally became finalized in 1928. Yeah. So she didn't even mention this in her autobiography, which kind of says all you need to know about how much she liked to talk about this. Right. We should say there was one other thing that did this, too. It wasn't just Archie asking for a divorce. He asked for a divorce a few months after her mother died. And Agatha Christie's mother was beloved to her. She worshipped her mother. She thought she was wonderful. Her mother was the parent that was there for her while she was a kid and raised her. It was just a very interesting person, it sounds like. So she died, archie asks for a divorce a few months later, and then this whole mysterious disappearance happened. That's right. And then one last thing. I read that at the Swan Hydro Hotel, she was actually playing cards and chatting with other guests about this mysterious disappearance. That was in all of the newspapers, and none of the other guests recognized or it was those band members that you mentioned. Interesting. I thought so, too, ma'am. So that's everything I learned from unsolved mystery. Should we take a break, finally? All right, let's take our final break, and we'll talk a little bit more about her later life and further success. All right, so it's at this point she is freshly divorced. She kept that name because that's the name that made her famous, so it makes a lot of sense. And she kept writing novels. She traveled on the Orient Express to Baghdad. She got into archaeology, just sort of a hobbyist, and made friends with a couple who were archaeologists, went to visit them in 1930, and on that trip met a man named Max Maloan, who was also an adventurer and an archaeologist 13 years younger. And they fell in love and got married, which is a very sweet story. Yeah. Apparently he was giving her a tour of some archeological sites, and he got the car stuck. And apparently he said later, she made no fuss about it, didn't blame him or anything like that. And he said, that's about the time when I started to begin to realize that you are wonderful. They got married. And she said later on, that the good thing about being married to an archaeologist is that the older you get, the more interested they become. Interesting. That's kind of cute. So this is when Ms. Markle comes along as a detective in the Murder at the Vicarage. That was her first one. That was the first Ms. Markle book. Okay. And then she's traveling around. She's doing these archaeological digs and trips. She's going to Syria and Iraq. She fell in love with Syria and the Syrian people, and she's really cranking out some big books at this point in the 1930s. That's why even on archeological digs, chuck can you imagine how uncomfortable it would be to sit and write for hours at an archeological site? I can't. It would be tough, I would think. And yet she was still just as prolific as ever. Yes. Books like Murder in Mesopotamia and Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express were all written during this period. And this is what really catapulted her into international superstardom as an author. Right. So she and Max stayed together for, I think, 46 years until her death, actually. I think she outlived him. So it's pretty sweet. But despite all of this kind of adventure and archaeological digs and visits to the Middle East, most of her life from that point on was in Devonshire, in this tiny little area in the English countryside, in the quaint little towns, and she Gardened and was very involved in local community theater. That was her life. She was also one of the biggest, most well known, most best selling writers in the world while she was alive. And yet that's what she did. She hung out with community theater group and gardened. That was just her life. Yeah. She got the Dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1071, and the rights to her novels were held by a company that she created for a long time. And then before she died, she sold part of that off. And that's been sort of bought and sold a bunch over the years, which is kind of how that usually happens. Right. But she did retain enough of the company to have it be worth a ton of money, which she passed down to her daughter, of course, as her only child. She sort of took care of her mother's works for many, many years and then passed that on to her only child, man named Matthew Prichard, who still holds these rights and still sort of manages that today. That's right. So everything turned out well for Matthew Pritchard. Heck, yeah. I wish my grandma was, actually, because I love my grandma, but sure. Would it have killed her to be an internationally famous author? No, it wouldn't, chuck and I'm glad we're finally talking about it been an elephant in the room for a very long time. So a lot of these went on to be very famous films, TV series. I think Murder on the Orient Express has been a couple of big movies, in fact, one couple of years ago that I have not seen. It's unwatchable. Is it really bad? I'm sorry. If you listened to this, Kenneth Brownie, I couldn't make it through the first five minutes. Oh, wow. I didn't like it. Okay. I love Kenneth. Ronnie. Yes. Okay, so that's my report. It's on the first five minutes. She very famously has a play called The Mousetrap, which is debuted at the West End in 1952, and it is the longest running play in the history of the West End, which is remarkable. Yeah. And to make that even sweeter, remember her sister who said that she probably couldn't write a mystery novel? Well, her sister was the first in the family to get a play produced on the West End, but it certainly wasn't the longest running play on the West End of all time. So she got her back doubling, and then she was hit by a train and Agatha Christie laughed and laughed and poisoned her corpse. So we need to talk a little bit here at the end. We always like to give everyone the accolades they deserve, but also point out some of the things that weren't so great. We don't want to whitewash anything. And she used a lot of kind of racially insensitive language some would call anti Semitic, at times anti Catholic, through parts of her career, such that the Anti Defamation League complained to her agent at one point. And because of that, American publishers were given the ability to change that stuff out, sort of at will, without any notice given to her. She didn't know this is going on at all. Yeah, they just were like, I don't think the Americans are going to go for this. The Brits can barely stand it. The Americans definitely aren't going to take this well. Yeah, and I read a lot about this, and there are different takes. One take is that she was a product of her time thing, which people, you know, rightfully point out. Another is that often times she's doing this to show characters are sort of underdeveloped as humans and sort of backward. So there's that as well. But you also can't dance around the fact that she did use some pretty bad words and we just got stuff out and they were bad even at the time, too. Yes, you can say a lot of people had different social attitudes toward race and racism. In that sense, she wasn't that much different. But there were cases where she was standing well outside of the norm, including in book titles and characters and things like that. One book in particular, and Then There Were None, was revised many times, not just in the US. But in Great Britain as well. And it's remarkable in that sense, but in another sense, it is also remarkable in that it's considered pretty widely to have given birth to the slasher film genre. Did you know that? I didn't until my bread say it. Yeah, I looked this up a little more. And on its own, and Then There Were None, the book ends sorry for the spoiler, everybody, but it ends with, I think, all of the suspects killing one another and everyone dies. In the stage adaptation of the play that she helped write, the Final Girl, a female character is left alive and has outdone the murderer who's coming to get her, which is the formula for any slasher film whatsoever. But there's a bunch of other elements in there too. And they're like, even on, like, horror fan Wikis, they point to that as, like, the genuine birth even more than psycho of the slasherfilm genre. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it is pretty interesting. Who would have ever thought that Agatha Christie, with her nonviolence and poison and occasional racism, would have been the one to birth the slasher film? Occasional racism, yes. And a lot of the racist stuff, just to put a final pin on that, was a lot of it was character descriptions, which can be some of the ugliest kinds of stuff like that, because it wasn't just like talking about philosophies. It was just like literally physically describing a character. Sometimes she would use some pretty derogatory language. Yeah. So again, it's a bit like exploring Elizabeth Blackwell or any historical characters. Always weird little bugs under the rocks you turn over. I'm glad we're doing our great work in the time of wokeness. Right? Exactly. No one can ever go back. I mean, we've made Missteps Here and There, but they can't go back and talk about when Josh and Chuck were big racists at the beginning. No, it's true. But just wait for 20 years from now, they'll be like, I can't believe they talk about those guys were Aegis bastards. Probably. So there's one other thing I want to say, too. So when she lived through World War II, agatha Christie was worried that she was going to die in the bombing blitz of Great Britain. And she really wanted hercule Puerto and Jane Marples to have a final case. So she wrote a book for each of them. One is called Curtain, that's poor Row's final book. And the other is sleeping murder. That is marvel's. Final case. It just kind of explains what happens to them. I believe poor Row dies and Marble just retires. But when she survived World War II, she was like, well, I'm not ready for these guys to be retired yet. So she kept those books and had them posthumously published. And they were in the when her Kilporose last book came out and he died, the New York Times ran a front page obituary for him, the only fictional character to have that honor bestowed on them. That's crazy, isn't it? Yeah. And also a very cool, good idea to write those books early on just in case, because you never know. Besides the bombing thing, she could walk off a ledge or get hit by a bus or die of natural causes early. Like you never know. And then you've got this legacy cemented, right? Pretty smart. Have you ever seen one last thing? Have you ever seen Murdered by Death? I know I've asked you before. I have that DVD sitting on my desk. Well, that's amazing that you have that on your desk and you wait. Is it on your desk at work? The wrong place? I was going to say watch it tonight, but don't watch it tonight. Wait until everything clears. You're going to love it. No, it's a spoof, actually, detective books of, like, Charlie Chan and Agatha Christie and Sam Spade and all that, that she helped kind of create. But it's actually like a complaint from fans of mysteries. It's just a wonderful book. Truman movie, truman Capotes in it. David Niven. Peter Faulk. Right? Peter Falk. Yeah. A lot of people. James Cromwell as a younger man. Yeah. James Coco as hercule pour row. It's just great. You're going to love it, man. So I guess we should say that she did die eventually, five years or three years after I met her in 1976 at the age of 85 at her home in Oxfordshire or Oxfordshire. And it was natural causes, not poison. No. Her last words were, good to meet you, Chuck. You got anything else? I do not have anything else. Well, friends, that is Agatha Christie. If you want to know more about Agatha Christie, go start reading Agathacristi books. And since I said Agatha Christie, like, three or four times, it's time for Listener mate. All right. I'm going to call this Letter from a Kid, because we love reading these letters from kids. Hey, guys. I've been listening to your podcast for about eight months now and I'd like to say I am a huge fan. This is immense. He's ten years old. Oh, yeah. I love this email. My dad is even more of a fan of you guys than me. And he told me about your podcast. I am a huge fan of the Atlanta Falcons and pretty much everything Atlanta related, including your podcast, which is weird because I live in Iowa. I love it. It is a little weird, though. Emma you're right. I love how self aware this guy is. I think when you grow up in a place like Iowa with no professional sports, you do that thing where you just pick out a team in a city. Yeah. You're like the base city rollers. You throw a dart at a map and go with it. That's right. Now I'm really worried there's a professional team in Iowa, but there is not. There is not. There are none. Right. No need to double check that. I've been listening to your podcast a ton during this coronavirus outbreak to keep me from going crazy, and it's worked. My birthday is actually coming up, so I'll not be able to see my friends or even have a party. It would be totally awesome and make my year if you said Happy birthday to me. But I want to bet you won't read this on the air. That's in fine reverse psychology right there. Well played, Emmett. I love your grass podcast. And last year, me and my best friend Oliver started a lawn care business and I made enough money to buy Beats Headphones to listen to your podcast on. That is full circle right there. That's right. He says, I made sure to wrap this letter up and spanking all the bottom before I sent it. So happy. Big, I guess. 11th birthday, Emmett. Best to your dad. Hello, Oliver. And everyone there in Atlanta, Iowa. Yeah, happy birthday, Emmett. The reverse psychology worked, man. If you want to get in touch with us like Emmett did and see if we wish you a happy birthday, I'll bet we won't. But who can tell them these crazy times? You can get in touch with us via 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 are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 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."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-01-09-sysk-mary-celeste-final.mp3	The Mystery of the Mary Celeste	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-mystery-of-the-mary-celeste	When the Mary Celeste was discovered floating and abandoned in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean one day in 1872, the legend of the ghost ship was born. Why did the Mary Celeste’s crew disappear? Was it pirates? Mutiny? UFOs? Well, probably not that last o	When the Mary Celeste was discovered floating and abandoned in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean one day in 1872, the legend of the ghost ship was born. Why did the Mary Celeste’s crew disappear? Was it pirates? Mutiny? UFOs? Well, probably not that last o	Tue, 09 Jan 2018 16:00:26 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=16, tm_min=0, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=9, tm_isdst=0)	59082375	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry Roland. The triumvirate that has at trick the trio. The triage. Trifecta French. There you go. Is that Latin? I don't know. I just know it as a gambling term. Well, whatever it is, it's stuff you should know. Hey, Happy New Year. Happy New Year to you too, buddy. Happy New Year, Jerry. Cheese. So in real time, this is our first recording of 2018. I know this always feels a little bit weird when we say things like, Happy New Year in February. Late January. No, it's like next week. Oh, we ate up the kitty. Did we get that slim? During our long break, which was wonderful. Yes, it was so nice. Chuck. I actually get this relaxed. No. Yes, I did. I unwound. My cortisol levels decreased, although the spare tire didn't actually go down with it. It was replaced by frosting. My webcam begs to differ because I was peeking in on you the whole time. Well, okay, I did a lot of work, but I did relax. In between, I saw you pacing, wondering what to do with myself. Clipping orchids. Clipping orchids. Man, my orchids are doing so well right now. It's super cold out, of course. Right? Yes. But I've got to keep them outside because they have a bit of an ant in the first station. I haven't figured out how to do anything about that one yet, but I built, like, a little impromptu cold frame around them, and I have a mini crockpot warming water inside the cold frame. So to the orchids. They're in Ecuador right now during the rainy season. It's like downsizing. Have you seen that yet? No. That means nothing to you, then? No, I have no idea what you're talking about. You have to tell me now. What is it? It's that new movie. The new Alexander Payne movie with Matt Damon. Does it have to do with orchids? No, it has to do with Ecuador shrinking people down and living in miniature. Oh, that sounds kind of cool. So there'll be, like, a miniature crock pot. That's what got me on that tangent. Did you ever see that documentary? I'm sorry, everybody who wants to stay on track, but just one more thing. Did you ever see that documentary, Chuck, about the woman who created miniature crime scenes for police to study and learn from? No. You should check it out. It was this lady who did exactly what I just said. They made a documentary about her and how much these things have actually helped teach techniques and how radical a change it was and presumption of guilt and that kind of thing. You know how much I love miniature things, though. Well, you would love this. I'm surprised you haven't seen it, then. No, because I think it was in Chicago. The museum in Chicago. And the downstairs I want to say basement, but whatever the lowest floor is, they have the works of the woman who created all the miniature house interiors. And it's just like I could have spent all day in there. Yeah, I'll bet it was amazing. I know. There is something about things that are really small, things that are really small and things that were once above ground that are now underwater. You get the little tiny Tabasco bottle. I just want to hug it. It's about as prized a Tabasco bottle as you can get. And I love small stuff like that. Yeah. I know what you're getting next Christmas. Tiny. Some tiny Tabasco. I'd be like, Hug this. Give me a small anything. Okay, good to know. Good to know. All right, so let's talk. Let's wrap. All right. You know me a mystery Chuck. I think you do, too. Yeah, this is a good one. The old ghost ship. Yeah. When you cross mystery with history, it just blows up. The whole spot blows up, and that's what this one is like. I remember learning about the Mary Celeste back when I was a young tyke. Probably filmed that, like, Time Life unexplained phenomena series. Oh, yeah. I'm pretty sure that's where it was. Those timeline books. Yeah, they were great. They were just chock full of just outright lies and mistaken facts and things like that, but they're perfect for, like, a little ten year old imagination. You were tiny. What do you mean? You were tiny ten year old. Your imagination was big, though. I wasn't tiny at ten. I was really starting to work on some chubs by then. Yeah. See, I'm doing in reverse order. I was a skinny ten year old. Oh, yeah. I was never a skinny kid. Well, anyway, just imagine little kind of chubby ten year old Josh sitting there reading a Time Life book, learning about the Mary Celeste, like you said, ghost ship, and just my hair standing up on and going, this is what a great universe to live in. Yeah. Where there can be ghost ships, right? Yeah. And we'll get to at the end, we will reveal the big well, no one knows for sure what happened, but no, we'll get to what the best guess is at the very end. Or should we just say that right now? No, that'd be weird. But I subscribe to the best guess as we'll see. All right, so way back machine time, right? But this is our seafaring version. Well, no, we're going to old New York. Okay. So we don't need to get wet yet. No, not yet. We're daniel Day Lewis rain supreme. Have you seen that yet? Oh, no, you're talking about the gangs of New York. Gangs of New York? I thought you're talking about the New and Phantom thread. Where do you hear about these movies? That's my job, dude. Oh, yeah, that's right. I don't think that movie is even out yet, actually. At least not in Atlanta. We're like a second tier city. Yeah, that's true. But I suspect not for long, because I think Atlanta's actually surpassed La. Now, as far as film production goes. No. Have you heard that? I could certainly believe it. Yeah. So does that mean we're second tier in LA's? Third tier, maybe so. All right, 2.5 kwh. All right. So are you talking early November 1872? Yes, November 4, to be exact. On Monday. Are you talking about the Astor House in New York City? New York, yeah, man. And this is at a time where, like, have you ever read Devil in the White City? No, man, I still have not read that. You should read it's pretty good. But one of the things that the book does is it reproduces menus from these dinners that they had when they were planning the expo. And these things were like they had chapters, basically, they'd smoke cigarettes in the middle. There'd be a cigarette round, because you had to do something to keep all of this food down and help the process of digestion. It was crazy how much they would eat. So I can imagine the food was pretty good at the Astor House in 1872. Yeah. But everything back then was, like, crown roast and rack of lamb, and it was just like huge trays of beef right. Live pig that you beat to death at your table and then start eating. God, they did it. Believe me. The Time Life books told me so. That's right. All right, so at this dinner table, we have a few people. We have one Captain David Morehouse, and then his buddy, he's a ship's captain. His buddy another ship's captain, because they tend to hang out with one another. Sure. Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, and they're sitting down with Briggs'wife, Sarah, and I don't know, did Morehouse have his wife there, or was he bachelor? That's not the impression I have. I think that Sarah was there because she was shipping out the next day, too. Okay. I think he was batching it, in other words. But they were good buddies, both captains, both set to set sail out of New York for the Mediterranean. And I guess they were just talking shop. Yeah. I think they both grew up in Nova Scotia, so they may have known each other there. A couple of salty old sea dogs, but good people from all accounts. Sure. The fact that these guys were having dinner in New York on November 4, 1872, totally unremarkable in most senses, right? Yeah. But a month later, it would be incredibly ironic. Yes. And tell them why. Well, because morehouse is ship. Is it deratia? I think so. Okay. We'll call it that. D-E-I-G-R-A-T-I-A degracy. Yeah. We'll sailing along, and we'll get to the specifics of how this happened in a second, but they came upon his buddy ship the Mary Celeste and bio accounts was probably like, hey, that's Briggs. We need to go over and check out how Spoons Briggs is doing. Right. And they weren't doing well because nobody aboard the ship was aboard the ship. No, I mean just seeing the ship would have caught him by surprise because he shipped out a full week later, bounded for the same city, leaving from the same port. So they should have never caught up to them. And then the fact that when they boarded it and there was no one aboard a mystery that endures to this day was born that day. That is correct. Right. So the Mary Celeste very famous ghost ship what a lot of people don't know, Chuck, is that even before the Mary Celeste became this famous ghost ship it was already considered pretty unlucky actually. Yeah. So 1860 was when not even named the Mary Celeste. It was called the Amazon at the time, was born in Nova Scotia. And I believe the very first voyage, what you would call a maiden voyage was a wholesome September to London across the Atlantic. Yeah, that's what she was. Pretty routine. Yeah. Didn't go very well. No, it didn't. No. Her first captain was a guy named Robert McClellan. Yeah. And he apparently had a cold. And when they shipped out he took such a turn for the worst that they had to turn around and go back home. And he died two days after they got back. Can you imagine back in those days if you get a cold you're like, well I got about a one in ten chance of dying. Right. Maybe even worse than that. Right? Yeah. But think about this. Like first of all, sailors are fairly superstitious bunch. Right. So a maiden voyage, anything that's like hinky or weird or bad about a maiden voyage automatically cursed ship. So the captain dying on a maiden voyage that can't even be completed, that's a cursed ship right out of the gate. I would say so. But this is also a business venture. So it's not like the owners gave up on the thing. They said, well, just get in another captain, you superstitious dogs, and get back out there. And that's what they did. Yes. And Captain number two was John Nutting. Parker Great name. It is a good name. And he also sailed to London. And when they left they actually encountered some trouble right off the bat. They hit some fishing equipment off the coast of Maine, pressed on, as you do, and did reach London, dumped off their cargo, set sail for home. And as they set sail for home they actually sunk another boat in the English Channel. Yes. Cursed ship. Yeah. And that other boat was probably fixed a lot. Right? Exactly. Amazon. Yeah. And the captain of the other ship even stubbed his toe on the way down afterward. It was terrible. Insulting. So again, this is a business venture. The owner said, whatever it was somebody else's ship. Our ships fine. We're going to keep doing this. London to New York to London. Timber. Route. They also did some West Indies trade for a while, and everything was fairly normal for a while. And then a freak storm caught the ship. And I'm not a seafarer by any means whatsoever. Same thing. So I don't know if this actually is like an inordinate amount of things to happen to one ship, but it does seem like a lot in just less than a decade for a single ship. So the first captain dies, second captain sinks another ship. They run into some fishing tackle, and then in October of 1867, she's run aground in a storm and is so bad off that the owners say, we're abandoning her. Yeah, that must be pretty bad. So they literally left the ship there to decompose. Or I guess you would call it rot if you're wooden. Sure, I guess wood decomposes, right? Or is that just rot? I think rot is more slang. Okay. It sounds grosser, too. Like cool, right? And at that point, the ship was bought by a dude named Alexander McBean, also from Nova Scotia, also a great name. The ship is changing hands. Basically, he sold that shipwreck, and I guess it was just a thing at the time. You would buy a shipwreck, maybe sell it and turn a quick profit, probably not a ton of money. But he sold that shipwreck to a dude who then sold it to another dude named Richard Haynes. So he paid about $1,750 for it, which is about $32,000 according to our favorite inflation calculator, which is West Egg. That's correct. Just got a good name. Plus it's easy to use, and it's been around forever. Yeah, I think it goes up to 2016 now, which is pretty good. That's pretty good. They're always just, like, a year behind, which I can respect. That's fine. They need the data. So Haines went through bankruptcy, and that boat was seized. And then that was sold to a group led by a man named James Winchester. Okay. And Haynes had fixed it up a little bit, but Winchester really put a lot of money into it, lengthened it to over 100ft, added a deck. Basically. The show would have been called Flip This Brigantine starring Vanilla Ice. You like that one, huh? I've seen that show. Have you seen it for like, five minutes? I'll tell you this. This proves that I relaxed this vacation. You ready? Yeah. I got hooked on an Animal Planet show called Insane Pools. Have you heard of it? I do watch one of those pool shows, but I don't think it's that one. It's another one. I have to go to bed now or else I'm going to be up to, like, 05:00 a.m. Watching this marathon about a pool renovation show that has nothing to do with animals. Yeah, it was bizarre how it just got its hooks in me. Yeah, that happens from time to time with me, too. And you know what scares me about those pools, though, is most of them are just amazing, and you have, like, grottos and waterfalls and all that cool stuff. But some people opt for those death tubes where you can swim through a thing to another thing. Oh, I haven't seen one with that yet. Yes. They're like, hey, we want to be able to swim through a tube to another part of the pool and potentially get stuck and die. That's how I see it. That would be really awful. I don't think that ever happens, though. They need to just leave a stick of butter at the mouth of that thing so you can grease yourself up real good as you're going through your pool. Just have a sheen of butter floating at the top. It kind of rots in the sunlight. I worked at a pool like that once. That's crowded. It was not butter, but there was a sheen. I don't know what it was. I'm sure it was sunblock. Yeah, I guess so. Has to be. What else is it going to be? I don't know. Body fault? There's probably a little body fault fixed in there, but does that cause a rainbow sheen? Oh, a rainbow sheen? No. I don't know what the hell it was. There should not be a rainbow sheen on your pool unless you had swimmers covered in gasoline going into your pool. That would explain it. Well, that might have been it. Okay. All right. And by the way, Winchester is just the major investor. There was a very notable other investor. And what was his name? Oh, you're asking me? Yeah. It's been a couple of weeks, hasn't it? Sorry about that. You're just staring open the space. That was weird. His name was Benjamin Spooner. Briggs Right. You'll notice is the dude from dinner. Yes. So he's not only the captain of the Mary Celeste, he was a two fifth stake investor in it. And what's notable is that at the time he invested in the Mary Celeste, he and his brother were actually considering getting out of the sailing game and buying a hardware store together in New Bedford, Mass. And instead, Briggs said, no, you know what? This is too good of a deal. This is a great ship. I'm going to pour my savings into a two fifth stake. And not only that, I'll be the captain of it. And not only that, for its maiden voyage, I'm going to bring my wife and daughter along with me. Yeah, it's one of those sliding doors things like, should have gone into hardware. Yeah. Rather than sailing into history. By the way, that is when the ship was officially renamed the Mary Celeste from the Amazon is when it was re registered, I guess. And I looked it up. I was kind of curious because there is a Marie celeste. Which is a fairly famous civil warship. And I was just curious where the name came from. And nobody really knows. But they said there is a theory that it was an error by the painter because it's in English and a French name. And it's just a weird mix up to not have been Marie and be Mary Celeste. So they think it might have been either the Mary Sellers or another Marie Celeste. So either way, who knows? Well, even today, though, still, there's some confusion. If you google Mary Celeste, google says do you mean Marie Celeste? And I say no, Google. I mean Mary Celeste. Okay. Do you mean vanilla ice? Right. Vanilla Ice flipped this pool. So Briggs, like you said, brought along his wife, who was at dinner, and then their two year old daughter, Sophia Matilda. They left little Arthur behind because he was seven and he was in school, and they said, we don't want to take little Arthur out of school. No, he was already pretty dim witted. No, I don't know. Okay. But they didn't want to interrupt his schooling. They said, Arthur, you stay here with some relatives. And they took Sophia Matilda with them. And this is a huge decision. I don't know if this is unusual or not, but whatever. Briggs said, I'm bringing my wife and daughter with me on this ship on the maiden voyage. And everyone went, oh, brother. I know. They're like, oh, good, this will be fun. We'll not only have to work really hard for weeks at sea, we'll also have to entertain your two year old whenever she wants her. Right. And we can't curse. Right, exactly. So that decision, though, probably had some effects on the voyage overall. It definitely had an effect on who Briggs chose for the crew. He had his wife, his daughter. He was known as a Christian, an upstanding person. Apparently he didn't drink much, if at all. He was known as fair, just level headed, and just an overall honorable person, not just at sea, but in life as well, back on land. So he was pretty well regarded. I'm assuming his wife was equally well regarded. And because his family was on the boat with them, he went to some trouble to make sure that the seven crew members that he picked were of upright character themselves, that there weren't any shade balls because you don't want any shady sailors out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with your wife and child. No, you don't want that. So that is to say that the crew of the Mary Celeste on her maiden voyage with Benjamin Briggs, his wife and daughter were all pretty top notch dudes, by all accounts. Yeah, for sure. So they set sale. What they were carrying was about actually 1701, to be exact, barrels of what's called denatured alcohol. This is not rum. This is not something you're going to drink. It is undrinkable. It is like fuel, basically industrial fuel. And they finally set sale on November 7, 1872, bound for Italy, bound for Genoa. And I think we should probably take a break right here. Let's do it. All right. We'll be right back about the haunted go ship. All right. Chuck route at sea. Okay, so there was an investigation, as you can imagine. We'll talk about that more later. But this investigation determined that probably although they definitely ran into some storms and heavy weather here there, but most of the voyage of the Mary Celeste was fairly unremarkable overall. Right, yeah. They made it a long way. It wasn't they did. It wasn't until the last five days before they are suspected to have disappeared that the Mary Celeste voyage turned a little odd or became a little unusual. And they figured out that from looking at the log books, that within that last five days, captain Briggs decided that he really should have seen land by this time. And if you're a captain in your Chronometer, which is basically like, from what I was reading about this, it's like a portable time zone that you can use for celestial navigation to basically tell exactly where you are in the world. It's a very valuable tool to have it see, but if your Chronometer is faulty, you're not necessarily going to be where you think you are. Okay, so based on his calculations with his Chronometer, he thought that they should have seen land, the Azores by then. This island chain in the Atlantic, kind of toward Portugal. Yeah. It's like just like dead west of southern Portugal. Yeah. I think the easternmost island of the Azores is, like, 400 miles west of Portugal, something like that. Quite any way I can imagine too. But I think it's also basically in the middle of nowhere in the mid Atlantic. Yeah. It's one of those things where if you do the Google map, you will see these tiny specs and nothing but blue. Right. You got to start zooming out to see where the heck you are. Right. It's like the Hawaii of the Atlantic, I think. Okay, so he thought that he should have seen the Azores by then, and he hadn't. So I think he started to get a little nervous because they changed course. They went northward, which he suspected would have taken him toward the Azores, and he may have been either looking to kind of reorient himself or just looking for haven. Who knows? But they know that they did change course and that he wasn't where he thought he was. Yeah. And I also get the idea, which will jive with one of the theories, is that he may have been a little nervous having his two year old and his wife aboard in general. Yeah, for sure. It's not just his safety now or even the safety of the crew. It's his little kid and his wife's safety. Of course he's going to be worried about that. Exactly. Man, I can't imagine having a two year old on a ship. What a nightmare. I know. Good God. Go on a cruise, you can experience it a million times over. Yeah, because modern day cruise ship is the same as a 19th century sailing vessel. It's not. You're right. There's nothing to do. No, that's true. Although they did have a melodian, which I had to look that up as well. It's like an accordion. Yeah. I don't see why they even call it something different. Right. An accordion with keys. All right. As opposed to what? The little buttons? Or maybe it's the accordion with the buttons. It's one of the two. Okay. You know what I'm talking about. It's like a weird El Yankavik type instrument. Oh, well, we should get Aaron Cooper to write us, because he will surely do. Yes, I'm sure. So they would have had that aboard, which would have been all the pleasure you could imagine. Yeah, like one wooden doll and a stone accordion is really kind of keep it to your old occupied and the communal Saltwick in the middle of the above deck. All right. So the next morning they wake up and the Mary Celeste actually sees land, which I can imagine if you are a semen out there in the 19th century and you're a little worried, there is no more welcome sight than seeing land after seeing nothing but water for weeks and weeks. So they see land. The log book says they saw land. They're about 6 miles from Santa de Maria, which is the easternmost of the Azores. And this is sort of the last stop before you hit Portugal. Right. I can imagine. He just was so relieved when he called the flame. Sure. So the reason we know this is not because anybody on the Mary Celeste told anybody, at least not verbally. They found the logbook and the log slate, which is kind of like you're just keeping track of stuff on the slate before you actually transcribe it into the logbook. And the log slate was where they noted that 08:00 A.m. On November 25, the Mary Solest sighted land and by their calculations, were 6 miles off of Santa Maria. Right? That's right. That was November 25. Yes. I guess they just had a nice Thanksgiving. Yeah. Maybe with their salt lick. No, they had food, as we will see. So remember the Gracia? I think that's it. That last one. So the other ship that was being sailed by his buddy, Captain Morehouse, remember Seaman Johnson of that ship said, hey, Cappy, there's another ship out here and it's about 400 miles further east from where that log had placed that ship. The Marriage. Right. Not only that, it was a good ten or eleven days later. Right. So this is all spelling trouble. There are only three sales set. The rest of the sales had either blown away, weren't raised, none of this bodes well, and Captain Moorehouse, I don't think he probably recognized from that distance that it was the Mary Celeste yet. Right. But he sent his first mate, Oliver Devil and second mate John Wright and another dude and said, get in that boat, row over there and see what the heck is going on. Right. So these guys, Devote and Wright were the ones who actually got on deck and investigated the Mary Celeste. And I read this one article that I think just put it so perfectly, like, just ropes creaking, like a door kind of banging open and closed in the wind and just utter silence. As far as humans are concerned, nobody on board the ship would be so creepy. I think that Oliver Devo and John Wright probably experienced one of the creepiest experiences that any human ever has in the history of people. So is it creepier for Josh Clark, seaman Josh, to get upon the ship and find nobody aboard but everything seemingly OK? Or to see dead bodies in each of the bunks? Okay, so it depends on the position of the dead bodies. Are they just kind of, like, crumpled and tossed, like they've been thrown down onto the bed or something like that? Are they sitting up at the dinner table or sitting up in bed? Or is it a Walt Disney ride? That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Or are they laying there with purple robes and Nike heavens, gate style. Yeah, that would be something as well. So, to me, creepier is, I think no one there. I think it would be more horrific to find the bodies, of course, but creepier would be just finding a ghost ship. Okay, I agree. I think, because there's the absence of something that's supposed to be there, and that's, I think, what would make it so creepy. Yeah. And I think the thing that really makes it creepy, as we will see, is that it wasn't like, hey, this ship has clearly been pirated. Right. And there's blood on the walls, and people have been killed. There was just nobody there. No signs of distress. The second the Chronometer I know it's tougher than you'd think to say the Chronometer, the NAV book, they were gone, but that log book was still there. So basically, like, there was food, there was drinking water. Everyone's clothes were there. That little girls, the Salt Lake was there. Her two toys were there. Shoot. There was the impression from her sleeping on the bed in the captain's cabin. Super creepy. It is. Yeah. There were no signs of violence. There was no signs of panic, no kind of disorder. I mean, some things were out of order, but it was the kind of stuff that you could chalk up to a ship drifting at sea for a week or so by itself. Like a broken compass. Right. Broken compass. Like some of the sales have been blown down onto the deck itself. There was some. Water in there and gold. Right. And then one of the things they found, which is a pretty big clue, was an improvised sounding rod, which is basically just a stick with markings on it to show feet. Right? Yes. And you would lower that into the hold to see where the water mark hit it's, just to figure out how deep water is in a hold. So they clearly knew that there was water in the hold because they built the sounding rod and it had been found on the deck by the two guys from the derate. Yeah, it was only about three and a half feet of water by all accounts. And that sounds like a lot to a guy like me, who's not an experienced sailor sure. But apparently on a ship that size, that's like no big whoop. One of the other things that ties in with the water too is they had two pumps aboard. One of the pumps was found disassembled. So there was basically like these guys came onto the ship and there are all these weird, out of context things that were the results of decisions made by people who are now vanished and they had to try to figure this out. But one of the first things that came into their head eventually, I think, when they went back to the De Gracia and told Morehouse what was going on in pretty short order, somebody said, well, we should probably take this ship to Gibraltar with us. How about that? Because there's something called salvage rights and whether it was your friend who is missing or what have you, you would have been pretty foolish to have just continued on your way and left the Mary Celeste because what they found pretty quickly and this adds to the mystery itself as well, the Mary Celeste was totally saleable. Well, yeah. And I don't even think we pointed out that all the denatured alcohol that they were shipping was there and intact. It's not like they had been axed into or like what would you pillage? Exploded or exploded. It was all there. All the gear on board was there. So there was a lot to salvage. In other words, because not only can you salvage the ship, but the cargo. Exactly right. And what it come out to? Like between 45 and 80 grand. And today dollars is what he could have potentially gotten for salvaging this thing. Yeah, because at the time the Insurers owed a reward to whoever salvaged the ship like this and it could run up to 100% of the value of the cargo or the ship. Mutual of Nova Scotia. Right. Good dollars, man. You want to see a board stuffed with neck beards? Yeah. Go to that bank. Oh, that's good. All right. So they, like you said, decided to do the smart thing and the right thing and it was his friend. Besides the fact that anyone would have tried to salvage the ship, but it was also his pal. So I think that probably had a little to do with him saying or maybe it was just all the money. No, I think it was both. I'm sure he was concerned. I've read accounts that he was concerned by this. He said, I'm very concerned. Yeah. The end. So they take this boat. There was three guys. One of them was Oliver Devo, who was the first maiden of the day, gracia, he was in charge of sailing. This is very important note. Yeah. He sailed with just two other guys, the Mary Celeste. They pumped out the water from the hold, they fixed the sales. And the night of the day that they found it, they set sail for Gibraltar. And just three dudes sailed this thing successfully 1000 km from where it was found onto Gibraltar, where they took it to the salvage court and said, pay up. That's right. And this is where things get a little bit weird because there was a man there, the Queen's Proctor in Gibraltar by the name of Frederick Sally Flood. Man, that could not be more British. I know. And he basically said he said there was nobody there at all. There's no explanation for any of this. And you want the equivalent of $2,017 of $45 to $80,000. Thank you. West Egg. I think that was an estimate in their dollars. Is there such a thing as contemporary at the time? Doesn't that always mean now? I don't know, I could have gotten it wrong. It's entirely possible. All right, well, it's 2018 and we're just figuring stuff out here, folks, so give us a break. So it's in their dollars, so I'm almost positive. Okay, well, at any rate, he was solely flood said, this seems really hinky to me, guys. And Devo, you, sir, since you boarded the thing first, you sailed it here. You are the star witness in this case. He gave his testimony, it was very clear, nothing weird about it. He was very honest because bio accounts had nothing to hide. But solely Floods just was suspicious from the beginning. Yes. So much so that during this investigation and this would be like going to probate court and all of a sudden the representative for the state accuses you of murdering your grandma, who is the state you're in charge of taking through probate. And then suddenly there's this murder investigation without any evidence of anything. Right. Just based on the prosecutor suspicions. Right, well, and the granny disappeared without a trace. Well, yeah, that's a big one too. I forgot that part. So that's basically what happened to these guys. So they were pretty surprised by this. And Sally Flood launched this investigation. They inspected the Mary Soles, they found marks on the railing, which Sally Flood was like, these are clearly hatchet marks. There was discoloration on Captain Briggs'sword. This is clearly blood. Well, it turned out that the hatchet marks, the axe marks were actually from the construction of the ship. That wasn't axe mark. So no violence there. That wasn't blood on Briggs'sword. It was just rust. But Sally Flood was so determined to prosecute these guys that he suppressed the test results that showed that this was not blood on the sword, that it was actually rust. He really wanted to get these too. Well, yeah, and here's the deal. I think things really ramped up here's what happened before all of this, like deep investigation. Remember, Morehouse still has his ship that was Waylaid. And so he says, hey Devo, I got to stay here for this thing to collect this dough. You just go on to Genoa, you've already testified and take our cargo a petroleum because I got to get the stuff here. I'm losing money, right? And so he did so and so all of a sudden solely flood was like, whoa whoa, whoa. He was the number one witness and you've just sent this guy away? So now I'm super suspicious. Yeah, but Devo came back. He's like, what's going on everybody? What's the big deal? Here's some salami. So finally solid flood just couldn't come up with any evidence of foul play, but apparently did raise enough suspicion that the probate judge said, you know what? We'll give you guys a reward, but it's going to be like a 10th of what you actually deserve. Yeah, so they got a reward of 1700 lbs, which was jack even in that day. And they were allowed to go on their way. The Mary Celeste was finally released in February. This all began in December. She was released in February to finally carry her cargo of alcohol to Genoa. And that would have been that. And what's weird is when you think about this ghost ship, you just think like, obviously they took her out of service or commission. You got to remember this is a business venture, shipping those days just like they are today. It's a business venture. And business people are not exactly the sentimental types usually. So once she got to Genoa, they got a new crew, a new captain and put her right back into service again. So as you say, it just is back out there on the market again, taking cargo around the world. And it ran a ground off a reef of Haiti in 1885. And this is just kind of a weird ending to this ship that was super unlucky or maybe cursed. Who knows? Of course that stuff isn't real, but it ran agroground in Haiti as part of this insurance fraud scheme. So they cooked up the scheme. What was the guy's name, the captain? Captain Gilman Perkins. All right, so here's what he did. He basically it's like any insurance fraud you could imagine today. Like when I was a kid there was this I didn't grow up in a big neighborhood. I grew up on a street with like seven houses and it was a dirt road until I was like twelve. With the murder house? No, what murder house? Was it a murder house or a haunted house? I can't remember. There was one down the street from you that you were scared to death. Oh, yeah, this was that. So that one was torn down, but a big house was built in its place. But the old barn from the murdery haunted house was still there. And my brother and I would used to go exploring is what we'll call it now. We basically busted into this barn and we're just checking things out one day, and then about two weeks later, the thing burned down. And I remember being a little kid, and these insurance detectives, is that what they're called? They are now insurance whatever investigators. Claims. Investigators, yeah. They came by and questioned scott and I were like, what was in that thing? Because this guy is claiming like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of I can't remember what. All I said was in there. And we were a little kid, so we just told the truth. We were like, none of that stuff was in there. We stole that. A bunch of old file cabinets and just a bunch of junk. It was just like a junk barn. I need to ask my mom. I'm not sure what ever happened with that. That guy is probably still in jail because of eight year old Chuck Good. That's funny. You got some guy sent up the river. The law prevailed, but that's basically what happened here, is this guy purposely wrecks the ship and says, man, there was a lot of really valuable stuff on board. I was toting a bunch of bass ale, like the real Bassale that we still enjoy today. Sure. And then what else was there was a bunch of really expensive shoes. Cutlery. Yeah, a bunch of cutlery. Fine fish, fine butter. And what was in there? A bunch of garbage. It was so this guy purposely runs the ship of ground. It's insured by five different insurers for a total of 34 grand in 1870. $2 contemporary dollars. And they probably would have gotten away with this, but the captain, Gilman Perkins, went ashore and sold salvage rights to this cargo, this fine cargo that was supposedly on the ship, to a local salvage person in Haiti. And had he not conned the salvager, then again, they may have gotten away with this, but the salvager went aboard to get this, to recover this cargo, this bass, this great butter, great shoes, cutlery, all this stuff. And found, like you said, just pure nastiness. There's a bunch of junk ale. A lot of the bottles weren't even filled. There were dog collars instead of shoes. Yeah. What else? The cutlery? No, the cutlery was dog collars. These boots were old galoshes. Yeah. The women's fine shoes. And the butter was the butter was rank slush, I think is what it was. Called. So the con man or the salvagers, like, I've been conned and alerts the authorities who get on the case and finally track it all the way back to Boston. And Captain Perkins, the last captain of the Mary Celeste, remember, the first captain died, the third or fourth captain disappeared, and the last captain of the ship is facing the gallows for barritry, which is deliberate destroying of a ship. That's a great crime. Narrowly avoided being executed for it. I think the jury came back seven to five, and he got off. Just narrowly avoided being killed for it. Yeah. I don't know why he got off. The article I read by a guy named Paul Collins supposed that the jury just couldn't bring themselves to kill a person for an insurance fraud scheme, and that was it. And actually, a couple of years after they changed the law, so that bear tree was no longer a capital offense, but you could still get in big trouble for it. But a jury would be more likely to convict if it didn't mean you're deaf. Right. So the Mary Celeste run around on this roof met its fate when, I guess, the government of Haiti paid for it to be doused in kerosene and set a flame. All right, well, let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about how the legend of the Mary Celeste lived on and then what may have actually happened that faithful day in November. All right, so the Mary Celeste, it wasn't some huge sensational story of the time. Locally, it probably got a little news, but it wasn't like, you know, didn't sweep the world. But there was a story written by one Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called J Habakook. Jepson statement in 1884. That's the worst made up name I've ever heard in Cornhill magazine. Also worst magazine name ever. Yeah, but it was like a huge magazine at the time. Oh, yeah, I know. It outsold corn Hole magazine. Right. So he writes a story, and what it is is basically this sensationalistic fake account of the Mary Celeste, but everyone takes it as real. Yeah. And he renamed the ship the Marie Celeste. I don't know if it was a mistake on his part or whatever, but that also muddies the waters these days, too, as far as Google searches go. Yeah. So everyone thought this thing was real. Basically. It presented a bunch of things as fact made up a bunch of stuff like the tea was still hot and steaming when they climbed aboard, and the beds were still warm, and it was sailing perfectly and fully sailed, and breakfast was half eaten, and there's a cigar still burning. None of this stuff was true. It was all cooked up to make the myth just even creepier. But a lot of people even today still think that stuff is kind of true. Did he make all that up, or was it just kind of added to later on. Well, I don't know what exactly he made up, but basically over the years, everyone just started adding stuff like that. The lifeboat was still there. None of that stuff was true. Right. So all of those facts I'm making scare quotes, as you can see, they lend credence to really outrageous solutions to this mystery. Right? Yeah. Some aren't exactly outrageous or preposterous. The evidence doesn't support them. Some are just totally outrageous. Right, yeah. So you can kind of divide them into different categories, like the natural phenomenon. There could have been a sea quake, which I guess happens, and that usually disturbs the sea above when the sea floor has a massive earthquake, water spouts, rogue waves. Remember we did a really good episode on rogue waves. Remember that one? Giant squid, giant octopus, which is a good one. Fall under the subcategory sea monster. That's the natural stuff. Sigma and the sea monster. Yeah. All right. Then there's piracy and murder. This, just for the time, would make a little more sense. Like, Conan Doyle said that there was an ex slave bent on revenge who just wanted to kill white people, and that was in his story. So that clearly ramped things up. There was a movie in the 30s with Bella Lagosi that one of the crew members was a murderous sailor with a hook. Oh, really? All right. Well, they always had hooks. Captain Briggs was overcome with religious mania, killed everyone on board, including his family, then killed himself. Then there was the mutiny theory that everyone got into this alcohol that you couldn't even drink. No, you would die almost immediately. Yeah. I guess. Just got the drunken murder rampage. What happens when you drink a little? You just want to kill, right? Exactly. I guess in our prohibition episode, it was shown years on that the US. Government had poisoned the bootleg hooch supply with natured alcohol, and people died and went blind from it. This is this stuff. Yeah, that's what they put into the supply. Well, and then there's just the kind of mundane pirateery like, hey, this was where there were North African pirates. And that's probably what happened. It was just a regular run of the mill pirate operation. Yeah, but whether it's like any kind of violence, like a religious fervor or pirates or something like that, there was not any sign of struggle, remember? And the one Life boat was missing. So it would seem that if they got off the ship, they probably got off willingly rather than there have been some sort of violence. Yeah. And then also the two brothers. There are a couple of brothers who are two of the crew members, vulgar T and Boy Lorenzen. And they were suspects for a little while because none of their personal possessions were found. Apparently there was no motive whatsoever. And a descendant of them said they had lost all their gear in a previous shipwreck. So just none of that makes any sense. They were good guys. Right. So probably was not murder, right? Probably not. Plus, also the idea that the crew had come across another ship pirated. It turned pirate all of a sudden and were led by Briggs. The idea that and then just took this other ship and set sail to start a new life elsewhere doesn't make much sense on its face. But even if you dig down just one more degree and remember that they left their son Arthur behind. He came in orphan on the day that the de Gracia found the Mary Celeste. It lends even less credence to that. Arthur. Yes. Again, he was fairly dimwitted. They left him behind. Not a very likable kid. He had a real temper for no good reason. He didn't like cake. Who doesn't like cake? I know. So the murder, piracy or lastly so remember the Captain Warhouse dined with Captain Briggs and his wife the night before they headed out. Yeah. And then Captain Warhouse is the one who found the ship and claimed salvage rights to it. The idea that it was fraud and maybe a fraudulent scheme cooked up, that one's really dismissed, too, again, by the presence of Arthur. Right. Arthur ruined everything. So you can dismiss murder, piracy, or fraud, typically. What about paranormal? Let's go ahead and dismiss that, too. Okay. Because I don't think that the Bermuda Triangle ate them or that aliens. Aliens, man. I don't think that happened. Yeah, that's a big one. So let's just go ahead and not even talk about that too much, because that's dumb. So that Frederick Sally Flood's obsession with this whole thing at the time contemporarily presented, like, the documented evidence we have concerning the case. So it's good that he did this, that he was gripped by this paranoia of the suspicion. Right? Yes. Because we do know some facts about the thing. We know that we said the ship was found with just three sales up and the rest were either blown down or unfurled. The lifeboat was missing. There was a rope dangling over the side from the back of the ship into the water. Nine of the 1701 casks were intact, but were actually empty. And on closer inspection, they were made of red oak, which is more porous than white oak, which the other 1701 barrels were made of and were intact and still full. So we know these things about this ship that are actually correct, and they've been put together to kind of create this explanation that, again, isn't definitive, doesn't prove it once and for all what happened that will never happen now, which I love, but there's a pretty good explanation, I think, that we both kind of agree is the likeliest explanation. Yeah. So those tasks that leaked but did not explode or anything, there could have been a smell. There could have been a sound. There could have been just some indication that maybe this ship is about to blow up or we are in danger. They had taken on a little water that might have played into it, but what really everyone thinks played into it is, like we said at the beginning, he had his wife and toddler aboard, so he was taking no chances, which would thoroughly explain why they got off of that boat really quickly at the very first signs that something could be wrong. Right. So those nine red oak barrels that were empty had 300 gallons of denatured, highly flammable alcohol in them. Yeah, it would have smelled. Yeah, it would have smelled. It could have created a fireball explosion. It could have blown the hatches off. It could have done a lot of things that would have made a reasonable person, especially one that's also concerned for the life of his wife and child, say, the likeliest thing we should do here, the most reasonable thing we should do here is get off of the ship. So considering that there was this alcohol aboard, some of it was missing, and that the lifeboat was gone and that the log book showed that they were within sight of land the last time they had made any kind of entry, supports the idea that they had all gotten into the lifeboat willingly because probably the alcohol and then the water that the ship had taken on. Yeah. And apparently in 2006, it was a study at university College of London where they tried to reproduce what that explosion might have looked like and sounded like, and they did it with butane so I guess is that about the same thing. I don't know why they use butane instead of alcohol vapors, I have no idea why, but they feel like it was pretty definitive. Yeah. And so basically, it caused a big, brilliant flame and made a sound. But because it was this vapor, it didn't, like, burn everything up. It didn't scorch anything. There was no soot. There was no evidence. So if this would have happened on board, this guy's got his wife and his toddler, that would have been enough to create a panic. And that's where my money is. For sure. For sure. And plus, also, I mean, the explosion, the exploding alcohol theory had been around for a while, but it had been dismissed because they were like, well, it would have left some evidence. But this study showed that, no, it could have actually blown up, scare the heck out of these people, and gotten them off this boat into the lifeboat, which they would have had connected to the ship, the Mary Celeste, by this 400 yards. It was a very long rope, inch thick rope called a hallyard, and they had connected the lifeboat to it. And what they supposed happened was that they kept a few of the sales down. Some of them still furled. To let the ship keep going. But at a slow pace because they were going to have to ride behind it for an indefinite period of time. And the wind caught it just right. Spread the ship up. Snapped the line. And then within an hour. The lifeboat was adrift with the Mary Celeste out of sight. So is the idea that they got in the boat attached with a rope attached to just say, hey, let's get away from it and see what happens here? Yes. Okay. And then it just starts going, the rope is gone. And then they're like, well, I can't catch it now. Right. And they would have been left to drift at sea to die, which is what everybody thinks happened. Yeah. And I guess at the time there would be unless they got really lucky or unlucky and the robot eventually washed ashore somewhere, that would just be no trace, right? Yes. They just were fish food. Yeah. I mean, if they're out in the Atlantic, especially if they just 6 miles away from an island that's in the middle of nowhere is pretty middle of nowhere. So if you're in a small boat, it'd be very easy to vanish without a trace forever. Man, I bet that story is the sad one, is what those final days were like. Yes. That kid. Yeah. Heartbreaking. So that's the story of the Mary Celeste. Good job. Good job, you. Chuck, I feel like we kicked the rest off the sword on this one. If you want to know more about the Mary Celeste, there is plenty more to dig into. This is a nice rabbit hole to jump down if you want to do that kind of thing. Just go search. Google. Say no. Google. I mean Mary Celeste. And start off. You'll have fun. And in the meantime, it's time for Listener Ma'am. I'm going to call this local listener. Hey, guys. My name is Sally and I am a sophomore at Emory University. Started listening to Stuff you should know two years ago when I was on a school exchange in Beijing. What began as a fun way to buy time and bumper to bumper traffic turned into a complete obsession. Your quick banter made me feel at home on the other side of the world while you're engaging in well developed topics reignited my love of learning. Since leaving Emery, I frequently imagine bumping into you guys in Decatur, in Atlanta, and having the opportunity to chat about your journey from college kids at UGA to potentially the most interesting and vibrant guys I've heard. Wow, you're vibrant, buddy. Thank you. I'm fascinated by how you do what you do, and there's nothing I would love more than be a fly in the wall of the show. From your creative process to your tangential tidbits. Whatever topic you happen to be covering, I am fully captivated by every facet. Nice, huh? Yeah. I still have not declared a major. She wrote a lot more really nice stuff, but I had to edit it for content, sure. Or for time. I have still not declared a major, and I'm still essentially a ball of frenetic energy. But you guys have helped me because you helped me tap into that frenetic energy and productively exercise, my burning and satiable desire to learn, to think, to question and to grow now as a young adult and until the nurses need to pinch my oxygen tank and physically made me stop. Well done. A million thanks. That is Sally Jinx. Thanks a lot, Sally. That's pretty great. Very sweet. Yeah, it is. And good luck with the rest of your schooling. Okay? If you want to get in touch with us and pay us some high compliments like Sally did, we're always down with that. You can tweet to us at Joshmclark or S-Y-S kpodcast. You can hit us up on Facebook. Comstuffiesheanowcharleswuckbryant. You can send us all an email, the stuffpodcast@housedeepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyoushenknow.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. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-08-22-sysk-uncanny-valley-final.mp3	Is the Uncanny Valley Real?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-the-uncanny-valley-real	In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori wrote an essay that said the closer robots come to lifelike, the more they unsettle humans. His theory became the Uncanny Valley, and science has been evaluating it – and what makes something creepy - in recent years.	In 1970, roboticist Masahiro Mori wrote an essay that said the closer robots come to lifelike, the more they unsettle humans. His theory became the Uncanny Valley, and science has been evaluating it – and what makes something creepy - in recent years.	Tue, 22 Aug 2017 14:46:01 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=14, tm_min=46, tm_sec=1, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=234, tm_isdst=0)	64876539	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there doing the robot which means this is stuff you should know. Robot stuff. I knew I'd get a laugh out of you sooner or later. Did you do the robot? Can you do the robot? I think I've seen you do pretty bad robot. I don't know about pretty bad robot. I can do a pretty great robot. I think that's what you've seen. I can't do any of that stuff. Yeah, I can't really either. If your claim to fame is, like, a really great robot dance, I don't know, maybe take up some other hobbies as well. Kind of round that out. You don't want them to be the only thing you're good at. Right. Because if you list that on a dating site, you might turn ladies off. Yeah. According to Eharmony. Yeah, that's foreshadowing. I love that one, don't you? Yeah, I had some issues with that whole bit. Yeah, we'll get to that. This is bad. All right, well, let's start at the beginning. Almost the beginning, Chuck. Let's go back to 1970, which was the beginning of the greatest decade in the history of humanity. Yeah. Neither one of us are born yet. I can finally even say that. I'm not even born. It must feel good. Yeah. Okay. Well, welcome to the club, I guess. Thanks. And in 1970, we're not just going just anywhere. We're going to Japan in 1970. I bet Japan was pretty cool in the 70s. Yeah. A lot of bell bottoms. A lot of ninja running around still. Yeah. There were calculators being wielded all over the place. Probably. It was a good time. Yeah. Good time for Japan. Right. And one of the things that was going on in 1970 I could not for the life of me find. What issue of this journal it came out in what month? But at some point in there was an obscure journal, a Japanese academic journal called Energy. And at some point during that year, it published an article by a Japanese roboticist, and his name is Masahiro Mori. Nice. Thank you. I have a lot of practice. And Masahiro Mori published this article, and he named it Bukimi Notani gensho is actually the full name of the whole thing. And as we'll see, it's kind of difficult to translate into English. Right. And it took many years after he wrote this article for it to be translated into English for anybody even try to attempt it. So basically, Mori was this roboticist, and he wrote this essay, and at the time, he just put it out there and went back to work, started teaching more and more roboticists. The whole new generation of roboticists learned under him. And his work just kind of sat there unobserved that article, I should say. And then in 2005, a rough translation of it was leaked out, wasn't intended for publication, and the world entirely changed because Masahiro Mori had, in his article, put his finger on something that no one had before in his capacity as a roboticist and a human. And that was what we call today the uncanny valley. Yes. So that's the idea that you're making a robot, and we'll see this applies to more than just robots, but in this case, you're making a robot and you want to make it look like a person, which I guess not all roboticists do. Some of them like the Clunky Jetson style robots, like Rosie. But I guess if you're a mauri, you're on the path to designing life like robots, and the closer you get to that life, like, look, everything is going great. Everything's going great. People are like, this is so cool. This is so cool. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, people go, oh, yeah, right. As it approaches, basically, when it reaches its most lifelike capacity that whoever's making it can conjure, people are repulsed by it. Yeah. Which is something that most people who ever hear of the uncanny valley are like, yeah, I've noticed that. That's happened to me before, too. But the thing is, Chuck, it doesn't actually make sense. Right. Like, we know a robot is a robot. Yeah. So maybe you could be afraid that it's going to pick you up and break you into or something like a cartoon, but that's different than being creeped out by it. Like, why would we be creeped out by a robot? And this is what Morrie put his finger on. Was there's something to this? And it doesn't make sense. And it wasn't even just this article that he wrote. He created a graph as well that's become quite famous. That really kind of gets the point across more than anything else. Yeah. And he wasn't even the first person to go over this and to put some thought to it. Freud, of course, because he liked to think about everything he thought about a little bit. And before Freud, there was a Gemini named Anch Jinched. Oh, nice. I did not realize that's how his last name should be pronounced. Yinch. That's good stuff. I think I put a T on the end, but the T is in the middle. Yinch. Yes, I think that's right. I've been saying Jinch. Well, we'll have to look that up, then. No. I think of the two of us. You got the German down. And he had a little term called. Umheimelich that he called it. So different languages had different names for it. And you go back in time all the way back to the 17th century. And people were and I guess robots didn't look super lifelike back then. But whatever their version of lifelike was in the 16 hundreds. People were like. I don't like that. Why is it looking at me? Yeah, it's got a quill, and it's writing things but like you said, Morrie made this graph because he was a roboticist, and he thought, let's look at this on a plot. It out so we can stare at it. And on the X axis, he had human likeness. Then on the Y axis, he had affinity, like whether or not you like the way this thing looks. Right. And just as we're talking about the graph went up and up as things got more lifelike and people like the way it looked. And then at a certain point, there's that valley, there's a big dip that really just kind of says it all. Right. And again, this all makes sense intuitively, but as we'll see, it's been very difficult to prove. And one of the reasons why it's confounded research thus far is because we're not even 100% sure what Morrie meant by some of the words he chose, at least as far as translating them to English. Right. For example, bukimi. Right? Yeah. It was translated in 2005 as uncanny, but again, the original translation was not intended for publication, but it leaked out. And so uncanny valley became the way we all think of it here in the west. But bouquet more closely resembles something like Erie. I've seen it explain that a word like bukimi means more than uncanny is just weird or remarkable or noteworthy. It's not necessarily something that gives you the creeps. Bouquet is something that gives you the creeps. Like Steve Bukimi. Nice. Exactly. So Bukimi probably more should have been translated to Erie Valley, but by the time an actual official translation that Morrie signed off on came out in 2012, the cat was out of the bag. Everybody knew of it as the uncanny valley. And there's no way anybody is going to come back and be like, no, everybody stop calling it that. It's now. The Erie valley. Okay. Right. And it may be one of those things where we're so used to uncanny valley now that it's hard to imagine Erie Valley, but right. I think that was the issue. Yeah. Nobody's going to go along with that. So this graph, like I said, it starts off on that left hand side, and this is where you have things that are super robotic, like a packaging robot in a factory that apparently most people don't have fondness for. I do because I love mechanical processes. Right, okay. So there's part of the problem. It's like that's not necessarily the kind of feeling that Masahiro Morty was talking about. Yeah. You're interested in robotics and robotic arms and the industrial processes, and you love watching how it's made. Right. What he was talking about was more like how it resembles a human and then how it makes you feel in relation to its resemblance of a human. Right. Well, in that case, it makes me feel nothing because it doesn't look at all like a human. Right, okay. So that would be at about the origin of the graph, it has no resemblance to a human, really, and it's not eliciting any real affinity in you at all as far as it looks like a human. Right. But lots of affinity as a thing that's called props. So you go a little bit further on the graph and then you have things like little stuffed animals. And I know C Three PO is a common one that's mentioned because C Three PO is built to look like a human. He does a great robot, kind of talks like a human and acts like a human. But when it comes to that face, and as we'll see, the face is kind of the key to all this. For the most part, C Three PO looks nothing like a human in the face. Everything is still good and people love C. Three PO Right. So if you're looking at the graph, c Three PO is going up in human likeness because he's got some commonality there and we're feeling affinity for him based on the human likeness. So he's going up. Yes. Okay. Everything's going pretty well so far, right, Chuck? That's right. Okay, so then we're going to start hitting some areas where things start looking a little more human, a lot more human, I would say, than C Three PO. Like, say, the characters in Moana are Frozen, Pixar characters, that kind of thing, where they look like they're supposed to be human, like they're based on human, but they have very exaggerated features that you would never confuse at first glance for an actual human. Right. So they have like big eyes, small noses, things that make them cute. Right. And so our affinity for them is going up as the human likeness is going up again. Things are going really well so far. That's right, because in Moana and Frozen, they look a little bit more like people, and we like them a lot more for that reason. Right. And then, like you said earlier, out of nowhere, the whole thing, this line that's just been going up very pleasantly at a nice little slope just drops downward, right? And it doesn't drop just downward, it goes actually below the Xaxis into negative territory. And now this is the uncanny valley. That's right. And that's why it has that name, because it's a valley. Right. And this is where those things, like, really life, like androids live or corpses live or zombies live. Because Morrie, he had the idea that if something's moving, it's even creepier than something similar to it that's not moving. So we actually created two lines on this graph, one for things that are animate and one for things that are inanimate. So if you look at this uncanny valley on the inanimate line, the non moving line, you've got corpses are at the bottom of it. But if you look at the animate line, it dips even further below than the inanimate line. And at the bottom of those are zombies. So dead people up and moving around and saying brains is creepy as it gets as far as this graph is concerned. Yeah. And Mario wasn't the only one that Ernst Yinch, that we talked about, the German psychiatrist, he also talked about the fact that if you are looking at something that should not be moving and it moves, I think we can all agree that a baby doll that suddenly turns its head and looks at you. Right. Probably one of the creepiest things you can witness. Right. Yeah. It's about as creepy as it gets. Or have you ever been to an open casket funeral? A few. I'm not a fan at all. No, it makes sense. We've really kind of closed or put a lot of space in between us and death. Way more than we used to have in, like, the 19th century. No, they either would sit up with the dead. Sure. Right. So this seems to be, like, kind of a holdover from that. But if you've ever been to an open casket funeral and have just stared at the corpse long enough, like, maybe it's arm or its fingers or something, your brain is so anticipating that it's about to start moving, that sometimes you can creep yourself out and make yourself think you did actually see it move. You'll also be asked to leave the funeral. Well, you shouldn't be, like, giving a commentary about this out loud, but you can do it to pass the time in the funeral if you're looking to kill some time. So here's the thing with all this. We know this happens because everyone kind of has this feeling, but no one and all this research has been done, and no one is exactly sure why this happens. So Maurice essay, and especially once it was translated, a lot of research started happening in this area. And it's problematic, though, because there are a few different problems. One is, well, it's subjective. This dependent variable, whether you have an affinity for something, is very subjective. So it's hard to kind of nail that down scientifically. Right. All right. So the number two is human likeness. Right. This is the independent variable. Yeah. And if you have human likeness, what does that mean? Like, what looks human, what doesn't look human? We haven't pinned that down. So if you can't pin the dependent variable down and the independent variable down, it makes it really tough to study. Correct. And then there's a third one, too. I love this one. Yeah. The third one is the original hypothesis. It doesn't have a mathematical model that really specifies the shape of this curve. Right. So it's still hypothetical, I guess. Right. Which means that so if you look at Morris graph, he just basically made a line. Right. It wasn't based on any studies he'd done. The whole thing was really an essay more than anything else. So researchers who are trying to seriously study this scientifically have nothing that they're actually trying to place their findings against, which leads to it puts them at risk for what's called the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. Yeah. Greatest name, fallacy around. And it's based on the idea that if you take a sharp shooter out in Texas and have them shoot at the side of a barn a bunch of times, some of them are inevitably going to hit the barn. And then the Texas Sharpshooter walks up and then draws the bullseye around the bullets that he already sunk into the side of the barn. That's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. It's ignoring data like the ones where you missed the barn in favor of ones that fall into what you're looking for, the bullet holes in the barn. You could do the same thing with the data that you get from testing the uncanny valley if you have no model to fit it into already. Yeah, I think they would have done better if they would have just instead of trying to prove something to maybe just research and call it a thought experiment. Right. But people are taking it seriously. And we'll talk about some of this research right after this. Chuck alright, so we're back. And despite the fact that this is really tough to study, it's not even established that it's a real thing in everyone's mind. By the way, there are people out there who are really studying the uncanny valley and trying to pin it down. Yeah. One of these people is at Dartmouth College. Psychologist. And I didn't look up their mascot. The Fighting Pub at Dartmouth College. We're going to hear from Dartmouth, but her name is Talia Wheatley and she's done some research and has found that it's not just like some uniquely Western thing or American thing. It's kind of all over the world. She studied tribes in Cambodia and they have the same sensitivities to these things that look human but aren't human. And they've even found that I think it kind of all comes down to the eyes. But they found just looking at the eye can be enough. Yeah. Somebody can tell whether it's a human or not just looking at a picture of the eye. Right. Yeah. And that's where I think people lose credibility and we'll talk about movies and sculpture and all that stuff, but they just never get you can't get the eyes right. Like you can't put life in lifeless eyes. Yeah. Hard. They try. Only God can. And there was this other experiment where you can morph a face digitally or whatever, like that Michael Jackson black and white video. Yeah. I think some people are creeped out by that even. Sure. But they would show this doll image and it would morph into a human face and basically they would have people mark where they thought that it would look more human than doll. And it landed about the 65% mark as far as morphing into human, which I mean, you can't really apply that necessarily. But just it's interesting. Offhand 65% point is about where the uncanny valley happened in Maurice mind. Yeah, I would think it would be higher than that, but yeah, still super interesting. And you were saying that the I's that's what you're betting on is that it's going to turn out to be the eyes, right? Yeah. So trying to investigate what constitutes human likeness, there's a researcher named Angela Tinwell, and she basically says, like, yes, it's all about the upper facial features and that we detect those, we read those. And so if there's any, anything that's even just slightly off in like, the eyes or the brows or the wrinkles that form that will lead to the uncanny valley, that's the creepy part. Or the smile, too. She also says, well, yeah. And all these things kind of come down to evolution. And her point is you can't battle millions of years of evolution that has honed our dumb little human brain to detect something that's off about a face. Right. It's just too much to overcome, basically. Right. This other researcher named Carl F. McDorman, who's from the University of Indiana, he's basically dedicated his career to this. Now, he found that certain kinds of people, if you do like a personality inventory before testing for uncanny valley sensitivity yeah. Some types of people are predictably more sensitive to the uncanny valley than others. Specifically, he found that very religious people that makes total sense. Yeah. Neurotic people and people with high sensitivity to animal reminders. I don't even know what that is. It's basically anything that reminds you that, hey, you're super civilized and you drive a car and you know how to play poker, but you're still an animal just as much as that ape over there is an animal reminder. People who are sensitive to that kind of thing tend to go off on the uncanny valley as well. And then people who are anxious are more likely to experience the uncanny valley as far as McDorman is concerned. Yeah, that anxious thing makes sense, too, because they're probably just more prone to be, I don't know, just have a reaction to a lot of things like this. Right. But we should say the science and all this, the fact that the independent and the dependent variable are still not defined, this is like the scientific equivalent of that backward, over the head, half court basketball shot. Yeah. That's the level of science that these people are carrying out at this point because a lot of them, sadly, are conducting experiments based on something that, again, doesn't have a set dependent or independent variable. So how can you do that is my question. Well, yeah, because in each experiment, they're going to be using different stimuli, different faces, whether it's a doll or a wax figure or a CGI character. And then they're going to be doing different things and have different expressions. And each person has their own subjective take. So it's a very tough thing to kind of nail down. Yeah. And I think some of them are actually trying to form the basis of this field of study right now. They're doing the groundwork, but I think some of them also are just chasing headlines. There's no better way to get into the media cycle with your study than releasing some findings on the uncanny valley. People just keep that up. Sure. They love it. One thing I thought was interesting was at Princeton, they tried this with monkeys, and they found the same thing happened when they had these realistic looking but fake monkey faces. The monkeys were, like, and turned away. It did make me think, though, like, all the you've seen these situations where, like, an orphaned animal has a creepy puppet mother. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about, and they seem to like that. But however and this is a bit of a spoiler, but toward the end of this article, it points out that human babies don't have this reaction at first either, and that it's kind of learned. So maybe that explains it. Maybe with the animals. I know you're talking about that cage, like, wire monkey mother. It's super creepy. Is a black and white photo. Well, no, I mean, there's all kinds of animals. They have, like, a fake tiger or a fake duck or whatever just so the animal will feed. I mean, it's usually an animal that milks from the mother, I guess. I see. But it's a common thing they do for orphaned milk feeding or breastfed animals. And they're always creepy, huh? Well, I mean, to us, but to a dumb baby monkey, they're just like, sweet, give me the teat. Yeah, there's a t shirt, maybe even a band name. Sweet, give me the teat. Yeah, that kind of falls into the long band name category. Yeah, for sure. But here's the thing is not everyone agrees with this whole thing. Like you said earlier, there's a man named David Hansen, and he's a roboticist as well, in Plano, Texas, and he did a very basic study. It was a survey where they showed images of two different robots that were animated to simulate human facial expressions and basically just asked, hey, what do you think of this? And 72% said, I like them. Yeah, I do see why people had trouble to study, though. Yeah, he said not one person said they were disturbed. Okay, sounds good. For the most part, though, studies into the uncanny valley are like, we're finding something here, although we should be suspicious of ones that basically show the uncanny valley that Morrie just graphed out of his, like, with free hand. Right. If you come across a study that shows that same thing, they're probably cherry picking data you got to say out of his butt. Yeah, maybe. There was another study, Edward Schneider, at SUNY Potsdam in New York. I bet they don't even have a mascot. They got together 75 characters from cartoons and video games, everyone from Mickey Mouse to Laura Chrome, who is very attractive, by the way. She's a computer character. Yeah. Are you talking about? Angelina Jolie? Well, no. I'm talking about playing tomb raider. I never played yes. When it first came out, I played Tomb Raider and I was like, wow, look at her. Croft is kind of hot. Well, she gets a lot of stuff done that's very attractive. I'm not sure what that means. Well, she travels a lot. She's an independent person. Yeah, that's what I meant. I was attracted to her mind and her adventures. Right. So, anyway, they asked people in the study, how attractive do you think these characters are? Or how repulsive do you think they are? And again, there was a graph with a dip in it at a certain point, as you would expect. Yes. Careful, everybody. So if you're a robot designer right. One of the things, like even back in his essay written in, there's problems here with movement. There are problems here with the smile. It has something to do with the face. Right? Yes. And somebody else said, I don't remember who it was, but there always seems to be a lag time between how realistic a designer can make a robot and how realistic an engineer can make that robot look. Right. And that disconnected morris mind was a big part of the uncanny valley, but he also seemed to focus on the smile, on the eyes. And one of the things that's at stake, besides this just being, like, an interesting topic of discussion, there are actual real world implications for this whole thing. Right. Like, if you're a robot designer, you want to create something that's not going to freak people out, because the whole purpose of robots is to interact with humans, and you want them to interact with humans, I should say lifelike looking robots. Right. Because, like, Ford Motor Company is ever going to buy an android that looks human to just work on an assembly line when they can get the same thing that does the same job cheaper, when it just looks like a robotic arm or something. Right? Yeah. The whole purpose of a lifelike looking robot is because that robot is being designed to interact with humans. And if you are going to run into this spot, some people say it's not even a valley. Some people think it's insurmountable a cliff or a wall. So if you're going to run up against this, you want to figure out how to overcome it because you don't want to creep people out with your creations. Well and you don't want to spend a lot of money to develop a robotic walmart greeter at every store, because it's happening. This is coming, people. Yeah. There's a robot called Geminoid F or Actroidf, depending on who you ask. I've also seen him called Ellie and she is out of this lab by a guy named Hiroshi Ishiguru, and he is probably the world's leading roboticist. If you've seen any life like android, it probably came out of this guy's lab. Right? Yeah. And she is starting to get out there in the world. She's been a debriefer of soldiers coming back from war with PTSD based on the idea that they might share more with a robot that they knew was just a robot than they would in actual human. She's in a play. She stars as an android. Good role. All right. And then there's Casper. There's a little robot called Casper. Yeah. Casper is a robot boy with a great cause created to help children with autism learn to read facial emotions. If you look up photos of both of these geminoid, f looks great. And really like Ishiguro is doing great work. Yeah, he really is. Casper looks terrifying. Right? So Casper is creepy, but that's not his purpose at all, right? No, of course. His purpose is to teach kids with autism how to connect. But if he's repelling them through the sun cany Valley, he's defeating the purpose. Well, they should go to Ishiguro and say, hey, we have this great cause. Can you make us something that doesn't look like the stuff of nightmares? Right, exactly. I wonder if Casper has been effective. Do you know? I don't know. Now I feel bad I didn't look into that. Well, I don't know. He's very creepy looking. I agree wholeheartedly. It's kind of like, no, he's not finished. Get back to the drawing board. Either that or, and this is what Morris said, go the other way. Just make him not human at all. Just cute or approachable. Right. So the roboticists are not the only ones who are facing this truck. There is a pretty powerful money contingent of people who are interested stakeholders in overcoming the uncanny valley, or at least figuring out if it's totally insurmountable. And that is Hollywood. Yes. Hollywood has sort of a rich history of getting it wrong when it comes to creepy CGI characters. Pixar had their very first short film, actually. It's called Tin Toy, sort of five minutes short, and they showed it to this preceded Toy Story and everything. Yeah. It was actually kind of like the outline of Toy Story's plot. Yeah. But they showed it to test audiences, and they made the mistake of making the baby Billy look too realistic. And everyone loved Tin Toy. And everyone hated Billy. Yeah. Have you seen it? Yeah, I hate Billy. Yeah, he's pretty haitable, for sure. And he is the antagonist, but he struck some chord with viewers that the Pixar did not mean to strike. Right. This is extraordinarily fortunate for Pixar. This is very early on in their history, and they learned from it, actually. They're like, okay, note to self. Don't try to make any of these characters life like. Let's go a different direction. And so they came up with those exaggerated features that we've all just come to know and love. Yes. Which was a great direction to go in, obviously, because they've had tons of success with that model. Right. You can make the case that it may have saved the company because other companies and other movies for sure, have not been nearly as fortunate. Yeah. One of the first big photo real computer animated movies was Final Fantasy Colon the Spirits Within. You should never have a colon in your movie title, by the way. That was the first mistake. Right. But this one was from 2001 and based on the video game, and it was off putting to a lot of people. And it was a big bomb for Columbia Pictures. But this is before Uncanny Valley had really been established, before Maurice essay was translated. So reviewers didn't quite know what to say. Now they would just say, we've tumbled into the Uncanny Valley again. Alright. But they would say things like Peter Travers, great reviewer from Rolling Stone, said at first, it's fun to watch the characters. What's an ellipsis is that? Two of them, a couple of them. But then you notice a coldness in the eyes, a mechanical quality in the movements, familiar voices emerging from the mouths of replicants erect a distance. Yeah. So he's describing Young Candy Valley. He just didn't have the name of it yet. Right. And then a couple of years later, you had the Polar Express, which became, I think, even more famous than Final Fantasy. Totally. As far as the uncanny valley goes but again, it's like you said, the reviewers didn't know how quick to put their finger on it. And I'm not quite sure how Final Fantasy was done, but I know that Polar Express use similar software and hardware to what roboticists are using now, where it's like motion capture. But rather than translating the motion to the robot, it's translating the motion into a digital 3D rendering of the character. Right. Yeah. So Polar Express was really expressive, but not quite there. So it fell really hard in the Uncanny Valley. And I think David Germaine of the Associated Press compared the kids in this heartwarming family Christmas movie to the children from Village of the Damned, which is not what you want. It's not at all what the studio wanted. And I think it lost a pretty decent amount of money. Yeah, there was another one, and these are all, by the way, courtesy of Robert Zemecas. He really went all in on this technology. I don't know why. I think sometimes as an artist, you can get so wrapped up in the coolness of what we can do now that you don't step back and look at what you're doing. Should we be doing? Because he also had a part in the Batowulf movie in 2007 that was a huge bomb. And The New York Times said this about that. People who are meant to be enraged or who are at risk of plummeting to their deaths just look a little out of sorts. When it was over, I felt relieved to be back in the company of uncreepy flesh and blood humans again. Sad. And then did you see The Adventures of Tintin? Yeah. I really liked Tintin, though. I did, too. I think Spielberg I mean, there is that uncanny valley a little bit, but the story and the movie were so good, he overcame that. I think I was about to say, I think Spielberg has come the closest to overcoming that chasm of anybody. But did he do it through good storytelling or through the eyes? I don't know. I don't know if it was a combination of the two. I don't know. But it is extraordinarily so. You know that stuff you'll see every once in a while where somebody does, like, what Beavis and Butthead would actually look like in real life, or what Charlie Brown would look like in real life. Fantastic. Right. So it still has kind of got a cartoonish quality to it. It's the same thing with the Tintin movie, but it was like it was as if you were living in a dimension where humans looked somewhat cartoonish. Is that making any sense? Or does it just make the whole thing even harder to understand? No, I get that he somehow was like, here, I'm not trying to nail what humans look like. I'm going to take you to another world where these people live. And if you lived in this world, you would look like this, too. It's weird. It's like he Bridged in Uncanny Valley that doesn't exist in this dimension. Yeah, he built a temporary disintegrating bridge across the uncanny valley. Right. I think the biggest example in recent years was the one that got the most attention was in Rogue One. Did you see that? The Star Wars movie? I haven't seen any of the new Star Wars ones except for I've seen the first six, I guess. But none of the two new new ones. No. Well, in Rogue One, they completely bring back to life grand Moff Tarkin, who was played by the deceased Peter Kushing. And they brought him back as a character in this movie and in the theater, like, when it first happens, he's got his back to you and it's sort of in the shadows, and you're like, oh, wow, that's pretty cool. And I didn't know that they would do that. But they got too comfortable, I think, and showed too much and gave them too many lines and too much light. And then it became uncanny valley. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, for sure. Thing about poor Peter Cushing's family having to see that. Yeah. I don't know how bad they just weep during that movie. Well, I'm curious about, like, life rights and image rights and stuff like that. If they had to get that cleared. I don't even know, I'm sure there's a backstory there. Oh, cushing was famously mellow. He would have taken a draw off his duby and been like, Whatever, man. Yeah. I think he spent the last year of his life on his weed farm in Northern California. Right. What about this? Mars needs moms. I had never, ever heard of that movie. And so I went and watched the trailer, and I still was like, I have no idea what this is. Yes. You know that comic strip, bloom county. Well, I'm a huge lifelong Bloom County fan. Okay. Maybe you know how to say the last name. It's berkeley. Breathed or breathed? It said Breathed, but I don't know if I've ever heard it said out loud. Breathed sounds nice. Let's go with that. So Berkeley Breathed. The person, the guy who did Bloom County. Yes. He wrote a book, a children's book called Mars Needs Moms. And basically, Mars had some sort of shortage of moms, so the Martians came and kidnapped human moms, and it was up to the human kids to go get their moms back from Mars. Right. Pretty cute little premise, but they took it and ran it through Zamekas Nightmare Mill with a company. Right. Image Movers Digital was the trade name of it, but everybody knew to just steer clear this place. Right. And this was like the apex. What's the opposite of the apex? The valley, I guess. So the deepest part of the CGI valley of the uncanny valley. Right. It was the stuff that they created. It was so off and just so spectacularly and classically off that when, I guess, Disney came along and bought this company. They came in, looked around, and said, we're shutting you down this movie, that we're not doing this anymore. What you guys are doing here is wrong, and you're all going to jail. Yeah. Here's my thoughts on that. I watched the trailer, and it didn't look any worse than any of the other ones to me. And in fact, I don't know the characters names, but there's a kid, and then there's this one kind of chubby guy in Mars. The chubby guy looks pretty good, actually, I thought. I think this was a victim. I bet the movie sucked really bad. And I think it was the last straw at the end of all these uncanny valley failures. Yeah. Because, again, this is the same company that had created a Polar Express. Yeah. The Nightmare Factory and Christmas Carol did not do very well either, so yeah, I think it definitely bore the brunt of its predecessors as well. Yeah, but I thought this was as bad as it got. If you ask me, I totally saw what Disney saw with this one. Yeah. Anytime something is marked as the thing that killed the thing, right. It's always just the last thing. Yes, you're right. Anyway, but it could have also been the thing that saved the thing, had they gotten it right, that's true. So, like I said, Mary was like and every time I say Mori now, unless I say it like Mori to say morri, it's like an old Jewish guy. I think of the wig salesman and good fellas. Yeah. Morris like, give me money. And Ray Leo just sitting there laughing because Maury's two pay falls off. Yes. Imagine that guy is the guy who came up with the Young Cany Valley. Okay. It gives a whole different spin to it, right? Yeah. So Mori says, just don't even try. Guys like, you're never going to be able to do this, even if you can. We're so far away from it. This is a 1970 he was saying it and it still holds true now. Yeah. We're so far away from this that just maybe put your emphasis elsewhere in the example he gave was, say, like a prosthetic hand, right? Yeah. Rather than trying to create a life like prosthetic hand that was in danger of creeping people out, which is the opposite of what somebody wearing a prosthetic hand want when they're walking around. The prosthetic hand said, maybe choose some wood. Well sanded, beautifully grained wood in the shape of a human hand. It gets the point across. This is my hand. I lost my hand. I don't have my hand. But there's nothing to be creeped out about here. It's kind of beautiful looking, isn't it? Yeah. That was Morris Take, and a lot of people side with him as well. As a matter of fact, I said, I think at the beginning that he was already an established roboticist when he wrote The Uncanny Valley in. He went on to teach a lot of people roboticists, or a lot of roboticists as well. And that very famous robot, Osamo, you know the one I'm talking about, he was one of the first ones that could jog in place. And he's kind of humanoid, for sure, but very cute. All white, shiny, lacquer plastic. You've seen him before. He was created by one of Maurie's students who clearly subscribed to Maurice's theory that you're not going to overcome the Uncanny Valley, so just make these things exaggerated and non human like. Yeah. And you'll have people love your robot. Yeah, I think that's a good tack. Yeah. All right, we're going to take another break here and then come back and finish up with a little bit. We're going to take a step back and just talk generally about creepiness, that we would talk about creepiness. So that's what we'll do. You promise, Chuck? The creeps. Such a great phrase. Everyone says, it gives me the creeps. It's one of those phrases that sums things up so perfectly. It's livid as a fresh bruise. And we have Charles Dickens to thank for this, evidently, because he gets credit for using the creeps in David Copperfield in 1849. People had had this feeling before, this sort of unpleasant off, what it feels like to get the creeps, but they said things like ill, like, or clammy. Not bad. Not bad. But if you said, that thing makes me feel ill, like today people will be like, what the heck are you talking about? Right. I think also you would use that to describe somebody who gave you the creeps as well. Like, that guy's really clammy. You know what I mean? Sure. Well, that means you're touching them, though. Like, Peter Lori would be clammy or eel like in some of his characters. I do, too. Right. So everybody understands that there is such thing as the creeps. Right. But we don't understand why we get the creeps still to this day. And again, this is important in relates to the uncanny valley, because another way to put the creeps is negative affinity. Remember, affinity was the X axis, and when the valley dropped down below the X axis, you dipped into negative affinity. You dipped into the creeps. The creeps, exactly. Right. So you talked about Ernst Yinch? Yeah. Did you get it? Sure. He was probably the first person to actually sit down and study the creeps or creepiness. I bet he was creepy himself. I don't know. I think he was just kind of a neat thinking man. Right. So, Yinch I like saying his name a lot more now. He wrote an essay in the Psychology of the Uncanny, and that's the English translation. The German word he used, like you said, is unheimlic. Is that right? M, not N. Unheimlich. Unheimlich. Yeah. Okay. Nice. You're getting better. Thank you. He used that word, and unhealth is a variation of the word heimlich, which is not just to say the maneuver, it means something else entirely, which is homey or familiar. Right. Yes. Unheimlich is the opposite of that. It's something strange and foreign, and very frequently it's translated into uncanny here in the west, here in England. Yeah. And he thought a lot about this. And one of the things that he noted, which I think thought was pretty interesting, was that people that he thought were more intellectually discriminating are more prone to have these uncanny experiences because they are critical thinkers about the world. Right. So that makes sense. Like, just they pay attention maybe a little more. Yeah. Or they're curious. They're like, why am I creeped out? Let me get to the bottom of this. Rather than, oh, I'm creeped out, I'm going to go eat the whole thing of Chips Ahoy and hide under the covers. Right. He also actually went even further and said, it's possible that all of humanity's knowledge has been accrued over these millions of years from the people investigating what's behind this creepiness. It's a pretty weird and neat theory of knowledge. Well, yeah. And speaking of theories, there are a bunch of theories on creepiness and why this happens, and I think they're all pretty interesting. The first one is called Pathogen Avoidance Theory, and we talked earlier about evolution. And this one kind of fits into that bucket. Basically a warning that we have evolved to have in our brain that says that person is off, they are diseased, even. You don't want to go near them. Right. You want to avoid that pathogen. Makes sense. Yeah. It's pretty approachable. Sure. There's another one that I've seen that I think fairly recent, and it's the idea that things give us the creeps when they're trying to non verbally mimic people. And so like, a robot doesn't do it, so we're like that's unsettling. Or somebody who you would describe as clammy or eelike maybe overdoes it a little bit, like they're trying to fit in. It's not natural to them. And that can give you the creep as well. That makes sense. But it doesn't really encompass everything. It's definitely not a unified theory of creepiness. It just seems to kind of inhabit one corner of the creepy spectrum. Yeah. There's another one called Violation of Expectation. This is like you've shaken hands with thousands of people over your life, but if you go and you shake a hand and you don't know that you're going to get a prosthetican, it may give you the creeps. Right. And that is probably very fleeting because you might just say, oh, okay, well, it doesn't give me the creeps now, but it's just unexpected for me. And actually you said that was fleeting. Right, Chuck? So I think it was you or somebody who said that creepiness. What gives us the creeps one time might not give us the creeps later on, which will kind of come into play later. Like Ernst June, basically he laid the groundwork for the study of creepiness and it seems to have gotten a lot of it right. Right out of the gate. Yeah. And like you said, if it doesn't give you the crease later, then that would fit neatly into the violation of expectation. Because then you can change your expectation. Right, exactly. Yes. Another one is Mortality salience theory. Yeah. This one Mori and Freud both subscribed to. And it basically said that when we encounter, like a robot or an automaton in Freud's day, they remind us of dead people, which in turn gets our mind to thinking about how we're going to die one day. And so all of a sudden we find ourselves in the uncanny valley, which again raises another sorry for the sidetrack, but raises another of you're point. Is uncanny inherent in the object, or is it inside the observer who's experiencing the creeps? Or uncanniness? I think it's in the observer. Yeah, I think it is too, which would explain why it can go away when you come to experience it again. When you shake the same prosthetic hand again, it's not creepy the second time. It might even be interesting or why some people might not experience it at all. Like someone might sit there and see a doll and the doll's head turns and looks at them, and they're like, neat, right? How much for that doll? Which means you've just met a serial killer. And then the dolls creeped out after that. This one I like, even though I can never say this word for some reason. Anthropo morphism. Nice job dehumanization dichotomy. Which basically is we attribute these human attributes to the robot until we realize that they don't have them. Right. So we're looking at this robot that looks like a person. We're saying, oh, look, it's just like a human. And they're walking and they're talking, and they're smiling. And then, oh, God, look at their eyes. Their eyes are dead. Look at the eyes. They don't have any internal thoughts at all. They're not human. And then all of a sudden on Cany Valley, which is a little bit about expectation, too, I think this crossover a little I think sure. Creepiness, I think especially the modern incarnation of creepiness. These are my thoughts. They represented crossroads. Right. Where evolutionarily creepiness, I think, was probably it alerts us. We're on alert when something's creeping us out. We're really focused on that thing right then. Yes, but we're also bound by society not to just turn and run from anything that could conceivably be a threat. You can also take it a little further and say that, evolutionarily speaking, it would not make sense for us to turn and run from every single thing that could conceivably be a threat before we've identified it as a threat because we would be using up a lot of calories and energy, and we would have to find more food than we do. It'd be inefficient. Right. So we're kind of bound socially to stand in place until we identify something as a threat or not, in which case, during this period, that's when we experience creepiness. Yeah. And I think everyone has experienced this. Like you're in a coffee shop or something, and, like, some super creepy dude comes in, and if you're like me, you're just like, all right, I'm going to keep my eye on that guy. I'm not going to bolt and run, but it might stand near the door. Sure. I might get my car keys ready. Exactly. It's this weird social contract, and I feel bad for people that just inherently look a little creepy. Well, yeah, let's talk about that. So there are these researchers from Knox College who did what they build is the first empirical study of creepiness, and this is in 2016. Such a great study. And it was an online survey. Very little heavy lifting, but it was a pretty cool survey. It was in four parts. And what they found overall was that physical characteristics, physical traits that are almost stereotypically linked to creepy people do have an effect. They are creepy as far as the participants in this study are concerned. Yeah. So the first section said, hey, what is the likelihood that this person is creepy? And there's, like, descriptions of them. There's 44 different behaviors. Right? Yeah. And the second part was participants rated the creepiness of 21 different occupations. I'd love to see that. List. The third section, it said, list two hobbies that you think are creepy. They only needed two. It was open ended, too. And then the last section, the participants said whether or not they agreed with 15 statements about the nature of creepy people. Yeah. And overall, again, like, they found yes. If you have physical traits that people find creepy, like bulging eyes or you lick your lips a lot, or you arch your fingers and then just kind of tap them together a lot. Okay. It's kind of creepy. But the Knox researchers concluded that those aren't creepy necessarily in and of themselves. It's when it's in conjunction with other creepy behavior that somebody comes across as creepy. Right. And of course, the one behavior they put in here, I think that was probably universally creepy, was someone who persistently steers the conversation toward a sexual topic. Right. Yeah. You don't do that. They also found 95% of participants and this is like, I think, 1341 people, 95% of them said that men were more likely to be creepy than women. Yeah, I think that's generally true. I don't remember getting the creeps a lot in my life strictly from the appearance of a woman. Right. But a lot of dudes on a weekly basis give me the creeps. Sure. But we should say so. There's a website called girl.com gURL.com, and they went on to Reddit and found a thread somewhere that they wrote a blog post about, and now we're reporting on it, so it's really come full circle. But it was a thread about how women can be creepy, and it was written by dudes. And there are some things that apparently are universally creepy among boys with women. Right, yeah. Women that are too needy can be creepy. Women who use baby talk too much or who, quote, never leave a guy alone. Yeah, I'm just going to go ahead and dump that right into the trash bin. That's why I only comment on that. Okay. What about, eharmony? I mean, if you come home and Glenn closes in your kitchen boiling your pet bunny, well, that's a threat. Yeah. That's not even creepy. That's just a threat. Right. Although I will say, in Fatal Attraction, the scene where she is sitting there clicking the light on and off, listening to Mad and Butterfly, that was kind of creepy. I was trying to think of, like, a creepy woman. I really couldn't come up with anybody. Well, these are creepy behaviors, though, you know? Yes. Not like Glenn Close walked into the room and you're like, oh, I don't know about that. Right. There's a difference. Right. There's a difference between genuine creepiness and just doing creepy things. Yeah. I think it is much harder for women to be creepy than men. Cannot think of a single actual creepy woman? No. I'd like to hear from people, though. Yeah. Eharmony, so we talked about reddit. Now we're going to talk about eharmony. They had an article where they wrote advice to dudes. It's called how to Avoid the Creep Zone. Right. And their advice was for your hobbies that you list to be just sort of vanilla. And even if you are an amateur Texidermist, maybe don't put that down. Right. They said it can be attractive for a guy to have an off the beaten path hobby. And one of the examples they gave of an off the beaten path hobby was collecting punk records. But don't get weirder than that. Yeah. And Texadermy in and of itself, some people might say is super creepy. We did an episode on that. Other people might say, no, it's just beautiful artwork. Right. But Norman Bates was in the taxidermy for a reason. In psycho. It was unsettling. Yeah. The Knox people who carried out this survey, the Knox University researchers, they basically said, here's what we think it is here's creepiness explained. And what they explained was what can be called the threat ambiguity theory. Yeah. This one, I think you kind of put a cherry on top on this one. Yeah, we really did. It's just basically where you are creeped out by something because your hackles are raised right then and it's because you haven't determined whether that thing is a threat or not. Right. There's another one, though, that I subscribe to. I think it is finally the unified theory of creepiness. I think it covers everything and it's called the category ambiguity theory. Yeah. Now, did David Livingstone Smith make this up or was he just championing this? I think he made it up because he wrote about the Knox researchers and said what they're talking about, you can call threat ambiguity category or threat ambiguity theory. With category ambiguity theory, he didn't cite anybody else, so it seemed to be his own construct. Yeah. So this is the idea. It's sort of like the threat ambiguity and that there is some confusion, but it's not a threat. Like, I think this dude in the coffee shop is going to kill me. It's more like I don't know how to categorize that guy. And that freaks me out. Right. And it's based on what's called essentialism, where if you are a member of a species of animal, whether human or raccoon or tiger, there's something about you or there's some collection or set of things about you that are totally unique to your species. It's something you possess because you're a member of that species and because you're a member of that species, you possess these things. And it can be very difficult to put your finger on it. But it's just one of those things that you know when you see it or know when you don't see it. Right. Yeah. And there are clear borders between these things. You either have this essence fully or you don't have it at all. You're lacking it, you're missing it, and something's really wrong. So in this article, he used the example of a wax dummy. Yes. Have you ever been to Madame Tussauds? Sure. Yeah. I find that the ones and again with the eyes, the ones that work the best are the ones where they have sunglasses on. Oh, yeah. Again, Michael Jackson. That's right. But the whole point with these wax dummies with the eyes is they're fixed. They're not moving around. The facial expression is locked in the skin itself. It can only do so much. And TUS in museums like that are the best of the best, and they do look pretty good. But that's the whole point with the Uncanny Valley is you can't get 99% there and say, we're fine. It's that 1% that still gives people the creeps. Exactly. It sums up everything. Like the threat. Ambiguity could fall into this, whether you're talking about robots, whether you're talking about a half dog, half lizard combo, which Livingstone sites or Livingstone Smith sites. Yeah. A desert would be creepy when you saw it. So things that are a threat are creepy, but there's also things that are creepy that aren't a threat in this category. Ambiguity theory figured it out. So if that's true, Chuck and David Livingstone Smith figured out what is the basis of creepiness, we finally have the independent variable licked and masahiro morty's uncanny Valley graph, and we can get to work. Is he still around? Yeah, he is. He's happy about all this. I get the impression that he's kind of like just whatever gone off on his own little thing. Okay. He's fine. He wrote it in 1970, after all. Yeah. Almost 50 years ago. Yeah. He's probably up there. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Good one. Yeah. If you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley, we should say this was based originally on a Grabster article, too. But if you want to know more about the Uncanny Valley, come read that Grabster article. You can type Uncanny Valley in the search bar athouseupworks.com and since I said search bar is time for listener mail, well, today it's a very special listener mail. This is Josh edition because you picked out a very special one. I love this one. I'm going to butcher the dude's name. That's right. Take it away. It's a good one. Okay, I'm going to call this one Email from a Real Irish Historian. That feels pretty good. Chuck, am I out of a job? Yeah, maybe. Okay. Hi, guys. I'm a big fan of the show. It's informative and insightful, and I find myself interested in things that I never looked at twice at before. One subject that I'd always found fascinating was the correlation between the Native American chocolate tribe and the people of Ireland. I didn't realize that was the thing. Did you. Not at all. This is a story, okay, which isn't well known outside of some areas of Ireland and, of course, within the tribe, but it's a really good story of solidarity between two groups of people despite being thousands of miles apart. Less than 20 years after the Trail of Tears, which forcibly displaced thousands of Natives, the Great Famine hit Ireland. During this time, as you know, Ireland was colonized by the British, and the people of Ireland were treated poorly due to the common misconception that Irish Catholics were lower caliber of human. He goes on to give more examples, but just suffice to say it was not good for the Irish people. During the famine, word spread to America and to the Chocolate Tribe. They sympathized with the Irish people so much that only 15 years after the Trail of Tears, they donated $710 during 1845 to send to Ireland as part of a relief fund. This is estimated to be roughly $68,000 in today's money. This was greatly appreciated by the Irish people, and after the Famine, the bond continued. In Cork, we have a sculpture honoring the tribute of the Choctaw people. And in 1990, members of the tribe came to Ireland and walked the Famine walk in Mayo to replicate the walk that starving people made to ask the landlord for help. In 1992, an Irish commemoration group walked from Oklahoma to Mission to replicate the Trail of Tears and raise $700,000 to help poverty in Africa. These two groups continue to work together, and to this day, our president has declared an honorary member of the Choctaw Tribe, along with the Quakers, who fed Irish people to the point that their members ended starving themselves. The Chalktail Tribe remains some of the unsung heroes of the Famine story of Ireland. Sorry it went on so long. I'm an Irish historian, so I tend to waffle love the show. Best of luck with yourselves. Roisin Kilroy. Fantastic. Great story. Thanks a lot. Roisin, I'm quite sure that's not the actual pronunciation of your name, because there's a lot of accent marks over letters that normally aren't. Yeah, so I apologize for that. But I nailed your last name, I'm positive of it. And Josh Clark, three and a half stars. Not bad. Out of three and a half, right? I don't remember. What was Star Search? Was it four stars? Oh, I don't remember. I just now remember there was such thing as Star Search. Yeah. Well, okay, well, you take the end part, Chuck, since I took listener mail. Oh, jeez. Thanks for listening. Hey, if you want to get in touch with us, you can find Joshmclark on Twitter and me and Facebook at charlesw. Chuck Bryant. Or you can go to our official pages, Stuff You Should Know podcast. What else? Let's see if they want to send us an email. Oh, yeah, email us at stuffpodcast@houseopeworks.com and have a good day. Is that what you say? That's good enough. All right, 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 Music app and listen today."
c2f737ce-5460-11e8-b38c-57698cb3a662	SYSK Selects: Bioluminescence: A Bright and Shiny Fish	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-bioluminescence-a-bright-and-shiny-fi	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.	Sat, 26 Jan 2019 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=26, tm_isdst=0)	36312817	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everybody. It's me, Josh, your dear friend. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen how bioluminescence works. We released it originally in September of 2012, and it's a straight ahead, super interesting science episode, the best kind, and for some reason, I sound so low key that it seems like I'm going to melt into the floor at any moment. No idea why. I hope you enjoy listening to it again as much as I did. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, 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. Okay. It's part of both Obama's and Romney's platforms. 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 poor people 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. Oh, 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. Oh, yeah. Now, about a little bit into it, they'll ask you, like, would 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 jealous crack 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. Yeah. Everyone's just sitting around. Well, we've gotten back rubs at the mall before. Yeah, 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 FA number two, which is Pass Claremont. It's in a little shopping center. Okay. Just look it up. Okay. It's all good. Okay. All good stuff. Yeah. I don't know how we got on there, but some places on Beerford Highway owe you some money. Seriously. At least some free fuck. This has nothing to do with bioluminescence. No, it doesn't. Although sometimes if you stir your FA 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. Yeah. And 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. 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 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 parish. And then it's just like they just write Y on a piece of paper and send it in. As Tracy Wilson of Pop stuff. Great podcast points out. All right, 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. Right. This makes it hard to study, or the animal will exhaust its light making glow capabilities out of 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 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. Is it like the real old timey looking one? That's sort of so that is pretty simple. It has electricity that passes through a filament, just 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. Take 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 glow stick somewhere that I used to dance with at rave. You were at raves? 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. 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 he left that out selling glow sticks. I sold the glow sticks full circle. Yes. All right, let's quit stalling. Let's talk about bioluminescence. Okay. That'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, right 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. If you look at pictures of fox fire, pretty cool. Yeah, it's eerie. It 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. Cool. That's my favorite bioluminescent organism. Why? Just because it's the single thing on land on Terra firma. Because it's a perfectly named thing. The jacko lantern mushroom. Like, it has that glow coming through the gills and just the gills. So it looks like there's, like, this glow coming inside, and 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 what else they call them lightning bugs, but definitely in the south. Yeah, 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 their little larvae can glow as well on the ground. Right. And 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. Am we? No, we talked about it in biospeliology. 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 euphoric 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. There's no reason. Same like with the case. Yeah. Remember what was the prometheus Salamand? 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 is frightening. So in this twilight zone, the dysfodic zone or mesopelagic zone? Mesoplagic 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 that same wavelength from something like 440 to 479 nm, which is like the blue green spectrum. That's right. So matches that sunlight. Yeah. Which is pretty cool. Yeah. Well, we'll get to it, but it can lead to some cool things, like camouflage. Yeah. But it also means that it travels farther. Light travels. 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, krill 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 that, like, come up out of the little 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 warm I think they're attached or they may be attached to their tubes. Okay. Or they just never come all the way out. I'm going to 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 like the fisher, like Jodie Foster. And Jane Gum is the loose jaw fish coming up behind her like, I can see you, but you can't see me. So as 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's 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 like a very specific pattern. Right. They use it to communicate, like, hey, you're looking pretty good. Meet you by the fence post, right? Yeah. Let's go get some. 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 is hanging out with Bill Paxton and 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 the 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, that whole movie from start to finish. Ron Howard but these dinoflagellates 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. And 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 I may say so. 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. 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's 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 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 and keep her away from Toy Story Three. Oh, dude, I can't even watch that movie. I made her watch up, and she was just, like a little blob of playing on the floor. The first ten minutes are just so sad. Yeah. My God. But I always explain 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 is penetrating down and see, like, the silhouette or in the case of Jaws, you see, like, the silhouette of the lady's legs on the raft. Right. That's good eating. 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. Like, 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, 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. Yeah. 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. 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 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. That's a terrible way to go. Yes. 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 diaphotic. 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. Yeah, I looked it up. 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 shrub 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 worked. 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 or 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 photoprotein, 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 startled. 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 lightbringer. Yeah. The morning star is another way to put it. Really? They said maybe it had to do with Venus because Venus is like a false star. Yeah. And so maybe lucifer is a false angel is what they're saying. That makes sense because the Devil would always come in disguise. Maybe, yeah. I think that's weak lightbringer, 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, it's hard to find out about that one. So you've got luciferin, you've got luciferase. Some of these chemical reactions require another substance and a lot of times as oxygen. Right. So loose phrase will come in, in contact with an oxygen molecule and then the luciferase 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 then originally there's a luciferring called sealanterozine, 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. Yeah. 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 elusive phrase 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 in like 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 bioluminescence. 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 why, 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 a bacteria, light 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 then they think it may be happened independently at different parts of the ocean. I talked to Tracy about this and it was a little hinky. 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 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? Do you see glowing cats? No. Are there cats that glow? Yeah. The Mayo Clinic likes to put jellyfish genes 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 keratin 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. Dysphoric yeah. Okay, so you're 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. It's a mouthful in the search bar@howstepworkscom, 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 listener 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 a point at the show where we thank people for little tokens and gifts and chotk keys 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. That's not right. It is right, but I tell everyone that writes in. Only people from Nevada say it that way. Nobody else says Nevada. Nevada. That's Nevada. All right. Lily, her sister Toby and brother in law Danny started a company called Please Be Good Humans. Yeah, they sent us some shirts. I think they sent some to stickers. No, everybody has stickers. We passed them out. Oh, well, Kristin Conner. I think that's a shirt, 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 his pirate gags booklet, which is a tailor made for Pirate Day. Pirate day. If you want to learn more about that, you could go pirateday pirateaday blogspot.com and hook up with Randy Carb. Noni. Action. Christopher M. Roth with an E at the end, said it's 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. Sitting there waiting. You Susanna from Archie. The Archie comics. She sent us a bunch of stuff. She sends us stuff in, 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 Gate 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 in. That's forward thinking. Yeah, but Archie's got him beat. That's right. Because of Kevin Keller, the first gay character in the Jinx comics. That Susanna is she draw, write, produce those. What does she do? Yeah, that's her baby. So support the Jinx comics and Archie as a whole. She sent his shirts, and we were supposed to meet at Comic Con, but she said they were slammed in the booth and she was unable to get away. Oh, I met Uncle John's reader people back in. Reader people? They gave us shirts and hats. Very nice. So thank you to them as well. We heard from Mad magazine, too. Floored me. Yeah. 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. Nice. Shutti Unison. I didn't see that one. It's good stuff. Andy Parsons and an 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. No, I don't get this one. That's cool. But it was very nice that he went to that trouble. Suki Suki design laboratory, sent us some hankies. And this was the lady who designed the baby head t shirt with the fly. Yeah. Our favorite t shirt of the submissions, 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 the hankies have 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 this. Death Manson. It's a Springfield Isotopes cozy from Death Man himself. Yeah, we appreciate that, sir. Silver fox broadband sent a 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. Right. They send us some reflective bike rappers 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. Yeah, 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 devin 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 send us 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 in this one. Go ahead. Let's go for it, dude. David Beaver's family has been making a magnetic calendar for 50 years. Yes. And not just one. They've been making the magnetic calendars for 50 years. Yeah, the magnetic calendar.com owned, operated, made, and sourced in the Midwest. The selling point, family business. They've been doing this for how long? 50 years. 50 years. Awesome. And then Jill Swingson has said twinkie the kid T shirts. So thank you very much. Yes, 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 I have to do it because these are all the ones that took 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. Comstepyshono and you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.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 Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarke, 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."
42c76726-53a3-11e8-bdec-734f1fc711aa	The SYSK Holiday Spectacular	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-sysk-holiday-spectacular	It's an annual treat, folks. Our holiday special is back and better than ever, and as always, brought to you ad-free. It's the least we can do.	It's an annual treat, folks. Our holiday special is back and better than ever, and as always, brought to you ad-free. It's the least we can do.	Tue, 24 Dec 2019 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=358, tm_isdst=0)	42781999	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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, spirit of Christmas Bryant. Josh Kringle. And there's Jerry Krampus Rowland over there. And this is stuff you should know. That's right. We should know how many this is. 17. No. 92. Yes, our 92nd Christmas specials edition. Second try. Holiday spectacular. Spectacular. Spectacular. No, that's Halloween. All right. Yeah. I don't know how many of this is, but we've been podcasting for almost twelve years now. It'll be twelve this next year. Yes. Like summerrich. Yeah. Do we release the Christmas episode the first year? I don't know. We'll have to go back and do our homework about ourselves. I'm sure someone knows this stuff. Right. But as usual, not that we're tooting our own horn, but we just want to remind everyone that we release this ad free every year. So our Christmas episode is without taint. That's pretty great. It's untainted. Well, you know, it always just felt weird to slap an ad in the middle of the Christmas sure. Themed show. Who advertises around Christmas. Yeah, exactly. So, anyway, we're all pleased with that. We are pleased. Tradition please. Is punch. Duck. Jerry's especially. Please. Look at her. So, Jerry, do you know it's Christmas? Yeah. Gerry is so grumpy. So, Chuck yes. I feel like we should start this one off in our usual tradition by a little bit of music to play us into the first segment. That's nice. It really is. Jerry's good at this. It really sets the mood. I think that was Trans Iberian Orchestra, if I'm not mistaken. Was it? No. We'll find out before we get started with this episode. Chuck, in the future concluded that here in the past, we should issue a COA. I know. Who would have thought our Christmas episode might not be appropriate for kids? But we're us. So this first story has to deal with magic mushrooms and Santa Claus, and it's all legit. But if you don't want your kids listen to that, then don't listen to it. Sure. Okay. Well, let's get on with it. Let's do. So I dug something up years back and we've talked about it before, at least in passing, but the more I jumped into it, the more I was like, this is nuts. I don't even know which order we're going in. You see, I have my papers all over, so I'm excited. I'm along for the ride. Okay. Just like the listener, I'm going to direct to hear the first. Yeah, you're directing. Okay. This is really a lot of pressure. All of a sudden. It places everyone. That's what you got to expect. Put my shoulder I'm the one let me put my sweater over my shoulders and tie it. Get out your old school megaphone. Yep. Okay. Chuck, please stand right there. Jerry, keep doing what you're doing. Chuck, we're going to talk about Santa Claus as a possible psychedelic mushroom. All right. I was hoping we'd start with that one. Okay. So like I said, we've talked about this before. I don't remember what episode. I know we have. Yeah, we have. But never this in depth. No. And I also want to point out that the Amenita Muscaria is that the full name? Yes. This mushroom, the very famous red and white Christmas looking mushroom, the one that any time you think of a gnome, that's like the toadstool they live around. That's right. I saw some of these just a few weeks ago in the woods. Wow. Yeah. Have you come down yet? Well, the person I was with said, I think those are magic mushrooms. I said, no, those only grow in cow poop. And they were like, no, I think those are too there's different kinds. Yeah. And we went back to the research, and it turns out they are. We did not touch them or pick them. We left them to grow. Well, yeah, they apparently they're also very toxic. Sure, I imagine. But there are things you can do to them to remove the toxicity, especially if you live around reindeer. That's right. But that plays a part in this story, because this great article you sent, santa Claus the Magic Mushroom and the Psychedelic Origins of Christmas. Yes. By Melanie Zulu. That's what I'm going with. Xulu. Yes. That's a great name. Sure. And what publication was this? Muff. What a great rag. Yeah. So Melanie Zulu basically did some research on this idea that Santa Claus was inspired by those psychedelic mushrooms, the fly agaric mushroom. Yes. And I got to say, when all of this stuff is read together, it's a lot of pretty heavy coincidence. It really is. And nothing else. Whenever you read about something like this, where something might have been based on speculation or whatever, you're like, a couple of those are kind of convincing from start to finish. This is so absolutely convincing that I'm like, this is the answer, everybody. That's right. Magic mushroom, maybe. So on the very far end of the spectrum of the speculation that Santa Claus is based on a psychedelic mushroom, you'll find Jack Harris, who's a very famous pot activist, so famous, in fact, I believe he has his own strain of pot, if not, like, brand, like Willy Weed, basically, or whatever Snoop Dogg's brands are. Right. And Jack Harris said, not only was Santa Claus based on a mushroom, santa Claus was the mushroom. That's where they got it from. It was like they used to basically eat these mushrooms and call them Santa Claus. Okay. Most people don't agree with that. Instead, they say, no. We think that there is something to the idea that Santa Claus was inspired by the rituals around this mushroom in particular, though. That's right. Notably, there's a professor named John Rush at Sierra College in California, and it's pretty neat. There are, like, legit Christmas scholars out there that you can get expert takes on, and he's one of those guys, and he said his quote is, up until a few hundred years ago, these practicing shaman and we're talking about shaman in the Lapland. Yeah, in northern Finland. Yeah, northern Finland. He said these priests are connected to older traditions. They would collect these mushrooms, dry them up, and give them as gifts in the winter solstice. So the stage is set. We know this for sure, they would collect these mushrooms and they would give them out for people to eat and get high. Right. But exactly what they were doing when they did that really kind of drives the Santa idea home a lot. Yeah. Notably what they wore. Okay, well, let's first start with that fly agaric mushroom. When you saw it, you were out in the woods. I'll bet you they were growing at the foot of a FIR tree. They were a pine tree, some sort of evergreen, right, correct. Okay. That's almost exclusively where they grow. I feel like I'm on the witness stand. All right, would you recall and then the other thing about it is they grow at least up in the northern climbs around the winter solstice. So you've got the winter solstice, which happens to coincide pretty nicely with Christmas, and you have the emergence of these mushrooms around fur trees, evergreen trees around that time. Right. Then you have the Siberian shaman, or shamans, seems like it should be shaman, plural, even. Yeah, but it's not. They would dress up to look like those mushrooms. So you think, all right, those red and white mushrooms. Interesting. So all of a sudden you've got a shaman with black boots, a red felt hat, white fur, red coat. Does that sound like anyone? Yeah, it's pretty surprising. If that were the long and short of it, I'd be like, that's a bit of a stretch, but let's continue, shall we? Yes. Okay. Those same shaman, they would give these flya garak toad stools out as gifts around Christmas. But how they would because by the time the winter solstice rolled around, there would be snow everywhere. They couldn't get through the door of their friends and loved ones. Yurts. So they would enter through the smokehold, the chimney, you might call it, to deliver these gifts. I like Smokehole better. Yeah. I'm going to start calling my chimney. Actually, I don't have a chimney anymore. No, you could though, if you wanted to have a chimney. Sure. No, we got rid of our chimney. Punch a hole in the roof. A Smokehole. Yeah. So they would climb down wearing the red coat, the white fur, the black boots, climb down a chimney and deliver the magic mushrooms. As gifts. As gifts. And then they would hang them in front of the fire. The people who receive the gifts? Yes. They would hang them to dry in front of a fire. Sometimes in hanging at them, in a stocking, perhaps in front of a fire. This is all true stuff. Yeah. This really went on just up until a couple of hundred years ago in Siberia, among the Sami people in northern Finland. And just as an aside, northern Finland, the Lapland happens to be where the geographical location for where Santa lives is. Yes. And we should add one final little note to this. When they're picking these mushrooms, they want to dry them out, so they would put them on the tree boughs, these FIR trees, hang them to dry in the sun. So now they're hanging, I don't know, ornaments, maybe. Yeah. On trees. That's right. Under which presents tend to grow. These presents, these mushrooms that are given as presents. So if you step back and take all this stuff and put it together. You have. Based on these rituals. Among the shaman of the Sami and in Siberia. The idea of harvesting mushrooms that grow under FIR trees for trees that people bring into their homes and put gifts under and hang ornaments on in order to celebrate Santa Claus coming down the chimney while wearing a Santa suit with a bag of gifts. Sometimes filling up stockings with those gifts. That's right. When you add all this stuff up, it's really convincing. Yeah. And then there's a little cherry on top, which is apparently reindeer really love to eat these mushrooms. Yeah. Remember how I said that they're toxic, but there's things you can do to detoxify them? Well, yeah. You can drink the urine of a reindeer who has eaten this, and that is a way to detoxify it. It is. The reindeer metabolize the toxic parts, but they don't metabolize all of the hallucinogenic parts. So you can boil their urine and drink the urine and not be sick. Yes, but still wig. Should we have had a COA at the top of this? Maybe. Probably. So we'll have to go back and record one. Okay. Well, that's it for that one. Yeah. So should we throw our bag of magic mushrooms in the sleigh yeah. And take off for the next house? Quite a gift. Okay, Chuck. So behind the scenes, I've done a little directing. That's right. And we have determined, I should say I've determined that we're going to do this one about It's a Wonderful Life, a movie I still have not seen. What? I know. For real? Yeah. There's a lot of the old Christmas classics I haven't seen. I haven't seen santa Claus Is Coming To Town, miracle and 34th street. I haven't seen this. Wow. You haven't seen the stop motion. Santa Claus is coming to town. Oh, no, I've seen that. What are you talking about? I think I just made up a movie that doesn't exist. Okay. That's a song, and it's a stop motion movie feature. Yeah, I've heard and seen both those things. You could have just stopped with It's a Wonderful Life. You should see a miracle on 34th street. It's just wonderful. I don't know. To me, there are three Christmas movies and that's all I see. There's a lot more than that. There's, elf wait a minute. There's Christmas vacation, okay. And there's a Christmas story. Okay. You're putting elf above miracle on 34th street? Your brain is broke. I am putting it light years ahead of it, and I haven't even seen it. Everyone I know to see it says It's a Wonderful Life is boring. No, I saw Miracle on 34th street. I haven't seen that. But it sounds boring. It's great. It's a wonderful movie and it beats off just terribly. I will watch that just so I can come back and argue. Okay, good. Please do. I'll wait. I would argue that they're so different. Like, why compare them? Well, you can compare them because Miracle on 34th three is so better. Do you laugh 400 times? Probably 450. Oh, I didn't know it was comedy. I'm just lying right now to win. But you don't know that. Let's talk about this mental floss writer j Seraphino. Great name. Who put out and we still love Mental Floss as much as we always did. Yeah, it's one of our favorite publications. We even know the guys who founded it. I know they're colleagues, so we can do this. But you don't know if that's right. He wrote a great article called How It's a Wonderful Life. Went from box office dud to accidental Christmas tradition. Yeah. I should say this kicks off really? This is the intellectual property law edition of our Christmas episodes. Yeah, good point. There's a weird thread. It just keeps popping up. So this movie from 1946, directed by Frank Capra, tells the story of George Bailey. I can't believe you haven't seen this movie. And I've heard it so boring. I have no desire. It's not. It's a classic, wonderful movie. It's not one of those things where it's like, oh, you have to see it's. Like a life changing movie. It's a good, sweet movie with great themes, well active, well directed. Everything about it is a good movie. You should really see it. No, you have to see it. I demand that you see it. I'll watch Elf again. Do you not like Elf or is no, Elf is fine. Good movie. I'll watch it. Just curious a couple of times over the Christmas season. I know. Problem with elf. All right, but don't not see It's a Wonderful Life because you like Elf. Okay? Okay. So I'm not going to see it despite you. So in 1946, when it was released, the critics and the audiences didn't like it. Imagine that. And it was a big box office flop for Frank Capra's brand new production company, liberty Films. Yeah, it was. So Capper was a pretty famous director in the he went off to head up the propaganda film division for the US government during World War II. And then after that, he and some other director friends of his got together and said, let's start our own production company. And they did. They started Liberty Films. And the first project from Liberty Films was It's A Wonderful Life? And it was a mess. It was a mess, actually, as much as it's just a holiday classic for every single person on Earth except for you. It was a huge dud, like you were saying early on in his life. So much so that it actually wiped their company out because it turned out to be a really big bet. It had a $2 million budget initially, which is something like $26 million today. Still pretty modest. But back then, if you were a new fledgling production company, that was a big first feature and it actually ended up being like a $3.7 million film. It went that far over. Yeah. It almost doubled its budget because what they refer to as a bloated shooting schedule they were rewriting the script over and over and over. It sounded like just a nightmare production, which is pretty funny when you think about it. Yeah. And they kept rewriting the script despite the fact that it was based on a short story. It wasn't just an original story. That might have been the problem, but maybe sometimes a short story is difficult. Yeah, I could see that. So, regardless, this over budgeted, I think they turned it in late even movie was released. The public didn't like it, the critics didn't like it, and it was basically headed for the dustbin of history if not for the fact that in 1974 the movie entered the public domain because the copyright holder forgot to file for renewal. I saw forgot to I also saw that they just didn't bother. Okay. Either way, imagine that they knew the copyright was coming up and they just said, Forget it. This literally isn't worth our time and effort. But, yes, either way, in 1974, entered the public domain and it went from this schlocky flop because that was one of the other things, too. This is an audience in 1946. They thought that this was just too corny and they rejected it wholesale. But by the time the 70s came around, people were a lot more jaded and they kind of wanted that corny, home spun kind of nostalgia from the 40s. It wasn't George Bailey. You haven't even seen the movie. And that was you named. Do you know who Jimmy Stewart is? Like, every TV station that wanted it got its hands on because it was free for them. Free. Yeah. They could show this movie over and over and over again. And they did. The idea of running a Christmas movie marathon, the same movie like they do with Christmas Story today that was apparently founded in the mid 70s by It's a Wonderful Life entering the public domain. That's right. And that was a tradition up until 1993 when the Supreme Court of the united States ruled in Stewart v. Abend. And that's Jimmy Stewart, by the way. But it's another movie. Rear Window. Right. Which is a certified great movie and a classic, and critics love that one, and so did the public. It was a great movie that established a precedent that allowed Republic Pictures, who originally owned the film's copyright to regain ownership because they owned the copyright on that short story that you mentioned and the score of the movie. So you own that short story. You basically own the movie. Yeah. Their argument was, you cannot show this movie without the story or without the score. So this is our movie. And the Supreme Court or whatever court ruled on it, said, yeah, you're right. That's right. So in 1994, NBC stepped in and said, well, we've got a bunch of cash here. We're flush from Friends, making us a trillion dollars. We're going to spend some of this on the rights, too. It's a Wonderful Life. Yes. And they locked it down. And that's why you don't see 24 hours marathons of It's a Wonderful Life anymore. And that's why you don't see it on Sxx anymore. Right. But if you happen to be listening to this in the United States on Christmas Eve, the day that this comes out, it's on tonight on NBC. I will not be watching. Okay, Chuck, so we're going to spend the rest of the episode with me convincing you to watch It's a Wonderful Life. I'm so agitated right now, I can barely say I know. It's my gift to you. Where do you want to go next, Mr. Director? Well, let's keep the intellectual property law thread going. Okay? We're going to talk about a song a little ditty, and it is called Santa Claus is Coming to Town. That's right. It's a fake movie that you made up that you've never seen. That no one's ever seen. But it's also that classic animated film, santa Claus is Coming to Town. I think it's rank and bass, isn't it? Yeah. And it's also a song that goes a little something like this one handed two song, Redacted. That was good, Chuck. You like that? That was better than Bruce Springsteen and the Jackson Five put together because we can't afford to pay for that. No, they say that it's one of the richest songs ever written because number seven richest song of all time. Yeah. Written by a man. And I got this original article, NKY man wrote, santa Claus is Coming to Town by Jeff Seuss. I think they mean Northern Kentucky. Yeah, sure. For those of you who live outside of the NKY region. Well, it's interesting when you see it, does that say New York City? No, it does not. Northern Kentucky. That's what they want you to think. A couple of years ago from Cincinnati.com and Jeff Seuss, and they were championing one of their own lyricist, Haven Gillespie is a Kentuckian, and he actually worked for one day at the Cincinnati Enquirer, which is the paper that owns Cincinnati.com. That's right. So he was really one of the he was born in 1888, born in February, worked as a type setter in Cincinnati and Chicago and became a really famous lyricist. But this is kind of a neat little side note. Even though he got very famous as a songwriter, whenever he was in Cincinnati, apparently he would do some shifts at a newspaper print shop just to keep up his union status. Health care pretty interesting. Yeah. So he wrote a few songs, actually. He wrote one of what I think is one of the best songs ever written. You go to my head. You know that song? I don't know. You'll have to listen to it goes like this song, Redacted, but there's a Marlene Dietrich version of it that you should look at them. It's amazing. It's a great song as it is. But Marlene Dietrich sing, it just does something to it. That's really something. I think it's Marlene. Right. Or is this her sister Marlene? Is it Marlene? I think so. Isn't it? I don't care. Anyway, ms. Dietrich does a really great rendition of it. Did I say your last name correctly? I think it's fraud. Dietrich, yes. Haven Gillespie wrote this song and he had a couple of songs and then he finally wrote a hit. And this is in the Tim Pan Alley era. Yeah, right. He finally wrote a hit called Breezing Along With the Breeze which is the dumbest name anyone's ever given to a song, but people liked it, and he moved to New York and he really started writing for Tim Pan Alley in earnest. But it wasn't until Santa Claus is coming to town that he was on Easy Street. That's right. A publisher at Leo Fi named Edgar Bitner came forward and said, here's a composer, mr. J. Fred Coots. Don't you get together and write a children's Christmas song kutz and Gillespie. That's right. I don't know whether he took this as an insult or not but he said he wrote it as a favor for a friendly publisher who said, I had a vocabulary children could understand. Good. Maybe that's a sweet sentiment. Who knows? Sure. But he basically said, hey, Dumdum, write a dumb, dumb Christmas song. Right. Do it. And he did it very quickly, something like 15 minutes, he said, on the back of an envelope. Isn't it like 90% of all classic songs are written in 15 minutes on the back of an envelope. Yeah, that's fishy. Including The Police is do do, do no die, die, die publishers thought the song was corny. The very first person to sing it, Eddie Canter, originally rejected it, but his wife was like, Come on, honey, is there any day that a wife hasn't saved? Like, she saved the song from obscurity because any kind of he was huge at the time. Yeah. He had a radio show. And on Thanksgiving Day, she said, Sing it, for the love of God. And he did, and it blew up. And if you listen to Tim Pan Alley, you know that what happens when a song blows up, means sheet music is selling because it's not recorded music yet. Right. And I don't normally go use Wikipedia for work. I'll use it in my personal life. Sure. But I couldn't help but come across an article on this. They said that it sold half a million sheet music yes. In a day. Wow. That's how big it blew up, man. That's incredible. It really is incredible. And by the way, Wikipedia is hitting everybody up right now. And I contributed $20. I'm just saying yes because I think it's good that it exists in the world, and I think we need it. No, I love it. Read Wikipedia. Give them a few bucks. Yeah. We've never used it as source material. Just half of our Internet reviewers think we do. Right. But that's why we don't do it. Because we want to prove them wrong every day of the week. That's right. But this song skyrocketed, I guess. Would you say a half a million? Yeah, that's what Wikipedia said. That's pretty amazing. I can't believe I just said that the first time it was recorded. And I said they didn't have recorded music. Of course they did. October 24, 1934 was when Harry Resser's Orchestra recorded it. Gillespie died in 1975, having written more than 1000 songs and as a Songwriting Hall of Fame member. And like you said, it's one of the seven richest songs ever. It really is. So there's some really interesting stuff about that that pertains to copyright law. That's right. Because if it's one of the richest songs ever, if you own the rights of that song, you want to hang on to those rights big time. Yeah. You want that birthday, happy birthday to you money. Right. Which doesn't exist any longer. Right. But the heirs of Coots, the guy who wrote the music, they entered into a contract with EMI, which is the huge, giant music publisher back in 1951, and then again in 1976. Get this, I didn't know this. I think the Supreme Court ruled that if you had a publishing agreement with somebody after 35 years, you could say, it's enough, it's done. I want the rights back no matter what, as long as this agreement was entered into after 1978. Okay, so the Cootez family again had a 1951 agreement and a 1981 agreement. Well, EMI said no. Cooch tried to file a termination order on this for this 1981 agreement. Even though this is the contract we have with them, is the 1981 agreement. We're really going to say it's a 1951 agreement so the family can't issue this termination. Okay. A circuit court judge said, EMI, you're wrong. Your agreement with the Coutz family is based on this 1981 agreement, which came after 1978, which means it wasn't grandfathered in. Which means that 35 years after 1981, the rights to Santa Claus Is Coming to Town reverted to the Coots family for an extended copyright protection period going to 2029. That's right. Isn't that fascinating? That is. And if you wondered why I wasn't talking much during that segment, everyone, because on the way in the room, I said, you know all that stuff I sent about Dan's copyright law? It was just so boring. Let's not do it. But Josh is directing this episode. That's right. So you got it in there. I love it. I think it's really interesting, especially considering this is like the Family. This guy's heirs got it back in 2016. They got the rights back to one of the richest songs ever. That's right. And they're rolling in it now. Yes. Do you know what they're called as a unit? The Little Coots. That's the court ruled in favor of the Little Coots. And that's the name of the Chuck E. Cheese Animatronic Band. I think so. Chuck E. Cheese and a little kid. What was showbiz? Pizza's. Band name. Did you ever see that documentary? No. Oh, dude. There's a documentary on show biz about the Animatronic Band from Showbiz, the guy who invented it, the people who collect them and keep them in their house. I'd like to see that. It's one of the better ones ever. I didn't go to Showbiz a lot because there was two near us. There was a Chuck E. Cheese, and there was a local I don't know if it was a chain called Sergeant Singers Pizza Circus. Pretty local. Did Sergeant Singer work there? Because if so, that was local. Yes. He asked me to call him Sarge, and then he later appeared on 6ft under Sarge. Nice rough, but I want to see that documentary. All right. So shall we load up the sleigh, though? Oh, are we just talking about Santa Claus coming to town? I think so. Unless you have some more copyright law you want to go over. Let's leave the courtroom behind for the rest of the episode. All right, we've got what have we got? Two more segments here. We do. Well, let's have a little music play at the end of the next one. All right, Chuck? And then there were two giddy with anticipation. Are you about which one we're going to do? I haven't told you yet. Well, we're going to go back to our friend's Mental Floss again. We're going to go in particular to an article from Mental Floss by a guy named Tate Williams. And it's about Christmas tree flocking. Yes. And my only criticism here, Mr. Tate Williams, is you did not title this what the flock is flocking. Yeah, you really missed an opportunity there, staring you in the face. With most publications, usually it's the editor that comes up with headlines. So Tape probably suggested that, and the editor was like, no, I'm in a. Bad mood today. Right. And shot that down. So now it's titled what exactly is Christmas Tree? Flocking. Very straight ahead, right? That's right. But what is flocking? Well, flocking in particular truck is adding texture, fiber texture. Well, what's flocking something in this particular instance, flock is fake snow. Right. And there's a whole movement, maybe I don't know if that's the right word, but there's a subculture of people who like to make it look like it snowed in very particular parts of their house. Inside their house. Yeah. And I've never been into this stuff because it just looks like a nightmare to clean. And especially with animals. Like, my tree is already being destroyed on day one by my terrible cats. But I work in the movie industry, as you know. And I worked in TV commercials, as you know. I know both of those. Every September or October, I would work on this car commercials where it's a very happy couple and there's a big bow on a car, they're wearing sweaters, and they're throwing snow. Yeah, that's all on the backlog in La. And it's a ton of fake snow. And it's awful to work with that flocking is terrible. Okay. So if you're working with it under those circumstances, yes, I can see it being terrible, but there are people out there that are like, no, we don't get snow here. And I like the idea of it looking like there's snow on my tree, but it's hot outside. I live in Arizona or New Mexico or Nevada or the southern part, or Texas, where some parts of it are very hot. Although it snows in Texas as well. Have you ever been at Christmas time somewhere where it's really hot? It's weird. I used to think it was weird. Now I've gotten used to it. I like it. Really? Yeah. La. Was part of what happens. I don't know if this is true for wherever you are, but in La. People would really go over the top, I think, to combat the fact that it's just La. Right. So you would get some really nice decorations and people really went the extra mile. Right. But I just always had a hard time getting in the Christmas spirit there. I know what you mean, and that's what I thought, too. But I've been in Florida for a couple of Christmases, and it's actually kind of pleasant. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Because you see the movie Bad Santa is set in Arizona, I think, was it? I don't remember. And it really kind of plays up that thing where it's just like weird desert and Christmas juxtaposition. It's not a good fit. Yeah. But I find Florida at Christmas time is very nice. Okay, fair enough. I know what you mean, though, is what I'm trying to say. In the spirit of the season. Well, people for a long time, though, have been trying to get that look all the way back to the 1000s using things like cotton or flour. Apparently in the Popular Mechanics in 1929, there was a recipe with cornstarch silicate, mineral mica and varnish. I don't want to use, like, silica and varnish. I mean, all of this sounds like if you add one more thing, it's a bomb. Right. But silica, you can inhale and get silicosis. Did you know that? No. Like, people who work with granite countertops are really acceptable to it's. Really bad news. Yeah. And there have long been kits that you can buy for make your own. Yeah. There's one that General Mills put out called Snowflock, SN O K. They're like, let's take out any sensibleness to this name. And that's what we'll call it. There's an ad for it. It's so cute. There's like a General Mills blog or there used to be. And there's like a newspaper ad for the Snowflake thing where it was like a canister filled flock that you would hook up to your vacuum cleaner and I guess somehow reverse the polarity and use it to blow the flock. Yeah, you reverse the polarity and the flux capacitor. Well, very nice. It seems like there's one big shot company now called Peak Seasons in Riverside, California. At least they're the only one that Mr. Tate Williams recognizes. Yeah. I mean, they seem like they're the heavyweight player here. And they make and sell a lot of this stuff. And they start with something that they like into toilet paper. Just a big roll that you feed into a machine and it comes out the other side. They liken it to baby powder. Yeah, it's like a very white powdery substance. Yeah. And some of the flock comes in, like, colors. And if you have a colored flock, like royal blue or purple or gold or something like that, you have to add cotton to hold the dye. But for the most part, they produce this stuff with some cornstarch, I believe the paper and then boron all together makes this flock that they sell in bags. And they ship these bags out to Christmas tree farms where you can go to a Christmas tree farm and say, I want that tree, but I want it. Flocked make it. So take that tree and flock it. And what they're doing is they're adding some Peak Seasons bag of flock to their flock gun and they shoot it out. They shoot this mixture that Peak Season sells them. And at the end of this gun, it mixes with a mist of water and it turns into this kind of slurry that sprays onto the tree. And the tree is like, stop. And that's when you know it's done. That's right. But here's the deal with this flocking process. It's got to look good or else you're kind of screwed because you can't reflock. Right. You can't spray it again. That tree can't get wet a second time because it won't dry once it's been flocked. You can never go block. Right. Nicely done. Terrible. And we are on fire in this episode. You think, with the dad buns? Yeah. You do have anything else on blocking? Yes. You can also not contribute to big flock if you don't want to, you can make it yourself. There's a video by a person called Mama Flock no. In the flock tones, something. Mama? Yes. Really? Mama From Scratch. I think they got in your head subconsciously. Probably. So Mama From Scratch had a recipe that consisted of barbasol cornstarch and white glue. Whip it into a froth, and then you paint it on. Apparently, when it dries, it puffs up and you've got some nice flocking, so you can make it yourself at home, too. Here's my Christmas tree tip for the year. All right. Don't allow them to stuff it into netting. Why? Because it's harder to get it back to Christmas tree shaped. Really? Yes. I mean, you want that tree for those boughs to fall. Sure. And that's a struggle. Anyway, when they wrap it up tight in a net and strap it to your car, it's harder to unfurl. Maybe you need heavier ornaments. No, I don't need anything. I need to not have that net. See, I have a pickup truck, so I just throw it in the back. No one's strapping anything to my car. Yeah, but doesn't it get wind burned on the way back? Where am I, Alaska? Well, no, I mean at high speeds. Driving on at high speeds. I drive really fast now. I get my trees locally. Okay. All right. Yeah. Throw it in the back of the truck. Okay. It's all great. What if you don't have a truck? What do you recommend? Well, you can strap it to the top, but I don't see the need for that netting. I see. I don't know why they do that. I think it's to prevent windburn. I'm not kidding. Well, it's not a stock. You're still getting wind blown on it? Yeah, I mean, some, but I think it's so compressed that it's I don't know. It's on this part. Okay. All right. Now that we settled that I don't know if it was actually settled. Well, I just want to finish so I can go watch It's a Wonderful Life. I'm so happy I'm going to do it today. It's the miracle of the season that just happened. Miracle on Palm City Market. Yes. So, Chuck, I think we should finish, then, on this sweet little thing that they do over in Finland, in particular in Turkey, Finland, which is the oldest city in the whole country. It was founded in the 12th century, and since the 1300, about a century after it was founded, they've been reading this Declaration of Christmas piece every year. Almost every single year since the $1,300. That's right. And it sounds like a really sweet thing. And it is, with a tinge of minutes. Because what they do every year is the bells of the Turku Cathedral toll in the midday on Christmas Eve. The chief of administration goes out to a balcony there in the old square in town. There's a lot of fanfare and reads this declaration and really brings out the people. Even in the worst of weather. They said there could be like 10,000 people out there. Yes. In the square, tons of people. The exact wording over the years from the original declaration have been lost to time. But the long and short of it is this hey, everyone be cool, everyone be harmonious, everyone be peaceful and love your neighbor or else you're going to be punished. Right? That's pretty much it. And not with coal, with monetary fines. Yeah. And I would look this up. So basically, the local administrator of, like, a town during the medieval era was beholden to the local representative of the church to keep everything nice and orderly around Christmas, this holiest season for the church. And they were basically saying, if you make me look bad to the church, I'm going to really bring down the hammer on you. So they've lost the wording, like you said, on some of the older versions, but they've been reading the same one since apparently back in the old days. And still the gist of it today is that any war, any violence, it ceases on Christmas. If you got a bone to pick with your neighbor, if you're a Hatfield or McCoy, cut it out. Stop for Christmas season. And Christmas season, by the way, this starts at noon on Christmas Eve. Did you say that? Yeah, it was at midday. Okay. So from that point on until the end of Christmas, you're expected to just live peacefully, at least avoid one another. If you're in a feud like you're saying, that's the first part. Well, yeah. The next part is you can't work. That's great. You can feed your cows and things. Yes. Why should the cows suffer? Because you're hanging out on Christmas. Right. But don't work. And you can't even have guests, apparently, unless you have permission from the authorities. Right. Which is great. Back in the day, if you were punished, if you were found in violation of this, you could be fined so severely that it says that you could be in debt for the rest of your life. Yeah. So they took it very seriously, and it wasn't until the 1970s that they actually removed punishment from the law books in Finland. Amazing, right? So now there's no real punishment to this, but they still read this proclamation every year. That's right. There are other towns that do it, but as far as anyone knows, turku is the oldest and the longest continuous one. Great tradition. I'd like to close this episode with this, if you're okay with that. Sure. So before we split, I want to say merry Christmas, everybody. Happy holidays, happy Hanukkah. Hope it was a good one. Happy everything. Yes. However, you choose to celebrate this year, or even if you don't at all. Even better, we hope you're having a good time with your friends and family. And as we always say, every year this season can be very tough for other people. And so just keep that in mind. Show some kindness, show some compassion, and reach out to someone if you think they need that hand. Sure, absolutely. Be kind to everybody. That's great. Or else you'll be fine. Right? So, everyone, to end this Christmas spectacular, we're going to finish with the declaration of Christmas peace. Tomorrow, God willing, is the graceful celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior, and thus is declared a peaceful Christmas time to all by advising devotion and to behave otherwise quietly and peacefully. Because he who breaks this piece and violates the peace of Christmas by any illegal or improper behavior shall, under aggravating circumstances, be guilty and punished according to what the law and statutes prescribe for each and every offense separately. Finally, a joyous Christmas feast is wished to all inhabitants of the city. And by city, we mean world. Happy holidays, everyone. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio stuff works. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
https://podcasts.howstuf…dventure-two.mp3	SYSK's Guatemalan Adventure, Part Two	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysks-guatemalan-adventure-part-two	Josh and Chuck talk more about their experiences in Guatemala and the amazing work that the non-profit group Cooperative for Education is doing there -- and how you can help! -- in part two of their Guatemala series.	Josh and Chuck talk more about their experiences in Guatemala and the amazing work that the non-profit group Cooperative for Education is doing there -- and how you can help! -- in part two of their Guatemala series.	Thu, 20 May 2010 15:31:01 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=15, tm_min=31, tm_sec=1, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=140, tm_isdst=0)	45122696	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Hey, friends. 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 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. And now for the exciting conclusion of Sysk's Guatemalan adventure. Here we find team Stuff You Should Know about to depart for their second school visit. So we take off from there and we go to our second school for our first computer center inauguration. And it's here, Chuck, that we ran into one of my favorite people, mr. Howard Lob. Dude, Howard Lob is one of the coolest, strangest dudes I've ever met in my life. Yeah, I'm just going to go and throw that out there. And he grows on you like quick, too. Real quick. He's so fungus. Remember when we first met him at the hotel in Guatemala City? He came up and was shaking our hand and wearing a fanny pack and talking real fast, and he was all smiles, and he leads. And the three of us cynics were like, that guy is weird, that dude. Then we meet him again. Really? I think it was before this when we got to hang out with them. But by the time we interviewed him at this computer center inauguration, we hearted Howard. Yes, we hearted him very much and still do. Howard is a great guy, a stand up guy, as I call him in one of the interviews that I don't think we're going to use. Okay, so the computer program, Josh, works a lot like the textbook program. But why should we talk about it when the truly weird and awesome Howard lobby can describe it for us? In large part, we typically work with larger schools. In a textbook program. If the school has 50 to 100 kids, you're good to go. It doesn't matter a number of kids so much. But in the computer center, we typically look for schools that have about 200 kids or more. That way you cover all the costs and still keep that student contribution down low. And you have partners as well, right? That's right. All of our, like, Rotary Club, Microsoft, other foundations, et cetera, help us with that feed donation. And Microsoft as well helps us with licenses. So that's an ongoing gift in kind. And that jump starts the program. And then after that we look for the communities to really make it self sustaining. We don't expect donors to come back year after year to pay the electric bill to provide new computers. The idea is it's kind of our promise to the donors that their money is well spent in an effective way and that the community will take that ball and run with it. So that's how it works in a nutshell. Much like the textbook revolving fund, self sustainable, but the kids paid just a little bit more money. I think it's more frequent, I think where they pay $2 a year for a textbook, they pay $2 a month for a computer. That is, that what it is. Yeah, but you spread that over 200 kids again, in five years you have that self sufficient escrow fund that can pay to replace all the computers. And the computers, Chuck, they were nice computers, but there was something really strange about them. Did you know what it was? No Internet. No Internet. Yeah, they had a simulated Internet. Here's what the kids learn on these things. They learn these rural, poor Guatemalan children are learning Microsoft Office programs courtesy of Microsoft, one of their little partners, which is great. Yeah, I think he mentions them in one of the clips. Okay. They learn how to email, they learn in Carta, which might seem a little old fashioned to us, but it's great for them. Right, and Windows movie Maker, and they have a simulated Internet. So when they eventually get out into the workforce and see the real Internet, they're not like, what is this? What's going on? Right, but still be blown away. I'm still blown away on a daily basis. Right, but one of the things that you were talking about that blew you away was these kids are just encountering computers for the first time and they're already making like PowerPoint slideshows and stuff like that, right? Yeah. And Howard was telling us about some of the successes that have come from these computer centers that Cooperative for Education, aka co ed sponsors or sets up. And he was talking about these kids that made a T shirt company, right? Yeah. Let's hear that one. For example, in a town not far from here, a group of girls broken, a group of four or six students, and they did a project that we call Microsoft or Project Office. Excuse me. And in this project they learned to create a business usually it's a simulated business. In this case, they made it a real business and they decided that they were going to create T shirts to sell to fellow classmates and things like that. So they use Microsoft Excel to create a budget. They used Microsoft publisher and movie maker to create advertising material and like a fake Amok TV ad, they worked with a local Silk screening company and created T shirts and started selling them. And even though they graduated from middle school, they still got this thing going. That's amazing. So you've got kids going from middle school and actually generating income for themselves and their families. How awesome is that? It is pretty sweet. Really cool. And Chuck He tells another story that we didn't use where kids going to school who lived in the surrounding area, it was all agriculture, all farming. Right. And so there's this ongoing debate over whether snow peas or broccoli were more profitable. Oh yeah, that's right. And these kids did data analysis of all the costs and outputs from broccoli and from snow peas and found in fact, snow peas are actually more profitable. And then they made a presentation and gave it to the town and completely changed the minds of all the farmers around there. Yeah. So they could make more money. Yeah. Pretty amazing. That is really amazing. It's spectacular. Well, it's so amazing that a guy like Howard quit his good job in the United States to move to Guatemala. We should say most of the co ed cooperative education is based out of Cincinnati and most of them live there and they go to Guatemala a few times a year. But they can work remotely because of the internet and all the great things there. But a few of them actually live in country and Howard is one of those. Right. And he gave up his life in America. Of course. He met a Guatemalan woman, married her. It might have something to do with it, not too shabby. And here's what he had to say about that. I think you've seen today that the people here are very expressive, very grateful for the help that we bring to them. The kids want to learn. The parents now know how important education is and that just feeds any emotion that we came to this country with. And so it's kind of easy to help in that sense and really in coed. I think all of us who work here have now found a way to help development, human development a little bit. And we feel like maybe it's really having an impact. We have a mechanism, a system that provides a sustainability and that's key just to donate something, drop it off and run. We've just seen it over and over. It just doesn't work. So we feel like we're kind of grateful that we have this opportunity to help others. That makes us happy. Hopefully it makes them happy. And we like to think it's having a real impact. And more and more we measure our programs, seeing good results. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, sir. We were glad we met Howard. Yeah, he's a cool guy. Very cool guy. So we go to the school and they have a big shady tent set up, cool breeze blowing. We're kind of out on the open range. Remember, it was like our first, so you can see for miles. Oh, yeah, it was great. Very nice scene. They get this old guy out there to play the harp, but it wasn't like a regular harp. It was this like a harp guitar thing. Do we have any of that harp music? Oh, is that it? Is that it I hear right now? That is it. Yeah. That guy was good. He was very good. And like, 130, and he was very old. And there was some ritual dancing. This is when the little girls came over and picked us up by the hand. Yes. And we danced. First of many humiliating moments for me. You're not a big public dancer. No, I've got that, like, plastered grimace of embarrassment on my face. It's just horrible. Right? It was very cute, though, actually. And we have pictures of that that we're going to have on the website. Damn. Fantastic. We thought that we were going to see a live chicken sacrifice right in front of our faces. It came down to the last second. Yeah. They're doing another traditional. This one wasn't the Corn dance, just like the symbolic sacrificing of the chicken, but it was a Mayan dance. Right. And they come out with a live chicken. And strangely enough, like earlier in that day, we've been told that Jeff told us about that at some of the Mayan ruins, they'll find, like, dead chickens. They're still some blood sacrifices that are carried on at Mayan ruins. Yes. And so within 4 hours, some kids walk out with a live chicken in the middle of a ceremonial dance. And we're like, Are they really going to do this? And this girl dropped the chicken and lifted it up and then just slid her hand right off the end of its head. And the chicken was like yeah. And there's literally like 20 Americans in this horseshoe configuration with them in the middle, all just thinking, oh, my Lord. Yes, but again with the smiles. It's your culture. Because I don't want to knock it. To each his own. And I haven't covered in chicken. But luckily the chicken was spared and it was all symbolic and we all breathe a little sigh of relief. And the chicken yeah, the chicken was glad, too. They ate him later that night, though, I'm sure. Oh, yeah. And then we went to the computer lab, and this is when the kids actually paired us up and sat us down and they showed us some of the things that they've been working on. And that's when you really get to see the good that coed is doing. When you sit down and you see a Windows movie maker slide presentation that a kid in rural Guatemala made who had never seen a computer six months ago, that's where it really hits home. And that was it for that school. Yes, it was. That was a lot. Do you think you can sacrifice force dancing computers, Howard? It sounds like my high school experience. So then we go to the hotel. Albergase de Techec Pond. The weirdest hotel in Guatemala. Yeah. It's a compound. It's not a hotel. It's a compound surrounded by a high wall with razor wire. And the best thing we could describe it was it looked like the Michael Jackson of Guatemala might have owned the property at one point. Yes. It was like a Neverland Ranch. It had this life size. Yeah, it was like a Neverland Ranch that had been left out, exposed to the elements for many years. That's true. It wasn't like nice and new looking. They have like a life size chess game and these Alice and Wonderland theme stuff. Yes. Statues all throughout the property. Each area was more unsettling than the last. It was a little weird, but it was kind of cool for sure. And before dinner, we went to there was this girl on the trip named Gabby. Yeah, gabby was I would call her the translator, but Gabby was like everything on this trip. Yeah, she's definitely a jack of all trades for coed. Yeah. She's the facilitator. Pretty much anything we needed. Remember in Antigua at the end when you're not supposed to give tours yourself because they have, like, the city tour, people are the only people that are supposed to officially do that. Right. And Gabby always headed them off of the past and explained to the cops what we're doing. Right. They're like, all right, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. And that works because she is a psychologist. Right? Yeah. That's her background. She went to school. Now she's a psychologist. Wow. And then she takes time off from her practice. Oh, I thought she quit her practice to do this. No, she just takes time off and she's like, you guys go nuts for a little while. I'm going to go do some co ed stuff. Right. So she's got a really good gig. She's educated. She is one of the more fortunate people in Guatemala who had not come from a very poor family. Did we say? She's Guatemala? Yeah, she's Guatemalan. Did I not mention that? I don't know. She's very Guatemalan. Yeah. And just an awesome person. And we asked her why that she would leave her private practice to go work with co ed like she does. And she said this. How can I not do it? How can I not believe in this? It's my people, it's my country, it's my kids. And I just love them. And I've had the chance, an incredible chance, to meet some of them personally and just keep track of them. And I see how they've been in their houses. You don't speak any castellano, any Spanish. And then now they learn English, they know computers, they bought a piece of plant, and instead of farming, they are constructing and they're working. They just have my heart. And Josh, as the interview went on, she got pretty emotional about what these kids in Guatemala means to her. And let's just see what she had to say about that. You can grasp or you can take care of your fingers. The kids that they have so much strength in them, and they're fighting and they're going against everything. So you got the tissues out, buddy? I know. It's pretty moving. Yes. It's really sweet. I'm one of those guys who's just like, yeah, you got a hard life, whatever. But when you see somebody like Gabby, you almost feel for other people through somebody like that. Right? For sure. Yeah, it's really nice. That's another way to put it. So that was the end of our night. Had another awesome dinner. Steak that night, remember? Yeah. At that place? Yeah, at the roadhouse. Yeah, it was like a roadhouse. And we go to our separate cabins and go to sleep. Jerry had a really creepy one off in the woods. Jerry was scared. First of all, Jerry made me walk her to her cabin, and I'm thinking, I hope Jerry doesn't try to put the moves on me. And by the time we get to her cabin, it's been like an hour and a half walk, and now I have to walk back in the dark by myself. But it was scary. I was like, all right, see you later. Good luck. If you need any help to scream it wasn't even that far, but it's funny. Then we go the next day, we go to an orphanage school, and we were late because Dan one of the guys on tour. Dan, who was like, I'm so surprised. Dan just didn't end up walking in front of a horse. Yeah, something like that. Things just went wrong for Dan, but he always had a great smile on Facebook. He couldn't find his alarm clock or something, so he kept sleeping. That was the first Admin tour, was where's Dan incidences that happened. Dan was awesome. So we go to this orphanage school, and what's sad about this one, Josh, is that it was an orphanage. Well, a lot of these kids aren't true orphans, though. A lot of them are dropped off. They have parents and families, but their parents know that they can't provide the life for them that they deserve. So the parents drop their kids off and leave them there and maybe visit once a month or however often they can. And we got one really good story from this school that remember the girl that went up on stage when they had a little presentation? They do this deal where they sort of have fun with how to take care of the textbooks and they'll ask different questions. Well, they'll tell them how to do it. Then they bring three kids on stage and ask them to repeat what they just heard about caring for the textbooks. And they picked two boys and a girl. And the two boys, they were kind of cutting up and laughing and they had nothing to say. But the one girl knocked everyone out. Yeah, she did. We all had presses on, very cute young girl, and she completely just like, took charge of the room and recited exactly how to take care of the textbooks. And you could tell she was on the ball, right. So after the whole presentation, we were out back interviewing Holly, who had gone and found out this girl's story, right, because also identified scholarship students, kids who are really going to benefit from direct help from donors. And this girl had scholarship student written all over so Hollywood and found out what her deal was, and she came back and told us. So after the presentation, I called her over to talk to her a little bit, and I asked her what she wants to do, what's her dream in life, and she said that she wants to be a bilingual doctor, which is wonderful. And I talked to her about her parents and what they do, and it turns out that her dad works in agriculture and he travels around to go and work in the field. So he's kind of the lowest level of agricultural worker here in Guatemala. He probably earns $3 a day, maybe at the most, maybe $2 a day. And her mom has left to go be a servant for a family in the city and just comes home on Sundays. So this girl, who is 14 years old for the last year, has been going to school full time and doing everything in the house for herself and her ten year old brother. And her six year old brother. So she gets up at five in the morning and makes the tortillas. She gets them ready for school. She's basically a little mom and has been for the last year because her parents have gone away to work. And I was amazed by this. I couldn't believe that she was doing this. And I asked her why her parents had left to do that, and it's because neither of them can read, neither of them has any education. They went to school until third grade, but they really didn't pick anything up. And those are the only options they have to get a job that's good enough that it will allow her and her younger brothers to continue their education and to go further in school. So then I asked her, well, why do your parents care? They're getting along, they're making it somewhat. So why do they care if you have a good education? And she said what most people say is that they wanted opportunities for us that were much better than the opportunities that they have. They have no choices in this country. So she kind of captured all of our hearts, I think. I think I said at the time in the interview that if I was a 13 year old Guatemalan boy, I would ask her to the next dance and then probably to marry her shortly thereafter on the ball and just ride on her coattails after that. Yeah, she wants to be a bilingual doctor. Yeah. How cool is that? So we took off after that. We went to our last school stop. And this Josh, to me, was the best one, mainly because Jerry gave a speech. Yes. Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in the history of stuff, you should know you're going to hear Jerry's voice. We tried it once before in the Hiccups podcast. We originally had her say, boo. Right. It just didn't work out, so it got cut. So here is Jerry, the producers voice. It's definitely my honor and privilege to be here with you today. Most of us have come a very long way to be here to let you know that we care very much about your future. These textbooks here today are just like any other tool you could ever use. As long as you work hard and you use it correctly, many great things will come from it. I would like to say directly to all of the young women here, you can do great things in your life, and it can start here. And I hope to see all of you succeed. And I think that we all feel the same way. Very proud to be here. The country is beautiful. You're beautiful people. Thank you so much for having me. Absolutely, man, how awesome was that? It was great. I remember filming this. I had the camera at the time, and I got all choked up. I know. I remember being like, why is Chuck with the camera? Right? I'm going to go have a cigarette. So this is called the Santiago Cooperative school. And the other cool thing about this, besides Jerry speech was the principal that ran this joint. Yeah. So this guy was around Santiago, was a hotbed of activity during the Civil War, and this guy was a prominent figure in the town and had to shut the school down. And he was kind of lefty. He saw things the ten years of spring way. Sure. And he had to keep his mouth shut. But as he was, he was also quietly building the school. So when the civil war ended, he could reopen and hit the ground running. And Chuck, like you said, he was a revolutionary in that he thought girls should be educated. Right? Yeah. It's not the most popular notion that women should have the same rights as men or girls and boys in Guatemala. So he's done a very unpopular thing for many years and fought to get girls the same rights and the same education as boys. Right. So the demographics in the school, at least gender wise, are about 50 50 now, right? Well, yeah. And I think a few years previous, you could count the number of girls in a school on one hand, and the day that we were there, they were numbered about 50%. And you could tell this guy is very much revered by his students and the people in the communities. They said, stand up guy. Great order, actually. And again, moving experience. Yeah. He should run for the president of Guatemala. Yeah, I'd vote for him. I would vote for him in a second. I would write in as a writing candidate as a green go right in. That's fraud, chuck, like you said, a very effective speaker. Very moving. Like, we went to a classroom later on, and he was giving us some more stories. And again, SAP that I am. Teared up. Chuck. Yes. Can we get some party resort salsa music in right here? Is it time? It's time. Okay. And, Joshua, this music is playing because we wind up our trip the week in Antigua. Antigua is one of the more popular tourist destinations, and that's where you're going to find that's where we saw more Americans than anywhere else. Weeks. Right. Because it's lovely. It is gorgeous. It's the old capital, or was the capital until 1776. Yes, just preserved in time, basically, as the largest city from 1776. There's some amazing stuff around there. It was racked by earthquakes over the decades, and some of these churches that were built in the 16th century were just huge collapse, partially. So we were actually we toured an abandoned well. It was actually still in use, but the back part of it was in ruins. And these huge columns that were like the size of a school bus were just boom on their side right in front of you because nobody could do anything with them. Sure. And they just fell during earthquake. But these were 500 year old columns that were just sitting there. Unbelievable. It was really amazing. The whole town was that too gorgeous. Remember the arch over the main thoroughfare? Yeah. And the reason they had that built was because it was a nunnery on either side, and the nuns didn't believe in letting anyone see them or see their faces, so they constructed this walkway above the street so the nuns could go from one side to the other in the town square with the fountain. Very awesome. So we check into our hotel, coincidentally, also the best hotel of the week. Yeah, the hotel via colonial. This place is awesome. Like, manicured garden. It was really awesome. Some cat helped me carry my bag to my room. Oh, really? Yeah. You had a bellhop? Yeah, man. Yeah. I think he didn't do anything else but take my bag to the room. Did you check them? Yes. And actually, I felt bad because I only had a couple of casualties on it, which is not much money. No. And I actually found him later on, I think later that night or the next day, and I found him and tipped him better, and he was looking, and he was all happy. And one of the guys who spoke English, he was tending bars. Like he thinks he just won the lottery. We gave him, like, a dollar amount. Yeah. Wow. So we have a little happy hour that evening by the pool in the gardens. And that's when we were introduced to Ron Zacapa, who is not our friend. I like him. It is rum. It is aged rum. Yeah. Ron is rum in Spanish, and I didn't know I was a rum guy until I had the Ronza Kappa chuck, I don't think that's a very fair characterization. Liking Rons of Copper does not make you a rum guy. This stuff is as one of our listeners who commented on the blog during our trip, and we mentioned that we're in Guatemala said, Try Ronza Kappa. It is the nectar of the gods. It was right. So good. I think we're a little loath to play up alcohol like this, especially because we have younger listeners, but when you kids get to be 21, make your first drink Ronza Kappa. You won't be disappointed. And, Josh, we should point out Jerry just stopped us to mention that we had the 23 year aged Ronza right there as well. So we have another delicious dinner. Remember the second floor? It's like an open air balcony overlooking the garden. Yes, I remember. Delicious. I dined with Anne. I know. By this point, we were actually mingling with other people on the trip. And the other truth, we definitely skewed the median age a little bit one way, right? You could say that. But there were lots of retired school teachers, lots of older women, women of a certain age, I should say. Sure. Who turned out to just be awesome. This isn't normally the crowd we run with. No. But all of them were just super cool, super fun to talk to. Heck, yeah. And it wasn't just, like, polite, like you're talking to your friend's grandmother mom kind of conversations. Like, I had really real conversations with these people. I know, right? It's so weird. I was kind of shocked. Like, my skin didn't prickle. But by this dinner, we were all kind of separated and mingling with the rest of the tour on a really fundamental level. I thought that was cool. Yeah. We all ate dinner with our own little groups, and that was very nice. I charmed everybody at my table. I'm sure you did. You were like the cool cousin at the wedding. Thank you. Sure. So the next day, we took off for town, and the coed gang took us on the walking tour. That. We mentioned earlier when we got in trouble from the local cops, but Gabby worked it out, and that's when we went around to the chapels and the churches, and they had a lot of knowledge, and it's like a really good tour. I've never been on such a good tour in my life. Yes. And the last bus back from the square was leaving, which left Dan running after it, waving and waving with a big smile on his face. Dan, sweet Dan. And that was the first time we saw a horse diaper. Yeah. I've never seen that. No. And it was full, and it was pretty much what you think it was. It was a diaper on a horse that kind of hung low. Sure. It was weird. So we go on this tour for the first half of the day. It's all this great stuff. And then the second half of the day, we meet back in the town square, and our group was the three of us, and then this guy named Steve who was old buddies with the burning your brothers and a Coed supporter all these years, obviously, because he's a good friend of the family and believes in what they're doing. And he's a doctor in Cincinnati. Right. And bilingual. So he went with us. And then we were paired with two kids from the Coed program, a boy and a girl. And they were charged to take us around town. Yeah, they did. While we shopped and help us, like, Haggle and Jerry took a little shine to the girl there. That was her little buddy. Yes. They turned out to be fast friends. Yeah, it was very cute. And we ate a Ployal comparison. Yes. Which is sort of like the KFC of Guatemala. I'm sorry, did I just steal your thunder? No. Okay. Because I mentioned a meal. Yeah. I didn't eat this meal, though, actually. Remember, I wasn't hungry. Oh, yeah, that's right. Oddly. And so they took a shopping, and one of the coolest things on this little excursion was we got together and we were like, hey, look, we should buy these kids something. Because you know how it is when you go to one of these countries. Like, these handmade goods are, like, dirt cheap. And that's not why we decided to buy him something. We can buy one of these kids something. Yeah. We thought, let's let him pick out whatever they want. And we had Steve translate, because he was the man in Spanish, and we told him to tell the kids, pick out anything you want, and we'll buy anything you want. And I thought that they would pick out some toy or some, like, fun thing. The little boy picked out a crucifix cross to where I noticed what did the girl get Jerry's bracelets for her family? I don't know if that came through, but that was Jerry. They've already heard her now. Yeah, that's true. The cat's out of the bag. So that just kind of touched us all that they were thinking of their family or his religion instead of, do they have iPhones around here anywhere? Neither one of them asked that. So we left. We parted company with our kids, and I already set that up. Dan was running after the bus. Actually. We did a little more shopping on our own, remember? Oh, yeah, we did, the three of us. That was fun. And we ended up back at the hotel for the last night's dinner. Right. And the last night's happy hour. Yeah. With more rons and kappa. And we didn't explain the Ranza Kappa thing. You are meant to burn the devil out, remember? Oh, yeah. That's pretty cool. Let's tell them what that is. So when you finish the bottle, you rub it everyone stands in a circle who's drink it, and you rub it all over your body, and you get it rolled in your hands, and you get it all warm. You do this for a good five minutes, and then you hold the lighter up to the end, and this blue flame comes out. It looks like a caramelizing torch. Yeah, it kind of shoots out. And they do that because the Guatemalans believe that if you ingest liquor, then that's the devil living inside of you. So all you got to do to write the ship is just burn the devil out at the end of the bottle, and you're all set. Bang, boom. So we did that, and that was a lot of fun. Everybody's in a great mood at the end this week. We're all buddies, and we're all having a blast. Yes. So we have the final night. They have a slide show of the week, which is always nice. It's like camp. There was a picture of me fighting a bull with firecrackers on its back. Yeah, we both did that. And you, too, little symbol. You were wearing a rotary apron. I was wearing an apron. Ship is what that's called. And they did the little slideshow, which is really nice. And then this was Jerry's birthday, so they brought out a cake, and they came to me earlier in the night and said, hey, do you think if we got a cake, it would embarrass Jerry? I went, yes, it would, and yes, you should. So they did. So brought the cake out, and in Guatemalan tradition, they forced her to put her face in it. Yeah. I'm not sure that was Guatemala introduced like a co head thing. Yeah. So Jerry had to take a bite of the cake without using her hands, essentially. Yeah. And she did it. Yes, she did. She was a good support. Jerry's letting loose at this point. Oh, yes. I saw a whole new side of her. So after dinner and the slideshow, we had the opportunity, everyone there, if they want to say a few words about their week, to do so. And I put you back in your seat and took the opportunity to speak for the team. Yeah. And I was very glad you did because, Chuck, you killed it. You had everyone in the room. Little tearyeyed except you, I think. I probably was really sure. Okay. You had the heartstrings pulled. I was pulling like a kite, like a box kite. I was working. It was very sweet. It was a very good speech. And you did a good job capturing the sense that we had kind of our eyes being open down there. Thanks, man. Our hearts being open, too. I appreciate that. Yeah. I spoke from the heart a minute. A good job, man. And another one of the people that spoke was Michelle McMaster. Yeah. Who we were on the trip with. And I don't remember if we were just tired, we didn't want to record anymore. Jerry worked, like, pretty much the whole time we were down there. We worked a lot. I felt really bad for Jerry this point. We were like, Put the camera away for the night. So we knew Michelle lived in Atlanta. And we're like, we'll have you come in, and how about we interview you in Atlanta? Yes. Because we want to get the perspective of the donor. And she was kind enough to let us off the hook and say yes. So we did get her perspective. And she did come in and sat down, and we asked her some questions about why she was donating to co ed. Because when we were down there, she was basically on this distribution tour, a memorial tour for her mother in law. Right. And this is her third trip to Guatemala. And she's like an old pro at Donating. Sure. She doesn't come from this opulent, wealthy family necessarily. She's just a normal Atlanta who really figured that this is a good way to do something with their money. Right. It's just such a poor country. And I am so fortunate. My family is fortunate. And I just feel at this point in my life, I can do something about it and I can give back. And I hope that a lot of people have the opportunity to do that because it's way better feeling for me than it is for them to receive the books. I mean, they thank us, but I really feel like I should thank them. And Chuck, Michelle was not the only veteran donor that was on the tour with us. You remember Stacy and Kathy Do? I remember? They were very awesome. Yes. They have a little place in my heart. Yeah. And they've gotten into sponsoring this I don't remember how many tours they've been on by the time they went on this one. But they've really taken a shine to Cohen. They and Michelle are very exemplary of the kind of people who go on these tours, especially repeat tours. There are people who are like, you know, I can just take a little bit of this money, and it just grows and grows and grows. And I think that's one of the reasons that coed has such this loyal following, this really dedicated group of people that they attract and keep because the money stays there, it doesn't get used up. It's sustainable. It's a sustainable model. And it's pretty amazing one, too. Yeah. I want to find one person that's gone on one of these tours that comes back and it's like, well, that was nice. Good luck with everything. Yeah. I don't think it happens. We're signed up for life with these guys. Yeah. So after dinner, it's Gerry's birthday, so we decided that we need to go out and celebrate a little bit in town because there's, like, clubs in Antigua, evidently. Yes. Got clubs. Yes. And don't you have a little I have a disclaimer here that I'd like to insert. I did not go out that night. I stayed in. I was very tired and happy to stay in, but I was also happy to see you guys go and have a good time. Sure. Most of the co ed folks and boy, howdy did you guys go out? Yeah, from what I understand, first of all, at breakfast the next morning, I could barely sit at the same table as, you guys are so bad. Do you want to recount a little bit of this thing? Well, Josh, I'm really not allowed to say what went on that night. We've all been sworn to secrecy. But let's just say there was a nightclub involved. There was a band, live band playing Guatemalan sky music. It's so cool. I danced for hours, and I'm not a dancer. I've seen you dancing. No. You're not a dancer? No, I'm not a dancer. And the next day, I woke up with bruises on my hands because I fell out of the back of a pickup truck at some point onto a cobblestone street. It's not good, Chuck. No. It was truly one of the best nights I've ever had. Cherry kept going the next morning, and you're just like, shut up. My head. It was great. It brought me back to my college days as if I was an exchange student in Guatemala. Cool. The experience. I never got to live back. And you said the band was, like, right there, right? Yes. I've never been to a club that's more crowded in my life. And it was just like, dancing and sweating and having a great time, living life. Man, that's great. And I just got a word from Jerry that it was the best birthday of her life. Yeah. And she's like, 40, so best speech from you. Wow. Best speech from you. Best birthday from Jerry. My cold black heart opened up a little bit like Mr. Burns. Oh, you're not Mr. Burns. Oh, thank you, Chuck. I saw the warmest side of you that I've ever seen. Really? And I haven't seen it since. But we'll just call it Guatemala and Josh. Okay. You just keep that to yourself. I loved it. Any final thoughts on the whole trip? Yes, Chuck. Remember we originally went down there to do a podcast on whether education can alleviate poverty, and in very short order, we were like, no, this actually deserves its own podcast. This is a pretty amazing organization. It deserves, too. Exactly. It has all the earmarks of a great organization that deserves a podcast. It's an underdog. It's kind of small. It's been chugging along for 14 years. Yeah. Started out super small, and it has just grown and been more successful and amazing. Yeah. And there's a lot of really dedicated, genuinely good people who are really giving themselves and not exploiting this group. I asked Jeff what percentage of donations go to the actual people. Right. And I think the industry standard is like, 50%, and they're hitting like, 80, 85, something like that. Right. That's huge. That's an enormous contribution. Yeah. You know why? I figured out is they're all really smart. Everyone down there that we talked to from Co ed was, like, really sharp and had honed this program down to, like, an really efficient charitable machine, I guess is the best way I can say it. So, Chuck, I have a feeling that you have some final impressions you'd like to share. And I'm not the only one, I think, who wants to hear them. Well, I could just say ditto. Josh. No, you got to slather it on, bud. Well, like we said, the people of Coed are just doing amazing work. They're unbelievable. The people of Guatemala were just some of the warmest, most welcoming people we ever met, that I've ever met. I know. Like you said, they laid down like evergreen bells at our feet when we walked through, and the kids came out. Remember the last school? They came out, and each one of them hugged us and ushered us in, like, one by one, and the principal speaking at the one place. And then people like Carolyn, who gave up their jobs to go down there and live and teach these kids, it was just the whole thing completely blew me away. Changed my perspective on what we have. Here what I have. I'll never look at a pencil the same way again, I'll tell you that. Excellent. Chuck and I would go back again. And Jerry is going back again. Yes, she is. She's going again this summer. They have taken a shine to her and vice versa. Yeah. She's doing some video work for them, which is pretty cool. Yeah. She's going on the July Snapshot tour, right? Yeah. So anybody who wants to go hang with Jerry and Guatemala can. That's your chance. Yeah. And, Chuck, if people want to see pictures of our Guatemalan tour, the one we've already been on, we have them on the site. You created an image gallery, right? Yeah. 75 photos of us and Guatemala get a pencil out or a pen. People write this down. We're also going to post this on Facebook if it's too long for you. But for you, non Facebookers it is. Www. Adventure HowStuffWorks.com stuff you shouldurednow guatemala pictures, HTM. So essentially it's adventure how stuff works, stuff you should know. Guatemala Pictures. Right. With Hyphens in between. Yeah. And like I said, we'll put it on Facebook and tweet it out. And so those of you in the know will have an easier time with that. And if you want to know more information about the Cooperative for Education, Coed, the work they do, not you, man. You know all about them. I'm talking to the people now. You can log on to their Internet website, coed uc.org. That's Coed uc.org. And Jerry tells us that you can just type in Cooperative for Education in this URL bar. And it'll redirect. Yeah, they got info on their website about the tour that you can take. It's not very expensive, actually, just to go down there for a week. They really take care of you. They have, like, security with you. It's really safe. I guarantee you will have a life changing experience. And they have got a video about the tour on there that you can watch. And I defy you to watch it and not get a little teary eyed. And it's all there on the website, all the information, and you should check it out for sure. Yeah, check that out. And again, if you want to donate to Coed, you can text a $5 donation by texting the word stuff. Stuff. Yes. Two, you'll donate $5, you'll receive a text back asking you to confirm the donation. Simply reply with the word yes to complete the donation. Right. And we have to say a one time $5 donation will be charged to your wireless bill or deducted from your prepaid balance. Messaging and data rates may apply. If you change your mind before confirming the donation, you can apply stop to 20222. Or if you need help, reply the word help. Donations are collected by the Mobile Giving Foundation. For more info, you can call 866-810-1203 or go to HMGF. Orgt. What a website, huh? Wow. Nice job, man. Thanks. And some wireless carriers limit the number of donations you can make. So check with your wireless carrier if you want to make more than one. Yeah, and on a personal note, I just want to say we've had awesome response from our Kiva sponsorships. Yeah. So we kind of talked the stuff you should know. Army up to co ed and we said $5 text, that's the way to go. Like, these people will definitely hear the story and they'll definitely want to throw $5 your way, literally. We don't ask people for much often, but I'm going to ask you to do that check. $5. And the clock is ticking a little bit because these text donation campaigns, they don't run in perpetuity. So I think it's through. What is it, jars? End of July. So pick out your phone right now. Just do a little quick text. Like we said, $5 will buy textbooks for one student for an entire year. And then it goes into the revolving fund and it's self sustainable and essentially you bought textbooks for life. And if you want to donate more, you can go to their website. They have information on how you can actually sponsor a computer center, get your name on it and go down there and visit it and cherish it and hug it. And you can go to their website and they have all kinds of information on how you can get more involved or go on a tour. And it's really great. And listen to us. Chuck. Really? We sound like we are hosting a telephone. I know. I never thought that I would be doing something like this. And I think the very fact that we are doing it hopefully lends some sort of credence to how we actually feel about coed. Absolutely. We wouldn't be doing this for any fly by night nonprofit. These guys are great. So again, if you want to learn more about coed, go to www dot coed. And we're going to post pictures on our blog, right, Chuck? No. I'm going to set up an image gallery and we will put that on Facebook and then the blog how you can get there. And we'll have probably close to like 100 pictures of our trip. Excellent. Well, that's it, right? Viva Guatemala. Adios. 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 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. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1218576117453sysk-wired-to-survive.mp3	Are humans wired to survive?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-humans-wired-to-survive	Are humans born with survival instincts? Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about human instincts and survival.	Are humans born with survival instincts? Check out our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about human instincts and survival.	Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:00:26 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=12, tm_min=0, tm_sec=26, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=232, tm_isdst=0)	12780169	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 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 brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Stuff you should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them because with every purchase, visa prevents, detects and resolve online fraud safe, secure Visa. Hey, welcome to the podcast. Josh Clark here with Chuck Bryant pair of staff writers fromhouse Stuffworkscom. How's it going, Chuck? Good, Josh. Just a pair of writers. I see you're still rocking your brain's cap even after you said, hey, I'm not so sure I'm watching anymore this season. Yes, but the hair's getting long. I just thought you were going to say you're a true fan. I am a true fan. So, Chuck, the brace might not be doing that well. It's almost like they've lost their will to survive. That's a really great set up, John. Thank you very much, chuck, you know that if they have lost their collective will to survive, that is flying in the face of evolution. It is in the opinion of many. Supposedly we are wired for survival. Yeah, I believe we are. I think you should give the example of the Japanese hiker, Mitsutaka Yuchi Koshi. I love that guy's name. Yeah, he's great. He's a good guy. This is just a couple of years ago, and this guy was hiking with his friends in western Japan. I think he went to go down the mountain by himself for some reason. And he tripped as good as I can tell, as he tripped, was knocked unconscious. The last thing he says he did was fell asleep in a grassy field. And you might say to yourself, what's the big deal? The big deal is he woke up 24 days later. Yeah, he was awakened by a rescue worker 24 days later. He was unconscious supposedly the whole time. The whole time. When they found him, he was a cool 71 deg Fahrenheit height, which is basically the temperature of an average corpse that has not been refrigerated. His organs were almost completely shut down, almost no heartbeat. And he lived because they surmised that he almost went to a state of hibernation. Like a bear wood. Yeah. So we're not supposed to be able to do that. No, we're definitely not supposed to be able to do that. And I tried. I have two, actually. I usually do it every winter, but it's unsuccessfully unsuccessful. I can rarely get my body temperature down. That low 79 is the lowest I've ever gotten. And that took a lot of willpower, too. So, yeah. You use this guy as an example in your article, Are Humans Wired to Survive? And I think it's a sterling example. We are seemingly programmed to continue to live, to protect our genes, to protect our offspring. And you get some great examples. This is one of those wonderful articles where somebody in one of our editorial brainstorm meetings came up with this idea. It was based on zero research. Right. When I was doing supplemental research for this podcast I went on and typed in humans Wired Survived. Nothing. There's nothing out there. There's no study that this was based on. It was Chuck using his own brain and drawing all of these conclusions from existing data. And I thought it was beautiful, too. Right. I appreciate that. When I went to do this research, I did the same thing you did and I really didn't find much and nothing. I decided that really the only way to research if we're actually wired naturally to survive is to see what human instincts we naturally have that we don't think about. They're just in us, that help keep us alive. And not just instincts. You also mentioned biological processes like our old friend fight or flight. Right. Chuck, I wrote an article on the Theory of Everything and it was about this guy who figured out this lead group, this really mind boggling math that was the answer to everything. It was the underlying cause. I think, just based on our podcast, the fight or flight response is the Theory of Everything. Right. We always come back to it. Yeah, it does come up a lot. Yeah. So we'll go over one more time real quick, shall we? Sure. Okay, so basically, you're confronted with danger. Your brain releases or sends signals for your body to release hormones like adrenaline, which act on your cells. And basically energy is taken from digestion and put towards enlarging your pupils, increasing your respiration, your heart rate, basically getting you ready to either pound somebody or run away from a pounding. Right. And the fact that this happens involuntarily that we don't have to think about it, that you can't really control it even if you do try to think about it? No, because people try to and you can't. Right. That in and of itself is kind of evidence for survival based at the very least on Darwin's theory of evolution, which is very much about well, almost all about natural selection. Right, right. And you want me to tell you that is natural selection is really a pretty basic concept, and I can illustrate it to you guys, like I did in my article. Let's say you have red worms and brown worms, and over time, birds decide they really like to eat these red worms, so they keep eating red worms, and then they start reproducing less and less. The brown worms are not getting eaten, so they're reproducing more and more, and over time, the red worms dwindle until eventually they could go away completely. Only the strong survive. And that's kind of the basis of old Chucky Darwin's whole thing. Exactly. And fight or flight is almost physical evidence of that. Right. Yeah. So what are some other examples that you gave? Well, there's one actually there's so many babies crying. Yes. One way we're wired because actually, most babies in the animal kingdom are born with a little bit of ability. I mean, a newborn horse will stand up and be running around within the hour. Sharks are born underwater, and they're pretty much on their own right. From the moment they're born. Human babies are really the only ones that are born kind of defenseless. Yeah. So a baby's cry is just their natural instinct to keep alive, telling mum and dad, hey, this is what I need, or I need something. And it's further evidence in the fact that they can change the volume and the pitch of their cry depending on how urgent their needs are. So that's hardwired, buddy. Yeah. Well, another example that you gave was that we have been shown to be able to visually recognize changes in our environment with living things more than inanimate objects. Right. And actually, I was looking into that, and I found that there was a 2005 Arizona State study that suggests that that very instinct to pick up living things may actually tie into modern prejudices. You want to hear about that? Yeah, this is news to me. Yeah, it's kind of cool, although it's basically just I'm sure there's some neo Nazi group that's picked it up to use it as evidence that we shouldn't mix races or something stupid like that. Right. But basically what the Arizona State researchers populated is that since we're programmed to recognize changes in our environment and we used to live in these small tribes of people that looked a lot alike, anytime we saw somebody who didn't look like the rest of us, we usually perceive them as a threat. Right. That makes sense. And even though we don't live in tribes anymore, this relic of tribal living or hunting and gathering still remains and explains modern prejudices, why people are xenophobic and racist and all that. Right. Anything that's not like you is threatening. Exactly. And I thought that was pretty interesting that it tied into that instinct, that survival instinct of visually recognizing organic changes in the environment. Right. I've got another one. I want to hear it, Chuck. Good. There was a study that the BBC did for the television program called Human Instinct that was really kind of cool that I watched and this isn't the most scientific study as you've pointed out to me in our downtime. I wasn't going to say it yet, but it is pretty cool nonetheless. Humans are born with an immune system and there's different genes that indicate what kind of immune system we have. You might be better at fighting off the common cold. I might be better at fighting off yellow fever. People have these immune systems and the theory is that you want to pick out a partner for reproduction that has a different immune system than your own because you'll have babies that are more robust against a wider range of sickness and disease. And they've proven this by the fact that by the theory that people do this through their nose, they actually smell rather than visually when they're picking out a reproductive partner. And how do they prove this? I love this test. Yeah. They got the show's host and they got these six women at the University of Newcastle. Six lookers to sleep in the same T shirt two nights straight. They put each of their tshirts in a jar and they had the blood work done before to see what kind of immune system they all had. And then this shows host sniffed all these shirts and put two aside that he found the most pleasing to his nose and then two aside that he found the least pleasing. And then the other two I guess he could take it or leave it. Yeah. And interestingly enough, it supported the results, the findings. The two that he liked the most shared zero of the same genes, immune system genes, as he did and the two that he did not like shared the most. Five out of six were the same. Wow. So this kind of indicates that we smell around for a good partner that will effectively leave us with robust babies that will keep the human race going. The reason I find it unscientific is because you can't go wrong with girls from the University of Newcastle. Like you said, they're all lookers go fighting brown ales. But this whole concept of wanting innately to create more robust offspring that kind of jibes with Richard Dawkins theories. Have you heard of him? No. Not the Family Feud. Host okay, that was Richard Dawson, right? This is Richard Dawkins. And they're often confused. They kind of look alike a little bit. They used to party together in the 70s. Richard Dawkins is a zoologist and just based on his observations and some studies and that kind of thing, he concluded that the human body and us in general are just kind of these mindless vehicles for genes. That it's really our genes that are interested in survival and we get our instincts from our genes, our genetic makeup, that kind of thing, which command ourselves, which in turn basically make us do all the things that we do or carry out all the processes that we're supposed to carry out, right? And basically our entire point of existence is to protect and pass along this genetic line as if we were wired to survive. Yeah, it's thrilling. It's proof enough for me. Agreed. So I think everybody would be very well off to go read Chuck's article, are Humans Wired to Survive? On how stuff works.com. Don't you agree, Chuck? I hope so. And stick around to find out how you can get $600 from Charles Brian right after this. Stuff you should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things to think about, like, say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket? Or whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera? But thankfully, we don't need to think about online fraud because for every purchase you make, visa keeps an eye out for fraud with real time fraud monitoring and by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace of mind? Safe, secure Visa. Okay, so thanks for sticking around. I don't blame you. I could use $600, Chuck. Where's this influx of cash coming from? Josh is coming from your own pocket, dude. How so? Well, it's called the economic stimulus check that everyone received not too long ago from President Bush. And I had a hard time getting worked up for that personally because it's kind of our money to begin with. Yeah, I chipped in 1260,000,000 of that $600. So thanks for giving us back our own money. Yeah, exactly. It's kind of a thing. But I guess the real question is, are you actually going to hand this over to one of our listeners or me? I'm not. But the real question is, does that really make a difference in our economy? I don't know. But I know our colleague Jane McGrath actually wrote an article called can Tax Rebates Really Prevent an Economic Downturn? I would advise anyone interested in the answer to that question to go read it on Housetopworks.com, wouldn't you? I'm going to do it right now, often. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep works.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcasts@housetopworks.com brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means school's out, the sun 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 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 want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? And by that we mean your dog. Hey. 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."
4333565c-53a3-11e8-bdec-dba689447c67	What was the Falkland Islands War all about anyway?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-was-the-falkland-islands-war-all-about-anyway	The battle between Britain and Argentina over the rocky, cold Falkland Islands is one of the weirder wars in history. Learn all about it today!	The battle between Britain and Argentina over the rocky, cold Falkland Islands is one of the weirder wars in history. Learn all about it today!	Thu, 19 Mar 2020 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=79, tm_isdst=0)	49541222	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Wait, what's the opposite? How about Sad Trombone? Vancouver and Portland, Oregon? We can't come see right now. We're sorry to say it's not us. The Coronavirus told us not to come. That's right. Local authorities are shutting down shows of this size. We are not able to come. We are postponing. We will have more information coming. As far as rescheduling, I believe how it works is your tickets are good if you want to come to that other show, but we don't know all the details yet, so just bear with us while we try and figure this out. Right. And in the meantime you can get in touch with the Arlene Schnitzer concert hall and the Chan Center box offices to figure out what's what. Yeah, they'll probably have good info, but we really apologize for any inconvenience and we will eventually see you guys, we promise. In the meantime, stay well. Wash those hands and don't panic. 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. There's Jerry over there. That friends makes the stuff you should know the final studio recording. That's pretty good, Chuck. Maybe not final. That sounded a little final. The temporarily for now final studio recording. The indefinitely suspended recordings in the studio. Yes. Starting after obviously everyone knows what's going on in this world, this country. Why don't be quiet. But we've you're getting set up in our homes. Yeah, I set up a system yesterday that I just didn't quite trust for today's. Yes. It was a little premature to test the day after, right? I think so, but I posted a picture of it on the Movie Crush page and I was pretty excited. I was like, guys, after twelve years, I'm finally a dude recording a podcast in his basement. Right. You went full circle backwards. Full circle. That's nice. It was funny. People were saying stuff like, just make sure your mom keeps it down upstairs and that kind of thing. Yes, I saw that picture. I love the quilt tablecloth. It's really home spun. It's beautiful. Yeah, that's my daughter's quilt. I had to yank that. Oh no, it's not okay. It all sounds pretty I mean, she's not cold at night. We have other blankets. Okay, good. It sounds pretty good though. The band room already had sound baffling. Okay. So I just sort of moved my bass player out of the way because this is kind of over in his corner and just kind of positioned it where I'm speaking into this sort of dense corner and I did a sound check and sounds pretty good. That's great, man. So look for that coming soon everyone. Hopefully you won't know a difference. Yeah, we should just not even mention it and see if anybody notices. Well, our aim is to keep bringing everyone shows every week because podcasts are going to be a pretty big deal moving forward for people. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, if we can record remotely and still release on time, that will hopefully be a source of comfort for people who are just sitting at homeboard getting a little stir crazy. So, yeah, that's the aim. So our two aims are to not come down with coronavirus ourselves and then also keep releasing on time and on schedule. That's number two. All right, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. Chuck so we're talking the Falklands War and you requested this one, right. So this is your idea. Yeah. Do you know why? It was one of those things that happens to us every now and then where we think of something that we remember. Right, but you know nothing about. I remember this, I was eleven years old, but I'm like, what was that all about? Where are the Falkland Islands, even? Right? What's going on now? I know all about it. Yes, but I was wondering if you requested it because of the fact that it's starting to heat up again. Geopolitically down there? No, I had nothing to do with it. Okay. Because it is. It turns out it is. We'll talk about it at the end there, but I was like, wow, that's very prescient. Chuck's got his finger on the pulse of some real arcane geopolitics right now. No, this was all just sort of yearbook memories. Right. The Falkland Island said, Stay cool this summer, see you next fall. So I was the first one to write on your crack. Did people do that to yours? Oh, yeah. That's timeless, man. So what we're talking about, though, is the Falkland Islands war. In 1982, Great Britain went to war with Argentina over a little tiny group. Well, they're not so tiny, we'll get into that. But as far as livable thrivable areas, these little rocky islands out in the middle of nowhere in the Atlantic Ocean, not to say that they're useless. They're definitely not useless. There are people who live there and have lived there for hundreds of years now. No, there's been archaeological studies of the area and they've turned up zero evidence of prehistoric people living there. So it's not a highly valuable area, but it is a place that some people call home. And we're in no position to poopoo anywhere somebody calls home. It's just again, Geopolitically speaking, it's really bizarre that Great Britain went to war with Argentina over this particular set of islands. Yeah. And we'll get into the ins and outs of that. But in general, it's fair to say that old time colonialism had a part in it, but it was also the fact that the Falkland Islands are not super far, if you're talking about the size of the world from Antarctica. And anytime there are different countries that want to be set up near other places, right. Seemingly unpopular land can become popular. It is, yeah. Every country wants to stake some sort of outpost near the ancient sleeping ones, the eldritch gods that are asleep beneath Antarctica right now, to worship them when they wake up. But that can lead to disputes among nations, and in particular Argentina is like, hey, man, these are like, 400 miles off of our coast. Surely they belong to us. They're about a thousand miles above Antarctica, the northernmost outpost of Antarctica. But the British say, no, this is a British territory, even though it is nowhere near Great Britain in any sense. We've stopped them before. It really hasn't, but it does. It has to do with colonialism and the British Empire. But they've said, no, we've been here for a while. This is our place. Yeah. And the Grabster put this together very detailed. Yes. Account. But we're going to talk a little bit about the origin of these islands and why different countries thought that they were theirs. Yes. Starting in about well, they think possibly Magellan, maybe Amerigo Vespucci. Love that guy's name. Yeah. They may have seen the Falklands, but the first British person to have landed on the Falklands is named John Strong, and he showed up in 1690. And the Falkland Islands look kind of if you squint and use 80% of your imagination, look a bit like a butterfly. And the body of the butterfly is a channel that runs between the two main islands, east and West Falklands. And so he named that channel the Falkland Sound, after the guy who was running the show for the Admiralty, the Navy, I guess, of Great Britain at the time, and he got his title from Scotland. So it actually is kind of appropriate that you would name this area after some place in Scotland because it is kind of Scottish climate wise, apparently. It's a little soggy it's kind of cold and you kind of have to like that kind of weather to survive there and not go crazy. Yeah. And he wasn't the first person. Other people had discovered it before. People came afterward, and it's sort of so removed that people showed up afterward. In 17. I won the French. 1764. More French. Yeah. And they both said, well, nothing is going on here. This is ours. And they named them French names. Yeah. The guy who really made the first real attempt at settling the place, antoine Louis de Bougainville, he set up a colony and the Spanish showed up and they said, hey, you know how we basically own South America? We own this, too. It's only 400 miles east of us, so get out of here and Bough okay, but I set up this legit colony and I want some money for it. So they gave them what would amount today to about $1.1 million for it. Not bad. Not bad at all. So the French said okay, Spanish, this is yours. We recognize that. Well, at about the same time, some English settlers showed up and they said, we're going to settle this place, had no idea that the French were even there, had even less of an idea that the French had just sold their claim to it, to Spain. And the British kind of made their home there for about a year before they noticed French settlement there and went over and said, hey, this is our place. You need to get out. Yeah, it's funny, too, because Ed made a very ed joke. He said, q yakity sacks. Because that's kind of what it sounded like at first. Britain settled. They didn't even notice that there was a French settlement there until a year later. Right. And then this weird exchange starting in 1769 started going back and forth. Where? Summer of Love. Yeah, I was going to say that every time we went to a year from now, I almost let it slip by and I was like, Last possible second, I'm going for it. That's pretty good. So starting in 1769, this weird exchange started where British ships and Spanish ships would go back and forth, trading letters that got a little more heated, saying, no, you leave. No, you leave. And then eventually Spain said, oh, you know what? We're going to send all of our ships. And Britain said, Fine, it's yours. In a certain way. Yeah, in a certain way. And this is really kind of critical because I guess the Spanish forced the British out, but I don't know if there was any kind of treaty signed or anything. It didn't sound like it. Okay, so the Spanish forced the British out and basically, I guess, took at least possession of the islands. But this is a big deal. The Falklands have been a site of international wars for years now. And the first one was called the Falkland Islands Crisis of 1770. Where the French were down there. The English were down there. The Spanish were down there. And all of them wanted this island. Mainly because the English and the French didn't want the Spanish to control the entire southwestern hemisphere of the world. Which they basically did by controlling South America for the most part. And conversely, the Spanish were like, I don't want the French or the English to have even just a little bit of a toehold here, so they need to get out. But it was a big deal. It was literally called the Falkland Islands crisis of 1770. Yeah. In America was like, oh, can we please be a country quickly so we can get down there, too? Right. We'll just hang in the background and manipulate everything. All right, so after that crisis point, England and Spain both had settlements down there for quite a few years and they were just sort of both down there. It was kind of odd. If you look historically, that's usually not how things go. Yeah. Apparently the crisis never came to a full head and actually just went to a breaking point. It just continued to simmer I guess with everybody hanging out on the island. I bet there were some good times too, though. Maybe. So in the 18 hundreds they both left and then that kind of was like a reboot almost for the Falklands. No one really had a claim it fell into. I mean, it sounds scary on one hand, but it also sounds like a wild party because pirates and whalers basically ed described it as had their way with the island for two decades. So I guess they had sex with the island. They literally humped the island. That's what it was like down there. But it fell into lawlessness and piracy, like we said. And then the Argentinian revolution came around. Spain lost all the claim, but Argentina, it was so rough. Argentina tried to say, hey, this is ours, and put governors on the island. But they got rebuffed by the party scene. Yeah, the party people said Get out of here. And they actually did. The Argentinians failed to install any kind of government on the island. And so in 1834 the British showed up with the governor and they said, we're installing some law around here. And either they were more apt to kill people to get their way or the people down there already were more down with the British than the Argentinians. I'm not sure, but either way the British were successful at installing a government there starting in 1834. So here's the thing. From that moment on the British had a government set up and connected to the government of Great Britain from that moment on. And that is basically the basis of the claim that they make that they say we have been living on these islands in one way or another continuously since 1834. Of course, this is our territory. Yeah, I mean, they built a town, Stanley, which is, as far as I know, still the sort of biggest thing going there. Oh, by far. They were farmers, our farmers. Sheep, cattle, pigs. They would do a little fishing. It was a place where boats could stop off and get fixed or fueled up or something. Or resupplied. Yeah, they make a little money on the side from tourists who come to see people humping islands. But we're talking less than 5000 people and they are all basically Scottish and Welsh descendants of those settlers. So if you were to go down to the Falkland Islands in the early 1980s and even now you would think this is a British outpost. Yeah, dude. As recently as 2013, Great Britain held a referendum for selfdetermination among the fall cleaners. And all but four four residents, not 4% four residents voted to stay a British territory. What do they want? The four? Yeah, Ross Bay. All they want to do is hump the island. They don't want to be bothered to think about politics at all. Which they call the Ross Perot. Ross Perot. Oh boy. Maybe we should take a break. Take a little cool shower. Okay. And we'll come back with more Falklandomania right after this. Okay. So the British are saying, hey, not only have we had a claim on this since at least 1834, the people who live there consider themselves British. It's ours. But the Argentinians said, no, you know what? The Spanish held this place before the British, and we inherited any title to it from the Spanish after the revolution. It's closer to us. What else do you want? What do you want to hear? And the Argentinian's claim on the Falklands is actually fairly tenuous, but that has not stopped them from kind of coving these islands and making attempts to go after them over the years. Yeah. I mean, Argentina will say, you guys left in 1774, so you abandon it. Britain would say, well, you never establish any kind of sovereignty there. Right there. There were no indigenous people. It's not like we came down here and kicked all your people out of here and displaced them. So there's really no big moral claims either. And I don't know if I know enough about it, even after all this, to really say, without making some people mad. But it seems like it was Britain's. Yeah, no, it's still like a point of national soreness in Argentina, and I think there's a little bit of national pride in the UK of it. But yes, the fact that the people who live there and are descended, some people who have lived there since 1834 consider themselves British. I agree with you that, to me, says it's a British territory, which ostensibly would make Argentina the invading force, the bad people. Yes. And that's the thing. We always have to have good guys and bad guys, and both sides did good and bad things during this conflict. There were bad people on both sides. But you can make man chuck. You can make the case that, yes, if you have to identify an aggressor in this situation, it was Argentina who did it, because, again, the Spanish settled it before the British, but then the Spanish left and the Argentinians overthrew the Spanish. There were no indigenous people that lived on these islands that were connected to Argentina in any way. There's really no legal or moral claim that Argentina had aside from proximity. And that just doesn't really hold up when it comes to territorial disputes. So, yes, you can really make the case that Argentina was the aggressor. And it doesn't hurt that the proportion of Argentinian listeners to stuff you should know pales in comparison to the British proportion. So leading up to the war, this is sort of the scene you've got the people living on the Falkland Islands. The economy wasn't great. It's never been booming. Like we said, it's a very small seaside hamlet of farmers. They were depending on the British government subsidies to even get by. And this is back in the late 70s, early 80s. Britain says you know what, we would like to start trading with Argentina. We would like to help these islanders out, maybe let them move some wool, maybe make it easier to get fuel and supplies. And Margaret Thatcher comes into power and says, maybe it might also be nice to sell them weapons in Argentina. Yeah, they need missiles and we've got them. Yeah. She opened her trench coat, she's like, what do you need? What do you need? I got it, I got it. Never went. Whoa. Iron lady. I'm not saying she was nude on there, just that she had missiles in her trenches. Got you. So there was one other thing. It wasn't just that the British were being patrimonious and really wanted to help the Falklanders out by opening up trade between them and the Argentinians. They also wanted to potentially offload responsibility for the Falklands to Argentina. Kind of like how you would consider selling a car that you knew maybe had 50 miles left in it. Oh, man. But you could sink some money into repairing it or whatever, or you can sell it to some schmo. And Great Britain identified that this would be a great bargaining chip. The Argentinians really want this thing, so maybe we can sell them this used car in addition to selling them some missiles for a few billion pounds. Yeah. Argentina said, Can I take it for a spin? And Britain went, I can't find the keys right now, but we go ahead and make the deal, I'll see if I can find them. It runs great, though. Yeah, exactly. So just trust me. But imagine what you just said in a British accent. Yeah, I've thought about doing it. So the thing is, this didn't go over very well with Great Britain. They were like, Whoa, whoa, whoa. These are British subjects in some form or another. You can't just abandon them to the Argentines, you can't sell them out. And the people on the island of the Falklands were not very happy with this either. Supposedly they used to call themselves kelpers, and I think I get the impression that it's one of those things that they can still call themselves kelpers. But if you're from Argentina and you call them kelpers, then that's fighting words, okay? But they did not like the idea of being sold off to the Argentinians as a pawn in a larger trade negotiation to sell missiles. That just didn't sit well with them. Now. And you get why. I totally get why. And the other problem is, this is just so neo lib, too. The Thatcher administration went in and was like, this is really what we want to do, is sell missiles, but we're not going to give one way or another. There's no compromise on the Falklands. It's either all or nothing. And they, I guess, wanted to open trade to the Argentinians, but didn't want to give them to the Argentinians. The Argentinians wanted them and rather than find a compromise. Like I said, it was just all or nothing. And they just left it as is. They basically scared the pants off of the Falkland Islanders, saying, we're willing to basically leave you guys hanging. But at the same time, they weren't willing to pull the trigger and go all the way and let Argentina have the Falklands and maybe administer them correctly. Who knows? So instead, the Falkland Islands were left in this weird geopolitical limbo, starting about where no one quite knew exactly how interested Great Britain was in holding these islands. Argentina was very interested in getting these islands. And the Falkland Islanders were caught in the middle of this. Yeah. And on the Argentinian side, they were sort of in the midst of a right wing military dictatorship that after a 76 coup, they were not nice people. They terrorized people, they murdered their opponents, they imprisoned people. It was called the Dirty War. Within that, or a few years after that, in 1009, that was an internal coup within that same party where a General Leopoldo Galtieri good. Sure. All right. He went into power, but still that same right wing faction. And they wanted not only the Falklands, they wanted South Georgia Island and South Sandwich Islands and basically wanted that whole sort of South Atlantic area because of Antarctica. Yes. The other thing is, a lot of people point to this. Did you mention the name of the dictatorship? The NPR? No, it's the opposite of the NPRP. Yeah, it's not the opposite. National Reorganization Process. Well, I mean, opposite of the ethos of MBR. Oh, it is, I guess. Although they're both into reeducation, for sure. Oh, boy. So Argentina basically was saying, like, okay, we're a military hunter. We don't know what to do with the economy. We're super oppressive, especially against our opposition, will make you disappear and murder your family and all this stuff. This is a bad jam at home. We need something to make everybody feel good about being Argentinian again. Maybe if we go get these Falkland Islands, this little adventure is that we go on, we'll restore patriotism in Argentina and we'll make everybody look the other way on what's called the Dirty War that we've been fighting for the last few years, since we've come to power. And that was kind of like the big impetus toward Argentina. They had, like, these military aspirations because it was, after all, a military coup that took over as a military dictatorship. So what else are you going to do? Military stuff. But at the same time, Britain was widely viewed around the world as not really caring much about what happened to the Falklands. And I think that gave Argentina an overblown sense of how easy it would be to just go ahead and take these islands once and for all as their own. Yeah. They needed this for nationalism. They couldn't count on Diego Maradona to come in and save the day for another four or five years. Okay. You have no idea what I'm talking about. He was a soccer player. Yeah. He must have been a contemporary Pay lace, then. The hand of God. That was a very famous soccer goal that he scored. You can't use your hands in soccer. Exactly. Look it up. Okay. So I think that kind of sets the table for what's about to happen here. It's not like England or I'm sorry, Jeez, I always do that. Let's just say Britain to be safe. That's what I've been doing. Britain wasn't really planning for this. Even though there have been a lot of back and forth about the Falklands, I don't think they expected ultimately a surprise attack. They weren't really prepared. Like you mentioned, the Argentines thought it would kind of go pretty easily because they didn't seem like they cared about it. The Brits. Yeah. And they're like, we're going to go get all these islands. But then this weird sort of start to the war, to the start of a very weird war happened, which is an incident at South Georgia Island with a scrap metal dealer, of all things. Yeah. So at that time, remember, the Argentinian dictatorship was just looking for any opportunity to take these islands, and that scrap metal dealer got a contract to dismantle the whaling station in South Georgia Island. And so we chartered an Argentinian navy vessel to carry him and his salvage crew over there. And Argentina actually thought this would be a good opportunity for us to secretly invade South Georgia Island. I mean, invade by way of just sort of parking their car there and saying, hey, this is ours. Exactly. And they didn't even as they were backing in, somebody else was coming in frontway. Seinfeld yes. And they just had to stand there and argue for a while. But finally the Argentinians won. And when they got this is the weird thing. When they got to South Georgia Island, the first thing they did, the salvage crew was raised the Argentinian flag. They replaced the Union Jack with the Argentinian flag. It's an act of aggression, dude. You could be a second grade Cub Scout and recognize that you are not supposed to do something like that. Not even as a joke, which is what Argentina ultimately claimed. That was we're just getting around. Just joking. Was there international diplomatic response? Yeah. And Britain does not take kindly to that. No, because they knew that Argentina wanted these islands. But here's the thing, it was a really stupid thing to do because right when British diplomats pointed out that they had done this and demanded that it be removed and the Union Jack be put up, the Argentinians were like, just kidding, just kidding, and put the flag back up. But it immediately put the British on high alert. The diplomatic tensions were raised. It was a dumb thing to do if they were planning on really tactically invading and holding the Falklands because it got the British attention. Yeah. It didn't seem like any of this is very well thought out. No, they were closer, so they both start sending ships. Argentina is going to get there quicker. Obviously. They sent clear indication that they were going to invade the Falklands. The Endurance was a British ship. And Captain Barker of the Endurance brought this news to London. There were only 68 Marines on the islands. Royal Marines. British Marines didn't have great weapons, were really under weapon, under artillery, under staff. It was sort of those deals where they're like, what are we doing down here, guys? For a long time, I think, until this happened. Right. So, I mean, imagine being that there was like 68 of them, I guess, just hanging out, like 68, knowing that the Argentinians were coming. Right. Or thinking that they probably work. I know they knew it was on the way. Well, here's the thing. So, back in London, Margaret Thatcher and her Tory government were not convinced. She said later on, I think her diaries got published about this or whatever, but in the days leading up to it, she was like, she could not believe that Argentina would actually go through with an invasion because it was such a stupid thing to do that she just couldn't believe it. That was combined with eventually with some of her military advisers saying, if they take these islands, there's no guarantee we're going to get them back. And she realized that if she lost the Falkland Islands to Argentina, that was it. She was never going to be reelected and her government would basically just limp along until the next election. It would be a really bad look for her. So she had to win these back, but at the same time, she couldn't just send the Royal Navy down there for nothing. So she had to make this decision about what to do, whether to be proactive or reactive. And she ultimately waited and was reactive. And by the time she reacted, she was working with the knowledge that it wasn't guaranteed that now that they have invaded, that Great Britain would be able to take it back. That's right. And you say take it back. We haven't even mentioned the fact that Argentina took it to begin with. Yeah, I think that was implied. April 2, 1982, about 300 in the morning, their tactical dive team came aboard the island. They approached the capital. They, under cover of darkness, fired on the barracks because the Royal Marines knew this was coming. So they had abandoned the barracks and were sort of falling back, essentially toward the Government House, which is where they were going to hold up on their final stand. Right. Argentinians had a lot more people. They had amphibious assault vehicles and eventually the Brits retired to the Government House and said, we give up, we surrender. 10:00 A.m.. The Union Jack was replaced by. The Argentinian flag and Argentina broke their arms patting themselves on the back. They lost five people, they killed one, I'm sorry, zero British soldiers. And we're like, all right, we did it. That was super easy, just like we thought. And so the Argentinians were thinking, well, that was very easy. The British are clearly disinterested in the Falklands. They're probably just going to say, well, you guys captured it fair and square, we'll get our people out of there, they're your islands now. But this is not at all what happened. In fact, the British did not take very kindly to this and I propose we take a break and talk about the actual Falkland war after this. Let's do it. Okay. So where we left off was Argentina had taken the Falklands with very little effort and then Margaret Thatcher realized what was going on in a big way and she went, Noddled my watch. That was dead on. So once Brittany said, you know what, we're going to fight back here and we're going to take these islands back, it became the real deal thing. And we'll talk about in the end, there are casualties numbered at about 1000 on both sides. So it still wasn't the biggest conflict, but it was a real conflict. No, it really was. And Britain was in this weird position. Argentina was in a weird position and that they were fighting a pretty substantial military. But Britain was in a weird position in that they knew that if they over showed force, if they just pounded the Argentinians into dust, other countries might actually enter the war on the side of Argentina. So they had to get these islands back without just using all of their might against Argentina. Yeah. And with also saying, we're not going to come after you, Argentina. In Argentina, supposedly they explicitly said that. Yeah. I mean, this is such a weird war and a weird time. It really was. It was a weird war. But, yeah, a lot of people just kind of joke like, oh, the British invaded the Falklands. What an overblown move. But at the same time, it was like Thatcher's Prime Ministry was on the line. And also the idea that these were British subjects who were being occupied, make no mistake about it, I can't forget about them. If you were living on the Falklands and you left your house, you were living under Argentinian occupation, they changed what side of the road you're supposed to drive on, which is crazy. A little bit. By the way, one of these days we're going to have to do a short stuff on dogging. It was in either Sweden or I think Sweden. It was the day that they changed from one side of the road to the other for driving. That was fun around the country. Yes. It was just a big mess. We'll talk about it sometime. But you also had to carry, like a white flag around with you to basically let them know you were noncombatant. And even still, even under those conditions, I think at least three Falkland Islanders were killed during this war, so it was a big deal. And there were reasons for the British to invade. And again, you can really make the case the Argentinians were the aggressors in the situation. Yeah. So, April 6, the Great Britain finally puts together a war cabinet. They name their operation Corporate and they send down a couple of aircraft carriers, about 127 ships. They send down fighter jets there's helicopters while they're doing this because, like we mentioned, it takes a long time to get down there on an aircraft carrier. They were still hoping to work this out. Like, France got involved and they said, you know what, we're not going to sell arms to Argentina anymore. They're flying our fighter jets, by the way, so here's some help in defeating them. If you want a little inside scoop, there's a little button on the back. As long as you push it and they won't be able to drop bombs. Yes. Their wings will fold in. Reagan got involved. He called up Galgieri specifically, said, let's try and work it out peacefully. I'm going to send Al Hague down there. And they said, no, we don't want your help, Reagan. So Britain said, oh, you don't want Ronald Reagan's help. Then screw you, it's on. Yeah. And so it was on from that point on. The British were like, all right, well, then it's just war is what we're going to do. So two aircraft carriers showed up and since they only had two, they had a limited number of jets. But it turns out that their jets were mostly useful in keeping the Argentinian fighter jets away from bombing and missile attacks on the ships, but weren't successful in every case. As funny as it seems like the British were fighting the Argentinians, the Argentina had some successes, definitely in this war, too. It wasn't just totally lopsided. Yeah. I mean, Britain, it all really started on April 25 and kind of one of the first things that Britain did was go after one of their submarines. The Santa Fe. Damaged that one pretty heavily. That submarine made it to the South Georgia island, but the crew jumped off and basically retired the submarine on the spot. Royal Marines were getting reinforced the whole time and this is really what made the biggest difference is Britain had complete control of the naval side of things. Right. Yeah. Just immediately, the Argentinians figured out, we aren't going to be able to do much with our navy, but again, we've got some fighter jets and they're French and they work pretty good as long as you don't press that one button. And they use them to good effect, in that they would fly decoy flights to get the British jets to come chase them. And then the real attack jets would come in and actually attack, like a ship or maybe the mainland or something like that? Yeah, that works maybe a couple of times, sure. They also had surface to air missiles that they used fairly well, although they apparently accidentally shot down one of their planes at least once. The point of all this, the upshot, is that despite British superiority, in just about every single way, argentina did have some success and they managed to stave off the British retaking the Falklands, which, spoiler alert, the British retook the Falklands. This whole conflict lasted 74 days. Yeah, they sunk a destroyer. I think they sunk some other ships. One of the big turning points was when, on May 2, the General Belgrano, which was an Argentinian cruiser, was destroyed by the HMS Conqueror. And that was like 323 men were killed, basically, in that attack. And that was not half, but 40% of the losses of the whole war. Right. And most of 30%, most of Argentina's losses came from the sinking of that one ship. And that was viewed as fairly grotesque by a lot of people, by the international community, really, because, remember, England needed to say great Britain needed to basically show themselves as showing restraint. This was not necessarily a show of restraint. The Argentinians said that this was not inside of the no go zone, where their ship wasn't supposed to be, that it had been tracked down by the British and sunk, that they could have just disabled it, but they purposefully sunk it and that it killed 323 Argentinians in one shot, which is just bad press for anybody. It makes England look like an overblown bully. And, you know, they died in pretty terrible ways. Like, a lot of them drown, but a lot of them froze in lifeboats because, again, we're not that far away from Antarctica, and it took 24 hours, I think, for them to be rescued. So a lot of people froze to death in lifeboats, waiting to be rescued, because they were sunk by the British ship, rather than just having the ship disabled. Yeah, it made a nice little Jaws reference in this, too. Did you catch that? I didn't. Made 2nd 1980, 2095 men went into the water, 772 come out the sea, took the rest. I got it. Now, the other big turner, right, yeah, of course, the other big turning point came. Of course. This is all like, sinking of ships and naval battles. What they needed to do was take the main town. And on May 21, the British gained a very good foothold when they made a landing on East Falkland and started advancing towards Stanley, which was not Stanley the guy that was just there cleaning up, but Stanley the town, stanley the measuring tape. That's right. And they basically, Argentinians would fight until they ran out of ammo, then they would get captured and the Brits would just move slowly, I think, for May 21 to June 11. They finally assaulted Stanley. And on June 14 no. Poor Stanley. On June 14 So just three days after they finally got to Stanley, they surrendered. Argentina did, yeah. But note here that it was May 21 that the British finally landed on East Falkland and June 13 that they managed to take control of Stanley. Yeah, three weeks. It was three weeks. And the Argentinians managed to hold them off for that long. But this is almost like, you know those movies, like the huge sweeping, epic comedies like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World? Sure. Where there's like ten different things going on at once. And the scene just kind of visits each person. In one scene, there was a brigadier general named Tony Wilson, who is, I guess, on hiatus from running factory records at the time. He was trying to get to Fitzroy, which was a smaller town, not as big as Stanley, but it was a town. And he decided to get some intel on where the Argentinians would he just looked up the number from one of the Fitzroy residents, went to a phone booth and called and said, hey, are the Argentinians around today? And the resident said, no, they're not. Maybe today would be a good day for you guys to come. And that's how they overtook Fitzroy. Wow. And so, little by little, they started taking the East Falkland until, like you said, they finally took Stanley. Amazing. And one other thing. One of the overlooked, unsung groups of soldiers who helped really retake Stanley are the Gurkhas. Have you heard about them? I have not. Holy cow, dude. They're widely considered to be the toughest soldiers in the world. Toughest mother gerkas on the planet. Exactly. They are from Nepal. They're the Nepalese, like basically Nepalese special forces. And they're known for carrying these Kukri knives. K-U-K-R-I knives. I'm sure I said that incorrectly. And by the way, apparently everyone else in the world, except for you and I, know how to pronounce the national language of the Philippines correctly. Yeah, we did a listener mail about that, but they're just still pouring in. Yeah. So these knives are just really fierce looking and these guys are basically just going from observation station to observation station, I guess just taking out Argentinian guys with their knives and helping reestablish this British foothold on the East Falklands. Check them out. The gurkhas. You'll like them? I think I like the gurkhas. Sure. So in the end, like we said, they surrendered on June 14. We should point out that there was a neutral sea zone that had hospital ships on both sides and throughout this whole thing, which got really acrimonious. It sounds silly to say about a war, but it was one of the more acrimonious wars because it was small and they were really mad at each other. But these hospital ships helped each other out. They cooperated, they transferred patients, which says a lot about how things were. Yeah. It was still civil, even though acrimonious, right, that's right. Argentina, in the end, suffered 649 deaths, which was, like we said, about half of those. Actually, almost exactly half came from that ship sinking. Britain lost 255 and those three poor Kelpers. And I'm sorry if that's offensive. Yeah, I don't know if it is. Let's just call them Falkland civilians. Yeah. They were killed. Stanley Heights. Yes. Stanley and the Antonians. So it did not work out well for Argentina. It really backfired. That was pretty humiliating defeat. The NRP was defeated in 1983 and free election started, so that's a good thing. Yeah. This was actually a huge impetus for them losing control of power, was that Argentina was defeated and kind of humiliated, actually. And this military government says this was like Ed put it like a Hail Mary, a last ditch effort to kind of retain power. They lost the Falklands, so they lost their power in Argentina. It's always good anytime a military dictatorship loses control of a nation. Sure. Yeah. So one of the things, Chuck, is still to this day, the Falklands are in dispute by Argentina. And I was asking you if you came up with this idea because of stuff that's been going on lately, but ever since, I think, 2009, Argentina made a claim at the UN to extend its territorial waters from 200 nautical miles offshore to 350, while 350 nautical miles off of Argentina completely envelops the Falkland Islands, the South Georgia Island and the Sandwich Islands. Okay. This is not something that the British are okay with. So much so that one of the revelations from the Snowden Whistleblower Files was that the British had engaged in disinformation campaigns and propaganda campaign secret ones to change public opinion in Argentina about the Falklands sovereignty and then being part of a British than being just thoroughly British. And Argentina has no claim on it. Right. And the reason why I was looking into this, I'm like, is another war there possible? Who knows? The reason why is because in 2010, they found a massive oil deposit that is in the territorial waters of the fall cleanse. So if Argentina's waters extend to envelop the fall cleanse, that's their oil deposit in the UK said, no, no, that's our oil deposit, because that's in the Falkland waters. And I think in 2016, the UN Commission ruled in favor of Argentina, even though they said, well, we don't really have any teeth. It's just our opinion that Argentina has a legitimate claim on this and the UK said we're not going to be paying attention to that. Wow. Yeah. So it's still continuing today. And even more than just being like a source of national pride now, it's a source of national oil. So who knows what will happen in the coming years over that? Jeez? Plus, when the eldritch gods wake up yeah, well, then we're all doomed. So you got anything else about the Falklands. Got nothing else. Now I get it. Yeah, me too, Chuck. Me too. So thanks for that. If you want to know more about the Falklands, well, you can start reading up on it. There's plenty of stuff to be read. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this from a teacher who is grounded right now because of the coronavirus and wants a little help from us. Okay. Hey, guys. My name is Marissa Stratton. I'm a 6th grade teacher from Springfield, Illinois. Like most of the country, our school is currently shut down. I'm wondering if you could help me with the suggestion for my students. I'm fairly new to the podcast world. I listen to and love your podcast. I would love to recommend it to my students, but I know some topics would be inappropriate for eleven year olds. You got that right. Like pumping the island. I was about to say any of our history shows here's where your help would be greatly appreciated. Do you have any specific episodes in mind that would be great for eleven and twelve year olds? Or do you have suggestions of other podcasts that middle schoolers might enjoy? I read a lot of articles, but I'm just overwhelmed. Being out of the classroom is very stressful and I want to make sure I'm recommending popularity and quality to my students. Not just popularity, that is from Marissa Stratton. So I thought about this. I didn't make a specific list, but I was just about to say most of our history shows are pretty appropriate. Would you agree? Yes. I would like to think that all of our stuff is in the wheelhouse of eleven and twelve year olds. At least the same level of humor. I think so. I mean, it's pretty easy when you look through the 1200 plus episodes. There's a lot of science and history and stuff like that. I think it's pretty clear. The ones to avoid, like if you see things on like magic mushrooms or marijuana, grow farm or murder stories, stuff like that, you may want to avoid. But aside from that, it's pretty self explanatory. A few dumb blue jokes. Aside from us, they're pretty clean for sure. And a lot of them probably fly over an eleven year old. Ted yes, but that's for her to decide. They may want to learn about the Mendel brought set. No, I mean our jokes. Our jokes might fly over the eleven year old. Got you. That's true. So, yeah, I guess I would recommend maybe listening to them once before sharing them, but yeah, like we pride ourselves on being pretty family friendly. Agreed. Okay. That was Ms. Stratton. Correct? Well, thanks a lot, Ms. Stratton. And hello to your class who are being taught virtually, I'm guessing, right now. We're the teachers now. Yeah, exactly. Just leave it to us. America and world. We got this. If you want to get in touch with us like Ms. Stratton did, please feel free to 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 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, 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 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. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-12-15-sysk-porta-potties-final.mp3	How Porta-Potties Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-porta-potties-work	Despite our lengthy history of evacuating our bowels and bladders, it wasn’t until the relatively recent 1940s that we began to construct portable, self-contained toilets to accept our waste. Dive into the world of porta-potties in this episode.	Despite our lengthy history of evacuating our bowels and bladders, it wasn’t until the relatively recent 1940s that we began to construct portable, self-contained toilets to accept our waste. Dive into the world of porta-potties in this episode.	Thu, 15 Dec 2016 08:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=8, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=350, tm_isdst=0)	39459182	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"San Francisco. The S y SK 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 San Sketchfest 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. A couple of drinks, 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. 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 howstuffworkscom? Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarkters. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry Master. Ace Roland. And this is stuff you should know. Yeah. Poopy Edition. This one's going to get disgusting. Yeah. I mean, I don't think you need trigger warnings when the title of the episode has got Porta Potty in it, but we'll just throw it out there. We're going to be talking about poop and pee. And so if you're having lunch, maybe just put that chili dog down gag easily. Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, Chuck, I don't think we can put it off any longer. Yeah, that kind of beat it out. I kind of like how this article actually starts, though, by Dave Ruse. He talks about the taste of Chicago. Oh, is this a Ruse jam? Yes, it is. He's good. So he talks about how if you go to the Taste of Chicago, right. Every July, they hold it at the Grant Park alongside the lake. When was our show there, by the way? Was that July? No, it was chillier than that. I think it was October. Okay. They had something had happened in Grant Park because I remember seeing hundreds and hundreds of Porta Potties on the drive in. Oh, really? Yeah. Maybe they just always have them there. No, I don't think so. Okay, well, for the Taste of Chicago, they definitely have portopolis, in fact, for 2014. And we should say there's like, a million people that come through this thing over the course of the week. Yeah, it's a lot of folks. It really is. Have you ever been to Atlanta's, taste of anything? No, I haven't. Either. I don't think a million people show up for it now. It makes me want to go try Chicago. Me, too. You got a million people. And Service Sanitation, Inc. Which is the company that landed the porter potty contract, crunched the numbers, looked at the food that was going to be there, said, you're going to have some beer? Yeah. Okay. They carried the one, and they came up with 380 regular Porta Potties. Yeah. 28 wheelchair accessible Porta Potties. Good. And 80 hand washing stations. They have soap and fresh running water. Not bad, right? So here's the thing. That's great. They delivered all those things, but had they just walked away and said, see, at the end of Taste of Chicago, it would have been a living nightmare for everyone involved. Yeah. That would be more than the Taste of Chicago. It'd be the sickening smell of Chicago. Yeah, that would have been bad because well, we'll get into it. But Porta Potty, sometimes you can leave them, come back a week later and just take them away if it's a temporary work site or something. But sometimes when you're selling beer and chili, you need to come at the end of every day and clean those suckers out. Yes. And that's what they did. They came at night when everyone was sleeping. Well, I guess if you went to bed at 09:00 p.m., that's what I'm sleeping. But they would come every night from 09:00 A.m. To 03:00 A.m., and they would work. And here's the thing. Porta Potties, it turns out I was overthinking them. I thought there was maybe a little more going on. No, they are self. I really don't know what I thought. It escaped me as the reality of Porta Potty sunk in. My delusions about my illusions about them kind of escape me. It trickled away, and now I can't remember what they were. You've used a port of addy, right? Sure I have. Okay. But I was holding my breath and just barely had my eyes open because I didn't want any germs to get on my eyeballs, so I wasn't paying that much attention. It's an in and out kind of thing. Yeah. It turns out that when you service the Porter Potty, what you're doing is you're showing up with a truck as a tank with a vacuum on it, a pressurized tank, and you are sucking the contents out of that porter potty. Yes. And then you put it in the truck, you drive off and you dump it off at the waste treatment plant of your local city or town. Yes. It's like a gigantic wet veck. Yes, it is. For poopoo and peepee. Yes. And a very dangerous one. I saw at least one story in a Porta Potty trade magazine. I read a bunch of those in Life. What was the magazine called? It's called Portable Restroom Operator. Pro. It's a good mag, man. I actually found this one issue online going all the way back to 2009 that I was looking for. So they're legit. Yeah, but they could have been a little more fun with the name. Well, I think they're saying, like, hey, man, take a look at all the fun you want, but we're saving you're behind. Hey, see, that sounds like a slogan. I'm sure it is. Well, they do point out a couple of the slogans because porta potty companies or Porta John's Jiffy Johns portalou, if you're in England, toy toy if you're in Malaysia. They're very famous for having pretty fun punny slogans. Right. Like, we're number one in the number two business. Not bad. No, it's not bad. No one takes care of our business like Mr. John. Sure. I saw that, too. Yeah. There's also one called Gotta Go, but it's spelled really impressively. It's all one word and it's lower case, so it's super mod. G-O-T-U with an Oomlout. G O. Love it. Do you like that one? Yeah. I thought you were going a different direction. I thought it was going to be a little more like GE A UX. No, if they were in Louisiana, maybe. Yeah, that's what I thought. Sure. No, this is an oomla. That's what got me. Well, that's why you love Motley Crue so much. Sure it is. All right. So should we talk a little bit about the history? I think so. All right, well, we need to go back to World War II in this case. And because World War II was going on, there was a need for more poopers, essentially. Right. Because they had manufacturing plants popping up. They had temporary manufacturing plants going up. They had places where they didn't want to build, full service, permanent bathrooms all over the place. All of a sudden, these people needed to go potty. I saw a few different origin stores, but the one I saw the most frequently was that the ship building docks at Long Beach during World War II. Sure. They're building warships for the US. The guys working the docks would have to build the ships would have to get on a rowboat and go back to the dock to use the bathroom. Yeah, that's no good. And they were like, this is a terrible waste of time. Can we just get something on the ship? So they started building temporary what amounted to the first porta potty. They are on the ships for them to use. Yeah. And these first ones, you can look up a picture of the Andy gump. Is that what it's called? I didn't see I got to look that up. I think it's the Andy Gump, like one of the just type in 1940s portapotty. And there would be a picture, and it's basically this big, heavy metal square. Sometimes they were wood, but they were super heavy and they weren't easily transported. This is preusing Chemicals, which we'll get into to help break the poo poo down. And stuff. So it was just a disgusting affair. I know. I'm having trouble right now. I see the indicator. You see it? Wow. It looks safe to be in. You know what it looks like? It looks like what they used on Mash. Yeah. Like the latrine. Yeah, same idea, basically. Yeah. This is just a latrine. You could take places. Got you. But I came across this really cool little thing on a website about World War II fighter pilots. And with World War II came along planes that could stay in, these bombers that could stay in the air for a lot longer. And they started to think like, hey, these dudes are up there for, like, ten to 14 hours. We have to come up with ways for them to go to the bathroom. Right? Yeah. I mean, you don't think about that when we do the frostbite episode. I certainly didn't think that they were up there getting frostbite because it was so cold. I also didn't think that they were up there so long that they couldn't use the bathroom. They had to hold it. Right? Yeah. And the earliest ones were, well, here's a funnel, and it's attached to a tube and it leads out of the plane, so go ahead and pee. Yeah. And that's basically just for the pilot and copilot this relief tube. After that, they're like, well, what do we have to poop? They said, can you get your hands on a produce crate? And the crew would say, like, well, yeah, sure. We have produced creative course, whatever we commies. And the people in charge of say, well, pooping that, take that up in the plane and just poop in that, buddy, and maybe wash it out when you get down here and put it back in for later use. Yeah. Or maybe just get a new crate, I guess, if you're not thrifty eventually they came up with something called the Elsan E-L-S-A-N. It's a chemical toilet, and it was really kind of one of the first little porta potties. But if you look up Elsin on the images on Google, you will find that it looks like nothing more than a metal oil can that you sit on. It's basically what it was. Pretty much, yeah. And all they're exposed. I mean, there's no room that this is in. You're just doing this in front of all your buddies on the plane. Right. Like prison. Sure. The Elsin toilet was still as primitive as it was. It was an advancement, but it had certain problems. Right. Like, if you were flying through turbulence that Elsie would spill its contents out into the plane. Yeah. There's a few quotes here I'd like to read. A couple of these from some of these fighter pilots. Here's one. And this is from a British pilot while we were flying in rough air, this devil's convenience often shared his contents with the floor of the aircraft. The walls and ceiling and sometimes a bit remained in the container itself. It doesn't take much imagination to picture what it was like trying to combat fear and air sickness while struggling to remove enough gear in cramped quarters and at the same time trying to use the bloody Elsin. If it wasn't an invention of the devil, it certainly might have been one foisted on us by the enemy. When seated and frigid cold amid the cacophony of roaring engines and whistling air, away from what should have been one of life's peaceful moments, the occupant had a chance to fully ponder the miserable condition of his life. This loathsome creation, invariably overflowed on long trips and in turbulence, was always prone to bathe the nether regions of the user. It was one of the true reminders to me that war as hell. That's so gross. You don't think about this stuff. You hear about all the glory of being like a bomber pilot. You don't think about sitting on a can and having your friends poop and peas up on your fanny. Sorry, to those in the UK. Right. Doesn't even make sense in that context. That means something different here in the US. Right? In your butt. Right. So, yeah, that's the first, I guess, chemical toilet, which is a designation of a porta potty. Right? Like a porta potty is a chemical toilet, but not all chemical toilets or porta potty. That's right. But a chemical toilet is any kind of toilet where you have something in there that's intended to break down waste. And actually, I don't know, that an Elsin toilet. I guess it was a chemical toilet. I see now, but that's gross because in addition to getting the rest of the cruise poop and pee slopped up against your rear end, so too were you getting very hazardous chemicals back then for sure as well. Yeah. So that's good, man. That guy may have had his buttocks removed after the war. One of the uses of the toilet, they said that this is supposedly very true, is that some members of the Royal Air Force actually jettisoned the Elsan toilets with their bomb payload on the German targets. I bet. So they would drop these toilets full of poo on the Germans. And there was an American too, had a great quote about peeing through the little hose. He said as the urine ran through the tube, it turned to ice and dropped like topaz colored hail to the ground. I like to imagine every time I urinated over Germany, my acidulus projectile would plink on some Nazi burgers. Aryan nose poetry. Yeah. There's some more good stories in here. You should oh man, I don't remember which website it was. Oh, yeah, yeah. I have to post that later on Facebook. Yeah, for sure. And I'll tweet it. Alright. So that's the war effort that eventually ultimately led to the creation of the porta potty, right? Yes. And again, there were already latrines, there had already been outhouses. And the difference between an outhouse and a Porta Potty is that an outhouse is basically some sort of rigid structure that's intended to be permanent or semi permanent that's dug over a hole in the ground. That's it. A Porta Potty is a self contained unit that has a place where the waste goes and is held inside that unit rather than put into the ground, which is extremely dangerous. We learned a very long time ago, pooping in holes in the ground is not a good way to go as far as public health is concerned. No, it's not. And that's one of the legitimate marks in the favor of Porta Potty. Gross as most people who have ever used one thinks they are. They're actually quite beneficial to public health. Yes. And they're green, too. Saves a lot of water. Yeah, I saw 170,000,000,000 liters a year, about 125,000,000 gallons a day in the US. Alone. Crazy. Yeah. So you want to take a break for a second? Yeah, we'll break and we'll talk a little bit more about the evolution of the Porta John right after this. Clark all right, Chuckers. So we're talking about the evolution of the Portugal. You got the Andy gump, you've got the Elsin toilet, and then finally, in actually the have, what we think of as a Porta Potty, a patent was developed by a guy named George Harding, and he called it for a portable toilet cabana, and it was made from plastic. And although he had the patent for it, the guy who actually gets credit for actually creating the first real modern Porta John or Porta Potty, with a guy named Harvey Heather. Yeah. And he created what's called the Strongbox. Great name. Have you seen the strongbox? Oh, yeah. Oh, you did? That's what I went and found the December 2009 issue of Pro magazine to find, because I saw a reference that they had published a picture of it, and I couldn't find it anywhere else. Oh, yeah. Those things are ugly. Yeah, it wasn't a great looking it's not like the fantastic portage on, say, have today. Yes. It's so gorgeous to look at right now. This thing was ugly. It had no alibi. Yeah. And these were made of fiberglass, which was good. It was lightweight and it was sturdy. It was as sturdy as metal or wood, and it was a lot easier to clean. But the problem with the Strongbox and the fiberglasses, it was a big kind of one piece mold. It was dark inside, which was not good. That's a big drawback. They weren't stackable as far as transporting them, and so that just made it really expensive to get them where they needed to go and back again. It did. And the fact that it was completely opaque and there was no light that could get in, that's an issue. Plus, I also get the impression that the floors could get pretty slick and you could fall and die of positional, asphyxiation in a portage. Yeah. And they were also fiberglass is pretty fragile, so they would break a lot. Fiberglass absorbs odors, which was not good. And so shortly after the fiberglass came along, someone said, you know what, how about polyethylene? This is what we will use. And George Harding, who you mentioned, co founded the Poly John Corporation and he started building the polyethylene portable toilets that were much better because they lasted longer. They would last like a decade. Although I would not want to use a nine year old Porter John. Well, that picture of the strong box that was published in Pro magazine apparently had been out in service. It was still in service and it had been built like 30 years before. Wow. Yeah. You would know that your company could not have cared less about you if you show up to your job site and there's a strong box there, and that's what you're expected to use with all of the possible choices that your company could choose from. And they went with the strong box. They don't care about you or your happiness. No. The polyethylene, the other good thing about them is they were assembled into different parts and pieces, so it made them a lot easier to transport, a lot cheaper. And if a part broke, you might be able to replace it. Oh, yeah. That is kind of good. Yeah. Makes sense. So hooray for polyethylene toilets. But one of the things that George Harding created in his patent that I noticed was a ventilation system, which is a big improvement. Right. For sure. Because when you're just piling human waste upon human waste into a hole, that it's going to create gases. Noxious gases, because bacteria is going to start decomposing that waste. And as a byproduct of that decomposition, they're going to produce what we experience as rotting fecal material. Right. Yeah. It's not just that it's stinky, it's dangerous. It is dangerous. And as that gas tries to find a way to escape upward, if the only hole available to it is the toilet that you're pooping or peeing into, those gases are going to come out of it and you're going to vomit while you poop or pee as well. So what George Harding had I told you, this one's going to be cross. What George Harding figured out was that if you could just basically create a pipe venting off that gas upward and out of the Porter potty, people would be willing to use Porter potty a lot more. And that was a huge improvement. Yeah. He also said, how about we make this rooftop translucent white so we can let in some natural light at least? Why don't we improve the flooring so that it's not as slippy? And maybe even further down the line, we'll have porta potties that have a little urinal that's separate, so you don't even have to sit your butt down on that most horrid of places, right? Yeah. What about the roll around toilet? Did you see these? Yeah, that makes sense. So basically, if you are on a job site where there are different multiple stories being built and you're up on one of the higher stories, it's the same thing as when you're working in the shipyards building a ship. You don't want to have to come all the way down to use the bathroom. So they created Porta Potties that were a lot more mobile that could be hoisted by cranes. Yeah. Just to different levels. Yeah. If you look up roll around toilet, it basically looks like one of those coolers that has the two wheels and the handle, and you could pull the cooler around, except it's larger. And sitting above the wheels is a urinal. Right. I don't see how you go poopy in those. So maybe that's when you go downstairs. I don't know either because it's not enclosed or anything. And this is wide open, just like prison. And there's actually a great scene from, I think, the first Police Academy, starring our friend and Twitter followers, Steve Gutenberg. And I think it's Mouser who uses a Porta Potty, and Steve Gutenberg goes over and gets some crane operator to send him the crane. Now it's Mouser's, his right hand man. I don't remember that guy's name, but they lift the Porta Potty up while he's inside using it. It's hilarious. It's wacky wacky stuff in Suzanne. The good life. Or you have maybe a really nice upscale wedding that's out in a remote area. You don't want to bring in just even the nicest polyethylene portage on it won't do. You will bring in what we call in the movie business, a honey wagon. It is a restroom trailer. And these are actually nice. They have running water, they have stalls. They have porcelain toilets. It's all partitioned. They have sinks and running water and mirrors, hand towels. It's like a rolling trailer full of toilets. Yeah. Like you can breathe through your nose in these things. You could lay down on the floor if you wanted. Yeah. And apparently these first started in 1984. Polly John in Columbus, Ohio. Go by, guys. And the original trailer was eight stalls, or as we said in the movie business, an eight banger had three urinals, and it was 32ft long. Wow. And now there are 19 companies manufacturing luxury restroom trailers around the world today. Yeah, I saw one that they market for outdoor weddings and stuff like that. They said all you need are, I think, six outlets, may be 620 volts outlets, and, like, a standard garden hose connection. And you got yourself a luxury Porta Potty trailer yeah. For your next remote black tie event. Right. Which, I mean, even people in black tie got a pee. Yeah, sure. So you might as well take it easy on them with a nice lux trailer that's right. So, speaking of Chuck, you want to take a break? Yeah. I'm going to go to a real bathroom. That's good. And hug it, and I'm going to get a crane operator to play a prank on you. All right, we'll be right back. Okay. Chuck? Yes. We can't put it off any longer. We got to go inside. We're going to go inside. Deep dive into the bowels of the Porta Potty. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Okay. You ready? Yeah. Catch your snorkel? Yes. Okay. So when you look into a Porta Potty, you may notice that the stuff that's inside the bowl or inside the holding tank is blue. Yeah. And brown. Sure. But it's more blue than brown, and that's no accident. That's right. Any Porta Potty is going to use a deep blue dye in the entire purpose from beginning to end of the blue die is to visually mask the presence of human feces. Yeah. They don't want you looking down there and seeing if it was just, like, clear, like it's already disgusting. You're getting the full experience from the smell alone. You don't need the visual. Yeah. And you don't poop in these things, do you? Oh, no. Okay. No, I think I would just put my pants and walk around instead. I don't think I would. I certainly don't remember ever pooping in it. It's possible I blacked out that memory, but I don't think I ever have it. Yeah, like the first lala palooza. Right. The only time I pooped in these I'm sure there's been some extreme emergency, but the only time I can really recall is when Emily and I were getting our master bath built at our house. Oh, no. We had another little bathroom, a little small guest bathroom, and we shared that. And then we had a construction toilet on site because they were doing construction. Right. I would get up in the mornings because I want to be a good husband and not ruin Emily's day in morning by getting in there first. So I would get my newspaper and I would walk outside in my slippers and use the portage on in my driveway every morning. But I guess it was pretty clean. It was yours, right? It was great. It was me and like, two or three dudes. There you go. That is Doable festival. Oh, no. Taste of Chicago. No. Yes, of course. Surely if you're sharing a Porta Potty with a couple of other people that you have to look in the eye, hear there, you're going to take care of it. But if it's random drunk strangers or people on drugs or something like that, it's going to get messy awfully fast. And again, as more and more people use it, that blue dye becomes more and more important, right? Yes, it does. There's also going to be a fragrance that they're going to add to hopefully match the odor and apparently make it worse. Well, I was reading in some trade magazines and I haven't experienced it myself, but I did get the impression that they have come a long way as far as fragrance goes. Yeah, like I said, you can get bubblegum fragrance. Oh, God, it doesn't sound good. Vanilla lasagna. That comes from just standard use of the Taste of Chicago. Yeah. I mean, you know me with fragrances, period. It's even worse to me. Everything bagel. No, but I came across the site and there's like a Jaguar brand porta potty fragrance additive. And they have like any fragrance you can imagine you got. Really? Wow. And then the final thing you're going to see down there or that it's going to be down there, are biocides to kill the bacteria and microbes. And it used to be that they would use formaldehyde to take care of that, but more and more wastewater treatment plants started saying, hey, we can't properly dispose of that stuff now the carcinogen, and we don't feel good about it. So they've been phasing that out over the years, going a little greener. And now they actually use enzymes, like beneficial enzymes and microbes that feed on this stuff. Right. They help break down the poop and they also feed on the bacteria that causes the smells. Right. So they're making the poop in there, but they're also naturally cutting down on smells, which I just find fascinating. Yeah. Since it's capable of breaking down bacteria, it's also capable of breaking down any organic material. So if you use the right kind of toilet paper, they'll break down the toilet paper as well. Yeah. It's just basically magic in a porta potty. Yeah. And the other benefit there is they don't need to be emptied as often if it's doing the job like it should. Yeah. Weather has an effect. Obviously, if you're in Georgia in the hot summer, things are going to get even worse. I imagine chicago in July is probably no picnic either in the Taste of Chicago. No one's going to go to the Taste of Chicago anymore. You're like, attendance dropped by 20% this year. You don't know what's going on. But when temperatures go up, bacteria go to work even harder and things are just going to smell even worse. So they might actually use more chemicals in the summer or more chemicals, especially if it's a summer festival. Right. And then conversely, I saw this I guess it was a blog post by a porta potty worker that was published on Cracked. And they basically just went over most of the stuff you can imagine, but just crazy stuff that they found. But one of the things that they made reference to is that the worst thing that they can encounter is frozen waste. Because they said once that happens, you have to break it up by hand. So to protect to defend their people from having to do this well, typically in colder areas during the winter, they'll create a briny. Mixture that will have a lower freezing temperature. Like the Minnesota Ice Fishing Festival. Right. But eventually you're going to reach a point where it's cold enough that it's freezing no matter how much salt you add to it. Yeah, and I did see one of their little tricks of the trade is they put a cake of this rock salt in the urinal. So you go peepee on it, and as you peepee on it, it just adds a little more salt slowly throughout the day. Right. The only issue with those is that you have to keep the deer away because they love salt lakes. You like that one? Yeah. I'm ashamed of basically every joke I've made this whole episode. I don't feel good about myself right now. All right, so let's finish up by talking about the really the worst part of this. If you're one of, like, eight people still listening, right? If you're still listening, then we'll finish up with the worst part, which is servicing these things. And we talked about it. It's like a wet vacuum to a wastewater plant, but you have to add new water. You have to add new blue junk and some more dry solution. I saw like, a ratio of one to one about fresh water to solution. We don't want to mess that up. No. And you think like, all right, so that's pretty gross and everything, but especially at like, a music festival or something, there's stuff everywhere. Like, you've been in these, there's urine everywhere. There's poop and places where you think, like, what in the world is someone doing in there? And they have to be cleaned out by somebody. It's an awful job. Yeah. There's stuff that people drop down there. Like, if you use the sock to wipe your bottom with, and you just deposit the sock into the Porta Potty, that's going to gum up the tank for the pump. So they have to get that kind of stuff out first. What about your cell phone? Cell phone? Yeah. Apparently they find all sorts of stuff, especially things like phones, wallets full of cash, jewelry, drugs. A gun. Yeah, guns that cracked. Guy said that he had a friend who showed up at a Porta Potty where they just found a body. Oh, my God. In the thing? No, in the port of party. Not in the actual hole. Okay, that's just cool. Yeah. But yeah, they find all sorts of stuff because almost everybody would say, well, that's gone. I'll just have to get a new identity because I dropped my whole wallet into Porta Potty. Actually, I saw a stat where 5% of people that go into Porta Potty don't come out at all. So the dead body scenario makes sense. They end up in that other dimension from phantasm. And then our article says that the worst case scenario if you're a Porta Potty service person, is that the Porta Potty? Well, there's two worst case. One worse, and one way worse one is if it just gets knocked over, either by a car hitting it or the wind or some jerk who thinks it's funny. It's not cool. Not cool. It's all knocks it over on purpose. But the ultimate, ultimate worst is if it tips over on its door. That's Achilles heel. Any porta. Potty's. Achilles, heel. Yeah, because what happens, all of the stuff that's in the holding tank gets dumped out when it's facing on its front on the door. All of the stuff is liable to come out, and it does. Especially when they pick it back up. It just sloshes around everywhere, and the poor port of Potty service operator has to wash this thing out. And those are the worst. Somebody can put poop, like, on the ceiling or on the walls or something. That's pretty bad. But when it falls on its front on the door and everything sloshes out, it gets everywhere. So you have to get inside to clean the whole thing. And at the very least, it takes them a lot more time and screws up their entire day's schedule. At the worst, they're in there cleaning a filthy Porta Potties nook and crannies from the inside. Yeah, I would just say it fell off the truck, boss. Right, sorry. It's in that phantasm dimension, boss. Didn't the guys from Jackass do one of these, like, put one of them in there and tip it over or something? Yeah, I'm sure. I think they did that when they were, like, four. Yes, I think they did, like, had a crane lift it and turn it over or something. I don't know. No, you're thinking police academy and also police academy geeks. You don't have to write in. It was place academy three. No, I was about to say I didn't remember that. You didn't see what no, I think I petered out after two. Even three might have been the best of all of them. What was the full name of it? Citizens on Patrol. Okay. It's the one where Bob Gold plate, like, goes over from his life of crime to being a junior police academy guy. Yeah. I love Bob Goldthwaite, but good. He's great. Can we stop? Sure, man. Okay. We have to say you got anything else? No. Okay. Chuck actually, I do. If you see these for the potty service people in your neighborhood, if there's construction going on, you see them bring in the truck, just flash a nice smile, give them a tip of the cap. It's a really gnarly job, and like they say, somebody's got to do it. They're making a living like they've got a job. They went out and got that job to make money and provide for their family. And don't forget, they're defending public health and they're saving a significant amount of water. Yeah. So there you go. Nice, Chuck. All right. Good way to finish. If you want to know more about porta potties. You can type that Hyphenated word on the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said Hyphen, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this quick john Cleese correction. Or John Cleese. Exactly. Congratulations on an absolutely marvelous episode concerning Monty Python, guys. It's great to hear so much of the history of the group. Well done. One bit of information. I happen to see John Cleese present a one man show a few years ago in Carmel, California. He just stood on stage and talked for about 75 minutes. Boy, that's a good gig. He discussed his life in general, Python in particular, and lots of other things. He noted that his name is pronounced to rhyme with cheese rather than fleece. In fact, his surname was originally Cheese, but his father changed it to Cleese. Awesome. This was a good thing for the sun being named John because he did not want to go by Jack Cheese. Yeah, I guess not. So it's John Cleese. Never knew that. That's from David Hewitt. Yeah. And I also want to say, Chuck, somebody called us out for not mentioning Carol Cleveland. She was, for all intents and purposes, the 7th member of Monty Python. Yeah, we felt terrible because she was in our notes and we mentioned her and lavish praise on her and our run through that we did in the studio. And it was just one of those live show things that got biased. Yeah. So sorry, Carol Cleveland. We hats off to you. We appreciate your work and we're sorry we left you out. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with me or Chuck, you can tweet to us. I'm at Joshua and Clark. And there's also S-Y-S-K podcasts. Chuck's at Charlesw Chuck Bryant on Facebook and at Stuff You Should Know on Facebook. You can send the both of us and Jerry an email to stuffpodcast athousedupworks.com. And as always, hang out with us at our home on the web, stuffyshetnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com summer school's out. 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https://podcasts.howstuf…rought-final.mp3	How Droughts Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-droughts-work	Droughts can be an inevitable feature of a local climate or a catastrophic result of human meddling. Learn the ins and outs of droughts including the American mother of them all, the Dust Bowl.	Droughts can be an inevitable feature of a local climate or a catastrophic result of human meddling. Learn the ins and outs of droughts including the American mother of them all, the Dust Bowl.	Thu, 06 Aug 2015 13:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=218, tm_isdst=0)	48958553	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry the Jester Stir making copies. And this is stuff you should know. That was a classic skit, wouldn't you say? And one of the only ones I liked by that guy. By Rob Schneider. Yeah. I wasn't the biggest fan. Did you see the one with Sting making copies? Yeah. Who's. Buddy, I'm not anti Rob Schneider, but I just wasn't like, how could you be anti Rob Schneider? Honestly, nobody. It's like being mad at a friendly horse or something. Yeah, exactly. That stupid. Friendly horse. I hate his guts. Yeah. What a weird intro. Yeah. Well, par for the course pretty much, my friend. Well, although his career has dried up that was good. And vicious. Man, I hope he doesn't listen before we get into the whole drying up reference. Chuck, we are long overdue for giving a huge shout out to our Kiva team. Yeah, that's right. Several years ago it feels like many years ago, we did a podcast on micro lending, and we said, hey, let's start a Kiva team. Kiva is an international lending organization. Micro lending, where they pair you with people actually, it's all over the world now who need money on a small basis. You loan them the money, you can get paid back and pull your money back out, or you can reload it. We have a very active team. And let's hear some numbers. Okay, so our team captain, Glenn of Glenn and Sonya, team captain Fame, sent us some stats recently. The stuff you should know. Team has 8453 members. Great. As of July 31. Yeah. How much have we loaned so far? Are you ready for this? We need a drum roll. Jerry, can we put in some sort of drum roll effect or a Wilhelm scream or something like that? Oh, all right. Okay. That's nice. That's very good. Here we go. $3,251,025. Dude. I know. That is crazy. Yes. And that's out of 117,539 loans, which is a total of 13.9 loans per member. I don't know how people are doing, like, nine 10th of a loan, but that's impressive in and of itself. Yeah. What that means is people get repaid and they just kind of do what I think we do. It's just kind of roll that into another loan. Yeah. You reload it. They make great gifts. I think at least one person sent you a Kiva gift card to congratulate you and Emily on Ruby Rose. That's right. And that's always a nice thing you can do at holiday times or birthdays. Yes. Whenever it's not too late to join. Like, we're not like, oh, you're new to the team. It's a very supportive, great team. And again, like you said, very active. You can go to Kiva.org teams. I believe it's pluraltepychannow. Or just search Stuff You Should Know on Kiva.org, and it will bring up our team and you can join and be embraced by our teammates. That's right. Yeah. So thanks to Glenn and Sonia, as always, for nudging us in the right direction and keeping up with the stats. Yeah. Really big help. And congratulations to our team on getting the $3.25 million in change in loans. Absolutely. Okay, so droughts. Yeah. Rob Schneider, heiva droughts. Right. The natural progression of things. Don't forget sting was in there. That's true. All right, let's talk droughts. They're a serious thing. Yeah. I mean, it's natural disaster is what it is. It is. Although Robert Lam wrote this article that forms the basis of this in part. Yeah. Robert of stuff to blow your mind. Award winning stuff to blow your mind. Yeah, they won an award. Congratulations. He points out that droughts are fairly natural. There's a lot of debate over whether climate change exacerbates droughts. Sure. But for the most part, droughts are natural. They're seasonal, they're temporal. They come and go, or in some cases, they just stay. And then you got a desert and it becomes a natural disaster when you apply humanity to it. Kind of like, do you remember those overhead projectors? Sure. And they would have transparencies. So there could be, like, different they could overlay stuff. So you have drought transparency and it's just whatever. But then you overlay humanity on it, and then it becomes a natural disaster. Yeah, I thought that was a pretty good point, actually, that Robert made in and of itself, if there were no humans, there would be a drought. The land would dry up in certain regions, animals would leave because there's no water. But it's like, who cares? They're not humans. Vegetation would die, or the few animals that could stay would stay, and the few plants that could still grow would grow. Right. And then that would just be the new ecosystem. Right. And then no big what potentially, if it wasn't permanent, it would shift back and the life would come back to the area. That's right. But again, humans, like you said, wouldn't give a big whoop if it wasn't for humans living everywhere. Sure. Growing crops everywhere and using tons and tons of water. That's right. Mostly to grow those crops. So we've talked about this again and again, but what I saw, the most recent stat I came across was 92% of the global supply of fresh water is used to irrigate crops, and 50% of that, only half is reused. Is captured and reused. Wow. So that means we lose a lot of water to agriculture. And agriculture is kind of leaky. You could put it that way. And the fact that we try to grow crops everywhere and use a bunch of the fresh water creates this kind of vicious cycle that exacerbates droughts, or at the very least, makes our reliance on a climate to not be drowdy really important. Yes. I just put a lot of words together and there's sense in there somewhere. No, it makes total sense. Just go back and listen to that last sentence a few times, everybody. It'll finally come through. It is serious business, though, and very sad and devastating. Between 50 and 100,000 people died in 2011 in East Africa with their drought. And right here in the US. We have suffered through some pretty rough drought here in the last 50 years. In 2012, they said it was the worst conditions in 50 years. And corn production. You put a debt in corn production that's going to put a dent in the world markets. Well, yeah, it's a big deal. America runs on corn. Dunkin donuts even dunkin donuts have corn in them. The world, to a certain degree, runs on America's corn, too. You know what I mean? Yeah. And when something like corn, as we'll see agriculture gets hit by drought, obviously, and when it gets hit by drought, because of the globalized marketplace that we live in today, when food prices go up, some of the poorer countries get priced out of the market, and they see things like food riots and starvation and all sorts of bad stuff. So droughts have, like, terrible effects. Yeah, it's a snowball effect. And it seems like I don't know if it's getting worse and if it is getting worse, if it's anthropogenic or whatever. Okay. In 2011, Texas had the driest year since 1895, which happened to be the year it started recording this kind of stuff. Right. So it's the driest year on record for Texas 2013. California had the driest year on record thanks to the ridiculously resilient ridge. Yeah. And Australia went through what's called the millennium drought. From 1997 to 2009, they had a terrible drought. They actually, like some places like Melbourne actually figured out how to live in drought conditions and survive and actually keep going pretty well. And a lot of people are studying what Melbourne did because they did it so well. That's because Australians are resourceful and smart people. Very resourceful, but not smart and smart. Okay? I wasn't saying anything. I'm just kidding. Just rubbing my eye. I got distracted. So even here in Georgia, we had a pretty wicked drought two or three years ago. Do you remember the governor led a prayer circle praying for rain, and it rained. Did it rain? It did rain. I don't remember that part now. It rained and there was a lot of hullabaloo because they were like, well, he led the prayer circle on the day where they called for like, 90% chances. Yeah. Did it rain while they were praying? Because that would be kind of cool. That would be kind of cool. I don't think that's what happened, though. But I do remember that. Yeah, man, there's nothing wrong with that. Pray for rain. Do your rain dance. There was talk of war between Georgia and Tennessee, and Tennessee said, we have guns. Yeah. And Georgia said, we have guns. We have guns too. Yeah. And there's a tense stand off. Yeah. And we left and went to New York City where there are no guns. We had something on the books already. So let's talk the basics of drought. Drought is obviously when it doesn't rain enough to sustain the ecosystem like it should, basically you're losing water through evaporation, which is when water vaporizes or transpiration, when water moves through the soil and through the plants and then leaves and it's not so useful to us. Right. So you're losing water faster than it's being replenished. Yeah. That is a drought. And again, this is all viewed through the lens of humanity. Like water isn't lost when it goes through the soil. Sure it is to us, that's great until we get it out of an aquifer that's being replenished. That's right. But it's not necessarily lost unless you really look at it through the human lens. Right. And there are many factors that go into whether or not a drought occurs and how long it lasts. Here are a few immediate causes. One is high pressure zones. Sinking air means you get a high pressure zone, which means you have clear skies and warmer temperatures. And if that stalls over a region, then more water is going to evaporate. So that is going to exacerbate the problem. That's like the ridiculously resilient ridge over California. I think 2013 to 2014, it was just this high pressure zone that just said, I'm sticking around here for a while. And not only did it lead to high temperatures and low humidity because it's a high pressure zone, it also blocked tropical cyclones that normally are brought to California by the Westerly. It just shot them up toward the Arctic or down toward Mexico. And California for two different reasons, didn't get precipitation and is still in a pickle as a result. Well, usually when you have a prolonged drought, you can point to a number of factors. Like ironically, a perfect storm that causes no storm. Right. Barack Obama another reason is air pollution. There's a decade long study completed, I think in 2013 from the University of Maryland, Go Turps, and they found that air particulate, which is pollution dust, so sulfates, produces more intense storms and wet areas, or it leads to more intense storms and wet areas and reduces rain and drier areas. So it basically just, again exacerbates whatever is normally going on there. It creates weather extremes. Creates weather extremes. That's a great way to say it. That's weird though, because particulate matter. Yeah, I'm trying to figure this out. They don't know. The mechanism is uncertain at this point. So there is no answer. If that was your question, I'm abandoning figuring it out then. And then here in the Southeast, one causes wind blowing inward from the ocean is usually a good thing because that brings in from the Atlantic on the eastern seaboard, brings in warm humid temperatures and in the summertime, and if they shift or weaken, then they're going to bring in less moisture and less rainfall. And I think that is what happened, was a wind shift, and whenever it was, we had our drought. When was that? Was that 20 12, 20 11? It may have been something like that around then. Yeah, it was fairly severe. I just remember all the lakes were way down. And I don't think we got to the point where they had forced rationing, but they were advising everyone and asking everyone to be better stewards. It was a big deal. Everybody was really nervous. I think the lake where Atlanta gets fresh water is down like 12ft or something like that. Yeah. Serious stuff. No good. You talked about changes in different areas. Did you mention Lenino or El Nino? Not yet. Do you remember that Chris Farley, when he was El Nino back in the 90s, he's like, I am El Nino, which means do nino in Spanish. So you know what that is. I sort of remember that there's a documentary out about him now, which I'm eager to see. Oh, yeah, I haven't checked that out. I forgot about that. I want to see that as well. So El Nino is actually named for little baby Jesus. Did you know that? I did not know that. Yeah. Back in the 1600, spanish fisherman off the coast of Mexico named it El NinJo because it was this weird arrival of really warm water in December in the winter months. They're like, oh, well, obviously it's the Christchild, so they named it El Ninja. And that is when there's warmer than average water temperatures in the tropics around, like, basically off the coast of Mexico. Right? Yeah. And those warm the air and create wetter than average conditions in some parts of the US. And other parts of the world and drier than average conditions in the other parts. That's right. And then there's the reverse of that, la Nina. That's right. And that's colder than average temperatures. So those places that normally get wetter than normal and drier than normal are flip flopped. But either way, you get extreme weather events like floods and droughts from this. And they aren't exactly certain what creates this, just that they're pretty sure it's natural. Yeah, well, actually, they do have a decent idea. In 2003, something happened, which the same thing happened in the 1950s when we suffered a pretty bad drought in the US. There are two ocean cycles that basically flip flopped. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multi Decadal Oscillation. Sure. And these things flick back and forth basically over time, and they cause either more rain or less rain. And the PDO is what causes the shift in those surface ocean temperatures. What causes the shift? The Pacific, Decatural Oscillation. Okay, but what caused these things to flip flop? Well, they just flip flop periodically over time. Basically. Weird. I don't buy that, though. Like something makes those things flip flop. Well, yeah, maybe so. I don't know. That's what I want. Answers. Some people probably say that's just the cycle of nature, I guess. So that's a cop out. But they say that every 20 to 30 years this is going to happen. And when you combine them with other factors, it basically gives everything a boost. And that's what creates El Nino or La Nina. Yeah, that's what they think. It's more like it works in concert with El Nino and La Nina. So these things have happened at the same time, which is the reason California is in such a drought right now. Wow. So you have the warm PDO plus El Nino means it's going to be wetter and cooler. PDO plus Lenino equals Drier and LeninI fluenced by the trade winds basically blowing on top of the water. I think you already said that. Right. It just circulates that water and the deep water comes up to the surface. Yes. Chili. Yeah. From Chile or it's chili water. Chili water. Got you. So, Chuck, there's different categories. People love to categorize stuff, right? Oh, yeah. And there's actually different categories of the categories for draft. I thought that was kind of interesting. It's a little bit of a brainbuster. Yeah. But you can kind of subdivide the categories for droughts into seasonal descriptions and then descriptions of drought severity. Right. So with a geographical or seasonal description, it's kind of like, here's an area and this is the kind of drought conditions you can expect. Yes. So there is a permanent drought, which is basically what you think of with the desert. It's a place that gets a minimal amount of precipitation and it never catches up to the amount of evaporation or transpiration. That's right. So it's just always dry. There permanent drought. It's an arid climate. Arid climate. And then next you have seasonal drought, which is like drought comes, dry conditions come on a predictable calendar. Yeah. Like the dry season or the wet season in the country. Right. Those two are pretty standard. No big surprises there. But the next couple you almost said no big whip again. I almost did. You saw that? My mouth went, whoa. Unpredictable drought is when there are irregular dry spells where it's usually humid or rainy and then invisible drought. I'd never heard of that. I think that's fascinating that's when it is raining and you think, how can we be in a drought because it's raining? It just means it's too hot, probably. And it's not raining enough because too much evaporation and transpiration is going on. Right. So it's invisible to the naked eye. It's like being skinny fat to where? Like you're thin on the outside, but your liver has got a ton of fat all over it. Oh, I thought you're going to talk about the people that have like really thin faces, but from the neck down they have weight. No. I hate those people. Oh, Chuck, you're going to get some mail for that. No. I hate those people. I'm jealous of those people because I have a big fat face. Like, there's no picture I can take. I could show my legs or my arms, and people say, what a thin guy. I think you look great, but everything from my nose to my waist gives me away. I'm going to do that. I'm going to start posting pictures of my legs and my arms. Okay. Like Danny DeVito, he always says, the troll foot that still has a nice small, tiny butt, too. We've all noticed. I'm going to take pictures of that. It's the talk of the office. No pictures of yourself. Everyone's body is fine. I'm not body shaming. All right, that's good. What I'm saying is I'm jealous of people with thin faces. I got you. All right, so we got one category down. Yes. Which describes, like, a region and area, although invisible drought doesn't really fit into that. But what else? Sure. Okay, the next group of categories. Man, I sound like we're using an overhead projector. This is this dry. I like it. It's appropriately dry for the drought episode. Well, you have to go through this. It's part of it. Okay. So these categories makes sense to me. They describe, like, the severity of a drought, right? Yes. And you can pretty much go from one to the other, and it makes sense. So, like a meteorological drought, it basically says that this time last year, we had about an inch and a half more rain than we got this year so far. No big whoop. No big whoop. Yeah. Basically, my brother in law, also named Josh, would notice this kind of thing. He's a little bit of a weather bug. Yeah, I like weather bugs. Okay, well, you would like Josh. And he's one of the few things, few people besides, like, maybe a meteorologist who would notice this. Which is why it's called the meteorological drop. That's right. You would have to be really paying attention to even notice this. That's right. Okay. That's stage one. Yes. Stage two is an agricultural drought, and that is when you're talking about crops. And agriculture is going to be one of the first industries or parts of the world affected by drought, obviously. So this is when farmers are starting to notice. You might hear a news blurb or two if there had been drought in the news, but it still hasn't. Like, you're not walking around the streets talking about it yet. No, just farmers and Josh are speaking to one another about the drought. That's right. What's next, Josh? The hydrological drought. This is when we start to notice. And that's when you're like, hey, man, I went to my lake house this weekend, and it's all ugly, like clay red, muddy junk everywhere. I can see the submerged buildings. The underwater cities are visible. Like in Lake Lanier, you know there's a town down there. Oh, yeah? Yeah. You didn't know that? I don't think so. There's a town down there. When Lake Lanier gets low enough, you can see it. You can see a Gulf 76 sign sticking up out of the lake. Wow. Yeah. Like the old ball one that's orange with the blue 76. Yeah. What was the town like? Some part of Beaufort or something, I guess. Interesting. You didn't know there's a town under Lake Lanier? No, I didn't. Isn't that Creepsville creepy? No, it's creepy. I think it's cool. I mean, if there were people living down there with gills, that would be creepy. So the point is, Chuck, that we notice the people with gills, notice everybody starts to notice the hydrological drought. It's like the talk of town. Sure. And then the next step is where it gets really bad. Socioeconomic drop. This is when the government tends to step in and say, you who have odd number addresses can water on Tuesdays, Thursdays. Those of you with even addresses can water on Monday, Wednesdays. Or it could flip flop. It depends on your local government. True. It's not set in stone. Right. But the point is, there are now restrictions taking place. There are now things being enforced. There are people are being asked to cut back. The reason why is because we're seeing a real effect, like, through the economy. Yeah. Like Robert points out something I've never really thought of. Tourism, of course, is going to dry up with the water. In some places, food shortages, shipping maybe affected imports and exports. And in less developed parts of the world, that can be really bad. Here in the US. It may just mean socioeconomic annoyance. In other parts of the world, it could lead to political unrest and armed conflict and panic and disease and, like, really, really bad stuff. Right. So that's socio economic drought. And let's take a break and let's talk a little bit about other effects of drought in the Dust Bowl right after this. So, Chuck, we kind of just gave some overview of, like, how drought works or how bad it can get. That's right. So what causes this? I mean, we talked about weather being a factor. Obviously, there's not a lot we can do with that. We have How Weather Modification Works episode that we did, and a TV show based on that, too. A TV episode. But not everybody agrees that cloud seeding works. Some people say it really works. Other people say it doesn't really work. Yes, we talked about cloud seeding a couple of times. I think it's been used to affect during wartime to wash out trails, supposedly. Yeah, in Vietnam, right? That's what they say. But I don't know. Everyone's not convinced. So when it comes to things like El Nino or La Nina, as it stands now at our primitive technological place in human history, there's not much we can do about that. The most we can hope to do is really kind of figure out what causes drought in other ways and see if we can do anything about that and the person in the hot seat or the thing in the hot seat, as far as that goes right now, is climate change. There's a big debate over whether we can do anything about drought conditions through climate change, and all that has to do with CO2, supposedly. Yeah. Well, between the last five decades, between 19 52,000 were the warmest in 600 years in the United States, temperature wise and I'm sorry, I think that's globally. But in the US. And the Southwest, they are predicting a rise as much as nine degrees by the year 2100, and that is accompanied by the two degree, 1.4 degree rise over the past 100 years. So what they think is that as more and more CO2 enters the atmosphere, this rise in temperature that it creates from this greenhouse effect will actually create drought like conditions. And one of the ways that it will create drought like conditions is by creating high pressure areas, which, remember, don't have a lot of humidity. They have high temperatures. Yeah, they're dry conditions. And they also, simultaneously, this denser air and dense air above it. Right. Or warmer air above it prevents the air below it from rising. Right. Because that's how winds and air currents are formed. Warm air near the tropics rises and replaces the cooler air to create this cycle. Right? That's right. Well, if the air above it is equally warm, the air below can't rise. When you have a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that air in the middle, I think, in the mesophere, stays warm. So you've got a big chunk of the atmosphere just hanging out around the Earth's surface. And when the upwelling doesn't happen, you don't have the upwelling action that also creates thunderstorms and generates large amounts of torrential rain, which really helps things when you have droughts. So they think and this is all just a conjecture at this point, but that's the big explanation for how climate change can lead to drought like conditions, and that if we can reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, we can conceivably reverse those drought like conditions. Well and don't they think that climate changes in general causes more severe everything, like severe storms and stream flooding? It's definitely something to consider. Yeah, sure. Try to tiptoe around this one, because there is a debate. Not really. No, it's basically fraudulent whether there's a debate over whether climate change is real. Okay. The climate change is real. Like, almost all scientific consensus is the debate that it's a human cost or not and whether we can do anything about it or is there no debate about any of that? No, there's debate still, but it's not real debate. Like, the scientific community is generally in agreement that there is climate change and that it is a real problem. Right. I don't know what the consensus is on whether we could do anything about it. I think probably most people would say we should at least try. It's worth trying. Sure. Why wouldn't you? Well, a lot of people say you shouldn't because it will affect your health or economic progress. Or say, for example, like China say the US. Is like, oh, hey, we're laying off of greenhouse gas emitting stuff, and we're getting a little greener. You guys should, too. And China would say, well, you guys kind of got to this point by spitting a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. It's China's time. Go sit over there and be as green as you want. Leave us alone. Right. There's a lot of political landmines to trips around in getting everybody on board to reducing the climate footprint or the carbon footprint of humanity. Yeah. What riles me is when you see usually on social media when someone says, in the wintertime, it's the coldest winter that's seen in years. So much for global warming. Warning. Warning. A warning. How about that? Maybe they should change the name. Is that a Freudian slip? But there's a great video that Neil degrasse Tyson does you can find on YouTube about the difference between weather and climate because those are two entirely different things. And he does this little thing on the beach with a dog that's great and that kneeled, the grass, Tyson way, with his shirt mostly I'm buying and everything. Well, he's on the beach, of course. Sure. He's gone on his clam diggers, his Hawaiian shirts unbuttoned. He's a cool cat. He is a cool cat. But he explains it very simply, the difference between weather and climate. So before you go, say something dumb like, it's super cold in June, so there's no global warming, just go watch that video. That's my recommendation. And I want to recommend a book called Merchants of Doubt. Right now I'm reading, and it's about how the tobacco industry, climate change, denial, all this stuff is largely the result of PR. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, it is a very interesting book, actually, and I think there's a documentary based on it that just came out, too. If you don't like reading, who does? I do. Robert points out to in this article, predicting drought isn't really something you can do necessarily. You can predict seasonal droughts a month or so out, and I guess you can predict certain conditions. Like right now, they're saying that California is probably in trouble for the next 20 to 30 years. Yeah. I don't think they see an end in sight because of the various climate factors going on. Any rain would help, but it's not like a rainy few weeks here and there is going to make much of an impact. Right. It's pretty scary out there. Well, that's one reason why they're studying. For example, Melbourne, Australia. Or Melbourne, Victoria, Australia? I'm not quite sure how. You say it properly, but under this drought, this millennium drought, melbourne dropped their water usage by 50% under drought conditions. They did it through, like, local recycling programs. Apparently one really effective program was electronic billboards that said, the shared reservoir is at like 25% of capacity right now. Don't forget what's going to happen if we all run out of water. Recycle your water, use gray water to water your plants, that kind of stuff. And it worked really well. They should just do dumb infographics for Americans as like, the water getting lower and then dead people at the bottom. Here's where we're headed. Does it make sense to you now? Right. Person watering your lawn in Los Angeles. There's a lot of dead people in our reservoir buried at the bottom. I think I to read a little bit about the La drought or Southern California in general, that they're not making enough headway with their conservation measures right now. It's not putting much of a dent into it. Like their public campaigns. Yeah. Selfish people still watering their stuff. Well, all the comments supposedly, any shared resource people are just like, let everybody else conserve. I'll be fine. Give me everything I need. This little bit doesn't make a difference. Yeah. And this article, I think it was a Scientific American article I was reading about Melbourne being so successful. One of the ways they were being so successful was taking this shared resource, this reservoir, and saying, like, all of us share this, and it's down to this level. So are you going to be the jerk who makes it drop even more by taking more than your fair share? One of the jerk that should be their campaign. Right? One of the problems is California doesn't just have just a single shared reservoir. They get their water from a number of different sources. Big state. Yeah. So that would be tough to hit that same note with California. Yeah. But as goes California, as go the US. Economy. I think some estimates say California is the 8th largest economy in the world. The state of California. Oh, yeah, I've heard that before. Dire consequences, potentially. So let's take one more break, Chuck, and then when we come back, we're going to talk about dire consequences indeed from the 1930s in the United States. That's right. Ka. The Dust Bowl. So I teased the Dust Bowl in the beginning, and then we didn't get to it. But now we're getting to it. This is just like TV. And I became a little oh, I know. Just keeping people on the hook. I became super interested when I was in Oklahoma recently. I went to the Woody Guthrie Museum in Tulsa, which is great, by the way, and they had a whole section on the Dust Bowl. And I didn't know much about it. I mean, I knew generally it was a drought and dusty, but I hadn't looked into it too much. And since then I've studied on it some and watched the great Ken Burns documentary on the Dust Bowl. Very good. You know those parts of that appear in Interstellar? Oh, really? Were there clips of that? Yeah. I don't remember. They play it like it's people really like Interstellar? No, not really. Oh, I love that movie. Yeah. Love it. I thought that was such a great movie. I really didn't like it. Huh? I had a lot of problems with it. I loved it. My biggest problem with it was just let the viewer figure out the movie. It felt like every ten minutes somebody was explaining something of Inception. Same guy, same problem. I don't think so, but I didn't run into that. You know how much I hated that part in Inception? When you watch Interstellar again, just make a little note. Anytime someone explains what's going on, and you'll have like, 20 times written down on your little notepad. I guess it didn't bother me in this one. It bothered me. And it's not like I have anything against Ellen Page in particular. Oh, sure you do. You're a Juno hater. That has nothing to do with Ellen Page. Now. I'm just joking. Anyway. No, for some reason it didn't stick out to me in our stellar. I just thoroughly enjoyed that movie. Oh, good. I'm glad you did. I don't want to rain on your parade. Anyway, parts of the Ken Burns documentary show up in Interstellar, but it's great just on its own. Oh, yeah. And the reason we bring up the Dust Bowl is because it's larger than just a drought. People tend to think of it as a drought, but it demonstrates things you can do to prevent drought from becoming the worst case scenario is exactly what happened with the Dust Bowl. Yeah. It was one of the worst natural disasters in the United States history. For sure. Yeah. And it was just one natural disaster compounding another and another and another. What happened actually starts in the 19th century when America was undergoing its westward expansion and the US government passed the Homestead Act. And these gave land grants to Western settlers who wanted to set up farms of between 160 and then later on 320 acres. Which sounds like a lot. Yeah, but they're actually not when you start thinking about these massive states like Oklahoma and Texas and Kansas and all of this. So what happened was eventually these plain states, the semiarid grassland, was carved up into a huge patchwork of smaller farms, and people started farming and things started going really well. The land became productive very quickly. Yeah. And at first things they were farming somewhat sustainably. They still had grasses and still had cattle grazing on these grasses, which is all good stuff. And these are native grasses that were resistant already. They were acclimated to this, again, semiaid climate. That's right. So let's flash forward or fast forward a bit to post World War one in the 1920s, there was a recession and farmers all of a sudden said, you know what? We can get these new machines and use these new mechanized farming techniques to try and make more money and turn some of this grass into wheat. Yeah. Because if you have like a hoe, right, and you're just hacking away at this semi arid ground, you're going to be like, I've got 320 acres, but I'm just going to farm 20 of them. Right. Because this is a lot of work, but if you can go buy a plow and some oxen and later on a tractor to drag those plows, you can turn all 320 acres into productive crop land. Yeah. And so they overproduce wheat. Yeah. There was a bumper crop year in 1930, was it, where so many farmers bought so many plows and used these mechanized methods of farming that there was a bumper crop of wheat? So much so that the price of wheat plummeted. And it just so happened that there was a recession, like you said, at the same time. So there was an oversupply of wheat and an under demand for it because everybody's broke. That's right. And so everybody said, well, what do you do? You just plant more weed, plant more wheat. Yeah. Basically expand your farm to try and turn a profit. And so all of a sudden, all these drought resistant grasses were no more. There was wheat everywhere. And apparently wheat does not jibe. That quantity of wheat doesn't job with the natural landscape. And the soil became dusty and dry. And you coupled that with a drought which hit hard over the period of like three years and high winds and everything blew away. Yes. So 100 million acres of topsoil ended up blowing away. Like just blew away. It wasn't there any longer. All that was left was the rocky sub soil. Like blue to the east coast. Yes. Some of it blew to California, depending on where the winds blew. Some blew all the way to Washington DC. Which actually proved to be fortuitous because that got Congress attention. And these things were called black blizzards. And there's man, you've seen the footage. It's just amazing. Unbelievable. When these huge towering clouds of black dust were just coming toward what looked like these tiny little miniature houses. It doesn't look real. No, it doesn't. But this really happened on the Great Plains in the we're talking 150,000 sq. Mi over Oklahoma or parts of Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado and New Mexico. And the drought itself was from 34 to 37. And 60% 60% of the population left. Yeah. A lot of them moved to California. California wasn't very happy. A lot of them left their farms and were just broke. Basically. They were like the first generation to find themselves underwater. Yeah. Because a lot of them, again, remember, there was this drive to make more money by producing more wheat, even though there was an overabundance of wheat. So they really over leveraged themselves by borrowing more for farm equipment and farm hands and farm supplies. And when the bottom fell out on the wheat market, they were overextended and their homes and farms got foreclosed on. Yeah. All these people who are just a little while back were farming. Middle class people were now, like, homeless and on Route 66 and basically doing the Grapes of Rat thing. Yeah. I mean, like you said, a lot of them moved west and I think you said that California was not so happy with that. About 10% of them ended up in California, and it was not a great time for the country as a whole. So they didn't want all these new people, we call them Okies, even though about 20% were from Oklahoma, they'd want them coming in there trying to get their jobs. And it was bad news all the way around in California. So in actually what's a pretty good example of the federal government doing something really right. They stepped in actually FDR stepped in with the New Deal and created a lot of measures that tried to alleviate the worst effects of the Dust Bowl. And one of the things that they did really well was create the Soil Conservation Service. Yeah. That was in basically strict instructions to farmers to plant grass, plant trees, how to plow, how to terrace, how to hold rainwater, how to portion off your farmland and not just grow wheat over every square inch of it. Right. Yeah. Leave some land to be fallow and regenerate after one year of production or a couple of years of production. And one of the other big pushes that's still going on these days is no till farming. One of the big problems that they did by knocking out these grasslands was first they got rid of the native grasses that were good at holding the topsoil in place, but then they actually killed the top soil and loosened the whole structure of everything. So it was easy to blow away when these strong winds came in. And apparently topsoil takes something like I've seen in a few places, 500 years to produce one inch of new topsoil. Wow. So once it blew away, it wasn't coming back. And I'm not quite sure how they've replenished it since then. I know that these soil conservation measures are helping, but is it just grassland that's growing on sub soil still for the next couple of hundred years? I don't know. I know that somebody out there knows that, though. Well, please let me farmer I do know that they said by the early 1940s, much of that land had been rehabilitated. And not only did the government step in and still install a lot of new laws and measures, but they also bought a lot of land to take it out of production. Yeah. About 11 million acres. Just to keep it grassy and stable. Right. And the new deal brought. It wasn't just the Soil Conservation Service, we won't get into all these, but the Works Progress Administration was created. I think the Ses is now the Natural Resources Conservation Service. And they really stepped in and said, we can't let this happen again, even though in the 1950s there was another bad drought. But I think I remember in the 70s that's why we have skateboarding. Oh, yeah, that's right. I mean, not completely, but it's when they went to the swimming pools because they were empty in California. Yeah, but thanks to those measures, things in the didn't reach the levels that they did in thirty s. And I read this really great article called Rethinking the Dust Bowl, and I can't remember where it's from, but it's posted on the podcast page for this episode on our site. Yeah. And it was basically saying, like, this is a really good example of the government stepping in, taking really good measures, because ultimately what created the Dust Bowl was parceling out the Great Plains into these small farms. If you're a small farmer, taking soil conservation measures is not economically beneficial to you. You're not going to see a lot of the benefits, and it's going to be very expensive. Right. And if you're just a small farmer, it doesn't matter, your farm doesn't matter. But if you put a bunch of small farms together and no one's taking soil conservation measures, then what you have as far as from an ecological standpoint is one gigantic farm with no soil conservation measures. And that's what set up the Great Plains for the Dust Bowl. Federal government came in and said, you guys are small farmers, you don't have to be big farmers, but we're going to put a bunch of you together to form what's called a Soil Conservation District. And we're going to say if you plant these trees for wind breaks and you do these other soil conservation techniques, we're going to subsidize your farms. And it worked really well and a lot of small farmers got these subsidies and the Great Plains was saved. Hurray. Right. But then the same article was like this is also a really good example of how the federal government doesn't work. Because as smaller and smaller farms were bought by bigger and bigger farms and consolidated into like. Big agra. These subsidies are still available for these farms and farming companies that would have carried out these measures anyway. Because they would directly benefit from the money that they put into it. They're still getting government subsidies from it. So it worked really well at first. Now it's not working anymore. It's just kind of a waste of money. They should have had a stipulation in there though, like farms of certain size or something. I don't know. Should have, could have, would have. I found that really interesting. I can totally get why you suggested this Dust Bowl drop episode. Yeah, it's good stuff. We've had a lot of asks for this one lately. You got anything else? No, sir. Well, if you want to know anything else about the Dust Bowl and droughts and that kind of stuff, go to How Stuff works. Type those words into the search bar and it will bring all this up. And since it's a search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this batty email from a bad guy. Okay. Hey guys, I'm a bad biologist specializing in threatened and endangered species in the eastern US. It's a great episode and you nailed it. Especially the section on echolocation. I'll add that while most insectivores insectivorous bats do catch their prey while on the wing, some have specialized to flutter slowly and their echolocation are so sensitive and high pitched and their hearing so sensitive that the bats can glean insects from vegetation in the darkness. This could be in response to stealthy moths that have learned to sense that echolocation in evade round and round goes through predator prey arms race. One clarification, though, is regarding the effect of white nose syndrome. You said in the podcast that the itch is what wakes the bats from Hibernation. It's more that the bats immune system is ramped up by the late stage fungal infection and their metabolic requirements are beyond what they have prepared for. The damaged wing membranes are especially susceptible to evaporate water loss in most hibernation. Interrupted bats are thought to die of lack of water rather than lack of food. Additionally, new studies indicate that the clinical signs are in stages of the disease and that the chemical imbalances cause internal damage before the visible fungal hyphae do. One mechanism for this is chronic respiratory acidosis caused by increased dissolved CO2 levels in the blood. Oh, man. I told you he's a bad biologist. He's a bad guy. Listen to you guys every day and have taken s YSK onto the woods on bat surveys more than once. Thanks for the time. I knew we'd been on a bat survey before. It's a great balancing act of fact and b s. To each their own and holding humanity to a higher standard. You guys consistently hit it out of the park. Man, that is nice. That is from Jason Whittle. Thanks, Jason. And my wife's hometown of Akron, Ohio. Nice. And where LeBron lives too. That's right. And you know what? We actually got our episode shared by oh, boy, now I can't think of it. The Bat Society. The Bat Society of America or the world Bat Society. I can't remember getting along which one? But one of the larger bat organizations shared our podcast and said we did a great job. So I thought that was oh, man, that's awesome. Well, thank you. Thanks to the Bat Society. Thanks to Jason. It was right. Jason Whittle. And if you want to be cool like Jason and send us a really interesting email full of tons of facts you can do that. You can tweet to us too at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffysheno. You can send us that email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. And in the meantime, you can hang out at our supercool homeontheweb stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com. Hey everybody. 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435377fc-53a3-11e8-bdec-07685a0f0a17	Bidets: Now More Than Ever	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/bidets-now-more-than-ever	We all know the benefits of bidets. But with toilet paper in short supply, they're more important than ever before.	We all know the benefits of bidets. But with toilet paper in short supply, they're more important than ever before.	Tue, 14 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=105, tm_isdst=0)	44836231	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. We lost Jerry some time ago, but this remains, as always, stuff that we should know because Jerry's here in spirit. I can tell you that Jerry's alive. Okay, that sounds very ominous. It totally did, now that you mention it. We lost Jerry. She's here in spirit, Jerry's only. She may not have ever existed. Who knows? It's all one big weird dream, right? Yeah. Did you see what I titled this episode, by the way? No, I haven't looked yet. Bidets Colon now more than ever. That's great. Good job, man. Because that is true. Having a bidet right now can really keep you out of the rat race to find toilet paper because I used to have one of the toilet attachments and it got lost in the renovation and move, and I kind of forgot about it. And the very first thing I did when I heard about this toilet paper surge was get online and buy another one of those things. Yeah, we had just happened to get one for our other bathroom right before all this happened. So we're all set on the rear situation with the water application. Clean bottoms. Yeah. So I was raised a toilet paper guy. Oh, of course. And I know how you feel about that. Middle class kids. Every once in a while, though, I'll remember in our toilet paper episode, I'm just going to come out and say it using paper to wipe your bottom with, and that's it. It's just gross growth. Growth. It is dry paper. Seriously. I hear that in my head a lot. It's hilarious. But that to me is like, okay, this makes sense. It feels normal and I've gotten used to a bidet, but even still, I'm using a little bit of toilet paper there, too. Also, we should probably say this episode is chock full of TMI, so just buckle in for that. But yes, if I use a bidet, I still use a little bit of toilet paper. And the thing that I think got me out of all this, chuck, just want to say up front is the science is still out on which one actually is more beneficial for you health wise. There are people saying toilet paper is yeah, I've seen it. And I think this is what I suspect because there is such a dearth of studies on this and some of the studies that have been done are showing mixed results that it basically depends on how your doctor or whoever you're asking feels about toilet paper or bidets. That's what they're going to recommend. Your doctor or whoever likes the bus driver. My doctor drives the bus, too. Yes, but these are hard times. All right, so we're talking about bidets, which is if you don't know what this is, you have been living under a rock but for a lot of Americans, and we'll get to why Americans haven't been hip to them a bit later. But some Americans still might not be hip to these. A bidet is a little and they can be different things, but the kind of classic modern bidet looks like another little toilet installed beside your toilet or near your toilet. Not quite right, though. There's something you can't put your finger on that ain't quite right about that toilet. Yeah. Like if you walked into a room and you never seen one before, you wouldn't be like, well, there's one for pooping and one for peeing. Yeah, I think that definitely does cross your mind. Either that or else you go, oh, cool. But there are different ways that you can have these modern bidets. Some of them have little water streams that squared up. Some of them have a little like a shower handle. But the long and short of it is, it's another appliance in your bathroom with water and a little basin that you straddle after you do your business and clean yourself up with water instead of dried toilet paper. That's the classic bide, right? Yes, the classic bidet. Not the bidet of olden days. No. Should we talk about the other types or go back to the olden days? Now let's go back to the olden days and we'll catch up again. All right, that's a little tease, everybody. We're going to talk about other types of the days eventually. Yeah, and I didn't see exactly I saw anywhere from late teen 16 hundreds to early 1007 hundreds. Yeah. But definitely European. And the first bidets, the word means pony, kind of a little short legged, strong horse. And at the time, the French were crazy about those kinds of horses. Yeah. And apparently that has something to do with how you're supposed to use it. I still don't fully follow that. So, like these original bidets, it looked like a little kind of mini bathtub, but it also had something like a saddle shape and you squatted over it like you would almost like you were riding like, a little cobhor. Okay, all right. Well, that makes a little bit of sense, I guess. And it also had like four legs coming out of the body. If you think about it, it kind of makes sense that it looks like a little tiny horse without the top half or a head or a neck or ears or mane or tail or hooves. But other than all that, it's the spinning image of a cobhorse. Yeah, I think they looked a little more like ottomans with a little chamber pot in the center. Yes, but ottomans came from the Turks and the French probably hated the Turks at the time because that was geopolitics, so they would never make that comparison, even though it was like this great elephant in the room. Right. But these things were in the bedroom in France in the early 1700s, next to the chamber pot. And the very idea of pooping and peeing in your bedroom was pretty new. You still had an outhouse. But from what I saw, chamber pots and bidets were for nighttime business. So you don't have to leave your bedroom. Yeah, I mean, it's really kind of sweet if you think about it. It's luxurious, poop and pee in your bedroom, especially on a cold night. But eventually people were like, well, there's a lot of cholera around, there's a lot of typhoid. We should probably move these to a separate room. And eventually they did. And they called those bathrooms. Yeah, or restrooms or toilets or WCS or poop station village or Lose. I've got one for you. I wanted to say this in the last episode we recorded the wastewater episode. All right, let's hear it. So you know the word lou means bathroom or toilet in the UK. At least if not more so. When we were in Edinburgh doing those shows, remember you took a nap and I got all bored, so I went and walked around the city by myself. I went to old time Edinburgh, like old time, like seven times I went there too. Don't make me okay. Just some napper. I must have been napping when you went because I don't know why you wouldn't have just gone with me when I tried to wake you up. But regardless, on this tour, maybe you'll remember this, the tour guide said that they think the word lieu came from the Scotch people, the Scottish people saying guardy Lou when they threw their waste water out into the streets. Oh, yeah, like they would shout gardelou. And they think that guardilou came from guard de lee, which means watch the water in French. And so they think that guardy Lou came from watch the water and then lou came from gardyloo. And then that's where we got that term for the toilet in the UK. I love that. That's one for your next dinner party. I cannot tell you how many dinner parties I busted that out at. So bidets back to the bidet. They are or were more of a high society thing. Like you were using an outhouse if you weren't, I don't know, necessarily aristocracy, but you had to be like middle and upper class to have a bidet in your bedroom or in your house and probably a chamber pot even for that matter. Well, for a couple of reasons too, I think. One, you typically had servants who are going to take it away for you. That's number one. You got to change the number two, right? And then number two, if the spade is basically just a wash basin with water, they didn't have running water at the time, which meant you had to haul water. So you probably had a servant hauling water for you as well. So yeah, you were probably this thing that was like a luxury to the rest of the world was just nothing to you because you didn't have to do anything, you just used it. You didn't have to do any prep or take away or anything like that. That's right. And they don't know for sure who invented it, but this dude, Christopher de Rosier, made one for the French Royal family in 1710. A lot of people point to him as being the inventor of the bidet. Didn't take long. Within the next 30 or 40 years or so, they started having things like little hand pumps, so you could kind of have a little rudimentary spraying device to help yourself out. That's nice. It is nice. It is. I mean, because prior to this, it was just, again, a wash basin that you would straddle and just kind of flip it up onto your underside, your fanny, as it were, with your hand. Right, with your hand. And eventually that water comes back down and mixes with the water you're flipping up and you reached some critical point tipping point, as Malcolm Gladwell would put it. And now you're just flipping poop water up onto your nether regions and it's no longer helpful. So the idea that you could just sit there and spray a pump, a stream of water on there and not have to just flick the stuff out of the basin on to you, that's an enormous advancement. And they came along pretty early, I think, the 1750s, right? Yeah. That's about when the little spray thing came along. That's beautiful. And Chuck, one other thing, too, I think about the same time that the pump handle came along, they also installed like a refillable tank. So you fill the water with tank and everything that was in the basement was all just waste water. So you were good to go by 1750, as far as bidets were concerned? Yes, everything was totally clean and totally safe by 1750. Nothing could possibly go wrong. So these were big, obviously, in Europe they spread. Italy and Portugal were really big on the bidet. Still are. I thought Italy may have been the actual inventors of them and that the French possibly just popularized it. I could see that, yeah. French, they steal everything. They did. But at the same time, they were a superpower at the time, and they were also basically global taste makers. So once they became got into bedaze, the rest of the world followed pretty quickly. Or most of the rest of the world not if you were England or America, you probably went, no, thank you, Frenchman. Yes. South America, Argentina, Venezuela. They're pretty popular in the Middle East. And of course, Asia and Japan very much leads the way in not only bidet use, but bidet technology these days. Yeah, it's a classic example of what I've talked about before. The Japanese say, oh, I really like this invention. We can improve it by 130%, so let's do that. And that's exactly what they did. That's a good Japanese accent. Thanks. I had a little vocal fry there at the end to make it particularly confusing. So maybe let's take a quick break. Go cleaner vomit, as my daughter says. And we will talk about what's the deal with America and why we hate cleaning our buttholes the right way right after this. So, Chuck, you're talking about buttholes, I believe. Before the break, let's pick up where you left off. Yeah. What's up, America? Why don't you clean your butt hole the right way? I thought this was pretty interesting. There's a guy who I guess is a bidet expert who is speaking with The New York Times, and we happened to overhear it. He had some theories about why America didn't like the days and when you kind of touched on before, which was that England hated France at the time. They were rival world superpowers, much akin to America and the United States during the Cold War. I mean in the USSR. America USSR. Draco versus Rocky during the cold War. Right. So the English hated everything associated with the French, and they would just have never gone for bidets. But that seems to have carried over into the colonies like America, which is a pretty good theory for why Americans have never adopted bidets. Yes, and those were in the early days of non adoption. World War II happened. This sounded kind of like I wasn't sure I believe this at first, but then I saw it in a different way in a bunch of different places, so I do believe it. Yeah, but apparently American soldiers would go to brothels in Europe and in Japan, and depending on what theater of war you were stationed at, and you would see these bidets and you would associate it and there were a few different things going on. You might associate it with sex work and think gross. At the time, there were people that thought using a bidet after sex could be a contraceptive practice. Not true at all. Well, yeah, they thought that Duching was a reliable contraceptive practice. And it wasn't until, like, the 20s or 30s where it was proven basically indisputably, that, no, it basically does absolutely nothing. But the idea that you would use the bidet to do that kind of further associated it with sex work as well. Yeah. And then the other thing, which is incredibly sexist, and maybe throw in just a dash of misogyny, is that women on their period it hasn't been that long that women have been able to get products to deal with that and to talk about it as if it were just a normal thing that happens to the human body. It was very much under the table. I think we should do something, man, if we dare go down that road on Springtime Flower Blossom episode. Well, I was thinking maybe a shorty just on, like, tampons and maxi pads and the development of those things, because it took way too long for the awful, awful reason that manufacturers just didn't want anything to do with that, right? Yeah, for sure. I'm down. All right, well, let's do it. But menstruation had a lot to do with bidets not being used in America because no one wanted to talk about menstruation for a long, long time. So you've got GIS returning from overseas where they visited brothels and aren't particularly looking forward to introducing their wives to bidets because they associate them with sex work. They're also really useful for menstruation, which wasn't talked about at the time. And then they remind everybody of the king of France, who everybody hated, and you put those three things together, that makes it really difficult to market in America. And so they think that one or all of those reasons are why Americans never really got into the daydays, not until the Japanese said, hey, everybody, check this out. But we'll get to that. Not quite yet. Yeah. Another reason and this was mentioned as a chicken or the egg thing, I personally think, because the idea is that American bathrooms aren't big enough for this extra thing in there, but I think had we adopted it to begin with, we would have made our bathrooms a little bigger to fit these things personally. For sure. Totally. Because our bathrooms are enormous now, and they could totally fit a bidet. But if you look at most bathrooms, like a master bathroom, the suburban house, like, the bathroom is big, but the toilet is still small. The little toilet area. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we totally would have expanded our bathrooms to allow it. I think we just didn't need to have bigger bathrooms is because we didn't have it. So I say disdain for bidet led to smaller bathrooms rather than vice versa. Where do you fall? Yeah, I agree. I'm kind of mad because this was my chance when we renovated our house to put a real deal bidet in there if you want one. Yes. I didn't even think about it, but like you said, our toilet is wedged in a little zone, like all toilets. We could have made our shower smaller and stuck a bidet next to it. I guess I can see you dropping your highlighter while you're researching this article. Like, when it struck you. I was pretty much my chance. Interestingly, though, kind of one of the bigger bidet models that was popularized around the world was invented by an American named Arnold Cohen in the 1960s. Yeah, dude. So I had no idea about this, but the bidet seat that you use, that I use, that basically all Americans are starting to be like, hey, this is kind of awesome that everybody in Japan uses, that a lot of people around the world use today was invented by a guy named Arnold Cohen in the 1960s in the United States. No idea. Yeah. I also saw him referred to as the baday king. Yeah, man. And God bless this guy. He tried his best. He created this thing for his dad, who was older and not doing too well. And we'll talk about medical benefits here in a minute. But if you have a rash back there, if you have a hemorrhoid or an anal fissure or something like that, there is some research, like you said, not enough, but some research that shows that bidet can really be helpful if you have one of those conditions. And his dad did so. He was a former ad guy. He tried his best, and it just didn't quite work out in America. For Arnold Cohen. Yeah. He created a model called the American Sits Bath. S-I-T-Z bath. Which is weird because it's not a sits bath. No, there are sits baths now, and I don't know if they predated it or he just kind of adopted that or what, but he basically took a toilet seat and modified it. Added a foot pump to pump water under your bum with. He went to trade shows. He tried to market it as much as he could, and he also was very much ahead of his time. And again, this is the he was still a young man at the time. He saw that it was a problem how much toilet paper Americans use. Yeah, that was one of his driving forces, in addition to trying to come up with something that could help people like his dad who are suffering from rectal issues. And he said I think one of his quotes is, nobody wants to hear about Tushy Washing 101. This is too difficult to market. I know. And so he kind of gave up, I guess, to an extent. And I guess some time in the 70s, he either approached a company called Toto, which stands for Toyotafi, or Oriental Ceramics, and Japanese, or they approached him and they licensed this concept and kind of tinkered with it, made it better, made it much more automated, made it electronic. And they debuted the Washlet in 1980 in Japan. And it took a little, like, getting used to over there's. Well, but in very short order, the Japanese kind of clumped onto it and it became like part of their culture as much as, like, Sushi. Sure. Great. We did a great episode on Sushi. We did. I was also going to say chopsticks, anime. Cuteness. Who knows? Maple trees, a lot of stuff you could say. Sure. Maple. Japanese maples. I got a couple of those. Yes. They're beautiful, man. Do you have the kind of, like, sweeping, spreading kind or the upright kind? My favorite ones are the small low spreaders. And I got a couple of those. I don't think they're going to be huge, but the way I have them in our garden, it's just very lovely. It's one of my favorite trees. Yes. You don't want them to be huge when they're like that because they're supposed to be kind of subtle, understated and low growing. Yeah. Boy. There's one around the corner for me that I have Japanese maple envy in a big way. It looks like a twelve foot umbrella that's about 4ft off the ground. Wow. It's just gorgeous. Yeah, I'll bet it's old. Yeah, it's got to be. I just want to sit in it. Every time I go by their yard. You probably lay under it and just tickle it. Did I say sit under it or sit in it? You said sit in it. Yeah, I'm going to sit under it. Okay. You're going to be the weird neighbor who just sits in people's yards. Maybe. I've wanted to do that so many times, and I know you can't do it, especially as a grown adult. So what kind of a day do you have? You don't have to buzz market, but I got kind of one of the, like a $75 model that goes under your existing toilet seat. But I know that some of these Japanese models, it's actually part of the toilet seat and has dryers and they talk to you and all that good stuff. I will buzz, buzz, buzz because I love mine. I have two toto washlets. Okay. And it's not like the highest end one where you stand up and it flushes automatically or it talks to you or has lights. They have some that have UV lights built in, so when the lid shut, it kills everything in sight. But it's like a good wash lit. It has like a heated seat and everything and it's just wonderful to have that's the one where the seat is part of the unit, right? Yeah. Like the whole thing replaces your toilet seat and there's like a big kind of bulky contraption in back that I think is like a water tank and where all the mechanisms are. But it's like you take your old toilet seat and you throw it out the window into your neighbor's yard under the Japanese maple, next to your old spare tires and dead possums, and you replace it with this one bidet toilet seat. You connect it to the water supply and then you plug it in and there you have it. I'm looking at this thing now. I kind of want to get one, but I don't have a power outlet over there. That can be a problem. So you have to that's like an added cost a lot of times, unless you're comfortable with just having like an extension cord and surge protector or something, fine. It's not the end of the world. But if you're not, then yes, you need to have an electrician come and put a power outlet next to you. I really miss. Yeah, because you could have done that when you're doing the could have done that. Sorry I didn't warn you. No, that's all right. So I guess since we're talking about bidet seats, I guess we should talk about the cheaper ones. You can get them for, like, anywhere from $30 to $50. And like we said, that goes under your seat, and you have a little control device on the side of your toilet seat that you just turn on the spray and it shoots out. It's cold water. Unless you have the means to hook it up to warm water. But ours is cold water, so it's a little bit of a wake up up in the morning. Yeah, I bet. Is yours warm? I guess. Yes, it is. It's warm. The seats warm. It's just beautiful. I just want to poop in your house. Now. You come over and use it any time you want because I know you pee sitting down, so you're okay in my book. But these wash so get this, man. The washlet, when it was introduced in 1980, and the Washlet is like I don't know what you call it, but they took let's wash and turn it into the washlet when they released it. But as of 2007, toro had sold 17 million of these worldwide. 1980, it is amazing. As of 2000 and 912 years after that, it was 50 million. Wow. They sold 10 million since 2016. I'm sorry. 2019 was 50,002,016 was 40 million. So at some point along the way, a big portion of the world said, I like that. I'm going to try it, and I'm going to get one, because the sales have taken off even before this coronavirus shut in toilet paper run that we're experiencing in America. Yeah. I wonder. I was going to say if they had, like, a counter that said, like, 50 million clean buttholes. But there's more than that. You have two buttholes in your house. Right, exactly. Well, that's one of the things that people point to, is, like, well, there's a cost savings. If this thing lasts long enough, you'll eventually, eventually pay for itself in savings from having to buy toilet paper. Yes. And we'll get to the waste and toilet paper. But that is a problem. Yeah. Because even if the cost thing doesn't quite work out, you are still it's coming close to breaking even. It's not like a complete waste of money, but also, money aside, ecologically, it's probably a much better thing than toilet paper by any measure, any metric. All right, well, should we take another break? I think so. All right, let's take another break. And believe it or not, we're going to tell you how to use these things right after this. Okay, Chuck. So I teased it earlier. I think we should start with this third act by talking about the different kinds of bidets. We've already talked about two, right? Yeah. There's the little Cobhorse bidet that looks like a tiny bathtub next to your toilet. The Washlet is a brand name, but it's almost become a proprietary epidemic. Widespread. Yes, but that's also called the bidet seat that you replace your toilet seat with. And then the third type is a hose that looks like, you know, the dishwashing hose that you have, like, is coming out of your kitchen sink if it's, like, next to your toilet. That's the third kind of bidet. It's called, like, a wall mounted showerhead bidet. Yeah. I don't think these are nearly as common, are they? I didn't get that impression either, but when I looked it up, a lot of different images came up on Google Image. I don't even want to do that. All right. Can we talk about how we use these things? Yes, but I just want to say one more time, I'm thoroughly engrossed by the wall mounted showerhead bidet. Okay. You have to see one of these sometimes. I know. I've seen pictures. I just haven't seen them in person. Okay, I got you. Neither have I. But I spend a good hour staring at pictures of these things and imagining sure. All the possibilities. So go ahead. I think this part I cobbled this together from a bunch of sources from the Atlantic, from How Stuff Works, I think New York Times, but mental Floss, I think, or yeah, mental floss. And I think this came from How Stuff Works, step by step for how to use the bidet. Nice. And the first step, they say, is locate the bidet. That is a good first step. I can't believe they put that in there. I thought that was very funny. Actually, technically, their first step, if you're going by bullet points, was use the toilet as you normally do, both for urination and for defecation. That's step one as far as the editors of How Stuff Works is concerned. Oh, that is really funny. Yes. And actually, they do point out in that step one, that whether or not you wipe a little with toilet paper first I wouldn't do that. How I do it is I wet my bum first with a good spray, and then I use just a little bit of toilet paper. And that's the great thing, is you're not using nearly as much. You can just use a few squares to kind of just make sure everything's cleaned up and dry. If you don't have a fancy pants dryer like yours. Yeah, I found that the dryer takes so long. That's why I don't have the patience for it. No. Who does? You know? Crazy psychos, maybe. Unless you got a good book or something. Sure. And Uncle John's bathroom reader. That would do it. That would keep me on the can long enough to air dry with the blow dryer. Or a little book coming this fall. Oh, yes. Shall we plug it? I think it's a great time to plug our book. It's called stuff you should know. An incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. That's right. Coming to bookstores this fall. You can pre order now, and I think all signs are still full bore ahead, even though we're. In the midst of a global pandemic. In fact, hopefully, they're thinking, this is just what people need. Yeah. And hopefully it is. And at the very least, it is guaranteed to keep you on the toilet until your legs go numb. That's right. That's an old George Carlin joke. Oh, really? What, to sit on the toilet? Do your legs go numb? No, he was talking about some game show, and one of the contestants was introduced. One of her hobbies was sitting on the toilet until her legs went. Really? Which is not good for you, they say, especially if you have hemorrhoids. It can make that a lot worse. So you're supposed to do your business and get off. I could totally see that. You're also not supposed to watch TV in bed. That's supposed to be for sleeping. So if you ever have trouble getting to sleep, they suggest that you go read out on the couch until you start to get drowsy and then go to bed and fall asleep so that your body and your mind will start to associate bed strictly with doing your sleeping business. I say poopoo to that because I love watching TV in bed. Yeah. Hey, I'm with you. It's a nice little treat. It's great. I get why people don't do it, but I'm not one of those people. Hey, to each his own, we always say, right? Teach their own. Teach their own. Yeah. All right, so I guess we're at medical. Oh, no, wait. We located the bidet. Right. You've done your business to me, the downside of having the separate bidet is you do your business and then you've got to get up and remount another device. So you've got it going on with your fancy pants wash lid. I think. I think that's why I was so surprised that you wanted a regular bidet, because there's, like, a whole drippy step moving from one to the other. Probably not. I think when you get a washlet, you're not going to want a regular bidet any longer. I can't get a washlet, dude. I don't have the power. I need that out. You can hire an electrician to come run an outlet. It's very easy. Oh, I know. I'm going to look into that. You're right. Okay. You're going to love it, Chuck. Okay. Does yours talk? I forgot. No, it doesn't talk. That would be amazing. I've never seen the talking one, except on The Simpsons. Well, maybe that's where I got it. Yeah, because there's that one that says, I am honored to accept your waste. I think that's where I got it. Surely some of them talk, right? Probably. I think Japan is famous for talking appliances, right? Sure. And just having, like, weird random stuff written on their appliances. Yeah. I mean, I've talked about that rice maker. I think you have the same one or one of the same versions. That thing makes all kinds of fun sounds. Yeah. Oh, hey, while we're talking about this stuff, let me say mike Mightygood Rahman hooked us up. Dude, that was so nice. Well, first of all, thank you for mentioning it, because you got us hooked up big time. I did not anticipate that much ramen coming. No, like a box full of Mike's Mighty Good ramen, basically saying, hey, thanks for the shout out. So I had never tried it before, and it is really good stuff, and we have a bunch for free, which is nice because it also stores really well, too, during times like this. Yeah. And I had already also purchased about $100 worth, and it all kind of came at once. So I have literally a big moving storage bin full of Mike's Mighty Good, and I eat it for lunch every day. Today I had the vegetable coconut milk, lemongrass, and it is delicious. Yes, it is amazing. I think the beef is my favorite so far. Oh, I love that spicy beef. Have you augmented yours yet? No, I'm a novice still. I'm just kind of taking it little by little. But I saw that they have, like, a recipe card for suggesting how to kind of dress it up a little bit. Yeah, I mean, I usually just because it's a good, quick meal to go and pretty low, very low calorie. But the other day, I did have some beef brisket, and I mince that up really small, and I cooked I did a boiled egg and cut that thing in half, and it was so good. Man, that sounds good. Yeah. We don't buzz market much, but it is delicious, and they hooked us up, so thank you, Mike. Yeah, and thank you. Also, the thing that made me think of it was the Zoji Rushi rice makers. They liked us talking about them, and they're like, hey, you guys want some? You want a thermos? Yeah, which is pretty nice, too. Maybe I'll get a washlet. Yeah, toto brand washlets are really great, Chuck. I can recommend them highly. All right, so let's talk about medical uses. Like you said, there hasn't been a ton of research, and there has been a little conflicting research, but a lot of doctors GPS do say in specialists, if you have colitis, if you have IBS, if you have crohn's, if you have colon cancer, then a bidet seat might be right up your alley to help you out back there. It will be. But also, Chuck, I just realized we never finished saying how to use the bidet. Well, no, you squirt your butt, right. And I said that you either could dry it, pat it dryer, or have a dryer. What else is there? Yeah, we did make it through that. Wow, it just went so quickly. I think one of the things I want to point out really quickly is that the whole point of it is that you're using water to clean off your bottom in the exact same way that you would use toilet paper to clean off your bottom or your other bits, depending on if you have other bits down there. How do you put this? I don't know. Well, whatever. I think I did a fine job. Thank you very much. Some people prefer to use toilet paper to dry off. It sounds like both of us do. Some people just air dry or they use the blower attachment or whatever, but that's it. There's nothing more to it. I've read that some people use soap, which is crazy to me, but okay. And then some people chuck, I ran across this, they don't even use a bidet. If they poop, they take a shower afterward. Have you ever heard of anything like that before in your life? No. I would say that's an extreme germaphobe clean freak is probably not a nice way to say it, but there are probably people legit phobias about that stuff. But from what I saw, there's a significant number of people, at least in the United States, who, like you, poop, you take a shower. That's just what you do after you poop. Interesting. I would take seven showers a day to be a water crisis just from you. What a waste. Well, yes, that is a huge waste. And that's actually kind of a criticism of bidets while you're using water instead. But as we'll see in a little bit, you're using a resource one way or another down there. That's right. There you go. Okay, so you were talking about medical issues. Sorry about that. No, that's all right. I talked about all the ones dealing with your bottom, but apparently and this is I don't know how much research they've done on this, but apparently they can help out with UTIs as well. If you get frequent UTIs. Yes. And here's how they suggest that if you are a woman, you use the bidet on your woman parts before and after sex, and that will help cut down on fecal bacteria entering your vagina and becoming part of your vaginal microflora, which can lead to UTIs. Interesting. I thought that was pretty interesting as well. And guys, don't take the fence well. No, you can get a prostate infection from not keeping very clean down there. No, I just mean if you make love and then your girlfriend or wife jumps up and runs in there and cleans out real good, just be a man about it. Right. You should probably not take offense of that kind of thing. Should we be talking about this? Yeah, we haven't crossed the line yet. Okay. I think you established a new line in the student loans episode, so I think we're well within that. Well, my reasoning there is if there are any elementary school kids listening to student loans, then their little Alex Peak keaton can handle it. Alex Peak, man, what a great shout out there. Yeah. What else? Here, if you're elderly and if you have arthritis or something, it's tough, man. You might just physically have a harder time wiping your bottom if you use the bathroom. And apparently, as you age, one of the single biggest factors for staying independent, like, you can still cook, you can still clean, you can still take care of yourself, but you might have a hard time wiping your bottom. You can still stay independent if you can get that Bidet going. Yes. And again, if you're sitting there just like, wait, what are you guys talking about? If you were raised on toilet paper, from what? There's a huge divide right now in the world. Apparently, a good three quarters, two thirds to three quarters of the world does not use toilet paper, or they use it much more sparingly and they use a Bidet instead. And they consider that clean. They consider using toilet paper unclean. And whether toilet paper or Bidets are clean or unclean is so culturally ingrained that it's almost unimaginable, considering one cleaner than the other, depending on what you've been raised on. But that is the case. And they've done a lot of well, they haven't done a lot of studies, but some of the studies they've done have shown, like, yeah, this actually is cleaner, or, no, this isn't as clean as you think. But one thing that really kind of stuck out to me, Chuck, was the idea that water alone can make you cleaner than wiping your bottom. Which makes total sense if you step back and think about it, because all you're doing is wiping paper on your bottom. But to me, it's like you're getting stuff out of there and you're getting it away, which I guess you're doing with water as well. Yeah, that's kind of it. Like you said, they've done some studies, and they have shown that it can ease some of these symptoms of anal fissures and hemorrhoids. There's something called itchy anus that it can help with that is a real thing. But there was also a study about ten years ago in Japan that said if you use a warm water bidet, and if you are a woman, it can kind of jostle loose your microflora in your vagina and it can just kind of knock things out of whack down there and it can lead to more vaginal bacterial infections. Yes. So in the study, it was like, 268 women, and they found that normal microflora was not present in 43% of Bidet users. And only 8% of non users of Bidets had normal microflora not present. That's pretty significant. And then of the 50 out of the 268 who had fecal bacteria present in their vaginal microflora, 46 of that 50 used Bidets. So that was a really surprising thing to a lot of people because they're like, no, this is clean. This is way cleaner than using toilet paper. And this study suggests that that's not necessarily true. Now, was that for only for warm water, though, from what I saw. Yes, it was warm water. Yeah. Use that cold water. Sure. It really gets you up in the morning, like you said. And then I guess, finally we're at the point where we talk about just toilet paper. We covered toilet paper in our episode on toilet paper, but as a reminder, about 90% of toilet paper in the United States comes from Canadian forests. And that's not cool. Americans represent less than 5% of the world's population, but we use 20% of the world's toilet paper, and that's got to stop. Yes, dude. So those Canadian forests, they're talking about old growth boreal forest. And there's a term I saw the tree to toilet pipeline. I saw 27,000 trees a day go down the toilet in the form of toilet paper. And again, this is mostly old growth trees. And I guess the toilet paper industry in the United States is like a $6 billion industry. From what I saw. There's a lot of I think each American uses about 40 rolls of toilet paper every year. The average household uses 150. There's a lot of room for improvement, and that's a big plus for bidets. Even if you still use toilet paper to dry off, you're using so much less than you would without a bidet that you're just saving tons of trees by using a bidet. That's right. You are using water. But if you've ever used one of these seat attachments or seats like you have, it's not a ton of water. It's not like a bathtub or anything like that. No, not at all. And the more advanced your bidet is, it doesn't have to be like the most high end bidet for this to happen. But pretty quickly, as far as technological development goes, in the bidet you get, the amount of water is going to be much more efficient than just, like, say, squirting a dishwasher hose up there. I'm just fascinated by that. It's pretty great. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, there you have it, everybody. There's bidets. We told you there's going to be a lot of TMI, and we delivered. And since I said TMI, everybody, it's time for listener mail. This is from Mary Kerr in Buffalo, New York. Hey, guys. Been listening to stuff you should know for years. It's been my companion on mini morning run, road trip and just tidying up around the house. I listened to the shorty on Chuck, mentioned his license plate had six six six in there. I thought of the story about my brother Matt. He recently moved to Wisconsin and was at the DMV to change his license plates. The DMV employee handed him his new license plate number, which was 6666 miles per hour. I know, I love it. Not bad. The employee looked at the plates and said, do you want a different number? And he thought about it for a second, and he thought a different number would be best so that he didn't appear to be a speeding Satan lover. And so the DMV employee graciously changed out the plates. And I'm not going to read what plate they changed out for because it's just now occurring to me that I don't want to out her brother's license plate for some reason. That's true. It was a man, she said, just a silly story I couldn't help but share. Thank you for your knowledge, levity and distraction that you have provided over the years, especially in this time of stress and uncertainty, and keep doing what you're doing. And that is from Mary in Buffalo, New York. Nice. Thanks a lot very much. Appreciate it. Although I do have to say, personally, I'm a little disappointed in your brother. But that's okay because he probably doesn't care. Yeah, if you want to get in touch with us like Mary did, so you can hear that we're disappointed in your sibling, well, you can send us an email, then 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 shows. Summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's criminal. Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, Morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Erkart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today."
3f96fba2-5461-11e8-b6d0-8f9655781f81	Selects: The Unsolved Mystery Disappearance of the Sodder Children	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-the-unsolved-mystery-disappearance-of-the	In 1945 a house fire took the lives of five children - except that their bodies were never found. In this classic episode, dive into the longstanding mystery of the odd circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Sodder children.	In 1945 a house fire took the lives of five children - except that their bodies were never found. In this classic episode, dive into the longstanding mystery of the odd circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the Sodder children.	Sat, 10 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=100, tm_isdst=0)	42483997	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everyone. It's me, Josh, your old friend. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I'd chosen our episode from 2016, the unsolved mystery disappearance of the Solder Children. It's a story, a very tragic and sad good one, but also incredibly enthralling about five children who disappeared after a house fire on Christmas back in 1045. It's one of my all time favorite episodes, which is why I'm choosing it as a select, and I hope you enjoy it as well. 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. Jerry's over there. So this is Steph you shouldn't unsolved Mysteries edition. Yeah. Really? Are you cool with this? No, I'm leaving. Yes. I think it's great, man. I love me a good unsolved mystery, and this is super sad, so it's not like I love it, and I think it's hysterical. Right? I just like, unsolved mystery. What's an hysterical unsolved mystery? Like, I got pants in the second grade, and I don't know who did it. That's a hysterical on top mystery. Yeah, I was just in line, pants around the ankles, turned around, and everyone was like, did you just go with it? And you were like, Check it out, check me out. I'm in second grade. Yeah, good for you. But it never happened. I made it up. Oh, really? Yeah. It's called improv, buddy. It's a craft so unseen, end seen and seen. Have we ever established which one it is? Yeah, a few times. No, it is. Chuck, we are talking about a family called the Solders. Not the Solders, right. Not the welding technique. No, the Solders. They are a family out of Fayetteville, West Virginia, of Italian extraction, as we'll see. Yes, very much so. Like you said, this is an unsolved mystery. Their family going along totally normally has turned into one of these stranger unsolved mysteries in American history. Yeah. And certainly in West Virginia history. Oh, definitely. And I should say, I texted our friend Justin McElroy of the McElroy triplets. Right. Well, they're not triplets. They're brothers. Oh, yeah. Of my brother and my brother and me podcast because they are from West Virginia. And as you'll see here, there's a very famous billboard that we're going to talk about about this case. Right. And I was like, hey, dude, do you remember where seeing this thing, how far are you from Fayetteville? Right. He said, just a couple of hours. He said, but I've never heard of that. And I was like, really? This seemed like the kind of cautionary tale that would be whispered about all over West Virginia. I can see that. But he said he never heard of it. And then he looked it up and said, oh, wow. And I said, I bet your dad knows about it. And then he did. He said he didn't respond. Oh, you didn't text him back? Answer me. No, that's all right. I am Facebook friends with his dad, though. I should have. Yeah, ask him. Go to the source. That's right. Well, let's go back to the beginning, Chuck. Okay. Back to 1895. That's right. That's when Giorgio Soldo, who had become George Solder, was born in Sardinian, 1895, and came to the US. In 19 eight as a young lad of 13 years old. And he was a go getter. He really was. So he had an older brother who traveled with him from Sardinia to New York. I guess he was like, I don't want to do this. And right when they made it through Ellis Island, he turned right back around and went back to Italy. Yeah. I don't know, man. Go get a cup of coffee and think it over is what I say. If you made that ship's voyage, just mull it over for a day or two. Yeah. Cause what if, like, you're halfway back, you're like, actually, I should have stayed. Yeah, you might meet a pretty lady from Brooklyn. Did you see that movie Brooklyn? No. Great. Really? Yeah. Okay, check it out. You sounded surprised. I was a little surprised. Yeah. It was nominated for many awards. It doesn't always mean it usually means it's pretty good. No, it depends. Okay. Brooklyn highly recommended about a young Italian man who falls in love with an Irish immigrant. Well, this has nothing to do with this thing. No, not at all. Because this man falls in love with an Italian immigrant. That's right. So George, like you said, he was a bit of a go getter. He's 13, he's on his own, literally, without any other family in America. It's kind of mind blowing. But then you think back to 1895, they didn't really understand what childhood was at that point, so he was probably like a working age and had been for years. But it seems really weird to us now. Sure, he might have been retiring at 13. He was smoking cigars already. So he, like I said, was a go getter. He started working on the Pennsylvania Railroad and then moved to West Virginia. To Smithers, West Virginia, and worked as a truck driver and then said, you know what? This is America. Darn it. I didn't come here to drive a truck for someone. I'm going to own my own trucking business. And the Statue of Liberty went, yeah, nice going, kid. So he started his own trucking business and he's in West Virginia. So in short order, he starts hauling coal. Yes, coal and dirt. And it wasn't like the hugest business. I think he did okay for himself. He did it okay for himself. He's like solidly middle class. He didn't become like, wealthy or anything. And as a matter of fact, later on, a local government official would say that the Solders were one of the best middle class families in Fayetteville. Yeah. And they had a small Italian population in Fayetteville, which I think is why he ended up there in his community. Yeah. And he moved there with his wife Jenny, right. Yeah. Jenny Cipriani, who he met, she came over from Italy when she was three. He met her at a store called the Music Box and they got married. And like Italian families do, they had ten kids. Ten kids in 20 years. Yes. That's a lot of kids. Pumping them out with great regularity. And like you said, when they moved to Fayeville, the reason they moved to Fayeville had no idea that West Virginia even had Italian people in it, let alone strong Italian communities. But they moved to Fayetteville and they were part of the Italian community. And George was well known again, they were a respected middle class family there. He did pretty good for himself, and he was also well known for his opinions on everything, including politics. And during the was at war with Italy, and not all of the Italian Americans were feeling it. On the American side, there were a lot of disagreements over Mussolini and the government that he was creating among Italian Americans, including in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Sure. And George in particular hated Mussolini and very frequently spoke out about them and would get in arguments with some of the locals who felt differently about Mussolini. And I guess there were some hard feelings here there, but he doesn't seem to have taken them seriously very much. No. And we mentioned that if it sounds like we're setting something up for later, we indeed are. So just tuck that little fact away and then can we fast forward in time yeah. To Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve, that's right. So here's what happens. It's Christmas Eve, as is tradition in some households, you can open up a few gifts on Christmas Eve. Yeah. So this is what happened. They opened up some presents, comes time for Betty By and five of the children, maurice, 14, martha twelve, Louis, or Louis ten. Jeannie a little confusing because that's the mom's name, eight years old. And Betty said, can we please stay up late and play with these new toys? Yeah. Their older sister Marion, she worked at a five and diamond town 2 miles down the road, and she had surprised her younger brothers and sisters with some toys that they had not been expecting. That's right. And they were very happy. So they asked Mum if they could stay up. Yeah. And the elder Jenny said, yeah, I guess you can stay up. Turn out the lights, lock the doors before you go to bed. I'm going to hit the rack with your dad. And our two year old daughter Sylvia, 23 year old John, and 16 year old George Jr. I guess they were just ready for bed, too. Right. And then if you're thinking there's one missing child, he is away in the military, the eldest. Yeah. Fighting either Mussolini or Hitler or Tojo. Right. One of those guys. Right. So he's away. And I could not for the life of me find that guy's name. I couldn't neither, actually. So the mom goes to bed, Jenny goes to bed, and the dad, George, and his two next oldest sons who had been working with them that day, they'd all gone to bed about ten. What time did the mom go to bed? At eleven, something like that. Yeah. But she leaves those five youngest children and Marion, their older sister, who I think was 17 at the time, downstairs when she goes to bed. Yes. And then at about 1230 on Christmas morning, because remember, that was Christmas Eve, about 1230 at night, the phone rings. And this is not an era where and this kind of, to me, goes to show these people were doing all right. They had a phone in 1945 in West Virginia. They may have been the only people in West Virginia with a phone in 1945. I'm just saying. I don't think everybody had a phone in West Virginia in 1945. Okay? So they certainly didn't have one at their bedside. So Jenny, the mom, has to get up to answer the phone, and on the other line she hears a woman asking for somebody she doesn't know or recognize. And in the background, there's obviously a party going on. There's laughter, there's clinking of glasses. And Jenny says, I don't know who you're talking about, you have the wrong number. And the woman laughs weirdly and hangs up. Yeah, I'm going to go ahead and come out and say I think this means nothing and it's total coincidence. So supposedly they track that woman down and she said it was just the wrong number. Yeah, total coincidence. That's what I think. But think about that, though. Yeah. Like, had that not happened, a lot of other stuff would have gone unnoticed. Right, true. It's a big deal. So before she goes back to bed, she noticed the lights are on downstairs. Yeah. She said, Turn the lights off. Lock the door before you go to bed. So one of her kids is on the couch asleep. She's like, Wait a minute, the door is unlocked, the lights are on. They shouldn't have done that. So let me lock the doors and turn off the lights. And she leaves the one that's asleep on the couch asleep. It was the one that got her sisters as toys. Sleepy time on the couch, that's fine. But those five younger ones who've been playing with their toys, they were in order to be found, so mom just assumed they went upstairs to bed. Right. So she goes back to bed. Yes. And then like an hour later, she's awoken by like, a thump on the roof. Yeah. And she falls back asleep again. Well, it sounded like a heavy thump and a sliding down of the roof right. Rolling or something, as if something heavy had landed on it and then slid off right. And she just went back to sleep. Very important matter. She probably figured it was a reindeer or something like that. It would be in Christmas. You never know. The next time she woke up, she woke up to panic and chaos because her house was on fire. And Chuck, we'll talk about the fire right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial, plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. All right. Dude, the house is on fire. That's right. So Sylvia, a little two year old Sylvia, is in their room with the parents. So they get her out absolutely covered with them because she's in the crib. And then 17 year old Marion and 23 year old John and 16 year old George Jr. Are all outside and safe right at this point. So everyone is out except for these five other kids. Right. And they were on the top floor of the house, I believe, in two different rooms, and the only way down is this one single staircase. And George tried to go back into the house. He broke through a window, cut his arm quite badly getting in through the window or opening the door, and runs inside. And the entire downstairs floor is totally engulfed in flame and smoke. He can't see anything, but he can see that there's no way he can go up the staircase or anyone can make it down the staircase. So he runs back outside of the house to try to figure out another way to get up to those kids on the top floor. Yes. And here's an interesting .1 of the relatives of I think it was the guy who ended up marrying the youngest daughter later in life. Sylvia said they did a lot of research on this, and he said the original police report said that the very first statement said that the two sons, John and George, who got out, said they actually ran into the other kids rooms and physically shook them awake. Right. And then later on in interviews, they said no. They just called out to them and assume they heard. But it still is a mystery as to whether or not that really happened. Police will say the first statement is usually the accurate one. Oh, yeah. But that's just speculation. So from what I understand, the family rationalized that later on by saying that the two boys probably felt very guilty, and they said that they did what they wish they had or felt that they should have done. That makes sense. And that their revisions later on were actually the factual ones, that they tried to rouse their siblings by just shouting up the stairs, I can buy that. So Papa tries to get in, cuts himself really bad. Yeah. Then he says, Wait a minute. I have this ladder that leans up against the house. Always, always let me go grab that ladder. Is not there. Very weird. It is very weird. And it will be found in a ditch, like, 75ft from the house later on. And later on, witnesses supposedly saw a dude stealing it from the garage. But there are so many things that people say about this case that is hard to know what's true and what was invented that is true. That they saw a guy. A dude. Well, they report that they saw a guy. Well, that guy the guy actually was found and was arrested and charged for stealing and never questioned about the actual fire. The guy that stole the latter. Yeah. Okay. So the dad says, Let me get my trucks, my Big Coal Holland trucks, because those are tall. Let me pull that next to the house. Climb up on that. Neither one of the trucks start, even though they've been using them to work earlier that day. Yeah. So the thinking by the cops and everyone else pretty much is in the panic. He and his son flooded the engines trying to get them started, and they wouldn't start. Yeah. But it became yet another, like, fishy detail that made this family suspect. Something really weird happened here. Yeah. And then later, there was a totally don't understand the whole engine removal theory. So it doesn't make any sense. That guy who stole the latter was caught stealing a block and tackle that you would use to remove engines. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. But it doesn't mean that he messed with their car or use that block and tackle to do anything to the engines. No. They probably just flooded them. That one I'm in agreement on. So this family, they're watching helplessly as the house is going up in flames. The house burned to the ground in about 45 minutes, ostensibly with the children trapped inside. Yeah. And if you think, why didn't the fire trucks come? The Fayetteville Fire Department. It was 1945. It was Fayetteville, West Virginia, christmas. Yeah. It was christmas night or morning, I guess, at this, .1 of the daughters went to a neighbor's house, called the fire department. No operators on duty, even. Right. And another neighbor who saw this didn't have a phone at their house. So they went to the local tavern, and they called the operator to report the fire, too. And they couldn't get the operator either. Operator was probably at home sleeping for christmas. That's right. So, eventually, someone drives and literally physically tracks down fire chief FJ. Morris, who does not come out smelling well in this well, he doesn't. He said, I can't drive the fire truck as the fire chief. Right. And the way that they don't even have a siren, the way that they alerted the fire department was called a phone tree. They just start calling one another. Then they call the next person, which made even less sense, because, again, the solders were the only people in west Virginia with a phone in their house. That's not true. So eventually, 7 hours later, at 08:00 a.m., the fire truck arrives to find a smolding pile of ash. And a lot of people are like, well, clearly, the fire department was paid off or told to halt. From what I gather, it was sheer ineptitude. And also the sense, I think the fire marshal or fire chief defended himself later, saying, yeah, he said, I couldn't drive the fire truck, so I had to wait for somebody who could. And also, that house went up so fast, there wasn't any need for us to get there in any kind of hurry. Well, I mean, that's probably true. He also said burned in like between 30 and 45 minutes. Yeah. If you're a fire chief, it's not what you want to say. No. Who cares when we get there? Also, one of the firemen who showed up was jenny solder's brother. Yeah. So it's not like there was this conspiracy among the fire department, necessarily. Although that is a common belief in people who pay attention to this case. It is. So, what they find at 08:00 a.m. As a house burnt to the ground, what they don't find are any remnants of those five children. Yeah. And herein is where the mystery really kicks in. Yeah. The family starts paying attention to little weird details. At first, they just assume that the kids have just totally gone. They were totally burned up. Well, that's what the fire chief said. He's like, there's no remains whatsoever because it burned them to nothing. They did, like, a cursory examination of the rubble. They did find some other stuff. Like, they found appliances that were recognizable. They found a couple of other things, but they never found any of the kids. And they took the fire chiefs word at face value and said, okay, well, our kids are in there. We can't bury the site of this any longer. So george went and got a bunch of dirt and buried the site in about 5ft of fill dirt and decided to plant a memorial garden there on the side of the house. Fire. Yeah. This is on january 2. So he wasn't supposed to do this? No, they were supposed to leave it open to continue to investigate. The state police inspector said it was faulty wiring. It's now covered in dirt. And so now the family has just left alone saying, what happened to our children? Were they in there? Right. So when they buried the place in dirt, they assumed that the children were still in there. And this is their grave now. They were never going to be found. But then, like you said, they started thinking about weird details that emerged. Right. One of the first ones was the idea that it was faulty wiring. George basically knew for a fact that it wasn't faulty wiring. He'd recently had an electric stove installed. And just to make sure, again, he was doing pretty well. Just to make sure that the house didn't burn down with this new fangled electric stove, he had the wiring in the house redone. And then he had it inspected by the power company, who sent out an inspector and said they did a good job, the wiring is fine. So he basically knew almost for a fact that it wasn't faulty wiring in the house. Yeah. Not only that, after the fire started, when they were outside, there were still lights on in the house. Right. So remember jenny came down and turned out the lights. She left the christmas tree lights on. And while the house was burning, the christmas tree was still the christmas tree lights were on, which must have been like a really ghastly thing to see. Sure. Speaking of the wiring, there was a point a few months earlier, and this is definitely a strange thing when this guy showed up, he was a stranger. No one knew him. And he asked about working as a driver, and he didn't have any work for him, but he was sort of just I guess they had the conversation outdoors, wandered around to the back of his house and said, you know what? Your wiring here at your fuse box is going to cause a fire someday. And george thought, well, that's a really weird thing to say because not only did I have it just inspected and it's fine, it's just a strange thing for you to say, mr. Stranger. Get off my property. Pretty much take the canole. Very nice, but weird and disconcerting after the fact. Obviously he didn't think anything of it at the time, other than that's a weird thing to say. Yeah. Another fishy thing that happened that really kind of stuck out in retrospect was the life insurance salesman, right? Yeah, a life insurance salesman came through and tried to sell george some life insurance policies for his children. And george didn't bite. And the guy got irate and his, quote, was kind of weird, actually. He said, your house is going to go up in smoke. Your GD house. Your children are going to be destroyed. And then here's where it really gets weird. He says, you will be repaid for the dirty things you've been saying about Mussolini. And George just went like, get off my property. Yeah, just the usual. Yeah. So remember we said that he was outspoken about Mussolini and his politics? Clearly, this got around to this dude, and it's just a weird, disconcerting thing to say, especially after these kids look like they may have perished in this fire. Yeah. Especially if he didn't make a big deal out of it at the time. Was this like a normal business attempt in 1945, west Virginia among the Italian community, your kids are going to die. You'll be repaid for what you've been saying about Mussolini. Good day to you. I don't know. I'm sure that's not in the handbook. What's even fishier, though, Chuck, is that same guy served on the coroner's inquest jury that ruled that the fire was the result of faulty wiring. Yeah, it all gets a little weird. Yeah. And then quite a few other weird things. One of the older sons said that, you know what? Right before Christmas, there was a dude parked right across from our house watching the school bus and watching the younger kids get off the school bus and come to the house. And it was clear that he was sitting there watching us. And it was strange. Yeah. He was in a van. Was he really? No, I bet he was. He would have been if it were, like the 70s. All bet. Yes, that's true. So, Chuck, let's take another break because the mystery is about to deepen even more. The plot thickens, et cetera. 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. All right, so things are getting a little weird. And all of a sudden, now Jenny and George, the Solder parents, start thinking, like, wait a minute, are our kids actually dead? Who is the last person to see them alive? If John and George Jr. To be believed, they were the last ones to see them alive because they went and shook them awake. But they may not have actually done that well, and they changed their story to say that they didn't. Right? Yeah. So then, technically, Marion, the 17 year older sister who brought the toys and was downstairs with the kids while they were playing with them, would have been the last to see them alive. But I could never find anybody pressing her for what her story was. So the assumption that I'm going on is that she just fell asleep on the couch, and when she fell asleep, the kids were still downstairs. But the Solders are starting to wonder, like, wait a minute, were those kids even in the house when the house went down? And they're backed up by the idea that no remains were found? Yeah, that's the one that really is bothering them. They're like, something should have been found. Yeah. And all of a sudden, this story is starting to get national attention in the press. And the soldiers later on would say george would say, if they were burned in the house, if they died in that house fire, I want to be convinced. And if they weren't, I want to know what happened to them. And this kind of kicked off, like, a lifelong quest for George and Jenny. And in 1949, to try to literally get to the bottom of it, they hired a guy to come in and investigate, to basically excavate the memorial site and look for the remains of the children. And he didn't find it. Well, yeah. And previous to that, they did their own experiments with burning things, animal bones and just sort of self experimentation to see what remains. And there was always bones, of course. Yeah. They could never get them to just turn into ash. They went to a crematorium even, and said, we're probably just not even getting this thing hot enough. And they said, well, actually, at 2000 degrees, it would take 2 hours to completely burn a body up. Your house didn't get nearly that hot. Right. And it only burned for 30 to 45 minutes. So there should definitely be human remains, like, all over the place. Jenny kind of really turned into, like, this citizen scientist. Actually, she taught herself forensics as far as burning of remains goes. She looked into other fires. There was another fire that happened around the same time that killed seven people, and the remains of all seven people were found in the burned out house as well. So she's, like, getting more and more convinced, and so is George, that their kids are still alive. So in 1949, they had a forensic investigator of. Some sort come in and do an investigation and an excavation of the site. And he turned up some stuff. He found some coins, found a dictionary that had belonged to the kids, and he did actually find some vertebra, and he had the vertebra sent off to the Smithsonian Institution, actually. And they investigated this and issued a report about the bones. Yes, they did. They said the human bones consist of four lumbar vertebrae belonging to one individual. The transfers recess a fuse, so the age of this individual at death should have been 16 or 17. Top limit, 22. And on this basis, the bone show greater skeletal maturation than what I would expect from a 14 year old who's the oldest missing child. Right. So basically, it was either placed there by someone, it was not charged, it was not a part of the fire. It hadn't been part of the fire, it wasn't one of the kids, and it was either placed there by someone or happen to be in that dirt. Can you imagine that? Think about that. George went and got a bunch of filled dirt to come and fill in this memorial site and ended up disturbing a grave, like maybe an unmarked grave somewhere. I didn't think that was remarkable. That's crazy. If you went and got filter and you found a bone bones, human bones. Yeah. I wouldn't can you tell by the pitch of my voice that that is crazy? I can. The other weird thing that they found was this green rubber casing that later they found out it was a part of some kind of bomb, an incendiary device. And some people think that that's a weird thing to have on your property. The house had just burned, and they think this could have been the sound that Genie heard in the middle of the night when something hit the roof and rolled off. Right. Who knows? But she didn't hear a big boom. It seemed like if it was a bomb, that would have been pretty obvious. Yeah, I mean, if it was like a napalm balm, it doesn't necessarily explode. It just ignites spreads. Yeah. So they don't make noise. I don't know. We'll go experiment with one. Objection. Speculation. Smithsonian report actually said, it's really curious that the bodies weren't recovered or found in this pretty good excavation that you guys hired this dude to do. And it actually set off a larger investigation in West Virginia. The governor and I think the state police superintendent both said, what you guys are doing is hopeless. The case is closed. Your kids died in that fire. Case closed. And the Solders were like, no, we're going to go hire a private detective. And they did hire a private detective. And he started sniffing around town and heard a weird rumor that the fire chief had said that he actually found a heart and had put it in a box and buried it at the site. Which is a weird thing to do. It is. And he went to the guy and was like, you got to show me where this thing is buried. He does actually dig it up, and they find a sort of I wouldn't say fresh beef liver. freshish, but not burned. And then he admits, you know what? I put this there, hoping that someone would find this and just think it was a body part of one of their kids. We can close the case. Right. Very ham fisted way of closing a case. That's a jerk. Yeah. And it's just I don't know why he thought that would work. I don't want to say he's dumb, but it was a pretty dumb thing to do. Beef. So previous to this, all sorts of weird claims had started to fly in reporting of sightings all over the country. One woman was operating a tour stop about 50 miles west, and she said, no, I saw them the morning after the fire served in breakfast. They got into a car with Florida license plates, and trust me, it was your kids. Yeah. So that freaks them out for sure. Of course. Then there was a hotel not too far in Charleston, and apparently late at night, I think four kids had checked in, accompanied by some adults, two women and two men, all Italian. And she said, I tried to talk to the kids and tried to be nice. And the dudes freaked out and started talking Italian and shuffled the kids out of there real quick. Yeah. And they left early the next morning. Super sketchy. Some lady said that she saw the kids looking out of a car that was driving by as the house is on fire. And then there were even more tips that kind of poured in over the years, including one that said that they were actually being held by a distant relative of Jenny's. Someone said that Martha was in a convent out west, I believe. Yes. In 1967, they got a letter from a lady in Houston, said that the oldest boy or one of the boys Lewis, had lived in that town, got drunk one night and basically told everyone who he was. They actually went, and, in fact, George Solder and sometimes Jenny, he would go all over the country tracking down these leads. Right. And always, sadly, comes back empty handed. When he went to Texas, he got down there, met with a guy, and it wasn't his son, obviously, but had to go back and tell his wife. Another zero on this one. Yeah. It's really sad when you step back and look at it from the perspective of the parents, they were not convinced that their kids died in this fire. They were open to the possibility, but they weren't convinced, and they wanted to know for the rest of their lives. So, yeah, he would go all over the country chasing down leads, and the reason he would do this, Chuck, is because he got no help whatsoever from the local authorities. The Solders actually wrote to the FBI and got a reply from J. Edgar Hoover himself that said, I'd love to help, but this is out of our jurisdiction. If your local cops will invite us to help, we'd be happy to help investigate. And the local cops said, thanks anyway, and turn the FBI down. I can't imagine how frustrating that must have been for the Solders to see that. To see Jr. Hoover say, we'll help out, but these guys have to invite us and get turned down for that. Yeah, it was kind of their life obsession. And obsession is a really good way to put it. There's a story of George seeing a picture in the paper of a ballet class in Manhattan. And he became convinced that one of the girls in the picture was his daughter Betty. And he drove to Manhattan and demanded to see his daughter and the parents or the school was like, you need to get out of here, dude, you've lost your mind. This is our kid. No, you can't see our kid. So we had to go back home after that. So in 1968, it gets super weird. Jenny comes home, gets the mail and sees a letter addressed to her. Not to the family or to her and her husband to Jenny. Solder opens it up postmarked in Kentucky. No return address. And there was a photo of an Italian man who looked to be Italian in his mid 20th. So the age fits. And on the back of it, it said in handwriting, louis Solder. I love brother Frankie. I-L-I-L boys illilboys. No idea. A 90132 or three five. No idea. The most weird, mysterious thing you could imagine. And I looked at a picture. They were like, this very well could be our son. It looks a lot like him. It looks more like him than I do. I didn't think it was him. I was like, the eyebrows didn't match to me. The nose didn't match. But you can never tell a kid from nine to 25. Yeah, because this is like 20, almost 20 years. He might have looked like it could be true. He might have looked different enough. But, yeah, that mystery just was never, ever solved. And so back in the 50s, after they started getting shut down by the local cops and the state cops and everybody, they started to take matters in their own hands. And one of the things they did was erect that billboard that you asked Justin McElroy about. It became kind of famous. Aside from the McElroy's, everybody in West Virginia knew about it. And it was a billboard on the Solders property with pictures, big pictures of the five children with their name and age and then basically a rundown of what the family thought may have happened to them. And at first, they offered a $5,000 reward and then up to $10,000. Yeah, and they owned it. So it was there until the 80s. George died in 1968, and then Jenny died in 1989. And after Jenny died, they took the billboard down. That's right. What other reports came in? One bus driver said he claimed he saw someone throwing, quote, fireballs onto the house. Some of the stuff reeks pretty wasted at the time. Yeah, some of the stuff reeks of, like, that after the fact stuff that people kind of invent. Right? Like, wait a minute, I saw a guy throwing fireballs. Right. But there was verified after the fact. Weirdness. Oh, yeah, for sure. That keeps this case alive. Like, one thing we didn't mention, their telephone line was cut. Yeah, and some people say it was a guy that stole the ladder, climbed up, cut the phone lines so they couldn't reach anyone. But, I mean, you said they found the guy. Did they ask him about that? From what I understand, they didn't ask him anything. They just find him for theft. Ladder theft and block and tackle theft. Oh. The other weird thing is they hired another private investigator at one point to track down where that letter came from. Yeah, picture of Lewis, and this guy just disappears. Yes. He may have just been, like, a CD gum shoe, maybe, and just took their money, quite possibly. Or maybe he was murdered because he found out the truth. I don't know. But they said that he literally vanished, like they couldn't ever reach him again. I think it's likely he's a CD gum. He just took some desperate family's money, and hopefully he's burning in hell. Did the Mafia rub him out? Because that became one of the leading theories, is that George was approached by the Mafia, rebuffed their advances, and that was it. They took the kids. Well, yeah. And supposedly it's not just a total flight of fancy. Apparently, the Mafia was really big in the coal business and the trucking business in the area at that time. So it is entirely possible he was approached by the Mafia. And he does sound like the kind of guy who tell him to go stick it. Yeah. He also may have made some enemies with the Mussolini cracks. Sure. What else is there? Well, one thing that was lost the time was that vertebrae, even though it's almost 100% that it was not one of the kids, at least if they still had that, they could DNA test it now. Yeah, but of course they can't. Yeah. And so little baby Sylvia, who is two, maybe three at the time, I think two is what I've seen most, is the last surviving solder child. And she said these are her earliest memories of that night of the fire and seeing her father losing his mind, trying to get to his house and bleeding. And she promised her parents that she would keep the story alive so she talks about it a lot. She goes onto the online sleuth websites that talk about the case and kind of feeds information to people and tries to keep the story alive. It's just crazy, man. You go to bed, you wake up with a fire, and five of your children are just vanished. Yeah. And there's no way they burned up to nothing. That's just impossible. So I read this blog post, like MPR person named Stacey Horn did a piece on it, like, years back, and she wrote this really long blog post about stuff that had been cut from the piece. Yeah. And I got the impression they were trying to play up the mystery. And she said that she personally came to believe that the children did die in the fire and that there was plenty of evidence that supports that idea, but that the media tends to play up the other side of it. But she also said that there's enough weird stuff surrounding it that if she learned that they were still alive, she wouldn't be shocked. Oh, yeah. And the fact that they never got in touch because it's not like these kids were estranged from their parents. They're a tight knit family by all accounts. Right. And the family rationalized that by saying that their family was in danger and they were trying to protect their parents by never getting into right. Which would kind of align with the mafia theory. Just terrible, man. You lose half your family without a trace. Yeah. If you want to know more about this, there's plenty of sites on the Internet that has stuff, but we found this really great article that we base this on by Karen Abbott. It was called The Children Who Went Up in Smoke. Yeah. The NPR one is good. And Stacey Horn Singh is pretty cool, too. It's weird as I have a good friend named Stacey Horn. It's not the same one. No. But when I clicked, I was like, oh, interesting. And I clicked on her thing and it said, Stacey Horn, like cat. She's a cat person. My friend Stacey is a noted cat person. And it's not the same person. No. And I was like, weird. Doppelganger? Yes. No. Maybe the name Doppelganger. Yeah. I'd have to see your face. I think I said something. Well, how about the search bar? Since I said search bar, it's time for listener MailChimp. Handy Dandy search bar. Sure. People said that they missed that. Used to say that. The handy search bar. Yeah. I don't think I said handy, Dandy, did I? Maybe Jerry said yes. That's back when she listened. So I would take that better word. Hey, guys. Huge fan of the show. Two exclamation points. Yes, I've been listening to your show for about a year now and turned my wife and kids onto the program. They are all hooked. We had a Stuffy show marathon even in our car ride back to chicago from Athens, Georgia. We look forward to your new episodes and are burning through them quickly to pick up the pace, you guys made reference to lead paints being on roadside signs. That is highly unlikely, says Sean. Those signs are changed quite frequently and are based predominantly and then he goes on to name, like, eight different types of pigment chemistries, which I won't read out. Okay. And other mixtures of iron oxide. He said lead chromates can still be found, however, in road markings like yellow and white lines on the street. Any new road markings are now done with the chemistries I mentioned previously, but there are many states across the country that still haven't gotten around replacing removing the lead cremate based paints on the street. Not trying to nitpick it's a common misconception to people outside the color industry. And based on my nerding out with a chemistry named Dropping, I bet you can't guess what industry I'm in. Here's a hint. I don't dance. And he's a chemistry nerd. What does that have to do with dancing? Chemistry nerds don't dance. I think that may be a reference to something we said that I'm not picking up on. Maybe. Okay. Maybe Sean can clear it up. Yes. We need a follow up listener mail. All right. That's from Sean Mula. Oh, it was German. He dropped the omni out. Okay. The Mueller. He didn't want that association. Well, thank Sean. We appreciate that. Let us know about the dancing thing. I think we're not the only ones who are curious. Right? Yeah, I'm not sure what that means. If you know what Sean is talking about, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoustenoe. You can send us an email to steph podcast@housestepforce.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffysheno.com stuffyhanno is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
https://podcasts.howstuf…use-swapping.mp3	How House Swapping Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-house-swapping-works	Traditionally, house swapping involves temporarily exchanging homes with a stranger for vacation purposes. Tune in to learn more about house swapping, from the traditional version to hospitality exchanges and couchsurfing, in this episode.	Traditionally, house swapping involves temporarily exchanging homes with a stranger for vacation purposes. Tune in to learn more about house swapping, from the traditional version to hospitality exchanges and couchsurfing, in this episode.	Thu, 14 Oct 2010 19:29:43 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=19, tm_min=29, tm_sec=43, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=287, tm_isdst=0)	30138010	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 Joe. Charles W, Chuck Bryant. This is stuff you should know. Extreme Home Makeover Edition. Tip of the hat to you as well. I just gave you a literal tip of my gap. Yes. You don't see people do that enough anymore. No. Tip of the hat. Tip of the hat to you. Top of the day. Top of the morning. Luck of the Irish. Let's do this. Okay. Chuck, this is going to be one of the worst ones we've ever done now. It's going to be so great. I don't think you're right. All right, we'll see. I guess we'll leave it to everyone to decide. Well, because then people say that was great, and people say it sucked. Yeah. Or whatever. And we'll be no further along than we are now. We have no idea. Yeah. It's just you and me and Jerry in a little tiny room. Yeah. And we're just completely isolated, totally out of touch with reality. Completely. So, Chuck, I guess we'll get this stinker started, huh? That sounds good to me. Do you remember back in 2006, there was a 26 year old guy from Montreal named Kyle MacDonald? I don't remember him. You will in a second. He did one of the coolest Internet undertakings of all time. Facebook? No. MySpace? No. It's not a business. He had a red paperclip and he decided that he wanted to trade it until he got a house. That was great. It was awesome. Where did he end up? He ended up getting a house in a place called Kipling, Winnipeg. He really got a house? Yeah. Wow. In less than a year and in 14 trades, he went from a red paperclip to a pen that looked like a fish, so on and so forth, until he ended up with he traded an afternoon with Alice Cooper for a Kiss snow globe. And that's when everything opened up. Corbin Bernstein from La Law. Remember him? Yeah. He turned out to be a huge collector of snow globes. And he wanted the snow globe, so he offered trade the snow globe for a paid part in a movie he was directing. And the people of Kipling, Winnipeg said, that's it for us. We've been waiting. This is what we want. We will trade you a farmhouse in our city for that part in that Corbin Bernstein movie. Well, who like the mayor of the town? The town together, I'm sure, led by the mayor. The town got a part in the movie. I don't know who got a part in the movie. Okay, thank you for pointing that part. That question didn't come up. Where it falls apart was the guy went to Kipling, he accepted the house because he wanted to make the trade. Right. And he turned around and sold it. He's like, I'm not living here. Oh, you're kidding. I remember the people of Kipling cescachawan did I say Winnipeg? I don't know. Cescachawan. They were not pleased. You know where it fell apart from me? Corbin Bernson. Terrible. Corbin, if you're listening to this, I apologize for Chuck. I love you. In major league. He was he was a spectacular jerk, but he wasn't over the top. He nailed it. Chuck, the guy swapped a red paper clip for a house, but that is in no way, shape, or form related to our topic today house swapping. That has the word swap in it. That's a nice lead in. Josh, house swapping is more like swinging, but with houses rather than spouses. Yes, Josh, it has actually been around since the mid 1950s. So has swinging. It's been growing like crazy. About 20% of travelers do this now, and they say it's growing at about 15% a year. Wow. Which, I mean, you do the math, buddy. In, like, six to eight years, looks like we'll all be house. Whopping. Okay. No one will be staying in hotels anymore. I don't think that's true. Yes. Mathematically, that does make sense. Right. But the problem is people like me are kind of high strung. You would not be a good housewifer. No, it's not so much. The person in my house, I generally trust people and I trust my instincts. There's some thrill kill cult who loves a good blood orgy. I'm not going to lend my house to some group like that. Right. Yeah. But I wouldn't feel comfortable in someone else's house. Oh, really? See, that's probably the opposite of what most people's reticence has to do with I think it goes both ways, man. You do? Yeah. I like off swapping. Yes. It goes both ways. And I can tell you the one that I would really not feel comfortable with, really? Is the hospitality exchange. Yeah. Let's go ahead and talk about the three ways that you can do this. And if you've seen the movie The Holiday, I have seen house swapping in action. Was Eva Mendes in there? She was not. Wait, Queen Latifa? No, she was not. I I'm thinking of last holiday. Yes. The Holiday starred Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet. She did not appear naked in this one. But the movie, the holiday and Jack Black and the very fetching Jude Law. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet swapped houses for holiday. Okay. And romantic hijinks ensued, obviously. With Cameron, of course, with Jude Law and Kate Wins it with Jack Black. Nice. And La to London or I'm sorry, english country cottage type of thing. So that was house swapping in action. And what they did was called a traditional exchange. Yeah. And that's when you plan your vacation at the same time and say, I'll stay in your place, you stay in my place. Yes. There's also Chuck, I think the traditional is far and away the most common and frequent type and appealing, because all you have to do is own a house. That's it. Well, own a house in a place where somebody would want to go. Yeah, there's different ways around that. If you're in Mobile, Alabama, and you want to swap apartments with someone in New York, you might not get a lot of action. Maybe not, but what if the person in New York who's swapping has family in Mobile? Well, true. Funeral got to go down to Mobile, but by God, I'm not going to spend a dime while I'm down there. How swapping it is. Yes. I'm not going to pay $45 for that day's end. You know, it's sad. I was reading one of the articles that this article on our site was based on, and they made that point, like, sure, if you live in Manhattan or Rio, you're not going to have any trouble whatsoever. But they said, you can still have a successful swap if you're able to convince somebody who has a house where you want to go of the hidden charms of Toledo or Tulsa. They rang on my hometown as an example. Well, place you wouldn't want to go. Yeah. I think all you need to say is, Tony Pacos, and people would be all over it. Exactly. Or cleaner. Or cleaner, yes. So the traditional exchange is one non simultaneous swap is another. This is the rich person swap, I take it. Yeah. It's when you have, like, a vacation house, and you don't necessarily have to plan your vacation with theirs. You can just say, take my place in Worcester, and I'll take your place in Rio. Yes. Rio is the hot spot right now. You could also do non simultaneous swap where maybe you're not at home. Somebody's using your home. Right. But you're not using those at the same time, but you're banking a credit to be able to use theirs in the future. I have business in Rio, so you can stay in my house in Atlanta. Right. And I'll pick you up at a future date to stay at your house in Rio. Exactly. Because my company is paying for me to go to Rio this time, so I don't have to worry about it. Yeah. Okay. And then there's the one that I would find extremely uncomfortable. Do people really do this? Yes, they do. And I'll describe some of them momentarily. But the hospitality exchange, it doesn't matter whether I'm the host or the guest, I would feel really uncomfortable. My mom was always a very generous person, and she always wanted to bring home, like, a single friend or something at the hospital she worked with for Thanksgiving or Christmas. And my sister and I were always like, we don't know this person. Now our holiday is awkward. Like, yes, we're helping a stranger, but you ruined it at what cost? Right. So I've always been like that. I've never liked hanging out with people I didn't know on a really intimate level. Yeah. But I can hang out with anybody in a bar or whatever. If someone's house is in play or is the setting, it changes everything. It's just uncomfortable for them. But I'll tell you who is into that. The 2.2 million members of Couchsurfing.com. Those people? Yeah. I don't even know if you said for sure what a hospitality exchange is. That's when you live with each other. Yeah. That's when you say, you can come and stay in my place, and while I'm here, I'll be here, too, and then I'll just come visit you someday while you're there, and we'll just be uncomfortable. But what if it doesn't go well in the first round and you hate each other? I don't know. I think it was free. So maybe you could send a friend. Like, I don't like you, but I have a friend who would love you. Well, they do say, though, to be fair, that it's not necessarily like you're in a little one room apartment with these people. It works better if you have a large house with maybe a private guest house or some area where you don't have to necessarily be with each other all the time. Right. So that makes a little more sense. Still not into it. If you are into sharing your town with strangers, like, let's go see this, or let's go to the world of coke. Right? Exactly. If you can't possibly get to the world of coke often enough, hospitality swaps are the one for you. I love showing people Atlanta that I know. Yeah. That's one of my favorite things, is to delight people with the charms of my hometown, because there are many charms in Atlanta. But strangers, I mean, if it was a friend of a friend that was a stranger, I would certainly do that, too. But I would never log on to a website and just say, just come and visit me. I'll show you around Atlanta. All right, so we've clearly established now that hospitality exchanges are the worst idea ever devised by humankind. Or we're just two big jerks, right? One of the two. So let's stick to the traditional exchanges where you don't meet them, they don't meet you. You just use one another's houses. That's how it was in that movie. So according to this Time article about house swapping as well, written by a Russo, specifically Francine Russo. Okay. Most of the people about 40% is an estimate have already house swapped. So most people who are involved in house swapping have done it before. Yeah, they're usually professionals, business people, doctors, lawyers. It's not a couch surf situation. No. Again, there is Couchsurfing.com, and I would advise people to go check that out. If you're into hospitality exchanges, either as a guest or host, check out Couchsurfing.com. It's pretty cool. Yeah. But with the traditional house swap, let's talk about the details. Chuck, what are you going to do. Let's say you live in Rio yes. And I live in Mobile, Alabama. Okay. And you have a dead relative in Mobile and have to go there. Well, I'm depressed all of a sudden, but what I would do is fight through that depression first and then you and I would start exchanging emails with one another where we start to outline specifics of what this is going to entail. Because on the surface it seems easy, like, hey, just swap houses. But there's a lot of small details. You might have a car that you want to have use of. You can use my car. You might have house plants or pets. You might have mail that you want picked up. You might have your refrigerator only opens if you hike up the left side first and pull the door open. There might be little tricks to your house. You got to jigger the deadbolt from the inside if you want to leave the house. So you got to get all those little details out in the open so you know what you're dealing with. You're also going to be leaving the keys to your car, the keys to your boat, the keys to your ATVs, everything. Like you are giving these people your life. If you are a friendly sort or a suspicious sort and you have neighbors, friends and relatives that live in the area who will listen to your commands, you may command them to drop by and introduce themselves, maybe to act as tour guides, maybe to just say hi, maybe to just give even more advice. Find out if everything's going on like you're switching lives with people for a minute a week. Well, in the movie The Holiday, the reason that Cameron met Jude Law was because that was Kate Winslet's brother. Okay. Yeah. So you are sort of switching lives. And the reason Jack Black was there because I think I can't remember, but it was Jack Black. He was there. He was the neighbor or something. He knew her somehow. So yeah. I was reading another article that this article was based on. I think it was in Budget Travel and the woman who was talking about house swapping was saying that she and her. I think. Mother were staying in his Paris flat and they were living Francois life like they were eating at his favorite bistro down the street and they were like. Fixing his leaky sink and talking to his neighbors outside his flat. That kind of stuff. Yeah. So you can expect like if you kind of keep to yourself, you're probably not going to house swap in the first place. But if you're looking to come out of your shell, trade houses with somebody. Well, and they say that's another great reason to do this. If you want a more immersive non touristy experience. I've never even rented an apartment from someone, but I'm keen to go to a foreign country and live in a neighborhood apartment rather than a hotel. I like hotels for a minute, but the hospitality, all the fakeness, it all rings false to me. Oh, you're crazy. Hotels all the way from me. It just is so fake to me. But you know it's fake. You know that these people are paid to be nice to you. It's not like I think that they actually like me or anything like that. I don't care. Right. I'm at the hotel. I don't care. No, trust me, I love hotels a little bit because I didn't get to stay in them as a child. Right. We were poor teachers and we can't it's funny that you bring up teachers, Chuck, because this whole thing, the whole thing was started in 1953 by a group of teachers really? Who founded InterVac International Vacations so that they could cheaply swap. What makes sense? Rental places or houses. They have to make ends meet. That makes total sense. So that's where how swapping actually came from as teachers. I didn't know that. Now you do. What's another good reason to house swap, Josh, or what's something you can do? Forget good reasons. What's something else you can do to be a good house swapper? What can you offer? You want to treat this like you want to treat the other person's house like you are hoping they're treating your house well. Yeah, right. So let's say you break a dish. You would leave a note and say, I broke this dish, I'm very sorry, here are all the pieces. But here's also money to replace it. And if it's more, let me know and I'll send you the difference or whatever. Or better yet, just replace something if you can. Replace it, if you can. Sure. Yeah. It's probably still a good idea to leave a note. Unless it's just something that they're never going to make dishes. An imposter. Right? Exactly. You will probably also want to restock the fridge when you leave. You want to clean up. If the car catches on fire, you're going to want to pick up the phone and say your car is on fire. Yeah. A big oops. You should probably let them know. And it's nice to leave. A little parting gift. Sure. Right. You also want to take care of their pets. If they've asked you to take care of their pets, bring in the mail. These kinds of things are usually worked out ahead of time, though. Yeah, they say it's a good idea. A lot of times having a letter of agreement, it's not a legal document, but it just kind of outlines expectations for each other because in the end, what you want is just a positive experience. You don't want to come home and say, my plants are dead or my dog is dead. Gosh. I was going to say that. I was going to say hungry, but sure. Dead from hunger. Dead from hunger. So you want to have reasonable expectations. And apparently these websites who run these places say that it generally works out pretty well. And the biggest problems that usually have are differing expectations that aren't outlined really specifically. Right. I'm usually a differing expectation or differing definition of cleanliness. Yeah, that's the same. You ever go on Yelp and read hotel recommendations? No. It's awful. Something's got to really be wrong with the hotel for me to log into a website and complain. But you should see the stuff people complain about, the quality of the chocolate left on their pillow. And their expectations are so ramped up for some of these folks. It's the same with hotels. Yes. I just call those people hard to please, whether you're house swapping or just vacationing. Sure. But not only that, I would consider myself hard to please, but I don't see ever really going on to a site and posting a complaint. No, it's more just like, well, you failed to please me, so I won't be back. But all that's going on in my head, or I'm saying it's a human she's like and that's it. I did do one Yelp post about a nameless restaurant here in Atlanta that served me a raw hamburger, like purple raw meat inside. It was disgusting. Which one? I'll tell you after. Okay. And I did write a Yelp review, because all they basically did was say, oh, I'm really sorry that your burger would have killed you if you would have eaten it. Well, we won't charge you for it. And I said, oh, okay. How about, like, a free piece of cheesecake or something? And I complained. And then they got in touch with me, though the restaurant did, from the Yelp review, and said, we're so sorry, this is not our policy. We'd like to offer you a gift card for an undercooked hamburger. It was only $25. I thought it was kind of lame. It was a nice place. Oh, was it? Okay. You're eating hamburgers in five star restaurants now. Well, but it was one of those $16 hamburgers got you. Yeah, I could see that. Chuck, we talked about some common complaints. We also mentioned the letter of agreement, right? Yes. Not a legal contract, like you said. There's a couple of points that most people would make on a letter of agreement. It's where you're saying, you do this, I'll do this, or I'm going to do this, and you're not going to do that. And you just have it spelled out so that everybody's on the same page. Right? Sure. So what are some of the points in the letters of agreement? William Sapphire would call them like a hotel. You would want to know, like, the phone and Internet deal. If all of a sudden you have a big long distance bill, you want to get that prearranged ahead of time. How it's covered? Yeah. You want to outline who can stay there, just like a hotel. Hotels say you can't have 20 of your friends in a room and you can say, I don't want 20 of your friends in my house. Right. Especially if they're a thrill kill cult into blood orgy. Yes. You also want to talk about what will happen if something is damaged or broken down. Do you want to know immediately? Do you just not want to know? You have them call Jack Black, the neighbor, right? Sure. And also you want to disclose whether or not you have homeowners or renters or auto insurance. Yeah. Because the cool thing is you can let somebody take your car because as far as the auto insurance company is concerned, that's your friend and your friend is covered by your insurance. Well, maybe not always. Right? Well, yeah, I think as long as you're covered. Yeah. Well, I think one article I read, it didn't spell out car insurance, but it did say that a lot of insurance companies, if you're going to do the house swap, you should check with your homeowners insurance and just make sure everything because some of them have little caveats. That is a great point. That is a very good point. And you should probably also do that with your car insurance. Yeah. Just to be safe. Right. Chuck? Josh so we mentioned InterVac, right? That was the one that started all this in 1953. There's also a place called Homelink that's big. And then there's tons of other sites. I went on InterVac today. They had this place at Table Mountain in South Africa that was one of the most beautiful homes I've ever seen in my entire life. Pool. Everything just mod. Really sweet house. So they do have cool houses, and apparently they have about 10,000 listings. Are you going to go there? No. Did you offer up your place? No, I was just checking it out. I want to do but apparently everywhere from Craigslist for free to these high end sites that charge you about $100 to be a member to list your house. Yeah, there's a whole subculture out there that we weren't aware of. Let me look into this. Yeah, I don't think my house is I guess if you were a big golf fan, the East Lake Golf Tournament is, like, right across the street if you want to rent my house for the weekend, which is actually this weekend. Oh, is it? Yeah. I got home yesterday and there are cars everywhere and yuppies from the suburbs throwing their cores like, cans in my yard, talking about how dirty the neighborhood was. I could see you with the shotgun being like, Get off of my lawn. Yuppie. Yeah. It's kind of fun, but it's also kind of annoying. I'm with you. Are you going to sell anything? I may sell some parking spaces. Oh, yeah. Okay. But no Bloody Mary. No, that didn't work out. A couple of last things real quick. Chuck intuition is huge. Yeah. If you start to get the impression that you don't really feel comfortable with this person the more you talk to them. Sure. That's that. And since they're house swappers and you're doing this, they'll understand if you kind of are on the fence, you can feel free to ask them for references, apparently is fine. Although I'd be like, no, that's why. Another reason you're not a good househopper. And then if somebody seems a little controlling, like, here are exact details of what you have to do every moment you're at the house. Yeah. No, thanks. They're probably not going to be real comfortable. They're being forced into this possibly by a thrill kill cult that they're a member of. I think I'd be okay with it. Okay. Except for my animals. I would be a little suspicious to let the stranger take care of my animals. Yeah. I would have to really know that they had dogs and cats and they knew how to do it. And Emily gets real specific with the directions for the animals. Yeah. Which is a good idea. Another thing you should do is take the things you really love or maybe valuable, and either put them in a friend's house or lock them in a room in your house just to be safe. It's not necessarily even thievery. Just if you have a really expensive vase, don't leave it on your kitchen counter. That's just dumb. Agreed. Mistakes can happen. Agreed. So that is the sound that officially ends house swapping forever for the rest of our lives. We'll never talk about it again. Thank you. Thank you for bearing with us this far. Hats off to you. Tip of the hat. Chuck just did it. If you want to learn more about house swapping why there's nothing else to know. You can type in H-O-U-S-E space S-W-A-P-P-I-N-G in the search bar@houseupworkscom. And that brings up, of course, Facebook questions. Yeah. How about a quick announcement, Josh? Okay. It got very quiet in here all of a sudden, didn't it? A silence fell. Yeah. The co ed, the Cooperative for Education. Yes. Our beautiful friends who took us to Guatemala. Indeed. Yeah. They are having a fall fiesta here in Atlanta, and we want to give that a little pluggage. It is October 21. It is at the Metropolitan Club in Alpharetta, Georgia. Right. And that's at seven to 10:00 P.m.. That's right. $20 to get in. But $20 buys you food, wine, beer and entertainment. And by entertainment, we mean Jerry will be there. Jerry's going to be there in the flesh in her birthday suit. She'll be playing drum solos. I don't know if a rim shot is a drum solo. And basically they're raising money for their awesome operation with, like, awesome prizes. You can win raffles. You can win a week long African safari. Yes. Sign brave stuff, which I know you'd be into. Brave Stuff. And Chuck, just to give everybody a quick rundown. If you don't know who Coed is, first of all, go listen to the two part Guatemala podcast, right? And they are a nonprofit that basically pulls together money to buy textbooks for schools in Guatemala, which in turn rent them and create the self sustaining system where every five years the schools have saved enough money through these rental fees to buy new textbooks and much more. Yeah, and they do computer labs, too. You and I thoroughly believe in this group, right? Agreed. So we would encourage you, if you're in Atlanta, to go to the Fall Fiesta october 21 in Alpharetta. And we're trying to get more information on the Coed site. You think if so, it's www.coeduc.org, right? Ye should go there anyway. Coeduc.org concrete. Okay, so let's get to it. Yes. We're going to cover a few of these real quick. Josh, I gave you a sheet there, right? Will you play along? Sean Ross, hyphen favorite soda question mark. What's your favorite soda? That's what he's asking. I've been big on club soda lately. Just plain club soda. They have it in the break cream now, the little Schweps. Oh, they do. I've just been drinking it. I had that in there. Remember we talked about in taste? We have taste buds. Four carbon dioxide. Yeah. My carbon dioxide receptors are in heaven. I love that stuff, too. I am not a big soda drinker, but I do love Sunkist and root beer. Good stuff. And I love Lacroix, which is the fizzy water with the natural flavoring. Very good, Chuck. Yes. Excellent. You go. Eric Sanchez says, would you fight a full three rounds against George Sampierre for $10,000? He's a UFC guy. Oh, really? The question used to be, would you get in a ring with Mike Tyson for $10,000? $10,000? Yeah. There's no way. This space is way too pretty for that. I just don't like pain, so no, thank you. Okay, answers that one. Let's see. Victoria Dougher. That name sounds familiar. Is that Facebook buddy all the time? Yes. She might have been a New York person. Okay. Well, hey there, Victoria Duggar. Whose voice is it who introduces you on the podcast? Is that Jerry? It is not Jerry. It is Roxanne. It is our head of the video department, Roxanne. She does a fine job, and she's from North Carolina. People always say, what is that accent? It's a non regional dialect. Yes, it is. She studied and Roxanne went to high school with Zac galifan ACA. Yes, they know each other. Small little tidbit there for you. Shannon Rink says, what do you see as the future of the podcast? You guys have been doing it for a couple of years now. Do you see yourself doing it for a few more years? God willing? Yeah, we were talking about how the magic is gone, but we're going to soldier on and make half good podcast. I think we both. Agreed too, though, that we love the podcast so much. Even if bigger and better things are in our future, we would like to keep doing the podcast. Sure. But we'll see. Yeah, let's see. We did the Sean Ross favorite soda one already. Yes. Jan Moffat asks, do you use innuendo on purpose or is it just a consequence of talking about things like totem poles? I'd say both. Yes. It depends. I think a lot of our humor is really accidental, but it just kind of makes it funnier, don't you think? It's also fairly skatological and we do a good job at renting that in. Yeah. For example, you have in your signature of phallus Nicholas Buchali. Actually, his name is Nicolas Sarana Butcherle. What has been the most difficult podcast to explain? I had a real hard time with The Sun podcast, as we all know. Well, we did have a lot of trouble with The Sun, didn't we? I don't think that was a good one. It was large hadron collider for me. I think the one that I thought I was going to do well on but really didn't was butterfly wings color iridescence. It was so maddening. Do you have another one? I do. In the inevitable movie bio on Hippie Rob, who do you think should play the lead? I never met the guy, so you tell me. I can't really envision anybody playing hippie rob, but hippie rob? So I think that if someone approached us to do a movie on Hippie Rob, we would have to launch like a national search for Rob, find them and pay them in like, Milwaukee's best ice. It's funny that I don't know who he is, but I still have you get a mental picture when you hear about someone. Who do you have? Who? I picture the guy and office space. The next door neighbor that had the big mullet and the big handlebar mustache. You're not too far off. Rob is a little softer, a little more self aware than that guy and with red hair. Oh, really? Yeah. That just blew my mind. Yeah. Reddish strawberry blonde hair and beard. Crazy. And I got one more. I have one more. It's from Scott Fogg. And he says, American coke or Mexican coke? Definitely Mexican Coke. I don't even drink Coke, but when I see Mexican Coke, I buy it because it's got sugar. Yes. The real deal. If you want to ask us a question, you have to be our friend on Facebook. You have to go to facebook. Comstuffyshennow. You can also follow us on Twitter. It's S-Y-S kpodcast. As always, you can send us an email at stuffpodcast@howstuffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffs.com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our blog on the Howstepworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you."
https://podcasts.howstuf…sessed-goals.mp3	Are we obsessed with goals?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-we-obsessed-with-goals	We've all been brought up to keep our eyes on the prize and our pedal to the medal when we go for that brass ring, but does the Western interest in goals verge on an insane obsession? Learn how goals work (and if they're healthy) with Chuck and Josh.	We've all been brought up to keep our eyes on the prize and our pedal to the medal when we go for that brass ring, but does the Western interest in goals verge on an insane obsession? Learn how goals work (and if they're healthy) with Chuck and Josh.	Thu, 24 May 2012 16:00:40 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=16, tm_min=0, tm_sec=40, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=145, tm_isdst=0)	39169541	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 Joe. Charles W, Chuck Bryant. And he's here because he decided to be here and he met that goal. You're a successful human being, Chuck. I wake up every day and I set goals for myself. Do you like, just get out of bed, get out of bed, take that shower, take a call from Josh again. Clean those armpits, Chuck. Done. Good going, Chuck. You're a real go getter. Yes. I have a bit of an intro. Okay. Slightly anecdotal. It's not necessarily newsy. Maybe this time last year it was newsy, but chuck, you heard of the Occupy movement? Of course. Yeah. If you go down West Peach Tree, you'll see, like, maybe 14 stout hearted people. Are they still there? Man. Wow. Yeah. Heads off to them. But the whole Occupy movement, one of the big criticisms of it that I remember, and I think it still floated pretty frequently, because I was just discussing this with my aunt and yummy. Right. My aunt's an old lefty, and she has, like, very pronounced ideas about the Occupy movement. What a great thing it is and all that. Right, yeah. And she was saying we were talking about whether or not it's successful, and one of the criticisms of the Occupy movement is that they didn't have any goals. They were goal is. And so how could you ever think about being successful if there's no goals? Right. So my aunt was saying, well, no, they were successful in spreading awareness that there's, like, a plutocracy and there's just one person and they're in charge. So they were successful, like that they didn't need a goal. And that's kind of part of the point. Sure. You made the point that the Arab Spring that it was based on all had goals. They had a stated goal, and mostly it was getting this one person out of power. Right. So there's a measure of success or failure, and most of the time it was a success. Right. Or at least it was an ongoing, continued goal. When I said that, though, when I was like, well, they didn't have any goals, I felt like such a schmo, like just a corporate dude. They didn't have any goals, so they failed at it. And I'm curious. I feel like we in this country are very much obsessed with goals. You're right. And we equate success with goals, reaching your goals. Yeah. And not just here. No, but it seems like the west okay. Yeah. I think we should explore that. Okay. Without any research whatsoever. Let's just start talking right now. Well, it was interesting reading in this research because I was kind of all over the place. Part of me was like, because we're going to talk about, like, sometimes calls are great, sometimes there's a downside to them. And here, sometimes you can achieve them. Right. Sometimes you won't. I was vacillating all over the place with it emotionally. I was on a roller coaster. I was like, man, goals aren't that great to set. Sometimes you should just be mindful and prideful about doing great. No, you can't be prideful if you're a religious type, because pride is a sin. What's that with the goal? Well, you're saying you have to be prideful. You can't be prideful. You're hamstrung if you're religious right out of the gate. Okay. Yeah. I'm talking about myself. Oh, got you. And then other parts of me said, no, goals are great. And so I think where I landed was, sometimes goals are great, sometimes they shouldn't be around. Yeah. I guess it probably is context specific and individual specific in all cases, too. But at the same time, I think part of the problem is with this obsession is that we try to figure out how to streamline things, whether it's achieving goals or whatever. And so we try to shove a one size fits all thing down people's throats. And in this case, with goals, it's set goals and achieve them or be unsuccessful. Yeah. And there's also sort of two parts to this which will be intermingled, which is personal goals and, like, corporate type goals. Right. And it's interesting, if you look up goals on the Internet, you got to go a long way to get past financial advice. Right. Almost everything is, like, financial goals. Financial goals. If you're 20, you can think about retirement. Yeah. Stuff like that. Or you run into that guy who's like and for those of you who are, like, blinking in disbelief yes, we're talking about goals. Goals. And let's define what we're talking about. Everyone has an idea of goals, but we don't want it to get confused with something like drive, ambition, intention. Sure. So say, Chuck, you're like, I want to be a guitar player. That's an intention, right? Yeah. I want to be a good guitar player. Saying no, a good guitar player would be a goal, though, I guess. But you want to play guitar. Okay. We'll just say that's an intention. Okay. Saying, I want to be a performing quality guitar player within the next six months. That's a goal, right? That's a stated goal. Or I want to learn the solo for Carry On My Wayward Son by next Thursday night. You better, man, you've got that show my Kansas cover band you've been talking a lot of smack you better be able to deliver my Kansas cover band is actually called Wayward Sun. Well, yeah. Every Kansas cover band is called Wayward Sun. Yeah. We have a club. So where should we start? Should we start with the downside of goals and then some of the more positives and, like, how to achieve them? Yeah, let's talk about goals and how to achieve them. Okay. There's been a tremendous amount of studies since the especially in organizational psychology. Sure. Field psychology is to blame for goal obsession, I guess a lot of people say. Yeah. And especially in the not just starting there, but that was when people were way into that kind of thing. Yeah. My family has this book, the family bookshelf from stuff like that. What color is your parachute? Yeah, there's one that I still have. I've never been brave enough to crack it open because I don't want to accidentally just get a snippet of information and I'm ruined as a creative person. But it's called becoming a More creative person. You could tell it's like a goal oriented self help book to become more creative. Is this at your dad's house? Yeah, it's at my house now. I adopted it. Maybe it's, like, full of cashmen. It's one of those books that's hollowed out in synergy. I've never opened it up. So I bring up psychology because there's been a decent amount of study that under certain circumstances, setting goals can be helpful. Sure. Right. The problem is, if you go to the Internet or you get one of those selfhelp books, or you start listening to self help gurus, you're going to get a lot of information, and not all of it is good. But of course, all you can do is sort of study and ask questions on people who do reach their goals. Right. So it's kind of hard to determine what is good advice. But I thought this one article in particular was pretty good because they listed out ten things, only about half of which were good advice. But you will find these ten things listed commonly, and they are. Should we just go to them? Yeah. Number one, step by step plan. Make a step by step plan. Two, motivate yourself by focusing on someone else who has achieved a similar goal. Right. Like, look at Josh, he quit smoking and he lost a lot of weight. And think about me all the time. All the time. Drive yourself mad. Number three, tell other people about your goal. You hear that a lot. Yeah. So you're sort of publicly accountable. Right. Think about bad things that will happen if you do not achieve the goal. I think that's negative personally. Okay, go ahead. Number five, talk about the good things that happen if you do achieve the goal. Number six, suppress unhelpful or negative thoughts about your goal. Number seven, reward yourself for making progress. Number eight, rely on willpower. Number nine, record your progress. Number ten, fantasize or visualize how great your life is going to be when you achieve that goal. So those are probably the top ten techniques, according to a psychologist named Richard Wiseman, who wrote a book, I believe, in 2010 called 59 Seconds about goal setting and goal achievement. Right. Yeah. Those are the top ten techniques. Cold from thousands of people. Yes. You want to give them the big surprise the big twist to that list? That list has a twist to it, Chuck. Half of them are proven to make goal achievement harder. That's right. The even numbered ones were ones that people who try those techniques usually don't succeed at meeting their goals. The odd number ones were proven techniques that wiseman found were commonly used by people who set a goal and made it right. And sadly in his study of the thousands of participants who had stated goals like quitting smoking, losing X amount of weight, whatever it was, only 10% of them met their goals. But of those 10%, those odd numbered techniques were the ones that proved successful. Right. And he goes on to point out that you can't prove that that caused it's. One of those causation things correlated. But correlated does not prove causation. Right. So quickly again, the odd number one, these are ones that should help you out. Make the step by step plan. And there's all kinds of articles on being concrete with your goals. Yes. And also it breaks them down into sub goals or something smaller in bite size. So like this big amorphous goal, like becoming a good guitar player in six months becomes I don't know anything about guitars but learning this chord today and then this and when you put it all together and you've been keeping track and writing it down, it's controllable. Exactly. You're a control freak for doing this in the first place and now you are able to graphically display that habit. That's right. So make the plan. Tell other people about your goal. They say that's a good thing to do. Think about the good things that will happen. But they say to draw the line at like fantasyland. Right. Don't do that. No. Once you find yourself bathing in a lake of chocolate, you've gone too far. And also I want to say, telling other people about your goal. You know, there's like whole website set up to publicly shame you really? To keep you on track when you're doing a goal. There's this guy, I wish I could remember his name, he came up with basically the Twitter diet where you tweet to your followers, okay, I'm going to do this. And then every day you weigh yourself and you tweet the results and then if you've gained a little weight everybody piles on you and calls you a loser or whatever. Wow. Keeps you on track. And apparently it's been proven to work. There's other ones where you log in and you track your progress and as long as you're not a liar it shows that it keeps you on track for things like quitting smoking, something like that. If you go and say I had a cigarette today or whatever. This thing will actually deduct a certain amount from your bank account that's connected to it to PayPal and they just take your money like say every time I have a cigarette I have to pay $20 and when you go on and keep track of this thing. Just takes your money out of your account and it's been shown to work. Isn't that interesting? Because people like money. Exactly. I love money. I've thought about declaring something like, on a weight loss plan to like the stuff you should know army, because that's a good they keep you honest, for sure. Well, but they're too supportive, almost. People would be like, oh, it's okay, Chuck, you had an eclair. Don't worry about it. We still love you. It's like no one would hold my feet to the fire. You think you do pose a pretty good I think you might be right. I mean, people would be very encouraging, but I think they would like what you mean. You need some sort of it's too bad that we don't have, I don't know, like fitness podcast or something like that. Those people really hold you to it. Give it a shot. I don't know. Give it a shot. America, chuck is going to need his feet held to the fire and you're going to do it. Well, on that note, though, what I'm doing now is I found that a poundage goal is just getting on that scale is no good. So I'm working on literally weekly and daily goals. Like, I've got my little calendar up on my refrigerator and my little marker next to it, and I mark publicly in my household if I went to the gym that day. And the goal each week is four times a week. Good for you. And the week said, I don't go four times. I'm sitting there looking at it and it's shaming. I think you and I are going to go in together and get Emily a riding crop to smack your thighs with every time you don't reach your daily goal. Yeah, the poundage goal, I had someone tell me it's like, don't get on a scale. Just like, well, if you want a way to obsess, yeah, there you have it right there. But it also works for some people. Exactly. We're coming around right here, if that makes sense to you. Right. And then do that. But it works for some people. For other people, it's just a little too much. Okay. So quickly, the remaining odd things that should help you reward yourself for making progress and that doesn't mean if you're dieting and trying to lose weight, you reward yourself with, like, the hot fudge sundae, necessarily. Yeah. And then record your progress. And that all ties into the accountability and writing stuff down instead of just visualizing and thinking about things they say to be really concrete, like write it down, look at it, make it physical and real. Right. And that's why they think that goals work when they work, is they take things out of the subjective and put them into the objective. So there was a study from the 70s bandura and Simon and I can't remember Bandura's name, but his name is very familiar to me. He came up with something else. I guess it was habit formation, but they figured out that I guess they took a bunch of severely obese people and divided them into so the control group was told to just do their best at losing weight. The other group were told that you need to lose x number of pounds by this week and x number of pounds by this week. They set goals. Right. And they lost something like 50%. No, twice as much. The people who said the goals lost twice as much as the people who were just told to do their best. And I think it's probably because it's just saying, I have something to focus on, to pay attention to quantify my progress rather than what is doing your best mean? Well, there's ambiguity there because someone might say, well, I did my best and my best just isn't good enough. Well, yeah, we'll get to that in a little bit. That's absolutely correct. And then not just with weight loss people. During this whole gold, there were studies of how setting goals could reduce accidents in the workplace. Sure. How they could reduce sick days. Like it became an obsession with companies. Yeah. Still this yeah. To basically say, like, hey, everybody set a goal and we're going to make a bunch of money. Yeah. And there's also this thing called stretch goals. Yeah. I've never heard of that. I hadn't either. And I was like, that's smacks of corporate buzzspeak. Oh, yeah, I'm going to look that up. Hanging fruit. It was. Yeah. Stretch goals was coined by the legendary geo Jack Welch. Okay. And he basically said, like, a stretch goal is virtually unattainable goal that you give to your employees to shake them out of their ruts, basically. Which isn't great. People are finding out. No other companies, at least. It does bring us to a question, though, chuck, the whole point of what we're talking about is why can't we just achieve our goals when we're the only obstacle? Well, there's been a little research done on the brain, and research does show that the brain tries to protect you from change. Really? Yeah. Like anything that's scary or fearful, which could be any kind of change in your patterns in your daily habits, is threatening, basically. But not only that. Remember when we were talking about chunking and habit formation on the video podcast? Yeah. Same thing. The brain is looking for a way to streamline the process so that it can use up the least amount of energy possible in carrying out something. And the way to do that is just get you to do the same thing over and over again. Habit formation. Right. So our brains are naturally inclined, we think, at this point in neuroscience, to finding the path of least resistance in carrying out something that's habit formation. Aubrey Daniels has a book called Oops 13 Management Practices that Waste time and money. And he argues that these stretch goals are not good for your company because he has cited studies that when people in departments fail to reach their goals, then there's a performance decline afterward. So you set up these almost unattainable goals, and it's sort of a big bummer for everyone when you don't reach them. Yeah. Especially if they've been really working hard to achieve them. I imagine there's like an aftermath where you're just like, well, what's the point in any of this? Sure. We're going to work our tails off and still fail. Well, and that's one of the points, is that with goals, it's sort of looked at as a pass fail thing. I guess some managers are better at saying, well, we got 85% toward our goal, and that's really great, but most of the time we didn't reach our goal, so we failed. Right. And that's an inherent problem with goals, is what we're talking about with subjectivity and Objectivity, where just do your best. Right. Or raise $100,000 in six months. Sure. Right. The good thing about goals is that they take away that subjectivity, but at the same time, like you're saying, they set you up for the measure of success is perfection. Yeah. And that can be a problem for losers. Adam Galinsky is a professor at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and he is a co author of a book called Goals Gone Wild. Yeah, very clever. But he has a quote in here. I thought it was really relevant. And he says that goal setting has been treated like an over the counter medication when it should really be treated with more care as a prescription strength medication willy nilly with it. Right. Well, yeah. It seems like a way to solve a big problem all at once. And there is a dude named SIM Sitkin at Duke who did a study of companies that do stretch goals. And stretch goal a way to quantify it, say, is to be like the number eleven in flight magazine in the country, and to say, you're going to be number one in two quarters. We're going to be the number one inflight magazine in the country in two quarters. The Sky Mall. Yeah. Wow. That's a huge stretch goal. Sure. And they found Tim Sickkin, who's got one of the better business school professors names of all time, found that companies that engage in stretch goals typically are already desperate and embattled, and if they fail at the stretch goal, they're in big trouble. Like, it's a last ditch thing. Right. And it's a lot to ask of your employees, and it's kind of unfair rather than saying, okay, what's wrong with our organization that led us to this point? How can we do this incrementally? It's kind of like a Hail Mary pass as a stretch goal. Right. Interestingly, too, they've also found out that setting goals that people don't meet lead people to unethical behavior, like when they're tasked to keep track of their own goals and report they will lie when they don't reach their goals, just to say they have reached that ethereal goal. But it's also you're asking somebody in as many words and not so many words, are you a success or are you a failure? Right when you're saying, did you reach your goal or not? And the other other aspect of unethical behavior related to goal setting is the idea that when you focus on a goal, it's easier to compromise your everyday morality to achieve that goal. Sure. And apparently that's a possible outcome of goal setting is that people just start kind of cutting corners and cheating and doing whatever they need to achieve that goal. Be successful well, or do weird and dangerous things like my father who, like, ate soup every day for like a year and that's it, like a bowl of soup and wore, like, one of those plastic suits around in July heat in Atlanta or I just won't eat anymore. Although I think he ate, like, cabbage soup for literally like six or eight months straight. Wow. And it's not healthy. No, that's a great example. It's something he otherwise wouldn't have done. That's kind of dangerous. So it's dangerous. It can lead to unethical behavior. Another downside that people have suggested about goals is that they can keep you from learning. Yeah. You're so focused on this goal, that number, and then you combined with the fact that your brain is in the habit formation. So it's trying to figure out the easiest way to do this one thing that you end up with tunnel vision and you possibly miss all sorts of other opportunities or ways of learning to do this thing better. That may have nothing to do with the goal, but we'll achieve that goal because you have blinders on. Goal setting often is related to blinders. Like, keep your eyes on the prize. Yes. And we're kind of slipping here in and out of organizational goals and personal goals, but they do share some common downsides. Yeah. What I liked in this research was toward the end of it, where some more forward thinking companies are concentrating less on a number goal that everyone has to meet and more on what's called mindfulness, being in the moment, being present rather than focusing on the future. So this part stunk of positive psychology to me. Yeah, but I kind of like it. I think mindfulness and personal like your goal for me, I don't set goals with the podcast other than do an awesome job. We don't have, like, no goals at all. Man, no wonder we've been lagging lately in the ratings, Chuck. Like, the ratings are nice, but you and I don't sit down and say, like, we want to be number five this week, or we want this many downloads. It's more like you wake up and you just like, I want to do a great job today and be mindful in the moment of that. And I know that's all hippy dippy, but it's hippy talk. Okay. So for those of you who do want to keep your eye on the ball and you do carry out goals and you set goals, right? Yeah. In addition to those steps you just gave to setting goals, one of the things that they have to overcome, it feels like, is procrastination. Yes. I thought this is interesting. Yeah. This is a really good interjection here. One of the things that keeps you from achieving a goal is just putting off taking it up. Right. And that whole journey of a thousand miles begins with one step kind of thing. If that's not working, you tried the tree falling in the woods thing. No. Buddhist like slogans are working. You should hear about this effect. The Zygonic effect. Yeah. Or Zygonik. This was named for a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigernick, although it said that she was German. I don't do a good Russian. At least you didn't do a British accent for that. Yeah. Thanks. She noticed something while she was eating at a restaurant in Vienna. Reportedly, and I'm not quite sure I understand how it initially dawned on her, but she saw that waiters only seemed to remember orders which were in process of being served. Once they were completed, they forgot about them. Yeah. Like if you went up to a waiter after they took the order and was waiting on another table and asked them about the order they just took, they could repeat it to you. Sure. But after they brought the food out and maybe the check was made, if you asked the waiter what the order was, they would have no idea. Or they came back and they were like, how was your steak? And you're like, I had the chicken. Yeah. And they go commit to pooko. So she did a little studying on this and some other people, and this is in the 1920s. And then later on, Kenneth McGraw, 60 years later, did some studies on the Zigzag effect, basically asking people to do puzzles and string deeds together and do certain tasks. And then they would interrupt them sometimes. Right. And then quiz them afterwards on what they remember doing. And I think more people remembered who had been interrupted than who had completed the tasks. Right. Yes. So that's significant. Equally significant in that Kenneth McGrath study was that something like 90% of the people who were interrupted in the task and told that they were done, they didn't have to complete it, continued to complete it anyway. That would be me. Yes. That would drive me nuts if they gave me a puzzle to do and they're like, ten pieces left. And he said, no, get on out of here. I would freak out. I would obsess about that the rest of the day. Right. And then forget about it. The whole point of this is that we have some sort of drive to complete a task once we've started it. So the key to overcoming procrastination as it relates to the Zigarnik effect is to just dive in somewhere, anywhere, anything, depending on. And they've found in follow up studies that if the goal is just too lofty or if you really couldn't care less about the goal, the Zigger neck effect is likely to not have that much of an effect. Sure. But if you do, you're taking an order for money and you need to remember it and you're interrupted. You're going to remember this, right? Yeah. To get around procrastination, you just dive in and start. And it sounds like a cop out to say the trick to not procrastinating is just to start. But it's true. And they point out that a lot of people can be frozen. And I was sort of like this with my backyard when we moved into my house. It was like it looked like a junkyard, right? Like a barren, dirt junkyard. And it was literally one of those things where I walked back when we first moved in and I was just like, where do I start? Right? I was paralyzed. I was like, I don't know what to do. And then you pulled that first weed and within 2 hours you had a brand new backyard. Well, that's the point though, is start small and be like, you know what, just let me do this one thing. And as long as you get that ball rolling, chances are you will continue little by little and eventually look back and be like, wow, I've actually gotten a lot done over the past six years. And apparently it doesn't even have to be you don't even have to start at the beginning. Sure. Like, you didn't have to start at this specific corner. You could walk in the middle and started messing with whatever. Yeah. Traps. We talked earlier about the techniques that don't work. Apparently some techniques not only don't help you achieve your goals, they actually are detrimental. All right? They're deletrious to you achieving your goals. I'm sorry. They're detrious to you achieving your goals. So for example, if you make a goal way too specific, you might get stuck on that one aspect of it and forget the overall part. Right? So let's say you want to be a better guitar player and that was your overall goal, but your goal was to be able to play carry on, my Wayward son. And you focus on it. You focus on it. It's just not working. It's just not working. Perhaps you just wasted a bunch of time working on Stairway to Heaven that you would have mastered very quickly and gained confidence from and then explored. Rather, you're just facing frustration after frustration. Right. You also don't want to have too many goals at once because then this is pie. In the sky stuff. Sure. And then you also don't want your goals to be too terribly short term. Okay. So you want to be a better guitar player. Right. That's pretty good. Why not be playing sold out arenas eventually? And then an even better goal. Loser it is. Okay. Or actually a good example of that is with my little plan now, with the weight thing, the weekly thing, there is an overarching two month and four month goal. So that sort of lines up with that. It's not just week to week, it's week to week with a two month and a four month in mind. But not just two months and four months. Like, I have to break down. I can't set a goal for a year out. I've got to break it down. But I wonder if you set a goal for two months or three months, and it was to lose X amount of weight or go to the gym X number of times or whatever. But then you set it after you set those goals, a larger overarching goal to have some better cholesterol score a year from now or something like that. Would that work? Or personally, would it set you back in your two shorter term goals if you then made a longer term goal after the shorter ones remain? So, like, if I met the two months in the four months, if I made one for like, a year after that yeah. Or you didn't even meet them. You were just like, in the midst of them. You started to have them kind of, like, under control, and you're like, oh, okay, I might actually meet these. I'm in the thick of them. Why not just maybe set a longer term goal? I think that would work. Which fits in the model of achieving goals. Can gain you confidence. Well, I just got my degree in organizational psychology just now. You watch that happen. Very nice. Yeah. Tricky son of a you know what? Let's see what else. Chuck well, I know that people talk about the younger generation. People in their twenty s and early 30s are actually a little more goal oriented now than maybe, perhaps they were ten years ago. Is that right? Yeah. And I think especially women, there's a big movement for turning 30 is like a big, big thing now. It's always been a big thing. But there are all these blogs now where these women have these goals where, I want to do this by the time I'm 30 or I'm 29, I'm turning 30, and I want to get this done in the next year. Like sort of a premtal aged, bucket list type of thing. Got you. And I think that Eat, Pray, Love book had something to do with that. And that movie, the Bucket List. Yeah. Actually, another guy, I think he wrote it. Wow. He was a fellow PA with me in La. Oh, yeah. Now he's like, some big time movie guy that's pretty big time. He was pulling the strings of Nicholson and Freeman. Morgan Freeman. Yeah. But we know a girl, actually a girl who worked on our TV pilot. Laura has a blog, 29 Turning 30, where she wanted to do something new every day for a year. And I read it from time to time. I think it's kind of cool. And they're not always huge things. Like one might be like, bake a turkey for Thanksgiving, like something she had never done before in the middle of July. Or one might be go skydiving, like there are larger ones. But every single day, she wants to do something every day. Yeah, it's kind of interesting. And that's both short term and long term. But also, I wonder, though, like, what will be done with that? I see what you're saying now when you reference the bucket list. The it was very goal oriented, but it seemed more organizational. And now it seems like it's transitioned more to personal goal setting, like traveling, just doing a bunch of stuff. I guess the point is, what will be done when that person turns 30? What will be done when somebody finishes their bucket list and then they're just kind of sitting around waiting to die? In this article that you put together, there's the pro goal setting. There was the goal. Goal setting can be good and bad. And there was kind of the anti goal setting. And one of the things from the anti goal setting seemed to suggest, like, do we even need goals? Do we need to set them? Or is it really actually kind of a bad, psychotic thing to set goals, especially as a regular habit? If you are overweight and you want to lose weight and you want to lose weight, maybe goal setting is a good thing. But if throughout your normal day or your normal life, is goal setting a good thing? And I really think we kind of tapped it on the shoulder at the beginning when we said it's kind of tailored to the individual. It is with the weight thing. Some people might do very well with the poundage goal and not do crazy things. Some people might do better with, you know what? I'm going to start out this week by not eating sweets and going to the gym three times. Right. But isn't there also a voice in there somewhere? And it seems like there's not these days, especially in the west, for the people who said, I'm happy being fat. Well, yeah, that is one of the things one of the psychologist points out is the detriment of goals is it sort of puts a taint on personal acceptance. Right. Because the idea is if I didn't meet my goal, that means I have failed and that I'm not good enough as I was, right, and still not good enough because I didn't reach that goal. Yeah, but even beyond setting a goal and failing. Is there a place in this world for people who don't set goals, who are not like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, but somebody who has a job, goes to work, but isn't out there? Like, I'm going to make an extra fifty K this year. Sure. I'm going to have three kids in one year. Watch this. It's crazy, that kind of thing, like just setting goals, that this is my life and it has to lurch forward. Somebody's just like, I'm pretty happy. I've got cable TV. It keeps me pretty happy all the time. My car is beaten, but it still gets me to and from work. I kind of like my boss. I don't want his job, but I'm pretty happy where I am. My wife and kids love me. I love them. We get to go on really poor vacations, but we go on vacation together. I spend time with them. Those people are being edged out by goal setting in this country. That was me. And still is to a large part. Yeah, definitely. But at the same time, I feel like you have struck something of a healthy balance, too. I feel like you can make your life progress by leaps and bounds, by setting goals and achieving them. But I think we should all be aware that there is a cost to that and it's frequently your comfort. Wow. Good stuff. I wasn't sure about this one. You played together. You did a good job. I was sure of it. You said lots of words. Let's see if you want to learn more about goals. I don't know where you'd learn them on this site, do you? No. But we'd love to hear from you if you have encountered your own twenty s to thirty s, young bucket list experience type of thing Chuck does, at least. Sure. You can learn all about psychology@housetepworks.com. We've got stuff on positive psychology, happiness, all sorts of crazy stuff. Just type psychology into the search bar houseupworks.com. And I said search bar, which means it's time to plug our happiness audiobook. That's right. That is a goal. We recorded a happiness audiobook a while ago, and I think it's pretty good interviews, which is different for us. We normally don't do interviews. It was good. We put some time and effort into it. My niece speaks, quotes the Dalai Lama at the beginning. We got an email from somebody saying, like, that tear the listener up when they heard my niece saying that. And I was like, yeah, that is cool. But it's good. Yeah. We have professionals and it goes all over the map, man. We explore whether happiness is a good thing, whether it's a bad thing. It was just good. I'm proud of it. I like it. There's also our superstar guide to the economy right next to it. Yeah. Is that still relevant? Yes, because it was about economics. Okay. We didn't even mention the bailout. It was fairly everyday. It's about the money supply. It was about supply and demand. It was about classical versus Keynesian economics. Yeah, you're right. It was good. Okay. They're both worth it. And they're both, what, like four or $5? I think so. We're working on getting them elsewhere, hopefully. But you can definitely get them on itunes right now if you look hard enough. That's right. Let's go to itunes and search in the store and search stuff. You should know. Super stuff. Guide. They'll bring both them up. That's right. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck with your bucket list, you can tweet to us a very short bucket list at Syskpodcast. You can go on Facebook. Sure. Facebook.com stuff. You should know the new timeline page that I hate, which you love. I don't know anybody that likes that. I know some people did. Some people like, you're just old. You resisted to change. I'm like, what? That's crazy. Like, now it's kind of clunky and weird. These are the same people who tell you it's okay to have the extra care, huh? That's right. You can also set a goal to email us and you can achieve it by addressing it to 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?"
21169dfc-121b-11eb-85ed-5fc971db27b0	Short Stuff: Mojave Megaphone	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-mojave-megaphone	What is the Mojave Megaphone? Well, nobody really knows. Listen in today to learn about this desert mystery.	What is the Mojave Megaphone? Well, nobody really knows. Listen in today to learn about this desert mystery.	Wed, 16 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=167, tm_isdst=0)	11680332	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. Mojave. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Mojave Josh, and there's Mojave Chuck and Mojave. Jerry's out there somewhere. And so is Mojave Dave. And this is Short Stuff about something I had never heard of before. Chuck the Mojave Desert megaphone. Yes. Mojave. How are you, mojave I'm good. I'm Mojave. Mojave? You Mojave? Sure. No, dumb. Have you ever been to the Mojave Desert? Sure. I guess you have to have been if you've ever driven from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, right? Yeah. Boy, that's not the most fun ride in the world, I got to say. Barren, isn't it? Yeah, it's pretty barren. Cows goals everywhere. Yeah, exactly. Tumbleweeds and dead Mafia bodies. Me and my old friend John Pendel driving to Vegas to get him a Krispy Kreme Las Vegas T shirt and then driving home. It just does not seem right to call him John. I know him as Johnny, and I always will. Johnny P. Johnny Pendell sounds like a bad kid. At school. He was a decent kid. He's probably laughing because he gets in touch with me every time we mentioned him, so he'll laugh at that. He's a good guy. I know he is. That's why I can out him as a bad kid. Bad kid, though. So did you guys ever go see the Mojave Megaphone, or have you heard of it before? I had not heard of it until I found this article on how stuff works, actually. Nice work. Well, nice work how stuff works for really turning us on to something. Have you heard about anything? No, I hadn't. I already said okay, I've never heard of this before. It's Mojave. Okay, so in the Mojave Desert as a matter of fact, in the Mojave Desert National Preserve, there is what looks a lot like a giant, weathered steel megaphone, bolted pretty much permanently to a couple of boulders on the top of a hill. And it weighs a lot. And no one can make heads or tails of not only how it got there, but what it is and how long it's been there. It's a bona fide mystery. Yeah. This is nuts to me that nobody has come out and knows the origin of this thing. I know. Surely by now somebody would have been like, oh, I know the guy who put it there, and here's what it is. And by the way, this is Banksy's real identity kind of person. You know what I mean? Yeah. So the Mojave Desert is this thing is located actually in the Mojave Desert National Preserve. It says a remote corner, but they're all fairly remote. It could be art. It could be a horn of some sort, like it may be a siren, and we'll get to some of these in a little more detail. But it's just crazy to me that no one knows how this got there, especially because it has sort of shaped like a megaphone, but it's the kind of thing where it seems like one would be able to say, oh, well, no, that used to be a thing, because there were other things that are shaped just like this. Right, exactly. There's nothing like that. And like you're saying, nobody's come forward to be like, this is what it is, or everyone has to preference what they're saying with I think, or I see it as it's all just interpretation, which is great. And if you describe it a little further, it looks like two slightly different sized rocket boosters place. Top to top or mouth to mouth. I like to think that the fire comes out of the butt. All right, sure. So this is mouth to mouth bolted together like that. There's a couple of triangular fins. I think there's a pair of them, at least toward the end on each side as they flare out. And then inside, there's crosshairs basically made of rebar, it looked like, to me. And the whole thing has no markings. There's no numbers. There's no letters. There's no nothing on it, not even what seems like it was maybe used for before. And then if you look at the rebar and the welding job, it doesn't seem like it was part of any kind of mass production. It almost gives you the idea of a oneoff kind of thing. Yeah. Which means it could be art. It's big. It's about 8ft long. And if you see where it is, it took some effort, maybe two people, but probably at least three or four people to get this thing up there, get it bolted onto the side of this cliff. And it has led to a lot of speculation over the years as to there's some pretty decent ideas, I think, as to what this thing could be. Maybe we should take a break. Yes, we should. Mojave. Yes, mojave. And we'll be right back to really mojave this mojave. 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. 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. Comssk and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code SYSK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain that's squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. Mohamed okay, mojave chuck all right, so some people think it might be a siren of some kind from the 1940s or fifties. Like, you know, they tested nuclear bombs not too far from here. It's near some army and Air Force activity. Maybe it was an early warning signal. Other people say, I don't know about that. Like, this thing is really out in the middle of nowhere. You would have something like that closer to where people are, probably. So that idea is okay, but has also largely been shot down by a bunch of other people. So that, to me, still makes sense because while it's not and never was very heavily populated place, I think there's a ghost town called Crucero nearby. I mean, it's between the existing towns of Baker and Ludlow, and they're not exactly like Beijing and Shanghai or anything like that, but there's a rail line, an old abandoned rail line that runs right through there. And apparently they used to run chemical agents to the military bases out that way. So while you wouldn't have had a lot of people to warn, you would have had a potential situation to warn about, even if it was just a few people of, like, a major chemical spill or a gas leak or something like that. So to me. The idea that it was some sort of warning system. It does make sense. But at the same time. It doesn't make sense that they would use some handmade one rather than one that was available. Because there were huge air raid sirens that were around in World War II that looked kind of similar. But were obviously arrayed sirens. And they looked like they would work a lot better than whatever this thing was. Yeah, I saw on YouTube there was this woman who did a siren test, like, got a crank siren and put it in the small end, then had her friends down on the ground, see if they could hear it. And they could, but it didn't amplify things that much and interestingly in the YouTube comments. And so, believe me, I'm not saying that this is like the worst research possible to say a YouTube commenter said this, but there was a YouTube comment that said, hey, listen, I think it might be something from an old salt mine, like hot brine might have been pumped at high pressure through this thing because it's just made of such thick iron and steel. He said you could make something like a megaphone out of something a lot lighter. Yeah, sure. And that sort of made sense a little bit. That's the only reason I mentioned it. Other people said that they said something like a rocket booster maybe, or maybe what's called a venturi, a pipeline venturi, which is an enclosure that is hourglass shape, that controls the flow of fluids through a pipe, which is legitimate too. And wouldn't they have some record of a pipeline through there? That's the thing. Either no one's looked in the right place yet or it just wasn't documented, which means it was either secret or it is a more recent art installation. But if you look at it, I think one of the people who run tours out there said that they think that it's been there for 30 more years. This thing looks like it's been around for a lot longer than the 1990s. It looks very old and it's possible it's use was just so mundane that it didn't need any kind of documentation or it's possible a secret and I kind of don't want to know. But at the same time, I think I would find it pretty fascinating to know its use too. I think that also makes mysterious objects really interesting, knowing their history. Yeah. Another thing that feels plausible to me is that it was not something that sent out a sound, but something that maybe was used to detect something like if they were doing nuclear testing at Nevada testing site, that maybe it was something that measured or detected long range shockwaves or something like that. And then it could make sense that the government it might have been sort of a one off and not have manufacturing numbers and the government wouldn't readily come out and say anything like that existed. Plus, also, Edwards Air Force Base is kind of nearby, which is where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. Yeah, sure. And he very famously said, folks, Mojave over. That was it. Should we tell people how to get there? I think so, sure. I mean, it's all over the place. We even have the exact coordinates. Yeah, the exact coordinates are get out your pencil, everyone, and Mojave is down on your Mojave. 35.0, 56 degrees north, 116.1963 deg west. And that's the user decoder pin. Little orphan amy secret message. If you want to go there, you cannot just walk there or drive there in your Toyota Tersell. No shade on the tercel. Great car. Sure. But you need a four wheel drive because you're going to have to drive through the Mojave River. You're going to be on dirt roads, going to be driving through sand, through canyons. And it's not the easiest thing to get to. No, not at all. But if you want to get there, you can. People have before and you can take a photo with it. Sure. Or bring a crank siren and do a test of your own. Or you can look for gold. There's a legend that it actually points to a gold horde underground, but I'm not sure I buy that one. No, I think they mentioned the crosshairs for that reason, but I don't know, it's just really interesting. It doesn't look like any megaphones that were used at any period in anyone's history, so I don't know, I think sometimes people just didn't they find something like a monolith in Utah recently? Yeah, that definitely wasn't art installation. This isn't necessarily well, if you do go, let us know. We want to hear about it. Get in touch with us. In the meantime, everybody short stuff is Mohaved. 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/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1221674091991hsw-sysk-erase-identity.mp3	How Can I Erase My Identity and Start Over?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-can-i-erase-my-identity-and-start-over	Everyone dreams of snagging a fresh start at life. Whether you've thought of changing your dull given name, or just disappearing entirely, this HowStuffWorks podcast will tell you what it takes to erase your identity.	Everyone dreams of snagging a fresh start at life. Whether you've thought of changing your dull given name, or just disappearing entirely, this HowStuffWorks podcast will tell you what it takes to erase your identity.	Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=12, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=262, tm_isdst=0)	10160264	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. Josh Clark, Chuck Bryant. We're here for you. How you doing, Chuck? I'm doing well, Josh. I'm doing pretty good, too, Chuck. I just drank a vault on an empty stomach. I'm about to choose a cover up this microphone. I'm ready to go. You got another one lined up? I do. This is my second one. Right. I don't even know what that is. I'm about to pass out, actually, but I'll try to make it through. Yeah, please don't. I can't carry this. So I've got a great news item for you. Ready? Sure. Okay. So it turns out the sovereign nation of New Zealand actually enforces its law that you can't give a child the name over 100 characters long, and you can't give a child a name that could prove socially handicapping. You want to hear an example? Charles Manson. No. And arguably I like it. I think it's very lilting and sweet, but it's arguably worse than Charles Mason. There's a nine year old girl who was in the midst of a custody battle with her parents, and the judge found out what the girl's name was and how much she hated it and actually made her a temporary war to the court so she could legally change her name herself. Let's hear it. Talulah does the hula from Hawaii. Wow. I'm not kidding. Is that two names, one name? No, that's her first name. All spelled again, no, it's separate words, and I think they actually even spelled it correctly, like the is not capitalized, that kind of thing. That's ridiculous. But I was reading this BBC article on it, and they brought up some other examples of names in New Zealand that some made it through and some didn't. There are a couple of bizarre ones that made it through, like number 16 Bus shelter. Bus shelter, yes. And another one that made it through is Midnight Chardonnay, which I think Q Grant probably has designs on that poor child. Yeah, I think it's no secret how that child was conceived. Exactly. Yeah. But there are a few more that didn't make it through. Like, yeah. Detroit sex, fruit. And the twins? Fish and chips. The federal government, or maybe even local government moved to block those names. Really? But I'm curious, though, is Charles W. Bryan? Is that the name your parents gave you? Did you change it? No, Charles Wayne. I was named after John Wayne, which is a true story. Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know what the W stands for. Yeah, that's it. I'm Wayne now. I do. Well, if you have your original name, do you know anything about this kind of thing? Is this in your field of expertise, per chance? You know, my wife actually changed the spelling of her first name. Oh, yeah? Although not legally, but well, when she fills out her driver's license records, and on her bank account, it's all spelled the Emily with an I E and not Emily with a Y, but she never legally got it changed. But it just kind of goes to show how you can change these official documents without really having the courts say you can. Yeah. Just by setting precedent. Right, exactly. But there are legal routes to do this kind of thing. Right, right. And I think I know what you're getting, too. Yes. Chuck? How could one erase their identity and start over? That's a great question. Unfortunately, I hate to spoil this for the listeners, but there's really no way that you can completely erase your identity in this day and age, at least in the United States, without the government doing it for you. Yeah. Technology has made it a lot more difficult to commit just about any kind of crime. Huh? Yeah. In the old days, you could do there was one thing called paper trip, which is you could assume the identity of, like, a dead infant and get their records and claim their identity as your own. It's depressing, but effective. Yeah. Or what? Yeah. You can't do that anymore, though, because computer records nowadays and everything, it makes it really difficult to completely erase your identity. So I guess even if you do change your identity, there's still records of your former identity linking the two together, right? Exactly. So if you're on the run from somebody, like, you can change your name pretty easily. If you have special circumstances. You can change your Social Security number. But you have to prove to the government that someone's either been misusing yours and another reason you can change your social is if you're a victim of domestic violence. And you really need to go underground where your ex husband or ex wife I guess if your victim of spouse abuse is a husband. Which is actually not paid nearly enough attention to husband abuse. I'm not kidding. It actually is a real problem. Men don't feel the least bit confident in admitting that they are abused by their wives. And I got to tell you, it's out there. Sure. Well, that's a podcast for another day. Sure. Well, let's do it. We'll put it on a calendar. Agreed. So, like I said, you can change your social for several reasons. It needs to be approved. You can change your name. It depends on what state you live in for the process you go through, but it generally costs $50 or under, and a judge actually rules I thought that was interesting. Whether or not you can change your name. Well, that's only if there's objections. Right? Well, they make a ruling regardless, and it's always yes, unless there is an objection. Okay. So basically, to change your name, you have to advertise it in the legal Oregon. That usually the county newspaper. And this is for the great state of georgia that we live in. Okay, I got you. So it does that for several weeks, and if somebody notices and they have an objection, they can object. And I actually know of an instance where that happened. You remember Jeff Kilowatt? Who doesn't? Yeah. So apparently, kneecapping America's Sweetheart can get you some really bad press in this country right. Because he famously hit Nancy Kerrigan, ice skater Nancy Kerrigan in the knees with a crowbar. Yeah. On behalf, he claimed, of his wife, Tanya Harding right. Who was in competition for carrigan for American Sweetheart, that kind of thing. So after the whole thing dies down, a couple of years after Galilee petitions to have his name changed to Jeff Stone, there were plenty of Jeff stones that lodged formal objections, including, oddly enough, I heard, the guy who played Jeff Stone, the sun, on the Donor Reed television show from the 60s. Isn't that weird? Wow. So people do object, but I think you have to be a little unsavory for somebody not want you to share their name. Right. And I would think Galileo would have changed his name before that just for the simple fact that his name was Galilee. Right, exactly. Yeah. You've given us a couple of good reasons. Can you give us any famous cases of people changing their identities? I can. Well, let's hear it. Well, there's a really recent one, radovan Kratic, the Serbian leader from Bosnia Herzegovina. Right. Yeah. Back in the Balkan wars, there's a lot of ethnic cleansing going on, and Radish was one of the ones who was committing genocide against the Muslims in that area. So the war's end, the US. Indicts him for crimes against humanity. He drops out. Apparently, he was still something of a hero to the Serbian population around there. He was hiding in plain sight to an extent. He actually grew a beard and became an alternative health guru and was living quite publicly in Belgrade. Wow. Finally, we get a very pro American, pro west leader in that area. And like, the next month, Radish is under arrest and on trial. War crimes is a pretty good reason to change your identity as well. Yeah, I think when I was researching this article, I found that a lot of people that inquire about this on the Internet, you can get certain websites will say they'll change your name, but it's really just a big scam. They'll give you a fake ID or reuse a bunch of the same records over and over. And it's really for those of you out there that look into these, it's just a big money rip off. That's one of those things where if you want it done right, you have to do it yourself, I would imagine, especially if you're having trouble with your identity through identity theft or whatever. But I guess if your identity get so ragged out, it doesn't matter who you trust it to change it for you. But I wonder if the percentage of people changing their identity is on the rise with identity theft just exploding all over the place. Yeah, I think that's one of the problems with the Internet is identity theft, and it's also one of the problems of people not being able to change their identity because of the paper trail via computer. So it's sort of a double edged sword. So, check. Do you want to give our listeners the number they can call if they're interested in changing their Social Security number? Yeah. If you're a victim of spousal abuse or if your Social Security number has been tampered with, you can call 1807 7212 13 to inquire to the SSA about what you can do. And for all the great details, you can read Chuck's article. How can I erase my identity and start over on how stuff workscom? And stick around to find out what article makes Chuck think of Frankenstein right after this. We're back. Thanks for hanging around. I don't blame you. What article is it, Chuck? Well, it's sort of misleading. It's not Frankenstein the Doctor who created the Monster, but it's the awesome 70s instrumental groovy song Frankenstein. Do we have to pay anybody for that? I don't think so. If we paid anyone, it would be Johnny Winter, because that's his song. Okay, all right. And you can ask me why. Yeah, this is kind of not only did we start you misled me to mislead the readers, and now I'm just as confused as ever. Why would that possibly remind me of Franklin? What article are you talking about? Well, because Johnny Winner famously has albinism, along with his brother, fellow musician Edgar Weiner. Edgar Winter group. They're both albinos. Currently. It runs in the family. So the article How Albinism Works, is that's the one? So do you just sit there and Frankenstein plays over and over in your head? Every time I read it over and over, I get the ear warm. Well, that's fantastic, Chuck. So you can read all about albinism and all sorts of other interesting articles on how stuff works.com. Check it out. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@houseofworks.com brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you?"
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215462245732sysk-dog-best-friend.mp3	Are Dogs Really Man's Best Friend?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/are-dogs-really-mans-best-friend	Check out the story of Hachiko, a loyal Akita who waited for over ten years for his master to return. Learn more about Hachiko and loyalty in this HowStuffWorks podcast.	Check out the story of Hachiko, a loyal Akita who waited for over ten years for his master to return. Learn more about Hachiko and loyalty in this HowStuffWorks podcast.	Tue, 20 May 2008 18:14:06 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=18, tm_min=14, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=141, tm_isdst=0)	5023689	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Welcome to the housetheparks, Podcast. I'm editor Candice Gibson, then joined today by two of my best friends in the office, writer Josh Clarke and editor Chris Colette. Hey, there. Hello. So we're talking today about whether or not a dog is really a man's best friend or a woman. True short answer to this is yes, of course. But illustrating this concept with the story of a Japanese dog and Akita enu named Hatchico. We're all big fans of Hatcheko. Here@houseepworks.com a little background around the office. Candice wept openly when she read this article. It was amazing. It was an amazing site, and we now use it as a measuring stick to determine whether how much humanity one of our coworkers has. And long story short, this one of our poor coworkers is now considered a robot because she did not actually cry at this article. So we're all big fans of Hachiko. Somebody want to give some Hachiko background? Hachiko. I'd love to get some background on Hachiko. His nickname was Hachi. Essentially, he was a professor's dog at a Japanese university. And they were very close, so close, in fact, that Hatchica would walk the professor to work every day at the train station and then wait for him at the train station when he came home at night. And this continued for, say, 1012 years. Is that right? Yeah, I'd say about that one. And then one day, very tragically, the professor actually died while he was at school and never returned. But hisigo undaunted waited for him at the train station. He continued to come every day and let the professor, even though he wasn't coming home. And it got to the point that people started to notice that the professor's dog clearly needed a human being to belong to. So they gave the dog to another family, but he routinely escaped from home and returned every day to the train station in a very sad, Victorian orphan kind of way. He contracted all sorts of diseases. Yeah, he got the mange. He became a little street worn, I guess you could possibly say. Although they cleaned him up pretty well. He's now stuffed at the Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo. What they did, he's white as a whistle here. They buried his bones next to the cross that's the owner got you. Yeah. So she goes in two places at once here on the office. We actually had a pretty big debate over this article when I wrote it. Chris actually edited it. Candace had nothing to do with it except for crying. Some of the wording got changed. Originally, I said that Hachiko waited patiently, and we had something of a debate. Can a dog wait patiently, or was I just anthropogenizing it? Well, no, anthropogenising it. You have to say it with a hitch right after eyes. Well, see, the thing is how stuff works. One of the big things that we strive for is to be as scientifically accurate as possible, and we don't want to attribute these feelings to a dog. But this is one of those things that I'm actually kind of glad that we had the debate about, because obviously this can't be quantified scientifically. But if you look at Hachiko coming back day after day and fighting with other dogs and catching doggy diseases on his way to the train station, I got to say that obviously, he could have been waiting for people to give him more treats. It could have been something very survivalistic, but it doesn't seem that way. It seems like he was loyal. It seems like he was waiting patiently. Sure. I mean, he was doing this long before people started giving him treats as well. And also, there's been studies that have shown that dogs are capable of displaying or at least exhibiting secondary emotions like jealousy, shame, pride, guilt. And I think any dog owner knows that a dog can feel emotions, can show emotions, including ones that are supposedly just relegated to humans and chimps. So I don't think saying that he was waiting patiently was anthropomorphizing him. Well. I think it's just simply one of those situations where we were airing on the side of caution. I think it's up to everybody to make up their own mind. And you can make up your own mind, too, Candace, when they read is a dog really a man's best friend on Houseoffworks.com? Exactly. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseteportss.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@houseopworks.com brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you?"
96e49762-440c-11e8-82c5-d72f2c3497e3	How Drug Courts Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-drug-courts-work	If you aren't in the know, you may think drug courts are set up to quickly prosecute drug users and get them into prison in short order. Turns out it's just the opposite...	If you aren't in the know, you may think drug courts are set up to quickly prosecute drug users and get them into prison in short order. Turns out it's just the opposite...	Tue, 29 May 2018 17:27:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=17, tm_min=27, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=149, tm_isdst=0)	49504411	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. 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. Hey, everybody. Tour announcement. It's just me, Chuck. Josh isn't here for this one and we had to get it out the door. So apologies for 50% of Stuff You Should Know, but we have added two dates to the 2018 tour and there may be another couple to come. You never know. But everybody, we asked Salt Lake City in Utah and should we come there? And boy, we heard from you, so we're coming. It's that easy. Tuesday, October 23, we are coming to Salt Lake City for an evening with stuff you should know at the Grand Theater and we are super excited. Tell you what, you guys really came through on the emails and social medias and let us know that we would see some love if we came to Salt Lake City, a city we talked about often in the past. So we are coming tuesday, October 23, and we decided, hey, we're going to be out there. We might as well add another city that we've never been to. So it is your lucky day. Phoenix, Arizona and dare I say Tucson and the greater Phoenix area. Drive over to Phoenix and come see us on Wednesday, October 24 at the Van Buren. And this is also an evening with stuff you should know. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds a little more regal than normal. So come see us. October 23 and 24th. Salt Lake City in Phoenix. You know what, I don't even know if tickets are on sale. I believe by the time this announcement goes up, tickets will be on sale and you can go to the Van Buren website or to the Grand Theater website to get your ticket links. I will try and have them up very soon on S Ysklive.com, but don't know if I'll get to that today. But look forward soon and we can't wait to see you guys. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And we've got guest producer Tristan with us today, who's filling in for Jerry, who may or may not exist. Tristan exists. Look at him. He shaved his moustache. I know. And Chuck, he shaved his moustache within a day of me telling him how cool it was next time I saw him. No mustache. Interesting. Yeah, that's what I thought too. What's that all about? Tristan, he destroyed that's cool. That's probably the appropriate response to that one. Yeah, but I noticed you can't even look him in the eye right now. No. Luckily we're sitting beside one another, not facing one another. Also be really weird for the next 2 hours. I'll let you know if he pulls a knife. You'll know that because I just run from the room. Okay. That will be the signal. Alright, sounds good. So let's say that Tristan pulled the knife on me and it had nothing to do with the fact that I complimentedruinders mustache. Let's say that it was because he was a drug addled lunatic. He was literally attracted to the moon and he was on drugs and he pulled a knife. Had I got my phone out in time and called 911 and the cops had shown up immediately and arrested him, tristan could have been up for what's known as chuck a drug court. Yeah. Wait, that was not my best interest. That was good. Of the ten years, but it was in the top 20%, sadly. Okay, so that means about I can't even do math right now. What's wrong with your brain? I went to a show last night. I didn't even drink much. I'm just tired. What did you go see? Calexico. Oh, really? My boys? Yeah, what else are they in? Iron and wine? Well, they did a record with them, that's what it was. But they're not in them, so to speak. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. Okay, so they did a joint jam together. They did. And I'm a little tired as a result. Okay, well, let me set it up again. Chuck. Oh, no. Okay. Well, here's the thing. Did you really know about drug courts? I mean, it was something that I was aware of. I don't sit and think about different types of courts much. And I've never been through drug court, but I guess I knew it was there. I didn't know this much about it and I certainly I got to say I've never run across a more glowing review of drug courts among anything in the media. And the media really loves drug courts, but apparently how stuff works heart drug courts like crazy. Yeah. I did not specifically know what it was. I did a brief little skim when I picked up the article. But I thought when I saw drug courts, I was very naive and I was like, oh, these are just like courts set up just to run people into jail as fast as possible. Oh, I see. Let's turn and burn, like, 100 cases a day and just throw people in the slammer. But it turns out it is the exact opposite of that. Yeah, it is. And turn and burn. This is like Top Gun all of a sudden. I am dangerous. No, it's meant to be the exact opposite. And ideally, and it sounds like there are some actual really good, ideal drug courts out there, it is meant to do the opposite. It's meant to say, hey, man, you're a criminal. Let's not kid ourselves here. But you're a criminal, really, because you're addicted to drugs, right? You're an addict first in a criminal second. Right. And then maybe a family member fourth or fifth, but you kind of put that on the back burner during your drug career, right? Yes. You're on drugs, and you're committing crimes. And even more to the point and this is how it kind of got its origin, which we'll get to in a second. I've seen you before. I recognize your face. That's how bad the situation is. You're clogging up the court system. I've got, like, a serial killer behind you who's getting very impatient, frankly. We need to move this along, save some money. Let's figure out if there's another way that we can do this that actually helps you but that also helps society and saves costs. And that came in the form of drug courts. Yes. Should we get in our low rider, way back machine and drive back to the late 80s in Dade County, Florida? So first I bought us matching pastel suits. I appreciate that. To where? Put it on. Oh, it's on. It's puffy. It looks like what's that? Crepe paper. Crepe paper? Yeah. Or fish skin. All right, so we're in Miamidade County. We're in our metallic purple lowrider. We're driving around, and there's a lot of people on crack. So height of the crack epidemic. Right. And people are being run through, like you said, these courts so often, and these jails are so clogged because these drug addicts are being run through there. Sometimes they are dealing drugs, maybe sometimes they're committing crimes, but sometimes they're just people who had drugs on them and are very sadly addicted to crack cocaine. To the point. Like what you said, which is these judges are saying, man, you've been in here five times in the last six months, and this is no good. There's got to be a better way. Right. So some judges actually got together, and they said, let's make a better way. And I don't know exactly how they did this. They couldn't find the full story on it. Yeah, like, whose singular idea it was or how they actually went about establishing it. I guess the municipal court system gives these judges a tremendous amount of leeway in setting up courts on their own, apparently. But in Miami Dade County. The judges got together and said, we're going to set up what will be the nation's first drug court. Actually, I found out who the very first person it was. Judge Drug. That's what it was named for. What a coincidence. I know. Isn't that weird? Judge Crack Cocaine. But there's an interesting story in our own article that we should probably highlight about this attorney, David Scott Markets, that I thought was pretty interesting. And in 1993, he was an attorney on drugs. He was arrested, drug possession, leaving the scene of an accident. He was a defense attorney. So wait, you just painted a picture that I think screams Porsche. Yeah, he had a Porsche. He probably had a 928. Sure. Which I thought was kind of like the coolest car. Is it the one that looked kind of like a Lotus Submarine bond? Lotus Submarine. I had like the pointiest end, pointiest front. It's the one from Risky Business. Not familiar. I think that's the 928. Alright, and if I'm wrong, so be it. Porsche. I'm not going to Google that stuff right now. But he was a defense attorney and a successful one too. And he was assigned to drug court. His attorney said, can we put this guy in drug court? And his quote in this article says, it wasn't an arrest, it was a rescue. And he was in his mid 30s, went up in front of Judge Stanley Goldstein drug. And apparently this is kind of a great success story of a drug court situation because this guy turned his life around, committed to this program, went to the twelve step meetings, and is now a successful attorney again trying to steer his clients to drug courts because it works so well for him. Right. And that's actually one of the ways you can be steered toward a drug court is your attorney, your defense attorney can go to the judge when you're busted and say, this person is a really great candidate for drug court. Judge can say, I agree, let's do this and kick you over to drug court. Yeah. So this one in Miami was the first one. It was sort of the pilot program, I guess. And by most measures, we'll save the poopooing until the very end. How about that? That sounds okay. But it was looked at as a success. And then all around the country they started emulating this program to the tune of today. There says in our article there's more than 3000 of these set up in the United States. Yeah, it seems to be hovering just over 3000. I think I saw 3057, 3076. So it seems to have topped out at about $3,000. Okay. Although there is a 2017 memo or I guess advisory from the Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis, and it recommended this is 2017, late 2017, that every district in the US. Established a drug court. So it's possible there will be more in the future. Got you. I don't know how many districts there are. Maybe there's 3082, maybe we're almost there. But they're like, Come on, you guys, just let's make it 100%. Yeah. So like you were saying, it can come from the defense attorney, but it can also be a prosecutor. It can be the cop who arrested you. The way I look at this is it seems like everyone sort of it's like a team effort. It's set up in a way so it's not adversarial. It's not like the prosecutor and the defense attorney are fighting each other in this case, and the judge, everyone sort of gets on the same side to say, hey, let's see if we can straighten this person out. Right. Not only is it not adversarial in a drug court, the prosecutor and the defense attorney are required to hold hands throughout the entire hearing. I know. And Bobby McFarron right. Resides as the bailiff. And instead of swearing on the Bible, you just sing don't worry, be happy at the same time. And then everybody goes they clap and go drug court at the end of every session. Should we? We should probably yeah. Let's take a break. 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. 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, so Bobby Mcfarin has just left the room. Court is starting. Yes, Kora started. You know who would have been a great drug court judge is Harry Stone. R-I-P. Yeah. And that's it. Just recently passed. He was not an old man. No. And by all accounts, a really good guy. When all the people started pouring out their stories, it seems like he was a really good dude. He did this really heartfelt, like, very moving one man show right after Hurricane Katrina that you can probably on YouTube, if not on Netflix or something like that. That was about all the horrible things that happened from the flooding and just the humanitarian crisis that arose. It was pretty great. Wow. And if you don't know who he is, people, then we are referencing the great, great show. Night Court from the would say, one great wow. You build them up and you knock them down. No, I thought he was a great individual, but the show itself was one great not great great. So the great great Harry Anderson was limited by the bad writing to one great. There you go. Okay. But his character specifically from this explanation of drug courts and what is expected of drug court judges, it is exactly what he did. Like, he was compassionate toward the person. He wanted to know what their backstory was. He would recognize them by sight, sometimes by name. Every once in a while, he'd lighten the move with the magic trick, maybe take away the magic trick part. But all of those things are boxes that a drug court judge is supposed to check. It is nothing like what normal court is like. Yeah, correct. Which is why it's a sitcom. Right. It's more like night court than regular court. Drug court. Is that's right? How it works is it very dependent on what court it is because as everyone knows, it works on the state level and then like, the city or county or municipality level as far as how they want to structure their own scene. Sometimes it's only people that didn't have, like, a violent crime committed in the course of their drug use. I saw that that was a federal funding requirement. Oh, really? You couldn't also be up on violent crime charges? Okay. So if you shot somebody in the kneecap while you're robbing them for drug money, you're probably not going to get kicked at drug court. Well, and sometimes if you have dealt drugs, you are not allowed into drug court. That's another one, too. A lot of them tend to pick first time offenders, people who are new to the court system. If you are caught on, like, possession charges or something like that, and there's a drug court in the county that you're in or the municipality that you're in, there's probably 110% chance they will recommend drug court for you. Right. And then sometimes they will have the defendant sign a contract saying, I'm on board with this. I'm actually signing my name on this document. Sometimes they'll even have to plead guilty. Right. So there's two ways that it can go. One is that they say, we have you. You've been indicted and charged with possession of crack cocaine. Right. And if you go to regular court, you will probably get sentenced. Here's what your jail time might be, but we are offering for you to go to drug court instead. And what we're going to do is we're going to defer these charges against you pending your graduation from this drug court program. We'll get more into the program in a second, but it's hanging out there as a potential but if you don't, then this is what's waiting for you. Right. It's not like everybody's just going to forget about it after you go to drug court. Right. This is one of the things. Right. So coercion is the key to drug court. Right. The other way that they can do it is they can say, you have to plead guilty to this charge, and if you go to drug court and graduate successfully, the judge will either dismiss your sentence or they might even expunge the conviction from your permanent record. Yes. Right. I was trying to remember my violent films. And here's the other thing that's different than regular court is this is all done very fast. It's not like you're hung up for weeks and months trying to figure this out, because their whole deal is you walk in there addicted to drugs and they want to get you treatment as soon as possible, right, whether it's inpatient or outpatient. So, like, within days of an arrest, you could be in treatment. Yes. Again, if you go to normal jail, that is not what happens. Most jails don't offer treatment programs. Some do, but a lot of them don't. So if you go to jail, your treatment is either going cold turkey or just doing a bunch of drugs in jail. Right? Right. This is meant to say, okay, we're going to actually keep you out of jail. You're not going to jail right now, but you're going into this treatment program. And like you said, it could be inpatient or outpatient. It can be public funded treatment, or it could be a private treatment hospital, like a rehab center. Right. And all of this stuff is hammered out on a case by case basis. So you are recommended by either your attorney or a judge that sees you in the criminal court might say you do better in drug court. The arresting officer apparently can recommend drug court, and then they look at you as an individual and they look at your individual case, and then they decide what is the best way to handle your case. And there is definitely like, a structure in a program that every drug court is going to have. But there's a lot of room. From what I understand. There's a lot of room and a lot of leeway for them to almost personally tailor your drug court experience to make it as successful as possible. And this is the ideal version. Again, I know that we're holding off on poopooing. As you can see, Chuck, I'm biting clear through my lower lip right now. Yes, but this is the ideal version and it does exist in some places. Yes. It's tailormade. It's like a pillow menu at a nice hotel. It's nothing like that. But what you are going to get, just like at a nice hotel, is drug tested a lot and maybe every other day for the first while, you might be drug tested. Yeah. I think that one attorney who was busted and became like a drug court advocate, he was drug tested like five days a week. Yeah. And again, this is tailored to you. So one of the things our article points out is that what happens is your judge gets to know you. And that's kind of the whole point is they need to know who you are. So A, they can suss out whether or not you're trying to game the system. And from what it sounds like, they get really good at that and kind of reading these people who are like, no, man, I can tell this guy, he's just trying to go through drug court so we can go out and do drugs again. Or this person seems like they really want to turn their life around, right. So they will get to know these folks and assess. Like, I think they need maybe to be tested once a week. And the more you test clean, the less you get tested and the more sort of leeway you have and freedom you have as long as you're working those steps in completing your program. Right, okay. So then, like I said, though, the coercion thing is the key to drug court, right? The whole point of drug court is that you can go through a program out of court, right? And it wouldn't be judicially mandated or anything like that. But what the drug court advocates are saying is that doesn't work nearly as well as the idea that if you don't complete this program, you're going to jail. Right. And some drug courts take it even further and say, okay, man, here's your choice. You can stick with the regular charges, go to normal criminal court for this, you will probably almost certainly do some jail time, or you can come try drug court. If you succeeded drug court, you won't go to jail. We may even dismiss the case and make it like this conviction never even happened. If you fail, not only are you going to jail, you're going to do more jail time than if you hadn't come into drug court at all and just stayed in the regular criminal system. So the coercion there is very strong. And the reason that it's there, according to drug court advocates, is because that is what helps ensure the success of these treatment programs and gets people to actually complete them and become unaddicted to drugs at the end of it, or at least started on a path that they can keep up with for the rest of their lives. Yeah, when I said it's a quick program, the program isn't quick. They get you going quickly. Right. But this doesn't happen over the course of a few months. It seems like the minimum is about a year, and it can be as long as two years sometimes to graduate and prove that you are drug free and committed to being drug free. Right. So you'll have the court all up in your stuff, like during that two years. Right. Some of them are even shorter, but they're almost meant as like an emergency case, like somebody's having a mental health crisis. I don't know if it's federal. I know some states have it. At least if it's not a federal law that you can be locked up for, I think, 72 hours against your will. If the court says this person needs to be they need emergency mental health treatment. There are some kind of subcategories of drug courts that have been set up to address the opioid crisis. That will be like a 90 day emergency crash program that's basically meant to keep you out of jail, but also keep you alive and really get your treatment going. But that's like an additional part to the drug court program because from what I saw, it seems like twelve to 24 months is pretty normal. Yeah. Who are these people? Who are these prosecutors and defense attorneys and judges? And in most cases it seems like they are people that have specifically requested drug court. It doesn't seem like a lot of people are begrudgingly assigned drug court. They feel compelled to do so. Maybe a mid career switch, or maybe that's what they wanted to do to begin with. They feel like they have a calling to try and help people and not necessarily just be like, I'm going to be the prosecutor that throws a book at everybody and a judge that just wants to put everybody behind bars. They definitely have a more compassionate side than you're probably used to in a courtroom. Although I will say most courts I mean, I've only been to traffic court and stuff, but they have all sorts of traffic court is they have a range of people in there. And most of the judges I've seen in my life have been it's sort of harsh with a heart of gold. Yes. I've never seen one in person that was just like seemed like a real jerk that was just intent on running people through the system. You make a good point. I think every scientific study that involves human subjects should be required to get their population sample from traffic court. There's no better, like, perfect cross section of America than a Tuesday morning in traffic. Oh, man, you ain't kidding. So that's the rule now for science, everybody. Yeah, that's really true. And you're always like I feel like every time I've been to traffic court, which has only been two or three times, I always feel like I'm the last person I'm there all day long and always envious of the people that are up there first. But at the end of the day, it ends up being fairly interesting for a dude like me who just enjoys watching this sort of experience play out. Have you ever been to traffic court and you were, like, looking at the cops who showed up and you're like, Is that the one that the guy gave me tickets? Because if they don't show up, they throw out your case, supposedly. Right. Which I'm not even sure if that's an urban legend or not. No, I think it might depend, but I think that can be the case for sure. Well, I've never been able to perfectly say, yes, the cop that gave me the ticket is not here. That's because you were whacked out, man. I really can't remember. I wasn't even in traffic. I was, like, in jail, just hallucinating at that time. Yeah, I have heard that, because that was the advice I always got, was, all right, you want to plead not guilty just in case they don't show, and then by the time you actually get up in front of the judge, if they've shown up, you can always change your plea, bro. And they actually have another they have a diversionary court or a diversion court, like a side court that they've set up for a traffic court where you can go in, plead guilty, and then pay, like, a reduced fine and you don't have to sit there for the whole day. And it's really they just take any pretense of trying to keep people safe as the reason they give out traffic tickets. Just they completely do away with it. It's just like there's, like, a guy wearing one of those green brim, like, bankers caps. We'll charge you money if you make it fast. Yeah, pretty much exactly. But there's, like, no public safety aspect to it. It's just a money making thing. But that actually qualifies as, like, this kind of thing with a drug court. It's like, here's regular court. Here's something else off to the side that we're using to divert people out of the clogged court system. For sure. Yeah, I think everyone should go to court just at least once. I want to be on jury duty. I got called not too long ago, and they didn't even call me up to be questioned or whatever. It just ended up being hanging all day. And then they dismissed a whole lot of, like, the 30 people I was with. But I'm into it. I would definitely do it. I certainly wouldn't want to be tied up for weeks. Right. Or what do they call it when you have to sequestered? Yeah, sequestered. No way. Like a white case. You get dinner for free. Yeah, but come on. I know. It would be it gets old after, like, two or three weeks. I think you're right. Free dinner. All right, so where are we? We're talking about good judges and bad judges. So yeah, everyone's sort of on the same team in drug court. Which is, let me get to know this person. Let me find the root of their problem. Let me see if we can help them walk the straight and narrow together, which sounds very hippy dippy. I'm kind of surprised this took root in the United States. Yeah, it is like Finland or something, right? Super Scandinavian. Yeah. So, again, this is ideally, not every judge is going to fit this bill, but drug court judges would tend to lean toward this personality trait or act like this more than, say, your typical criminal court judge. Right? Right. So one of the things that's expected of them as part of being a drug court judge is they are meant to be kind of a social worker almost for this person. It's a really weird position for a judge to be, why not just leave it to the social worker? Well, again, you come back to the coercion, right. This is supposed to be built into even average drug court program. It treats addiction as a public health problem, as a chronic disease. And if you're not familiar with that model of addiction, go listen to our addiction episode, because it's really interesting, but it treats it as like this is a chronic disease. So it's expected that this person is going to probably relapse, probably with 100% certainty, depending on the level of their addiction. And that is not grounds to wash out of the program the first time, or maybe even the second time, or maybe even the third time. It's up to the judge's discretion. But eventually you get to a point where the person either washes out of the program or it's clear they're not really taking it very seriously. So the judge will issue what's called a flash incarceration, which means you showed up to take your drug test. It's been four weeks since you were last in court. You're in the program, and you just failed, and the judge is tired of you failing your drug test. And the next thing you know, you're wearing an orange jumpsuit and spending the next ten days in jail to kind of, like, snap you out of it and get you serious about this thing again. And then over time, eventually you'll wash out. You'll get kicked out of the program and end up in criminal court, and you'll pick up where you left off, which is the beginning of your trial for whatever the original charges were. Right. But the idea that you can be incarcerated and still remain in this program, and given these second and third chances, depending on what the judge and the prosecutor and the court staff think your level of dedication is, you're not going to find that anywhere else in the criminal justice system in the United States. No. And not only do they try and treat people for drug abuse, but if you are a victim of domestic violence, you will go to an agency to help you with that they work a lot with veterans. If you suffer from PTSD or if you're just a drug addicted veteran, then they're going to make really sure that they're taking care of you and providing you with all the medical and mental health benefits that you have. And I love how our article says it, that you have earned not even that you deserve like you have earned this, right? And so this is another just crazy different thing about the drug court is imagine that, Chuck. Imagine this basically being like, homeless and addicted to heroin. And you're a veteran, right, to have people who have access to computers and emails and know the phone numbers of the services you're supposed to be calling and know what forms you need to fill out and then even how to fill out those forms to have access to people who can help you do that. So that all of a sudden, you actually do get the benefits that get you off of the street and into a treatment program and get the government to help pay for it. That's invaluable. And that's another aspect of drug court, is that they provide those services. You have access to those people who are helping you get those services, or if your child has been taken away, they help you navigate the child welfare system so that you can go take the classes you need to take to get your child back. There's just a lot of different services that they offer that they help people with, too. I think it's just an amazing idea. Yeah. And it makes sense, too, because one of the big drawback, or not drawbacks, but one of the big things holding these people back many times is when you're a heroin addict, you are robbed of any ambition to do this yourself. Even if you wake up sober and you're like, man, I don't want to live this kind of life. But you are addicted to this drug, so you don't wake up and think, let me go to the local library because they have the Internet there and I can sign up and find out where this stuff is, and I have no family that's going to help me do this, or I've rejected them. That first step can literally just be the person. It's like, yeah, this is the number. You can be driven there and dropped off there, and that can kick start the process of getting healthy again, right? So that's a huge part of drug court, too, and that's a huge part of the success of it. So there's this whole court system set up there that if you want to take advantage of it, you can get off of drugs and you can stay out of jail. And the way that from some of the studies I've seen, the best role that a judge can play is supportive, but also stern. Not a pushover, but also just not a blowhard. There's no room for blowhards in here, but there's also no room for somebody who's just completely being taken advantage of by person after person. Right. So you want a nice mix in the judge, but you also want a judge who's going to listen to the other professionals, too, and act almost as an advocate of the person who's in it. But they're also meant to kind of create this atmosphere where you're doing this. This is good, man. This is a respectable thing that you're doing. And therefore, I'm going to treat you with the respect that you're earning right now by being the Reinforcement Program. Right. And rather than confrontation and shame, which apparently has a terrible effect on addicts, regardless of whether you're in court or in a rehab treatment or whatever, and then the end of it is considered like a graduation, it's meant to be a big deal. So much so that they'll actually bring other people who are in the program to court on the day that you are graduating from the program, because they it's kind of a big deal. And they treat it like a big deal. Exactly. You yeah, exactly. And they're treated with respect. And all these people who they probably become at least civil with, if not jovial and friendly with over the last 90 days or twelve months or 24 months, to see them patting that person on the back, I'm sure that means a lot. So the idea that it is it just feels really weird to be talking and not say and of course, we mean Sweden, right? It is very weird. Judge Bjorn. Bjornsson. It's out there and it's growing like wildfire. All right, well, let's take a break and we will come back and finish up with some statistics and some more glowing reviews. And then, of course, the dreaded poopooing of the bad side of drug courts. Right after this, only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. 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So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions, faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. All right, so the cool thing about these kind of programs, when the government is involved in pouring a lot of money into these programs, is that there's going to be a lot of research and there has definitely been a lot of research on drug courts. And all data points generally point to the fact that it works on a pretty big level. It saves people money and saves taxpayers money. It lowers crime. It reduces crime. It lowers the rate of recidivism. One bonehead word, I think we can agree. So let's start with a stat from inside jail. In prison. 80% of offenders in jail in prison abuse drug and alcohol. Like, while they're in prison, in jail, okay? 50% of them are clinically addicted. So it is clear that there is a really big problem to just sending addicts to jail. Yeah, because, again, remember, not a lot of jails, especially like city and county jails, have treatment programs. You're probably in a federal penitentiary. You're a good state pen if you're getting a treatment program. And if you're a low level drug offender, you're probably not going to state or federal penitentiary. You're going to city or county jail. Well, yeah. And 60% to 80% of inmates who seek drug treatment, like, if they have the program and you just want to seek that program while you're in prison, 60% to 80% drop out early. With the thinking for drug courts, being that they're already in jail, there isn't that carrot dangling or rather maybe a hammer dangling above their head that said, you can avoid jail by doing this. They're already in jail, so there's not a lot of incentive. So the thing about drug courts is that they apparently changed that thing. This article says they reverse all these numbers. It's a little glib, if you ask me, but they definitely are. They put a dent in it. They do. So there was a National Association of Drug Court professional study, and there's been other studies that have shown similar statistics, but something like the recidivism rate is like 16% after the first year, 27% after the second year, which is far less than what you would find in the general population for people on probation. Yeah. And these are people who have completed the program, which, as we'll see, is a big caveat. People who are parents in the drug courts, their kids tend to spend less time in foster care, and their family is more likely to be reunited after they complete the program. What else? 35%. Reduced crime rate compared to alternatives. And then another study from the national institute of justice for Escambia county, Florida, which I believe is like Pensacola area. They said the felony rear rest rate there was lowered by 18%. Dang. So there's a lot of statistics that really seem to show that this works, including reducing prison population, which saves the state's money, making improving employment opportunities, which would give more tax revenue. And so it seems like it's all like a no brainer 100%. Why would anyone have a problem with this? Right, well, here's why. I didn't get this drug policy alliance one fully. Did you? Yes. All right, what's the deal there? So one of the things that drug courts do is they take the war on drugs from the supply side, which means, like, invading Mexico, to the demand side, which means busting users. Right. And drug court is just basically a new iteration of the idea of busting a user, but rather than just busting them again and again and again in the hopes that they'll eventually give up on drugs, this is to cure them of their addiction to drugs. It's the court intervening, but it's still the same thing. And the drug policy lines is like, we don't need to be doubling down on busting low level users in addicts. We need to treat it strictly as a public health thing. And if you are busted with a small amount of drugs, you shouldn't ever go to jail. Like, it should be decriminalized. And what they're saying is that this whole thing is like a whole new direction, a whole new push that's just keeping us from decriminalizing low amounts of drugs, which the Drug Policy Alliance says is best practices. All right, that makes sense. And then you sent a really interesting article. What was that? Was that the Atlantic? No, it was the Pacific Standard. Oh, it was the Pacific. It's the Atlantic of the west coast. Yeah. That one was really interesting because they paint or not paint. But they kind of tell another side of the story through a few examples of real people. Which is. All right. Let's say my son or daughter is addicted to heroin and they go through like. What you talked about. Like the flash incarceration. Like. Hey. You came in here and tested positive. So I'm just going to go ahead and throw you right back in the slammer for ten days. What's happening is a lot of these people, and it depends on the drug, but especially in the case of heroin and opioids, is they're putting people back in jail very quickly who are in the middle of going cold turkey. Right. So that's not a good situation. And kind of round me across the board, medical professionals have agreed that methadone and what was the other drug? Let's just say methadone, because most people know that one, that methadone is like an essential medicine if you are trying to kick an opioid or heroin habit. And under the terms of a drug court, you can't use methadone even. Right. So they found that 50% of drug courts in the US have an outright ban on what's called maintenance right. And the idea behind maintenance and like you said, it's like the medical community says, this is the best practice if you're addicted to heroin or opioids. You go get what's called a maintenance dose, where you get a little dose of something like methadone, and you get it every day at the same time, every day, the same amount. And you get your body so used to this that you're no longer getting high. Right. But it keeps you from going out and getting high because you no longer have that craving. You're not drug seeking anymore. And apparently they compare it to, like, being on Prozac, that you can go out, have a job, have a high stress job, live a normal life, and be on methadone, this maintenance dose of methadone, and not ever get back on heroin. Well, 50% of drug courts say no. This is an abstinence based court. To be part of it, you can't test positive for drugs and therefore you can't be on methadone. And so what they're doing is, if you wash out of the court system, whether they kick you in jail or say you're out of drug court and you haven't been on methadone, but you have been off of heroin, when you get back on it, what used to be just a normal dose to you could kill you. That's just what happens with your body when you're in withdrawals. So it's like these drug courts that are abstinence based drug courts are setting you up to overdose on heroin if you don't follow this program strictly. Right. And what they're saying is, judges who don't listen to the medical community's best practices, that's a very dangerous situation. Yeah. Because they know that you're super at risk for relapse. And then once you're in there for ten days and you're cold turkey and you're clean, then you are also, like you said, significant risk for overdosing and possibly dying. Right. So, again, it seems to be specifically with, like, heroin and opioids, which is maybe the biggest problem in our country right now, drug wise anyway. Right. So I'm not discounting that. But especially in these cases, it seems like drug courts need to at least be they're not saying drug courts are bad, but they need to maybe work with the medical community a little more when it comes to heroin. And opioids is the best practice for getting these people clean because that's the goal. Right. And a lot of them do. A lot of them do allow for medication and maintenance. I didn't know it was 50%. That's good to know. I thought it was rare that they allowed for maintenance. Oh, yeah, no, a lot of them do, but 50% say none whatsoever. But yeah, a lot of them do. Some of them, though, the other 50%, some are on certain basis. Like if you're a pregnant woman, they'll let you do a methodone treatment or something like that. It's not like half let you and half don't it's, half don't, and then some of the other half let just anybody, like maybe 20% just openly allows it. But that is the way to cure somebody of heroin and denying them that it's ill informed. Well, yes, and very sadly, it is anecdotal. I don't know what kind of big studies they have on this, but they told very specific stories about people that went through drug court, were released and overdosed and died because their body couldn't take what, like you said was a week and a half ago, a normal dose. Right. It's very sad. And then again, there's the other aspect where it's like since they can select who comes into drug court, they're selecting people who are going to likely graduate and make their drug court look even better. And so they're going to pick first timers, scared kids who are like, my whole life is going to be ruined if I end up in jail, who will probably see this program, too. And so that means that the data is kind of cherry picked. Yeah. Like these recidivism rates, those are for people who complete the program. For people who wash out of the program. They're actually worse off than the people who were similar criminals under the same circumstances that just kept going through criminal court because they ended up with more prison time, more jail time than they would have had if they just stuck to criminal court. So there's definitely some criticisms of it. It can be done better, but it does seem like there are some courts out there that actually do follow, like these ideal best practices models. There's just so much leeway that it's different from court to court. Yeah. And it just depends on the judge, really. You need Harry Anderson in there. Sure you do. All those judges need to learn at least three card tricks and look good in black. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I don't either. So let's see. If you want to know more about drug courts, you can search those words on the search bar@housetoforce.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this what will be one of two North Korea responses and this in a subsequent recording. We got a lot of good feedback about that episode. I was pretty stoked. I was, too. I was nervous. Hey, guys. This is from Ken in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He said, I've been enjoying your show for a while now. I wanted to toss a stone into your North Korean pond. I was able to visit the DMZ while I was there for a while. He told the story while he was there, but he was able to go to the DMZ, and he said, it was fascinating. Thought it was funny that each side built super tall flagpoles to be just a little taller than the other, and also made modifications to their buildings on either side of the blue huts to also be taller and more imposing than the other. South Korea actually trains their DMZ guards sandwich in the most imposing stance possible. One more thing I'll share is a talk I had with my Korean co teachers. I asked them what they felt about reunification, and the universal answer was that there should be one united Korea and they hope to see it happen soon. The loan dissenter was a woman who said she recognized how difficult that process would be, and she didn't think it would be good for the country. When the other teachers heard this coworkers opinion, they all looked at her like she had just poured mayonnaise on the kimchi. It was delicious to me. I don't know what the problem is there. If it were the Japanese mayonnaise, maybe. Yeah, exactly. Oh, man. What was that stuff that was so good? Kewpie. Then more of that, please. They couldn't believe she wasn't for reunification. Your culture is less individualistic than ours, so they often all towed the party line on such things, but she did not. Anyway, thank you for turning my long drives and monotonous tasks into opportunities to think and learn. My wife and I in most evenings talking about our days and how they went, and I often discuss the topics on your show because that's what I've been contemplating. Ken from Lancaster, PA. Thanks a lot, Ken. Say hi to the Amish out there for us because they don't listen to our podcast. Yeah, give them an iPhone. Walk in the world. There was one thing that I wanted to mention. There are actually two things in that episode that I forgot to mention. One was the 1976 axe attack of North Korean guards against South Korean guards. Did you hear about that? Yeah, like killed by a hatchet, for goodness sake. Right? And then the current president was on the team who came out after that and finished cutting down the tree that the South Korean guards were originally doing. And then the other thing is that North Korea holds the Math Games, and they hold it in their own personal Olympics, and they hold it in 150,000 person stadium. And I think it's a National Geographic documentary about this girl who's a gymnast or a dancer or something like that. I can't remember. But it's her training for the Mass Games. It's a great documentary. Check it out. Great. Okay. Thanks a lot, Ken. Thank you, Chuck, for letting me talk, and thank you for listening. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark. We're both at Syskpodcast. Chuck is at moviecrush. Chuck is also on Facebook. Comstuffyshonow. Chuck's on Facebook.com. Charleswchuckbryantandtuffyshonow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housesteporks.com. As always, join us at our home on the web, stuffysheaknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.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 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."
https://podcasts.howstuf…k-filibuster.mp3	SYSK Selects: How Filibusters Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-filibusters-work	In this week's SYSK Select episode, although lots of people incorrectly believe the filibuster was an intentional rule created by the founders of the U.S., this ancient method of stalling legislation was actually brought about in America by accident. Lear	In this week's SYSK Select episode, although lots of people incorrectly believe the filibuster was an intentional rule created by the founders of the U.S., this ancient method of stalling legislation was actually brought about in America by accident. Lear	Sat, 01 Apr 2017 13:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=91, tm_isdst=0)	35175948	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everybody, this is Chuck. And surprise, you get a bonus episode this week. And every Saturday, moving forward with our SYSK selects episode. So what we decided to do was to kind of you know, not everyone knows we have all these back episodes laying in wait to the tune of 900 plus. So each week, Josh will pick one. I'll pick one. We're going to curate these. It might be newsy. It might just be one of our favorites, and we're going to publish them on Saturday. So if you haven't heard this one before, enjoy it. If you have, maybe listen again. And this week, I picked out filibusters, especially because of kind of what's going on in this country right now with the looming nomination of Mr. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and the threatened Democratic filibuster. So if you don't know what filibusters are all about, give this episode a listen, and everything will be a lot more clear, and we hope you enjoy it. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and with me, as always, Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry and that's stuff you should know. I feel the buster that you can't I could talk for the next 24 hours straight and not allow you to speak, and I would be filibuster in this podcast. No, you'd actually be creating a podcast still. I guess so. We don't have any parliamentary rules, so, I mean, technically, you could do that, and it's a podcast still, upon reading this, it seems like the US. Government doesn't either, because one strategy is to just pick up your ball and go home. Yeah, that's sort of what filibustering is. Except you don't go home. No. You stand there until everybody else goes home. Yeah. In the most classic example yes. Which is what we're all about here at Stuff You Should Know, the classics, man. Right, Chuck. You know, this year, 2013, which is drawing to a close, there were two very high profile filibusters. One was by Wendy Davis, member of the Texas State Senate, who filibustered against a proposed bill or a package of bills that would limit access to abortions. Did she actually do it like a solo filibuster? Yeah, the classic move. She had, like, on some snazzy pink, magenta, Mazuno, running shoes, a back brace. Oh, really? I believe a catheter. Shut up. No, I'm not kidding. I'm almost positive she had a catheter and spoke for 11 hours straight. Yeah. There was also another one in September by US senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, one of the founding people of the Tea Party, or at least one of the most prominent members of the Tea Party, who was filibustering against a continuing resolution to keep the government open. Okay. Or to reopen the government. So he went solo as well? He did. One was real, one was fake. What do you mean? Cruises was fake? It wasn't a real filibuster. It was basically stage dressing that looked like a filibuster. But at its core, as we'll soon find out, it wasn't a filibuster because it was the result of a deal with Harry Reid that Ted Cruz would be allowed to speak for 21 hours, and then at the end of his 21 hours, this vote would go on. The whole purpose of a filibuster is to prevent a vote from taking place, not make a deal to speak for a certain amount of time and then let the vote go through. And then Cruz even further wound people by voting in favor of the motion after he supposedly filibustered it. Man so we have one very real one, wendy Davis. She wasn't allowed to take a sip of water. She had to stay on topic, spoke nonstop for 11 hours. Catheter the whole thing. She had to stay on topic? Yeah. Is that a new thing? Well, it's a Texas state rule. Okay. Got you. And then Cruz just basically spoke for 21 hours, handed the lectern over to, I think, Rand Paul for a little while. It was just kind of meandering or whatever. It looked like a filibuster. But as we'll find out, it wasn't really, even though Davis was very much a filibuster. Got you. So let's talk filibusters. Man yeah, it's one of these I was about to say uniquely American. But it does happen, and it has happened in other countries. It actually dates back to ancient Rome. Yes. But it is uniquely American, and the way that we do it, how it's abused sure. So it's history does go back to ancient Rome. Cato the Younger was a master of the filibuster, and this was back at a time when you actually could make pretty good use of the filibuster, because the Senate rule was that all business had to be concluded by dusk. If it wasn't, sorry, it's off the table. So all you had to do is stand there, technically for one day and you could filibuster anything. It's pretty silly when you think about it. Yeah. A lot of people, I think, assume that it's like, part of the Constitution, maybe. No. Or that the Founding father said, hey, we need this rule to filibuster. No. That perhaps it was brought up by Superman and the guys at Clark Kent. Yes. Okay. I think we get there some day. All right. So filibuster is an actual is any sort of action that you can take to block or delay action in the Senate. House can't do it. Senate can. Right. And it exists because there are rules. Yeah. It's an odd thing with an accidental history. I guess first we should say that the name they believe comes from the Dutch word that means pirate. And as pirates take things hostage, filibustering can also be looked at as taking things hostage. Very much so. I mean, like a vote or a bill that wants to be introduced, confirmation or nomination yeah. For confirmation, for a judge, let's say. Yeah. You're holding it hostage. A lot of people think a filibuster is a good thing because it allows the minority, meaning the minority in the Senate, to still have a voice right. And not just have get run roughshot over by the majority. And the Senate has a long, storied history of giving a tremendous amount of say and right to the minority, whichever party that might be at any given time. And so, as a result, the filibuster was allowed to exist for a while, ever since it was accidentally created. But initially, the Senate and the House had a rule that prevented filibustering. Yeah. The previous question motion, which required a majority vote, and it was not used, though, apparently. No, ever so in. They got rid of it. Yeah, the Senate did. And kind of didn't realize what they had created was a bit of a loophole in that. Now, if you wanted, you could get up and speak endlessly about something, and that's basically what it is. Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Jimmy Stewart did it, and everyone loved it, but these days, it's kind of a different story. Well, yeah, it's definitely lost a lot of its substance, too. Well, they didn't used to use it very much. No. In that previous question motion. That's what it was called. Right. Yeah. So that was basically, like you could say, is everybody ready for this guy to stop talking about this bill, or can we be done with debate? And everybody says, Yay or nay. And then if it's then you just go on and vote like it ends debate. But like you said, nobody was using it, and so they just kind of threw it out. Their debate is good. Yeah, I guess it was. Aaron Burr was saying, we need to simplify these rules. So the Senate did it, the House didn't. Which is why you can't have a filibuster in the House, because they never got rid of the previous question motion. Yeah. But like you said, Jimmy Stewart did it. Everybody was just in awe of the idea of one. All you need is one good senator. The rest of the Senate can be corrupt, but as long as you have one Jimmy Stewart in there and a catheter yeah. And a little bit of stamina, the truth, justice and the American way can prevail. And as you were saying, as a result, a lot of people think having a filibuster is a good thing. Sure. Because it prevents tyranny by the majority. Yeah. In essence, it is a good thing in a democracy. And like I said, it wasn't used that much in the 19th century. The first one was not until 1837, and less than two dozen took place before the year 1900. In 1917, things change with President Wilson got a little ticked off because there was a filibuster blocking a bill. Arming merchantships and the Great War was being fought and he said, we don't have time for this. Right. So I'm going to push to pass something called a closure rule, which means that we can cease this filibustering with a two thirds vote. Right. And he didn't really have any say. I mean, the President, he's not involved in the Senate, that's the Vice President. But he was using all of his influence and public opinion against a little group of willful men. Yeah. I mean, he hated it and he was a big champion of trying to limit it as much as possible. So the Senate passed this closure rule that said you can bring something to a vote with two thirds majority, which is 67 Senators. That's right. That's a lot of people. That means that the will of the Senate, not not just the majority party, I should say, but the actual Senate is like, enough of this. We agree that we need to stop debating this. Exactly. It has since been abused or used, depending on your viewpoint, during the civil rights movement, racist senators used it to block all sorts of things from anti lynching laws to civil rights bills and successfully strong thurman broke the record for speaking for 24 hours and 18 minutes. That's still the record straight. Yes. That's because no one else wants to do that or has the stamina or the adult diapers. Right. We can't leave. We keep talking about that. We should explain you're not allowed to leave, even to pee. You have to keep talking. Well, that was the case until the 70s, apparently filibustering, thanks to the segregationists who are using it to prevent lynching laws, to prevent the civil rights bill. Pretty much anything that had to do with civil rights, they were using the filibuster for. So by the time the 70s rolled around. The Senate passed a different rule that meant well. It said if you want to bring a vote to closure to end debate. No longer do you need 67 Senators. You only need 60. Which is a little easier to get. But we're going to give the minority still see. The Senate loves the minority. The ability to threaten a filibuster if they have 41 senators on board with that filibuster. And you don't even have to stand up there anymore. Yeah, but you still can if you're a loan Senator. It didn't eliminate the loan filibuster speaker no. Because if you have 40 or 39 or 38 or it's just you you're just that one person, then you have to stand up there. Still yeah, but the idea that if you had 41 Senators who would, if called upon, would vote against that closure yeah. You don't have to talk. Right. Because by definition, you have that filibuster power. And the whole idea of adding this rule was not just to kind of give a little back to the minority when you are taking it away by dropping it from a two thirds to three fifths majority for closure. Right. They were also trying to make it so that the Senate business was more streamlined and efficient, but it has unintended consequences of people saying, like, oh, well, I threatened filibuster. I'm going to sit over here. I don't have to talk. I'm going to threaten filibuster. So that means, take this bill out of consideration and let's move on with the other business. That's right. And that's when bill just started getting blocked left and right. Yeah. And back to thermo supposedly with the whole bathroom thing, he took a steam bath to dehydrate himself so he wouldn't have to pee. That's the story. I can imagine that would take for maybe 1012 hours, but then 24 hours, yes. He peed himself. You think? I'll bet it's just one of those untold stories of the Senate. Sean Thurman peed all over himself. Okay, so that's the simple filibuster, the one you don't see as much anymore because the one guy standing up. Yeah. Now it's more about, hey, we can just threaten it. No one has to waste their time speaking and debating. But, Chuck, it does keep you from wasting time. But because it's easy to do and because all you need are 41. Senators created a backlog. It's a really easy way for the minority to hold anything they want hostage, which is one reason why a lot of people say it's a good thing to have a filibuster, because it protects the minority from majority tyranny. But having a filibuster means that really just a fairly small group of senators, less than half, can hold anything they want up. And just that one simple filibuster, the presence of it means that you can have any crazy nut who is a senator hold anything up that he wants as long as he's willing to stand there and talk. So there's some people who say, we need to get rid of the filibuster. There are others who say, no, the filibuster has to exist. It's this accidental thing that the framers didn't put in there, but it was a happy accident that it came about, and it proved it's worth as a part of democracy. Yeah. Well, you mentioned earlier who was the lady? Davis. Yeah. Wendy Davis. You said you had to stay on point, because in Texas, they say you have to stay on point. But federally, there are no laws specifically or rules that say you have to do so. You just have to talk, which is fairly ridiculous. And in 1935, Huey P. Long did such things as read Shakespeare and talk about cooking fried oysters or site recipes tell behavior. Huey Long had a pretty good fried oyster recipe. It's just crazy. It's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. You can say whatever you want. Yeah. Literally. That is what our government is doing. They're up there talking about oyster recipes on the floor of the Senate to block a bill being introduced. Perhaps I've always equated filibusters with a senator standing up there reading from a phone book. I think that was another common tactic, too. Did someone do that? Yeah, I don't know who did, but it's definitely been done USA, right? Yeah. I think it kind of should leave it's shameful. It is. Especially when it's not. Just at the very least you should have to stand up there and debate your bill or debate your position yes. And talk about what the issue is at hand. And if you're willing to do that, if you feel that passionate about that, then there's really not a lot of criticism that push along at you. But if you're standing out there talking oyster recipes or in my opinion, if you're saying threatened filibuster, that to me it's hijacking. It is? Yeah. It's piracy. It is. So that is not the only way you can waste time and block things from happening in Congress. Right. There are all these little tactics that can be used. For instance, you can introduce a lot of amendments to a bill and instead of just saying waving the right and saying, you know what, we're introducing this amendment, everyone knows it, we don't have to waste our time reading it. They can demand we're going to introduce 47 amendments to this bill and we're going to read each one in full. Right. It's just a time wasting measure. You can also add on to that a roll call vote for each amendment. So you have an amendment read and then you have a roll call taken for every senator to say whether they vote yes a or nay for each amendment. Yeah. Which would make it even more timely. Something called quorum calls. Apparently that ascertain the number of senators present. I don't know how that's different than a roll call. Roll call is what you're voting. Like, how do you feel about this amendment? Are you present or not? Because you have to have a quorum. I can't remember how many make up a quorum, but basically there has to be a certain amount of people present for Senate business to be conducted. So quorum would be to find out if there's enough people present and if you're just doing it delay time. They might be in their offices or whatever, they might be having dinner and they're still technically present. But if you call quorum call, then that means they have to come in and say present and then go back to dinner. There can be something called an anonymous hold which allows someone to block a bill, a man or woman in the Senate when it requires unanimous consent in order to be voted on. But it's anonymous, which is kind of tricky because then you don't know who's holding up the gumming up the works, right. Then it turns into like a big game of Clue. Yeah, Harry Reid did it in the conservatory with the rope. So filibuster reform. Surely something this weird and hanky should be looked at and reformed in order to retain the true spirit of the filibuster. And over the years, there's been a lot of talk about reform, a little bit of action about reform, but not a ton until recently. In the 50s, there was but one filibuster per session, and in 2007 and 2008, there were 139 threatened filibusters, affecting 70% of major legislation in 20 07. 20 08, right. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. So it obviously got out of hand and people were abusing the power. I can't help but wonder also if the concept that both groups are coming together to rule the country in a combined manner has become less and less of a concept over the last few decades as well. Is it? Or am I just like making that assumption? And it's always been that way. There's always been that division. Is that the case or no, it seemed to be like my opinion is that it used to be checks and balances, and now it's not so much checks and balances is just severe, severe digging in to your own. It certainly seems that way, but maybe it was always like that. I don't know. I didn't grow up in the don't know either. They probably felt the same way the American people did, those jerks in Washington. Oh, I'm sure they did, but I wonder if they had as much cause to say that as we do today. It's always actually worse. I mean, the numbers would suggest that, but is it just that the numbers are showing that people figured out how to use a filibuster better than they knew before, which is smarter, or they're more adept at using it, or is government broken that much more to where there was one a year each year during the then there's 139 a year in 2008? Yeah, it seems broken to me, but indicates that to me, too. Yeah. I'm fairly cynical about the state of modern politics, though. I am, too. And the thing that gets me the most about this is the idea that the government is broken because the two sides can't agree. Even though. Really. If you get down to it. There's almost no distinction between Democrats and Republicans ideologically here there a little bit. But definitely between liberals and conservatives. But between the Democrats and the Republicans. I feel there's almost no difference any longer. Like where the rubber meets the road and not ideologically speaking. And so the idea that the government still can't function even when you have virtually one large mega party, I don't understand it. I don't understand what's going on there. It's sad. It seems like it would be functioning in a really smooth manner and steamrolling over us, you silly boy. Right. So we've talked a lot about this weird process, but we should talk about reform right after this message break. Okay, so back to it. We were talking before we went off on some of our personal things, how bad it stinks now about reforming filibusters, but problem arise when you try to reform filibustering, because that can be filibustered. Yeah. If you have a proposal to reform filibustering, it's still a measure, and you can exactly. This whole talk of how to reform filibustering, some proposals came up in 2010. There were three good ones. One was if you're filibustering, you can't threaten a filibuster any longer. You have to get up there and you have to talk. Yeah. Play the part that was shot down. Yeah. Another one was that over the length of a filibuster, the required number of Senators to invoke closure just decreases. So a filibuster could only go on for so long before you get to, like, a simple majority. Now, that was shot down. The third one, you got that one. Yeah. It would have banned filibusters on motions, bringing a bill to the floor so you couldn't filibuster, like, maybe something to perform filibustering. Right. None of those were passed. And the reason why you would think that one party would be like, well, we don't want filibusters. We're in charge. You have to remember that eventually you're not going to be in charge, and you're going to want a filibuster. Both parties filibuster. The Democrats filibustered Reagan's appointments and nominees in the just like the Republicans are filibustering Obama's right now. Yeah. I will say, though, in fairness, it's record numbers now compared to even what Democrats did, and I'm not saying one is better than the other. No, it's much more highly invoked in recent years, for sure. And it's definitely been squarely on the shoulders of the Tea Party, too. Yeah, it's been since the Tea Party started to get some major seats. For instance, I got a number for you. It used to be fairly rare to filibuster a judicial presidential appointment. It wasn't used that much for that. It was more for, like, bills and things. And there have been only about 180 something times in the history of this country that that's been done, and more than half of those have happened during the past seven years. Wow. So it wasn't used that much in the past, but in the past, it's been happening, I think, more than 92 times in the past seven years. Well, you know what that suggests? That suggests that before those things were used like a scalpel, and now they're just basically arbitrary. That's exactly what it was. In the eight years that Bush Jr. Was in office, there was about a dozen of those nominees that were filibustered, as opposed to 92 since Obama's been in there. Yeah. It's definitely not surgical anymore. And again, both parties use it, but it's being misused and has been for a while. Yes. And if you listen to the GOP, they're saying that Obama is trying to pack the courts. If you listen to the Democrats, they're saying, dude, nobody does this. Come on, be cool. So the reason that all those bills failed or the reform failed in 2010 was because they basically did a little handshake deal where they said, all right, don't use filibustering so much to prevent these bills from being introduced. All right, I won't do that. And, hey, you guys can add a bunch of amendments if you want to, and no one's going to use the nuclear option. Are we all cool with that? Yeah, we're all good with that. And then the GOP went back and started filibustering again. And so the Democrats used a nuclear option. Yeah, they did, which is huge. I remember Harry Reid threatened it, and everybody's like, oh, my gosh. Okay, all right. I can't remember what it was. The GOP was blocking something that Harry Reid really wanted to push through, and he said, I'm going to use the nuclear option, and it works. Have we even said what that is? I don't think we have, no. So the nuclear option, is it's the power of the majority to use parliamentary procedures to change major rules, in this case, specifically to remove the ability to filibuster? Yeah, just for that session. Yeah, just for that session. I think so. I saw that in this article, but I didn't see it elsewhere. Well, here's the thing. The majority holds the power to say all we need is a simple majority, 51 Senators, which we have as Democrats to change a rule. Right. And that rule that we're going to change is that you don't need 60 Senators to block 61 Senators to block a filibuster or 60 Senators. I'm sorry. You only need 51, which we, the Democrats, have. Right. Simple majority. Yes. So this has been in the power of whoever has been in the majority the whole time. But it's such a polarizing thing. It's saying, like, we're taking away your ability to block what we want to push through through filibustering because we're taking away your ability to filibuster. We're going to pass this rule with a simple majority saying it just takes a simple majority to invoke closure and end debate and bring something to the floor. It's not saying it only takes a simple majority to confirm this nominee. Yeah. Because that's already the case. So if you follow it backwards, it takes a simple majority to confirm a nominee. Now it just takes a simple majority to bring that nominee's confirmation to a vote. And they did that by passing a rule with a simple majority saying that we're going to end filibustering. Yeah. And that was just a few weeks ago, on November 21, and it passed 52 to 48. All Republicans and three Democrats hopped to the other side and voted against it. And it was not for all filibustering. It was just filibustering on executive branch nominees and judicial nominees. But not Supreme Court nominee. Yeah, other than the Supreme Court. Yes. It's not like for introducing a bill or whatever, but earlier this year, they reached a compromise on some reform. Both sides worked out a bunch of new rules that changed the process somewhat. But I guess that wasn't enough in the case of November 21 and Harry Reid because he kind of threw down the gauntlet, which no one thought would ever happen. No, it's been an option for many, many years, and no one has ever exercised it. So Harry Reid either said, this is ridiculously, out of control, our government is broken, or Harry Reid was drunk with power, depending on who you talk to. Well, it kind of came down to the or this particular sticking point was about nominating judges to the United States Court of Appeals for DC. And Republicans said that you know what? The DC circuit is really underworked. They said that they could save a million dollars a year per judge, cut costs, basically, which is pretty preposterous considering the amount of money that's leaked away every second in Washington. Just bad as the argument. Makes the whole thing smell fishy to me. It's a little bit shallow. Sure. And then Democrats said, no, you know what? You guys didn't have these concerns when Bush was appointing these nominees, and we need to maintain this court because in the size of it, because it's really complex like this particular court is. So I heard the Democrats tried to block appointments to that same court when Bush was in office. I'm sure they did. Yeah. So apparently both sides just completely flip flop the same point and took entirely wanted another point when the presidency was, well, it depends on who's in office and who has the majority, what your beliefs are. It seems like yes, washy is what I call that USA. As of November of this year, obama presented 79 nominees who received cloture votes. Bush had 38 in the eight years that he was in office. But we should say that most of those closure votes ended the debate, and most of those nominees did clear the filibuster. Right, because you used to have a filibuster that required 60 Senators, but a confirmation only required 51. So now it's 51 and 51. And in the meantime, regular old Americans are out there, like, having real troubles, and Senators are on the floor talking. Actually, that was 1935. I can't keep talking about the oyster thing, but still cathetering up in some cases. I'm pretty sure she had a catheter. Really? That's crazy. And uniquely American. I guess so. You got anything else? I got nothing else. I hate to sound so jaded about all this stuff, but it's kind of hard not to. I think you would be a drooling automaton if you didn't get worked up about that and just say, no. This is how government should work. Yeah. If this doesn't make you cynical, it doesn't matter what party you're affiliated with or whether you're conservative or liberal. If you think things are working right now, you need to completely reevaluate your. Life. Yeah, it's hard. Did you hear Russell Brand go off a few weeks ago in the interview? It's an interesting take, but yeah. Don't go vote yes. It's hard to make an argument that your vote really matters these days. No, I mean, like, if you're in a red state of deeply red state and you're a Democrat, there's really no reason for you to go vote. Yeah. Only a hand vote. Your vote might matter. And then those are the states that the candidates go to and that the senators have more power than others. It is a broken system. But how many politicians in this country are out there truly, like, pure and chased in their motives? I don't think there's a single one that's pure and chased in their motives, but I think there are still some good ones out there. No, there are, and I guess I don't know, they believe in their own side. Yeah. When you dig up on the dirt of things that go on behind closed doors, the ones you have to look out for are the ones that don't believe in their own side. They're just exploiting one side to get themselves into power. Those are the ones that are truly bad. At least if you believe in your own side, you have conviction. Whether I agree with your convictions or not, at the very least, I respect the fact that you are convinced of your convictions. But if you don't have any convictions and you're just out for power, then and tell with you, pal. Buddy. Lady olives. So we're going to move to Costa Rica? Yeah. Do they have government there? Yeah, they have government there. Are there any tropical islands that have no government? There's tons of uninhabited islands. Okay. That's what we need. And I'm not trying to believe in anarchy. It would just be nice to move to an island, but there's not a bunch of jerks wasting your time and taking your money. Yeah. I don't know. Anarchy is looking more and more attractive. Sure. We should do a podcast on anarchy. We really should. If you want to know more about filibustering, you can type that word into the search bar. Howstopworks.com? And since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm going to call this one. Let's see if we can help out some heroin addicts. It's not funny. It's funny how I said it, though. Hey there, guys. Thanks for keeping me entertained and sane. I'll explain the same part. I will let you know what's been up with me and how you guys have helped me in the past few months. I am a 25 year old living in Santa Monica, California, and I'm a part of the huge homeless population there. Most nights, my girlfriend and I ended up staying in a motel in Venice in La. Where we are both homeless. It is my fault we ended up this way. We were both addicted to heroin and it was because of me. Each day my girlfriend and I have to go out and come up with $110 in order to afford our heroine in our room. That's our daily habit. Each day we have to do this. It is an awful way of life and we both feel horrible. We've been trying to get Detox Meds through the county clinics, but the waiting list to see a doctor, to get into rehab like that is a very long list indeed. Unfortunately, there are not resources out there for drug addicts as far as Detox is concerned. Yes. What is the Switzerland? And actually there are not a lot of people or institutions that are willing to help unless the addicted person has insurance or money to pay for treatment. We're not bad people just looking at us. In fact, you wouldn't know that we are addicted to heroin. We both have had jobs in the past and homes in the past and she is even a college graduate and is certified to do special effects makeup. The reason why I'm writing you guys is because you can imagine this lifestyle is very stressful. It's a lot of pain, shame and guilt on a daily basis. And about three or four months ago, I came across your podcast and it's really helped me get through some of the tough times. I found that listening to you when I'm in a fight with my girlfriend or stressed or sad really helps me turn around my mood. So thanks for this and thank Jerry as well. And this is from TJ. I told TJ that we would put a call out and I don't know if it will work or not, but if anyone in Southern California has a resource for TJ and his girlfriend to kick heroin, then we'd love to hear from you and we will put you in touch via email. TJ, if you're listening, I don't know if this is going to work and this is about as far as we can take it, but if someone writes in, we will definitely put them in touch and see if we can get you guys off the junk. Yeah, so thanks for writing in. I'm glad we can help in some small way. Yeah, I'm glad we're doing something to help out. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, like also turning his mood around. Yeah, true. But if you are a resource and can help these guys, email us at our stuffpodcast@discovery.com email, just put in the subject line, I can help the heroin addict. I think that's a great subject line. Yeah. And until then, TJ and girlfriend, stay safe, please. If you need some help that you think Chuck and I can help you out with, you should get in touch with us. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. It's on Twitter. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyshonow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and you can join us at our home on the web@stuffyoushaneau.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.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 Kilgarue and Georgia Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today."
c4a00d6c-5460-11e8-b38c-bb1cd56c35fe	SYSK Selects: How Porta-Potties Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-porta-potties-work	Despite our lengthy history of evacuating our bowels and bladders, it wasn’t until the relatively recent 1940s that we began to construct portable, self-contained toilets to accept our waste. Dive into the world of porta-potties in this classic episode.	Despite our lengthy history of evacuating our bowels and bladders, it wasn’t until the relatively recent 1940s that we began to construct portable, self-contained toilets to accept our waste. Dive into the world of porta-potties in this classic episode.	Sat, 12 Sep 2020 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=256, tm_isdst=0)	38678030	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Happy weekend, folks. In old podcast time, it is December 15, 2016. In modern podcast time is 2021. Thing that has not changed between 2016 and 2020 is how porta Potties work. So it's an interesting topic, believe it or not. I remember really enjoying this episode. Don't really enjoy Porta Potties, but it's kind of a neat thing to research, believe it or not. So give it a listen, why don't you? How Porta Potties work. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarkers. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry Master. Ace Rowland. And this is stuff you should know. Yeah. Poopy edition. This one's going to get disgusting. Yeah, I mean, I don't think you need trigger warnings when the title of the episode has got Porta Potty in it, but we'll just throw it out there. We're going to be talking about poop and pee, and so if you're having lunch, maybe just put that chili dog down easily. Yeah, sure. Okay. Well, Chuck, I don't think we can put it off any longer. Yeah, that kind of petered out. I kind of like how this article actually starts, though, by Dave Ruse. He talks about the taste of Chicago. Oh, is this a Ruse jam? Yes, it is. He's good. So he talks about how if you go to the Taste of Chicago right. Every July, they hold it at the Grant Park alongside the lake. When was our show there, by the way? Was that July? No, it was chillier than that. I think it was October. Okay. They had something had happened in Grant Park because I remember seeing hundreds and hundreds of Porta Potties on the drive in. Oh, really? Yeah. Maybe they just always have them there. No, I don't think so. Okay. Well, for the taste of Chicago, they definitely have porta potty. In fact, for 2014, and we should say there's like a million people that come through this thing over the course of the week. Yeah, it's a lot of folks. It really is. Have you ever been to Atlanta's, taste of anything? No. I haven't either. I don't think a million people show up for it. No. It makes me want to go try Chicago. Me, too. You got a million people. And Service Sanitation, Inc. Which is the company that landed the Porter Potty contract, crunched the numbers, looked at the food that was going to be there, said, you're going to have some beer? Yeah. Okay. They carried the one, and they came up with 380 regular Porta Potties. Yeah. 28 wheelchair accessible Porta Potties. Good. And 80 hand washing stations. They have soap and fresh running water. Not bad, right? So here's the thing. That's great. They delivered all those things, but had they just walked away and said, see, at the end of Taste of Chicago, it would have been a living nightmare for everyone involved. Yeah, that would be more than the taste of Chicago. It'd be the sickening smell of Chicago. Yeah, that would have been bad because well, we'll get into it. But Porta Potty, sometimes you can leave them, come back a week later, and just take them away if it's a temporary work site or something. But sometimes when you're selling beer and chili, you need to come at the end of every day and clean those suckers out. Yes. And that's what they did. They came at night when everyone was sleeping. Well, I guess if you went to bed at 09:00 p.m., that's what I'm sleeping. But they would come every night from 09:00 p.m. To 03:00 A.m., and they would work. And here's the thing. Porta Potties, it turns out I was overthinking them. I thought there was maybe a little more going on. No, they are self. I really don't know what I thought. It escaped me as the reality of Porta Potty sunk in. My delusions about my illusions about them kind of escape me. It trickled away, and now I can't remember what they were. You've used supportive potty, right? Sure I have. Okay. But I was holding my breath and just barely had my eyes open because I didn't want any germs to get on my eyeballs, so I wasn't paying that much attention. It's an in and out kind of thing. It turns out that when you service support, what you're doing is you're showing up with a truck as a tank with a vacuum on it, a pressurized tank, and you are sucking the contents out of that Porta Potty. Yes. And then you put it in the truck, you drive off, and you dump it off at the waste treatment plant of your local city or town. Yes. It's like a gigantic wet veck. Yes, it is. For poopoo and peepee. Yes. And a very dangerous one. I saw at least one story in a Porta Potty trade magazine of somebody who I read a bunch of those in Life. What was the magazine called? It's called portable Restroom Operator. Pro. It's a good mag, man. I actually found this one issue online going all the way back to 2009 that I was looking for. So they're legit. Yeah, but they could have been a little more fun with the name Pro. Well, I think they're saying, like, hey, man, take the fun you want, but we're saving you're behind. Hey, see, that sounds like a slogan. I'm sure it is. Well, they do point out a couple of the slogans because Porta Potty companies or Porta Johns jiffy Johns portaloo if you're in England, toy toy if you're in Malaysia. They're very famous for having pretty fun punny slogans. Right? Like, we're number one in the number two business. Not bad. No, it's not bad. No one takes care of our business like Mr. John. Sure. I saw that, too. Yeah. There's also one called Got to Go, but it's spelled really impressively. It's all one word and it's lower case. So it's super mod. G-O-T-U with an Oomlout. G o. Love it. You like that one? Yeah. I thought you were going in a different direction. I thought it was going to be a little more like GE a UX. No. If they were in Louisiana, maybe. Yeah, that's what I thought. Sure. No, this is an umbrella. That's what got me. Well, I know that's why you love Motley Cruz so much. Sure it is. All right, so should we talk a little bit about the history? I think so. Alright, well, we need to go back to World War Two in this case. And because World War Two was going on, there was a need for more poopers, essentially. Right. Because they had manufacturing plants popping up, they had temporary manufacturing plants going up. They had places where they didn't want to build full service permanent bathrooms all over the place. All of a sudden these people needed to go potty. I saw a few different origin stores, but the one I saw the most frequently was that the shipbuilding docks at Long Beach during World War Two. Sure. They're building warships for the US. The guys working the docks would have to building the ships would have to get on a rowboat and go back to the dock to use the bathroom. Yeah, that's no good. And they were like, this is a terrible waste of time, can we just get something on the ship? So they started building temporary what amounted to the first porta potty they are on the ships for them to use. Yeah. And these first ones, you can look up a picture of the Andy gump. Is that what it's called? I didn't see it. I got to look that up. I think it's the Andy Gump, like one of the just type in 1940s portapotty and there will be a picture and it's basically this big heavy metal square. Sometimes they were wood, but they were super heavy and they weren't easily transported. This is pre using chemicals which we'll get into to help break the poo poo down and stuff. So it was just a disgusting affair. I know, I'm having trouble right now. I see the Andy gum. You see it? Wow. It looks safe to be in. You know what it looks like? It looks like what they used on Mash. Yeah. Like the latrine. Yeah, same idea basically. Yeah, it's just a latrine. You could take places. Got you. But I came across this really cool little thing on a website about World War II fighter pilots and with World War II came along planes that could stay in, these bombers that could stay in the air for a lot longer. And they started to think like, hey, these dudes are up there for like ten to 14 hours. We have to come up with ways for them to go to the bathroom. Right? Yeah. I mean, you don't think about that. When we did the frostbite episode, I certainly didn't think that they were up there getting frostbite because it was so cold. I also didn't think that they were up there so long that they couldn't use the bathroom. They had to hold it. Right? Yeah. And the earliest ones were, well, here's a funnel and it's attached to a tube and it leads out of the plane, so go ahead and pee. Yeah. And that's basically just for, like, the pilot and copilot, right. This relief tube. After that, they're like, well, what if we have to poop? They said, can you get your hands on a produce crate? And the crew would say like, well, yeah, sure, we have produced crate, of course. What are we, commission? And the people in charge of say, well, pooping that, take that up in the plane and just poop in that buddy and maybe wash it out when you get down here and put it back in for later use. Yeah, or maybe just get a new crate, I guess, if you're not thrifty eventually they came up with something called the Elsan E-L-S-A-N. It's a chemical toilet, and it was really kind of one of the first little porta potties. But if you look up elephant on the images on Google, you will find that it looks like nothing more than a metal oil can that you sit on. It's basically what it was. Pretty much, yeah. And all they're exposed. I mean, there's no room that this is in you're just doing this in front of all your buddies on the plane. Right. Like prison. Sure. The elephant toilet was still as primitive as it was. It was an advancement, but it had certain problems. Right. Like if you were flying through turbulence yeah. The Elsin would spill its contents out into the plane. Yeah. There's a few quotes here I'd like to read. A couple of these from some of these fighter pilots. Here's one. And this is from a British pilot. While we were flying in rough air, this devil's convenience often shared its contents with the floor of the aircraft, the walls and ceiling, and sometimes a bit remained in the container itself. It doesn't take much imagination to picture what it was like trying to combat fear and air sickness while struggling to remove enough gear in cramped quarters and at the same time trying to use the bloody Elsin. If it wasn't an invention of the devil, it certainly might have been one foisted on us by the enemy. When seated and frigid cold amid the cacophony of roaring engines and whistling air, away from what should have been one of life's peaceful moments, the occupant had a chance to fully ponder the miserable condition of his life. This loathsome creation, invariably overflowed on long trips and in turbulence, was always prone to bathe the nether regions of the user. It was one of the true reminders to me that war is hell. It's so gross. You don't think about this stuff. You hear about all the glory of being like a bomber pilot. You don't think about sitting on a can and having your friends poop and pee up on your fanny. Sorry. To those in the UK. Right. It doesn't even make sense in that context. That means something different here in the US. Right? Yeah, that's the first, I guess, chemical toilet, which is a designation of a porta potty. Right. Like a porta potato is a chemical toilet, but not all chemical toilets are portipotties. That's right. But a chemical toilet is any kind of toilet where you have something in there that's intended to break down waste. And actually, I don't know, that an elephant toilet. I guess it was a chemical toilet. I see now. But that's gross because in addition to getting the rest of the cruise poop and pee slopped up against your rear end, so too were you getting very hazardous chemicals. Oh, back then, for sure, as well. Yeah. So that's good, man. That guy may have had his buttocks removed after the war. One of the uses of the toilet, they said that this is supposedly very true is that some members of the Royal Air Force actually jettisoned the Elsan toilets with their bomb payload on the German targets. I bet. So they would drop these toilets full of poo on the Germans. There was an American who had a great quote about peeing through the little hose. He said, as the urine ran through the tube, it turned to ice and dropped like topaz colored hail to the ground. I like to imagine every time I urinated over Germany, my acidulous projectile would plink on some Nazi burgers. Aryan nose poetry. Yeah. There's some more good stories in here, man. I don't remember which website it was. Oh, yeah. I have to post that later on Facebook. Yeah, for sure. And I'll tweet it. All right, so that's the war effort that eventually ultimately led to the creation of the Porta Potty, right? Yes. And again, there were already latrines, there had already been outhouses. And the difference between an outhouse and a porta potty is that an outhouse is basically some sort of rigid structure that's intended to be permanent or semi permanent that's dug over a hole in the ground. That's it. A porta potty is a self contained unit that has a place where the waste goes and is held inside that unit rather than put into the ground, which is extremely dangerous. We learned a very long time ago pooping in holes in the ground is not a good way to go as far as public health is concerned. No, it's not. And that's one of the legitimate marks in the favor of Porter potty is gross, as most people who have ever used one thinks they are. They're actually quite beneficial to public health. Yeah. And they're green too. It saves a lot of water. Yeah, I saw 170,000,000,000 liters a year, about 125,000,000 gallons a day in the US. Alone. Crazy. Yeah. So you want to take a break for a second? Yeah, we'll break and we'll talk a little bit more about the evolution of the portajohn right after this. Clark all right, Chuckers. So we're talking about the evolution of the Portugal. You got the Andy gump. You've got the Elsan toilet. And then finally, in actually the sixties, you have what is the what we think of as a Porta Potty. A patent was developed by a guy named George Harding, and he called it for a portable toilet cabana and it was made from plastic. And although he had the patent for it, the guy who actually gets credit for actually creating the first real modern Porta John, or Porta Potty, was a guy named Harvey Heather, and he created what's called the Strongbox. It's a great name. Have you seen the strongbox? Oh, yeah. Oh, you did? That's what I went and found the December 2009 issue of Pro Magazine to find, because I saw a reference that they had published a picture of it, and I couldn't find it anywhere else. Those things are ugly. Yeah, it wasn't a great looking it's not like the fantastic Port of John's. Hefty yeah. It's so gorgeous to look at. Right? No, this thing was ugly. It had no alibi. Yeah. And these were made of fiberglass, which was good. It was lightweight and it was sturdy. It was as sturdy as metal or wood, and it was a lot easier to clean. But the problem with the Strongbox and the fiberglasses, it was a big kind of one piece mold. It was dark inside, which was not good. That's a big drawback. They weren't stackable as far as transporting them, and so that just made it really expensive to get them where they needed to go and back again. It did. And the fact that it was completely opaque and there was no light they could get in, that's an issue. Plus, I also get the impression that the floors could get pretty slick and you could fall and die of positional, asphyxiation in a portrait. Yeah. And they were also fiberglass is pretty fragile, so they would break a lot. Fiberglass absorbs odors, which was not good. And so shortly after the fiberglass came along, someone said, you know what? How about Polyethylene? This is what we will use. And George Harding, who you mentioned, cofounded the Polygon Corporation, and he started building the Polyethylene portable toilets that were much better because they lasted longer. They would last, like, a decade. Although I would not want to use a nine year old Port of John. Well, that picture of the Strong box that was published in Pro magazine apparently had been out in service. It was still in service, and it had been built, like, 30 years before. Wow. Yeah. You would know that your company could not have cared less about you if you show up to your job site and there's a strong box there, and that's what you're expected to use with all of the possible choices that your company could choose from. And they went with the strong box. They don't care about you or your happiness. No, the polyethylene. The other good thing about them is they were assembled into different parts and pieces, so it made them a lot easier to transport, a lot cheaper, and if a part broke, you might be able to replace it. Oh, yeah. That is kind of good. Yeah. Makes sense. So hooray for polyethylene toilets. But one of the things that George Harding created in his patent that I noticed was a ventilation system. This is a big improvement, right? For sure. Because when you're just piling human waste upon human waste into a hole, that it's going to create gases. Noxious gases, because bacteria is going to start decomposing that waste. And as a byproduct of that decomposition, they're going to produce what we experience as rotting fecal material. Right. Yeah. It's not just that it's stinky. It's dangerous. It is dangerous. And as that gas tries to find a way to escape upward, if the only hole available to it is the toilet that you're pooping or peeing into, those gases are going to come out of it and you're going to vomit while you pooper pee as well. So what George Harding had I told you this one's going to be gross. What George Harding figured out was that if you could just basically create a pipe venting off that gas upward and out of the porter potty, people would be willing to use Porta Potties a lot more. And that was a huge improvement. Yeah. He also said, how about we make this rooftop translucent white so we can let in some natural light at least? Why don't we improve the flooring so that it's not as slippy? And maybe even further down the line, we'll have Porta Potties that have a little urinal that's separate, so you don't even have to sit your butt down on that most horrid of places, right? Yes. What about the roll around toilet? Did you see these? Yeah, they make sense. So basically, if you are on a job site, right, where there are different multiple stories being built and you're up on one of the higher stories, it's the same thing as when you're working in the shipyards building a ship. You don't want to have to come all the way down to use the bathroom. So they created Porta Potties that were a lot more mobile, that could be hoisted by cranes. Yeah. Just to different levels. Yeah. If you look up roll around toilet, it basically looks like one of those coolers that has the two wheels and the handle, and you could pull the cooler around, except it's larger and sitting above the wheels. Is a urinal. Right. I don't see how you go poopy in those. So maybe that's when you go downstairs. I don't know either because it's not enclosed or anything. And this is wide open, just like prison. And there's actually a great scene from, I think, the First Police Academy starring our friend and Twitter follower Steve Gutenberg, and I think it's Mouser who uses a Porta Potty, and Steve Gutenberg goes over and gets some crane operator to send him the crane. Now it's Mouser's, his right hand man. I don't remember that guy's name, but they lift the Porta Potty up while he's inside using it. It's hilarious. It's wacky wacky stuff in Sue's. Yeah. And then if you really are living the good life or you have maybe a really nice upscale wedding that's out in a remote area, you don't want to bring in just even the nicest polyethylene portage on won't do. You will bring in what we call in the movie business a honey wagon. It is a restroom trailer. And these are actually nice. They have running water, they have stalls, they have porcelain toilets. It's all partitioned. They have sinks and running water and mirrors, hand towels. It's like a rolling trailer full of toilets. Yeah. Like you can breathe through your nose in these things. You could lay down on the floor if you wanted. Yeah. And apparently these first started in 1984. Polly John in Columbus, Ohio. Go by, guys. And the original trailer was eight stalls, or as we said in the movie business, and eight banger had three urinals and it was 32 ft long. Wow. And now there are 19 companies manufacturing luxury restroom trailers around the world today. Yeah, I saw one that they market for outdoor weddings and stuff like that. Sure. He said all you need are, I think, six outlets, maybe 620 volts outlets, and like a standard garden hose connection. And you got yourself a luxury Porta Potty trailer yeah. For your next remote black tie event. Right. Which, I mean, even people in black tie got a pee. Yeah, sure. So you might as well take it easy on them with a nice lux trailer. That's right. So, speaking of Chuck, you want to take a break? Yeah, I'm going to go to a real bathroom. That's good. And hug it. And I'm going to get a crane operator to play a prank on you. All right, we'll be right back. Okay, Chuck. Yes. We can't put it off any longer. We got to go inside. We're going to go inside. Deep dive into the bowels of the Porta Potty. Oh, my gosh. Okay. Okay, you ready? Yeah. Got your snorkel? Yes. Okay. So when you look into a Porta Potty, you may notice that the stuff that's inside the bowl or inside the holding tank is blue. Yeah. And brown. Sure. Yeah. But it's more blue than brown and that's no accident. That's right. Any Porta Potty is going to use a deep blue die. And the entire purpose from beginning to end of the blue dye is to visually mask the presence of human feces. Yeah. They don't want you looking down there and seeing if it was just like clear, like it's already disgusting. You're getting the full experience from the smell alone. You don't need the visual. Yeah. And you don't poop in these things to you? Oh, no. Okay. No, I think I would just put my pants and walk around instead. I don't think I would. I certainly don't remember ever pooping in it. It's possible I blacked out that memory, but I don't think I ever have it. Yeah, like the first lala palooza. Right. The only time I pooped in these. I'm sure there's been some extreme emergency, but the only time I can really recall is when Emily and I were getting our master bath built at our house. Oh, no. We had another little bathroom, a little small guest bathroom, and we shared that. And then we had a construction toilet on site because they were doing construction. And so I get up in the mornings because I want to be a good husband and not ruin Emily's day in morning by getting in there first. So I would get my newspaper and I would walk outside in my slippers and use the portage on in my driveway every morning. But I guess it was pretty clean. It was yours, right? It was great. It was me and like two or three dudes. There you go. That is Doable festival. Oh, no. Taste of Chicago. No. Yes, of course. Surely if you're sharing a porta potty with a couple of other people that you have to look in the eye here, there you're going to take care of it. But if it's random drunk strangers or people on drugs or something like that, it's going to get messy awfully fast. And again, as more and more people use it, that blue dye becomes more and more important, right? Yes, it does. There's also going to be a fragrance that they're going to add to hopefully match the odor and apparently make it worse. Well, I was reading in some trade magazines, and I haven't experienced it myself, but I did get the impression that they have come a long way as far as fragrance goes. Yeah. Like I saw, you can get bubblegum fragrance. Oh, God, it doesn't sound good. Vanilla lasagna. That comes from just standard use of the Taste of Chicago. Yeah, I mean, you know me with fragrances, period. I'm with you. It's even worse to me. Everything bagel. No, but I came across the site and there's like a Jaguar brand porta potty fragrance additive, and they have like any fragrance you can imagine. Wow. And then the final thing you're going to see down there, or that it's going to be down there, are biocides to kill the bacteria and microbes. And it used to be that they would use formaldehyde to take care of that. But more and more wastewater treatment plants started saying, hey, we can't properly dispose of that stuff now the carcinogen, and we don't feel good about it. So they've been phasing that out over the years, going a little greener. And now they actually use enzymes, like beneficial enzymes and microbes that feed on this stuff. Right. They help break down the poop and they also feed on the bacteria that causes the smells. Right. So they're making the poop in there, but they're also naturally cutting down on smells, which I just find fascinating. Yeah. They also since it's capable of breaking down bacteria, it's also capable of breaking down any organic material. So if you use the right kind of toilet paper, they'll break down the toilet paper as well. Yeah. It's just basically magic in a porta potty. Yeah. And the other benefit there is they don't need to be emptied as often if it's doing the job like it should. Yeah. Weather has an effect. Obviously, if you're in Georgia in the hot summer, things are going to get even worse, I imagine. Chicago and July is probably no picnic either in the Taste of Chicago. No one's going to go to the Taste of Chicago anymore. They're like, attendance dropped by 20% this year. You don't know what's going on. But when temperatures go up, bacteria go to work even harder and things are just going to smell even worse. So they might actually use more chemicals in the summer or more chemicals, especially if it's a summer festival. Right. And then conversely, I saw this, I guess it was a blog post by a Porta potty worker that was published on Cracked and they basically just went over most of the stuff you can imagine, but just crazy stuff that they found. But one of the things that they made reference to is that the worst thing that they can encounter is frozen waste. Because they said once that happens, you have to break it up by hand. So to protect to defend their people from having to do this well, typically in colder areas during the winter, they'll create a briny mixture that will have a lower freezing temperature, like the Minnesota Ice Fishing Festival. Right. But eventually you're going to reach a point where it's cold enough that it's freezing no matter how much salt you add to it. Yeah. And I did see one of their little tricks of the trade is they put a cake of this rock salt in the urinal. So you go peepee on it, and as you peepee on it, it just adds a little more salt slowly throughout the day. Right. The only issue with those is that you have to keep the deer away because they love salt lakes. You like that one? Yeah. I'm ashamed of basically every joke I've made this whole episode. I don't feel good about myself right now. All right, so let's finish up by talking about the really the worst part of this. If you're one of, like, eight people still listening right? If you're still listening, then we'll finish up with the worst part, which is servicing these things. And we talked about it. It's like a wet vac. You suck it out, drive it to a wastewater plant. But you have to add new water. You have to add new blue junk and some more dry solution. I saw like, a ratio of one to one freshwater to solution. We don't want to mess that up. No. And you think like, all right, so that's pretty gross and everything, but especially at like, a music festival or something, there's stuff everywhere. Like, you've been in these. There's urine everywhere. There's poop in places where you think, like, what in the world is someone doing in there? And they have to be cleaned out by somebody. It's an awful job. Yeah, there's stuff that people drop down there. Like, if you use the sock to wipe your bottom with, and you just deposit the sock into the Porta Potty, that's going to gum up the tank or the pump. So they have to get that kind of stuff out first. What about your cell phone? Cell phone? Yeah. Apparently they find all sorts of stuff, especially things like phones, wallets full of cash, jewelry, drugs, a gun. Yeah, guns that cracked. Guy said that he had a friend who showed up at a Porter Potty where they just found a body. Oh, my God. Yeah, in the thing now in the port of party, not in the actual hole. Okay, that's just cool. But yeah, they find all sorts of stuff because almost everybody would say, well, that's gone. I'll just have to get a new identity because I dropped my whole wallet into Porta Potty. Actually, I saw a stat where 5% of people that go into Porta Potty don't come out at all. The dead body scenario makes sense. They end up in that other dimension from fantasy. And then our article says the worst case scenario, if you're a Porta Potty service person, is that the port of Audi? Well, there's two worst case. One worse than one. Way worse one is if it just gets knocked over, either by a car hitting it or the wind or some jerk who thinks it's funny. It's not cool. Not cool at all. Knocks it over on purpose. But the ultimate, ultimate worst is if it tips over on its door. That's Achilles heel. Any port of potty is Achilles heel. Yeah, because what happens, all of the stuff that's in the holding tank gets dumped out when it's facing on its front, on the door. All of this stuff is liable to come out. And it does. Especially when they pick it back up. It just sloshes around everywhere. And the Porter party service operator has to wash this thing out. And those are the worst. Like, somebody can put poop, like, on the ceiling or on the walls or something. That's pretty bad. Yeah, but when it falls on its front on the door and everything sloshes out, it gets everywhere. So you have to get inside to clean the whole thing. And at the very least, it takes them a lot more time and screws up their entire day's schedule. At the worst, they're in there cleaning a filthy Porta Potties nook and crannies from the inside. Yeah. I would just say it fell off the truck, boss. Right. Sorry. It's in that fantasy dimension, boss. Didn't the guys from Jackass do one of these, like, put one of them in there and tip it over or something? Yeah, I'm sure. I think they did that when they were, like, four. Yes, I think they did, like, had a crane lift it and turn it over or something. I don't know. No. You're thinking Police Academy. And also Police Academy geeks. You don't have to write in. It was Police Academy three. No, I was about to say I don't remember that. No, I think I petered out after two. Even three might have been the best of all of them. What was the full name of it? Citizens on Patrol. Okay. It's the one where Bob Goldthwaite, like, goes over from his life of crime to being a junior Police Academy guy. Yeah. I love Bob Goldthwaite, but good. He's great. Can we stop? Sure, man. Okay. We have to say you got anything else? No. Okay. Chuck? Actually, I do. If you see these Porta Potty service people in your neighborhood, if there's construction going on, you see them bring in the truck, just flash a nice smile, give them a tip of the cap. It's a really gnarly job, and like they say, somebody's got to do it. They're making a living like they've got a job. They went out and got that job to make money and provide for their family. And don't forget, they're defending public health, and they're saving a significant amount of water. So there you go. Nice, Chuck. All right. Good way to finish. If you want to know more about Porta Potties, you can type that Hyphenated word on the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said Hyphen, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this quick john Cleese correction. Or John Cleese. Exactly. Congratulations on an absolutely marvelous episode concerning Monty Python, guys. It's great to hear so much of the history of the group. Well done. One bit of information. I happen to see John Cleese present a one man show a few years ago in Carmel, California. He just stood on stage and talked for about 75 minutes. Boy, that's a good gig. He discussed his life in general, python in particular, and lots of things. Other things. He noted that his name is pronounced to rhyme with cheese rather than fleece. In fact, his surname was originally Cheese but his father changed it to Cleese. This was a good thing for the sun being named John because he did not want to go by Jack Cheese. Yeah, I guess not. So it's John Cleese. Never knew that. That's from David Hewitt. Yeah. And I also want to say, Chuck, somebody called us out for not mentioning Carol Cleveland. She was, for all intents and purposes, the 7th member of Monty Python. Yeah. We felt terrible because she was in our notes and we mentioned her and lavish praise on her and our run through that we did in the studio. And it was just one of those live show things that got biased. Yeah. So sorry. Carol Cleveland, we have to talk to you. We appreciate your work, and we're sorry we let you out. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with me or Chuck, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark. And there's also S-Y-S-K podcast. Chucks at Charlesw. Chuck Bryant on Facebook. And at stuff you should know on Facebook. You can send the both of us and Jerry an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. And as always, hang out with us at our home on the web. Stuffyouw.com. Stuff you should know is production of Iheartradios how stuff works. For more podcasts my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-09-29-sysk-polar-bears.mp3	How Polar Bears Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-polar-bears-work	Polar bears are more than just lovable creatures that roam the ice in search of food. They're one of the most fascinating animals on planet Earth. Sadly, as ice shrinks, so does their habitat. Learn all about these huggable beasts in today's episode.	Polar bears are more than just lovable creatures that roam the ice in search of food. They're one of the most fascinating animals on planet Earth. Sadly, as ice shrinks, so does their habitat. Learn all about these huggable beasts in today's episode.	Thu, 29 Sep 2016 07:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=273, tm_isdst=0)	45087494	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck. Chuck Bryant. Stretching out a significant amount amount of this article, like, literally as we started recording that's important stuff, there's like numbers and dates and weights and temperatures and that's important stuff we just scratched out. I feel like it's all covered in the body of the text of the article, though. Well, I mean, that's one way to do an intro, as anybody in journalism can tell you. You can write the article and then go back and summarize it as an intro. Sure. I've never been partial of that. The intro to me is just like this stream of consciousness. Yeah. Now it tells you where the rest of the article is going to go because you don't know, man. Because it's all jazz, baby. Yeah. Polar bears. Polar bears. Polar bear club. Although they may have clubs, they're one of the least studied mammal populations on the planet. It's because it's cold, no one wants to go hang out and watch them. Yeah, pretty much. And because it's also extremely dangerous to study polar bears up close and personal. Yeah. They look cuddly, but they will. Especially newt. Yeah, newt. Yeah, I got a little bit about newt. Okay. Very sad. But you're going to say they look cute and cuddly, but don't leave us hanging. Well, you go up to hug one like you want to, right. And you get your face eaten. Oh, yeah. If you're lucky. That's all that happened. I saw pictures of a guy who survived a polar bear attack. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, he was messed up. I guess it was still attached, but three quarters of his scalp was now flip backable. Like there's a whole clear through his Achilles tendon and his ankle. Wow. So, like, his Achilles tendon was intact and the front of his ankle was intact, but in between the two is gone. That could have been a claw poke or a fang. Yeah, it could have been like flicking it with its thumb and middle finger. Very strong. It's one of nature's cruelest things to make an animal so huggable. You know, if you hug a polar bear, it's bad news. Yeah. It's like one of those black widows that marry and kill. Right. Well, that's just my interpretation of polar bears. You mean the ursus? Maritimus. Yeah. And maritimeus is a legitimate thing to call it because technically a polar bear is a sea animal. A sea mammal. Yeah. Because they spend most of their time actually on the sea. That's right. And in the sea sometimes, as we'll find out. Right. Well, I guess we're knee deep in this thing, huh? Yeah. Because you skip the intro. So the polar bear what they think, and I enjoy our animal casts a lot. Me, too. There are some of my favorite ones. I just wanted to say that although the polar bear doesn't, despite its hug ability, doesn't compete with the jellyfish or the octopus. Sure. But it's up there. Sure it is. Because you can hug a jellyfish, you know, I think and an octopus, that's a great hug. Eight times as good. They won't let go. I guess four times is good. Yeah. All right. So the polar bear two times is good because polar bear has four no, I mean as a human hug. Oh, goodness. So Jerry even like that one. So the polar bear evolved, as best as we know, a couple of hundred thousand years ago from the brown bear. Actually, I saw the scientific consensus between 5,600,000 years. Really? Because I saw the 200,000 all over the place. Did you really? Yeah. But it might be one of those how the Internet is like I think Science Magazine used the term scientific consensus. Oh, wow. So I was like, that might be right. Threw it on the gauntlet. Yeah. Well, let's just say let's go with the scientific consensus. Okay. And not our own article on our own website. But they did evolve from the brown bear, they think. And one of the ways that they back this up is by saying polar bear can go have sex with a brown bear and they can make a baby bear, and that bear can actually have babies. Yeah. Which means everything. Jibes. Do you remember I think it was our evolution and isolation episode that was a good one, where we talked about speciation events and we talked about this, how the brown bear just kept ranging further and further north, and as their kind of habitat changed, they actually evolved into a different species, the polar bear. Right, yeah, I remember that now. But I remember a species or a speciation event taking place when the two groups could no longer reproduce. That was my memory of it, but I guess not because I went back and double checked. Polar bears are different species, but it can reproduce with brown bears. And it does make sense because humans and Neanderthals, or Neanderthals, if you're a pet ant, could reproduce and have fertile offspring. And they're definitely two different species of humans. Yeah, that's true. Right? Yeah, they were. Well, occasionally people get together and have a few drinks and science is created. So there are way more brown bears. Everyone knows, and we're going to talk a lot about this. That the polar bear. I'm not sure the official designation. I don't think it's officially listed. Well, it depends on where you are as the official listings is threatened or the like. It depends on the country it's in. Yeah, but they're not doing great. There's only about 25,000 polar bears, and their habitat is shrinking, literally. Physically shrinking. Yeah. That's the big problem, is that the melting of Arctic sea ice, as we'll see, is the Arctic sea ice is where they live. Right. They live on ice floating out in the Arctic Ocean. And they don't like to be on land when they are on land, it's a problem for them. So the decrease in Arctic sea ice that's going on because of climate change is affecting them tremendously. Yeah. And affecting the rest of the ecosystem. Yeah, definitely. Because, say, if they get stranded on land, they start hunting on for land mammals, which affects the ecosystem. And that now their competition. That's not normally there for prey. Exactly. There's all sorts of ripple effects that are coming out of it. But one thing I did see is that the polar bears that are really far north are actually benefiting from the melting ice. Oh, really? Because it's easier for them to hunt now. Oh. Because it's just less area to cover. The ice is thinner, so they can hunt more easily on it. Interesting. Yeah. Well, it's a good thing you said north, because you're not going to find polar bears, but the South Pole where Santa lives and penguins. No, wait, Santa lives at the North Pole with the polar bears? That's right. We've all seen the Coca Cola commercials. Yeah, but that has penguins in it. Yeah, penguins and polar bears would never meet. Yeah, that's true. Except maybe at a zoo. Yeah, that is true. They had polar bears at the San Diego Zoo. There's a polar bear in China, in a mall in China that has a zoo. And it is one of the saddest things I've ever heard of. I signed a petition last night to free it. Oh, really? Its name is Pizza and it is Pizza the polar bear. Wow. I think it's billed as the saddest polar bear on the planet. Oh, man. It's so sad. Look into it chuck out. Yeah, I guarantee you will. And you know what? I bet we could get a lot of people to sign that petition. We'll see if it matters. Okay. The petitions matter. Do they make a difference? I think if they're accompanied with the right press. Like media pressure. Right, sure. Or like a mafia thug to deliver the papers. I got a petition for you. I highly recommend you read it. So polar bears do live only in the Northern Hemisphere. Those 25,000 are in 19 distinct populations in just five countries, including the United States. Yeah. That's funny, because their habitat is at the top of the world, where five countries basically come together. Yeah. Well, Alaska. Yeah. That's the US part. Canada, obviously. I think two thirds of all polar bears actually live in Canada. Yes. Even though they if you asked them that, they wouldn't be able to tell you. Russia is another big one. Norway. Yup. In Greenland. That is correct. And it is tough living up there for humans, but not for polar bears. They love it. They are well adapted over the years, just supposedly, if they run for any bit of time, they have to stop and lay down because they'll overheat and they will exhaust themselves. Yeah. I identified a lot when I was reading this with a polar bear. Right. I kind of like these guys. They are incredibly well adapted, which is another reason why I think they don't think it's any less than 600,000 years that they evolved from brown bears. Right. Because it was it would take so long for these. They're really different from brown bears. Like, brown bears are basically herbivores. Polar bears are carnivores. They eat seal blubber. Like brown bears eat berries. Right. In the occasional human on accident, maybe. But polar bears are like, give me some seals, I want them. I bet they would eat some berries if someone offered them up for dessert. Maybe. But there are no berries. Right, but it would take a lot because they get kind of big and they need a lot of fat to ward off the cold. Oh, yeah. And they have a lot of it. They have two layers of fur and then full blubber layer that's about four and a half inches thick. Of just blubber? Yeah. Supposedly, like 50% of their weight at any given time or when they're fully developed or nourished, is a blubber fat. Since you mentioned the weight, we'll go ahead and throw some stats out. Okay. Adult males, eight or 9ft. 9ft? Yeah. Apparently, that's the biggest bear. The polar bear is the biggest of the bears, from what I understand. Not the bear. And Stein bears, bear and stain. Adult females, six to 8ft, and the males weigh up to \u00a31300. 9ft tall and \u00a31300. Yeah. That's intimidating. It is. You've seen Lost? I haven't. This article mentioned it, though, of course, because it was probably written when these stats are accurate, the females can get up to about \u00a3700. Those claws I mentioned, about two inches. And they live about 20 years. Yeah. I was surprised by it. It's really short. 20 years? Sure. I didn't think that was too bad for a bear. Well, I thought it was very short. What do you think? What's a good bear span for you? Lifespan? Like 40 or 50 years. Yes. That's what I want to see for a bear. Well, we all do, let's be honest. 20 years. This is like live fast, die young type age. So their paws, which we mentioned, the claws, they have these big, beautiful, fat, round paws that act like snowshoes, and they walk and they spread out when they walk on the ice and sort of distribute their weight. In fact, when they're on thin ice, they even spread their arms out wider. It's very cute. And they have these little papillae on their bottom paws, these little nubs, because ice is slippery and the front pods are actually slightly webbed for swimming. It's amazing. Yeah. So like you said, it's a sea bear. It is, Samaritimus. So let's talk about some of its actual habits and the things it does after a break. You want it to yes. Hey, my friend. If you want a website these days, there are some frustrating ways to go about it. But one easy way is by using Squarespace. Yeah. Squarespace doesn't require you to hang out with coders. Now all you have to do is figure out how to drag and drop using a mouse, and all of a sudden you know how to build a website. Thanks to Squarespace. That's right. They have beautiful, premade templates for you. They're going to look great if you want to sell something, you want to hockey wares. They have seamless commerce tools. They have great customer support, even though it's really easy to figure out on your own if you can't work something out. They have twenty four seven real human customer support, and every member of that team is an actual user. Yeah, that's right. And right now you can start a free trial today@squarespace.com and enter our offer code stuff whenever you make your first purchase, and they'll give you 10% off. Plus, when you sign up for a year, squarespace will give you a free custom domain name. That's right. Just visit Squarespace.com and enter our offer code stuff. Squarespace set your website apart. Chuck, you mentioned their fur, right? Yeah. So you know their fur is translucent. That's right. Another episode at some point. Probably. The evolve in isolation one. Yeah. Or maybe translucents. Maybe the butterfly's wings one. Yeah. I can't remember what it's called. Iridescence. Iridescence. That was a really interesting episode, too. It was. But yeah, their fur is actually translucent because it's hollow, and it's hollow because it traps air. And then their body heat can warm the air. Kind of like have you ever camped when it was cold? Yes. All you need is one of those little thin blow up mats because your body heat warms the air underneath it thermorest right, that's a brand name, but sure. Right. Okay. So it's the same thing, but this is their fur that's doing that. Yeah. And since it's hollow and translucent, it actually scatters all colors of light and creates this white appearance, like a quartz wood or something like that. Yeah. It's amazing. So they're not actually white coated in whitefar. It's all an illusion. Yeah. So if you saw a polar bear in New York City, it would be the color of street garbage. Right. Like a chameleon. It's not true street garbage color. What color is that? Grayish. Mustard. Yeah. It's like a pizza box. And there'll be some recycling and then just some New York apartment detritus. It's like the colors of the rainbow. All right. So the fur is not all over their body. The parts of their body that don't have this thick insulation and this blubber, the tail and the muzzle and the ears have adapted to be small because it's not as insulated with that blubber. So it requires less energy to heat. Yeah. And it has less surface to lose heat from. Right? That's right. So yeah. These guys are like incredibly well adapted for their environment, which is really saying something, because their environment is about as inhospitable a mammal as you could imagine. Yes. They are routinely comfortable and apparently have no heat loss whatsoever at temperatures of like negative what is it, like 50 Fahrenheit? Negative 50, yeah. That's the temperature they're comfortable in. And they actually experience no change in body temperature at a temperature of negative 34 degrees Fahrenheit, which is negative 37 Celsius. Amazing. Yeah, they're unaffected by it. They're that well suited to the environment. So we mentioned them walking. They can walk great distances up to 30 I'm sorry, 20 miles? 30 day for days and days in a row. And they've been tracked swimming up to 60 miles, which is amazing. Okay. One other thing. Yeah. I saw a Canadian Geographic article, which is the thing. Okay. This is a 2012 article and they mentioned a recent study, so probably 20, 10, 20, 11 maybe 2012 study found polar bears swimming as a result of climate change up to 687 km. Wow. That's 426 miles. That's to get from ice dive. Yes. Man, that's sad. 426 miles. These things are just swimming like well, I don't think they're supposed to swim that far. No, definitely not. No, but they can. They'll do it. That's amazing. And they're doing that to eat that sweet, sweet seal blubber. Yeah. And plus, I mean, the sea ice is their habitat. This is where they live, it's where they sleep and it's where they hunt, most importantly. Yeah. So another big difference with the brown bear is they don't hibernate like your average bear. You like that females sort of semi hibernate when they're kind of pre and post pregnancy, but it's not true hibernation in the biological sense. You want to talk about mating? Sure. Specifically polar bear mating. Oh, yeah. Again, they are a fairly not closely studied mammal population. Right. So scientists actually aren't entirely sure how females signal to males that they're ready to reproduce. Right. And the reason why is the females don't appear to actually go into any kind of heat. They have something called induced ovulation. Right. Yes. Which is once they're mating, they start to ovulate. Yeah. Actually the intercourse is what causes the ovulation. Right. And not always. Sometimes it takes several times. Yeah. You got to be good, you got to know what you're doing. Right. And once they actually do, I guess sure. Once the egg is fertilized, the embryo doesn't actually start developing right away either. Yeah. That's super interesting. It's an eight month gestation, but the first four months just sitting there yeah. The fetus is just like waiting while the mom eats and eats and eats and prepares for that long period as we'll see where she has a little cub and cubs. Yeah, couple at a time. Usually twins. Isn't that cute? Well, you've seen polar bear cubs, right? Yeah, it's pretty adorable. Twins, chuck, they're born blind without teeth. They probably make cute little noises. They're not insulated, so they need mom. Like, if polar bear mom dies right away, polar bear cubs will not survive. Oh, yeah. They're toast. Zero chance. Yeah. Like you said, they're born blind and without teeth. They have really thin fur, no insulation. They weigh about a pound and a half foot long, which is really tiny for a bear that's going to grow into \u00a31300. Oh, yeah. And yeah, the mom makes a den when she's carrying her embryos and starts to fatten up. She goes and makes a little winter den, sometimes a snowden, which, by the way, you should see that movie Snowden. It's good. Yeah, the documentary of the movie. Well, both yeah. And so she'll make a little snow cave, snow den, that kind of thing, or use an actual cave. But for the most part, she's usually just digging out a little space for herself. Sure. And then she'll give birth and then nurse the cubs for at least their 1st 20 months. Yeah. They have to hang out with mama for a while and drink that milk. Yeah. I think maybe a couple of years, maybe up to four years they spend with mom, like, learning to hunt and all that kind of stuff. But yes, she doesn't leave the snowden for the first several months. Yeah. Dad splits after a week. Right. He's like, My work here is done. I might even go get someone else pregnant. Right. They're not monogamous the women. The women, the females. Lady bears, they made successfully, usually between the age of six and eight years old. And they only, for a mammal, don't reproduce a lot, which is one of the reasons there's only 25,000 of them. They only have about five litters over their lifespan, whereas some mammals, they just have litter upon litter every year of multiple little cubs. Yeah. Which is another reason why a loss to the polar bear population is a big deal. Their replacement rate is kind of low. That's right. And there could be a battle over mating with the female because it's sparse out there. It's not the most happening scene for picking up not a fern bar. No, it's not a fern bar. So if that happens, they will fight. They won't kill each other. Yeah, I thought that was kind of neat. Yes. Of course. The human in me is like, they know that they're dwindling, so they won't kill each other. Of course. It's not true at all. That's funny, because the human in me was like, they're like, it's really tough out here, so we all got to stick together. Yeah, you like to think that. But what they do is they will lower their head, but pin their ears back and roar. It's kind of a lot of posturing, but there could be, like an injury that occurs fighting over who to mate with. Right. But not to the death. Yeah. I'm sure it happens occasionally. There's probably a jerk bear every now and then just feels threatened. Todd, right, he's all on steroids. But when a death will happen is if anyone messes with those cubs. Because mama bear will take you down without thinking twice. Right. It's very sweet. So the little bears have been brought up by their mom, the twins, Chuck and Buck. They have been brought up by their mom and raised to hunt. Hunt. And now they know what they're doing. So if you could drop in on either one of those guys and actually, I was really surprised to hear this. Males will, like, hang out with one another. Yeah. They're not necessarily territorial. Yes. They'll even share a meal occasionally if they have enough. Again, that's because they're like it's tough out here, man. Yeah, come on. Yeah. They're like, Brother, can you spare a dime? I've had my \u00a3100 of blubber today, which is literally how much they can eat, right. So when they hunt, they prefer ice, like a bit of icy ice that they can sit on. And actually what they'll do is they look for holes in the ice. The main prey of the polar bear is the ringed seal. Yes. Their favorite. They'll eat other stuff. They'll eat just about anything. A whale, carcass alive, beluga whale that they can catch, walruses, whatever. But they really go nuts for ring seals. Ring seals have a thing where whenever the ice is thin enough for them to dig through and by thin enough we're talking like 6ft. Right. The seal has these basically appendages on its flippers that are sharp and they use it to carve holes through the sea ice. And these are the seals breathing holes. And they make about ten to 15 of them every season. And then they'll keep them open throughout the season. They maintain them. So they're hunting down there, they're eating their own stuff. They need to come up for air sometimes. Well, polar bears stake these things out because they know that a steel has to come up for air every five to ten minutes. Yeah. It's like whacka mole almost. Exactly. Yeah. Well, it's sad in a way, but it's also for the seal. It is, but it's necessary. And it's pretty sharp too. But it's an amazing waiting game that requires tons of reasons. You can watch videos on YouTube of a bear and this is like 1000 pound bear, very gingerly because the seal can see what's going on or feel it. Right. And they very quietly walk up to these holes and just wait like a cat, almost hours, just waiting and smelling. They can smell like 20 miles, so you can bet they can smell down into that hole. Sure. And then there's one slow mo video of this bear leaping up in the air and basically everything but his butt and his hind legs goes down into that water, right? Grabs that seal with those claws yeah. Curse these breathing holes that I need. I couldn't have had guilt. Yeah. And the bear eats well, like I said, about \u00a3100 in a meal. And it's also horrific because they're white, and the blood from the seal really stands out against yeah. And on the ice and snow, it's like it does it looks like a horror movie, but bears have actually evolved to clean up very, like, immediately after eating. So they'll eat and eat and eat. Like you said, they'll eat, like, \u00a3100 of blubber at a time. And when the hunting is good, they'll just eat the seals blubber. Sure. Right. And actually what's interesting is the omega threes in that seal blubber actually cut down on the type of cholesterol that would allow plaque to build up in their arteries. Oh, wow. So they can subsist, basically, on a diet of fat seal blubber. It's amazing. And right after they finish this meal, they're covered in blood, and it's really, again, horrific. They'll take a bath depending on the time of year, they'll take a bath in the sea itself, or they'll take a snow bath, and then they'll take a little nap. Well, because they need that. Like you said, they need that fur to remain translucent and clean in order to stay warm and dry. So, yeah, they clean up to keep themselves warm, not just because they look like something out of a west raven movie, but also because they have to remain camouflaged, too. Yeah, exactly. Well, before we take a break, I do want to mention the very funny thing. If a polar bear does not get that seal in the hole, they can throw a little hissy fit. Oh, yes. And they've been known to pound the ice in frustration. And I don't think people are putting their stuff on the bear. They literally like when they miss the seal, start throwing things around and beating on the ice because they're angry. Like, imagine waiting at an air hole for two days. The seal finally comes up, and you miss. Yeah, I don't think it's anthropomorphizing either. Yeah, it's pretty funny. All right, let's take a break, and we'll talk a little bit about their dwindling ice and numbers 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. Alright, we're back. One thing we did not mention that I think is obvious, but we might as well say it is. The polar bear is nothing hunts the polar bear. Right. They're the king, daddies and mamas of their land, the apex predator. Yeah. Which is pretty good place to be. The bad place to be if you're a polar bear is where you live and hunt because like we said, it's shrinking and it creates a lot of problems. We mentioned a little bit about the ecosystem. They'll go in there and they'll eat birds and eggs and things like that when they have to caribou maybe on the shoreline. Yeah. But they're not supposed to be eating that stuff. Right. And they're not supposed to be encountering humans as often as they are either, which is a problem in some parts of the world. Yeah. Well, there's actually a town in Manitoba called Churchill that's developed. Basically it's made itself a tourist destination for polar bear tourism. But it's like one of the few places in the world that's like an established settlement where Westerners can come and view them. Yeah. But even in Churchill, they occasionally have to shoot the polar bears if they just won't leave. Yeah. And apparently little PSA here, if you ever encounter a polar bear, do not lay down and play dead. That's not what you want to do. Yeah. Is it like regular bears, you try to make yourself look big, look big, make a lot of noise, chase them off. Apparently they'll break out. There's another town in, I think, Norway that they'll rev their snowmobiles, they'll get the town helicopter out and try to scare them off. Like that. Yeah. That's the one small Bard, which has 2300 people and 3000 polar bears. Yeah. So they probably gotten pretty used to fending for themselves. Yeah, they have. For the most part, the bears will leave because from everything I saw, the polar bear in particular isn't interested in encountering humans. It's not their thing. No. It's like almost any wildlife they're forced into that situation. Yeah. If you look at bear tax, though, like a grizzly bear will attack you while you're just sleeping quietly in a sleeping bag anywhere near and it comes into your camp, it'll maul you, you're dead. The polar bear list of polar bear attacks do not include stuff like that. It's a polar bear that you've startled or you're very hungry or it's very hungry and you happen to have meat in your pocket. Yeah. In Churchill, Manitoba, their stats, they have had two people killed in. 300 years by polar bears. Yes. It's a pretty good track record for one of two towns where not bad. Yeah, one of them was because these kids saw a bear and started throwing rocks at it. Not a good idea. So the bear was like, all right, jerks, here I come. And then the second one, a dude had meat in his pockets, you know? Yeah. He was eating at a diner. He wanted to go box that was meatloaf. They're like, just put that meatloaf in your pocket. And he's like, I guess I will this one time. The one time. But actually, if you do, look at the polar bear stats right, for attacks, fatal attacks by polar bears in the United States and Canada. And remember, 60% of all polar bears live in Canada. So this is a substantial amount of the polar bears. There have been eight fatal attacks in the United States and Canada by polar bears since 1972. Four of those took place in zoos where humans climbed into the enclosure with the polar bear. I saw this one lady that wanted to swim with them. Yeah. They jumped in and got bitten on, like the arm and back and was like screaming and they fixed her out. Oh, she survived. She survived. A bad idea. Yeah. Apparently that's the thing. There's a dude in Toledo before I was born who was found in the polar bear enclosure at the Toledo zoo, and they think he was probably on drugs. And I'm sure he was like, this is going to be great. I'm going to go hang out with that polar bear. But think of it, eight people died in the US. And Canada since 1972. Half of them at the zoo, only four in the wild. Yeah. So that's the real stat. It does say a lot. It does. And we said, make yourself look big. If you don't know what that means, the big trick is to you probably going on a winter coat if you're living in one of these places. So just grab the bottom of your winter coat and pull it up over your head with your arms and basically yeah, you just appear like large. That's one of the big survival tips for any bear, really. It just makes you look bigger and scarier. Right. Because bears are actually polar bears are pretty smart, supposedly. Is that right? Yeah. I was about to say they were dumb, but they're one of the smarter mammals. Where did you see that? I was just on a polar bear site. They were just literally ticking off all the cognitive abilities. But I think they're supposed to be much smarter than your average brown bear. Yeah, yogi Bear. Yeah, Yogi is pretty smart. He can talk. Where's the tie? I think he's driven a car before. He can get inside a picnic basket. I loved that when I was a kid. Did you watch that? Oh, yeah. Yogi bear. I liked yogi Bear from the original series all the way through the weird stuff in, like, the don't remember the weird stuff, like the Laugh Olympics? Oh, yeah, sure. All that spin offs and whatnot. So, Chuck, we've talked about it indirectly a couple of times, but the polar bears habitat is shrinking tremendously, right? Yes. The ice is literally melting. And like I was saying in that one Canadian Geographic article, they were saying that the bears in the south are really having trouble, and there are far more human bear encounters than they normally are, because if a bear makes his way to shore and summer strikes and the ice recedes, he's stuck. They have to wait around until winter comes again or late fall, and the ice starts to come back towards shore. So they can swim toward it. Yeah. Or swim 400 miles. Right, exactly. So that's creating a problem, especially for the ones that are in the southern range. But the ones that are in the northern range are enjoying, like, easier hunting than ever because the ice is thinning out for them, so the seals can get through it more easily. So there's more seals, so there's more hunting up north. The thing is, that's not necessarily sustainable. They may be enjoying, like, a heyday right now, but eventually that ice will melt, too, and, well, they'll be goners. Interesting, because a bear can overheat from running. Right. So as the temperatures increase, the bear's actual physical health is in danger, let alone their habitat shrinking. So they're not entirely certain what to do. I looked up hunting polar bears, and I think the only Inuit people are allowed to no, well, there are certain places in Canada where you can get an exemption, but it's apparently very rare and controlled and very expensive. Well, inexpensive. And supposedly, they say, is well within the bounds of not harming the overall population number. Well, again, I'm sorry to keep going back to this well, but that Canadian Geographic article, I should probably say the name, I think it's called The Truth About Polar Bears. Yeah, totally worth reading. But it talks a lot about managed hunting programs being a good thing or bad. They were saying, as long as it's done right, basically everybody involved. I think they even cited the World Wildlife Fund as saying, like, yeah, we should probably manage these populations through hunting with very strict quotas. But yeah, the Inuits traditionally, or the Inuit and I think the crew, are two groups that have virtually unrestricted honors, like native rites, but they're apparently trusted to stay within these limits. Yeah. And the people that can pay to do it, I think, have to be taken in by Inuit guides and the Inuit families. Who keeps the bear meat right after the rich American yes, I saw that, too. Kills the bear. That's great. Who cares about the meat? I just want to kill the bear. Yeah. I just want the head on my wall. I founded Jimmy John's. Isn't that the guy? Yeah, he's a big game hunter. Who else? Who's the other guy? The dentist that killed Leo the line? Yeah. I wonder what ever happened to him. I bet his dentist practice suffered. That would be my guess. Oh, it definitely did. But I wonder if it rebounded since since the Internet got bored and moved on to something else. Yeah, probably so. I'm not into any hunting for myself, but I certainly hate big game hunting for anyone. You know, I would like to put a call out, like anytime I've had discussions about hunting or whatever, and I've said, I don't see the point. In our modern world of hunting, it's always been countered with, well, hunting is a lot more humane than the factory farming that you're eating the meat from. Yeah, that's always struck me as a straw argument. Straw man argument. But I've never been able to exactly identify why. Or maybe it's not, and that's why I've never been able to identify why, but it's always confounded me. Yeah, I know that people talk about the populations and control planting and all that being good for the population, which I'm sure that's very valid. I'm just talking about me personally. Like when push came to shove, I like hanging out in the woods. I like camping. I like shooting guns every now and then at targets. Sure, shoot up some tin cans, it's fun. But when push came to shove, I could never, like, pull the trigger and kill an animal. I shot a squirrel when I was a kid, and it was just like the worst day of my life. I think I told that story. It was awful. I've got one or two of those under my belt. Yeah, and you either get into it or you don't, I guess. And all of my friends hunted growing up in Georgia, sure. At my church, like every single one of them. But my dad didn't hunt, so I didn't hunt. Yes, he didn't take a stand. He was just into camping and hiking and not shooting animals, leaving nothing but footprints. Yeah, take nothing but photographs. Yeah, it's not take only pictures and polar bear heads. Leave only footprints, leave only blood in the snow, and leave the polar bear meat behind for the Inuit. So newt. Oh, yeah, Newt. You got anything else? No, let's finish up with Newt. Everyone remembers Newt, the cutest polar bear ever in Germany. And Newt died very sadly, had a seizure and fell into a pool. And they think that he probably drowned once he fell in. Right. I think he had meningitis. Well, no, they finally found out what it is. They couldn't find any kind of pathogen. And so this doctor, Harold PRUs for the German Center of Neurodegenerative Disease, got together with Professor Alex Greenwood at the Libnitz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, and they said that he had an autoimmune disease they found out because nothing made sense about the seizure. So they really wanted to investigate, not only for newt's sake, but to see if they could help other animals. Right. And it turns out that newt is the very first animal domesticated wild ever diagnosed with an antinmda receptor encephalitis. That's what it was, encephalitis, not meningitis. Yeah. Which is a noninfectious form of encephalitis, which basically is when your body's own immune system attacks your brain. Wow. It's the very first animal ever recorded to have this poor new well, poor newt. But a big breakthrough to learn this, that it can happen. Yeah. Because now they can study it, and newt was the reason that they can make this progress. So maybe something good can come from that. Yeah. Very sad, though. Sure. Have a seizure and fall into water and drown. Yeah. Got anything else? Got nothing else. I do have one other thing that Inuit, speaking of the Inuit, they have obviously a number of legends about polar bears. Sure. One of them is that they're actually shapeshifters human shapeshifters. Once again, they're igloo's they shed their polar bear skin and turn back into humans. I like that. The other is that when an Inuit kills a polar bear, they will put out like an offering of tools. Again with the idea that the polar bears, they share an afterlife with humans, possibly as humans, and that they need these tools in the afterlife. And the better the spread of tools you give the polar bear, the more likely this polar bear is to tell other living polar bears, hey, you should let this guy kill you because he's going to hook you up with some amazing tools afterward. Nice. So go ahead and let him take your life. Very spiritual. It's pretty cool. They call them nanook. Yes. N-A-N-U-K not o K. If you want to know more about nanook, you can type the word polar bears into the search bar athousepforks.com and since I said nanook, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this letter from a young fan. Okay, good. We like those, right? Yeah, of course. Hi, guys. I'm a 14 year old fan. Actually, my 15th birthday is tomorrow, which is now in the past, so he's already 15. I wanted to get it out before then. I've been listening since last July, and I've recently been listening to the older podcast from the beginning, about three years in at this point. I've never written in before because I had no real reason to. I have recently started my freshman year at a new school, and it's been hard for me because I was homeschooled before this and I could listen to you guys whenever I wanted to. But now I'm at a charter school, and I miss having you in my ear all the time. And then he sends his name as Elias, and he sends a couple of PS. If Jerry were to speak at a normal volume. Would your microphones pick her up? No, I don't think so. Jerry, would they? No, she sticks right now. These are directional mics. These are omnipresental mics. Well, that means they should pick up Jerry, right, but they're not that good. Okay. No, Elias, these microphones are generally for when we put our mouths right upon them and they're not meant to hear other things in the room. Right. That's what they're made for. Yeah, because Jerry yells at us through most of the show. No one ever hears it. There's a lot of shaking and twitching that we do. And then the PPS, which is correct, recently came across how squatters work. You gave an example of renters who moved out, but it invited a house. Guess who refused to move out, which classified as a squatter. I was wondering if you could rent for a month, stop paying, and refuse to move out. And invoke squatter's rights, would that work? I'm not planning on trying it, but it invoked my curiosity. Elias, I don't think that would work because it takes many years to finally gain. You might be able to stay there for a little while, but I don't think you would be able to stay there for the years it would take to gain, I guess, ownership of the property. Oh, that's what he's asking. Yeah, you'd be able to stay there throughout the legal process, but I think it's like 13 years that you have to stay somewhere well before you can. Okay, but it's years, right? Yeah, it takes a long time. Sure. And I would imagine at some point, a landlord would eventually bring in Vinny and Jimmy. Yeah. Vinny and Tutt. To make sure you leave. Yeah, that would be my guess. The key here, Elias, is to go find yourself an abandoned house that clearly no one wants. Move in there, spruce the place up and start paying taxes on it. Don't do that. But I'm just saying. Sure. Advice to 15 year old listeners. Thank you, Elias. Yeah. Thanks a lot, Elias. That was a good one. If you have a question, then you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook@facebook.com stuffyoushhnnow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstoughfworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, everybody. 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402b148e-121b-11eb-ba6a-23a929514bc4	Short Stuff: Your Dirty Bed	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-your-dirty-bed	Is your bed dirty? You bet it is. Are chimpanzee beds dirty? Not as dirty as yours!	Is your bed dirty? You bet it is. Are chimpanzee beds dirty? Not as dirty as yours!	Wed, 10 Nov 2021 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=314, tm_isdst=0)	11449616	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Short Stuff. Let's go. Let's go. It's Short Stuff. Yeah. So this one is courtesy, kind of. And C State University Golf Pack. Yes. Thank you. I'm glad you said that. Couldn't remember, huh? You were at Saintar Heels. I might have been. I'm sorry. Bad move. I was going to call them the Golden Pirates of Love. That's good. I like that. Well, if you ever found a university, I expect you to use that as your mascot. It's Barry Manilow University. Cool. I saw that guy in person in concert. Front row, center. Yeah. When was that? In Vegas? I don't know. 2013? 14. 1516. 1718. That was it. Great. Oh, one of the best ever. I was a huge, huge Barry Male fan as a kid, four or five of his records. And I'm sure my mom was just like, what is going on? Doesn't he know that's not cool? They're kidding, right? But we're not talking about that. We're talking about your gross bed and the fact that you lay in it every night. How often do you change your bed sheets? Once a week. Yeah, same here. I think that's normal. Yeah. It's not like I use the bathroom, take my clothes off, and then just go to bed without cleaning myself off every night, either. But it turns out that from investigations into the human bed, you would get the impression that all of us do something very similar to that every night. Because apparently human bed is, like you said, really gross. On the microbial level, at least. Yeah. And the point is not to gross you out, because it shouldn't gross you out. That's kind of my point. If you're doing a once a week changeover, that's not too bad. No, because we don't live on the microbial level, so we couldn't care less. That's right. But when you get in your bed, there are trillions of microbes that make up your own human microbiome, and you're shedding this stuff. You're shedding well, kind of gross stuff at times, but it's on that microbial level, so you just try not to think about it. But there are fecal, oral and skin bacteria. Fecal bacteria that you're shedding in your bed on a nightly basis. Yes. Under normal circumstances, outside of this episode, you don't really think about that. But that's also the reason that your parents taught you never to lick your own sheets. Yeah. Well, you got to get the food stuff out of there first. So you lick it, then? Well, you make a cup with one of your hands, the palm of one of your hands, and then you use the other hand to scoop that stuff into the cup. And then you eat it like that, like a handful of nuts. Don't ever lick your sheets. It's just gross. All right. That's a good point. So the point of all this is, like you said, it's not to gross everybody out, chuck it's to basically say humans are primates. Let's find out how much our beds differ from other primates beds. Isn't that correct? Yeah. And these researchers at NC State University, I think, in 2018 did this, and they found, as far as we go, about 35% of the bacteria in our beds come from us. Like I said, that the oral and skin and fecal bacteria. And they're like, well, that makes sense. 35% coming from our own bodies. And we are really curious because chimpanzees are close to us, what the deal is with them. Because here's the thing I never knew about chimpanzees. They make their bed. They build and construct a brand new bed for themselves every single day. I did not know that either. I think that's a very refreshing fact that I had no idea about chimps. I see them in a different light now and I feel like, kind of a jerk for thinking they were a little dirty before. Yeah. So they wanted to find out what's going on in a chimpanzee bed. And what they were kind of zeroing in on is not like, how dirty are they, but how much of their own microbiome is in their bed compared to other stuff from their environment. Since these beds are up in trees, like other tiny little insects all over the place and like, gross stuff from them, or is it mainly just stuff from the chimpanzee? Yeah, the researchers were like, it's gross enough talking about human beds. Let's try to make everybody bark by talking about chimpanzee beds. Should we cliffhange right there and take a break? You bet your sweet, but be you bet your sweet chimpanzee. Yeah. All right, we'll be back with Zippy the Chimp right after this. OK, we're back with Zippy the chimp. Is that a new chimp or is that like a throwback from the 50s? Zippy was an actual lovely, as my daughter calls them, little stuffed animal oh, okay. That I had when I was little. And it had a hand that you could squeeze. Was he wearing red overalls and a red cap? I think Zippy had red. Do you remember when we used to make, like, galleries on the blogs? Sure. Because part of our job you made knockoff lobbies, right? I made it one of the best galleries ever. It was like the most unsettling dolls of all time. And I was like 50 or 60 of them. But Zippy was definitely in there. Those are weird times when they were like, paid views equal money. Guys. I know. If you could come up with like 100 pictures, let's say. Yeah, it was a step up from the knockoff wallets. They had a sewing prior to that. I thank God for the blogs coming along. Yes, Zippy wore red. And then my mom was so great. One of my favorite books growing up was The Bear, the department store bear. And Corduroy wore green corduroy overalls. And my mom took a teddy bear lobby that looked like corduroy and made homemade these little green corduroy overalls for them. That is so sweet. And I still have that. Now my daughter has it in her room with her other 50 levees. That is very sweet. That is a great story. I'm glad you use that as a tangent and not because this article is a little thin. Well, we are killing some time, aren't we? So we're talking about this study where they wanted to basically compare human beds to chimpanzee beds to just basically make chimps look bad, point out how great humans are, and they went back and they looked at their findings and they went, what? And found that no, chimps actually are pretty clean if you compare beds to beds between humans and other primates, including chimps. Yes. I think they went to Tanzania, which is a great place to go if you want to get some chimps. And they got swabs from 41 chimpanzee beds or nests. They call them nest, too. And then they tested those for the diversity, the microbial biodiversity. And then I think for 15 of those nests, they even use vacuums because I talked about the insects and stuff that you're invariably going to get when you live in the woods and a nets. Sure. Try to navigate them. Yeah. And they wanted to see kind of what was in there, so they vacuumed up about 15 of them and then, like you said, they thought they were going to see about the same thing, which is that chimpanzees had a bunch of gross stuff from their own bodies in their beds. And they found the opposite. They found almost entirely the beds were almost entirely lacking. They did find that the environmental bacteria is what dominated the nest and not chimpanzee. Gunk. Yeah. No oral, no skin, no fecal bacteria, even. And get this, everybody like, if you sleep naked, yes, you're going to get some fecal bacteria on your bed sheets. It's just inevitable, no matter how clean you are. I'm sorry, we're talking about microbes here. It's okay. It's okay. It's normal. Chimpanzees do not traditionally wear pants of any kind. They sleep naked all the time without variation, unless they live in a house and they wear pants. But that is definitely not the norm among chimpanzees in the wild. No pants and yet not a single type of fecal bacteria that's known to inhabit chimpanzees feces was found in their nests in any of the nests that they studied. Which means, sad to say, everyone, chimpanzees are way cleaner than you when it comes to beds. Yeah, I mean, what we've done is we've gotten rid of we don't wear shoes in bed, heaven forbid, and stuff like that. So we're not tracking in as much stuff from the outside. We generally change into jammies or, heaven forbid, if you sleep naked in your bed like you were just talking about. I can't do that. Never have been able to. I have a friend who warned me never to sleep naked because he was in a house fire once, and his life was actually saved by the person whose apartment he was at. And he was sleeping naked and ended up outside in this condo complex, totally naked in the middle of the night because of this fire that, again, his life had just been saved from. So he was grateful to be alive, but also ungrateful to have been naked. And I don't believe he ever slept naked again after that. And he said one of the neighbors gave him like a blanket or something, but he was standing out there naked for a little while, thanks to that house fire. Yeah, I sleep on top of the covers generally. Sometimes I'll snuggle up under in the dead of winter, but I basically just sleep completely on top of a bed. And the thought of sleeping completely on top of the bed, completely naked, it makes me feel vulnerable. I think it's disgusting. Nobody wants to see that. And I don't know, I feel really vulnerable. Yeah, like somebody could come along and punch you in a terrible place. Whatever. I just don't want my parts exposed like that all night for like 8 hours in a row. So instead you wear nothing but a blazer, forky Piggot. Yeah, that's good stuff. So anyway, where I was going is that our beds don't have a lot of that outside stuff, right, because we change into other things and we don't get that stuff on our bed generally, so it's just a less diverse set of microbes that are in our bed. It's mainly from our bodies. Yeah, and there's no mystery to why chimps beds are cleaner. They make their own nests, their beds, night after night from scratch. They just get a bunch of twigs and leaves and make a new bed every single night. Which is pretty neat that they're like. It's gross to sleep in the same bed twice. I can't believe humans do it. That's right. So we want to shout out once again NC State University and their paper the Ecology of Sleeping Colon the Microbial and Arthropod Associates of Chimpanzee Beds. Very nice. Quite a read. Very nice. And since they said very nice twice, that means, of course, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
8a740b0a-4a58-11e8-a49f-ab07350008bf	SYSK Selects: How Homelessness Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-homelessness-works	osh and Chuck take a look at homelessness in the United States, discussing everything from the factors that lead to homelessness to what you can do to help alleviate the situation.	osh and Chuck take a look at homelessness in the United States, discussing everything from the factors that lead to homelessness to what you can do to help alleviate the situation.	Sat, 13 Oct 2018 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=286, tm_isdst=0)	40218210	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. Hey, friends, 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 in compatibility, Eharmony's process reveals truth 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, everyone, chuck here. And welcome to the Saturday Stuff You Should Know select episode I picked this one out this week. Well, it's our famous homelessness episode, and for those of you who don't know, we recorded this and released it around Christmas time, December 23, 2010. We thought it would give everyone the warm fuzzies and make people want to go help those in need, but no, actually, it did do that for some of you. But we actually got a lot of flack over this one, and very disappointingly. A lot of people wrote in and said, you know what? People deserve to be homeless. They put themselves there. I am not supposed to help them. If they can't help themselves, screw it. And that was really disappointing to hear, but we stand by the show. I think it's a good one. So please to enjoy our episode on homelessness from 2010 and have a great Saturday. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, with me as Charles W, chuck Bryant, fresh off of the Stuff You Should Know Facebook page, where we've been discussing all manner of interesting stuff, like Bob Ross has come up. Have you been posting Bob Ross videos? I did. He's the best. I posted the peanuts Christmas times. Here a little segment you've been buzzing. Some pretty good stuff, too, but thank you. What's one of your favorite things that have gotten people buzzing lately? Did I post about Bonnie Prince, Billy? Or is that on my own Facebook page? I don't know. Yes. Did you? No, because you would have taken it down. I would not have. I would respect your posts. I'm sleepy today because of Bonnie Prince Billy last night. I would scoff at it, but I wouldn't take it down. I love that that's become a running gag is me loving him and you making fun of him. Go ahead. Okay. Are you ready for me to make fun of him? Yeah. I'm not going to. He seems like a nice guy. Okay. So, Chuck yes, Josh? Chuck, I wrote a blog post actually recently on homelessness. I read it. Did you read it? Yeah. Really? I read your stuff, man. Are you kidding? I'm a fan. Really? Yes, really. So the whole thing then, you know, this already was centered around well, it started around this news that came out in July, that the population of homeless school children had risen dramatically to about 1 million kids. Unbelievable. In US schools, public schools, I would imagine, who are homeless. Right. And in one particular area, I think, by the number, statistically speaking, in Sue Falls, South Dakota, that's a homeless kids per classroom. Yeah. They had a huge increase, didn't they, there? Oh, yeah, something like that. In that state period, yeah. In Sioux Falls School district, it's jumped 44% over the last five years. And what in Texas? Like 100 plus percent. Yeah. So across the US. There's been an increase of 41% nationwide, right. Of school children. Yes, of homeless school children. So Texas has seen an increase of 139%, iowa, 136%, the lowest of the highest five is New Jersey, with an 84% increase. And this is, of course, all due to the great Recession. Sure. That's going on right now, right? Yeah, of course. And somebody actually posted I haven't read the links, but somebody actually posted a comment on the blog that said, it's bad enough homeless school children are depressing enough, but there's plenty of homeless kids out there who aren't in school. Well, yeah, sure. Think about that. So the economic recession is clearly to blame for this 41% increase in homeless school children, and there's a lot of other factors that over the years have contributed to homelessness, which we'll talk about. But Chuck, let's talk about homelessness in the United States, shall we? And we should say we're just going to concentrate in the United States. Actually, I've got a few stats. Do you have? Well, just some stats. Okay. So let's go ahead and talk about this and get the around the world out of the way. Worldwide, they approximate. And we should go ahead and say that counting homeless people is a tough bag because it changes drastically week to week sometimes. Well, we should say that there's two ways of doing it. One is it's called a point in time count, where it's basically like, all right, everybody go count the homeless people in your area today on this one particular night and then report it in, and then we'll tally the numbers. And then the other way to do it is basically over a year. And that's like, a huge undertaking usually done by the Census Bureau that identifies how many people have used homeless shelters, how many of them have been different, and it comes up with a pretty rough number. Well, yeah, but one of the reasons it's difficult is because fortunes change rapidly in this crazy, fast moving world. Right. And homeless people sometimes are in cars and campgrounds and places where you can't find them so it's tough to get the dead accurate numbers. But having said all that, my friend, I do have some stats. Worldwide, approximately 100 people around the world are homeless. The UN what did you say? 100 million people in the world? It sounded like you said 100, not 100 million. Okay. The UN says there are about 30 million displaced indigenous people. I don't know if they count that as homeless necessarily. I would imagine. So that might be a part of that larger number. And then I started thinking about, like, are there homeless everywhere? And of course there are, but I said, what about places like Sweden and Norway, like, where you would not expect homeless people? They have them there. But Sweden only has about 17,000 homeless out of 9.3 million people. That's pretty small percentage. Yeah. Norway, though, has 1.4 homeless people per every 1000 people, which is not too far off America's percentage, really, because we have about 1%. Right. About three to 3.5 million people is the latest number I saw. The latest number I saw is actually less than that. What was it? And this just doesn't make sense because the homelessness population has increased in the US since the recession. Yes. So the 2005 number, I think, was 2.3 and 3.5 million between those two. Right, like you just said. But then there's another one from 2009. It's 1.56. So the numbers are all over the place. I bet that's not right. Yeah. So that's a little bit from around the world. Russia, China, Africa, Canada. It happens everywhere. But most of this is US based, because that's where we are. What we can say, though, is that, percentage wise, there's a disproportionate number of minorities that are homeless. Minorities in this country make up about 12% of the population, and African Americans make up about 50%, and another 13% are Hispanic homeless in the United States. Right. African Americans, they account for between 38% 50% of the homeless population. Right. But they only make up about 12% of the US. Population. Yeah. Right. And obviously you'll see most of this in big cities, but it's a problem in rural areas as well. As well, yeah. And typically, homeless families make up a greater proportion of the homeless in rural areas, which is any kind of homelessness is sad. But an entire family being homeless, that's really tough. Chuck, we talked about what was driving homelessness right now. Driving the increase is the recession, but in the late 20th, in this century as well. First, right. There's been a combination of factors, and the two biggest drivers are poverty, an increase in poverty and a decrease in the availability of affordable housing. Two huge factors in addition to others that we'll talk about later that have contributed to people not having a home. I wish the status status well, because we'll talk about all the other factors like drugs and alcohol and mental health and stuff like that. But it's sad that the reason why people have homes, because they can't afford housing. Right. And here's something I just want to put this out there. Now, I was reading a history of homelessness in the US. And the author was basically saying homelessness has been around forever. Like, apparently 14th century England had vagrancy laws, right? People have been homeless have been not necessarily living on the streets, but don't have a permanent residence. And that's an important point, too. When we talk about homelessness, we're not just talking about people sleeping on the streets. We're not just talking about people sleeping in emergency shelters or even in their cars. The true, genuine definition of homelessness is you don't have a home. Right? You don't have a place that's your own. You're staying with family, you live in a weekly motel. Right. That's homeless as well. Yeah, true. Right. But back to the history of homelessness. The author was saying we've had homeless in the US. Since we've been here. The difference is, we used to have homeless because we couldn't afford to give them work. We couldn't afford to take care of them. Right? Now we can't afford to take care of them. We just don't. Right, well, yeah, that's interesting you brought that up because I was reading about other countries, and America seems to be unique in a very bad way and that a lot of Americans feel like it's deserved and because you messed up by doing something really bad or you're on alcohol or drugs. And a lot of Americans take that attitude that homeless people deserve to be homeless, and then most of the rest of Americans just don't think about it at all. Very invisible problem. Or there are people that do care and don't think they deserve it, and they're what we call good people. Or advocates. Yeah, advocates. 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. 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. How do people get homeless, Josh? Well, Chuck, let's talk about it. We said that poverty and lack of affordable housing are two of the biggest drivers with poverty. Okay. Yeah. Right. Now, when you quantify poverty and the poverty line, you basically figure out how much the average person pays in a state or in a nation or something like that, for housing, utilities, food, that kind of thing. Then you set a line and say, anything below this is you're eligible for government assistance. Right? Right. Your poverty is stricken. In the US. The poverty line is somewhere around 17 grand a year for a family of three. Right. Wow. The problem is there's a big disparity between the poverty line and the minimum wage. Yeah. So the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, right? Yup. For a person to work 40 hours a week, that's a normal work week. 52 weeks a year. No vacation? None. Like, they work five days a week, every week, they would gross $15,080. That's not very much money. Right. So you're actually falling below the poverty line, making the federal minimum wage. Right. And then consider that actually to afford a two bedroom apartment, this is the median across the state to afford a two bedroom apartment at 30% of your income, which is the definition of affordable housing. Yeah. 30%. At making 725 an hour, you'd have to work 87 hours a week. Ridiculous. So there's a big part of the problem right there. Well, yeah. It said one of the stats in here that was shocking was about 15% of homeless people actually have jobs. I saw 44%, actually. Oh, really? Not in this article, but just across the Internet. What is clear is that a lot of people end up homeless that don't think they would ever end up homeless. They live paycheck to paycheck, they have a job and they're getting by, but then something happens. They either lose a job or they have some outrageous medical bills or some catastrophe happens, and then your average Joe or Jane with a job can find themselves homeless, like, pretty easily sometimes. Yeah. It's not always just some schizophrenic who has a heroin problem, you know? Right. In fact, most of the time, I would say it's not. We also talked about a lack of affordable housing. Right. We said the definition of affordable housing is 30% of your income. Right. Apparently there are 5 million. Is that what you're shooting for? Yeah. 5 million US households pay more than half of their income in rent. Right. That is unbelievable. That's called worst case scenario. Yeah. And the rule of thumb is if you pay a quarter, you're doing good. Oh, really? Yeah. So, yeah, half of your income and rent you're in a bad way. You shouldn't be living in whatever big city you're living in. Well, that also encompasses that worst case scenario also encompasses people who live in substandard housing as well. Oh, yeah, true. So it's not just how much you're paying out, it's what you're paying for. Right. Or a combination of the two. Right. Part of the problem, chuck, do you remember Techwood? Yeah. Techwood Housing. Tequila Housing. No, it's not. And that remember they demolished Techwood, which is like the projects in Atlanta right before the Olympics. They're just gone. And it was like, okay, you poor people, you don't have to go home because you don't have one anymore, but you can stay here. Right. And that was that. And apparently there was a nationwide trend since the 80s. Yes. Between 82,003 more than 2 million low rent housing units were basically demolished or turned into expensive high rises. Right. And during that same period, from 80 to 2003, government assistance for housing fell by half, decreased by half. So that's going to equal a lot of homeless. And not only are we not helping the homeless, we're actually creating homeless. Right. Well, so we talked about, obviously pay and being down on your luck, temporarily living paycheck to paycheck. Right. Why else would you become home? Well, you kind of hit the nail on the head a little bit when you talked about heroin addicted schizophrenics. Yeah. Those can be a combination of those two or separately. Mental illness and addiction are two big factors in homelessness as well. With the mentally ill, apparently, about 20% to 25% of all homeless people have some type of mental illness. Right. That brings up a really interesting point. Have you ever heard the urban legend that Ronald Reagan is responsible for the increase in homelessness because he closed down all of the mental institutions? Yes, I have heard that. That's actually not too far off the mark. When he was governor of California, from like, 67 to 74, he shut down a lot of the state run psychiatric hospitals. Oh, really? When he became president, one of the major things he cut funding to was the treatment of mental illness. And because of this cut in funding, a lot of mental hospitals shut down and a lot of mentally ill people found themselves homeless. So kind of indirectly, in that sense, he definitely contributed to an increase in homelessness. Well, should we go ahead and talk about the McKinley Vento Act then? Because we're talking Reagan. Oh, yeah, here we go. He also signed the first, and it says only Significant Homeless Act of Congress. Right? Yeah. The McKinney Vento Act. That had a different name, but then they named it after Stewart McKinney and Bruce Vento, who were two of the biggest champions. Right. And it had all sorts of cool programs in it, right? Yeah. Emergency shelter, transitional housing, health care, food job training, substance abuse services, all kinds of cool stuff. Yeah. And it's really ironic that he was the president that signed that into law because he is also widely credited, and this is going to take off so many Republican listeners. He is widely credited as creating the homeless problem in the US. Really? Not just through de institutionalization, but through the creation of the wealth gap that we've seen between 1980 and now. You talk about substance abuse, and about two thirds of homeless people struggle with some kind of alcohol or drug problem, not surprisingly, and then sadly, domestic violence has a big part to do with it, especially with women. About half the women are battered women, and they oftentimes don't have anywhere to go. If they're brave enough to actually flee their jerk husband, abusive husband, then they have nowhere to be because their husband might be the sole breadwinner sure. In that kind of circumstance. So they have battered women shelters, thank God. Just for women that suffer from abuse and chuck kids, too. I think half of homeless runaways being domestic abuse or homeless kids on their own. I guess we're fleeing domestic abuse in about 20%. We're fleeing sexual abuse. But it doesn't stop there. Unfortunately, when you are homeless on the street, you encounter even more abuse. Many times you leave home, you leave an abusive situation at home. You live on the street. Then you get attacked on the street for being homeless, or you are forced into doing really bad things for food and shelter and stuff like that. Untoward things. At the bus station. At the bus station. And veterans, Josh, are a big part of our homeless problem. And that I can't see Saddest of all because it's all really sad. But when you're veterans, when you go to fight for this country and you end up one of the 200,000 homeless single men usually with mental illness, substance abuse problems because of maybe post traumatic stress disorder right. That is heartbreaking. Yeah. Again, you just keep hitting that nail right on the head, man. There's a lot of overlap and problems or factors in homelessness. Like, homeless veterans may be more prone to having a substance abuse problem or suffering from a mental illness like PTSD or substance abuse. And mental illness overlap in other people as well. And part of the problem is you get to get into a vicious cycle. There are far few services, far fewer services available, easily accessible on the street than there are if you have a house in an income and an address and a phone number and all the normal stuff that you just kind of need to be able to get by in the US. These days. Yeah. And you look at something like the Department of Veterans Affairs, which does as good a job as they can, as far as I know, but they can only accommodate about 25% of homeless veterans. But what's so frustrating is that they could accommodate all of them. They could not if they wanted to, if they had the funding. Right. So you see these record bonuses for CEOs on one hand, and then you hear about homeless veterans. The money is out there. Yes. And I'm glad it was veterans that got you. I hope it's homeless school children that get somebody else. I hope somebody hears us and realizes that we have all the money we need to reserve everybody. Sure. It's just some of the wealthiest are going to have to give up a little bit of it so that some of the poorest have a house. Right. It's as simple as that. We have the means to have the will. Yes. And we're not talking about just some social program with these alcoholics living off my dime. We're talking about homeless veterans and children and abused women. Right. And even if it is alcoholic veterans, we've already learned have we not learned already that alcoholism and all addiction is a brain disease that follows the brain disease model these days? You need treatment. Well, that's the whole stupid American idea that I talked about, was that some people feel like they deserve to be homeless. They see them on the street and they think, what did you do to get here? Yes. Instead of, what can I do to help you? Yeah, well, this is touched a nerve today. It's homelessness. Well, you really should I'm not shocked, but I'm glad I'm angry. That's what I'm saying. Okay, good. I'm glad you're angry, too, Chuck. So, Joshua, let's talk about some of the effects. And a lot of these you can file under duh, but it bears saying. Oh, you're talking about women's shelters. Yeah, well, women's shelters only let in women. And if you have a teenage son, you can kiss him goodbye. Yeah. So bye bye, family unit. Yeah. Physical attacks. Homeless people are attacked, beaten, kicked, chained on numbers that are urinated, spray painted, lit on fire. Pedant is pretty bad. Yeah, just because they're homeless, people will go out and beat up homeless people. Yeah, well, there's, like, a whole line of thinking that serial killers practice on drifters early on. Sure. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? So you tap IBM to UNSILO your data, and with the help of AI, start crunching a year's worth of transactions against thousands of compliance controls. Now you're making smarter decisions. Faster operating costs are lower, and everyone from your auditors to your bankers feel like a million bucks. Let's create smarter ways of putting your data to work. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. 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.com stuff. That's Lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. Health effects for kids. If you're homeless, you're going to have a higher rate of stomach problems, asthma, ear infections, depression, anxiousness. PTSD is pretty prevalent. Yeah, it's a cause of caused by homelessness. And not just adults, but kids as well. Right. Like, you can actually start to develop PTSD because you don't know where you're going to sleep the next night. Wow. I mean, think about it, Chuck. Like, have you ever been without a home? No. I would think it can be really weird to not know where you're going to stay or to not just have a hard day at work or a hard day at school, and to know that at the end of this day, you have no idea where you're going to sleep. Maybe you're going to sleep in your car. Maybe you're going to sleep in the woods. But you don't get to just rest. You don't get to just take a shower, pop a beer, and watch TV or whatever it takes to unwind. So your stress level is heightened constantly without any resolution to it. And of course, you're going to suffer PTSD, or at least stomach aches, something bad. Right. Adults, too. It's not just kids. They can get frostbite, leg ulcers, respiratory infections, HIV and AIDS and diabetes. Yeah. Probably way more common than the homeless population. So lots of health effects going on. Josh. I agree. Chuck. So, Chuck, we talked about Reagan as both creator and alleviator of homelessness. You talked about some of the programs that the McKinney Vento Act created. Some of the other programs that have been developed in the United States are like, Section Eight housing. Yeah. Right. Do you know about this? Yeah. Well, there's homeless shelters, which are like the emergency beds when it's cold, that kind of thing, where you can go temporarily. Right. And a lot of those are I would say most I don't have any numbers on this, but I would say most of those are privately operated. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. And then there is the Section Eight things that you were talking about, which is not public housing. It's when you fill out a Section Eight voucher and you can go find just a regular private apartment to rent from a landlord. It's got to fit certain requirements. And if you meet all those requirements, you only have to pay off the rent and bills, and then the government pays the other straight to the landlord. So that's section Eight. But section Eight, they're a huge waiting list, and I read that a lot of cities have shut it down until the list gets smaller, and they're like, there's no point in keeping a list of four years, five years. We're just going to shut it down, get the list smaller, and then open it back up in a couple of years. Yeah. So good luck getting Section Eight, if that's what you're trying to do. And did you mention public housing? No. So you talked about shelters. Apparently there were 500,000 beds in 2005. There's now 643,000 or there was in 2009, and about 3 million to 3.5 million homeless people. Yeah, but that's a pretty significant increase in five years. Yeah, that's true. But with public housing, if Section Eight is not an option, there is public housing, or there used to be, at least at Techwood. Right. Which is basically like an apartment block where you go and live and you pay what you can and as long as you follow the rules. I just made air quotes. You can stay there as long as you like. Right. Ideally. Right. Again, there's not that many public housing units or not as many as there used to be. We need to talk about food banks because that's a big part of being homeless, is getting your meal. And the United States it's not like starvation in other countries where there is no food. There's lots of food here. Lots of food is thrown away. So since the do you know that there is an estimate that up to half of the food we produce is thrown away? Really? Half in the US. And the low estimate is a quarter? Wow. Yeah. I tell you what, never go get a job in the film industry. If you want food waste depresses you. The craft services, just catering the whole thing. It's ridiculous. But food banks have been around since about the that everyone knows you can donate canned goods and non perishable items and they will distribute them to homeless shelters and homeless people directly sometimes. Yeah, that's a big deal. You ever volunteered anything like that? Yeah, I've done the Thanksgiving thing before. This makes me want to do more than that, though. That feels like going to church on Easter. You know, we should build like an addition onto your house that we can house homeless people in. There you go. Squatville. We can put up a lean to or something. Chuck squatville not a bad idea. Job training, though. I mean, we talk about things like public housing and the projects and that's all well and good to get people place to be, but at the same time, this is where the Republicans can go. Yes. At the same time, you don't want to support a nation of people on the government's. Dime without offering some kind of job training and something to say, hey, let us help you get on your feet. Let us help you get a job in data entry or on the manufacturing line or whatever. So, luckily, there are groups like the Coalition for the Homeless first Step that provide this kind of job training. And the veterans are doing the same thing with the homeless veterans Reintegration Program. Right. And I should say there isn't a homeless alleviation program in existence in the US. That's geared towards simply taking care of people. All of them are geared toward ending homelessness in the individual and collectively through things like job training, through things like helping to write resumes. Yeah, rehab is a huge one. Mental health treatment, getting people cheap drugs, like getting them to a point where they're not homeless anymore. It's addressing the factors of homelessness, not you don't feel like working, so here's some money that doesn't exist. And I suspect that there's not really a desire to just have somebody give you some money and not do anything ever and just be poor in anybody. I don't know. That's my opinion. We disagree. That's awesome. Well, I don't know if I disagree or not. I don't have enough time to think about that right now. All right, what can you do, though? Well, we can build lean twos on your squatting land. You can volunteer, like you said. Right. Give your time. If you don't have the dough. Give a little time if you do have the dough. And it's not necessarily just dough. You can donate old toys and books and toiletries and clothes, that old computer that's gathering dust that you could get $75 for on Craigslist, you should donate that instead. Write it off in your taxes, and maybe homeless people can get trained how to use that computer. Yeah. Or you could donate your car. Yeah, that's a big one. You can be an advocate, try to raise awareness, letter campaigns, all sorts of things you can do there. You can hire homeless people. Yes, they do have skills, as we've seen. A lot of people who are recently homeless may also just be recently unemployed as well and have job skills. And then the last one on the list in the article, which I thought was, bring it home. Great respect. Huge. When you see that homeless person on the street, don't let the first thought to be in your head, hey, jerk, how did you mess up to get here? Maybe you should think, hey, did you develop schizophrenia in your thirties and lose your job because of that? And get split up from your child because you couldn't care for your child, even though you want to, because it happened to Will Smith? I was hoping we could make it through this without bringing up that stupid movie, the Pursuit of Happiness. Yeah, well, they make a movie about it. It was such a big deal everyone knows that guy was homeless with his son. Now he's rich. He's worth $65 million. Yeah. Actually, you know what story I like better? This is the one in this article. That was a guy what was his name? David. Yeah, he's quoted David Pearl. Yeah, he was quoted in that Respect part. Yeah, he was just a regular dude. Had a job as a restaurant manager, college graduate, and for 15 years as a restaurant manager and develop schizophrenia. Got fired, ended up hitchhiking and homeless for two years on the streets of D. C. And now I think he's heading up a homeless group in DC. Now. I think he's an executive at It. Yeah, but he's quoted in this article in the Respect, like, what can you do? He says most of the despair in being homeless comes from being treated like you don't exist. Right. And there's something we should point out, Chuck, throughout this it's, however many minutes into this podcast, we've just now used the first homeless person's name. First and last name of the whole podcast. Yeah. There's a whole conception of invisibility. Yes. The nameless they are, they're not the nameless. You can completely interchange that with the homeless. That's just as faceless, just as nameless, just as genderless, just as identity lists. And I just want to close and get everybody over to on design. There's this awesome blog post by a guy named John Thakara. T-H-A-C-K-A-R-A called look or Connect. And he's talking about he's using photography to demonstrate how we treat the homeless and how we should treat the homeless. And there's a photography book called Shelter. And this guy roamed around Europe and took photos of homeless, like impromptu makeshift shelters, like blankets hanging over a limb in the woods or someplace under an overpass. But in every single picture, it's just the shelter. Not one homeless person appears in this whole book. Interesting. And the cara is pointing out, like, this is kind of emblematic of how we view the homeless. Right. And then he was also kind of crediting a girl named Erica Schultz, who is a photographer out of Seattle, and she has a series called Invisible Families, and she photographs the homeless, but then the caption she includes captions beneath the photograph, right. And it's of that person. So there's one of a little kid walking through a homeless camp, and he's got, like, this bamboo stick up, right? And the caption is here. Jack Ahern, age nine, marches with the bamboo stick while staying at a city located in Skyway. Sometimes Jackwood and list fellow Nickelodeon quotes to help him look for worms. On other days, he'd play on a pogo stick in mud puddles or with the resident cab kitten that had six digits on one paw. The bamboo stick was a gift. So that's a person now, not a homeless kid. Right. That's Jack, a her in age nine. Well, and the gentleman from DC suggests that if you have a regular walk to work in a city or something where you see the same homeless person on a daily basis, then ask them what their name is one day. Call them by their name. Look them in the eye. You don't have to give them money if you don't want to. Little things like that can make a big difference in a person's self esteem and maybe allows them to view themselves as human again. And you can give them, if you're worried about giving the money that they spend on alcohol or something, get a little food, gift voucher, something like that. So there it is, everybody. Our fifth summation of the podcast. Fifth and final. Yes. If you want to learn more about homelessness, you can type that word into the search bar, how Stuff Works. The Blank generic genderless identity list. Search bar. Very nice. And since I said that, it's time for is it listener mailman? Yeah. And in the spirit of this podcast, we're going to do a big old Kiva round up. You want to explain what Kiva is real quick? Kiva is a website where schmoes like you and me can go and donate well, I shouldn't say donate lend increments of $25 to entrepreneurs in developing countries and people on their way up. Here in the United States, even these loans are pulled together to create a larger loan which ultimately repay a loan that's already been made to the person, and then that person uses it for their business. Repays the loan, you actually get your $25 back. That's right. If you want. And you can reinvest it. And basically it's micro lending. Yes. And we have our own loan team, which we are proud to say is the number four team and members on all of Keeping Out. I know that's really fun. Behind atheists number one. Yeah. Christians are number two. They're, like, so angry. And right behind the atheist and Team Obama is number three. And little old us are right there in front of Australia. So let's go over that list again. Go over it, Chuck. From wonderful Atheist of America Christian Coalition team Obama Stuff You Should Know. Australia pretty cool. And as of today, we've loaned as a collective 3406 members of loan, 10,813 loans to the tune of $313,825. That is not bad. Is this going to be out for Christmas? I don't know, Jerry. Yes. We would suggest you can get a Kiva gift certificate and give it to your loved one at Christmas. It's a nice little cool thing to do, like a stocking stuffer, right? And they go and lend it. But ultimately, if they want, they're just postponing getting that 25 or 50 or $75 cash for a month or two. It's repaid. It's not a donation. And with that, here comes the listener mail. Because this one really got me two of them really quick. Hi, guys. My name is Kara and I am another one of your 13 year old fans. Just want to say hi and how much I love your show. Some friends and I make and sell jewelry and donate the profits to Kiva. That is awesome. I know you guys have your own Kiva team, and I love that you use your power to do good. Since most people haven't heard of Kiva, please mention this on your show. It would be so great to get some business that we can relanan. You can see someone barjewelryandloans at www.tinyurl.com projectraw. And I went today, and they have these little earrings and little necklaces and rings and things that these 13 year old girls make by hand. And they've loaned $375 so far. Awesome. And that is Kara in Kensington, Maryland. And that is so cool, I can't even talk about it when 13 year olds are doing stuff like this and CEOs are getting rich and thumbing their nose at the rest of the world. So karma is going to bite you one day, sir. And this one, we usually don't plug other Kiva teams, but we're going to because this is from our buddy sergeant, newly promoted Staff Sergeant Walker. All right, Mr. Bryant, with your inspiration, I've started my own Kiva team for the armed forces. With the whole armed forces? Yeah, he started an army team. Okay, so it's different. Well, he says armed forces Kiva team, but it says army in the URL. Okay, so if you're in the Marine Corps, do not give it is www.kiva.org teamusiva, team. And he was wondering if you could just give a little shout out to all the armed forces personnel listening to your show. And can they donate to our army team? And so I'm going to encourage you to donate for the army team. Everyone else, donate for the stuff you should know. Team and support Project Raw. I can't believe you did this without checking with me. You don't want to support NMC, so sorry. Anyway, good holiday mojo coming your way if you get involved with stuff like this. Well, congratulations on the promotion, Staff Sergeant Walker. Kara, congratulations on being a very cool 13 year old. Actually, a very cool person in general. That's right. Since it's around Christmas time and I'm about to weep, why don't we just bring it on home, drive it through my heart with the sweetest Christmas story you've ever heard in your entire life? That's fact based. Have you got one? No, I'm just saying. I'm asking for them. I'm on the first tier, so I want to just go ahead and have my computer. This one has been first. I got a little weepy a couple of times, too. Did you really? No. Okay, good. If you have a good story for us, a good holiday story, we want to hear it. Send it in an email. You can wrap it up. Tie the ribbon on tight, make sure the card is attached and send it to stuffpodcast@housetuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housedefworks.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 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 petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores."
https://podcasts.howstuf…airy-tales-1.mp3	The Dark Origins of Fairy Tales	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-dark-origins-of-fairy-tales	Fairy tales are for kids right? Well not at first they weren't. They were dark tales of murder, rape, incest, cannibalism and mayhem geared toward adults. What changed? Chuck and Josh will drop that knowledge and more in today's episode.	Fairy tales are for kids right? Well not at first they weren't. They were dark tales of murder, rape, incest, cannibalism and mayhem geared toward adults. What changed? Chuck and Josh will drop that knowledge and more in today's episode.	Tue, 03 Nov 2015 15:12:22 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=15, tm_min=12, tm_sec=22, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=307, tm_isdst=0)	39900556	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W Chuck Bryant in the guinea. And it's just the two of us. Yes. With you guys. I feel like we're the coke commercial from the 70s that Mad Men never saw the show. Oh, really? Yeah. It's a good one. I've heard heard good things. Yeah, you're not the first person I've heard mention it's. Like, we're holding hands with our listeners all across the world. I'd like to buy the world a coke thing. Is that supposedly them? I don't want to spoil anything for anyone. Okay. Wow. What happens at that's a huge plot point. I'll tell you afterwards. Okay. If you're never going to watch the show. Yeah, I probably won't. I mean, like, I pick and choose what I'm going to get into. It's a commitment, especially. How many seasons did that thing go? Six. You're not like most people who just watch whatever's on in front of them until it's over. A lot of people do. Most people do. What, you don't think people pick and choose their culture they consume? I think that they do, but I think they're more ready to jump in than I am. Like, the idea of taking your tablet to the beach to watch TV, that's not like a great thing to me. What happened to us? So what you're saying is you're more selective than your average Joe? I guess, but I don't mean to make myself seem all like, lady DA or anything like that. I'm just saying I don't watch TV shows like Narcos. Remember I told you to watch it the other day? Yeah, and other folks have told me that, so I'm going to watch it. So I saw the first episode, amazing stuff. And I started to watch the second one. I was like, I just can't right now. I don't know what it is about me. So you recommended that to me before you saw it? No, I saw the first. Okay, got you. I could have seen the first couple of minutes and it would have been like, go watch this whole series. I think it's going to be great. And then you bailed on it. Yes, but I haven't bailed entirely. But I guess that's my point. It's not just something I can pick up, like willy nilly and I don't know why. Because it's TV. Well, here's what I used to do. Boy, we're already so sidetracked. But I don't care because there's no one in here. No one here to stop it. That's right. To pull the plug here's, what I used to do, is I would watch a show, let's say a few seasons, and then if it started getting bad, like True Blood or Dexter, I would be like, well, you better got to finish it. Oh, no. And then I got to the point where I was like, no, I don't need to finish it. No, it's true. I can bail on a TV show that starts to suck. Yeah, the showrunner bailed on you. Exactly. So why can't you bail on it? And then I'll just read about the finale? Because that's all I care about is seeing how it ended. Sure. And in the case of Dexter's finale, it was amazingly awfully great. But, yeah, I think that's fair. Same with books, too. Why plow through a book that you're like, I cannot care about this any longer. I'm only 44, but I do sense my mortality a little bit. Like, wait a minute. Do I need to watch this season of this thing that I don't like? Sure. Because I'm going to die and I haven't seen Casablanca yet. What? I haven't seen Casablanca. Really? No, you should. I know, because I'm going to die like that's any night of the week kind of movie. Oh, yeah, I plan to. Okay, so speaking of dying, Chuck, it turns out that in fairy tales, these wonderful little things that Disney promoted and turned into, well, wonderful little things sure. It started out with a lot more death, a lot more destruction, a lot more cannibalism. How about murder, rape, incest, torture, kidnapping, sex with the comatose necrophilia? Yeah, probably somewhere in one we haven't heard of yet. Yeah, that's where fairy tales or that's the type of tales that fairy tales started out as. Yeah, and I think we agreed we're going to do a show on fairy tales. Probably like the brothers Graham Hans, Christian Anderson and Chau Pilot. Oh, nice. The three big. The three biggies, yeah, and fairy tales in general, because it's really interesting. Well, let's make this a two parter. So this will be part one, and then part two will be a fuller explanation of everything we just talked about. Agreed. Okay, so we don't have to go into it too much. But the point is that many years ago, there were such things as oral traditions, folk tales, and they were typically passed along by, say, women who are working at Looms or people who put the kids to bed and were passing the time before the fire because there weren't tablets you could take to the beach to watch Oranges, the New Black anywhere. So you had to entertain yourself somehow. So adults told each other tales, and these form the basis of fairy tales, which seems weird to us now, because fairy tales you tend to associate with kids, but that just wasn't the case before. Yeah, and apparently the brothers Grim, Yakov and Wilhelm originally intended them for adults. Things weren't selling so well, so they said, maybe we should sanitize these a little bit, lighten them up and see if we can get kids to read these grisly morality tales. Right. To scare them into being straight shooters. Yeah, and then Walt Disney came along and he said, you think you sanitize things? Wait until I put my Disney Stank on it. Because my Disney stank smells like roses. It does. There's, like, glitter and like, fairies and it's just all very nice. Smells like I was trying to think of the best smell I can think of, but Pert Plus smells pretty great. I had a friend who used to call the suave shampoo. They called it Suave. That was pretty funny on purpose. Yeah. That was legitimately what they thought it was. Yes. He really thought that. He like, stay at his house. Like, hey, if you need anything that opens on some SWAV in there no, that's hilarious. Yeah. You were talking about how Disney sanitized it. Yeah, that's right. Sanitize things. I don't think we're going to do all ten, because that's what we do, but we're going to talk about some of the earlier versions of now sanitized classics. Yeah. Because it's kind of fun because you see just how far we came when things became Disneyfied. Chuck should we talk about Pinocchio? Yeah, that's a good one. Which was as far as Disney films go, that was maybe the creepiest of all. Yeah. Because of the stranger danger that wound throughout. It totes and that was part of the original thing, was like, you don't go off with strangers, you don't run away from home. Exactly. There's plenty of predatory adults who want to just do all sorts of horrible things with you. That's right. So Pinocchio was kidnapped by stormbole and basically was threatened with pinocchio was made of wood and said, I'm going to burn you alive. You're going to make a good fire one day if you get too old, if you don't stay young. Which is also creepy. Yeah, it is. And Pinocchio was like, oh, no, Mr. Bill. But the source story was by Carlocoloti in 1883. And so Pinocchio was teased in that version by about as woodhead by Jimmy Cricket. I don't know if they call him Jimmy Cricket in that version, though. No, but it was a cricket. Yeah. And he definitely didn't have a top hat and sing When You Wish Upon a Star. No, that was all Disney. Yeah. So Pinocchio gets really upset and throws a hammer and kills the cricket with a hammer. Yeah. And then Pinocchio is hanged and killed. Tied up, hanged and killed by the fox and the cat. Oh, I thought, like, by the court for killing the cricket? No, by his enemies. But he loses his temper and as a result, one of the main characters in the story loses his life and Pinocchio is left to be like, what have I done? Right. And then he's killed. That's a great children's story. That is. But think about how bizarre that is, that at one point there was a story that adults told one another about a wooden boy yeah. Who they really wanted to stay a boy or else they'd burn him alive. Yeah. And we'll get into more like fairy tale analysis and that kind of thing. In the other episodes. Sure. Just chew on that for a little while. Chew on the weird psychosis that lies behind that. All right, up next, we have The Little Mermaid, which I don't think of course, I'm just guessing, but I didn't know there was an original source story. Hans Christian Anderson. Yeah, I had no idea. Was it actually called The Little Mermaid? I guess it was. I think it was. And there's actually a statue of the Little Mermaid in Hans Christian Anderson's home country. Oh, really? Utopia. Yes. In Denmark. Yes. Yes. He was Danish, right? I think Copenhagen Harbor. There's a statue of her, but not the Disney one. Right. So that is Ariel, obviously. We all remember and love that movie. Actually, I didn't, because I was a senior in high school at the time. I wasn't into that. I was too busy watching bad TV on the beach. Are you all right? Yeah. Okay, so in the movie, we all remember that Ariel makes a deal with Ursula, the sea witch, and she says, you know what? You can be human if you'd like. Just give me that beautiful singing voice of yours. Yeah. And in the real version, the witch offers her a potion in exchange for her tongue, which she cuts out. Yeah. And Ariel says, sure, first of all which is weird. Yeah. But she says, this will also make you feel like a sword has pierced your body forever, and you'll be able to dance, but it will feel like you're dancing on knives, and it'll feel like there's maggots eating at your open wounds. Oh, man. So she takes a deal anyway. Yeah. Offer a guy. So say what you will about that as well. In the original version, eventually, I think, the sea ladies come out of the ocean and say, if you kill the prince, give her a dagger so you can kill this guy. Drip that blood on your feet, and you'll get your mermaid tail back. And she says, I can't do it. So she flings herself into the ocean and becomes seafoam, which is what happens. But then she goes the sisters take her into heaven, and the dude ends up marrying another lady, which she watches as she's ascending into heaven. Right, man. So no blood on her feet. No. Never killed the prince. Okay. Cinderella. Yes. Not Cinderella. No. Great Jerry Lewis movie with Dean Martin, too. Right. Was dean in that one? I think he might have been Cinderella. Was it the same thing? Was it the exact same story, but just Jerry Lewis? Pretty much. Okay. Yeah. And it's a pretty old story, but the Disney version basically has, like cinderella is very sweet and beautiful and kind, but she's being basically human trafficked by her own wicked stepmother who makes her do everything that her two lazy, ugly, inside and out daughters won't do or don't want to do that's. Right. Like, clean out the cinders from the fireplace, hence her name. Is that where that came from? I believe so. No idea. So the original story was from 1697 and Chau Pearl, Cinderella, or the little glass slipper. And as you remember, in the original, she is allowed to go to the she's dressed up by the very godmother. Yeah, very godmother. Yeah. Very great character all time, all pretty. You get to ride in this great horse drawn carriage, which used to be a pumpkin, remember? And it will turn into a pumpkin at midnight. Yes. So you'll lose all those nice clothes and that glass slipper. If you want everyone to like you for being wealthy, make sure they don't see you on, like, the messages these are sending when you really dig into it. I know. Pretty horrible. I can't wait to talk about it in the next episode. It's all just one big teaser for everybody. It is the fun teaser before the Grim ending. So she takes off before midnight. The prince is like, Wait. Come back, please. And she's like, no, I got to go. I can't let you see that I'm actually poor and pretty. And she's like, what? I couldn't hear you. She's like, Nothing. And she takes off, but she leaves behind her glass slipper. And this glass slipper that fits her perfectly is what the prince decides to use to identify this mystery woman. So he starts looking throughout the kingdom. Correct. And in the original version, which I said, by P O, it's actually pretty much like that. But in 1812, and that's the thing with fairy tales, they're rewritten a lot throughout the ages by different folks with different versions. Right. And in 1812, the Grim brothers had a version called Ashen putall, which I don't even know what that means. I don't either. aussiAn, maybe it's the same thing. Cinder and Oshin, maybe. I don't know. The Pootel? What is that? I have no idea. Okay. But anyway, so the evil stepmother in this version says to her stepdaughters, to the oldest one, she's like, here's what you do. I know that shoe won't fit around your big hammer toe. Here's a knife. Cut that thing off, and the shoe will fit. And she does it. She cuts off her toe, puts on the slipper, and the prince was like, this is great, until these pigeons, magic pigeons, come along and say, hey, Prince, check that toe out. It's bleeding through the glass slipper. Her shoe is filled with blood. She's like Romeo and Michelle's. High school reunion all of a sudden. So the prince is like, you get away from me, imposter. And sends the eldest daughter, the eldest step sister, away. The youngest one tries the same thing, except she cuts off part of her heel, which seems to be exponentially more painful than cutting off your own toe. Yeah, same bit, apparently. Charles Perrault was like, I can't come up with anything else. We'll just go with the same thing. The two pigeons point out the bloody shoe, and the younger sister goes away. And then finally, somehow, Cinderella ends up with the shoe on. Right? Yeah. And he says, I found you. We're going to go get married. And in an active good favor, she invites the stepsisters to the wedding. Because she was such a nice person, probably to rub salt in the wounds. Well, yes, and also because she knew that her pigeon friends were going to pluck their eyes out. Which they did. Yes. One at a time, they pluck out one eye each, and then they come back and finish the job and pluck out the other eyes. So here's the thing. We were raised with this kind of stuff, right? Yeah, sure. I'm familiar with the Disney version of all these things, but I also had a fair idea that there was a weird, darker foundation to these stories before. Right. Imagine not having ever been exposed to this kind of thing. Think about how bizarre some of the twists and turns that take place in these stories are. Talking pigeons end up plucking out the sister's eyes after exposing them earlier. That's just a weird extra twist. Yeah. Like if the aliens came down, right, they're like, this is what we read our children on Earth. What is wrong with you? All right, well, let's take a little break here. Oh, yeah, we forgot to do this. And we'll come back and talk about a little someone with a Red Riding something. I think I might know who you mean. All right. Little Red Riding Hood. That's who I was talking about, everybody. I was not going to guess that. So let's recap the real story here, which is everyone knows this one as well, I'm assuming. Little Red Riding Hood is traveling through the woods to deliver food to her dying grandmother, and she meets the hungry wolf. Yeah, she's bringing butter. A pot of butter. Is that what it was? Yeah, according to Charles Perrault. Delicious. So the wolf says, I like to think way in advance and make grand scheme. So I'm going to tell you, little girl, who I'd like to eat to stay here and pick some flowers. Grandma would love some flowers as she's dying. Yes. And by the way, where is Grandma? Lives in Little Riding Hood. While she starts picking flowers, like, oh, down the way and take a left at the old oak tree and then don't make eye contact with the talking pigeons. That's right. And you'll find Grandma's house. So the wolf takes off while Little Red Riding Hood is picking her flowers. Unbeknownst to her, the wolf has gone and is now eating her grandmother to death. Yeah. And then, like, Norman Batestyle dresses up in her clothing, sits with his back to her in a rocking chair and lays in wait, which you would think that's dark enough. Yeah, it's pretty dark. Just eating grandmother's bad enough. Right in the grim version, it was called Little Red Cap, which doesn't have the same ring. No. Little Red Riding Hood. It's beautiful. It just rolls off the top. Little Red Cap? No, it just kind of ends right there. So Little Red Riding Hood is actually eaten by the wolf in their version and then yeah, because she comes in, the wolf stress as the grandmother and they have a little exchange and she ends up getting eaten in exchange. Yeah. And so he eats her dead, or we think she's dead. A woodsman comes along and cuts the wolf open with well, there are different versions. Shears are an axe and the woman, the grandmother and Little Red Riding had come out and as if you think that's the end. No, let's fill the wolf with rocks. Oh, do they? In a grim version in the grim version, the wolf gets up and tries to go away, but he is weighted down by the rocks inside of his body and collapses and dies. Wow. So it's a good ending. Yes, it is. In that case, that's the grim version and the Charles Perrault version, he ended his with the moral of the story kind of thing. And the moral of his story was do not get in bed with a sexual predator. Yeah, because in his story, Little Red Riding Hood comes to grandmother's house and she suspects that something is amiss, but she still takes off her clothes and gets into bed with grandmother when she's invited to by this wolf dressed as grandmother. And she says, what big arms you have. What big legs you have. What big ears you have. And the wolf has a smooth answer for everything, you know what I'm saying? And then ends up eating her. Just she dies. She's eaten to death by a wolf. And that's the end of the story. The moral is little girls should not expose themselves to predation by sexual predators. Basically. It's not exactly how Peralt put it, but essentially that's what he was saying. Well, here's a direct quote from Parole. From this story, one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers. And it is not an unheard thing if the wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort. There is one kind with an amenable disposition, neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas, who does not know that these gentle wolves are all such creatures, the most dangerous? So you're basically saying, like, they're all gross and dirty and preying on you. Yes, which I mean, hats off to him for performing. That public service. But where's the fairy tale that says sexual predators do not predate? I don't think they read stories for but they were once young children, young boys who could have been raised on that kind of thing. That's a good point. I tipped my little red cap to you. Thank you. Oh, this is a good one. Hansel and Gretel. Yeah. I grew up next to an older couple who had a dog named Gretel Schnauzer. So cute. Really sweet dog. So this one starts out with an evil stepmom married to a dad of the father of Hansel and Gretel, and she's like, you guys eat way too much food, and your dad and I are in danger of going hungry. Yeah. So we're going to take a long walk in the woods, and only two of us are coming back. So the kids she does this twice, because the kids are smart enough on the first go round to leave a trail of pebbles in the woods. Oh, I thought it was breadcrumbs. That's part two. Okay. At first, they leave the pebbles. They come back, and she's like, Son of a all right, we're going to do this again, and you're not taking any pebbles. She talks about into the woods again, they leave breadcrumbs, which are famously eaten, and so they are now stranded in the woods by the pigeons. They're talking pigeons, probably. So, yeah. So the plan has worked. From the evil step monster, they then encountered the bloodthirsty witch, who basically is like, look at this sweet gingerbread house. Why don't you come on in here, because I know your little piglets like to eat. Yeah. And they do. They go in yeah, they go in a house made of gingerbread. That's a great device right there. Sure. Who wouldn't want to just come into that house and see what's inside? If the house is made of gingerbread, what the heck is the microwave made of? There might be charcuterie inside. Sure. So once inside, they're trapped, because this is the house of an old witch who seems like a kindly old lady as they're going in. Then once the door shuts, they're in trouble. Right? Yeah. Gretel is basically enslaved. Hansel is locked in a cage and fattened up. Yeah. Like a goose. So she can eat him. Yeah. And then at some point, the witch says, what the heck? I'll eat you both. And this gives Gretel the chance to get a drop on the witch. Yes. Which is pretty funny to me. The witch is basically like, hey, Gretel, why don't you go and look in that oven, let me know if it's hot enough. And she's blind the witches, and Gretel's like, I don't know what you mean. Why don't you show me what you mean? Right in the wood says, oh, okay, you stupid girl, let me show you. Exactly. So she shuffles over, and she's like, you stick your head in like this. Engage the right. Because Gretel went and pushed her in by the rump. And the witches burned alive to death. Yes. And then Hansel and Gretel make their way back home, and the stepmother is dead. Right? But in the alternate version, Gretel is like, wow, Hansel, you do look pretty good, and eats him alive. Oh, really? No. Well, what gets me is they go back home, stepmother's dead. They don't explain how she died. And I wonder if the dad was just like, so sorry about marrying that lady who tried to kill you twice. She's still digging holes in the backyard. Should we take a break? Oh, yes, I think we should. All right. We'll take another quick break, and we'll come back with some of my favorites. Welcome back to Story Time with Chuck and Josh. Yes. Adult story time. Yeah, because if your kids are listening to this, you're a monster yourself. Rumplestiltskin this one really creeps me out when I was a kid because it featured an imp, like a creepy, beastly imp who not only that had a lack of control over his emotions. He was prone to emotional outbursts, and he was, like, unstable, which made him even more scary. So this one starts out, there's a miller who tells the king that my daughter can spin straw into gold. You ought to see this girl go. He's totally full of it, though. Totally full of it. I don't know what I'm sure he was expecting to get away with it. I don't know how. Who knows? Maybe he's going to, like, hit the king over the head with something when he came to look and then marry him while he's unconscious. So the king says, great, she's cute. Let's trap her in the castle and lock her in a room with a bunch of straw. Spin it into gold, lady, and I'll marry you. Yeah. And she's like, she gets in there, and she's like, I have no idea how to spend anything into gold. And this little empty rumple stoke skin climbs up, says, I can actually do that, and if you give me some jewelry, I'll spend that junk in the gold. He does. So the king is like, this is sweet. Let me lock you in a bigger room with more straw. Rumplestilt skin comes back, spins all that into gold for more jewelry, comes back a third time because now she's hooked. Yeah, she's hooked. And she's like, I don't have any more jewelry. What are we going to do here? Right? And what does he say? He says, I got an idea. I got an idea. I've always wanted to own a human child. So you go ahead and start spinning, and I'll make sure this gets turned into gold, and then you can marry the king. And when you guys have a kid, you just give it to me. And she's like, what are you going to do with the kid? Don't worry about it. Don't worry about that at all. They'll be fine. So she says, that sounds like a good idea. I can get the gold now, but pay later. And he says, yes, if you want to look at it like that. That's fine. And she says, let's do it. So they end up colluding. This last time, the king marries her, and years pass, and then the woman has a child, and one day Rumplestiltskin a child she came to love. Sure. Despite knowing that there was a bounty on the child's head. Yeah. And it was conceived under duress, let's just say. Okay. But she loved the child. And Rumplestilt skin comes a calling. Yeah. And he says, hey, remember me? And she's like, how could I forget? Yes. He said, I'm back to claim my bounty. Give me that kid. I've got lots of neat things planned. And she says, I'd kind of like to keep my kid, actually. And he's like, no. Okay. I love fun and games. So how about this? I have a really weird name that you've never heard before. I've never told you. If you can guess my super weird, one of a kind name, we'll just call the whole thing off. Yeah. I'll give you three days even. Yeah. And she gets the name. She does. Well, she overhears them, right? She sneaks around and overhears him in his own layer. I don't remember. I think that's how it is. Okay. But she guesses his name correctly, and he does not like that at all. Oh, no. By the way, in the early 80s, harvey Vichez Tattoo from Fantasy Island played Rumple Stiltskin in a TV version of this. So this outburst must have been particularly upsetting because you love Tattoo. You don't want to see Tattoo playing Ruffle Stiltskin having this outburst where he's just lost his human child that's been promised to him for years because this lady managed to guess his name. And he goes, the devil told you that. And he stomps his foot, and he stomps it so hard, it goes right into the earth and gets stuck there, like, up to his waist. And he gets really angry about that and says, Let me get my leg out of here. And he tears his body into two pieces, and the lady is off the hook. Yeah. In the 1812 version, he just runs away, and they actually went back in 1857 to allow him to tear his body in half. Weird way to die. Agreed. Who has that kind of upper body strength? Well, Rumble Stiltskin. I guess so. And there's a new TV show out, too. I don't know if it's still out that had a lot of these characters, like, Once Upon a Time or something. Yeah, I think so. I didn't watch it, though. I think it's still around. Is it? I think so. What's his face? Robert Carlyle's in it from train spotting. I love that guy. Yeah, he's good. All right, let's skip that one, because that one what about Snow White? You want to do that one? Yeah, Snow White. So Snow White was the one that changed everything. That was Disney's first animated full length feature. And apparently everybody, including his wife, said, do not do this. This is not the way to try to make your name. And he said, no, I'm going to do it. He borrowed one and a half million dollars at a time to make this movie. And it turned out that everybody loved it, obviously. It's apparently the 10th highest grossing film of all time, adjusted for inflation. Wow. Still? That's crazy. Yeah. So Snow White was the one that everybody thinks of when you think of a fairy tale becoming sanitized or dignified. Yeah. Because in the grim version, there was a heart in a box that the evil was the evil the evil witch. The evil witch. The one who is jealous of Snow White's beauty. Right. She wanted her heart in a box. Yes. That actually made it into the Disney version. Yeah. That was the sanitized version. Right. In the full grim version, she wanted to eat the liver and lungs of Snow White, as a matter of fact, which is a little freaky. So the sanitize Disney version wasn't quite fully sanitized compared to the other one, but a little they cut out the cannibalism. Yeah. And the grim version, Snow White at her wedding, the evil stepmother gets involved there and the guests heat a pair of iron shoes on burning coals for Snow White into these shoes to dance until she dies. Yes. From wearing her feet are burned off or something else. Or she just danced herself to death. She's a dance, dance, dance, dance dancing machine. I've got a couple of more here. Rapunzel yeah. Overtly sexual. Overtly sexual. And I just realized while researching this that the Beastie Boys were clearly literature fans from What Comes Around. Song rapunzel. Rapunzel, let down your hair or I will climb up and get into your underwear. It's the Beastie Boys line, and I remember it when I heard that line, I was like, that's childish. But that's actually exactly what happens in the original version. Ad rock. That was pretty childish. Yeah. Is that what you thought to yourself? I did not like your usual collegiate high minded stuff. Shake your up. The Disney's movie Tangled is the Rapunzel version that's been super sanitized. And it's about a young girl whose hair has miraculous properties that make you not age. So obviously there's going to be some evil lady that wants that hair yes. Who happens to be a witch, builds a tower to house Rapunzel. Unfortunately, she doesn't think to make the tower taller than Rapunzel's. Hair is long. Error. Rapunzel has a prince, I believe it's got to be a prince. I didn't even have to look down. Yes, I'm sure it's a prince. I always needed a prince to save the damsel. Right. Which we'll talk about in the next episode. But she likes to let her hair down and let the guy climb up her hair every night after the witch went to sleep. And they would get it on in the tower where she was locked up. And they did this a lot. Yeah. And apparently one day she was very young and naive otherwise. And she said to the witch, my clothes grow tight. And the witch is like, what? You know what that means. Figured out what was going on, banished Rapunzel to the desert and said, be gone with you. And the prince comes back one day and I guess he gets into the tower somehow. Yeah. He climbs up in the tower and he is confronted not by Rapunzel, his lover, but by the witch, by the wicked witch, who's like, I know what you did. Yes. And there are a couple of versions. He either leaps from the tower or she pushes him from the tower. And in both versions, his eyes are gouged out by the thorns below. Right. And he's blinded. Right. But he's still very much in love. He wanders the earth blind and homeless from that point on until he by chance encounters Rapunzel, who's living as a single mom raising their kids twins on her own, apparently in a desert like town, maybe somewhere in Nevada or Arizona. Barstow. Okay, so she's in barstow raising their twins as a single mom, and he, a homeless blind man, encounters her. And apparently it's just like when Ralphie comes back home in a Christmas story. She starts crying at the sight of him. Right. And her tears heal him. Heal his sight. Now that he has sight currently, he's immediately got a home again. So they make their way back to his kingdom and get married and live happily ever after, which is very rare if you haven't caught on by this point in time. What, live happily ever after? Yeah. That is a really rare story. And it's sweet too, because the love goes beyond that immediate once the sex drives up. It seems like in other children's story yeah. The dude is just like, whatever, I'm fine. This guy in one version jumps out of the tower to kill himself and is blinded and wanders the earth. That's sweet. Once the sex drives up. Puzzle. All right, let's finish it off with the worst of them all, because it straight up is rape. Yes. There's no dancing around what happens in Sleeping Beauty. No, it's like kill Bill. What do you mean? The beginning of kill. Bill. Oh, sure, you remember. Yeah. So in the Disney version, 1959, of course you remember. There was a young princess and a sorceress dooms her and cast a spell on her and says, you're going to die at 16, which is even in our time, pretty young. Did you understand why? No. Probably jealousy. Yeah, she's probably ugly and Sleeping Beauty was a beauty. Sure. So she says, you know what? You're going to prick yourself on a spindle and you're going to die. That is the spell. It can only be undone by a good fairy. Of course, the good fairy comes along, says, you can get out of this slumber if a prince, your true love, awakens you with a kiss. Yes. Pretty innocuous, right? Sure. I mean, why not just let's make it interesting. Is the what witch said that's? Right. But there's an earlier version in the 14th century from France. I have no idea how to pronounce that. Paris forest. Okay. And in this version, the prince returns, finds the woman laying in bed, naked and unconscious, and he rapes her. Yeah. He's like, I can't help myself and I'm a prince, so no rules apply to me. Pretty much. So she becomes pregnant, has a kid. Still while asleep, she doesn't wake up from this. She gets raped, she gets pregnant, has a baby. Her little baby bites on her finger, thinking he's breastfeeding, and causes the spindle the chip from the spindle to fall out of her hand, I guess. Yeah. Her finger, where she pricked it. Yeah. And saves her. So all I had to do was remove the what's it called? The flax chip. No, what is it called when a piece of wood gets into your finger? No. Splinter. Splinter? Yeah, she had a splinter. All anybody had to do was remove it and she would have been fine. Pretty much. Luckily her kid was a dumb dumb and didn't know a breast from her finger. That's right. And there's another version called the sun, the Moon and Talia from 1634 by Gimbatista basil. And in this version, it's a king who actually rapes the maiden. She has twins. And the queen finds out and she says, you know what? Come here, cook. Take this lady, take her kids, cook them, kill them, cook them and feed them to the king. And he says, alright. But then he goes off, he's like, I just can't do that. What am I, some kind of sicko? Alright, I'll just kill a baby lamb instead. And he feeds them lamb? Yeah. If you were a cook or a huntsman or a woodsman during this era, part of your job was murder. Like, you were expected to murder innocence at the whim of the people in charge. Yeah, I'm just cutting down some trees. You need me to kill someone, right? I got an axe. You want me to put someone's heart in a box? All right, well, that was it. Be sure to listen to part two of this, where we talk about all the weirdness that's behind all of this. Weirdness, right? And I bet drugs. Sure. It's always behind the weirdness, right? Don't you think the grand brothers were token on something? I don't know. Let's find out. All right, if you want to know more about fairy tales that are way darker than you realize as a kid, just type something like that into the search bar. HowStuffWorks.com? And it will bring up this wonderful article. And since I said wonderful, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this. We inspired someone to go back to college. Wow. How about that? Hey, guys. My name is Marie. I'm from Lakewood, Ohio. Suburb of Cleveland. I've been listening for a few years. I'm sorry. For years. Okay. And as soon as I heard you were coming to Pittsburgh, I flipped out and called my mother immediately. She's also a huge fan. Her name is Joanne. Please give her a shout out. So they came to Pittsburgh, and they were in the audience. Nice. Thanks. Great. However, the reason I'm writing is way more important than that. You guys were my inspiration to go back to college. After listening to how sign language works, I signed up for classes about a week later. By the first day, I was in love, not just with the language, but also with school. I'd forgotten how much I love to learn and be challenged. And at the start of fall semester next year, I'll be returning to school full time, and I could not be happier. In the words of my best friend's, dad, you belong there. Nice. How about that? Congratulations. Also, in your episode, you mentioned three sentence structures for sign language. I employee, employee i, or I employee i. You're curious about the last structure, and the purpose is for clarification with the different structures. Long sentences or sentences like I love you can get super confusing. She said or sentences. It's clearly not a long sentence, right? It's hard to tell who is giving and who is receiving the love. By adding the second eye, you are clarifying who is performing the verb. Right? So thanks again for being my entertainment and my inspiration. Keep on doing what you do. You never know whose life you won't influence next. That is from Marie Rasmussen. Thank you so much for that email, Marie. We appreciate you. Best of luck in college and continuing your education. Yes, and thank you to you and your mom, Joanne, for coming to our show. I'm glad you guys had a good time. If you want to get in touch with us because we inspired you to do something great or because we make you angry, whatever. Actually, you know what? We don't care to hear from you. If we make you angry, keep it to yourself. Yeah. You can get in touch with us via Twitter at S-Y-S kpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepforce.com. And as always, join us at our home, on the web, stuffyoushineo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseworks.com."
419e693a-53a3-11e8-bdec-9b5ccbd1b7fd	What Happens When the Government Thinks You're Dead?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-happens-when-the-government-thinks-youre-dead	It’s bad enough when the government knows you’re alive – there are taxes to pay, laws to be followed, all sorts of boring and unpleasant things. But each year, thousands of Americans find out life is far, far worse when the government thinks you are dead.	It’s bad enough when the government knows you’re alive – there are taxes to pay, laws to be followed, all sorts of boring and unpleasant things. But each year, thousands of Americans find out life is far, far worse when the government thinks you are dead.	Thu, 02 May 2019 13:30:35 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=35, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=122, tm_isdst=0)	37228146	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. Jerry is not eating anything today, chuck, the air is clear. And did you just do that as a coaster? Yeah, I don't want to make a chinky sound every time. Oh, okay. I thought, I want this, I don't want that, I want this. No, I get it. Did you hear that? You didn't hear anything? No, I said everyone, Josh just folded up his notes and put his can of cola down on that, and I've never seen you do that. And I thought you were trying to preserve this cheap Ikea desk. This thing is tougher than leather. Okay, so it was a sound thing. Sure. It's a sound dampening technique. Man, look at us after all these years. Yeah, I just came up with that up in our game. So, Chuck, do you remember we did a Social Security number episode? Did we? I thought so. You don't remember that one? Sure. It was one of those ones where you're like, my eyes are going to bleed because this is so boring, but it turned out to be pretty interesting. Sure, it was one of those. Yeah, I remember that. But we should give a little bit of a refresher on Social Security numbers. Okay. Yeah. Here's mine. Oh, you're going to give yourself 28794. No, I don't even because what if I just accidentally said someone else's, like, made one up? All right, and people want to go try that. Yeah. And some dudes listening. It's like, dude, how'd you know? Todd. It's always Todd. I don't know. So Social Security numbers. Get this, everybody. They first started being issued in November of 1936, and the Social Security Administration was created to administer a New Deal program of federal benefits, things like welfare or retirement benefits, Medicare. The entire reason any of us originally were given a Social Security number was to track our lifetime earnings and to determine how much we'd put into Social Security so that when we retired, they could determine how much we should get out in retirement. That's why everyone has a Social Security number. Yeah, and because they're nine digits, there's something like a billion different possible combinations, and we're about halfway toward using up the Social Security numbers. Oh, interesting, but probably gaining fast. We are starting to gain much faster than we were before. Good point. But we still got plenty of time. But because of this, Social Security numbers get retired when you die, which we'll get to. But originally when you were given Social Security number, that was it. It wasn't meant for anything else but to track your earnings and to figure out your retirement. Right? Yeah. Not like when you go to get a haircut, basically. And they ask you for your Social Security number. Yes. In the federal government said, okay, there's a couple of other things that you should really have your Social Security number for. Passport. Makes sense if you go to open a bank account. That was a new one, too. I'll buy that. But then, like you said, as computers came along, now everybody asks what it's become? An Identifier. And an authenticator. And that is really bad. That is not what we should be doing with Social Security numbers. Yeah. Not only that, but the phone numbers and everything and the addresses, it just annoys me. And I'm not like a conspiracy guy. It's not like I think, what are they going to do with this? It just annoys me. Well, I can't get a haircut without I have cash in my hand. You have scissors. Can we just do this right? Can we do it like, Floyd style? Yeah. It annoys me. But even if you take away the annoyance, companies have proven time and time and time again that they're not to be trusted. Protecting your Social Security number, because to authenticate you saying you are who you say you are. They've got to have your Social Security number on file, and when somebody hacks into their databases, they get your Social Security number. All of your information is right there, and it's become a real problem, but it's also become a real problem living a modern life without giving out your Social Security number, right? Yeah. So we say all this to point out that if for some reason you didn't have a Social Security number any longer, it would be tough to navigate life. And that actually happens to some people. Yeah. If you've seen the movie Brazil, or is it like this? You never saw Brazil? No, it's sort of this in a future dystopian world, but basically it's bureaucracy at its best of someone who's dead or not dead, and the government mixes it up. Is that what Brazil is about? Yeah. I did not know that. Yeah. I'm glad you brought that up then, because we would have heard from people. Yeah. It's good, right? It is. And you should go listen to the movie crush episode in Brazil with Jonathan Colton. Okay. I didn't know that one. No one slipped past me. I wasn't talking to you, but sure. Oh, you're welcome to listen. No, thanks. I'm part of everybody. I had to go to the Social Security office recently to get a card because of this job and our new company. Really? Yeah. I had to prove, whatever, that I'm alive. You're not unemployable. I guess you didn't just give them your passport. I couldn't find my passport because I'm in between houses right now and it was buried somewhere. Okay, but you do have it because we're probably going to Toronto this year. I do have it. I did find it, kind of after I went to the Social Security office. But all that was just to say that if you think the DMV is a pit of despair, just go to the Social Security office. I don't want to. It's not fun. I really don't want to. No. So, okay. You can imagine how bad it is when everything is just hunky dory and you just need a copy of your card. That's all you needed, right? Yeah. For some people. Some poor SAPS out there, they are thought by the government and listed by the government as having died. That's right. And that is a big problem if you're alive. Yes. Because, again, you need your Social Security number for everything to start with. And then secondly, because we have enough Social Security numbers to go around. Like I said, when you die, your Social Security number gets retired with you. Yeah. They hang it in the rafters of your local NBA franchise. That's exactly right. If you look really closely, they're all up there. But that is a problem for somebody who gets listed as dead on what's called the Death Master File. Do I need to say it? No. Even somebody listening to the very first step, you should know right now, they know what you're saying. There's a bunch of good band names in here, but Deathmaster File is pretty good. So. It's also called the Social Security death index. But death master file is way better. I think you would agree. It depends on who you're talking to. I think Genealogists typically call it the SSDI. Everybody else calls it the death masterpiece. What I saw you know why? Because they don't know how to party or they get their own little weird party going on. Yeah. Think about that. Yeah. You got to look at people differently sometimes. I was trying to think of the bumper sticker. Genealogists do it blank in the archives. Genealogists do it with their DNA, with their dead ancestors. It's two bumper stickers. Yeah. Just having a lipsy. That'd be kind of fun. All right, where are we? The DMF. All right. It was established the same time the Social Security numbers were back in 1936. And then it took all the way to the 1980 before the public could even see this list. Right. There was a Freedom of Information Act that was filed back in 1980, and there was a lawsuit, and the federal court said, you know what? This is public information. You have to publish this. And there's actually, like a master death Master file that's called the new MEDINT. And that's, like, everything. And that's the one that the Deathmaster file is derived from, the public version of it is the death Master file. Right. Which, when you die, there are a bunch of ways that your name can get to the SSA, the Social Security Administration. Sometimes it's a funeral home. Sometimes it's from a hospital. Sometimes it's from your family, because it's the family's responsibility ultimately, to report it. But most of the time, the funeral home is the one that actually does is like, a service. I wouldn't have known that, but I also saw well, now, you know, there's probably some poor stuff you should know. Listener our condolences. Sure. Who's dealing with this right now? It's your responsibility to go report this to the Social Security Administration. Okay. That's sad. I also saw that your bank, the postal Service, some other randos are legally allowed to report your death as well. So it's a post person just saying, like, I haven't picked up their mail in, like, three weeks. They're dead to me. I think I should just report that. I don't know. I could not find the procedure from that. Anything other than a couple of good sources mention the postal service as a legal entity that can report your death to the feds. All right, so why do they want this Death Master file? Of course, if you have paid well, the government needs to know if you're not around anymore. It's kind of that simple. There's a couple of reasons why. Yes. They need to know because you get a little dough, they can't have your Social Security number out there. No, they need to know that you're deceased because they don't want to be paying income tax refunds if somebody starts filing them fraudulently. They don't want people opening bank accounts in your name. They want to make sure that you're listed as dead. Yes. And so that's what the death Master file does. It kind of serves as the storehouse for all the people in America who've been dead basically since the 60s, but it goes as far back as 1936 or 37. Yeah. Which is surprisingly more than 100 million people. Yes. But they think that there's maybe up to 16 million dead people missing from this list. It's not perfect. We'll spoil now. I guess we should then follow that statement by saying there are tens of thousands of people on that list who should not be on that list. Right, exactly. But before we get to that, this death Master file, originally, Social Security could track who was dead and who wasn't so they could determine who to pay Social Security Administration benefits out to the survivors. Get this. Did you know this? If you're in America and you're the recipient, you're the survivor of somebody who gets Social Security, you get a cool $255 to help bury them. Yeah. That's when I said you get a little dough that I meant little a little dough. Yeah. Maybe like one of the fancy handles on the casket would be covered by that. I don't even think you can get cremated for $200. I don't know. I don't even think they'll leave you in a ditch out back for $200. A sky bury will cost more than that. Maybe that tristate crematorium would take your $250, but that's it. Yeah. Do you remember them? Oh, sure. Yeah. Evil. So, like you said, mistakes are made. And this is where it turns slightly Brazil. There was an investigation in 2011, and they actually named Grave Mistakes, which is hysterical, by Scripps Howard News Service. And what they did was they took this master death file from three different years, 98, 2008, 2011. They created a computer program to basically just compare them to see what they came up with, and that they found almost 32,000 living people who were listed as deceased in 98 or 2008 that were then taken off that list after they realized that they goofed up 2011. So these people had spent months, years maybe, listed as dead. And here's the problem. It's bad enough if you go to apply for Medicare because you're retired or Social Security benefits and the government says denied, you're dead. You're listed as dead. Because as far as the government is concerned, if you are on this, you're dead to them. Yeah, that's bad enough. But remember that Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that opened the thing up to being published publicly? The reason why that suit was filed was because the business community said, hey, we can really use that thing. Basically, it would be like a big do not take checks from these people list for all dead Americans. Because if somebody comes to us and wants to open a bank account, wants to get an insurance policy, wants to get a car, wants to get a job, it doesn't matter. Wants to do something where they could take us for a ride if they're a fraud, then if we had this list to check against, like Social Security numbers or names or whatever, we could root out fraud and we could defend ourselves from identity theft and the fraud that's perpetrated by it. And so banks, insurance companies, car dealerships, cable companies, employers, everybody, other government agencies, barbers, all barbers, don't forget them. They all use this death Master file, which is available publicly to check your applications against. And if the government says that you're dead, it says it on this file. Whether it's right or wrong, you're dead. And that's a whole lot of problems for you. We're going to get into those right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up Jalapeno sesame and chocolate cover goodness with realtime datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting. 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. 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So before we broke, I was talking about that Scripps investigation, and there was an Inspector General's report in 2008 that kind of pulled back the curtain on this stuff. And Social Security said. Yeah, that's about right. There's a lot of people, tens of thousands that we think are dead and aren't dead, but their success rate is pretty good. Yeah. And they said, but we're at a 99.59 rate of accuracy, which is not too bad for a government bureaucracy. That's really good. And they said that 90% of the time you can fix it in just a year. Just a hellish year. Yeah, not too bad. And so they basically admitted to being a government. I don't want to knock them too much because it feels like everyone's always knocking government work, but they're basically saying, like, yeah, man, these names are miskeed, or these numbers are miskeed. Sometimes they're like that happens. Yeah, pretty much. So the thing is that 00:40 1% error rate, that's tens of thousands of people every year. There's like 2.7 million people added to this list every year who die in America. Right. Wow. So it adds up to a lot of errors. The thing is, the Social Security Administration, so they take their Death master file, they hand it over to the National Technical Information Service, and they're the ones who distribute it to all the insurance companies, the genealogy websites. I think Ancestrycom publishes it. The credit bureaus. Yeah. Insurance companies, everybody who wants to do a background check on you, they all get their versions of this from the National Technical Information Service. But part of the agreement to get this from them, you have to pay for it. Is that you have to keep your DMF up to date, because if you just buy one every once in a while and the Social Security Administration finds an error on and updates their file, if you don't go get the new file, your old file is still going to have that error. Right. And that's when it becomes problematic for the people who are listed as deceased when they try to go get credit. And it kind of has a tendency to spread once it's out there. Yeah. So like I said, sometimes it's being miskeed. I think they said, like, one out of every 200 is just from clerical error. Sometimes it can be like a family member goes to reported death and they accidentally make a mistake where they might end up being on the death list. Yeah. I don't know how that happens, but it does happen. There are people like Don Pilger. Human error. Mary Dubai, who apparently Mary Duboard just gave up. She's like, My husband can get credit cards still. I'm just going to live off of his sometimes. This one woman named Candice Atkins just accidentally clicked deceased on a tax return on electronic filing, and that was it. Can you imagine? No, I can't believe there's not an undo. Yeah, I was looking she had submitted I guess you could probably have undone it in the moment, but she didn't realize it and submitted it. Right. But you should still be able to undo that. You would think so. And then there are some weird things. These anomalies that you dug up, more than 40% of false listings made in 2007 were from Illinois. Yes. It sounds like a hiccup in the system to me. A hiccup in the system or a super lazy data entry person? Yeah. More than 2 million Americans were falsely listed as dying on the 15th, and that was just an internal policy, is to use the 15th as a default value when they didn't know. Right. Middle of the month sounds good to me. Right. I guess that was just a question of not going to the trouble of verifying the information. Right. And it can happen the other way, too. I think at least 6 million dead Americans are labeled as alive, which is a huge problem because your information is out there ready to be abused by the nefarious. Well, no, that's the opposite. If you're listed as deceased but you're still alive, your information is being published and can be used for identity fraud. If you're actually dead and not listed, if somebody knows that you're dead and not listed, they can use your stuff to perpetrate fraud against the government. Yeah, that's what I was saying. Okay. Yeah. 67,000 of those people of those numbers were used to report $3 billion in income between 2006 and 2011. That's a lot of tax returns refunds fraud. Yeah. So it's a problem both ways where either you're dead and you're not listed on there or you're not dead, and they listed you anyway. And like I was saying earlier, once this information gets out there, because there's so many different entities getting this list, once it's out there, it stays out there. It's very tough to go around to everyone and get this information changed, even once you get it changed with the Social Security Administration, because while it's a requirement to keep your list up to date, if you're a subscriber, there's no enforcement to it. There's nobody who comes along and says, let me see your list. Oh, it's not up to date. Give me $10. That you're fine. There's nobody enforcing it. So once it's out there, it's very tough to undo. It takes forever. Well, less than a year on average, supposedly. So there are a lot of horror stories for what this can do to someone's life. This one person, Rivers what's the first name? Judy Rivers. Judy Rivers. Rivers. Cuomo police actually detained Judy Rivers from using because she used a debit card, her own debit card. At a Walmart? At a Walmart. Plus, she also had a Mountain Dew bottle size meth lab in her pocket. But it seems like all of these cases, it ranges from stuff like your insurance gets all messed up or your maybe disability checks or your Medicaid payments or trying to get a home loan or trying to get a credit card. Like anything that you can think of where Social Security number might help. You can't get a hair cut, right? You should see how long the hair is on these people. Even if you have cash, they won't do it. Rivers ended up living out of her car for six months. Yeah, she had just a really bad time of it for five years. And at first, she didn't know what was going on because she was frozen out of her bank accounts. Because this is something we said. You can't get future loans, you can't get future insurance policies, you can't get future credit. But also the stuff that you already have, your current bank accounts, all that stuff gets frozen because you're listed as dead. And so that comes up on the computer, and your account gets frozen. And even when you show up and say, hey, it's me. You know me, the seller can't do anything about it. The bank can't do anything about it. It's done. And now you have just been pitted against the system. Yes. And it's like there's no door you can go knock on and say, hey, we can clear this up in just a few minutes. I'm clearly alive. You just click the few little things you need to click to get my life back. Because the US. Government, it's not nearly that easy. So I guess that Chuck, that brings up what to do, because there are actually our procedures in place. Like we said, the Social Security Administration says this is not fully accurate. Anybody who gets this list needs to keep updating it as we update it. I think they released an updated list weekly. They don't even tell you, though. You find out the hard way almost always. That's a big one. Yeah. It's not like they say, by the way, we found an error because they don't know. They don't know you're alive. Right. So I actually called the Social Security administration. She did. I did, because I wanted answers. You didn't go to the office? No, I didn't. I was a little lazy. Coward. It wasn't cowardice. It was laziness. I was talking to just the guy who answered, and he knew exactly what I was talking about. New all the procedures. But I asked him, I was like, do you guys ever uncover this yourselves? Or is it when people come to you that you know there's a mistake? He's like, yeah, when people come to us. So supposedly there's all these reforms in place and all that, but I think still, for the most part when an error is uncovered, it's because you found it out. But even if they do find it out yes, what you said is true. They don't inform the person, which is kind of a violation of the privacy act, right? I would think so. From what I understand, it is like anytime your confidential information is breached and made public, you're supposed to be informed about that. So the SSA should be sending out letters, but as far as I know, they do not. I love this quote in here under the section on what to do. Like, the Social Security administration is trying to correct this. And there's a quote from someone who works there that said that sometimes they'll go out and see if older americans are really still alive. And it says this we go to medicare and see if anyone hasn't been to medicare for three years. And if they haven't been, we try to go out and make a phone call to call them and see if they're still here. And the interviewer was like, are you drunk? That's what it sounds like. That was the follow up question. Oh, man. Supposedly because of things like that, scripts howard news service investigation in 20, 11, 60 minutes did a big one, and I think 2014 or 15. This is right up there. Alley. Yeah, for sure. Yes, it is. Very 16, I guess, kind of story. Like the truth of what you just have ran through me like a bolt. But the Social Security administration has finally kind of started to be responsive, and they are supposedly undertaking reforms, including having investigators try to root this out themselves, which ironically, they're relying on other government databases, like this guy said, medicare to check their records against they've stopped taking reports from the state and now only accept direct reports from people. But that in itself opened up another problem because they went back and cleared out the records of like 5 million americans whose deaths have been reported from state databases. Right. So that 6 million went to something like 11 million of dead people who aren't on there now. Are they actually recommending that you pull your credit report three times a year? Yes. Really? Yes. That seems like I don't know that affects your credit. I don't know if that one does, really. I know it's free for sure, but I don't know if it affects your credit or not. But yeah. So you get access to the credit reports from the three big bureaus. Right. Have you set up calendar reminders? No, I'm going to now, like once a quarter for the rest of your life to make sure you're not listed as dead. I haven't had time today yet. It seems like if you're an active consumer in the world, you would find out very quickly, very quickly without having to do that. Yeah. That script service, though, when they found like 340 people who had been listed as dead, they tried to contact as many of them as they could. They said about half of the people were well aware that they were listed as dead and through nightmare struggles but strangely, like, half had no idea what they were talking about. So it's like, what kind of life do you have to live to not be aware of that? Because you or I would come up against it within a week or a month or something. It seems like there would be something that came up where it's like, wait a minute, it says this information isn't incomplete, or it says you're dead, or something like that. We find out pretty good. Or just to go get money out of a cash machine. Right. It might say, sorry your Pin doesn't work. But I think the recommendation is in addition to finding out that you're listed as dead, there's also a lot of other stuff that you can kind of keep tabs on by looking at your credit report three times a year, once every four months. Yeah. And they say the real solution for all of us would be if every company on the planet doesn't require well, here's the thing, though. They can't legally require your Social Security number to open up or start a telephone in your name at a home. Right. But they'll ask for it, and if you refuse to give it, you may not be able to get it all, or you may just have a really hard time. Yeah. They can refuse to do business with you. And that's the crux of the problem. Exactly. Because that de facto means that you need to play ball whether you want to give your Social Security number out or not. Tough. If you want that Internet service or that cable service or you want that haircut, you're going to have to play ball. Yeah. I remember growing up, I remember I had a Social Security card and I remember my mom. Being like, you got to put that in your desk drawer. I remember. Don't touch it ever. If somebody comes near your drawer, you shoot them with this gun. Yes. It was crazy. And now it's just like, I probably give out my Social like, twice a month. Right, but because of those breaches, because so many people have your Social Security number now, and because hackers have gotten really good at getting into things like, I think it was Experian or TransUnion who were hacked in 2017. Yeah, that was huge. Not only did it basically just totally erode the public's trust and credit bureaus to keep our stuff private, like, they were the ones who were supposed to be unhackable. Right. And I think 137,000,000 Social Security numbers made it out into the wild from that hack. That not only eroded trust in the credit bureau, it was the beginning of the end for using Social Security numbers like we do to authenticate or as Identifiers. Yeah. Companies, some are moving away from that now, right? Yeah. Because they're getting sued and they're getting fines, and they just realize they can't keep this stuff protected. The problem is no one knows what's next. A lot of people talked about, like, blockchain, but nobody understands blockchain, which, by the way, we should totally do a blockchain episode. Yeah. But everybody's kind of like, it's probably going to be blockchain, but first I have to go figure out what blockchain is, and then we'll figure out how to do Social Security numbers through blockchain. I'm sure in some offices they're like, you know, the old barcode on the back of the neck? Seems silly, but it sure would work. Have you seen Brazil? Should we take a break? Oh, yeah. All right, let's take another break, and we're going to talk a little bit about the rest of the world right after this. What if you were a gigantic snack food maker and you had to wrestle a massively complex supply chain to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno sesame and chocolate covered goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create Learn More@ibmcom consulting hey, everyone. 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Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page, and enter code stuff. So, Chuck, we're going round the world in 80 days in our nice little balloon. Actually, I said we're going to talk about the rest of the world. We're only going to talk about one more place in the world. Hey, man, I got Canada. Oh, yeah, the UK. Okay. Basically anywhere there's a country with a bureaucracy and a country where people die, there's going to be someone erroneously listed as dead. All right, so let's go to India. Okay, we'll do that. In India. It's not always an accident. Sometimes it's an error. But sometimes you can do what they call, quote, killing people on paper in order to say their property is mine. To lay claim to something. Legally, you can do so especially it's not legal, but it's something that happens. No, you can bribe an official who will say, yeah, okay, yes, this person is dead. Thank you for reporting their death. Here is their land, uncle or cousin or whoever. Well, supposedly in the northern state of Utah Pradesh, it's become a real problem there. And there was a man there. There is a man, yeah, he's still around. Named Lal Bahari, who in 1976, at the age of 22, found out he was listed as dead. And his uncle did his uncle do this or did his uncle just get the land? His uncle's family. His uncle's family. Oh, they're the one that purposefully listed him as dead just so they could get the land. Yes. He went to go get a business loan. He was a loomer. And he went to get a business loan. And to get a business loan, he needed documentation of his identity. When he went to go get that, the local records office is like, you're dead. And it took him 17 years to undead himself. Yeah. Fortunately for the world, he had a great sense of absurdity, of humor. Yes. But also the humor in absurdity. He realized, this is so preposterous, and he really used that as motivation to make huge moves. Yeah. He would answer the phone as dead person, which is Retak. Is that how you pronounce it? He would answer the phone like that. He organized the Utah Pradesh Retok Singh, which is the UDA Pradesh Dead People's Association, and it seems like really brought a lot of attention to this through almost like absurdist public demonstrations. Public shamings, too. Yeah, like parades of dead people walking around on the steps of the government buildings and stuff like that. And finally, in 1994, he did have his death overturned legally, did you see whether or not he got his land? I didn't see that, actually. Great question. I didn't even think about that. But yeah, I did not I don't know, about 221 people, because of his efforts in that area of India, had their deaths overturned. Yeah, that was just in one year, even. Which I think is cool about him is he founded this organization and got his life back in 94, but still stayed on as the driving force behind the Uter Pradesh Dead Person's Association and won an IG Nobel Prize for it. Not bad. We did an episode on that, too. You remember the IG nobels. Man, that was a long time ago. Yes. So one more thing. We never really actually said what to do if you end up listed incorrectly as dead on the Death Master file. Start answering the phone. As dead. Chuck yeah, exactly. Shame the government. Also, the other thing you're supposed to do first is go in person to your local Social Security administration. And by the way, this is information directly from the SSA to me, to you, because I called them. I know the guy said, just bring your driver's license and passport and we'll handle it from there. And I was like, Wait, that's it? He's like, yeah, the information matches, your picture matches. That's all you need. And you said, if I handle it, you'll mean nothing will happen here. That's right. And I go, So do you give the person so they give you a letter saying this person is alive, they were listed as deceased by mistake, give them their credit or whatever. We love you. Social Security administration. And I said, do you give the letter then once they prove it? Or he's like, no, once the file is updated, then we typically send the letter out. And I was like, how long is that? And it's weeks easily, if not months before you're going to get a letter. But if you find out the first thing you want to do, go to your local Social Security office with your passport and or your driver's license and say, surprise. Yeah, I saw that. One person even had to have a note from their doctor verifying that they were indeed alive. Yeah, weird life. That must be weird. So if you want to know more about the Death Master file, you can go look it up. It's kind of interesting, actually, as far as bureaucracy goes. And since I said bureaucracy, it's time for listener mate. I'm going to call this. This is a follow up on the rape kits episode, which we got a lot of amazing and sad stories from that one. This is about the money, the monies because remember on the show, we said that you have to pay for that stuff for treatment? Yeah, right. Apparently, you can get money back, which we meant to go back and rerecord a section and did not. Oh, yeah. So this is by means of following up on that. Hey, guys. Long time listener, first time writer. Finished the episode on rape kits and realized I could offer some information that will hopefully bring some peace of mind. I work as a medical biller for a hospital in the Midwest. Part of my job is processing the sexual assault claims that come in at our hospital. We have a program for those who present to the hospital after a sexual assault. We in partner with the state, cover all the charges that result from the initial Er visit, and the patient is given a voucher for any relevant follow up care that they may need over the next three months. That is awesome. It is. And we realize that a lot of states do this after we had recorded and published the show. Yeah. I'm so glad this person wrote in this. It is good to know. We also take steps to ensure that the patient will never see a bill or be contacted by our department in regards to their visit to reduce any retraumatization. I'm the point person for this process here. Handle all the claims. Personally, I'm not sure how many hospitals implement this program, but I hope this helps you all know that at least here we do as much as we can to alleviate any unnecessary burden from our patients during this stressful and sensitive time. That's really great. Thanks for all you guys do. You have transformed many days, years spent in a cubicle into opportunities to learn. Keep doing the great work. And that is from Maria. Thank you very much. That was amazing. Yeah, Maria, thanks for doing that job, too. That's tough stuff. That was the antithesis of another email we got who basically said, regarding your little soapbox about how society should take on that cost, keep your politics to yourself, because I disagree. I don't know if I saw that one. It was a bad one. And I just wanted to say that that person is a butthead. Oh, no, wait. Maybe I did see that. I couldn't even bring myself to respond. I think I did, and I did respond. Oh, what did you say? I don't remember. Did you tell them they were butthead? Go jump in a lake. There you go. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, whether we think you're a butthead or a saint, it doesn't matter. We still want to hear from you or a beaver. You can go on to Stephanieo.com, check out our social links. You can also send us a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, spray with perfume, 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 favorite show. 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. 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, hot, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. 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4430dbf6-53a3-11e8-bdec-eb0fdcd8262b	What's the deal with swing states?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-swing-states	Swing states are all the rage once again this election season, but the makeup has changed a bit. Learn all about what makes a swing state a swing state right now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Swing states are all the rage once again this election season, but the makeup has changed a bit. Learn all about what makes a swing state a swing state right now. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Tue, 06 Oct 2020 13:41:20 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=13, tm_min=41, tm_sec=20, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=280, tm_isdst=0)	45281749	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, chuck Bryan over there, and Jerry's over there somewhere, I think, in our office. And this is stuff you should know. The swinging super hip Cat Edition swing states, they're the swinging estates of all. They like to sleep with each other based on keys they took out of a fish ball. Should say up front. Thank you to How Stuff Works.com for this article, along with Politico, NPR, and, I think 538 blog, I got some stuff from you sound like you're giving an acceptance speech. Yeah. For Best Election Podcast episode Right. We are not going to win. Yeah. So this is on swing states, which are all the rage battleground states these days. Everybody loves them and have been for a while. But some of this stuff I thought was even enlightened me, and I thought I kind of knew most of this stuff. Yeah, it was one of those things that I found that you can make a lot more difficult than it actually is, at least just the general concept of swing states, but there's a lot of detail and info and history to it that makes the whole thing really interesting. So to keep from making the whole thing more difficult than it is, let's just define swing states at the outset. Okay? Go ahead. Swing states are states during presidential elections in the United States here that are so closely divided politically that they could go either way. They could vote one way or the other. And based on a lot of governmental ins and outs that will go over depending on which way they flip, they could make or break a presidential campaign and elect the president or deny somebody else the presidency at the same time. Even they can do both. That's right. And I'm glad you said that, because more than anything else in this episode, we want to drive or I want to drive home at least I'm sure you're on board. Okay. A swing state is not just a state that is very closely divided politically among its constituents, and it just could go one way or the other. It is a state where there are enough people in that state who can be persuaded to change who they vote for that it can make a state go one way or the other. We're talking down to the thousands or even hundreds of votes. Right. And that is why it is so important that everybody votes. Everybody votes. But especially if you live in one of these swing states, because there are believe it or not, there are people that still haven't made up their mind in this country, which is really surprising in this particular election because things have gotten super partisan and polarized in America, and they had been going that way for many years now. But I don't want to say it's reached its apex. I hope it's reached its apex. I'm sure it could get way worse. But things are real polarized here. So it is very surprising that there's undecided voters. And I remember from our election polling episode, we were saying one of the reasons that the state polling was so far off is because there were so many undecided voters at the end of 2016. That in and of itself is pretty surprising because the candidates were so different, things were so polarized then. It's even more surprising now if there's any undecided voters. But they're out there. There's not a ton of them, but there's enough of them to swing an election and swing a state. Yeah. Brookings Institution says 75% or more of a presidential candidate spending occurs in these swing states and they're spending on ads. A lot of it is ad buys and social media ad buys, robocalling, stuff like that. Right. But we should go over I know we did one on the Electoral College, but just for our friends across the many ponds, we should give kind of a quick overview of the very odd way that we do things here. Yeah. Because everybody thinks in the United States that everybody goes to the polls. And during a national election, like the presidential election, and elects the President, one person has one vote. And that is definitely true. Each person does have a vote. But the thing is, we have something called the Electoral College. And rather than directly elect the President through a popular vote, we have an indirect way of electing the President where all those people who go to the polls are going to the polls to cast a ballot, whether they know it or not, for the electors, for each party. So if you voted for Donald Trump in 2020, say, what you're voting for is not necessarily Donald Trump. You're voting for your state's Republican Party electors to go to the Electoral College to cast their vote for Donald Trump. Hopefully, that is the indirect way of electing the President that we have. And under this situation, under this indirect Electoral College set up that we have, you can actually get elected President without winning the popular vote. And that's what happened in 2016. It's happened four times. Yes, twice very recently. It happened in the 2000 election where Al Gore, I think, won the popular vote by half a million votes. Happened in 2016, where Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by almost 3 million votes. Like 2.9 million. Then it happened a couple of times in the, I think the 19th century, didn't it? Yeah, four times. The other two were pretty far back, and all four times Republican candidates lost the popular vote and ended up being winning the election. And we'll get into changes on the horizon as far as that goes. But to kind of put a pin in the Electoral College, how it specifically works is each senator from each state, which is two senators, because each state has two get a vote. And then for each representative in the House, they get a vote. And everywhere, except for Maine and Nebraska does what's called a winner take all. So if everyone in Georgia or if Georgia votes for, let's say, Joe Biden, then all the electors would have to vote for Joe Biden and cast that vote in Maine and Nebraska. What they do is and the goal here, by the way, is 270 electoral votes if you want to win the presidency. But they do the district system, which is they award two of those electoral votes to the statewide popular vote winner, and then they go, I think, just district by district, don't they? Yeah, they do. And so you can win if you win your statewide election in Maine or in Nebraska, you get two electoral votes automatically, and then you get one for each district that you won. Yeah, it seems a little more fair. It does seem a little more fair, but I saw that on FairVote.org, they said if you do the math, it's actually way less fair on national level. Yeah, maybe it works for Maine and Nebraska, but if all states did that, you would be able to eke out an even more imbalance between an Electoral College win and a loss of the popular vote. I thought somebody put out that there is a path to 270 electoral votes so you would win the presidency while also getting just like 23% of the popular vote. I like to think that that could never happen, but apparently mathematically with this setup of the Electoral College, it could happen. And the reason why is because, one, the Electoral College exists, like you said, and then two, because of that winner take all system to where it doesn't matter whether you win a state by one vote, you get all of the electoral votes for that one state. In creating swing states, the Electoral College also creates what are called safe states. And a safe state is where so many people so reliably vote for the party that that candidate is running for that you can just count on that state giving, like winning their electoral votes. And you actually start with the base of that. Let's say there's 170 solid electoral votes among 20 states for Democrats, right? That is what you would rely on, not just on Election Day, but throughout the campaign. And so you're not spending much time or money in those states because those are safe states. You don't need to it doesn't make any sense to do that. It makes way more sense to spend all of your time and money and attention on those swing states because those are the ones that aren't necessarily safe, but they're also not necessarily leaning the other way either. And you could conceivably put those swing states together to create that 270 or more electoral votes, which should lead you to the presidency. Right. But it's gotten a little tricky here in recent years because there are a few swing states that are kind of really solidly swingy, and then there have been a few that are more swingy or less swingy, and you have to make a decision as a candidate where you're going to spend your money and your time, and that's where polling comes in. A lot of people say that perhaps Hillary Clinton didn't spend enough time in certain states that ended up flipping to Donald Trump. It's all strategy, I think. Now we can maybe take a little extended sidebar here about this whole blue state red state thing, which I thought was very interesting. Yeah. Because here in America, we have blue states and red states. The blue states are the Democratic leaning states, the red states are the Republican leaning states. If you are sort of in the mix, maybe a swing state, they might call you purple in the news. If you hear that, that's what that means. But it didn't always used to be these colors, and I got this from NPR. I found it interesting to know that when the colors first started being assigned in the mid 1970s, the Democrats were red and the Republicans were blue. Yeah, supposedly blue was traditionally the Republicans color because it was the color of the Union during the Civil War, and the Union was led by Abraham Lincoln, who was Republican. And then also, apparently in Europe, the conservative parties are typically associated with the color blue. So it made more sense, at least at first, to have Republicans be blue and Democrats be red. And supposedly that's where it debuted back in 1976 here in the United States on NBC, because NBC was the first network to have to go full color. Right. And so on election night, 1976, they said, check out our amazing interactive map. Blue states are going to be ones that Republicans have won. Red states are going to be ones that Democrats have won and have did you see a picture of the map? Yeah, it looks like a giant stained glass window in the United States. It does not look super flashy or anything now, but at the time it was like, knock your socks off. Technologically advanced, I guess. Yeah. But here's the thing, is, those colors weren't locked in. Like, there was never any vote about those colors or anything like that. They just sort of went that way. As more and more TV networks went color, they went with other colors, and it got a little bit confusing. Depending on which network you are watching, you might see different colors representing different parties, I think always red and blue, but they were kind of flip flopped. And it wasn't until 2000 and The Washington Post, they credit Tim Russert, I think the late Tim Russert, he passed away. Yeah, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. They credit Tim Russert with kind of locking in what we now know as blue states and red states. Blue being for Democrat, red for Republican during the 2000 election between Gordon Bush. And these colors are important because it's in one of these writers in here. What's his name? Bill Bishop. He's from Texas. He wrote a book called The Big Sort and he kind of makes a really good point that it's become a shorthand of not just a leaning of a state, but sort of a lifestyle. Like, you hear things like it's a really blue neighborhood or a red community and you kind of know that's shorthand for a certain thing in this country now. Yeah. And part of the problem with especially designating entire states is like, red or blue is that it makes it seem like there's this homogenous group that the whole state thinks that way. And that's not necessarily true. I mean, there's plenty of states out there that are considered red states, but they were one by one and a half percent or 3%. It's like a very close call, but it went Republican in the presidential election, so it's a red state. Or like you said, you can get it down to like, community level, that kind of thing. And in doing so, all you're doing is sowing this division of tribalism that exists in the United States to where it's just so easy to have this allegiance to blue or red. They don't even make it donkey or elephant any longer. It's blue and red. It's one of the most basic things you can sort by, which is colors. And it's a real problem in that it somehow stokes that mentality that in group out group mentality that is so problematic in the United States right now and is drowning the country as we speak. Basically. I hate to say it, but it's absolutely true. It really is. And it's especially annoying if you have political leanings like I do and live in a state like Georgia that is for the past 20 plus years been solidly read. And then I used to live in California. I have plenty of friends in California who say things about places like Georgia with such disdain. It just bothers me so much. And this thing can be said for people on the other side of the political spectrum. It's not exclusive to me being a liberal in Georgia. I'm sure the same frustrations happen for Republicans in Massachusetts. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm quite sure. I don't know what article that came from. They point out that those people are some of the most die hard partisans. You'll find people who are minority in their state sure, because they feel like they're really carrying the flag for their party or whatever. But, yeah, it's a real problem. It takes away all nuance. And it also makes people think like, oh, you're from a red state. I can't work with you. My constituents won't like it if I work with you. Red state person rather than you're from Wisconsin and I'm from California. Let's figure out how to make this highway Bill make more sense kind of thing. Yeah. Emily and I have a lot of conversations about the lack of nuance in today's world, and I think that's one of the biggest problems we have going on right now. Nuance has been lost, and everything is carved very much into red and blue and black and white, and it's been sad. And you know what another thing that makes it sad, too is? It's not just like that's just appealing to the lowest common denominator. It activates in all people, including brilliant, intelligent people who are otherwise normally level headed. They still have that part of their brainstorm, and they're like, I'm blue, I'm red. I affiliate with that, and I hate the opposite. When you lose nuance, a lot of stuff goes out the window with it. All right, well, let's take a break. That was our first soapbox of the day. I thought we started out on a soapbox. Maybe the episode was going to be on, I think, pretty even handed soapboxes, though, right? Sure. All right, well, we'll come back and we'll build another soapbox in the next couple of minutes and we'll be back right after this. We're back on swing states. Right? And I think we should kind of talk about how they swing or how they have swung or swing recently, because with swing states, you kind of get this idea that they're the same all the time. That's just not the case, especially not lately. It seems like 1992 and 2016 were both watershed years as far as just completely recoloring the electoral map. And in 1992, Bill Clinton did it, and in 2016, Donald Trump did it. And it just surprised everybody both times. Yeah. 92. And if you're our age or younger, you might not have been super hip to politics when you were in high school, let's say, or early college. And you may not know that there was what was called a red wall. They didn't call it a red wall back then, but it was a red wall where Republicans had a pretty firm lock on the Electoral College in that from 1966 to 1988, 21 states voted Republican every single election. And that included, you might be surprised to hear, california, illinois and New Jersey. Virginia, and here's the one that's going to really make your heart stop vermont. Yeah. Traditionally, Republican voted 21 times in a row, and that is 191 electoral votes. So the Democrats had a pretty big disadvantage going into 1992, historically, meaning that they had to win more than three quarters of the remaining electoral votes for these quote unquote competitive or up for grab states. And that's not counting DC. Which Democrats have always got a lock on. Yeah. For the last 14 elections, DC. Has always gone Democrat. Right. So the common wisdom was that when George H. W. Bush went up for reelection. Not only was he in the incumbent president, which means that you're supposed to be favored, typically, he also had this red wall, which I don't know what they called it, but this lock on the Electoral College, and it was presumed that he was probably going to win. And then Bill Clinton came along and he flipped nine states from that red wall, not just the swing states, he flipped nine of those red wall states, which was 118 electoral votes, and ended up winning 370 to 168 in the Electoral College votes. Somebody bring me a sledgehammer. That's basically what he did, though it was pretty unprecedented and like you said, just flipped the political thinking in this country on its ear and flipped them so hard that California, Illinois, New Jersey, and Vermont haven't voted Republican since the 1992 election. Really reshaped the map. Yeah, he flipped those Republican lock states into Democrat lock states. That's right. And now they call it the blue wall. And they do call it the blue wall now because blue is firmly ensconced as Democrat. And there are 18 states supposedly among this blue wall, along with DC. That have voted Democrat in each of the most recent six elections previously, from 92 to 2012. Right. And that's when Trump came in and flipped it onto you once again. Yeah. So he flipped some traditionally Democrat strongholds like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and he did so by, first of all, energizing voters that hadn't really been seen at the polls, very much like voters without higher education diploma. A lot of rural workers, especially blue collar workers who had been lifelong Democrats, went out and voted for Trump and ended up taking I think he flipped more than just those three. Oh, yeah, he flipped five Maine in Minnesota. No, I'm sorry, he flipped those three. And that's how he won the Electoral College. But he almost won Maine and he almost won Minnesota. Right. And both of them were pretty strong Democratic states. Minnesota hadn't voted for Republican in like 50 years, and he came close to flipping that. And so here's the thing. We're talking about all these states being flipped because when the state gets flipped in an election, especially if it's kind of close or narrowly held rather than flipped, that state is probably going to be a battleground or swing state in the next election. Yeah. So if you're wondering, I mean, we'll list out the swing states and sort of in that drama right here. But if you're wondering if you might be in a swing state, it has to do with quite a few things. Obviously, the voting history there being predictable. If you voted for a long, long time for a specific party, you're probably not a swing state. If your demographics in that state are traditionally really support the same candidate, then you're probably not going to be a swing state. The fact is that most voters in most regions most regions of the states in this country, they have really different opinions based on the experience of just literally the physical place where they live. Right. So, like, the rural voters typically GOP or Republican, whereas people in metropolitan areas, major metropolitan areas frequently go toward the Democrats. And they have different experiences based on their geography and depending on how balanced that is, how big the metropolis is, how big the rural area is in a state compared to whatever metropolis or capital is there, that can make that state a swing state. Like, North Carolina is a really good example of that. There's a lot of highly educated tech types, scientific researchers who live in the research triangle in North Carolina, but there's also a ton of rural voters, too, who are active in politics, and those two balance each other out. And so North Carolina is very frequently a swing state in presidential elections because of that. Yeah. And I want to be clear. We're not like disparaging people who don't have college diplomas. There are all kinds of ways to be smart. There are a lot of people with college diplomas that can't change their oil on their car or build a fence, and those are other types of smarts. And they're all different ways to be smart. Yeah, I'm not saying that at all. If you listen to our election polling episode, a divide between college educated and non college educated voters was created in 2016 where it hadn't been there before. Exactly. And now that is a major part of American politics. Right. So along with North Carolina this year, and again, this is what they expect to see. It could be turned on its year once again and states could be in the mix that we didn't even forecast. You never know. But right now, they're saying that North Carolina, Arizona, Florida, always. Florida is so important. Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin. Some people say New Hampshire. Some people say Georgia That's a big one. That's a big one. Georgia hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential candidate, I think. Has it been since Clinton? Yeah, that's what I would say. Since 92. And I think Texas, remarkably, and Georgia have both drifted left by four points with each of the last couple of elections. And they're saying that it's going to be very tight in Georgia, and I don't think anyone is anticipating that it will flip. Right. But it's purple and in the mix for the first time in a long time. Yeah. Which is really saying something, because in Georgia, for many years, if you were a Democrat, it just did not matter. Like you just didn't need to bother to vote. And that's a big problem with swing states and the Electoral college that we'll talk about. And you mean that metaphorically, by the way. Right, exactly. But I mean, there's this whole concept of a wasted vote in a safe state for the opposition party. Their votes wasted. But we'll talk about that later. But just like there's some surprising states that are now considered swing states or battleground states in 2020, there's also some that have customarily been swing states that aren't necessarily and the big stand out one for that is Ohio. Ohio has voted for the President correctly, or I should say they went the nominee or the candidate that Ohio voted for has been the President, the one who won the presidential race in like dozens of elections, maybe not dozens, but they've been voting correctly for the President, correctly picking the president. I feel like I'm digging myself deeper into a hole here. Anyway, what that says about Ohio is that, wow, Ohio is like really a thinking group, politically speaking, because we have had Republican presidents and we have had Democrat presidents throughout the last few decades and Ohio has voted differently just about every time. And that says that Ohio is a long standing swing state. Well, Ohio is flipped in 2016 and there's a lot of political observers who are like, Ohio is now leans conservative, now a red state. And that's a really surprising turn of events for 2020. Yeah, I think Colorado, Ohio, and Virginia are three of the traditional swing states that have been taken off that list. Arizona and Georgia. I don't think Texas is officially on the list at all, but I think because Texas has always been so solidly conservative for it to eat towards the Democrats at all, just making a lot of hay. So there's a lot more talk about it on the news and stuff like that. Right. Because there's so much media influence and I think that the liberal media probably thinks that, oh, Texas is leaning, maybe we can help push them over the edge if we talk about it all the time. Yeah, probably because that's how things work. If you listen to the polling podcast and like you mentioned earlier, minnesota hasn't voted for a Republican in about 50 years and they have inched a little bit. Right? Yeah, I think Trump just missed Minnesota and Clinton just barely won Minnesota by like 3% and Maine by 1.5%. So those two are definitely in play, like they haven't been in a while. Should we take another break? Let's take another break and then we're going to come back and talk about, get this swing states. So Chuck, one of the things that we talked about early on is that swing states basically tell campaigns where they need to concentrate their focus, their money, their candidates time, election stops, that kind of thing stumping. And they do that. That's where the vast majority of the money goes is the advertising campaigns in the swing states. Florida is a really good example of a long standing swing state that gets tons and tons of advertising money. Yes, Florida is such an interesting state to me because it's really hard to pin down politically. And I think it's because I think more so than almost any other state except maybe California. I feel like there are more versions of Florida than almost any other state has versions of itself. Absolutely. Florida is not small. It's not the size of California. But you think about the gulf coast and then inland from the gulf coast, very different people. Yeah. The people inland wouldn't be caught dead in Florida. Yeah. You think about Miami beach in that area in key west and fort Lauderdale, and then you've got the interior of like the Tampa clearwater area, which is really different. Let's not forget about the most magical place on earth, orlando. Well, you've got Orlando and then you've also got up in the north borderline, georgia. You have places like Jacksonville and St. Augustine. And just Florida has so many different kinds of places within its own state. It doesn't surprise me that it's really hard to pin down politically because it's hard to pin down just sort of culturally, I think. Right. And because you have so many different places that geographically inform the voters that are so demographically diverse all in one state, then that of course is going to be a swing state in Florida. Probably always will be a swing state just for those reasons. Yeah. The retirees are a big. They always point to retirees in Florida. Traditional conservatives. But apparently the youngest three generations amount to 54% of registered voters there. Now that's surprising. Yeah. I guess the sad way to say it is that many of these people are dying. Yeah. Surely an elderly population is going to eventually die off. Then you got a younger population going to age into it. But it seems like right now the elderly population in Florida has been losing ground numbers wise while the younger populations have been gaining ground. That's right. They're coming after you for a state because you need all those young people to work to take care of all those old people. Sure. So Florida gets a tremendous amount of attention. A lot of money, a lot of campaign visits, all that stuff. And because it's a swing state, all swing states get that kind of stuff in presidential elections. But people in other states, especially in solid states that have gone one way for many election cycles, those people say, well, hey, what about us? We want attention. We want these campaign stops. We have things that are important to us that we want to talk to you about and hear from you about. We don't care about Florida, we care about Idaho. So come to Idaho and talk to us in Idaho. And the candidate usually says, like, I don't even know where Idaho is. Please leave me alone. I'm trying to pay attention to Florida and you're being very distracting right now. Yeah. And here's the thing. In my mind, I say, who cares if a presidential candidate comes and talks to people at a dumb rally? Does that really matter? But what. They do is it's not just a broad sort of let me make a stop there. It's very pinpointed and calculated. Like they might be going after a really specific constituency there, how close some of these swing states are and they might say, you know what, if we can get auto workers to vote for you will be set. Or if we can get people that work on public roads and infrastructure flipped our way, then we can win by 10 votes. And so they may make pit stops in these states to go to the factory. I mean, that's why they do that stuff. It's all just very calculated and very specific. Right. Because the viewer on TV is like, hey, I work in a factory and they're in a factory right now. They must mean that they really identify with my needs and wants. Well, true. And that's someone from another state that also just happens to work in a factory. But the people in that state feel like, wow, they're here to talk to the coal miners. Right? I can't believe they came to Michigan. No one ever comes to Michigan on purpose. Hey, we went to Michigan on purpose once. We haven't ragged on Detroit in a long time now. It's been a while. But that's really what we're talking about. Michigan is code for Detroit when you talk about not going to Michigan. But it's just interesting how pinpointed and how just like razor sharp and focused and laser focused campaigns are these days with talking to very specific groups of people. If they think they can win 1000 votes out of a state, that could make a difference. It can. Because again, here's why. Literally 1000 votes could make the president in a state because of that winner take all electoral votes. Whereas if those states use the district system like Maine and Nebraska, if you won 51% to 49%, you might get half of the delegates and they get the other half, basically. But the fact that it's winner take all is that, yes, those extra thousand votes really count in a good sized state for ten electoral votes, 20 electoral votes. So it's definitely worth spending that much time and focus on one single state. And a lot of other states resent a lot of non swing states, safe states resent swing states because they say basically it's up to Ohio and Virginia to decide who gets to be president. The rest of us are going to go vote as we're expected to. Because if you're in a safe state, it doesn't matter if you win by 1000 votes or win by a million votes, it's winner take all again too. So you're not going to pay that much attention and really in a way, you're not producing the president. That's a little cynical in my opinion, because without that solid safe state you wouldn't have that foundation that the candidate is building these swing state electoral votes off of. I don't think that's fully accurate, but there does seem to be like some sour grapes amongst state people. That makes sense to me most of all, Chuck, when you're talking about people who feel like their vote is wasted because they're voting for the party, that's the opposite of how the state traditionally goes. So if you're a Georgia voter and you're a Democrat for the last several elections, you could very easily feel like your vote was so wasted you might not even bother going to the polls because your vote, in this sense of Electoral College, this is a really good reason to do away with the Electoral College. As far as the Electoral College is concerned, your vote didn't count. You had no reason to go vote as far as electing the President goes because it was washed away and drowned out by all the other votes that went toward the other candidate. And since it's a winner take all system of electoral votes, your vote didn't matter because they were always going to win all those delegates because you were going to get outvoted. Right. And I'm glad you said president specifically, you should always vote for the President, of course, but there are so many ballot measures and local considerations on the ballot, local elections that really have such an impact that you always, always vote. But it's almost like filling out your census form in a way. It's the only information that we have of we're a state is politically is you casting your vote. Yeah. So if you cast your vote in Georgia like I do, and Donald Trump wins Georgia again, it's not a wasted vote because the Democratic Party will look up the numbers and say, wow, like they're doing now. Look how many Stacey Abrams almost got elected. The first African American female governor in the United States almost won in Georgia in an election that many people thought was undermined by the Republican candidate with voter suppression. And that was a big deal. So now that's why so much attention is on Georgia, because it's like you're filling out your little census thing. You're casting that vote and they're saying, okay, well, Georgia is in the mix now. We're going to campaign in Georgia more plus, also, there's another really good reason to vote in those situations as well. Like I'm sure other voters in Vermont who felt like they were probably wasting their vote in 1992, but they went dutifully to the polls and exercise their real basic important right as a citizen, their right to vote, and Bill Clinton ended up flipping the state. Had those people been like, it's just a waste of vote anyway and stayed home, that state wouldn't have been flipped. The same goes for Wisconsin and Michigan for Trump in 2016. So there's a lot of good reasons to go out and vote, even if you feel like your vote is wasted. It's just too cynical. And I understand, especially during the coronavirus pandemic. Things are definitely different. But under normal circumstances, especially the idea of just staying home and not voting unless you're protesting against your party's candidate, that's different. But you're right in a candidate. Okay, sure. I mean, just the idea of getting out to the polls on Election Day and participating in government on that one day every four years, even, it's important. It's just important in ways that you can't fully put your finger on, but you just know it's important and important enough to just do it well. It's a right that people in this country literally lost their lives to ensure, and it's a right that not everyone in this country had until fairly recently. And so it would be a very sort of privileged I know that word is thrown around a lot, but it's a truly privileged frame of mind to think, why bother voting when so many people in this country, women and people of color, didn't even have the right to vote within the last 100 years, right? So that's the only thing that really burns me up. Vote for whoever you want to vote for, but if you sit at home and you don't even vote, then just get out. And you know what Chuck voter Die is P. Diddy says is that Paddy. Yeah. So one other thing that really has grabbed me in the last several years is the idea when I was a younger lad, I was like, voting doesn't even matter. It doesn't count. Everything is controlled by the Illuminati anyway. Yeah. You're a young anarchist. Right. So the idea that the Russians are meddling in our election and that the candidates take the election so seriously and super PACs raise so much money to spend to try to sway people's public opinions. The idea that that actually happens in real life to me goes to support the idea that your votes actually do count. That voting really does matter in the United States still. And things are not so thrown off course and controlled and under the thumb of people who are really pulling the strings and calling the shots. That actually doesn't exist in reality. Voting matters. And I think that the threats to voting that we've seen over the last several years have really kind of driven that home for me. Yeah. And you know what? By the time this comes out, there'll be a couple of months to go before the election, or actually, maybe one month to go. Check your voter registration, make sure you know where you're going to vote. If you're voting early, make sure you understand that if you're voting absentee or by mail, make sure you fully understand how that all works. Don't be surprised on Election day. You don't want any surprises. You want to make sure you know exactly how you're going to vote and that you can ensure that you can vote. Absolutely. Go to USA. Dot gov to check out voter registration and to make sure that you are to confirm that you're registered to vote. I still check. Yeah, I checked recently, too, and then I tweeted it out on the Stuff You Should Know podcast Twitter platform, too. Totally. And we should put a bow on this one by talking a little bit about the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. You read my mind. And the NPVIC. This is a group of states that advocate for a different plan moving forward. These are states and people that say, how can a candidate win by 3 million votes or 500,000 votes and not be President? Because that is clearly not the will of the people. We have a broken system. Let's get rid of this electoral college. And right now there are Washington, Oregon, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, DC. And Hawaii are all signed up in a pass legislation to enter this compact, with several more pending. Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Virginia are pending. Right. And so what this compact says is the state signs on to the compact that says under normal Electoral College rules, we give our electoral votes to whoever wins the statewide ballot. Instead, we're going to give it to whoever wins the national vote, the national popular vote. So even if, say, Joe Biden loses Idaho, if Idaho was signed on to this and this thing were in effect, but he won the national popular vote, idaho would give its electoral votes to Biden. So that the states are going to follow the popular vote and basically go around the Electoral College. Yeah. Not by using the Electoral College. Yeah, because you can't abolish it. It would take a constitutional amendment and ratification by 38 states, I believe, to get rid of the Electoral College. This requires none of that. It's the state signing on to go around the Electoral College by using the Electoral College. And I mean, we should say, too, the Electoral College is part of the Framer's vision for the Constitution. But they specifically added this provision to keep the popular vote from selecting the President. They wanted to keep this elite group of politicos in charge of who actually picked the President, and they created the Electoral College to get in the way of the popular vote. Yeah, it's interesting. It really is. So that's swing states, eh? That's swing states. If you want to know more about swing states, start reading up on swing states. Start reading up on politics. It's pretty interesting stuff. And like we said earlier, go vote. Just vote. And since I said that everybody's, time for listener mail. This is from McKenna Bridge. And this is in defense of baby carrots. Just like Chuck, the thought of baby carrots disgusted me in the past, conjuring up images of towering piles of food waste that I imagined were the byproduct of the smooth little suckers. But we got it all wrong, my friend. While the baby carrot is, of course, a very manicured and aesthetically pleasing version of the real carrot pulled straight from the soil. Their invention basically changed the entire carrot industry forever. And there was a guy named Mike Yorosic who decided to smooth carrots down in the 1980s into these little aerodynamic bite size cylinders, and they were called baby carrots. He figured carrots were ugly and too plentiful to profit from as farmers, so they had a long growing season and the people just weren't buying them. So, Mike yusurik. I'm sorry. Eurosic introduces the baby carrot and boom. Carrot sales absolutely skyrocketed. And even today's, baby carrots frequently topped the list for the largest share of supermarket sales. Wow. Asking about the peels, guys. Well, they are just about the perfect byproduct for making carrot juice. Baby carrots are tasty, convenient, and turns out a wonderful invention. The more you know, right? Anyway, I'm not completely caught up on your podcast, so maybe someone has beat me to the punch. But I didn't want to chance you all making fools of yourself the next time Baby Carrots comes up. You guys are great. Keep up the amazing work. You're a loyalist. And baby carrot convert McKenna Bridge. And I even looked it up, too, and I think I saw that it was a myth that they are bleached. Sounds like something I would buy into. It sounds like something I'd buy into too big carrot or I'm sorry, small carrot. Yeah, carrots are bleached. The Illuminati really runs things, so I haven't fully vetted all that. But that's what Mckinnabridge says, is that they really turned around carrots as a whole and that they do use those shavings. That's really cool for carrot juice, is what she says. Well, McKenna, that was really great stuff. Thank you for trying to keep us from making fools of ourselves again. It's not going to stick. If you want to get in touch with us, like McKenna did, you can send us an email to stuff podcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-10-13-sysk-census-final.mp3	How the Census Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-census-works	Counting humans has been happening for a long, long time. It usually had to do with taxing them, but now census data can reveal a lot about a population and help satisfy its needs. Count us in for this episode.	Counting humans has been happening for a long, long time. It usually had to do with taxing them, but now census data can reveal a lot about a population and help satisfy its needs. Count us in for this episode.	Thu, 13 Oct 2016 07:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=287, tm_isdst=0)	42566707	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. The simplest way to look professional online? Visit squarespace.com google start your free trial, use the offer code work for an additional 10% off your first purchase. Google and Squarespace make it professional. Make it beautiful. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles, W, tuck, Bryant and Jerry. And this is Debbie Chanel. The podcast. There are one, two, three of us. You just took a sense of you like that. Yeah. I thought, this is much more interesting than I thought it would be. Wouldn't take much. I would guess most people's expectations of the census is that it's awfully boring. It's not at all. I don't know about that at all part, but yes, there are plenty of interesting factors to it that keep it from being awfully boring. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying it doesn't get you jazzed. It's not exciting, but it's interesting to me. I'm sure it's exciting to some people. People in demography statistical wonks statwonks, right. As we call them stocks. Oh, man. Just keep going. Yeah. There are plenty of people who find the census amazingly interesting. And that's who this is for. That's right. We got 2020 coming up, by the way, which just the name of it makes it an exciting census. The 2020 census. Yeah. And I should say we're talking about the American census. There are censuses everywhere. Yeah. It's not like every country does a census on a set schedule, but it's pretty common, actually, especially in Westernized developed countries, to do a census every ten years where you literally go out and one form or another count every single person living in your country. Yeah, I got a couple of facts about other countries, but this is largely about the US census. Okay. And in the US. We do our census every ten years on years ending in zero. That's right. I was like, I wonder if everybody does it like that. And again, it's kind of hit or miss with other countries, but I saw in the UK, they do it every ten years and years ending in one. Really? I was like, that is so foreign. Maybe they want to see what mistakes we make. Actually, probably not, because as we'll see, the census starts cranking up a full year before they even start taking names. Yeah. And actually, something else that surprised me about the US. Census comparison, we started long before they did. Our modern census started before the UK's. Modern census by several decades. I wonder if they were just like, oh, it's a bloody good idea, or I wonder if they just weren't concerned. They just looked around and said, there's lots of us, and that was good enough. Enough to rule the world. Sure. All right. So every ten years, like you said, it's the Commerce Department, the Census Bureau here in the US. Here in the US. Oh, boy. We're going to say that every time it is in the US. Constitution goes all the way back to 1790, back when there were less than 4 million people. 4 million. Back then, they didn't count slaves. They didn't count Native Americans. I think they did count slaves in the first one. No, I'm saying the 4 million people oh, okay. Was not counting those people. Are you sure? That's what it says. Okay, but I'm not saying they didn't count them in the census. I got you. Okay. Sadly, what that probably means is they were not considered people. So there's a whole federalist paper about this. There's something very famously called the Three Fifth Compromise. Oh, yeah. Remember that? I've heard of that. Yeah. Where the Southern states were like, hey, you got to count the slaves. And the Northern states were like, you guys treat slaves like property, so no, we're not going to count them in the census. And there was this deal struck called the Three Fifth Compromise, where slaves would be counted as three five of a person. Wow. Right. And the whole reason was that the Southern states didn't want to be overwhelmed by the larger, more populated northern states that weren't big on slavery, because ultimately, as far as it goes in the United States, when you are conducting the census, you're trying to figure out how many representative seats in the House of Representatives each state gets, and it's done by population. Yeah. And as you'll see, there are many other things that the census helps with these days. But the original two things that the census was supposed to do was to see who was fit for the military and available and to count people to see how many representatives you got. Those are the two biggies. Right. Let's talk about the first census. First of all, there were censuses in the Bible. All over the Bible. I remember reading about them when I was a little kid. Yes, you knew all about census, didn't you? But I did. There's a little debate on the very first census in the North American continent. On the North American continent. Yeah. 1576, some claim. Spanish King Philip the Two the Sequel. I just made that up. Spanish King Philip. Two electric boogaloo. The deuce that he wanted information about the colonies and I think sent Native American Indians through what is Mexico now with questions. Right. He hadn't thought it through very well, though. Now he sent them with these questionnaires in Spanish, I imagine. But the American Indians that he sent down there didn't speak Spanish. Correct. They apparently were not ones to quit or give up whenever they faced a hardship, because they just created their own system of hieroglyphics to depict what goods each town produced that would be taxed by the king of Spain. That's awesome. It is awesome. They even drew maps, their own maps, to point out where each town was right. They had no training whatsoever in cartography and they didn't speak Spanish. And yet they managed to come up with this apparently beautifully illustrated census that they delivered to King Philip II in the Texas State Archives, I believe, today. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I have to say, our article sites an article from the Prescott Evening Courier newspaper, and it's from 1950. This article is and it's pretty interesting, but if you scroll down on the same page, there's another little article. The headline is agencies asked to rid offices of Sex perverts from wow. I wonder what apparently there's a sex pervert purge in 1950 of government agencies. I wonder what you have to do in 1950 to be considered a sex perverse. I read, and it just said, proof of sex perversion. So who knows? Being gay, being a Peeping Tom, or it could have been anything but sexually assaulting a woman, I'm sure you're a sex pervert. It's pretty funny. I mean, not funny, but, you know, interesting. Yes. Other people say the first north American census was in canada back then. New France by Jean Tan for the king of France. And Talon actually went round to all the houses over the winter of 65, 66 counted all 3215 people of European descent. And then others say, no, we're going to officially say the US census was the first real census, even though I don't believe the real first one was in Mexico. The second first one was in Canada, but the real first one took place in the United States hundreds of years later. 1790. George Washington signed it into law, and the Constitution is actually just enumeration of inhabitants in quote. But as you'll see, as we go on, there are many more questions and things we can glean now, more than just the number of people. And now they're starting to get a little more back to basics. In the 2000 census, there was a long form one that had, like, 52 questions. Forget it. Yeah. Most people are like, I'm not answering this. I think that was probably when they changed it. Yes. In 2010, they came up with a short form one that was sent to everybody, and it was ten questions. Yeah. And as we'll see, literally three of those questions were, how many people are in your house? Yeah. The first three questions, different ways. Yeah. Because this is really the one. Right. I thought that was kind of funny. 650 US marshalls went in I'm sorry, 1790 for that first census. Got on their horses unannounced and went house to house all over the nation with their quill, pins, scraps of paper, literally counting heads, cost about 45 grand. The 2010 census. This surprised me, though. It shouldn't have $13 billion. And I thought, no, that's million, but it's billion. Yeah. And it was actually that was less than they expected it would cost. Yes. They came in under budget by 1.6 billion, so it's pretty good. I hope whoever was responsible for that made a name for themselves and a big fat bonus. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. In the form of, like, a $50 gift bond right. From the US Treasury. A long bond, by the way, Chuck. I was like, okay, well, $45,000 in 1790 obviously was probably equal to 13 billion. No, not even close. So West Egg inflation calculator doesn't go far enough back to 1090, but it does go to 1800. So in $1,800, that 45,000 would be 632,500 today. Oh, wow. So they were efficient on the horse, the scraps of paper and the horses and quill pens. I said some hardtack chewing tobacy, maybe a pot of beans, maybe. You're starting to get a little extravagant. That first census were the original 13 states, plus districts of Maine, Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee, which was the Southwest territory at the time. It's kind of funny. Southwest, yeah. Tennessee. Yeah. And these were, I imagine, in order, the things that you had to name on that census. Name of the head of the household, number of free white males over 16, number of free white males under 16, number of free white females, number of other free persons, and then the number of slaves, and then the number of sex perverts. Right. That was the very first one. We'll take a little break and come back and speed all the way up to 1880. Right after this. Yeah. Isn't that where Back to the Future three was set? Was it? It was somewhere in there. We're living in Deadwood. Did you watch that? I started to, and I was like, I don't have time for this. Oh, man. Oh, shout out to the great Tim Omenson. He's an actor on Deadwood, and he's a stuff you should know listener. Oh, yeah. Met him at Podfest. Nice. He's on JV Club with me, and he's great. He's like a real listener. Nice. And shout out to Kevin Pollock. Yeah. Who's another stubby senior listener we met at podcast. He bum rushed our stage during the middle of our podcast, which was very surprising. Yeah. That'll eventually be out, right? That's right. It's weird. It's like Kevin Pollock just came. Surreal. He was very sweet after. He was like, Man, I really am a fan guy. He's like, Cool, dude enough to come and watch you. And he brought along Wayne Federman, a great writer and comic who also was a listener. I didn't get to meet him. Yeah. I talked to him afterward about the Beatles. Well, obviously, he had met our shows coming out on Monty Python, and he had met Eric Idle the day before our podcast. Wow. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. The universe was circling him. He was the drain. That's right. So Kevin Pollock and his fiance. Hello. Wayne Federman. Howdy Tim Omenson? Good daysa. Nice. And Tim, by the way, is on that show Galavant, which is no longer around, but you can catch on Netflix. This is great medieval musical show that network is actually brave enough to make really cool. It was Coprock, but said in medieval times. Yeah, but good, right? Coprock wasn't good. I didn't see it. I didn't either. Okay. I was under the impression it was the same thing, that it was like, this is a musical cop procedural. What is this doing on television? It had nothing to do with whether it was good or not. It was just too weird. Anyway, thanks to those people and all the non celebrities who came. Sure. Everybody who came. Yeah. We don't want to just you don't have to have a big name for us to be appreciative that you came and saw a stinky, stupid episode. Of course not. All right, so I picked up in 1880, deadwood is What Sidetracked Me. And that's when they actually started using trained workers to work in the census. Right. Not just federal marshals with their pots of beans. Yeah. And then about ten years later, they actually had the first machine to help them count their information, which was primitive but useful. Dude, it was a computer. Yeah. The US. Census Bureau has this unsung history of basically being the first to use computers, right? Yes. So they had this machine that they built. I didn't see a name for it, but basically it was a tabulating machine. So starting in the 1890 census, the census takers, who, again, like you said, were now trained individuals. They were trained to punch a hole into the response. Right? Yeah. How many people under the age of 16 in this house? Four. They punch a hole wherever the four was. Right. Hanging chads. Pretty much, yeah. That's why you want to make sure the hole punched all the way through so you wouldn't have a hanging chad. That's right. And when they turned in these cards, they could feed them into this tabulator that would make note of which hole was punched and store this information. It was a computer that the Census Bureau was using in 1890? Yeah. It was a steampunk computer. Pretty much, yeah. It was operated by Will Smith. Was that Wild? Wild west? Yeah. Boy, what a sneaker. Did you see the TV show that it was based on, though, back in the day? Yeah. That was great. Yeah. What an imaginative TV show that was. Agreed. So they've used the real computers. Starting in 1950, the Census Bureau ordered one called the UNIVAC. It's one of those things that's huge and takes up a room. There's many machines working as one. Right. Like the Whopper. And then in 2010, they finally introduced GPS devices, and I didn't really understand why until I read the next three sentences. I stopped for a second. That's a weird thing to say, but there were mistakes. Up to 5% of people counted when census takers were doing this all by hand with paper, maps would assign people, 5% of people to the wrong congressional district. Accidentally? Did I say purposely? No. Okay. Yeah. I just wanted to make sure that they were cleared of any wrongdoing. Right. It was all a mistake. And now with these GPS coordinating devices, they have a .5 error rate, which is a lot better than 5.0. Very much. Yeah. So Gerrymandering will be that much more difficult, we hope. We need to do an episode. I forgot to say that for sure. And we should also say, since we're talking about our episodes, if you love this stuff, go listen to our population episode, where we talked a lot about census taking, and our Maps episode will really get your engine revving. Yeah. For real, if you're a GIS geek. Right. Or a stock. Right. So the Bureau works with the National Processing Center. It's not just like, let me take this form and look at it and write it down. It's very automated these days and pretty advanced. What they do to ensure its accuracy? Well, at the very least, thorough. Yeah. Like, they take a picture of every single finished questionnaire, so there's an image file of every single one. Okay. I'd say that well, that's not advanced, but that's inching toward advanced. They're like, Hold still, please. And then they have a scantron computer. Basically, it's like that 1890 computer, but a little more advanced. But it does the same thing. Yeah. Optical mark recognition. Right. So, like, you fill in the bubble, boom. This computer is on top of it. A little more advanced. Yeah, but it's the same principle. Yeah, but then it gets super advanced ICR intelligent character recognition. And isn't that just I mean, that's something that reads people's handwriting. Right. And remember we did another episode, the USPS. One on the post office. Yes. It was a great episode. Especially those of you who hear our stamps.com ads and think, we hate the Post Office. Go. Listen to our USPS. Episode, which is basically an homage to the Post Office. Yeah. Brought to you bystands.com so they use the same thing for mail. Right. They have computers that can read people's handwriting. That's right. And then there's a secondary process to where with the computers, like, I don't know what this is. There's a human that gets a picture of it, and they type in what it is. That's right. Yeah. And then they have a QA department to finish it all out. Yeah. I think they do, like, 100% of any kind of human data stuff. They go back and double check that's right. Until 1960, the census is pretty much a door to door affair. This is so dumb. And what that it was door to door? Yes. There's too many people by this time. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. We're talking tens, hundreds of millions of people. Yeah. But then they decided, all right, here's what we should do. Let's mail these out to people, have them fill it out, send it back, and we will just have to count the Chucks of the world who do not fill it out and send it back. Oh, yeah? You don't fill it out, huh? I didn't fill it out, not on purpose. It just got away from me, you know? Chuck, you just confessed to a federal crime. I know, right? Seriously? Yeah. It's technically against the law. 180,000,000 people in 1960. Oh, wow. Yeah. That is crazy to count them all. Yeah. I did not fill it out. I think you should now. Well, I will for 2020. No, you have to do it for 2010, too. No, they found me. They came to my home. Oh, okay. I got you. Yeah, I just didn't fill it out and send it in. You didn't chase him away with the crossbow? Well, should we talk about that? No, I'm getting ahead of us. Okay. Sorry. Boy, that's a good tease, though. People like to just say crossbow. We did an episode on crossbow, too. Yeah, that one wasn't very good. Oh, yeah, that was fine. It was thin. Yeah, it was a long time ago, though. They were thinner then. It's better than Jack Hammers. Gosh, we should have an episode where you just talk about all our stinkers. That's pretty much every episode. So 74% in the 2010 census returned those census forms, so not bad. And the remaining 26% of people had to be counted by the 1.4 million workers that are broken down into four categories right. There's. Like, of that 1.4 million, like, almost 600,000 of them were the people who actually went out onto the streets and said, hey, you didn't send in your form. What's your problem? Don't you love America? They're called enumerators. Yes. They're also administrators who basically manage the divisions statisticians. They check their math and the demographers, like you were talking about, who totally walk out on all those numbers. Yeah. They're the ones who take these numbers, because, think about it, we're talking about ten questions, the first three of which are how many people live in your house, right? Yeah. And these guys can basically suss some pretty interesting information from just information like that. They can predict the future. They can call the lotto numbers. They can do all sorts. If you have a neighbor that's a demographer, you want to make friends with them. Yes, that's right. Because they can make you very wealthy. Josh, why would you take part in a census? Why is it a big deal? Again, first of all, to not take part is breaking the law, Chuck. But aside from that, the big picture, there's actually a lot that's done with the census. So yes, it's figuring out which states get how many seats in the House of Representatives. Correct. It's also figuring out where people live. They're double checking that their addresses on file. They have a national database of all the addresses in the United States, every single address. And they're going back and double checking all of them as part of the census. But ultimately, they're figuring out what to do with about $400 billion in state and local aid that the federal government distributes every year. Yeah. So every census equals about $4 trillion worth of aid and how it's going to be allocated. That's what the census figures are used for? In part, yeah. So if you're like, well, I don't want to take that stupid thing, but I like my roads to be serviced, and I like to have that fire station nearby, and I want to make sure there's a good school that can house all the students that live here. Right. And I want there to be a senior center for mom and dad. Yeah. And, boy, it would be nice if there was a public library kind of closer to me. Right. And would it kill you to put in a hearty kind of true, though. Sure. Because the private sector uses census numbers to determine where to open the hardies right, but just hardies, yes. No, but maybe where to open up a factory plant or something. I mean, there are many, many, many things that the census will satisfy that will help you out to make sure that you have everything around you that you need for a healthy community. Right. Plus, those maps, again, are really important because usually 911 emergency services use census maps to basically move around the area. And if you're worried about your privacy, it is held private for 72 years, this information. Yeah. And a lot of people are like, whatever, since this takers are blabbermouths, actually, they are sworn to protect your privacy. That's part of their job, no matter what. Like, this is anonymous. Right. And secondly well, I shouldn't say it's anonymous. It's sealed. This information is sealed between you and the census taker. Right. And then, secondly, they face a really stiff penalty if they do share your information with anybody, whether it's their best friend, their lol about your stupid answers, or with, like, say, any sort of welfare services or law enforcement, I believe they're not allowed to share any information. Like, the cops can't use the census to track people down. Right. The military can't use it, the IRS can't use it. Immigration can't use it. Yeah. So it's a five year prison penalty and 250 grand. So it's pretty serious business. Yeah. If they break that confidence, yeah. And they figured 72 years it seemed like a weird number to me, but it is a weird number. I guess they were like, if you get counted in a census, then by the time 72 years later rolls around, might be dead or you don't care. It probably has some sort of free Masonic numerological substance to it. Yeah, I can see that. But what's neat about it, though, Chuck, if you ever need to prove your age or where you live or anything like that, you can write the Census Bureau and be like, I know this is under wraps for 72 years, but I need proof that I'm saying, I am who I am. Right. Please provide me with a sheet. And Census Bureau provides a letter on your behalf saying this person lived at this place at this time. Our guy counted them. Pretty cool. Yeah. Should we take a break? Let's chuck all right. We'll come back and we'll talk a little bit about how this whole thing actually works. Chuck, I want to go on record also as saying when I say guys, I'm using it in a completely gender neutral sense. Yeah, we say guys a lot. Some people don't like that. I know. I mean, it gender neutrally, but the same people who don't like that also don't like the fact that you're using it general neutrally. I see what you mean, but let's get back to censusing. Okay. In 2010, like I said earlier, they started hiring people. The work begins on the census a couple of years beforehand. Right. That's the easiest way to say it. Start recruiting people to work. About January 25 of the census year is when they start actually counting people in Alaska. Yes. That's where this starts for a while. Since 1990, I think you said. Yeah. And it makes sense. Why? Oh, because about the time that the census really gets started, the rural Alaska experiences the spring thaw or the breakup, and travel becomes very tough, and everybody leaves home to go do other stuff because they've been cooped up in their house the whole winter. Yeah. I thought it was a very sensible reason. I thought it was just some cool old tradition. That's pretty new, actually. Yeah, exactly. So they start in Alaska. They actually count people there. Then in February, that's just sort of, let's get Alaska taking care of. Right. And then we can move on to other things. So in February, they send forms in advance to rural areas where these forms have to be delivered by hand. Then in March, the other folks receive a letter saying, since this is coming, get excited. Pretty much. Yeah. And they just have to sit around and wait for the census letter to come after that. Yeah. But what you do is, with that census's coming letter, it gives you the option of what language you want to get your census in. Right. Which is Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Russian. Or a Spanish English edition. Spanish. Yeah. And then in mid March, the actual forms are mailed. There's 120,000,000 residences in the US. Yeah. And, you know, one thing that really stood out to me when I was reading this, as we'll get into this stuff here in a second, is how many different ways there are to live in the United States. Yeah. There's places maybe, right. There's a thing called the residence rule yeah. That the Census Bureau had to come to terms with. And apparently, every census, they have a public hearing on the residence rule and if it needs to change or include other stuff. But it basically says where you spend most of your time sleeping, where you sleep the most is considered your residence as far as the census goes. Yeah. Even if you have another permanent residence, if you are sleeping under an overpass, that overpass counts as your residence during the census. Yeah. And I just thought you go to the houses, go to the apartments and the condos. And what else is there? Like dummy overpasses. I mean, there's dormitories, like, where college students live. Yeah. They get counted there. There are homes for senior living, assisted living homes. Yes. There are prisons. Yeah. They get counted. There are you might live in a boat at a marina counted there. You might live on an aircraft carrier counted there. What else? Shelters, trailer parks. Yeah. So one of the things that the Census Bureau has gotten kind of good at is making contact with local social service agencies, local nonprofit organizations, and saying, where do your transient populations, like, say, migrant workers, undocumented immigrants, homeless people, where do they live? Can you take us to them so we can count them? Because, again, they're trying to count every single person who lives in the United States, whether they are here legally or illegally, whether they live in a car or whether they live in a mansion. They're trying to count every single person, and some of it's super easy. Again, they send 120,000,000 census forms out to the residences. That's the easy part. Right. The hard part is going and finding people who have these nontraditional residences, hotels, people who live in weekly hotels. You got to count them. And one of the confounding factors of the whole thing, Chuck, is let's say your son is away in college or prison. Right. You're probably going to be tempted to say, well, he's going to be back eventually. This is his home. This is his permanent address. The Census Bureau constantly has to fight with that and be like, no, don't count them. They live in prisoner. They live in college. They are home in three to five years. Right. Which could be college or prison. Exactly. A lot of people that fill out these forms don't speak English, like, enough to fill out the form, and they may not even know to ask for the bilingual form. So they actually have online guides in 59 languages, telephone assistance in six languages, and 33,000 in person assistance centers across the US. Right. That are staffed. And I think very wisely, the Census Bureau realized that a lot of those households where the heads of households don't speak or write or read English very well may have kids who do speak English and read and write English very well sure. And could actually help their. Parents with this. So they started in 2010, especially a big push to the schools to get kids jazzed about the census and basically teach them how to talk to their parents about it and how to fill out these forms with their parents. Yeah. They send them a little kit, a little fun kit, complete with, like, coloring, color, the briefcase, kind of. Right. So back to the year, how the year shakes out. Completed forms are due by April 1 of the year, and May through July. They are coming the streets, looking for those people who didn't fill out the forms and looking for the people, like you said, in all these nontraditional homes, I guess we'll call them. Or if they don't have homes, just nontraditional places where people dwell. Right. And then July through December, they are analyzing all that data, and by December 31, they are required by law to report the new apportionment numbers to the president for the congressional seats. Right. And then they have till April the following year for all the data collection to be sussed out. Right. So it's a year's long process, I guess. What is that, two and a half or three years to complete a census? Yeah, that's just the actual census. Then there's also the work of, I guess with every census, you're also putting the last census that was 72 years old up on the Internet now. Right. Or it used to be on microfilm. Now it's up on the Internet. So the Census Bureau is always working. Yeah. We forgot one group of people that really cracked me up. Carney. Yeah, they mentioned carney's in here. Yeah. Got to count them. Yes. Traveling. Got to catch up with them first. Yeah, I imagine carney's probably aren't census friendly. You never know. I'm sure it depends on the carney. Can't pigeonhole them. You're right. Even if you're a pigeon, it's a longstanding motto here. Don't pigeonhold the carney. That's a T shirt. So on the actual form, like you said, it's gotten a lot shorter these days. And we kind of joked a few times about the fact that the first three questions are who's living there? But here's how it breaks down. How many people live in the household? Question number two were there any additional people staying here on April 1 that you did not include in question one? And finally, question number three says, just name everyone in the household. So you really want to make sure they get that correct. Yeah. You're also going to have to fill out things about your gender, your age, your race, what kind of Hispanic origin, perhaps your relationship to the head of the household. The actually, Alaskan Native tribes are not very happy right now because apparently in the 2020 census, they will be asked, are you a member of an Alaskan Native tribe? If so, what tribe? And they're like, what business of this is yours? They're not very happy about this. Whole thing. And that was the newest thing I heard about the 2020 census that's going on right now. Well, you got to roll with the times. In 2000, they started allowing more than one race to be selected. And that got me thinking about gender identity and if the US. Was going to do anything like that. Yeah. In like, 60 years, probably. I haven't seen anything for this next one in 2020, but I did see that Australia and the United States I'm sorry, australia and the UK. Have both planned to include gender identity options is that right? In the next census. Wow. But ahead of the curve in the US. For real. No surprise in Australia, actually, is people are mad there this year because apparently previous to this, they're doing their census right now, I think in 2016. And prior to this one, all the connecting information was optional. Identifying information. Like, you didn't have to put things like, I guess it's just different than the US. Like your address and stuff like that. You didn't have to connect. I think they were literally discounting people. And before Christmas last year, they sent out a press release saying that it's no longer optional, all this information, identifying information is going to be collected and stored in perpetuity, including things like your name, where you live, how much money you make, and stuff like that. And a lot of people got really ticked off. Sure. And they said that's leading to where they predicted it would lead to a lot of people just lying and giving a bunch of garbage data. And that's supposed to be on the census? Yeah. I thought they were starting to move more toward the model of including questions like that on the American Community Survey. Well, this is Australia. Got you. Yeah. Sorry. I think the way I read it was that previous to this year, it was just kind of counting heads. Got you. Yeah. That's very invasive. Yeah. You could optionally fill that stuff in, but now they're saying you have to. You have to. So who knows? And then we kind of teased earlier about people about a crossbow. Yeah. There's competing theories on what kind of job census taker is. Right. Yeah. Some people say it's a great job. It's very flexible. It pays in some places like $12 plus an hour. You get to write off the mileage you put on your car. Sure. Great job out on the streets, fresh air. Sure. Other people say it's an extremely dangerous job and one that the Census Bureau tends to downplay despite the fact that there are hundreds of incidents of census takers being threatened or attacked. Just doing their job. Senseless. Senseless. Violent. Yeah. And the crossbow guy in particular is the guy in Marion, Ohio, who had a no trespassing sign posted on his property and a picture of a crossbow. All right. If you're a census taker, that's meaning legally, that doesn't have anything to do with you. Right. You are basically a deputy federal agent carrying out your business, and you are allowed to walk up on somebody's property, even if they have no trespassing signs posted. Well, the guy in Marion, Ohio, said, hey, I would like you guys to leave. By the way, I have a machine gun here. And they started to leave, and he wanted, I guess, to make sure that they did leave. So he escorted them down his driveway holding his crossbow, not necessarily in any kind of threatening manner, but just holding it. And apparently no charges were pressed against the guy. I guess he did everything right. But there's apparently I was reading this article in the Seattle Times. I wonder if they were just like, we'll just put you down for one. Yeah. He's like, don't do that either, because I guarantee that guy lives alone. This article from 2010 in the Seattle Times, since his workers didn't count on such an angry reception, and I'm sure this makes it sound way worse than it is. Well, they said most people were great, right. But this is a collection of all the worst horror stories, which makes it an interesting article. Plus, 2010 wasn't it all depends on the year. Right? It's in a great time. Like, people weren't loving the government in 2010. Some people directly cited that they didn't want to help Obama out, so they weren't going to do the census. Oh, boy. People were attacked by dogs. One person was attacked with a baseball bat. Another census taker had a patio table thrown at her by an irate woman. There was just a lot of incidents like that. And it was mostly anti government, right? Yes. People yelling out, get out of my face with the government stuff. Right. Some people didn't make any threats, but, yeah, they were really incensed that the government was asking anything about them like that. And the census workers were like, this is crazy. People are really mad out there. They came back with news of the real temperament of a lot of Americans, and it was angry. Wow. Some of them quit. They're like, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm risking my life. For what? The census? Who cares? It's an interesting article. It gives you, like, a different perspective of it than that. Yeah. We're going to allocate money to government services. Well, I'm sure by 2020, everyone in the United States will love the government. Sure. Regardless of who wins the 2016 election. That's right. Yeah. You got anything else? Nothing sweet. Well, if you want to know more about censii, you can type census into the search bar. Houseoffworks.com. Hello. Since I said it's time for listing or mail. All right, I'm going to call this. We helped with anxiety. Good. Hey, guys, I want to write and see how much you have impacted my life. My name is Jared. I'm a graphic designer in Birmingham, Alabama. I grew up in Kennesaw, Georgia. Wow. Grew up in Salt. Sure. His family had to own a gun by law. Remember that? Is it still on the books there? I'm sure. I wonder if Jared was at our show in Birmingham that ended up being despite the smallest show, we did one of my most pleasured shows. Well put. Pleasure. It was great. That little theater was awesome. It was the workplace theater. Yes. Cabaret style. They were great. It's intimate and cool. Felt like people are sitting on the stage with us virtually. They practically were. So, anyway, he's in Birmingham. I have a horrible panic attacks, guys, and a panic disorder. There's just something about both of you, though, your demeanors and the tone of your voices that really calms me down in the car or at work, which is where most of my panic attacks take place. I know I feel for them. I don't know if any other anxiety suffers. Also, experience your show in this way. A lot of the time when I feel my anxiety rising, I pop in the headphones or plug you into my car stereo and calm myself down with some stuff. You should know your show has greatly impacted my life in its relationship to anxiety. I love you guys. Love the show. I always want to keep getting the word out about anxiety, taking away the stigma of mental illness. You guys do a great job. That is Jared, a humble fan. Jared wrote back today. He was very happy that we're reading this. Good. And I'm glad that we can calm you down a little bit, bud. For sure. Jared. Yeah. I hate to hear about your troubles, and they're always going to be here for you every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't worry. Nice. Chuck? Yeah. If you have a story like Jared, if we've helped you in some way, shape or form, we love hearing stuff like that. You can tweet it to us at SYSK podcast or to me, Josh Clark. You can post it on Facebook. Charlesw Chuck Bryant or Facebook. Comstuffynow. You can put it in an email. It's stuff. Podcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the Web stuffyoushaneo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1234388619004hsw-sysk-friday-thirteenth.mp3	How Friday the 13th Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-friday-the-13th-works	What is it about Friday the 13th that gives us the collective willies? Discover the surprising roots of this common superstition -- and what paraskevidekatriaphobia means -- in this HowStuffWorks podcast.	What is it about Friday the 13th that gives us the collective willies? Discover the surprising roots of this common superstition -- and what paraskevidekatriaphobia means -- in this HowStuffWorks podcast.	Thu, 12 Feb 2009 13:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=43, tm_isdst=0)	20444208	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. This podcast is brought to you by Audible.com, the Internet's leading provider provider of spoken word entertainment. Get a free audiobook download of your choice when you sign up today, log on to audiblepodcast. Comstoday for details. Hey, there. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh. Chuck is with me, as always. Prison. Couldn't live without them. You put the two of us together, you get a lumpy little podcast called Stuff You Should Know. Right, Chuck? And that's what you guys are listening to now. And if you are listening to this on its original publishing date, you should be nervous, because that means that tomorrow is Friday the 13th. Indeed. And before we really get started, Chuck, I think we should give a proper shout out to two of our listeners, cameron Clark and Parry Gabriel. Right. This is actually a listener suggestion. Yes. This is our second one. The first one is body armor. Yes. And both Cameron and Pari independently suggested that we do a podcast on Friday 13th. And we haven't gotten to the bottom of whether or not they're separated at birth or anything like that, but it's a swell idea. It is. So here we are right the day before. So, Chuck? Well, actually, I'm a terribly superstitious person. I can't really say that I'm not, but I know people who aren't that still kind of take a little extra measure of caution when Friday the 13th rolls around. Right. Are you like that? No, I'm not really that superstitious. And I don't really think about Friday the 13th. It's not even on your mind? No. I mean, I realize that if I look at the calendar, but I don't think two things about it. Got you. Okay. Not one thing. I am of less intellect than you. No, you're just more superstitious. That's the same thing. So, Chuck, I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's actually a phobia, the genuine phobia. I don't consider myself having a phobia, but there is a phobia on the books. And this is all you, buddy. It is all me. And that word that phobia is Parischevideka Triophobia. That is awesome. Thank you. Very hard. It looks like the alphabet. When I look at the word, it is, it looks like the Cyrillic alphabet almost, right. It's, like all consonants. But that is the actual fear of Friday the 13th, and people actually do suffer from this phobia. True. One of the weird things about it is this particular phobia, Parisvidecatriophobia, is a completely cultural construct. Western? Very much so. To begin with. Yeah. So let's get into this. Why do people hate 13? First of all, have you noticed in our building there's no 13th floor marked on the elevator? Right. Even though there is a 13th floor, it is marked 14. Right, okay. But yes, it's still a 13th floor. You can call it whatever you want. True. I call it 13th. Yeah. You can put lipstick on a hockey mom and still a pitbull. Right. And it's not just floors and buildings. Hotels often don't have a room. 13. Right. Planes don't have the 13th row. That's just weird. Right. It's unusual to me that it's played such a role in our culture that they actually go out of their way to do this. Yeah. And let me give you one more. Okay. Little League baseball yeah. When I wore the number 13 0.0 batting average for the season, hitting the head twice. So it's entirely possible that 13 isn't a very good number, possibly an untoward number. Right. It's possible that you stink at baseball too. That's actually much more likely, but okay. So anyway, this is old, and like you said, it's rooted in Western culture. And actually the fear of Friday the 13th is the convergence, actually, of two superstitions, 13 and Friday. Yeah, we haven't liked either of those things for a while. And it's not just this Western conception of Friday. 13th being a nervous date is actually rooted in Norse mythology and Christianity. And they seem very separate, but they actually came together and one played off of the other to develop this current fear we have. So you want to take it? Well, I can tell you a little bit about the Norse aspect of it. In Norse mythology, there was a hero called Balder, and Balder was killed at a banquet by another god, Loki. Did you ever read Marvel Store Comics? Oh, yeah. Loki was always the bad guy. Yeah. And so Balder was killed by Loki, who basically crashed Balder's party. It was a dinner party of twelve, and he was the 13th guest. So that story, when you tie into Christianity, the Last Supper, judas who betrayed Christ was the 13th guest. Yeah. So one of the common fears or common things is never go to a dinner party of 13. Yeah. It just seems like a good rule of thumb after those two very monumental experiences in history under the circumstances. Okay, so you said that kind of ties in this Last Supper and then this banquet in the Christian religion in Norse mythology, right? Yes. There's actually kind of a school of thought out there, and it basically says that Judaism, Christianity, and pretty much everything that came after that is rooted in ancient Egyptian religion. Okay. Did you know this? I did not. You're schooling me. Okay. You ready? Yeah. So there's this guy named Tom Harper. He's an historian, and he compiled a book in 2004 called Pagan Christ. And you can make an argument that he gets a little too granular, like he's proved his point too much, and perhaps he's being led to see what he wants to see. Right. But basically, he argues is that Christianity and Judaism just basically took popular beliefs that have been around for centuries, thanks to the chemites the ancient Egyptians. Okay. Specifically between Christianity and the ancient Egyptian mythology, horace, who's like the main guy. Right, which we'll get to later. Yeah. In listener mail. Horace and Jesus Christ bear a very striking resemblance. Just some of the details. First of all, they're embodiment. They're like the savior of mankind right. Under each religion. But then there's details, too. Both were born in stables. Okay. Both births were heralded by stars. Both had the ability to raise the dead. And the births of both of them were witnessed by shepherds. It just kind of goes on and on. I know that he finds a couple of hundred comparisons. Really? As you look at some, you're like, yeah, that's kind of a stretch. But some you're like, these are really close. Right. And it's not like the ancient Egyptians were without contact with anybody. Right. The Greeks learned most of what they knew about mathematics and astronomy and all that from the Egyptian. Sure. So all these people were interacting. It's entirely possible. The thing is, Harper doesn't necessarily manage to prove anything. He illuminates a bunch of stuff, which I think was his intention. But it does undermine this competition that it seems like the early Christian church had with everybody else. Right. One of the parallels between Horse and Christ, their birth were celebrated around the same time. Right. And people point out that things like the choice of when Christmas lies on or when Easter lies on, these were kind of placed around the time of pagan holidays to compete with them. Interesting. So people would have to choose. They couldn't go, well, I'm going to be pagan on this date, and then a month down the road, I get to have Christmas, too. That's not good. Right. If you're going to try to get everybody to your flock. And one of the pagan groups that were heavily targeted by the early church were the Norse. Right. And there's an idea that 13. They already didn't like 13. Sure. But the north were also very they venerated women. And the early church is not big into women having power of any kind. Yeah, that's true. So Friga, who is actually balder, the hero Balder's mother, she used to show up at witch covens. So there'd be twelve witches and she'd be the 13th. Right. Under Christian cosmology, anytime you've got twelve witches, the 13th one is going to be the devil. Exactly. All these competition created all of this. Accepted ideas in one culture were horrible and bad. Under Christianity. It was competition. Right. That's good stuff. Thanks a lot. I'm impressed. Okay, so the day Friday, actually, in Christianity is also unlucky considered to be unlucky. Yes. You want to take that? Sure. Supposedly Christ was crucified on a Friday. Not say supposedly. That's what they say. Right. And some theologians excuse me, say that Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit on a Friday. So that's another bad mark against it. Really? The great flood began on a Friday when Noah built the ark and flooded the Earth. Noah didn't flood the earth. He built the ark. And a lot of Christians in the past would not begin any new project or trip on a Friday because they thought it would be doomed. Yeah. So you take that Friday and you take the 13th and you marry them. And a lot of people think that that's why Friday the 13th came about as badness. Yeah. So is that the case? Is that true? Is there badness to it? Well, it depends on who you ask. There have been studies here and there. There was one in 1993. The British Medical Journal published one. I love this title. Is Friday the 13th bad for your health? Yeah. And they compared a ratio of traffic volume to the number of automobile accidents on Friday the 6th and Friday the 13th over a period of several years. And what they found out was consistently fewer people chose to drive on Friday the 13th, but the number of hospital admissions due to car accidents went up compared to a normal Friday. Did they conclude that it was possibly because people were a little more on edge on Friday the 13th or what? I think that was one of the conclusions, yeah. Which sort of makes sense. But that is strange that there is an increase on Friday 13th right. Which goes back to the thing that you were talking about with Harper. Perhaps. When you're looking for something, you're bound to find it. I remember. Did you see the movie Pie? Yes. Darren Aronofsky's first film, drilled to the head. That was tough. They raised a similar thing when the old guy kind of assaulted the dude and said, if you look for any number, you're going to find it. If the number in your head is 24, you're going to find 24 steps to your apartment 24 times that. You use the whisk to beat the eggs, that kind of thing. Right. So perhaps that plays a part as well. Yeah. There's a psychological bias, I guess. You're preparing yourself. You're looking harder than usual. Right, that makes sense. Well, if you went to Italy on Friday the 13th, you would probably find very few people who were particularly moved by it. True. In Italy, actually, the unlucky number is 17 because under Roman numerals it would be what? X VII. And if you rearrange them to V I Xi, that he lived. And it's past tense. And you often find that on gravestones. 17 is an unlucky number. True. Because try scaring somebody around here with 17. It's not going to happen. They'll just blink at you a little bit and walk away. I've got another couple of examples of 13 being a good thing. In Judaism, 13 is the age at which a boy matures into a man and you have your bar mitzvah. So that's good. Colgate University. Did you know this one no, I didn't share this one with you. They are a liberal arts college in New York State and they love the number 13, the tradition there. They said Colgate was founded by 13 men with $13 and 13 prayers and 13 articles, and the university is actually at 13 Oak Drive. So every Friday 13th, they throw a big party, basically, and really embrace it and wear the school colors and that kind of thing. That's pretty cool. So they're going to have one tomorrow then? Yeah. Excuse me. Someone's at Colgate University right now listening to this and they're swelling some Keg beer to Friday 13th. I think that would be pretty cool. I think so, too. So, you know, in Japan and China, what the unlucky number is? Isn't it four? It is four. I knew that because apparently in both languages I'm surprised to hear this in both languages, the pronunciation of the number four is very much similar to the pronunciation for the word death. So you may not find a four on like a menu in a Chinese restaurant or something like that. Right. I'm going to keep an eye out, actually, in the future, see if there's a four. It's good. Like the number four meal on a Chinese menu. Maybe it's Happy family. Maybe. So I got a few more 13 for you if you're patient. I am. In the world of sports, there have been some very famous, awesome athletes that wore the number 13. So you would think it would not be unlucky. Dan Marino, one of the best quarterbacks to ever play yeah, but one of the best quarterbacks to ever play and not win a Super Bowl. Yes. It makes you wonder how much better he would have been had he not warned 13. Right. The first thing that comes to my mind, sure. Alex Rodriguez, a famous baseball player right now for the New York Yankees. He could be a superstar. He is a superstar and he wears the number 13. But the Yankees have not been to a World Series since he joined their roster that is interesting in 2004, even though they have the powerhouse All Star lineup. So maybe that's unlucky. And Wilt Chamberlain is 13, but he wants all kinds of things. So yeah, I'd say that is lucky in that case. Yeah, I've heard people say the number 13 is a lucky number, but that's not my experience. I'm among Arad and Dan Marino is just a failed sports figure who for the number 13. Well, I don't know if I could call them failed sports figures. He has a batting average very much higher than 0.0. Agree. Friday 13th films. I'm sure you've seen some of these. Sure. There have been twelve including the one no, there haven't. Yeah, they've made twelve of those. Well, there were eleven original films, including the Freddy versus Jason thing that was pretty much terrible. But tomorrow actually is the release of the remake of the original. Yes. And that makes the fourth one in the series to be released on Friday the 13th. Wow. So it's good marketing. So this is twelve. This is the number, the 12th one. Surely they're going to make it to 13, right? Well, they're probably going to start remaking them all, I would say, if this is successful. Okay. And this year there are three Friday the 13th, actually, which is kind of unusual. And two months in a row, February and March, which is very unusual. Yeah. So that's good stuff. I agree. And I got one more for you. Okay. The band Black Sabbath. I love Sabbath. Yeah, we both do. They release their debut album on February 13. Friday, february 13, 1970. That seems like something they would do. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Isn't that crazy? They've been around since 70. Yes. Isn't it crazy that Ozzy can still walk? Barely. Yeah. Well, it's funny that you bring up the calendar, Chuck, because I've got one last little snippet. Okay. One of the reasons why Friday the 13th is a problem is because we moved to a solar calendar under Pope Gregory the Fifth, I think. Yeah. Greg. Okay. So he commanded that we moved to a solar calendar from a lunar calendar. Again, paganism. Right. Because in the pagan culture, in the pagan calendar, there are actually 13 months based on the lunar cycle, which is connected to the menstrual cycle, which, again, got to get away from women. There you have it. I'm not going to go there. So this Friday the 13th in February friday 13th and March, that wouldn't have happened had we stayed with the original pagan lunar calendar. Interesting. Yes. Well, I love you. These are all nice little tidbits. This is full of water cooler type of that's because there's absolutely nothing to Friday the 13th. Well, that's one of the main points, though, is even though there's all these ancient things that are rooted in the modern fear of Friday 13th, evidently most people don't even know these ancient things. So it's pretty much just one of those things that's been created yes. For our enjoyment. Yes. Nothing to it. Basically one way to make it through the day on a Friday. Absolutely. A little more on guard than ever. There you go. Well, you guys be safe. Just in case. Just in case. This Friday the 13th, the next Friday 13th, and all Friday 13th, we want you around to listen to our sweet voices for as long as possible, so don't leave your home. All right. Well, Chuck, do you have any listener mail? I do, but I believe our sponsor needs to chime in first. Oh, yeah, let's do that. You want to kick it off.com? Yes. Actually, if everybody goes to audiblepocast comStuff, they can sign up, they can register, and they'll immediately be eligible for one free download. Right. Which is a book on tape or everything. Sure. Anything you can conceive of that you could make into audio. They've got it right there's like 50,000 titles, lots of titles. And I went online, I was browsing, and they have my favorite detective novel of all time, Dashl Hammonds maltese falcon. Oh, really? And they have it in several different forms. They have a dramatized form and a couple of different ones, but they have like, the straight novel read aloud, which I'm actually looking forward to getting. Who reads it, do you know? I do, and I don't remember his name, but it's no one unheard of. Okay, well, I'm going to recommend and you're going to say you hippie. I'm going to recommend jack carwacks on the road. You hippie. It's the classic beat generation novel. And I'm going to recommend it because it's read by David Caradine. Awesome kane of kung fu himself reads it. And bill from kill bill. Yeah, that's my recommendation. Yeah, you can find both of those and like we said, 49,998 more, at least by going to audiblepoadcast. comStuff and registering to get your free one. So now is it listener mail time now? I think I've been made to wait long enough, yes. So, Chuck, what do you have for us? Josh, I have a listener mail that we're going to call the forest firestorm of nine. We got a lot of emails about you messing up the fact that I believe you said I said horace was the god. He was the one with the dog's head. Right. I didn't even have the right animal. Right. Ancient Egypt, it turns out. What I should have said was, horace has the head of a jackal if we were even going to be in the right ballpark. Right, but that's anubis. Yes, anubis. One of the two actually has the head of a jackal as the ancient egyptian god with the head of a jackal. Forest. And I'm sorry, everybody, it turns out forest is the one with the head of a cat. So I apologize to everybody who no, horace had the head of a falcon. I will not let you mislead listeners anymore. And thank you to all these people who wrote in, including satyarth mishra from India, age 13, jessica Saturday of Jacksonville, Florida, logan Larson studying in France, catherine Lee, thomas Radkey, chris albrecht of kujawks Kujaw, eric s of Philadelphia, jeremy shehan, alex Clifford of livermore, California, rick R-I-C nothing more. Right. Tommy Skiano of the mafia, jason barnhardt, andrew smith of Jerusalem. And then my favorite, rachel, Austin and boulder sent this direction in the form of a haiku, which we love. It is anibus jackal. Horace sun moon eye falcon, egypt next podcast. Nice. So thank you, Rachel, for being so creative with that. Thanks to all of you. Ever since the first email trickled in, I've been wearing my hair shirt, so I think I can take it off now. What do you think? Chuck, you have been punched. Is so itchy. Horus. Is not a cat. Well, if you want to send us a podcast about ancient Egyptian gods or anything that strikes your fancy, you can send it to stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 camry, it's ready. Are you?"
https://podcasts.howstuf…sk-tea-final.mp3	How Tea Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-tea-works	Legend has it that tea was discovered by a curious Chinese emperor after leaves blew into his boiled water. Now tea is the second only to water in popularity worldwide. And despite the varieties of tea, they all come from a single species of plant.	Legend has it that tea was discovered by a curious Chinese emperor after leaves blew into his boiled water. Now tea is the second only to water in popularity worldwide. And despite the varieties of tea, they all come from a single species of plant.	Thu, 12 Mar 2015 16:45:16 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=16, tm_min=45, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=71, tm_isdst=0)	49426664	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"What if you were a major transit system facing cyber attacks so you partner with IBM to keep your data network and apps protected. Now you can tackle threats without coming to a halt. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM let's create learn More@ibm.com what if we could change the world one relationship at a time? Don't miss the second season of Force Multiplier, the awardwinning podcast from iHeartRadio and Salesforce.org about tackling some of today's biggest challenges, like climate change, education, access, and global health. Listen in. As host baritonedate, Thurston connects with impactful organizations like the Trevor Project, doctors without Borders, and the University of Kentucky. Plus inspiring individuals like Amy Allison and Juan Acosta to discuss ways to maximize our impact. Listen to Force Multiplier on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry in Studio One a you just pointed that out to each other as if it's just going to be like, who's Jerry? And who is Merry? So I'm Chuck. You're Chuck. Okay. That's Jerry. All right. I was a little confused right there. Got you. Tears on a dude. Yeah. All right, now that we have that sorted, let's talk to you. Or we could change the name of the podcast to Two Dudes and a lady. Yeah, we could. Maybe that'll be our sidecast where we talk about this podcast sidecast. That's right. Coined by Josh Clark. Circuit 2015. So now you own that. I just put it on wax. Pretty sweet. Yeah. Pretty slick. Yeah. So, Chuck yeah? You ever drank tea? I just finished up some green tea. Are you still a green tea drinker? Yeah. I mean, I like all kinds of tea, but I drank some green because I was studying for this, and it just was like yeah, sure. You used to drink it by, like, the mini pitcherful. Yeah, I used to drink a cold. You don't either. I had this hot well, it is winter time. Yeah. Do you like tea? I like green tea. Yeah, I like green tea the most. I like chilled green tea. Sure. I don't like Wu Long, which until I guess today or yesterday, I thought it was Oolong. Did you know it was oolong? I had no idea, and I've never had it. I have. It's very woody. It's almost like roots. Like, you put some roots in some water, warm water, steep for a while. Or steep. I don't know why I always have trouble with that. It's clearly steep. Steep is different. Yeah, it's a different word. But for my whole life, I've confused. Steep and steep when it comes. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. Anyway, Wulong not the biggest fan. I like green tea, and I like it chilled. Black tea I'm not really big on. Yes. I like a good English breakfast tea. Love it. Do you? Or Earl Grey? You like those too? Sure, man. A little cream, a little sugar. Yeah. And then, of course, you've got your herbal teas. Yeah. I don't like this. Oh, you don't? No, I've been drinking. Celestial Seasoning Tension Tamer. That's not actually tea. Right. Well, that was the big reveal that I was working up to. I was just plodding along. But now that you've rushed me, I will agree with you. No, not all those are tea. Right. Sorry about that. Those aren't t. Here's the really big reveal. Okay. English breakfast tea, green tea, woolong, white tear. Do you remember that snapple ad where that old man shows the backpacker? Dude, no. It's like a snap of white tea. And he just goes, we fuck the top. And it's like that's it and he goes, that's it? That's white tea. All of those are the same thing. They're all the same. They come from the same plant. One plant. Did you know that? I did not know that until I researched it's. A camelia sinensis is the tea plant. The tea bush. Yes. And now we have to say there are different varieties of camellia synopsis. C synopsis is what those in the know call it. Well, horticulture, sure. But the plant itself, there is one species of tea plant and that's what it all comes from. It's how the tea is made. That explains the differences. Yeah. And then you add some stuff, like, apparently Earl Gray has the essential oil of the bergamot orange mixed in, which is nice. Sure. But that's still tea. It is tea, yeah. Right. It's got something added to it. Now, if you just took bergamot orange, dried it out, put it in the tea bag and sold it as herbal tea as like, Orange Dream, you wouldn't have tea. No, the Tension tamer. It's not tea. It's a dried herb that you steep or steep, depending on your preference, in warm water. Yeah. It's a steep, hot beverage. That's a good way of saying it because it's exactly what it is. So the cats out of the bag. Which means now that we've done that, we have to explain everything there is to know about tea. That is right. And I guess there's no better place to start than the 27 37 BC. Of course. And the Emperor of China. No one knows if this story is true. Of course. It's a pretty good story, though. But it's a good story because we don't know the exact origin of tea. It's been around for a long time. But some people say Chinese Emperor Shin Nung, who ruled about 5000 years ago, was traveling through China and he was big into sanitation. Yeah. Smart guy. Like boil your water kind of sanitation. This is thousands of years before Germ theory. Yeah, totally. Which is a couple of hundred years old. I wonder what led him to that conclusion, which was spot on. I don't know. I don't know. We can get in the way back. But you didn't ask him. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so a lot of fuel for that one question. It's a pretty good question, because yeah, you're right. It's spot on. How do you know that boiling water kills germs if you don't know what germs are? Exactly. So he was traveling through China and reportedly stopped to rest and was preparing some boiled water, some delicious boiled water. And a gust of wind blew some leaves from a bush into the water, changing the color, and he was like, hey, this is a different color now. Let me try it. Well, and it's delicious. He was renowned as a scientist. Yeah, sure. He was definitely, at the very least, a curious fella. And yeah, he decided to try it. He's like, Different colored boiled water? Of course, I'm going to try that and see what it's like. I bet he had his right hand try it first, and then five minutes later, it was like, okay. Yeah, exactly. He didn't die. I think that's what all the fat cats did back then. Sure. So it turns out that that was debris detritus from the camelia sinensis. He was born in China. No one knows if that story is true. I think, like you said, but it's a pretty great story, and since we don't know the true originty, why not? Yeah, I'll go with that. It's not that far fetched. When the Western Zao Dynasty was around, the tea was a religious offering, and during the Han Dynasty, it was pretty limited, so it was safe for royalty. By the time the Tang Dynasty came around, which was 618 to, they discovered a lot of more tea plants. Isn't that ironic that tea became from Tang, established during the Tang Dynasty? Yeah, that's pretty funny, because Tang is the opposite of tea, right? Yeah, I guess, in some ways. I mean, they're both water based, so probably not the opposite. Right? I don't know. It would be the opposite of tea. So, like I said, they found a bunch more plants in the Tang Dynasty, and the Chinese government actually said, you know what? Everyone should drink tea because it's good for you. Yeah. And we can make money off of it. Of course. And then from the Tang Dynasty, it spread to Japan by priests who were studying in China. They also brought Buddhism at the same time. Both of them took root. The Japanese said, we like this, let's try making some other stuff out of it. And they actually created the tea ceremony, which is a big deal in Japan still to this day. Yes. Have you taken part in one of those? I have not. Yummy took some classes when she taught in Japan years back, but apparently it's just one of these things where you're just constantly learning. Like I'm a master at T, right? You're always learning more. You're always trying to be perfect. And the thing that's so elusive about it is it's supposed to be utterly simple? Yeah, it's elaborate, but these steps are meant to be simple. Like, it's a very simple, plain form thing, like the sushi rice. It's like, why are the Japanese obsessed with doing things really well? They really are. Yeah. They don't own it in you're. Right. But the whole thing behind the tea ceremony and the Japanese adoption of it is that there's this idea that sitting down and sharing ceremonially in a ritual manner sure. A cup of tea can bring peace between people. Paul yeah. What's the tea ceremony? Cheno. There's a saying. Cheno. There's another saying. Yeah. It's cup of tea with me. Ichigo. Ichie. One time, one meeting. Which is the idea that every encounter is unique and can't be duplicated. Right. Very nice. That is nice. So, in Europe, I think a lot of people associate tea, of course, with England and Europe, the UK and Britain. Took a little while, though, all those places. There was a lag. Yes, there was. We're in the 17th century now, and the Portuguese were the first people to not import tea, but drink tea in England. Yeah. They were trading in the East Indies. Specifically Java. Yes. And the Dutch, if you remember, from did we ever do a full nutmeg episode? I think we did. Right. Cinnamon, too. All this showed up back then in the 17th century in the East Indies, around Indonesia, Java. The Portuguese just had the place on lockdown until the Dutch came in and we're like, we're taking over. One of the things that came out of that was the import or the introduction of tea to Europe through the Dutch. Yeah. They pretty much horned in on their trading routes and brought tea to Holland from China, and then from Holland, of course, it spread throughout Europe. And I think the King of England at one point married a Portuguese woman. Princess. Yes, princess. That had a lot to do with it, too, of course, Charles II did married Catherine of Bragananza, who was, it says in this article, a tea addict. And she was like, let's drink some tea, man. And all of Great Britain kind of followed suit, because back then, once a princess did something, everybody wanted to do that, even if she was a fiend of some sort, like a caffeine fiend. So the end of the East India Company's monopoly on trade in China, which happened in 1834, was a really big deal, because basically everything was coming from China until then. And then at that point, the East India Company said, hey, we could grow our own tea in India and we're going to start doing it. And they did. And by 1839, they had enough cultivation going on that they had the first auction of Assam tea in Britain, which is a big deal. That's the variety that they used to make Darjeeling tea. I think they're number two in production. Today, right? Yeah. India, China, Kenya and Sri Lanka are the big four tea producers. Yeah. Indonesia. I think it's fifth. And they're like, can't you just say top five? Right. We don't produce. Well, they do produce a lot, but not nearly as much. The other thing, too, that happened during the monopoly was the T clipper was born, which is pretty neat. When the company had the monopoly, there was basically no rush to get it there because they had the monopoly. Right. Like, you'll get the tea, we'll sail over there and we'll all be good. You ever heard a slow boat to China? Is that where it came from? Could have. What about High Road to China with your boy Tom Selik? Oh, yeah. Remember that movie? I never saw it. Yes, it wasn't very good. That was his brief foray into major motion pictures. Yeah. Didn't he play, like, the King of Spain in one of the Columbus pictures back in the early ninety s? I think I remember that. What was that? Either 1492 or Columbus. Yeah, I can't remember. So the T clipper. Yes. There was no rush, but until when that monopoly ended, it was basically like the fastest boat to get there. The fastest ship will be the one that gets the sale. So they started making these new ships that were had huge sales and tall mass could go a lot faster, and started the era of the TCPA races. Basically, you would leave the Canton River in China, go down the China Sea, cross the Indian Ocean, slink around the Cape of Good Hope, up the Atlantic, past the Azores and into the English Channel. Then you were towed up the River Thames by a tugboat, and the first boat to throw their load up on the docks would be the winner. Which is pretty neat. Until they built the Seaweed Canal. And then I was like, oh, well, I took all the fun out of that. It sounds like a pretty great race, though. Yeah. I wonder how long that took. I think they were just hauling butt the whole time, too. Yeah. But even still, it had to take weeks. Oh, sure. I would think so. And this we should say that was the mid 19th century. We would be remiss to do an episode on tea and not mention the Boston Tea Party, which is a thing everybody knows about the Boston Tea Party. What I didn't realize is that the British royalty, the British Crown, still, even after losing the colonies, in part over tea taxes, still continue to tax the heck out of tea for at least a decade afterwards before they finally relented and started to drastically reduce it in the face of tons and tons of piracy and smuggling. Apparently, in the late 18th century, \u00a37 million of tea were smuggled into Britain. Oh, wow. And \u00a35 million were legally imported. So the smuggling there was more smuggled tea than legal tea. In Great Britain in the late 18th century. Right. But apparently, despite all this, it wasn't until 1964 that the British government finally said, you know what? We're going to stop fiddling with the T tax and just not tax t anymore. When was this? 1964. Crazy. Wow. Tea is huge in Britain. Yes. And at this point in the late 19th century is when I think the average Briton was consuming about \u00a36 a year per person. It's a lot of tea. Yes. I wonder what that would be today. I meant to look that up. Is that wet harvest or dry harvest? No, man. Is that a seat tea bag? It's not seat. That's a lot of tea. Yes, that is a lot of tea, man. So, Chuck, we got the history under our belt. We'll move into how tea is actually made after this. 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 you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right. For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed. Your bed. Yep. We mean that kid your dog. Halo Elevate is natural science based nutrition for their best health. It's guaranteed to support your dog's top five health needs better than leading brands. That means digestive health, heart and immunity support healthy skin and coat, hip and joint support and strengthen energy. Find Halo Elevate at Petco pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores. Learn more@halopets.com. Okay, buddy, we were talking about the history, and then before that, we mentioned that there were four main types of tea green, black, woolong, wutang and white tea. I just don't understand how O-O-L-O-N-G is oolong. It's oolong. It's invisible but not silent. And like we said, all those t's come from camellia sinensis, and there are different varieties of them, like the Assam make star dealing. But the way that you process the leaves is where the differences come about, right? That's right. What's interesting to me is almost all tea in the whole wide world is harvested by hand. Yeah. Like, I think what was the spice we were talking about? Nutmeg. Saffron. Saffron. Yeah. I think nutmeg too. When did we talk about saffron? I think I mentioned it in the Cinnamon podcast. It's expensive because it can only be harvested right. And anytime you're involving people, it's going to cost more than some big stupid machine that can do tons of it at once. And that is certainly the case with tea, because there are only a couple of harvests a year. The first flush in the early spring, the second flush in the summer. And they really care for the tea plant. They pick and prune at them year round, but they only choose, what, a couple of leaves from each plant when they're actually harvesting? Yeah. So the top two leaves and the bud in between, that's your tea. Everything else is just basically the home for the tea that's harvested like the rest of the plant. This huge, enormous plant bush shrub is just there to sprout out these little bits. And the little sprouts are the tea that we drink. It's amazing. And that's all the tea. That's the oolong, that's the black tea, that's the white tea, that's the green tea. That's all of them. It's from these shrubs, just the top two little leaves in the bud? That's right. And from there, once they're picked by hand, they are taken to the factory, which is on the plantation, because something starts happening as soon as you pick it, and that's called oxidation. And oxidation needs to be very controlled because it's not necessarily a bad thing, because it actually is partially why you get certain varieties of tea. Right. Yeah. Depending on the kind of tea you want, you either want oxidation or you want to prevent oxidation. And we should probably say oxidation basically is when any kind of molecule. But specifically an oxygen molecule or O two. Interacts with something like the metal in a car. The inside of an apple. The leaf off of a tea shrub. Once the oxygen interacts with it. It starts to chain reaction inside. Where these oxygen molecules that have two unstable or unpaired electrons. Once the oxygen interacts with some other atoms in the cells of these things. It robs those atoms of their electrons. Right. Because it wants to pair up. And when it does this, it starts the process of oxidation. Yeah. Which is actually John Fuller, our old buddy, wrote this one, and he was a big tea guy, I imagine he still is. He's characterized it as actually burning it. So, like when you eat your apple bite and you go to your desk and you leave it there, and then you go to the bathroom for an hour or so, you come back. The reason your apple is brown now is because you've exposed that inside to the two and it's burning it. Yeah. Because normally the inside of the apple is protected from the oxygen in the air we breathe in the atmosphere by the skin. Once you puncture the skin, once you break the skin, it's exposed to oxygen and that process of oxidation takes place. Same thing happens with a leaf from a tea shrub. When it's attached to the shrub, it's protected from the outside air. Once you pluck it from there, and especially once you break it or tear it apart or do something with it, it's exposed to the air and oxidation takes place, and it withers in very much the same way that a leaf on a tree, a dead leaf in the fall, withers and changes color, that's oxidation as well. Yeah. Like you said, to the same thing that can happen to your car if you don't get that true code. Yeah. That's why you pay thousands and thousands of dollars more at the dealership for. That TrueCut. That's right. Black tea is the leader of all teas, accounts for about 75% of production. And like you said, the Earl Grey or the English breakfast tea, that's black tea. And it's not always I mean, it doesn't necessarily look black. It's kind of a reddish brown when you seep it. Yeah. Have to seep it. That's right. Yeah. I'm not going to help out your problem, am I? No, I'm just going to confuse you. I thought I might knock it out today, but now it's gotten worse, I think, actually. Yeah. You've also said oolong a couple of times. Yeah. That's kind of by choice. Okay. So with black tea in particular, that's like the oxidation master. That's right. That's the one you want oxidation for. So with the actual process of making tea, of processing tea leaves into black tea, you're actually inviting oxidation, and you're doing that well. You want to talk about how you make black tea? Yeah. It's a five step process. There's a couple of methods, but they both include generally these five steps. Yeah. One is by robot, and the other is by human hand, pretty much the orthodox method and the CTC, or the cut tier curl method, which sounds cool, but it's not, because orthodox is by hand. Sure. Which means it's better. And all of this, again, takes place in the factory on the plantation grounds, after the human hands have harvested the tea leaves and brought them to the factory, a couple of fields over. Okay. The first step is withering and that's when you're going to spread it out and let them weather like we're talking about with the leaf that falls, it's just basically losing moisture. Yes. After that, you've got rolling, where if you're using the orthodox method, the human hand method, you're actually rolling out and pressing the leaves so that you're kind of pressing the moisture out, but you're also simultaneously pressing some of the oils, those beneficial oils inside the tea leaf out so that they stick to the outside of the leaf. So they're kind of retained and dehydrated. Yeah. And if you're doing the hand method, it's a gentle process. You're trying not to break the leaf with the CTC method, they're just chopping it up because it's a big dumb machine. Right. And with, say, other types of tea, you wouldn't use that method because when you do chop it up, you're exposing it to oxidation. Yeah. Even more. Right. Which is part of the process that's actually the third step is oxidation. So after the leads are either pressed by the orthodox method or cut by robots. It's left out in a kind of a damp, cool space to basically oxidize even further to turn copper, turn brown wither, and then lose the rest of their moisture. That's right. Which is a good thing in the case of black tea. Yes. From here, you're going to dry it out with some hot air and the color is going to change even more from that copper that came from the green. And now you've got your brown and your black coloring going on. Yes. And then you put the leaves by size and by quality, or if it's going to become bag tea or something, it's chopped up almost into like a powder, just little tiny bits and then bagged and all that stuff. But if it's just loose leaf, then it's sorted by size and quality. That's right. And you're going to pay more for it. Yeah. That's black tea. And that's 75% of the tea produced in the world goes through that process, either by human hand or by robot hand. Green tea is next. And that, like we said a million times, is from the same plant. So cool. It is very cool. But basically what happens here is it's pretty much the same process, but you're just not oxidizing it as long because you're going to steam it or I didn't know this. You could pan fry it, I guess. If you're just growing your own tea and doing it in your house, you're John February. You just saw Chef, right? Man, that was a good movie. Very good movie. Way better than Birdman. The only thing I didn't like a spoiler about Chef was the whole social media thing. Oh, yeah. It was like almost a little weird. Underwritten by Twitter. Yeah, it was a little weird. I thought it was just strange that they're, like, willing to date the movie totally that much. Exactly what I was saying. You go see it in ten years, you're going to be like, yeah, this is so 2014. Yeah, I thought it was not necessary either. But anyway, good movie. It was a great movie and I thought it still fit. It's just thinking, ten years down the road, it's going to be odd. Right. Like the movies that talk about MySpace. Yeah. Sad, sad movies. But where were we? We were drying out. We were steaming. This is the point of steaming, is it stops oxidation. Yeah. And keeps it green. Hence the name, green tea. And it's not just that the tea leaves themselves are green or greenish, they're supposed to be, but also it imparts a greenish hue to the actual brewed tea as well. And the way that the green from the original green color of the leads is kept us from preventing oxidation. And that's done by steaming. And I looked everywhere to see how steaming prevented oxidation. I couldn't find it. I think it's one of those things where people are just like, yes, it does. It everyone's content to basically stop right there. And I'm like, no. How? And I tried to reword it a couple of different ways, and I'm like, okay, how does he prevent oxidation? Couldn't find that either, but apparently that's what it does. So I don't know if it seals the cells off, maybe I bet some authorizes them somehow, and it prevents the oxygen from getting to it. Yeah. We'll hear from someone. Yeah. If you know how steam prevents oxidation, please let us know. But as far as we can tell, it actually does. That's right. And we should point out here that there can be a range in hue. There can be a yellowish hue sometimes. And there's actually something I didn't know about that you told me about. Yellow tea. Yeah. So supposedly the steaming process can go a little awry, or it used to back in the day more frequently. The early steam days. Yeah. And it produces another type of tea. It's called yellow tea. And that's, like, sold. You can get it now. I don't know. I'm sure there's some specialty store that sells yellow tea. Yeah. All right. So basically, at this point, green tea is after it's frozen in time and staying green. The process is about forever young. It is. And the process from there is the same as with black tea. Pretty much, yeah. You're going to sort it. You're going to cool it. You can dry it out. You're going to sort it again and then sort it one more time. A lot of redundancy in creating green tea. And now we're at Oolong. We're Oolong, which is basically like it's kind of like yellow tea. I don't think they're one in the same, but it's steamed. But it's steamed after the oxidation process has taken place to an extent. So it's oxidized, but not as much as black tea. And it's steamed, but not as early as green tea. So Oolong is between the two. What's crazy is it doesn't taste like black tea or green tea at all. It's definitely its own thing. Yeah. Still, it's from the same plan. I don't think I've ever had it at all. Yeah. I need to just try something and see what all the fuss is about. If you go to a Lawson, which is a chain of convenience stores in Japan, strangely enough, you can go in that is a little weird. And pretty much anywhere you can buy, like, water, green tea, and oolong tea, like, in a cooler. You can get it everywhere, those three things. And you should try all of them. You have to try Ulong at least once. Yeah. I'll try some tomorrow. Okay. That's my dedication to you, sir. Thanks, man. Then you have your white tea, and that is very much a specialty tea and somewhat rare, and it is only picked two days out of the year when the buds aren't open yet, and it's less grassy, and it's a little smoother. But it is similar to green tea, and it has only been available outside of China for not that long, just a few years. Right. Snapping has only been making it for a couple of years. Well, that should date it immediately, like Twitter dates, chef. And it was reserved for Chinese nobility because of how rare it is. Right. But now you can get it. And we talked about other kinds of tea, too, like herbal tea, again, is just basically dried herbs that you steep, just like regular tea. Like chai. Chai is actually tea. That's right, because it's tea, black tea mixed with spices like cinnamon and pepper and stuff. So that still constitutes tea. But like chamomile tea, it's not really tea. Yeah. It's a Tissan. Right. And it's just again, it's just some dehydrated chamomile flowers that use steep and hot water. Same goes for Rui boss, which is a mouthful, but it means red bush and Afrikaans. That's right. Same with mate, which is not to be confused with matcha. No, but we'll talk about matcha, right? Yes, let's talk about matcha, Chuck, because I love the stuff. I had not been maybe you can call me a matcha poser or jumping on the matcha bandwagon. Yeah. In that article you sent, it said that it's the darling of the tea set now. Yeah. And my friend in California. PJ in La. You've met PJ, or was he may have bailed on it, but he was trying to make his own special matcha green tea and bottle it and sell it. I get what you mean, but I don't think he got past the making it at home stage. Well, there's not a lot to it. But again, I think the Japanese tea ceremony is surrounds matcha. That's what you're preparing is matcha. That's right. And all matches is like really good green tea that's been ground down to a fine powder by hand, which automatically makes it more expensive than any other teas. Most other teas. And what you have is this really fine, beautiful green powder, and you put like a teaspoon of it in a bowl or a cup or something like that, and you're supposed to sift it, I think, through like a sifter, just to open it back up again. Sure. Make it pop. And then you add some hot water and then you use a whisk to stir it. Yeah. I don't think we mentioned the other big difference with matcha is that the bushes are covered 20 days prior to harvest from sunlight, and that's the big distinction. And that means it's going to have a lot more chlorophyll and something called ltheanine. Oh, that stuff is good. This is the amino acid. Apparently, that's what allows you to feel both invigorated and calmed. Yeah. It works in conjunction with caffeine. Okay. And it's actually capable it's an amino acid, like you said, that is capable of crossing the blood brain barrier. So, like, when you drink it. It goes right to your brain. It doesn't have to be converted or metabolized. Right. And it supposedly has all sorts of cool benefits, like cognitive enhancement. You're just kind of clear it's just neat stuff. Well, and that's what the matcha proponents will tell you. I have some of this stuff, man. It's like, gojuice, you'll be clear headed. Take a hit of this. But matches, there's a couple of forms. There's the yosucha and the Koija. Or is it the koha? Probably koichi. Koi cha. Yeah, koichi Yusucha is thini and koichi stick tea. And the koichi, man, that is something else. That is made with half the water, twice the matcha. That sounds like my kind of matcha. Well, they say by the time you're done whisking it, it's going to be like the texture of paint. Well, serious matcha. Yeah. Because matcha has like a distinct taste. Oh, yeah. I love it. I get it at the Asian market near my house and I will just add it to my regular green tea. Like I'll whisk it up and then just add it there. But it's a suspension. You're drinking the tea leaf, right. Like if you mix up your machine then leave it there, a few hours later it's going to be separated. Yeah. It sinks. Yeah. So it's a colloid. Is that what it's called? I think so. I'm not going to repeat that because I'm not positive. What the colloid thing? Yeah. Is it a colloid? I believe so. Like quicksand. A colloid is a moisture, something that's like it's not actually dissolved, it's just mixed together. I think you are right. It's a colloid. And people proponents will say that it's better for you because when you seep tea I screwed you up. When you sip steeped tea right. You're only getting I don't know the percentage, but you're only getting some of the benefits of the tea because the tea leaf is still in there with a matcha. You're actually ingesting the tea leaf. Oh, I see. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that gym goes right past the blood brain barrier. And it does. And it's pretty trendy too, because you can now go to restaurants and they'll be like matcha sprinkled on a food dish. Or have you been to Umi Sushi yet? No, I went to Craft as a kayak the other night, though. Is that in Krugs? Is it good? It's really good. And I actually had a cocktail thought about you because I don't oh, yeah, you don't drink cocktail that much. It was good. It was bourbon and lemon and ginger and Thai spice. Like one other thing, maybe honey. It was pretty tasty. Sounds good. And the food was excellent. It's a little pricey, but when you eat the sushi, you can so tell the difference. It just melts in your mouth. Very much the same with Umi Sushi as well. It's just the quality between that and just about every other sushi you've had is just light years beyond yes, it is really evident when you taste it. I had some of the albacore and it was literally like melted butter, I'll bet. So good. Well, the point is, umi, sushi makes a green tea matcha, souffle with cream and glaze. They actually yummy replicated once. It was amazing. So matcha really goes with a lot of really good stuff. Even though it is trendy, it's still good. It is good. And like you said, it's super earthy. I recommend you try it. I like it a lot. I don't know if I'm getting the good stuff from that Asian market. It's probably the cheap stuff, but it's still tasty. I honestly don't know if it's one of those things where, like, you get what you pay for if a lot of it is just jacked up price because it is much or what, I don't know. Now this stuff is pretty inexpensive that I get, actually, for the amount you're getting. It's really not that cheap, now that I think about it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's a little canister of it. Yeah, it's pretty small. You're probably paying what you should be. We talked a little bit about the blood brain barrier, but we'll talk more about the health benefits of tea right after this. 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@capitalone.com commercial you want your kid eating the best nutrition, right? For all their days at the dog park and nights sleeping in bed. Your bed. Yep. We mean that kid your dog. Halo Elevate is natural 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@halopeets.com. So, Chuck, we're going to talk about the health benefits, as I said before the break. But first, let's talk about how to prepare t. Oh, yeah. There's a couple of ways. Depending on what you're dealing with. You can either be a loose leaf person or a bagged tea person. And I got the impression from this, like you said, Fuller was a tea guy and he did a very good job of trying to reserve judgment. Sure. But if I remember correctly, he was a loose leaf guy. And he comes through in this article. The loose leaf is better. Yeah, he had a special little unit there where he poured the water in and it kept the loose leaf separate, but it was all contained in one cup that you screwed lid on or something. You can get those or you can just do there's all sorts of equipment you can have to make your tea. Yeah. If you're preparing tea in a bag, you just pop it in some hot water. Well, no, not necessarily. It depends on the kind of tea for what temperature you want your water to be. That is true, and I didn't know this. Black tea is the only one where you want it boiling at 200 degrees. Wulong. You're going to the next, and that's about 190, which is close to boiling. Yeah. Or you just use your finger to determine whether it's 190 or 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Green and white tea is just steaming water. It's only about 170 deg. And your black tea I'm sorry, black and white takes the longest to seep and steep at four and a half to five minutes. Yeah. Woolong is about three to four. And green tea, man, you can get that stuff going in 30 seconds. Boom. And you're drinking it. My tension, tamer. Takes seven minutes to sleep, it says on the box. Can you tell the difference to tame your attention? Yeah, I actually can. That's good. It's pretty neat. I can't remember what's in it, but it talks about the active ingredient, whatever the dried herb is. But with the difference between bag tea and loose leaf tea has a lot to do with the benefits from it, right, yeah. So with the CTC method, which, again, 75% of the world's tea, a lot of that undergoes the CTC method because it's black tea, right? Yes. But you get, like, this powdery, chopped up, little bitty substance, and it's put into a bag and it forms a little clump and water doesn't circulate as well. The benefit of loose leaf tea is that the water yeah. Steeps through and circulates amongst the tea leaves more. I think it seeps through, man. I think you're right. But it circulates among the tea leaves. And the tea leaves, remember, especially depending on the type of tea may have been pressed, so that the oils are trapped, dehydrated on the surface of the tea leaf, you chop those things up and turn them into dust, you're going to lose a lot of that stuff. But if you have just a dry tea leaf that is dehydrated and has the moisture on the outside and some water rehydrates that and it just kind of stirs it up and gets into the colloid and you drink that, bam. If there are health benefits, which we'll explore, you're more likely to get them from that loosely tea than a bag tea. Agreed. And then, of course, you also have your iced tea here in the south. Sweet iced tea. Yeah. Which is delicious to me, because I grew up here. A lot of people think it's weird they had been drinking iced tea before 1900, but the St. Louis World's Fair was where it really took off because the guy was selling hot tea named Richard Bluckenden. I know. What a name I know. Even if you pronounce it the other way, like Bletchendon, it doesn't matter. He sounds like a made up Mad magazine staff writer or something. He was serving free tea, but it was hot and it was really hot, and so people were like, no, thanks. So he made it cold, and they said, this is delicious. Well, it was hot out in St. Louis that year. Of course, that summer, that was where I think hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream cones came from. And apparently iced tea. Could you imagine, like, the world changing after that in St. Louis? So that's where they credit iced tea being born. And of course, here in the south, like I said, you dump a cup of sugar in there while you're brewing it, and it makes it delicious and syrupy sweet. Did you read the Slate article that was linked to in here? No. I started to. It's got peacock features in it. Who's that? He used to cook at Watershed. No, he's good cook. And I got as far as page two when they compared the hospitality of offering sweet tea to passing a dubia to fish show, and I was like, no, I'm done with this late article forever. What? Yeah. What a weird thing to link together. It was that kind of article. It's so strange because there's like a thousand hospitable things you can mention. I know. Out of nowhere. It's very strange. All right, so finally, Josh, health benefits of tea. True or not true? Jury's out, man. Yes. So it's possible if the free radical theory of aging is correct, then it's got health benefits and ages. People hear these things a lot like antioxidants free radicals, and I don't think a lot of people have an understanding of what it is. And it's not super complicated. No, it's not. And I will explain it on the basis of you agreeing to doing a free radicals episode. Whole episode? Sure. Okay, cool. That was easy. Why would you say it like that? I'm just teasing. Okay, so, Chuck, with free radicals, right? We already mentioned oxidation. Yeah. That's what the free radicals are based on. So you breathe oxygen, and the O two molecule has two unpaired electrons. Well, those electrons want to be paired, so they go into your body and mess with your cells by searching around for other molecules or atoms that they can steal an electron from and repair. That's right, repair. Get it? Yeah, but it's actually the opposite of repairing it's, damaging the cells, because those atoms that just got their molecules stripped are now looking for their own electrons to pair with, right? That's right. And it causes this chain reaction. Well, the whole free radical theory of aging is that this is why we age. This is where disease comes from. This is how our system wears down and breaks down cellular destruction. Yeah. And we know that this is a real thing. Sure. Like that really happens. The same thing as being exposed to radiation. It's a chain reaction where molecules and atoms just go around charged, looking to neutralize themselves by pairing their electrons or charged electrons. Right. So what T is lousy with is antioxidants. Yeah. And that's what people hear that word a lot and don't even know what it is. Basically, it's just going to slow down that oxidation process because they can give up their electrons and still be fine. Exactly. Like vitamin C. Yeah. Catechins, which is found in high amounts in tea. Yeah. Betacarotene. Yes. Vitamin E. Just basically anything that you see is an antioxidant. Probably is an antioxidant. Again, the jury is just out now based on some recent studies that have found we don't know if this is actually a good thing. Well, yeah. And when it comes to T, people think basically it's, A, certainly not going to hurt you. Right. And B, it's probably helping you, but we just don't know exactly how. And it's not all super confirmed, but drink tea and eat fruits and vegetables because antioxidants, we think, are pretty good for you. Right. Because it is correlated with a bunch of health benefits. It's correlated with a reduction in diabetes. It's correlated with a reduction in, I think, blood pressure. Yeah. Lung cancer, a lowered risk of lung cancer, heart disease, cholesterol. Yeah. Just tons of stuff. There's all these correlations, they've never proven definitively that it's not, that people who drink tea tend to also lead healthier lifestyles and that it's something else. But there's a lot of evidence there that drinking tea does have some sort of healthful benefits or at the very least, it's not going to hurt you. Yeah. When they say they associate it with good health, then that's a pretty good sign that you're doing the right thing. They just can't say, we can prove this because this does this and we know it for sure. Right. So if that free radical theory of aging is true, is correct, and antioxidants are actually good for you, then the tea you want to go for the drink is the green tea because that's the one that has the highest concentrations of catechins, which include epicattachin epicatochan Galate. Epigallocaticin. Epigallocaten Galate, which is known as EGCG, and it has a lot of gall. I thought that was kind of funny, but black tea has these, but they actually convert to other stuff. They're kind of like dumbed down versions. So, green tea, again, it sounds like if you really want health benefits, if there are health benefits, you want to drink loose leaf green tea with matcha. Right, with a matcha. Chaser yeah, exactly. Tea also does contain caffeine. I don't know why some people think it doesn't, or that it contains very little. I've heard people say that before. Like, coffee's got caffeine. He doesn't have caffeine. Yeah, plenty of caffeine, sure, but generally not as much as coffee. Coffee contains about 80 to 120 mg for a mug. And tea is going to have 20 to 60, with black being the strongest at about 30 to 40 mg. And a green tea and woolong between ten and 20 milligrams. White tea has, like, 1% of the caffeine of cup of coffee. I want to give a shout out to my coffee, too, by the way. You know what we're on the cusp of, don't you? No. The USDA advising Americans to drink coffee to drink up to five cups. Five cups of coffee a day. Wow. And America right now drinks less than two a day on average. And the USDA is about to say, you need to more than double your coffee consumption, because it's not only not bad for you, it's good for you. Finally, on the cusp, everyone is realizing, well, there's a group that's I can't remember the name of it, but they come up with the guidelines for our diets. And it's this panel that's the Star cha. Exactly. The Star Chamber says, actually, we should start drinking a lot more coffee. And the USDA rarely ignores the advice of the panels. So we're on the cusp of the USDA saying, go drink more coffee, everybody and everyone will be like, Josh was right. Yes. He's the only guy drinking coffee before this announcement. Even I don't drink five cups a day on average. Really? Not anymore. I'm trying to step it up. I have started drinking more coffee lately, actually, because we got a little machine here. Now. That machine is dynamite. Yeah. What I do is I hit the regular coffee button and then add a shot of espresso, because that makes it the right size and strength. Right. Because the regular cup of coffee is not even the three quarters of my mug. I know. And it's not even a big mug. It's not like I have some giant mug. No, that's your tea mug. That's my tea mug, yeah. You can punch through a concrete wall with that coffee with the espresso shot on top. Yeah. It's good, though. If you want to know more about t, go drink some tea. You can also type t EA into the search bar@housetoforks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener ma'am. I'm going to call this left handed feedback. And, boy, did we get a lot of it. I don't know why. I guess sometimes when you segment a certain part of the population yeah. They're going to respond. Especially one that's been so mistreated for so many years. Yeah, because we heard from a lot of twins and redheads when we covered that stuff, but, boy, we heard from a lot of lefties. They're a proud people, as it turns out. Hey, guys, I am left handed. When I was little, my mom made me use scissors with only my right hand because of my aunt, my mother's sister, who was also left handed. She's very into sewing, and left handed sewing scissors are crazy expensive. Or at least they were back then. They're not as bad now. In order to avoid the same ordeal, they thought it would just be better to teach me to cut with my right hand, to never buy the expensive left handed scissors of any kind. I still have mixed feelings about this, but I don't think it harmed me. We did hear from a lot of people who were forced into right handedness from parents or teachers or whatever. Yeah, it was a thing. Toad's thing. It's so bizarre. I think there was a concerted, widespread effort to eradicate left handed people. One thing you only mentioned briefly, though, and the right hand dominance is with things like scissors and spiral bound notebooks. I'd also like to point out less obvious ones, like which side the paper is on in bathrooms. Ever thought about that? Yeah. It's on the left, though, in most bathrooms, isn't it? Yes, it is. But that makes sense. But I reached over with my right hand to tear the paper. I know, but you're different. Yeah. Doorknobs, computer, mouse or mice and the smeariness of pins all can cause issues for lefties. Anyway, love the podcast, guys. Especially ones about people like me. So, Sharon and Silani, Tennessee, what else about you can we talk about on a podcast? Yeah, let us know. And if you have something about you that you think would make a cool podcast, a whole podcast, let us know. What if she wrote back and was like, oh, gosh, I love lasagna and I hate dogs and I drive a Dotson. I drive a Dotson. Do a podcast on that. I'm the Dotson. Dotson drivers. Yeah, let us know. Sharon, right? It was Sharon, right? Sharon and other people out there who aren't Sharon, let us know, too. If you have any ideas, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can post on Facebook.com stuffyteau. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@householdworks.com, and you can join us at our home on the web stuffyoushenknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. You know you're a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet at Halo, we get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the worst. World's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-11-14-sysk-flu-final.mp3	How the Flu Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-flu-works	Every year the flu virus makes the rounds, laying up young and old alike for days before moving on to another hapless victim. But flu viruses can mutate and once in awhile they turn into something much deadlier, a pandemic that can kill millions.	Every year the flu virus makes the rounds, laying up young and old alike for days before moving on to another hapless victim. But flu viruses can mutate and once in awhile they turn into something much deadlier, a pandemic that can kill millions.	Tue, 14 Nov 2017 14:00:01 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=1, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=318, tm_isdst=0)	48219602	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, Portland in Seattle. We are coming to see you live next January. Yep. On January 15, we're gonna be in beautiful Seattle, Washington, at the Moore Theatre. Hooray. And then on January 16, the next night, we're gonna be at Revolution and hall in Portland. And we are super psyched for these, right, Chuck? That's right. These tickets are going fast. So for all the deeds, go to our livehome on the Web s ysklive.com. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark there's. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. This is stuff you should know about the flu, which I have. You don't have the flu, do you? I don't know, man. I've been on the planet for 41 years. Okay. I still can't really tell the difference between a flu and a cold. I think the difference that I can tell and I don't get the flu much. I always get the stomach bug, which, as it turns out, is not the flu, I just learned. But I don't get the flu flu much. But I can always tell, though, when I'm super achy, like, the flu just makes me feel like dog doodoo. Right. Whereas the cold is just a big inconvenience. Yeah. No, I've definitely had lots of aches, and I woke up, like, shivering one night. I don't know. She had a fever for sure, I guess. So I guess it must have just been one night in the middle of the night. So that's the flu, right? Probably. So I guess I do have the flu. No joke, everybody. Well, I'm erecting the clear glass in between us. Yeah, I think that I've had it long enough now, based on the research from this article, that I'm not contagious, or else I would have called this off. So did you get it in New York? I wonder. I think so. Which I was like I was just walking around, like, with my hands inside of a couple of plastic Duane Reed bags. It still didn't work. Well, that was your problem probably right there, because I didn't take them off when I ate. Gross. Yeah. So, yes, we were in New York for some Bellhouse shows, right? Those went pretty well. Yeah, thought they were great. All right, so the flu check. We won't reminisce about past victories. We'll just talk about the flu instead. Yeah. How about a stat right off the get go here? Okay. The flu, the city also, sorry, everybody, for the sniffling. That's going to inevitably happen. I'm trying hard not to do it. You're a method podcaster, which is also what I said in my very first episode. That's right. Remember that? Yeah. It's not any funnier now. So the CDC right here in Atlanta. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Not the CDCP. No, they just stuck with the original. Yeah. They reckon that between 5% and 20% of United States peoples get the flu each year. Compared to about 10% to 25% in dirty, cold Canada. Right, I know. And normally when you get the flu, you're laid up for a couple of days, right? Yeah. Like you said, you feel like dog do or something like that. Yeah. That's the seasonal flu. But even with the seasonal flu, which usually here in the United States or in North America, runs from October to March. Yeah, roughly. And then I didn't really think about this before, but in the Southern Hemisphere, it runs the opposite and actually peaks in August. Right. Yeah. Most of the time it's just an inconvenience for you, but it actually kills people sometimes. It can be dangerous, for sure. So in 2011 and twelve, that was a pretty low year for deaths from the flu. In the US. There were 12,000 people who died from the flu or complications from the flu. 20, 12, 13 flu season. 56,000 people died that year. And I think the average is something around 36,000 people in the US die from the flu every year. Yeah. And apparently the World Health Organization says around the world, as many as a quarter of a million people to a half a million people can die every year from the flu. Right. There's a lot of folks it is in the idea of dying from the flu. That's awful, because if you feel bad enough as it is from a flu that you recover from in a few days, imagine dying from that. That would just be a terrible way to die. Yeah. And the whole thing comes down to this little tiny virus, the influenza virus. And there are different types, and influenza, I found, is actually a shout out to the Italian name for it originally. Did you know this? I did not. So I'm going to say it normally, but then you have to say it in the famous Italian accent. Influenza de fredo. Are you talking about the influenza de fredo? Yes. Which means influencer the cold. Oh, all right. For many years, because the flu is most predominant in the colder months, everybody just assumed that it was the actual cold that was getting you sick. Right. That turns out not to be true. It's a virus that does seem to favor the cold, drier conditions of the winter months. But this little tiny virus gets into your body and it starts this chain reaction that is just fascinating. Yeah. So it is a respiratory illness. So like I said before, when you hear people say the stomach flu, which I've said a lot in my life, because I get it once a year with the poopy butt and the vomitus mouth and the ill belly at the same time, though I think I've asked you this before, has it literally ever happened at the same time? I think once in my life. Man, that's rough. I was on John with a bucket. So rough. Well, the worst time I ever had it I may have told the story before I was sick at a friend's house, which is the worst, when I was not living in Atlanta, but I was in Atlanta. Oh, no. And I was like, I just got to get to my mom's house. Mom. Yeah. Much more comfortable being sick there. And he was working, and it was just one of those things. And so I got in my brother's car that I was borrowing while I was in town. I don't like where the story is going. And I drove, no lie, probably about 100 miles an hour to snellville from Atlanta, thinking and I pooped in my pants in the car. And I remember thinking, if a cop pulls me over, he would have to be a cold, heartless individual to give me a ticket, because I would just say, sir, don't take me to prison. Take me to a hospital because I'm dying. Yeah. So I drove 100 miles an hour. It's kind of fun. So you made it home, you showed up with poopy pants, and your mom took care of you. Yes. Showed up to Diane's house, and I lived. But anyway, that was a long way of setting up this, which is that is actually not a flu. The stomach flu is not because the flu is 100% a respiratory illness right. And is not something that happens in your stomach or in your butt. Right. And let's talk first before we talk about the actual effect of the flu, let's talk about the virus a little bit. Okay, so back in 1931, there was this Iowa farm physician, which is to say he was a human physician of humans, but he probably lived on a farm because it was Iowa, 1931. His name was Richard Schultz, and he was trying to figure out what this bug that was getting people was. And he investigated with pigs first, because there are plenty of other animals that can come down with the flu, not just humans. Right, right. And he finally isolated the flu virus in Swine, and it led to this discovery of the isolation of the flu virus in humans, too. So right after that, they started classifying the flu by strains. You got A, B and C, right? So A is the most common and most severe. That's the bad news. Yeah. B is a little milder, little less prevalent, and then we go all the way down to C, which is I get the feeling C doesn't happen a lot, and it definitely isn't the one that you're going to have, like, a big epidemic of the flu from a sea. Yes. I couldn't find much on sea influenza either. Poor sea. Yeah. It'll make a comeback one day, and it'll shock the heck out of all of us. Right. So type A infects all sorts of different species, right. Humans, birds of all kinds, pigs, bats, horses, even. Yeah. I mean, remember the avian flu that scared the world. And that was a right? That was a strain. B strain is almost exclusively infected of humans. Apparently the only other species we've ever found a type B influenza virus in are seals. God knows where they got it from or if we got it from seals. Who knows? Maybe up north, I don't know. And then that sea one, it just infects humans and pigs. So you got the three types. That's right. And then one other thing about them, about the classification of flu strains is that there are also subtypes. Right. And so you mentioned like, avian flu, and the one that scared everybody was, I think H five N one. Yeah, that was it. I remember. So the H and the N, they refer to the two main proteins that you find on the outside of a flu virus and neurominage. Okay. Depending on those types of H protein or M protein, that's how they subtype flu strain. Yeah, that's a good little factor. I don't think anyone really understands what those letters mean. That's what they mean. Yeah. But as far as you're concerned, just pay attention to the news and when they talk about the scary ones, they'll mention those letters and numbers and then you can impress your friends. Yeah. You can be like, oh, well, they're talking about hemoglobin and neurominidase, and they'll say, Shut up, nerd. I hope you get sick. So as far as the standard flu that we're talking about here, the virus, it gets into your body and it kind of makes a beeline to your respiratory tract and it binds with your cells. Did we do one general on viruses? The one I think we really went in depth on was HIV, where we talked about how virus enters the body and takes over. It's just vicious. It is, but it's kind of like Admirable in a really deadly efficient way. It is. So they bind to the surface of the cells in that respiratory tract, and then they say, hey, I'd like you to meet my little friend RNA. Why don't I inject my genetic information into your nucleus and see how you like it? Right. And when it does that, the cell has been officially hijacked and the virus uses the cell's own RNA transcription process to create the proteins that are needed to make new versions of the virus. So the virus is using this host cell in your respiratory tract to make copies of itself. And suddenly, before the cell knows what's going on, it's made millions of copies of these viruses. Right. And apparently when you talk about it step by step, it seems like this takes a little while, right? No. In seconds, seconds after that, the virus has entered your respiratory cell. Millions of copies, copies of it have been made. Yeah. This is happening so fast. It moves in there, it says, I'm in charge now. Out of the way. Yeah, completely out of the way. I'm running the show here. We're copying each other and we're going to move out to the cell membrane because the cell is going to die very quickly. And then that's just going to poof me out into the body further to infect other cells. And it's scary how quickly this happens, right? So if you think about it, if that first cell produces millions of viruses, viral copies, and then they are released from the cell out into the rest of the other respiratory cells and each of those infects another cell, and then those cells all make millions, you see how quickly these viruses reproduce in your body. And once that starts to happen, you are infectious. I think once that first cell ropes, you become infectious. But this can be like a day before symptoms, right? So this is something people are always saying, like, oh, I'm not infectious anymore. Like me. I said it earlier, too, right? I know. But supposedly the day before you even know you're sick, the day before the first symptoms start, before you start, like, sniffling a little bit or whatever. You're infectious, buddy. Yeah. And you're infectious up to seven days after that day. You first start showing symptoms with the flu. And if you're a kid, you can be infectious even longer, because if kids are anything, they're walking germ factories. They are disgusting monsters. It's hilarious. It's true, man. My kid didn't get sick at all for the first 18 months of her life, and I thought, I've got a wonder baby. Yes. Really? I don't know what's going on. We put her in daycare a couple of days a week, and she was sick nonstop for the next six months. Man, that is rough. It is rough. And then they get the family sick. We'll talk a little bit about that and how that happens. But all this is to say during flu season. Especially if you work in an office where when you hear. Like. The flu going around or whatever. Or anywhere you work or in school. If you hear about the flu going around. Even if you don't feel sick or your cube mate doesn't feel or look sick. Just start washing your hands a lot. Oh, yeah. They say that's the best way to prevent getting the flu or spreading the flu is washing your hands a lot. And it's so simple that you almost might discount it, but that's actually true. That's the best way to do it. You can wash the flu virus off of your hands with some soap that will bind to it and the water will wash it right off. Wash that flu right out of your hair. Yeah. And if you have the flu, stay home. Yeah. Everybody but me stay home. Well, we're up against it. We had to record a day. And also wash your hands just constantly. If I'm about to touch anything, I'll wash my hands first, right? If I'm going to go somewhere outside of the hot zone, which is whatever room I'm sequestered in. I will wash my hands. I appreciate that. I mean, trust me. We're in this tiny studio now, the three of us. I know, I'm trying not to breathe. You've done all this in one breath? It's impressive. I know. Well, quickly before we take a break so you can breathe again, we're going to talk about symptoms afterward. Before you get these symptoms though, what's happening is your respiratory system is going to become inflamed and this inflammation might stick around for a few weeks, but from there it moves into your bloodstream and then that's when you're going to get these symptoms. Once it sort of moves into the bloodstream. Right. And we're going to talk about the symptoms as promised right after this. Alright Chuck? Yeah, a little bit. Let's talk symptoms. Okay. You know what I need. I need one of those reeds that Bugs Bunny used to hide in the water when Omar Fudd was hunting them. I could just get a long one and maybe a crazy straw would be even better and just like pipe it out to the air duct right there. That's a great idea. We'll get everybody else sick except you and Jerry. So the symptoms sound a lot like a cold because the symptoms are kind of the same. A cold is usually not as fraught with potential complications and maybe a little less severe, but they're pretty close, which is why you couldn't tell earlier if you had a cold or flu. Right, but that fever, that's the big one. Apparently it's a big distinction between the two. Yeah, I think that's kind of the way I distinguish it. Right? Yeah. And the colds are also caused by viruses are caused by coronaviruses, which can there are types of coronaviruses that are really bad that cause like MERS and SARS. Yeah, but for the most part when you catch a cold from a coronavirus, it's a low level virus or it's a rhino virus. That's the other one that causes the common cold. Right. So it's just a different kind of virus producing similar symptoms to a flu. Do you remember when Peter Sarsgard was on Saturday Night Live? Years ago. No. You know the actor? Sure. He was on there during the SARS, when there was a Sarscar in the United States. One of their skits was he had developed the Sarskard sarscard basically a surgical mask, but it was just funny. They said Sarge card, sarge card, like 30 times and I laughed every time. I think his younger brother was Pennywise the Clown in the It movie, right? Oh, I don't know. I'm pretty sure that was a SARS garden. He is amazing. Yes. Have you seen it? No. Oh, you got to see it. You're going to love it. Now is he a Sarsgard or a scars guard? Oh God, I didn't know there were two different things. Well, they're the scarsguards which is like Stellen Scarsgard is the dad. Okay? And then the son was the dude on True Blood, the vampire show, and then recently on that Pretty Little Liars, I think, one with Nicole Kidman. Okay, that's Alexander Skarsgard. I think that might be him. Is Sarsgard? The one who's in Fargo? SARS? No. Who is that? Peter Sarsgard? Yeah, that's another dude. What is up with all these guys? So are you sure you're not just dropping the chaos of Peter Scars guard? All right, here's the deal. The guy in Fargo, man, this is such a bad sidetrack already. It's pretty bad. The guy in Fargo was Peter Stormier. Okay, he's not even in the equation, then. No, but I definitely know that there is Peter Sarsgard. Okay, because he either was or is married to Mackie Gyllenhaal. Oh, yeah, I guess I knew that. Peter Scarsgard. Okay. And then they're still in Alexander Scarsgard, and I don't know who the clown was. It's Bill Skarsgard. And is he related to the Scars guards? I guess so, yeah. I believe he's the youngest of them. Okay. Oh, I'm sorry. I was wrong. It was Tim Curry I was talking about. No, actually, we never look stuff up. But I did look that up, because the headline here says Alexander Scarsgard's reaction to his brother Bill's clown costume. Yeah, his acting goes way beyond the costume. They did go with the costume costume, but it was good. I know there were so many people screaming at their phones, but I think we finally got it right. Yeah. Sorry about that, everybody. I also want to apologize for any medical students who are being forced to listen to this as part of their class. Hopefully your instructor fast forwarded through that part. All right, back. This all got started with Sarsgard. Sargegards. Oh, yeah, that's right, because that's from the coronavirus. This is the influenza virus we're talking about that creates this inflammation, which is your immune response, right. In your lungs. That's correct. And the symptoms, like a cold, are coughing, sneezing, the fever, which is different, as we said, with the flu achy body, which usually comes with that fever. And then Josh's Runny nose and congestion that you can hear in your overall lethargy. Yeah, I am a little under the weather, I guess, is a good way to put it. I can tell. So those are just standard flu symptoms. You can have secondary symptoms from complications of the flu. Right. One thing that has long gone hand in hand with the flu, as far as, like, death from flu complications goes, is bacterial pneumonia. Yeah, that's not good. And for a very long time, science wasn't quite sure why you were just so susceptible to bacterial infections when you were battling the flu, and they figured it out. It's actually your body's immune response that is responsible for it. Right, right. So when you have the flu and your body starts to battle it off, and you get a fever and your lungs become inflamed, that's your immune system's response to the flu virus. But when your body says, okay, calm down, everybody, let's bring the temperature back down, and your body represses its own immune response. It opens the door for bacteria that normally it would be able to fight off, to take advantage of this kind of naturally weakened state that your immune systems in. And you're much more susceptible to infections from bacteria, and that's where pneumonia comes from. You can get viral pneumonia, but you usually get bacterial pneumonia. And that's the stuff that people can die from, because that bacteria infects your air sacs in your lungs, which fill fluid and pus and blood, and you die from choking on bloody froth that fills up your airway. Yeah, it's a bad jam, man. Severe dehydration is another secondary symptom of the flu. That's why, of course, you always want to drink plenty of water when you have a cold or flu. I looked that one up too, Chuck, because if you think about it, why would you be dehydrated from the flu? It's from sweating. Yeah, sure. Your nose running, just leaking fluids. You are. And they start to add up, and all of a sudden you're dehydrated before you even know it. That's right. Ear infections, especially if you're a kid. Sinus issues. Emily always gets bad sinus problems along with this stuff. I know she was starting to get a little sniffly. Is she sick? She did get sick, that poor lady. Yes. New York, man, it kills everyone I love. And then if you like in Emily's case, she's slightly asthmatic, but if you are asthmatic, you have like, diabetes, it can make that stuff worse. Yeah. She doesn't have diabetes, right? No. Well, the reason diabetes is comorbid with the flu, or is problematic when you have the flu, is because type one diabetes, especially, is an autoimmune disease. So your immune system is already repressed? I guess. Yeah. And then heart conditions can be exacerbated by it because you're getting less oxygen from your lungs into your bloodstream, which strains the heart. And if it's already weak, people have heart attacks from the flu if they already have a heart condition. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. Again, it's a bad jam. Well, actually, in the episode coming up about the silly one, about the ten cursed movies, remember, the little girl from Poltergeist died at twelve from a heart attack brought on by the flu, right, yeah. Or she had like, a stomach blockage. They initially diagnosed it as the flu. Oh, okay. But I thought it was not never like a virus like that. I don't think so. I think they mistook it. All right, well, then forget all that. But people do, so your points still remain correct. Okay, so how you get the flu is this like you said, it's generally about November through March. January and February tend to be the worst of it here in the United States, and as we mentioned, offices and schools especially, because children are filthy monsters who just don't wash hands and they breathe on each other and touch each other and they don't cover their mouths when they cough for sneeze. But it's pretty cute when they hug each other. It's very cute, actually. It's worth all the sickness in the world. It's pretty great. But that's the reason that kids tend to spread it more, because as much as you try and teach them to cover their mouth and they cough and sneeze and wash their hands a lot, it's just not really on their radar like it is for adults. No, because they are dirty creatures. And then the kid then in turn brings it home and the family gets infected pretty quickly because tries you might there's just a lot of close contact with kids that you can't avoid. Even if you're washing your hands, they will find a way to infect you. Right. And if you go even further back, there's an even earlier origin before kids picking it up at daycare or preschool for the flu, usually it comes from other animals we're finding. Right. They're frequently birds, like we were saying. Right. And they used to think that for a human to catch a flu from a bird, especially the flu had to show up in a mixing vessel. Usually a pig which was capable of taking it could be infected by a bird flu and a human flu. And flu viruses have this amazing talent called reassortment, where a flu strain and another flu strain can get together and be like, oh, hey, you have eight proteins that make up your RNA. I do too. Let's mix and match and see what happens. And they thought for a long time that this really only took place in pigs. And then out would come a new super virus that no one had ever seen before that humans could catch, but from Southeast Asia, people being in close contact with infected birds, especially like in the poultry industry or something, there have been cases that started in the nineties of avian flu coming directly from birds to humans. So that theory went out the window and that's what set off those fears of a bird flu pandemic that we lived with for many years. Yeah, that's right. A lot of that was just spread from bird poop. Yeah. And it scared people because those bird flus are no joke. They have like a 60% mortality rate. Six out of ten people who come down with h, five and one bird flu die. Right. Yeah. Luckily, it's really difficult to catch it even when you are around sick birds. It doesn't very frequently make the jump to humans, but it can is what they found. Yeah. As far as the regular flu, the garden variety flu that we're talking about mainly here, it spreads from well, like we said, from touching stuff from coughing and sneezing. When you cough and sneeze, even if you think you're covering your mouth pretty well, there may be little fluids squirting out between your fingers up to a few feet. It's in the air around you. That stuff can travel. So if that lands on a doorknob or if someone covers their mouth like a normal and then opens a door or borrows a stapler or whatever, it's going to be on that doorknob, and then you touch it. And that's why, like, hand washing by the sick and by the non sick is so crucial. Yeah. And if you're like having an anxious day at work and you're doing your normal thing of chewing on your stapler to relieve anxiety, and the guy who borrowed it was sick, you're toast. You are toast. And as you mentioned earlier, it bears repeating. You can be sick a day before symptoms, and you can be contagious a day before symptoms and still remain contagious up to seven days after the symptoms start. Right. So even if you feel better after day four, you could still be spreading that junk around for a few more days. Right. And they say that even after you feel better, you should stay in bed an extra day because, again, your immune system is compromised and you can catch other stuff. So you want to be careful. That extra day really pays off. And that's when you just lay in bed and watch Stranger Things, too, right? I haven't seen it yet. Is it good? Yes, we just finished it last night. Cool. Did you see the first season? Yeah, that was great. Season two is just as great, if not better. I'm glad to say that, too. I was a little nervous because it was something I loved and I was like, oh, man, season two a lot of pressure. Well, yeah, that's how it happens. The sophomore season is very frequently, like everyone's aware of the success of the show and what people are saying about it, and they try to adapt to the expectations rather than continuing on doing what they were doing before. But good for you guys. Stranger Things. Yeah. So great. I want to get those Duffer Brothers on Movie Crush. Oh, yeah, it'd be cool. Those guys would be great. Should we take a break? Yeah, I think so. All right, we'll come back and talk a little bit about pandemics. All right, Chuck. So we were talking about how seasonal flu has seasons. That's why it's called seasonal flu, right? That's, I guess, one classification of flu. There's also a pandemic flu, and the same kind of flu virus can be a pandemic flu or a seasonal flu. And I think usually the way it happens is a new virus will emerge from, say, like livestock or poultry or something like that. And infect humans, and if it's totally novel, where no human has ever encountered a flu of this type before, it. Can just lay waste to people. It can kill a lot of people. It can infect a lot of people. It can spread the world. And when that happens, it becomes classified as a pandemic flu. After a couple of rounds around the world, people will have started to develop an immunity to it, but it'll still be passed around. And so for the decade or so, it can be the predominant strain of the flu, but it'll have changed over to a seasonal type of flu. So it's almost like the pandemic versus seasonal type flu describes how contagious it is and how virulent it is. I think that's the big distinction. Yeah. And I think also in the pandemic, doesn't that mean it has left the country? Yeah, I think that is kind of one of the indicators of it too. These numbers are staggering. This is the worst flu pandemic in world history. In 1918, I don't know what month exactly, but 1918 and 19. And it killed more than 20 million people around the world. And it killed most of those people, actually, in four months from September to December. Isn't that crazy? More lives were lost than all 20th century wars combined to the flu. Yeah. You said 20 million. 20 million worldwide, about half a million in the United States. I saw in many reputable places, 50 million people died around the world. It's staggering. Yeah. And it was like, right at the end of World War I, just came out of nowhere. And one of the other really noteworthy things about it that just baffled people was it was killing healthy people under the age of 22, 23, 24, like, just healthy young people killed by the flu. A lot of them died from pneumonia, and they finally figured out that it was because it had been about 20 something years since a flu resembling that type of strain had made the rounds. So people under, say, like, age 25, had never been exposed to it. So it was a novel flu which just leveled the people it was exposed to who had never encountered something like it before. Yeah. It's scary to think about. I mean, surely that couldn't happen today, could it? Or could it? Oh, yeah, sure, man. Do you think that we could have something like that off these days? Do you know? Like, a third of the population of the world was infected with that flu that year. Wow. Isn't that crazy? I know that's hard to believe. Yeah, that can totally happen. It's a real concern. All right. So as far as your risk of getting the flu, if you're a kid, like, there are different risk groups, like high risk, low risk, whatever medium or average risk. But if you're under two years old, your little immune system isn't quite smart enough yet to know how to fight things off, so you're definitely more at risk. And as always, what affects the children also affect the elderly. So if you're over 65 seniors, is elderly wrong to say? I think elderly technically 81. Oh, really? Yeah. All right. So we'll go with seniors. Seniors. Active senior adults who have decades left ahead of them. That's right. Who else? Anyone who has any kind of chronic like I mentioned, asthma or diabetes. Any kind of chronic condition. If you're pregnant, if you work in a hospital or a doctor's office or nursing home. Nursing home. Not just people who work there, but the residents, too, are in a really vulnerable position. Yeah. Because they are in the elderly age range. Their immune systems are pretty compromised. If they're in a nursing home, they're probably ill already, and then they're living in close quarters with other people who are ill. That's a recipe for disaster. Yeah, sure is. It's also a recipe for tapioca pudding. It is the best around, remedy wise. We'll talk about vaccinations here in a minute, because I thought that was kind of one of the most interesting parts of this. But as far as remedies, if you get the flu, it's a virus. So you can't take antibiotics? No, you can't take a pill that's going to cure you. There are some antiviral drugs which I've never tried any of these. Have you? No. I tried Zycam last year once. I think that's for colds. Yeah. I thought that was, like, discredited. Well, I had a few people say, oh, you should try Zycam. It helps knock out your cold faster. It killed my sense of taste and smell oh, no. For several days, to the point where I was scared. I don't remember that. I'll bet you were scared. Yeah, and I looked it up and it's a thing. Oh, I do remember that, actually. Yeah. That's just really unnerving, the idea of maybe it's permanent. Yeah, it was pretty freaky and super noticeable. It wasn't like a subtle thing. You'd be like, Chilly, I miss you. So that was my experience. I'm not making some sweeping statement about that medication. Way to see. But there are antiviral drugs. There's one called Tamiflu, rolenza fluidine. Little on the nose, if you ask me. Flu stop any viral drugs. They seem like a good idea, but they seem like a good idea under the premise that seasonal flu streams, they used to think that they died out at the end of the season. Right, right. Well, they started tracking them. Like, our global monitoring system is really top notch, and they can track flu around the world. And they've found that seasonal flu at the end of the season in North America, it just goes to South America. Yeah. So since that's the case, when you use antivirals and you're exposing these flu that go on to survive, you're also training them, evolutionarily speaking, to adapt so that those antiviral drugs are useless against them for people who really need them. So just like with antibiotics, using antivirals just to cure a common flu or to shorten a common flu is probably a bad idea when you're talking about the whole population. Yeah. And that's what they do. What they try to do is just keep the cellular spread from happening as much as it can. Right. And that's sort of the easiest way to say it. Yeah. A pair of them keep them from replicating, and then another one traps them inside a cell. Once they enter, it's like, oh, God, I can't get out. The door is locked. And then death. And they're all prescription drugs, right. If I'm not mistaken. So vaccines are, like, pretty hot. They're like, the hot thing to do on a Friday night is to go get a flu vaccine. Right. Yeah. I didn't get flu shots for many years until I had a kid. Yes. And they say, like, especially if you have a baby under six months of age, they can't be vaccinated, and so everyone around them should be vaccinated, is the recommendation from the CDC. Yeah, like, our close family, the Grand Grand and the Abbas and the Pop Pops and the Papas and the poopas and the Mimings and the momos. Yeah, momo got a flu shot. That was nice of her. She's very kind. So, yeah, we all got flu shots, and I never got the flu much. I didn't have a disbelief in the flu vaccine. I was just like, I don't really need to bother with that. Yeah, that's fine. Do you get them now, though? Is it a habit of yours now? Well, yeah, now they just sort of recommend it. When you have kids up until they're a certain age, you should get vaccinated as a family. Right. And when you have kids, if you get them vaccinated once they're able to be vaccinated again under six months, they say, no, don't do that. When they're young, though, and you're getting them vaccinated, they need to be vaccinated twice, like, a month apart. Yes. And so with flu vaccines in general, they recommend that you get it as early in the season as possible because it takes about two weeks for that to take effect. So with the kid, then I guess you would want to get them. So that six weeks before the flu season. I don't know. Or is that second one pretty much like, okay, now it's taking effect. Is it four weeks plus two weeks? I don't remember the schedule. Yeah, I don't remember the schedule. Well, ask your doctor. Okay. We're not doctors. Stop pretending. They'll tell you, like, when you go to get your little kitty check ups, they say, Come back in this month and get your flu shot number one and then flu shot number two. And so for a while, there were two kinds of flu shots that the CDC recommended. One was an actual shot, the flu vaccine that was in a shot form. Yeah. And then there was another one that's called Live attenuated Influenza virus, which came in the form of a nasal spray. And that was usually recommended for kids. I don't know if it's because kids don't like needles or what, but the CDC has officially stopped recommending nasal flu vaccines. Don't do those anymore. Well, and when they were doing it, when we say kids, you had to be over five because it was, like you said, a live virus, right? It was a live weekend virus. Yeah. And that's different. If you think, all right, I'm going to get a flu shot, so that means I'm going to get the flu virus shot into me, and so I might feel like I have the flu. That's not really the case. It's really kind of neat how they do it. These scientists and doctors, like you said, track what's going on in the world of flu all over the world, and they don't sort of they very definitely make a prediction and say, here's the flu strain specific to the United States. Let's say that I think we're going to be faced with this year, and they make their best scientific guess possible. And that is you get a not live version of that virus injected into your body. Your body sees, hey, foreign invaders, here, let me produce antibodies. Then if that virus or if the real flu knocks on your door later that winter, your body says, Wait, I've met you before. I know how to fight you. But it's pretty cool. And it literally the effectiveness I looked up this year, and it's a year to year thing. It's 40% to 60% on this year's strain. And it varies because it really just depends on how well those scientists have predicted how much they get it right. Right. Because if they get all three wrong, well, then you're toast when you encounter the flu that's going around that season. But even when they do get it right, it's kind of baffling that sometimes the flu vaccine just doesn't bestow any kind of immunity. Apparently, Australia just came out of a really bad epidemic flu season down there and didn't cause a lot of deaths, but everybody was sick with the flu. It was an H three type flu that went around. And even though that strain showed up in the vaccine that was given out, only like 15% of people who got vaccinated and were exposed to the flu were immune to it. Like 85% of people who got flu vaccines and then encountered the flu still got sick. That's a pretty bad track record for a flu vaccine, and they're just not sure why. One of the theories is so when they make flu vaccines, they grow them in egg protein, typically, like eggs. That's the medium they use to actually grow the viruses that they kill. One researcher pointed out that at least one kind of flu virus mutates in the presence of egg protein. So that the virus that you put in to grow in there is different from the one that comes out. It's a mutated version, and so maybe that would prevent your body from recognizing the original one that you're trying to introduce it to in the vaccine. So interesting. It is pretty interesting. Well, and they say there's a list of people who should not receive the flu shot. And one of those qualifications is if you are allergic to chicken eggs, then you shouldn't get a flu shot. Yeah, there's like a couple of other ways that they make flu shots, flu vaccines, but chicken egg is the most predominant way to do it. Yeah. If you're currently have a fever, wait on your flu shot under six months. Of course, we said you cannot if you have had flu shots in the past and you had a bad reaction because like I said, it's not going to make you sick, but you might feel a little achy or have sore muscles or something, but you can have a bad reaction. If that's the case, then maybe flu shots aren't for you. Right. And if you're an anti vaccine, then you probably already decided that flu shots aren't for you. Correct. Which we will never do an episode on that vaccinations. Right. Oh, you don't think so? I don't know, man. So the idea that a flu vaccine can check all the boxes but still just be wrong, wrong, wrong, and not confer immunity has some people looking for a universal vaccine or one that lasts way longer than just a year. What they're targeting is so when you get a normal vaccine, that vaccine is based on that ha protein, the hemoglobin. Yeah. And that's the most quickly evolving part of any flu virus. Right. So they're saying, well, let's look at other parts of the flu virus that don't evolve nearly as quickly and target that. And some of those parts are even basically universal among all flu viruses. So if you can find if you can create a vaccine based on a stable part of a flu virus that's a part of every flu virus, one vaccine could confer, ideally lifelong immunity from all influenza for anybody who takes the vaccine. One vaccine to cure them all. Exactly. Wow. Yeah. So you got anything else? No, I guess we're not going to cover the boogie wiggy flu. I thought that was boogie woogie fever. No, it's the rock and pneumonia and the boogie wiggy flu. Oh, that's nice. What's that from? Is that in Atlanta rhythm section song? No, they're better than that. Okay, well, since I said Atlanta rhythm section, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail. Yeah. This is a overlooked Simpsons bit from us, and this is not one of those we get plenty of things where people like, how could you not have mentioned this quote or this episode? But the response was good and people weren't necessarily poopooing it. No. And also I want to say thank you to everybody who wrote in to just say congratulations or to thank us. That was all. Every single one of those emails or tweets or posts were all well received. So thanks for those guys, totally. But this is something we failed to mention, which definitely deserves its own email. And this is from Rich, our man on Cape Cod. As he says, hey, guys, was listening to the Simpsons. Two partner, enjoyed it very much. You explained how an episode came to be from conception to animation, et cetera, and you paid respect to each portion, but then you slide it off one of the most important men in the franchise, you just said. And then they slapped Denny Elfman's score on it, and it's done. Well, as any true Simpsons aficionado would know, danny Elfman has never once written a score to The Simpsons. He wrote, as we know, just the title or the theme song. So he says that job fell to the immensely talented and recently terminated via email, alf Clawson. For 27 years, every score, every queue, every song was composed, orchestrated, and conducted by Clawson and his live orchestra. He's won two Emmys and seven Annie awards for his work. The reason this is such a painful sight was because this omission has been happening for years. Clausen has worked insane hours writing music for a live orchestra to accompany an animated show. He's always played second fiddle. Nailed it. He said to all those who think Elfman is any part of the show after he pinned the main title. In fact, the main theme song we all know and love is actually Clawson's reorchestration of ELFIN's theme that took place mid season three with a lush or more crisp orchestration. Wow. I bet you anything Rich plays the oboe. Alf clawson. I'm so sorry. I know he said, I admire your podcast for bringing light to information that has been stuck lurking in the shadows. You always make sure credit is given to those who sometimes went their entire lives without getting the nod they deserve. Well, this guy's really turning the knife in our back, doesn't he? And I feel you. O, Clawson, that respect. So Alf clawson for real. And then it was a bit of a longer email. He told the story of how he was recently fired by email, which is not cool. No, it's definitely not. After 27 years of dedicated work. I know, man. Not cool guy. So that is Richard Man on Cape Cod. Well, thanks a lot, Rich. I appreciate that. That was one of the better emails I've heard in awhile. Agreed. If you want to try and top Rich, let's see what you got. You can tweet to us. You can join us on Facebook, but send us an email stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com and join us at our home on the webstepyshio.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetoporks.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. 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 episodes of Morbid one week early only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today."
https://podcasts.howstuf…sysk-fascism.mp3	What exactly is Fascism?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-exactly-is-fascism	Fascism is a specific political philosophy that's often mistakenly used to describe any authoritarian, supressive movement or regime. Josh and Chuck discuss the origins, history and markers of Fascism in this episode.	Fascism is a specific political philosophy that's often mistakenly used to describe any authoritarian, supressive movement or regime. Josh and Chuck discuss the origins, history and markers of Fascism in this episode.	Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:31:50 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=17, tm_min=31, tm_sec=50, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=70, tm_isdst=0)	19336691	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. 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 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. 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. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. Fascist. Josh Clarke, fascist. That's exactly what I was going to say to you. I was going to say, Chuck, you're always calling me a fascist pig. Not true. Anyway, that's Charles W, Chuck Bryant. Hello. We're doing a podcast on fascism today. Yes, and as I was saying, chuck is always calling me a fascist pig, but I don't know that that's necessarily accurate after I read this article, how Fascism Works. Well, you should stop giving speeches from your balcony above Atlanta in my hand, parting my hair to my side a little bit. Take down all the posters of you all over the place. Never. Chuck. Yes. You want to talk about fascism? Let's do it. Okay. So did you know? I was surprised to find this out. Benito Mussolini was the guy who actually pretty much created fascism. He definitely coined the term. Yes, he did. And this concept of fascism was drawn upon from ancient Roman techniques, military techniques, plato, nietzsche? Sure. Machiavelli? Of course. And I was surprised to find this out because he ended up strung up by his ankles with his throat slit, people kicking him in the head. He'd fall down after he was dead, and they'd string him back up. Yeah, it didn't work out too well. No, it didn't. And really, he was kind of Hitler's lackey. Really? Sure. I was surprised to find that he was the guy who started fascism, but by God, he did. Apparently, he was a socialist until he got a hold of Nietzsche, and then he was like, whoa, Nietzsche screwed a lot of stuff up in this world. I like him personally, but you got to take the guy with the grain of salt. Yeah. So as far back as, what, 1922, mussolini was starting to ruminate on fascism, right? Yes. And what is it, Chuck? People throw this word around like it's awesome or sweet or lol. Have you noticed people use lol to a ridiculous degree these days? No, but I do know that fascism is I think I can't remember who it was, but someone said it's the most misused word of our times. Yeah. And I believe it or incredible. Right? Yeah. But you hear Bush is a fascist, obama is a fascist, nancy Pelosi is a fascist, dick Cheney is a fascist. None of them are fascist. All right. We're not going to debate that here. I thought that was a nice sprinkling of liberals and conservatives in there. I should throw in a Tea Party member to cover all my bases. Josh, it comes from the word fescue, Italian, meaning bundle. You're not going to say it was an accent and fascio nice than previously. The Latin route. I take it as thesis. Thesis. And that is a bundle of sticks tied to a single axe. And that kind of says it all. It is, pretty much. Again, Mussolini has a master stroke. This is a perfect descriptor of what fascism is. State is the axe which can blur, and the people are the bundle of sticks that support the head. Right. Or break, depending. Fascism has a tendency to push people to the breaking point, isn't it? I would say so. Although fascism also kind of brings out the absolute worst and conformist in human beings as well. So fascism is basically the opposite of democracy. The whole point is the state. There is no individualism. No. There is no capitalism, really. No. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's communist. Right. And actually, communism and fascism are opposite sides of the coin. Sure. At least economically. Right. Because with communism, it's one social class. Right. And with fascism, they're very distinct social classes that you cannot get out of. Yeah. If you're in a social class is under fascism, then be prepared to stay there. Right. And another defining characteristic of fascism is that the whole point of the state is war. Yeah. It's based on natural selection, Darwinian evolution sure. Where the state's entire existence is to wage and win war, and it's survival of the fittest. So everybody's out there waging war. Right. And if you lose, well, then you are naturally selected. You're absorbed by another state. You're conquered, you're subjugated. And the state that did the subjugating was selected as the fittest. It was the strongest. So the entire point of the state is to wage war. Imperialism, baby. Yeah. It's pretty rotten stuff, really. And Mussolini put it that war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. Right. What a jerk. But it was a rallying point. People got into it for a while. Yeah. And how you wonder, how can some guys come along and say, you have no individualism? Everything your mommy told you about how great and unique you are and your little snowflake is wrong, and your entire purpose in life is to support the glory of the state, which is going to go wage war indiscriminately. How do people get duped into this? How do they follow along? I'll tell you how, buddy. Okay. One thing that fascists prayed on when we say prayed, because it's not strictly defined, fascism isn't really around anymore, although there are tendencies in smaller groups. But as far as a big time government, it's gone. But one thing they do is they take a nation in crisis, for instance, let's say Europe after World War One, and they say, we can return our country to its former glory. All you have to do is buy into it. So people got to buy into it at first. You can't be done with the iron fist initially. Right. And the way they buy into it is that the people are already suffering. Right, yeah. So a lot of people blame the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One for eventually leading to World War II. There was a lot of restrictions placed on the losing nations. Right. They're normal working class people in countries like Germany suffered tremendously, and they had to repay to rebuild nations that they went to war with, and there was no trust whatsoever. So it was kind of a bad treaty, actually. But it did set the stage for fascism. Right, right. So you've got the people who are suffering and you're saying you got to buy into it. What are they buying into? Well, they're buying into the state and only the state, and everything you do is for the good of the state. Right. That pretty much sums it up. And a lot of times it's based on some sort of idealized past. Right. Which, again, after World War One, that made it easy because this nation, like Germany, was suffering tremendously. And so they were saying, well, we used to be great, we need to reclaim our superiority. Even if they weren't great, it doesn't matter. No. Because mythical, as long as they buy into it. Right, yeah. Like the 50s. Right. And also there tends to be one ethnic group that is singled out, is the important one, and everything else is being every other group is dragging this one group down and they need to be dealt with. The master race in the case of Germany, for sure. Yeah. And that's where we come to the difference between the capital F and the lowercase F. Right. As far as fascism no, I didn't know this. Apparently Mussolini is capitalized and Hitler's is not. Yeah. And he was probably pretty angry about that. I would think so, too. He wanted to capital F. Yeah, he got angry a lot. Mussolini's fascism was largely based on going and waging war just for the hell of it. Right, yes. Just to show the glory of the state. Hitler's conquest actually had a method to the madness. Right, right. His was basically based on furthering the Aryan race through conquest. Yeah. I got a cool quote for you all right. This Italian fascist philosopher who knew Giovanni, oddly enough, his name is Giovanni Gentile. He says, mankind only progresses through division, and progress is achieved through the clash and victory of one side over another. So basically, you can't progress unless you are dividing people and conquering. So there you have it. So my dad always said and his name is Genteel. Yeah. Gentile. Nice. Thanks, Chuck. I was looking forward to this one because I knew that you bust the Italian accent out of it to my blood. There's another characteristic that we didn't mention, and it's authoritarian leadership. Right, right. I mean, you've got Mussolini, you've got Hitler. They have these cults of personality surrounding them. Yeah. That's really important. And they come to embody the state. Right. So you can pretty much interchangeably say everything you're doing is for the glory of Germany or everything you're doing is for the glory of Hitler. They're pretty much interchangeable. Yeah. That's why they have their flags and their posters all over the place. Right. Which they love their posters. They do. Or did. There's also a tremendous amount of violence in these societies as well. You can't have word without violence. Well, not only that, it's not domestically. You also have violence. So in addition to, say, Hitler's process of the Final Solution, where he's furthering the area and race by murdering anybody who's not a member of it. Right. There's domestic violence for anyone who speaks out. Any resistance movements, anything like that, they're going to be crushed. Yes. You're not supposed to wage war indiscriminately for the glory of the state. You're really not supposed to turn on your own people. No. Right. Frowned upon. Most decidedly. So what's life like if you are one of those people who would have passed the Milgram experiment with flying colors and are just waving flags and happy as can be to see Mussolini's ILD Duche car driving past? Well, it's not a very happy place because Mussolini flat out rejected what he called the myth of happiness. Yeah, you did, didn't you? And it's not a good place if you're a woman, because the only thing you are under a fashion as a woman is a little fascist maker. Yeah. They don't want you working or anything. They want you making a little fascist. And the youth are accentuated in these societies. Right. Survival of the fittest. It is survival of fittest, but also the youth make the best soldiers, and they are also the leaders of tomorrow. So if you indoctrinate them throughout their lifetimes, beginning at an early age, they're going to have the same ideals. Yeah, right. It's also not very good if you're gay, because aside from Hitler and the gang thinking it's like mass perversion, it's also you can't make a little fascist. Right. So that was no good. I didn't know that. Is that why homosexuals were targeted so much under Hitler? Well, for both those reasons, they thought it was perverse and then you can't make baby fascist, so what good are you? Right. But Hitler thought it could be cured. Mussolini just outlawed it altogether. There's also lots of rallies. Parades. Sure. Like you said, posters everywhere. It's ubiquitous. The sentiment of fascism. Everything for the state and the leader, they're everywhere you go. So if you're 1617 and you're Courtney, you're going to go to a state parade. Fine. State holiday. They tend to take on a religious quality. Right. Because there's no religion but nationalism. Well, yes, that's a little tricky because they reject religion in a lot of ways. But in the article that pointed out, mussolini in Italy clearly cannot reject Catholicism because that's where it's rooted. So he would kind of use the Church to his advantage when it worked for him. And Hitler did a lot of the same as well. Right, sure. Yeah. He was a protector of the church. Right. So they say, god, these guys are crazy. Luckily, this whole fascism didn't take off all that well. Now, they had a pretty short run. 1918 to 1945 was the height of it. Right. Yeah. It's not very long. This is where you find the fascist states in Germany, Italy, romania had one, pretty much. Spain sort of did. Spain did, yeah. When Franco led the revolution, he was colluding with the fascists, but they apparently weren't organized enough or widespread enough to really come on as the functioning government. So he just took on he adopted some of their fascist values in Spain. I think one of the coolest things is why it didn't work out, was the reason it shouldn't work out, as people started to say, Wait a minute, genocide probably isn't a very cool thing to do, and violence and mass murder is. We're kind of bad guys now. I don't know if I like that. Right. We're sick of the shock troops. Yeah, exactly. Cracking our skulls for smiling. Because happiness is a myth. An absurd myth. Right. Yes. And so after World War II, the chaos is gone, which they depend on that kind of chaos to rally the people. Right. And the fascism was seen even before World War II or during World War II is leading the world of war. These guys were just conquering nations, like going out and invading other nations that were nearby for whatever reason, and they had to be stopped. Which is why World War II, I think, is viewed as such a positive war. There were such clear, mind bogglingly, distinct bad guys. Right. The rest of the world was like, we're going to take you down. And they did and fought well together. And it was, as far as wars go, a pretty great war. Yeah. We're not war guys, obviously, the kind of wars we waged today. But back then, I think I would have grabbed my musket way. Probably not a musket. You would have been really in trouble. I did go into the front I would have grabbed my bolt action rifle and I would have won for Hitler. Yeah. I would have tried to. Yeah. I would have been loving glorious band. Oh, I was just about to say that. I just saw it again this weekend. Yeah, that's a good, awesome movie. Unfortunately, fascism didn't completely go away. Like you said, there are small pockets of movement around the world. Right. We can talk about skinheads. No. These puttz, they're just stupid. I don't think we should give them any airtime. Because you know what? There's such small pockets of morons out there that embrace this kind of thing these days. It's just silly. There's some neo fascist sentiment that I found surprising. It's called love of difference. Yes. Which is basically just racial separation, but with a different spin on it, right? Yeah. They say being different is really great. That's why you shouldn't mix races. Right. Not because one is better, which is we just like being different. Right. And being white. Yeah. So those are kind of gentler fascists, I guess. And there are some markers that you can find in some governments. See if you can guess which ones we're talking about. Governments that have anti immigration laws. Right. That's a check. Small, progressive limitations on civil rights in the name of giving a democratic country greater security. Check. Isolationist foreign policy no comment. And government intervention and the means of production to secure the state from shortages and economic downturns. Definitely no comment. Creepy. Yes. So that's fascism. Yes. Right. And it's still around here. There I don't think that there is any pure form of government, is there? No, but like we said, there are these pockets of morons that embrace neo Nazis, that kind of thing. But I shouldn't completely dismiss them because they do act out in violent ways at times. Oklahoma City, obviously, so I don't want to make light of that. They do bad things. No. London had some bombings in 1999. I was thinking about that. London is one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. Very progressive city. And it had bombings. It has bombings sometimes. I know. That's pretty nuts. It is. Okay, so that's fascism. You want to learn more? See some creepy pictures of people smiling and waving flags as Mussolini passes by. If you love to look at Hitler and hate them, you can find pictures of them on this fascist article by typing fascism in the handy search bar@housestepworks.com. So I guess it's listener mail time, right? Yes, indeed, Josh. I feel 30. Yes. Josh. I'm going to call this one. How could we not mention Boba Fett? That's what I'm going to call it. We heard from quite a few people on this in the bounty Hunter episode because we failed to mention Boba Fett, who was arguably the coolest bounty hunter. He drove a Vet. Oh, did he? Haven't you ever heard of Vets? Vet MC? Chris no. I'll send it to you. So this is from our pal Aaron AC. He writes in a lot. He's a regular. I just got done listening to the latest joint how Bounty Hunters Work, and I'm appalled because I did not hear a single mention of Boba Fett. And then he types WA. Yeah, okay, so maybe he's fictional. Allegedly. But come on. During the Ninja podcast, I sat through what seemed like ten minutes of you guys parenthesis Josh geeking out hard on the Dossier credentials of action figures. So I know that's not it. So come on. How about a shout out for Boba? I think he deserves it. Dog and his mulleted militia ain't got nothing on the Fete man. And I would agree. I would too. So we didn't mention Boba Fett. We wanted to acknowledge that. And he also says, speaking of Boba Fett, in honor of his anti climactic afterthought of a death scene in Jedi, I'd like to offer a podcast suggestion how the Wilhelm screen works. Have you ever heard of this? No, I had never heard of it either, but it is awesome. It was The Scream that a sound engineer recorded for a movie. And I think the 1940s man dies by alligator was what it was called. And that has since been used the exact clip in over 200 movies since then. It's like an injury with sound engineers. Really. The Wilhelm Scream. I can't believe I've never heard of it. So he asked if we can play one, and I think, Jerry, we can probably wrestle up a Wilhelm screen. Can we play one now? It sounds a little something like this. I can't wait to hear what that sounds like. It's really funny, actually. And after you hear it, you've noticed. Oh, wow. I've heard that before. I hope I do. So thank you. I'm going crazy here. Like, it just played, and I still don't know what it sounds like. We just want to thank Aaron for educating me on a movie thing. I can't believe I didn't know this popular movie thing nice. I think Jerry knew it nice. And now you know. I do. And knowing it's half the battle. That's right. If you have any obscure movie arcania, actually, arcania of any variety, we're always very interested in that. Wrap it up in an email spanking on the bottom and send it to stuffpodcast@howstepfworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blog on the housetofworks.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 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 Petco Pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores."
86b935ae-3b0e-11eb-9699-1b2a87115bae	Les Paul & Leo Fender Part I	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/les-paul-leo-fender-part-i	The story of Les Paul and Leo Fender defines rock and roll music. Listen in to part one of the tale of these two musical rivals.	The story of Les Paul and Leo Fender defines rock and roll music. Listen in to part one of the tale of these two musical rivals.	Tue, 24 Aug 2021 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=236, tm_isdst=0)	42057640	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm josh the jet. Clark. There's Charles W, chuckle, Benny and Bryant. And Jerry's over there, she's just Jerry. This is stuff you should know. Jerry is Captain Fantastic. Oh, yeah. That's a good one. What are you talking about? A piano player? How about Mr. Robato? Sure. Okay. Jerry. Mr. Robato. Roland great. So how you doing, man? I think you're probably pretty jazzed about this one. Do you think? Yeah, I'm pretty excited about this one as a musician and guitar nerd. And we definitely want to shout out at the beginning the inspiration behind this. And a lot of the research for this came from the great book called The Birth of Loud. There's not a colon on the cover, but it's implied. Okay, so we get a different jingle for implied colon. Yeah, but it should be like a down kind of thing, like burn. Okay. The Birth of Loud, Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the guitar pioneering rivalry that shaped rock and roll. And this was from Ian Port in 2019. And if you're a guitar player, just get the book. You've probably already read it, but if you hadn't, get it because it's great. Yes. Hats off to him. Hats off to Dave Ruse for helping us out with this one as well, too. Totally. They did a great job. And it's a two parter, right? Yeah. We're going to two parted up because it's that big. It's that important of a thing. It's really easy for people like me who appreciate music but also appreciate music, too. You know what I mean? To kind of overlook just the epic story behind electric guitars. It's almost like I didn't think they were always there, and I knew roughly when they've been invented, and I think I kind of knew kind of who invented it, but I didn't realize just what a sweeping effect and impact that electrifying certain kinds of guitars had on the world. It's one of the most impactful inventions ever made. Oh, absolutely. And then when you look at this story and read that book, especially The Gentleman, Les Paul and Leo Fender, it's a remarkable story and that they were very similar in some ways. They were very different in a lot of ways. They both ended up with permanent injuries that affected their craft. When one was up, another might be down a little. And this goes to the guitars as well. When the Defender Brand was up, it seems like the Les Paul was down. When the Les Paul was up, Fender was down. And they both kind of tried to take credit for things that they didn't really invent at times. So it's really interesting when you look at the story of these two dudes in this era of innovation and invention and just how remarkable it was. And for the people who are really unfairly left out, they had maybe even more to do with it. Yeah, because there's a lot of hands that went into the creation of the electric guitar as we understand it today. A lot of people, a lot of unsung people. These guys just happen to be two of the ones whose names became synonymous with electric guitars. But that's also not to say, like, they didn't deserve to have that kind of recognition, too. They really did contribute, even if they did, kind of, like you said, take credit to some extent for things they didn't necessarily do specifically. Yeah. It's one of those inventions that if you ask someone who invented the electric guitar, you have to follow that up with a lot of questions in order to answer it. Is it the person who invented the electric guitar pickup which made it possible to electrify something, or is it the first person to stick that pickup on a chunk of wood instead of a big hollow guitar? Or is it the first person to actually build one that worked, that you could sell to people? You just can't answer that cleanly and say, this person invented the electric guitar, like, five or six people invented the electric guitar. Yeah. And if you're just a normal, non guitar person, you probably regretted asking that question. Now you just say, is that freedom rock? Hey, man. Yeah, that ran through my head more than once. For sure. Turn it up. So I guess we should get started. You want to start with Leo Fender? Yeah. So Clearance Leonidas Fender. Webster defines Fender as clearance. Leonidas fender? He doesn't have a good name, and he's one of these guys you said that he and Les Paul, who will meet in a little while, we're very different. And Leo Fender wasn't just different from Les Paul. He was different from a lot of people. He was what you would call an engineer. And if you have a parent who's an engineer or a friend who's an engineer, I thought about your dad, or you're an engineer, you know that engineers are different, kind of different. They're cut from a different cloth. And Leo Fender was definitely an engineer, from what I can tell. Yeah. I totally thought about your dad during this. Leah was born on August 1019 nine in Orange County, California, and his first injury that affected his craft was his eye. When he was between seven and eight, he lost an eye when he fell off his dad's vegetable truck and had a glass eye. From there on out, it's not like losing an ear, which we'll get to that later if you're an engineer who works generally in sound. But when you're working on small circuit boards and stuff like that, losing one eye is certainly going to affect your work. Well, plus, also, he apparently was self conscious about it, which is just tugged at my heart. Can you imagine a little eight year old Leo Fender who can't look up he's looking down at the ground all the time while he's talking to you because he's self conscious about his class. It's just heartbreaking. Yes. And like you said, he was an engineer. Little electrical circuit board nerd. He would take things apart and put them back together from an early age. There's a great story from the book. When he was about ten years old, he got underneath the car and the driveway and basically took a look at it, what was going on, went inside and sketched out not only just what it exactly look like, but how it all and could explain how it all worked together to make that car move. Yeah. Which is astounding that's, like, prodigy kind of stuff. Like he was in engineering. Prodigy is another way to put that. Absolutely. Even among engineers, it's pretty remarkable, and especially as a kid to do it, too. And then what makes him even more remarkable as an engineer and for all the things that he accomplished, he never had any formal training as an engineer. He just kind of became one just by doing things that engineers do, like taking things apart, putting them back together inventing new stuff, improving things that he thought can be improved. He just kind of learned by doing, which is old school. Very old school. Get in there and tinker away, right? Yeah. But if you don't have overalls on, what are you doing? You know what I mean? Now, was your dad always tinkering with things in the house too? No, he was more like, I've had to make drawings all day at work. Leave me alone. Maybe bring me an Old Milwaukee Tall boy before you leave. Okay. But if there was anything that went wrong in the house, my mom would be like, can you fix that? Can you fix this? And he could fix it all. Yeah, no problem. For sure. I can fix nothing. Yeah. He was too busy leading Cub Scout meetings that I was not a part of any longer tinker. He was too busy. Well, it sounds like you guys found a great way to not spend time together. We did. Well, I would bring him beer. That's how I got to spend time. Right. So Leo was really fascinated with radios early on as a child. He would build his own. He got a broadcast license when he was in high school, and before you know it, he had kids and neighbors, adults even, that would come over to have him fix their radios to the point where he had a little repair shop, and they're in Fulton, California, where the big fender factory ended up being. Yeah, I guess it started out as the radio repair shop and just kind of grew from there, right? Yeah. As a Radio Shack. Isn't that cool? A literal Radio Shack? Yes, I guess so. I think the good people at Radio Shack would have had a problem with it had you called it that, but it was that you could have made a case like, no, no, radio Shack is the Ripoff. This is the radio shack. And the judge had been like, shut up, shut up, shut up. Capital t. You're all going to jail. So he was building radios. He started working on PA systems, public address systems, which don't know what that is. People are getting on me now for saying, like, everyone knows what that is. It's what the principal talked on. Yeah. Or anytime you have a microphone attached to speakers, that's a public address. Yeah. That's funny, because it has been a little while since somebody called you out on that, because you stopped saying if you've been living under a rock, but now they're meeting you wherever you're at. As far as that's concerned, I'm trying to do better. You either have to completely stop or just give up caring. One of the two. Well, I'll explain what the PA system was so maybe I'm on the right track. I think you did great with that. So this is when he started to become obsessed with what we're just going to call the big challenge, which was basically you have to think back to a time where music was not electrified. They were singing through microphones. They did have lap steel guitars were electrified. That was technically the first electric guitar, was the lap steel? Yes. The Rickenbacher frying pan. I thought yeah, that was kind of the very first thing. And in fact, the guy who started Rickenbacher, George Bochamp, he was the inventor of the electric pickup. Yes. I got to thank him big time for kind of leading the way. Yeah, he laid the foundation that who knows how long it would have taken. But I just want to explain to people who are like me, who don't understand this kind of stuff just real quick what a pickup is. Sure. Yeah. The pickup is the heart of what makes the electric guitar electric. And it basically works through electromagnetism, where you loop a bunch of copper wire around some magnets, and then when you move the strings above those magnets, it actually affects that magnetic field and produces an electrical signal. That electrical signal goes from the pick up through the chord to the PA, where it's amplified. And now you have an electric guitar. And that's the guy who came up with this astoundingly impressive invention, because not only did it work, he figured out how to make it pretty small right out of the gate. Like the frying pan. Electric lap steel guitar is ugly, but it was small and compact. It wasn't like those early computers that took up an entire room. He figured out how to make it useful right out of the gate. It was a big innovation, from what I can tell. Yeah. And another way to think of if you'd know nothing about guitars, of the pick up is it's like the microphone for the guitar. Right. And when someone is playing a guitar, it's that little horizontal usually sort of not oval, but it's square and then rounded. I don't know what that shape is. What's that called? Ellipsoid. Is that real? Yeah, it's like is that what it really is? Yeah, I think so. All right. It's the little ellipsoid underneath the strings. Sometimes they're covered up, sometimes they're left open. Like on Fender guitars, they are left open. There's something called a Humbucker pickup which vendors have a tremendous amount of buzz when you plug them in because it's only one magnet. Humbuckers had two sets of magnets that canceled the out from each other. And those are usually, but not always, covered up with a little steel plate. Right. So Humbucker is just two pickups. So that, like you said, they cancel out the electrical noise from the other equipment that it picks up. Right. Yes. And that's what I prefer. Although I do have a Rickenbacher I prefer and have quite a few Gibsons. So when we say, like the electric guitar, you just hit upon something when we were talking about the frying pan. The frying pan was the world's first electric guitar. It was from 1931. It had pickups, it had amplified sound, but it was a lap steel guitar. So very shortly after that, we had what other people would call the world's first electric guitar. This is where that answer where you're like, well, who invented the electric guitar comes from. Because what a lot of people will recognize as an electric guitar came after. And it was from Gibson, I think, in 1936 where it looked like a normal guitar but it was electrified. Like the classic acoustic guitar, but an electrified version. And you'd say, well, why doesn't that qualify as the first electric guitar? Because it doesn't. For our purposes, for this episode, that's still not the first electric guitar as we're talking about. What we're talking about is as we'll see what's known as the first solid body electric guitar. That's what we're really driving it. So if you're sitting there and you're just crumpling your issue of Guitarist magazine right now and losing your mind, settle down because I just spell it out for everybody. Okay. Yeah. And so getting back to where we kind of got off track in a good way but getting back to the big burning question and the big problem was with these they called them Spanish guitars, but we call them acoustic guitars. Now, that had those electric pickups in them. They were really prone to feedback because they had this big hollow cavity behind the hole or it usually had what's called f holes. And that sounds funny, but if you look at them, they're just shaped like an ornate sort of curse of f. I'm glad you said it. So because of these big, hollow acoustic guitars with these pickups and early amp technology they would just feedback like crazy anytime you try to get any volume. Yeah. Those pickups wouldn't differentiate between the vibrations from the string that you were intended or the reverberated vibrations from inside the hollow body of that Spanish style guitar. And so it just sounds awful. Right. So that was the thing that Leo Fender was obsessed with. He was like because it's hard to imagine, but at the time, the guitar was not a lead instrument. And there were occasional guitar solos and stuff that you could insert into a recording or they recorded live, but you could put on a recording. But, like, if you were playing live in a venue, the guitar was very much in the background because you couldn't turn it up loud enough to cut through the vocals. And the drums, the piano horn sections, these are all really loud live instruments. And Leo Fender was like, we've got to be able to amplify the sound such that it doesn't feedback to where you can actually hear the guitar in a concert hall. Yeah. So, like, it can stand on its own rather than accompany whoever the horns or get drowned out. That was the point of, like, Fender. And later on, Les Paul's quest is to make the guitar its own thing and to basically do that by making it really loud and sound really good when it is loud. Oh, man, this is getting good. This is a good time for a break, I think, right? I think so, too, man. All right, I'm going to go take a cold shower, and I'll be right back. All right, Chuck. So we're back. So Leo Fender is on this quest? He's figured out there's a big problem here, that if you want to make a guitar loud, you have to make it not an acoustic guitar. But one of the things about him was he wasn't a musician. He didn't clamp onto this problem of creating the electric guitar, figuring out how to make an electric guitar because he necessarily cared about the music. And he also later on, it turns out he didn't like rock and roll, which would be kind of ironic. He was a country western dude from Southern California. Kind of like Nicolas Cage's character in Valley Girl. Exactly. Valley Girl. That was him, basically. It's based on Leo Fender. That's my theory, yeah. So Fender didn't play. But here's something that was very cute, the story from the book. He would go to local music halls during live performances. He always had this little tool kit on him, I think, much like your dad's slide rule. And he would jump up on stage and tweak the amps during the middle of performances. And people there would be like, what is this guy doing? And the band sometimes would say, hey, everybody, this is Leo Fender. He's the one that makes it sound just right. And he would, like, during the show, would kind of get a screwdriver out and mess with the amp. That's pretty cute. Very cool. Yeah. He'd be like, oh, you want me to turn it up, man? I'll turn it up for you, you're dirty hippie. All right. Should we go to Mr. Lesball? Yeah. So, Fender, we should just recap real quick. Fender has stumbled upon the big problem with electric guitars, the reverb with a classical guitar. So he's thinking about that. And now we meet Chuck Les Paul, who's born Lester Paulfis in 1915 in Wakesha, Wisconsin. He was a Wisconsin boy. Like, Edgeeen was as well, but not nearly as grizzly. No, but a guitar wizard like Edgin. Right. Little known fact about Ed gain. Yeah. So before we get into his childhood, this is the real important distinction between Leo Fender and Les Paul. Leo Fender did not play instruments, was an engineer at heart, and loved to figure out problems for other people. Les Paul was, at the height of his game, the most popular guitar player in the world and with a string of number one hits. He was also a tinkerer, but he was like, I need to make my guitar sound better for me so I can get better and sound better. Yeah, that was his goal all along. But it takes a special kind of person to say, like, okay, well, then I need to figure out how to make that happen. I need to figure out how to make an electric guitar rather than, oh, what can I do? I need somebody to do this for me. Someone needs to invent this, or I need to collaborate. Somebody. He was like, I'm going to go try to figure this out myself. And I didn't realize what a guitar god he was. And that I think at one point, he had four hits or four spots on the Billboard top charts. He was really a popular musician about midway through his career. But even from a young age, he started out playing like he was a performer. And I think he's also credited Chuck with being the person because he played country western, too. He also played the harmonica. His act was called Rhubarb Red. And it was just him, and he played the guitar in the harmonica. And he figured out long before Bob Dylan ever came along, that's problematic. You technically need four arms for that. So he fashioned a harmonica holder that he could wear while he was playing the guitar, just like Bob Dylan wore later on. He was the kid who invented that years before. Yeah. Maybe this is another one of those things where it's like, did he invent it or did he see it and make one on his own, but not taking anything away from the guy? He was also a kid taking apart electronics in his house, putting them back together. He really knew what he was doing. And he also had, like, every guitar player. That same big problem was when he played. He would be up there and he could sing through that microphone. Although he didn't sing that much. He did when he was a kid. But later on he realized he wasn't like, a pro singer. Harmonica sounded good through the mic but the guitar was still in the background. And he knew that was an issue. Yes. Apparently, as legend has it, he was playing a show at a barbecue stand and I think it was potentially a regular show. His harmonica sounded fine when he was singing. It was broadcast fine because he had a microphone but nothing was working for the guitar. He was drowning it out himself. So he realized that if he took the phonograph needle, the electrified phonograph needle from his parents phonograph and attach it to the guitar and then attach that to a radio he could actually amplify his guitar. So he figured this out, I think, at age 13 because he wanted to improve his barbecue stand chops and tips and tips. Supposedly, his tips tripled as a result. But that's pretty impressive stuff. I would not have thought about that at the Tender. You're an age of 13 or 45. Yeah. I mean, that's where the tinkering comes in. And I'm sure it didn't sound great to our ears now but at the time you have to put yourself in the place of literally having never heard something like this happen. It had to have been like a revelation to actually hear that guitar coming through the speaker. Especially if you lived in Wakesha, Wisconsin. You've never heard anything like that in your life. But he was very much opposite of Leo Fender and his personality. He was very gregarious, very outgoing, made a lot of friends. Could also be a little brash. It was not a great husband to his two wives, which will get to but he was always sort of the life of the party and he loved performing in front of people whereas Leo Fender really kind of wanted to be at the background unless he was very quietly getting on stage. Unless Paul from the very beginning, once he could afford regular guitars I think he moved to Chicago and was, like, making decent money, like, backing other people up. But he had a relationship with Gibson from the very beginning because Gibson started out as an acoustic guitar maker and they're still known. I mean, they make these great electric guitars but some of the best guitars in the world are Gibson acoustic guitars. Yes. They also made, like, mandolins and just all manner of string instruments. And then what they made were basically works of art. Yeah, they were beautiful. And they still are. My favorite guitar I own is when I bought during the Pandemic I finally bought the Gibson acoustic based on a 1940s model. And it's amazing the sound difference between even that and my really nice Martin acoustic is striking, really. Fender was not making acoustic guitars and they still, to this day, don't make a very good acoustic guitar. Yeah, I can imagine. It's really interesting. That one of the biggest guitar companies in the world. I don't know if they can't or if they just don't put the resources toward it, but I think their nicest acoustic guitar tops out at about $800, which is you can get a pretty good guitar for that. But these really nice Gibsons are, like, 4000. $5,000. Yeah. And like Gibson's whole jam was to make professional quality instruments that were, again, works of art. But if you were a professional musician, gibson could make an instrument that you could use and probably love. And they were making them already. They were making those electrified Spanish style or electrified acoustic guitars. Like I was saying as early as I think 1936, was the Es 150. Es stood for electrified Spanish guitar. And there was a jazz guitarist named Charlie Christian who really kind of championed that development. He think he played for Benny Goodman's band, but I think they named the pickup in those after him. Charlie Christian Pickups. So Les Paul was playing these Gibson guitars, but it still wasn't what he was looking for because, again, if you turned it up really loud, it would provide all sorts of problems. Yeah, it's funny, these little letters that the Es 335 is just a classic, amazing instrument still today. And they have all these cool letters, and you never know what they name. They mean. But electrified Spanish is kind of funny. That the iconic Gibson. SG. SG stands for Solid Guitar. Oh, really? Yeah. They're all just these very mundane abbreviations that all these years later just seemed cool because Angus Young plays it. Yeah, right. If you use a different example from Angus Young and be be really on board. But I got you. I play one. Well, there you go. There's a cool axe. So he charmed his way into the Epiphone factory in New York. Epiphany was a really big guitar maker at the time, and I think Gibson eventually bought them. I think they're under the Gibson umbrella now. But he got to work on his problems and he's got to look up some pictures of some of this stuff, kind of starting now. Just look up a picture of the Log from Les Paul. And it was about to say essentially, but it's not essentially. It was a four x four block of pine wood, about 2ft long, that he put a guitar neck on an Epiphany guitar neck. And he made his own pickup. I guess he didn't go out and buy a pickup or use one from another guitar. And he made his own pickup with a magnet in the wire, put some strings on it and called it the Log. And it was a very primitive but working, solid body electric guitar. It looked very much like something Devo would have played. Yes. And in fact, it freaked people out so much early on that he ended up taking apart another guitar and gluing sides onto the side of it. Yes. To make it look normal. To make it look normal. And there's this great picture of him holding the log kind of separating the sides off with a little rye smile. But the Gibson little side note the Gibson Firebird guitar, which is one of my favorite guitars. I used to have one, but I sold it. It's called a through neck guitar. I'm sure there are others, but it's the only one I can think of that's really popular. Whereas it's the same thing. It's basically one long piece of wood. Like the neck is the same piece of wood as the body and then they glue on these wings on the outside. Okay. All right. Settle down, Chuck. It's pretty exciting. So, Chuck, also, if you ever found yourself trapped in Wakesha, Wisconsin, you go to the Wakeshawk County Museum and they actually have the original log there on display. Oh, really? Yes. Apparently they have a lot of Les Paul stuff there. Including that with the wings of the guitar kind of pulled away to kind of show, you know, it's a neck through design, like the Firebird. I was just teasing you. I said to settle down. I was just taking the opportunity. Like I'm charmed very much, as I'm sure everyone else is by your childlike excitement over this whole thing. I'm as excited as when I got my first guitar when I was twelve which was a candy apple, red BC, rich, like metal guitar. I wish I knew what mine was. I had a metal guitar, too. Mine was pink, had a light coating of diamond dust and I wish to God I could remember the name. It was a local metal band from Toledo. What? Yes, they had like an album and a poster and everything. And the guy, the guitarist from the band worked at the music store where I would take lessons and he taught me and he was as interested as I. I can't remember Carl Weathers character and Happy Gilmore, but he's like a golf pro and just totally uninterested. That's how interested this guitar player was in seeing me as a future guitar player. And it's not like I blame him for me losing interest in guitar, but he wasn't a great mentor or anything. But I wish so bad I would have stuck with it a little bit longer because it was pretty boss. When I look back on the whole thing, I never knew this. How long did you try? I don't know. Five, six lessons, maybe. All right. I wonder what happened to that guitar, too. My parents bought the guitar. It was used and everything. But I have no idea what became of that guitar. I never took lessons, so maybe that's the key. Yeah, I could totally see that. I just shut myself in my room and started buying tableture. Which, if you don't know what that is, Instead of actual sheet music, like, written out, like real sheet music tablet or little numbers on, they kind of mimic a six string guitar, and they put little numbers on the strings on where you should put your fingers. So it allows anyone who can't read music to sort of figure out songs. Right. Like E-G-E-G. What are those chords? Someone's going to call you out on that? I don't know, but that was a Kids in the hall reference more than even a Deep Purple reference. Oh, man, I love that band in the skits. The little kid garage band. Yeah, it's great. All right, so back to the log. The log was very rough, very primitive, but what it did accomplish was amplification without feedback, no longer sustained. Yeah, and more importantly, it was a solid body guitar less. Paul kind of cracked that code that Fender, as far as I know, is still working on, because this is right. Yeah. Early 1940, I think it was pre Leo Fender, for sure. Yeah. So, I mean, Les Paul really does have a claim to fame, to creating the first wooden, solid body electric guitar. Think the frying pin was solid body aluminum. But he figured out that problem of reverb. Just get rid of the hollow body, replace it with the solid body. And it was ugly. That seems to be the big problem. It wasn't exactly what he was looking for, sound wise, but it was definitely close enough that it was like, I'm on the right track. Let me go show the people at Gibson. They're going to love this kind of thing. And they basically laughed him out of the meeting in Kalamuzu, Michigan, because he showed up with a really ugly guitar. Yeah, and not only that, they just didn't see the vision because, like I said, they were working with these ancient Luthers who had this ancient craft. They weren't ancient humans, but they would wake them from the dead each day to go to the workshop and create a new guitar. But the point is, they were doing great with these big acoustic guitars, and they were like, no one's going to want to hear that because this is what a guitar is basically like. It's not a lead instrument in the band. Leave that to the horns and the piano. So he was laughed out of there and had a little egg on his face. But this was a full five years before Leo Fender came up with his first playing guitar, which you should also look up. Just type in Leo Fender black plank guitar. And it looks a little more like a guitar than the log, but not that much. Now it looks way more like a guitar than the log, but it still doesn't look like a guitar as we know it. Yeah. I get the impression that he created the guitar kind of like how you might build, like, a car out of clay, but the axle works because you're testing wheels. I don't think people yes, but I don't think we mentioned that, though. Yeah, but he was testing out, like, pickups and I think testing the concept of a solid body as well. But he wasn't making it like, this is going to be my prototype. But it turned out to actually be kind of a prototype because I don't exactly know how word got around. I guess because he was friends with bands. So bands would kind of come around the workshop to see what was going on, and they started coming around, seeing and hearing this guitar that he made, and people started renting it, apparently for the weekend to go play shows with and just knocking the socks off of the bobby socks in town, from what I can tell. Yeah. And at this point, he has the Defender Electric Instrument Company. It's legit. And in the background of all of this and we're not going to talk much about amps, but in the background of all of this, he's building amps along the way. He was one of the first sort of master amp builders. Well, yeah. Fender amps are, like, as famous as the guitar, basically. Yeah. I want to short change those. So where are we at right now? Fenders made his plank guitar. Leo's got his log. Neither one of them are going places immediately with it. It's just kind of like they've both now cracked the problem. And there's a lot of obstacles between them and fame or at least guitar production fame. You know what that means, though, right? What? We're at our second break. Oh, good. Okay, Chuck. I think that was great. So Chuck just said we're at our second break. He's clearly driving this episode. Let's all go with it, shall we? Okay, we're back. Chuck, we're back. We got a log. We've got this little funny looking, black, solid body guitar, and we need to pick back up with Les Paul in 19, he moves to Los Angeles. He's starting to get session work. He plays with Bing Crosby, who was sort of one of the most popular singers at the time. Oh, yeah. He moved to Los Angeles to be near being Crosby, which I did a little research, and that was kind of a common thing. What? To just want to be near Ben Crosby? Yeah. You move across the country to be near Bing Crosby unless you were one of his kids. Was he not a good father? No. Oh, really? Not a good dad? I didn't know that. Wait a minute. Are you thinking of, Mommy dearest? Yeah, that's right. That's what I'm thinking of. Junk Crawford. But he was a huge music star. Les Paul was out there working with him. But then he gets I don't think we mentioned he got electrocuted really bad when he was 26. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. Playing music. He had sweaty hands, held a microphone, was also touching the guitar strings, completed a circuit and really damaged his hand such that it took I mean, I heard his whole body, but it damaged his hand such that it took quite a couple of years to even recover, which is huge. He might have never played again. Like there was a possibility that was going to happen. Yeah, and that's just injury number one for him. Right. But he gets drafted in World War II, goes to work in the army at the Armed Forces Radio Network and is playing guitar, basically backing up the Andrew Sisters, backing up Bing Crosby when they do these USO tours. So as far as the army goes in World War II, pretty plum gig. Right. Again, he did move to La. To being here. Being Crosby. And the fact that he's getting to play with Bing Crosby is, I'm guessing, a lifelong dream of his come true. And even after the war, I guess he made enough of a connection with Bing. I'm on a first name basis with him, by the way. Sure. That Les Paul became I don't know if there was like a mentor thing, but at the very least, he definitely patronized. Les Paul helped his career big time. One of the things that really helped Les Paul become, like, a genuine bona fide star, he was already fairly well known in a lot of circles, had some hits, but what really shot him to the top was a 1945 song called It's Been a Long, Long Time. It's actually a really good song, but it was kind of a song that was a hit because it kind of summed up America trudging weirdly back from World War II. And it's just kind of like this mellow, solemn song where it's almost I'm sure there are other instruments, but my ears pick up Bing Crosby's vocals and Les Paul's jazz guitar and his guitar enhances the vocals so much. But there's actual guitar solo in there and it's slow, but it's really good. And that kind of shot Les Paul to superstard him from that point on. Yes. So being Crosby is like, you need to open up a studio. I'll even help finance this thing. He did so in his garage, and before you know it, in Los Angeles, all these famous people are stopping by Les Paul's garage to hear him play, to hang out with them. Like I said, he was a very gregarious guy, so people just kind of wanted to be around him. And this is all going great, but he still wasn't quite satisfied with what was going on because the sound just still wasn't there. He called it sound on sound recording. He was the first person or one of the first people to experiment with studio techniques where you could layer recordings on top of one another. And this was before they were even recording on magnetic tape. Yeah, dude, multi track recording. Like, you know, how you hear drums playing, and you hear a guitar playing, and then you hear, like, vocals. All of those musicians may never have even been in the same room at the same time. You can do that with multi track recording. Back in the day, if you wanted to make a recording, you had to get everybody into a room. You all had to be playing at once. You had to be playing the song together, and then you recorded it, and that was the recording. Right. So to come up with multi track recording was huge in and of itself. But I looked into what he was actually doing, and it's mind boggling. He came up, I think, with a song called Lover. And it was that the one where it's like, seven tracks or eight tracks of guitar. Yeah. And the way that he made each track was he recorded one track, the first initial track onto Acetate, he made a record of that. And then he took that record and he played it, and then he played along with it, and then he recorded that onto another record, and then another record, and then another record. And by the time he was doing his 7th track, he had a record of seven tracks playing all at once on one record that he had recorded one by one, and he was playing the 8th track with it. And if you messed up one time, say, on track five, he had to start all over at the beginning, unless he still had those first few tracks handy. Hopefully, he didn't break each record after each recording or anything like that. But in that nuts, going to that, and that was about as innovating form of music as anyone had come up with to that point. Yeah, it's funny when you hear people working with, like, Pro Tools and Drag and Drop digital recording now, and they talk about, like, in the old days when they would cut and splice tape, like, go back even further, dude, to Les Paul doing this on actual Acetate Records. It's crazy. It is crazy. I was like, what does that mean? What was he doing? Like dueling asset records? And I looked and my eyes popped out of my head. Yeah, it's pretty remarkable the innovations he was coming up with. So he's doing all that. He's becoming more and more popular. And then a very faithful thing happened. A steel guitar player named do we say Wakey and Murphy? That's what I'm going with. All right. That's how it's spelled. He came over to Les's house one day and he said, you know what? I got this guy here. I want you to meet him. And he's really good with working on amplifiers, and I think you guys might like each other. And his name is Leo Fender. Before you know it and this is movie territory, leo Fender and Les Paul are hanging out together, trying to figure stuff out. Together, workshopping, problem solving. They pointed out, and he's right, that they weren't like great friends, but it's not like they were enemies or rivals at first. They just were really different from each other. Yeah, they kind of shared. At the very least, they had a common problem or a common quest that they were both working on. They were just not similar people personality wise. So they didn't click, how you put it. They weren't like, this is great, let's be partners, we're the same. Right? Exactly. But they also were also kind of becoming rivals a little bit too, right? Well, not quite yet. Like, at this point, they were genuinely trying to figure stuff out together. And I think, like, Leo was coming over every weekend, basically, musicians would come over still and he would ask them questions and try and figure stuff out, try and solve these amplification problems. But, yeah, there may have been a little friendly, like, let's see what these guys got kind of thing, but Les Paul was like, you can't even play. Yeah. And again, remember, though, by this time he had a company, the Fender Electric Instrument Company. He was mostly focusing on electric steel guitars because not just country western love that stuff, but Hawaiian music was really huge as well and they use a lap steel guitar. So he had a company already going. Les Paul had his own musical career going. He was just kind of he tinkered because he needed to. His focus is on his musical career. So I could see there being like a little bit of a rivalry and that they were trying to crack the same problem, but other than that, they weren't necessarily rivals. You know that's, right. In order to really solve this problem, it would take the entrance of a third gentleman that we haven't even mentioned yet that was very important to the story of the electric guitar. And that is where we are going to leave you for part one. Nice, Chuck. That was a very good cliffhanger. Who could it be? I don't know, but you're going to have to tune in Thursday to find out in this very special two part episode of Stuff You Should Know. My money's on CC Deville. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever to your favorite shows."
https://podcasts.howstuf…k-boomerangs.mp3	Boomerangs: Magic Sticks of Physics	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/boomerangs-magic-sticks-of-physics	The physics behind returning boomerangs literally may be the most difficult concept to understand in the entire body of science. Join Josh and Chuck as they try their absolute best to describe how boomerangs work - and maybe even pull it off!	The physics behind returning boomerangs literally may be the most difficult concept to understand in the entire body of science. Join Josh and Chuck as they try their absolute best to describe how boomerangs work - and maybe even pull it off!	Tue, 16 Dec 2014 15:27:34 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=15, tm_min=27, tm_sec=34, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=350, tm_isdst=0)	28538340	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetuffworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant and Noel is with us today guest producing. Yeah. Which makes it a super special full stuff you should know. A more hairstoot. Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, that's right. I'll then hold to get a haircut. I know he looks like a buddy of mine from elementary school. Your elementary school friend had a full beard? No, without he took away the beard, it would be like any number of my friends from elementary school. Yeah. There was always that one guy, though, that had the early facial hair, you know, jim Isa. Yes. Middle east. He sort of had a little mustache like the 7th grade. I had a friend named Ron in elementary school, man, he had like a deep voice, like the mustache and everything. It may have been fourth or fifth grade. Now he sells steer. He is, yeah. So obviously we're talking boomerangs. Chuck that's right. And if you associate boomerangs with Australia, there's actually a pretty good reason for that. It turns out that boomerang what do you think of a boomerang? Which is kind of like a crescent shape stick that you throw and it just comes back to you eventually and you catch it and look at your friends and say, pretty cool, huh? Yeah. How do you do that? That was most people think perfected by aborigines in Australia. That's right. If you want to go back even further well, there's a couple of types of boomerangs. Yeah. Well, there's many types of boomerangs, but two main categories is one that returns to you that you play with and the one that you go out and try and kill animals with that does not return to you. Yeah. I call those the sad boomerangs. Some people call them rabbit sticks. Rabbit? Oh, no. I know. Isn't that mean? But if you want to learn how to make one yourself, go to Survival Skills, the website, the hunting boomerang. It's pretty cool. This guy does, he shows you step by step how to make a boomerang. Natural skills. I'm sorry. Natural Skills. He just goes out in the woods and finds like a kind of roughly boomerang shaped stick and then hugs it into a functioning non returning boomerangs. Pretty awesome. Well, and that's what people theorize is how the boomerang came about back in day. They would eventually learn to take a club and beat an animal on the head. And then maybe one of tuktuk's friend was smart enough to say, hey, maybe if I throw this at the animal from a distance, I won't scare them away. Or that animal is faster than I can run, but I can throw a stick faster than the animal can run. Let me hit it in the head with the stick. That's right. And so over time, just like with any early tool evolution, I guess you would find sticks that flew better and further and further. And eventually they sort of took the shape of a boomerang because of its unique flying properties. Yeah. They figured out that a curved stick, you can aim it more easily and it'll fly longer. So they started selecting for those kinds of sticks, and then they started making those sticks themselves, like somebody from the natural skills website would. Yeah. The design of the two different branches made it more stable. Yeah. And we'll get into the mind bending physics behind a boomerang. Boomerang, frankly, are magic sticks of physics. It's almost impossible to understand them, like, what's going on, but we're going to do our best to explain it. And it's with a non returning boomerang. It's kind of straightforward. It's the returning boomerang that they say the Aboriginal Australians were the first to invent. That is really difficult to grasp the physics behind. Yeah. And the oldest non returning boomerang they found in Poland from about 20,000 years ago. Yeah. That was surprising to me. And what was that, fargo? No, it was in Poland. Oh. Because I think of, like, boomerangs exclusively associated with Oceania. Yeah. They were found in Native American tribes, too, and stuff, kind of all over the world. So Australian Aborigines use something called a Kylie exclusively for hunting at first. And they think and this is, I think, the neatest thing, because you certainly can't find this out factually, but they think that eventually they stumbled upon one that kind of came back and they thought it was fun, so they started throwing returning boomerangs just to get their kicks. Just for kicks, because returning boomerang you can't use for hunting. Well, no, because if you throw a returning boomerang, you can hit an animal. Well, if you hit the animal, it's not going to return back to you. That's not real. That thing just cartoons, everybody. So that's why there are two types. There's one that you brain an animal with, and there's another that you just throw around to impress your friends. That's right. And apparently, though, the Aboriginal Australians figured out how to use returning boomerangs to hunt. They would put some nets up in trees, they would throw the boomerang, the returning boomerang, and then whoever was best at making, like, an eagle or hawks call would make that call, and it scare all the birds because they'd see this thing flying here at hawks call, and they'd fly into the nets and the Aborigines would eat them. Not a bad idea. So that's pretty much the history of boomerangs. Yeah. No one owns a patent on the boomerang. There are many kinds of boomerangs that people have patented, of course, but the original boomerang was just, hey, this was something we figured out on our own. It's like DNA. Yeah. It belongs to the ages. Okay. It belongs to the universe. So you're returning boomerang is going to be a little lighter, obviously, because you're not trying to kill a rabbit. It's just for showing off. Yeah. And they have the little nerf versions for kids. I had one of those when I was a kid, the little three pronged boomerang. And those are kind of fun. But if you look at videos of the real deal, like large three foot wooden boomerangs, it's pretty impressive to see. It's a tough thing to do. You're not going to go out there on your first try and fly back to you. No, there's actually, like, boomerang teams around the world. Yeah. US boomerang team. Unless you're a wonderkin, of course, or a natural. I'm sure they do it on your first time. Yeah, I'm sure it's happened before. Yeah. Maybe, just maybe, you want to get a boomerang by the way. Did it? You going to I don't know, maybe how much they are boomerang team. What I'm hoping is a fan makes handcrafted boomerangs and sends oh, yeah, I hadn't thought about that. I'll bet we have at least one boomerang maker listener, so send us two. Yeah. Nice. Thanks, Chuck. That way we can go out and perform a little two man boomerang. Oh, yeah. Maybe we can cross them and everything. Sure, that'd be cool. Get it back down. So, again, the non returning boomerangs are pretty straightforward. It's the returning boomerangs that are lighter, and they're made to be more aerodynamic. And the proper way to throw a returning boomerang is to hold it at a vertical angle, hold it up and down. Right. Which is weird, because if you ever see somebody throw a boomerang, when it comes back, it's horizontal. It is horizontally oriented. Yeah. It kind of just lands very softly like a helicopter. Right. The thing is, it goes from upright to horizontal in the midst of this path, and it comes back to you. And if you stop and think about it, that makes zero sense whatsoever. A non returning boomerang certainly doesn't do either of those things. It's just the returning boomerang. And the whole reason behind this is because of the design of the returning boomerang. It's basically a two pronged propeller that's not attached to anything. That thanks to the force you give it and its rotation and a whole other bunch of stuff that we'll get into. It falls to the left, turns clockwise, and comes back to you. That's if you're a right handed thrower. Yes. With a right handed boomerang. If you're a left handed person, you have to have a left handed boomerang. And it's a mirror image of the right handed boomerang. If you try to throw a right handed boomerang with your left hand, it's not going to work out so well. I bet there's one person out there, it's like, oh, I had no idea. So we're going to muster up our courage and get into the physics of the boomerang right after this. All right, Chuck, here we go. All right. So I guess the first thing we should talk about is a little bit about just the physical design of the boomerang itself. The wings are slightly tilted, so it creates what's called an airfoil, just like an airplane wing. If you look out your plane window there and you're sitting on the wing, you're going to notice that the top of it is rounded and the bottom of it is flat. And that is going to give a plane lift and a boomerang lift. Right. The air going over the top of the wing, because it's curved in like a teardrop shape, it picks up speed. Right. So the air speed is increased, which means the air pressure is also increased well beneath the wing. It's flat. The air is going through like it's whatever, but the air pressure is higher, so you have lower air pressure at the top, higher pressure at the bottom. That means that you have lift. I believe that is Bernoulli's principal. Is it? I think so. Show off. No, not really. So that's the whole thing behind both airplane wings, like you said, and boomerang wings, because, again, if you really kind of want to start to understand boomerangs, first of all, do more research than just listening to this podcast. Sure. But secondly, you have to think of the boomerang as basically two airplane wings facing the opposite direction, connected together. Okay. That's right. And that forms essentially, a propeller. Yeah. And a propeller is well, it's basically, if you think about a boomerang, it has an axis, just like a propeller does, but the axis isn't there. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's invisible. Yes. The propeller is connected to something because it has to lift a helicopter propeller, because that's the lift, the helicopter. Right. Or if it's on the front of a plane, it's going to pull that plane forward and up, which is sort of a key we'll get to in a second. Yeah, but it's the same principle. But a boomerang just has an invisible axis, let's say. Okay, so it does. And it's very important because at that axis, which you can just imagine is in the center of the boomerang, where the two wings come together, that's the axis of rotation that the boomerang has. It's spin. Yes. And this article does a good job of pointing out that you would think then if you just turned it completely horizontally, like a frisbee, it would act like a helicopter propeller and just go up. Yeah, straight up. Or if you turned it completely vertically, how you're supposed to throw it? It would just go side to side. But it doesn't do either one of those things. No, and it doesn't. And the reason why is because if you turn on an airplane propeller or a helicopter propeller, a rotor, it starts from a stationary position and just start spinning. Exactly. The boomerang doesn't start from a stationary position, it starts spinning along that central axis and it's also thrown. Yeah. It's got that forward momentum already. Exactly. So now, because you threw this thing, you threw it and it started spinning around its own axis, but you also gave it that forward momentum, which is linear momentum, which means that it's now spinning around two axes. That's right. Okay. Is this Gyroscopic procession? We're close, we're almost there. And we get there, Chuck, because of these two axes. So consider this. So the thing is just spinning around. You just throwing it upright. It's vertically oriented to the Earth, and you throw it. And when you throw it, say it has a spin around that imaginary axis in the middle of the boomerang. Yeah. Or at that point, at like 20 km an hour. Yeah. Okay. Because we were in Australia, so we're getting these kilometers. Exactly. Well, plus, also, I read a Japanese paper on this. That's what they use, and it makes sense. But you threw it that energy, your arm transferred to it when you threw the Frisbee, too, which gave it its linear momentum. Say that's making it move through space at 100. That's right. So as the thing is spinning, whatever blade is at the top of the spin is going in the direction that you threw it. Right? Yeah. And you threw it at 100 miles an hour, and it's spinning at 20 km an hour. That means that that top blade is spinning at 120 km an hour. Yeah, you said miles, but yeah, we get it. Okay. You're mixing miles of kilometers. I'm just barely hanging on here. The bottom one, though, is going in the opposite direction, so it's actually moving at 80. So the top is 120. The bottom one is working in the opposite direction, so it's going 80 km/hour. But these things are attached to the same thing. Yeah. So this difference actually creates a difference in air pressure to its vertical orientation. That's right. Which creates torque, which tilts it. Now we've entered gyroscopic procession yeah. And pre session, I think I sort of set it like procession, but it's with an E. Yeah. It's like what gives Earth seasons that wobble. The spin is another part of a very important part, because when you throw it and we'll get into exactly how to throw it here in a bit, but you want to give it a good wrist snap to give it as much spin as possible. Right. And the spin is going to be determined, basically the rate of spin by a few things. The length of the wings. If there are these huge wings, the spin isn't going to be as great. The angle that they're joined and the amount of force applied by you, the thrower, and just like a gyroscope, which, if we really wanted to torture ourselves, we should do one on Gyroscopes man, that would be melt. My brain would melt. Yeah. My brain didn't process that stuff well. But like a gyroscope, it's going to have more stability the faster it spins so that's why you want that good wrist snap. Yeah. And the reason why it has more stability is because so that torque, that pressure that's being created by that difference in air pressure, that force is being pushed down, is actually stabilized throughout the spin of the boomerang. Right? Yeah. Like if you're going super fast on a bicycle and you take your hands off the handlebars, you're going to keep going straight. If you're going like super slow, you're going to start wobbling around. Right? Exactly. The thing is that pressure, that force of torque is constant. So it eventually because I think precession is if you're throwing with your right hand, precession always comes on in a counterclockwise motion. Okay. The torque, it turns the boomerang to the sides, which is why it eventually comes back around you horizontally. That's what lays it down. And it also brings it in an arc that forms a circular path that comes back to you. That's right. It's all gyroscopic precession. And it's because the boomerang, this little simple stick that's basically one crescent shaped piece of wood turns into a gyroscope that turns on three axes all at once. Yes. All in one throw. And so it goes from straight it goes from stationary being straight up and down to spinning and curving around in an arc back to you at 100 km an hour. Crazy. All because you tossed it correctly. Yeah. And the design, I mean, there are many, many different designs of boomerangs. Like I said, they can have two wings, three, four. You can look like a crawl and have blades attached to them because there is something called a battle boomerang. Yeah. Man, that seems dangerous. Yeah, it seems totally dangerous. I'll bet you could find that in a head shop somewhere next to like a Dragon Pewter statue or something. They probably have a deal so you can buy them together for cheaper. Some of them have what's called turbuletors, though, which can be little bumps and pits on top, which can increase the lift even more. And I read an interview with one boomerang builder and he was like, you can't, I'm sure, like nerf can with their soft ones, but like a true large three foot wooden boomerang, he said you can't computerize these and build them like they kind of need to be handcrafted and thrown and then tweaked and then thrown, so you get it just right. And I saw one of the US Boomerang Team guys demonstrating on video and he just put like a rubber band on his to, I guess, adjust it. That makes sense. Yeah. Cause, you know, like if you have a stealing fan or something like that, you can add weights or something to stabilize it, that kind of thing. Yeah. Or when you get your tires installed on your car, they put those little lead weights do they, to what's it called? Align it. Yeah, to align it. They put on that machine. And if it's wobbling, they'll add the little weights of them. I just thought there was a wizard in back. You're always in the waiting room drinking coffee and reading, browsing the Popular Mechanics scooter dragon statues. No, it's kind of cool, actually. I think it's kind of cool. It's really kind of nerdy to watch your tires get aligned. Yeah, they put it on the machine and spin it, and it's really kind of just like this. And they look at it, and if it's wobbling at all, they know exactly where to tap on these little weights. Nice. Because you don't want your tires to be a gyroscope. No, not at all. You don't. That makes for unsafe driving. So I guess we should, after this message break, teach you how to throw a boomerang. All right. You've got your boomerang. You're out in the field or on the beach. Beach is going to be tough because wind is one of the forces that are going to act on that boomerang. There are five forces I'm so nervous. The force of gravity, the force caused by that propeller motion, the force of your throw force caused by uneven speed of the wings, and then the wind. And the guy that I watched throw on on YouTube said that he likes to throw on with a slight breeze in his face. And he said that it depends on the angle at which you're going to release it, though, depending on how the wind and there's a lot of trial and error involved. Yeah, apparently you want wind. I couldn't figure out what the deal was with this, but it somehow helps the boomerang move. But you have what's called an angle of attack, and that's basically how you orient yourself to the wind. If the wind is blowing in your face, you should turn and face. You don't want your shoulder now being hit by the wing because that's 90 degrees. It turned a little bit to the right, so probably about like 45 deg. And that's what you throw to so you're throwing at an angle to the direction the wind is coming at you from. Yeah, but this guy kind of worked it out like he kind of measured the wind, did the old finger test, and he said, I'm going to angle myself a little bit to the right, and I'm going to throw it. And he said, and it should land just in front of me. It went behind him and he was like, Well, I was wrong, so I didn't have a good wind measurement, so let me angle a little bit more. And sure enough, the thing came right back to him. Nice. So it all depends on what angle against the wind that you throw that thing. Like Bob Seger says, oh, man, I can't stand that guy. Really? Bob Seger? Yeah. I don't have anything against him, honestly. Yeah, that old time rock and roll song, I just turned that as his first piano keys. Yes. I hate that song. But overall, I think Bob Seeger is okay. He seems fine. He's a working man. Yeah. Turn the page, baby. Oh, yeah. I don't like that song either. I guess it's like against the wind. Like a rock. Oh, I hate that song. Hollywood Nights. That's a terrible song, too. You hate Bob Seger? No, but I don't mind. Against the wind. Surely there's other Bob Seger songs out there. Bob, get in touch with us and introduce me to your catalog. That would be great if he was a listener. Actually, he just got a single tier going on his cheeks. All right, where were we? You're going to hold the boomerang with the elbow pointing toward you and the V pointing out away from you and again, up and down. It's vertically oriented. Yeah, vertically oriented, but at a slight tilt. Like you don't want it completely straight up and down. But you're not throwing it horizontally like you would a Frisbee. No, you're not going to get very far that way. No, actually, it does go up and then comes back down in a loop. It basically does it will do something. Yes. But interesting. Yeah. The thing is, it's kind of dangerous, so you don't want to mess around with it. Yeah. I mean, we should point that out. These things are heavy and made of wood, and they come you're throwing it hard. Well, yeah. I mean, let's catch the chase. Apparently, when you throw a Frisbee or a boomerang, which are virtually interchangeable in my mind, but they're really not at all, you want to keep your eye on it at all times. And if you ever lose sight of it, you don't look around for it. You need to go take cover your head and shout, Heads up. And get everybody else to cover their heads, too, because that thing can come back and clock somebody. Yeah. And that's if you haven't thrown it right. When I've seen the correct boomerang toss, it lands like a helicopter, straight up and down. So it's completely straight up and down. What's the next step? All right, so you've got that viewpoint pointing away from you. It's pointing at you. No, you want the point facing toward you and the V faces away from you. Okay. Got you. And you want it's super important. This part is you want that flat side. Remember we talked about the airfoil? You want the flat side facing out. So to your right if you're a right handed thrower. Got you. If you don't do that right, then you're not going to have a good result. Yeah. You would only probably tilt it to the left of the wind if you're left handed, I guess. I don't know about that. Okay. I don't endorse that state. Okay. So you're going to hold it at the bottom of the wing. They say a pinch grip. The guy in the video called his little pistol grip, like, with two fingers and a thumb. Okay. Snap your wrist when you throw it. And he didn't throw it super hard. Yeah, like, you don't have to really wing it. Yeah. He didn't sound like Steffi Graff when he threw it or anything. Monica Selis, you mean? I thought Steffie graff did that, too. Was it Monica Selesis? There's a lot of grunt, but Monica seizures every time she hit it. That's what I meant then, but she got stabbed. Look what happened to her. Oh, gosh, I thought that was Steffi Graff, too. Did you know Steffi Graff and Andrea Agassi are married? Yeah. Isn't that cute? It's adorable. Okay. You would be funny as if their kids were terrible at tennis. They just trip over their rackets and whatever. Bob Seekers their coach. That's right. He's a badminton coach. All right, so you are snapping your wrist. You're throwing it basically like a baseball at a little slight angle, and you're going to snap that wrist to give it a good spin. You throw it vertically, and hopefully it's going to go out and up and curve around and then land back down fairly softly somewhere close to where you are. Right. And you don't want to try and catch it with your hand like in a cartoon. Well, you can, but you want to clap your hands together on it. Yeah. Don't try and catch it like a frisbee. No, but I think if you are a boomerang throwing person, you are trying to catch each one. Oh, yeah. But, you know, you do it one handed, you clap it together, you trap it in between your two hands. Yeah. And if you're catching a frisbee like that, then God help you. Yeah. You're going to get laughed at. Yeah. But it's safe, too. It's just you don't really have to be worried about it frisbee. It's super safe. I don't think I have anything else. Is that it? Well, just one other thing. When I said that it's spinning around three axes, if you were impressed with that, prepare to have your mind blown even more. It's spinning around three axes to lay down flat from the torque. It's also spinning around an additional three axes to follow the arc in a giant circle and come back to you. So technically, a boomerang when you throw it is spinning on six different axes from the point of release to the point of landing. Wow. Isn't that neat? It's pretty neat. Yeah, it's neat. This is one of those things where people were throwing these things long before we knew anything about how they actually worked. People figured them out, and then science came along afterward and said, oh, well, this is how it works. But this stuff is so complex. It really kind of exposes that moment in science where you're like, I kind of have to have faith in this because I understand it so thinly that I just have to have faith that this is correct. And it's almost virtually the same thing as saying, well, the great wizard is the one who's moving it around in an invisible circle back to you because he wants you to prosper and not have to make a boomerang every time. Virtually the same thing at this point in my understanding. Yeah, they're a great teaching tool as well, I imagine if you're trying to teach physics and gyroscopic procession, then the problem is almost everybody I saw, except for the Japanese paper I think it was titled What Makes a Boomerang Come Back? Were just terrible at explaining it. They understood everything, but they could not explain it in anything approaching layman's terms. I read a Popular Science article. I think it's called the science of boomerangs. It was pretty good. I wish you would have sent that to me. Oh, yeah? Because I've been agonizing over this for many hours. I just figured you had your Japanese sources and we're good. It was in English, too. Of course. It was Japanese. So good. If you want to know more about boomerangs, you can look up stuff all over the Web, but why not start at our website? HowStuffWorks.com? Just type that word in the search bar and it will bring it up. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm just going to call this I split Adams for a living. Nice. So you know we're on the wrong track already. Yeah, we're going to be corrected. Yeah, but he's very nice about it. I split Adams for living at a nuclear power plant. So I was really excited that you did a podcast on nuclear science topic. You guys really did a great job, actually, of breaking down a topic and making it accessible to a wide audience, something I personally feel that organizations involved with nuclear technology tend to struggle with a little bit. Anyway, I'm writing in with the correction. You stated that nuclear fission reactions involve the electromagnetic force, while nuclear fusion reactions involve the strong nuclear force. I remember saying that both of these reactions actually get their energy from the same strong nuclear force. In both cases, if you were to measure the mass of the material before the reaction, compare that to the material after the reaction, you would find that there is less because some of the strong nuclear force holding the atoms together was released as energy. The difference in the energy released pretty much comes down to how much of this mass was converted divided by the mass of the atoms involved. The thing is, that makes total and complete sense if you think about it. Sure. That makes it irritating that we got it wrong. Since Adams good for fusion, are much lighter than Adam's good for fusion, the reactions are a bit stronger. Reactions which involve the release of stored electromagnetic energy are actually all of the reactions that involve electrons, which includes chemical. Reactions since this is a much weaker force. That's why there is such a huge energy difference between burning coal and nuclear energy, as you pointed out in the podcast, is millions of times more potent. So thanks again, guys. Looking forward to the next one. And that is Jeffrey Halseyman. He's a reactor engineer in Zachary, Louisiana. Thank you very much. What's his name again? Jeffrey. Jeffrey, appreciate that. We love hearing from experts in the field. Oh, yeah. If you are an expert in your field and you want to correct us about something or whatever, we want to hear from you. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast and join us on Facebook.com. STUFFYou knows. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstworks.com and you can join us at our home on the web stuffyysheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com."
https://podcasts.howstuf…18-sysk-salt.mp3	How Salt Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-salt-works	A Roman senator once said, "Mankind can live without gold, but not without salt." Right he was. The human body needs salt so much we have developed a taste for it specifically. But too much salt can be toxic. Learn about salt's role in human history and h	A Roman senator once said, "Mankind can live without gold, but not without salt." Right he was. The human body needs salt so much we have developed a taste for it specifically. But too much salt can be toxic. Learn about salt's role in human history and h	Tue, 18 Feb 2014 18:01:51 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=18, tm_min=1, tm_sec=51, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=49, tm_isdst=0)	41033626	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. The podcast. Oh, yeah. James over there, she's all laughing today for some reason. Old salty dog. Why did Salty calling someone salty? I wonder where that came from. I meant to look that up. The one I didn't look up. Yeah, because you're in a salty mood. Yeah, I said that plenty. And what if that comes from, like, a salty dog? This is my idea. Okay, so salty describes somebody who is a little coarse, a little rough around the edges, a little upset. Hear me out. Because their face is usually puckered into, like, a sourpuss face. And what makes your face pucker? Eating salt. So they're a salty person. Okay. I would call them lemony. Well, so take something with a grain of salt. Nicely ancient. That's from the Romans. Okay. They would take poison with a grain of salt. There's something that was hard to swallow with a grain of salt to make it go down more easily. Okay, let's go ahead and cover these then. Somebody not being worth their salt. Yeah. In this article, it says that slaves were traded with salt. And if you got your hands on like a slave that wasn't worth much, like he wasn't worth his salt. Is that not the origin I found? The first reference in print came from an 18 five description or book about an expedition to Guinea Basal. And it mentions a guy who wasn't worth his salt. He's a good man. Peter Hale. H-A-Y-L-E but he wasn't worth his salt, the guy said And I looked it up, and I couldn't find that, whether Hale was hired or was a slave. But I got the impression that what the guy was talking about wasn't that he had traded salt for hail, but not worth the salt in his body. No, he was not worth the salt. Meaning a salary, which supposedly salary is rooted in the idea of paying someone in salt. Same with soldiers. Saul Darius to give salt salad, too. The word salad comes from the word salt. Really? Yeah. So salt, it's an important thing. Historically speaking, there's been economies largely based on salt. There's been cultures rated by other cultures because of salt. If you were an ancient salt producing area, probably the rulers controlled with the tight grip that salt production and salt distribution. Yeah. And that actually carried on into the modern age. When Great Britain was occupying India, they had a tight control on salt production there. And actually, Gandhi started a revolution, or helped along the revolution to overthrow British imperial power through a salt protest. He walked 240 miles to the coast where the salt production facilities were and grabbed a bit of salty clay and boiled the salt out of it, which was an illegal act. And that protest spurred other similar protests. And the British were like, hey, you can't do that, mate. You can't mine your own salt. Right. But he did, because he was Gandhi. It was called the Salt March to Gandhi. By Gandhi. Yes. Salt dates back to 60, 50 BC, and they actually have found evidence of salt trading in prehistoric times. So obviously, it's used to spice food is great, but it's used to preserve food was super valuable back in the day and still today, because salt is one of these things, you remember, nature loves homeostasis, it loves balance. Yes. If you introduce salt to the mix, it kind of throws off that balance. So to gain homeostasis, salt is introduced into, say, meat. It likes to go into the meat, yes. But it also draws out the moisture, whether it's blood, water, whatever. So it dries out the meat, it introduces the salt and it draws out the moisture. That's right. That's called curing, which preserves things, because anytime bacteria comes in contact with that salty meat, from that point on, the bacteria boom, gets dried out and dies. Yeah. That's why packaged foods are still loaded with sodium. Unfortunately, I got some stuff on that later, but it was used as a currency in Ethiopia up until the 20th century and was used as a form of suicide in China for nobility. They would OD, unsolved and kill themselves. Oh, yeah. Because it was expensive and very valuable. So nobility, that's like it was like a noble way to go out. We'll talk in a minute. Like what happens when you have too much salt? It's not very pleasant. It's not very pleasant. But, you know, in medieval Europe remember we did the ten medieval torture devices episode? Well, we skipped one called the Goat's Tongue, and it was apparently a real thing, a tickle torture. They would dip your feet in frontwater, bring in a goat, and the goat would lick the bottom of your feet and then they would dip it again. Is that in the article description? No, I'm saying, like, it wasn't in there from the description. Apparently being tortured, tickle tortured, was not pleasant. I would love to have my feet looked by a goat. They would do it until you did not love it. That was the point of the Goat's Tongue tour. Sounds like fun to me. Yeah. In the Middle Ages, salt was transported along the notorious old Salt Route in northern Germany. I know what I'm going to get you for Christmas now. A goat in some salt water. I've had both at the same time. I don't know why I didn't think about it. It played a big role in early America as well. Massachusetts Bay Colony had the first patent to produce salt here in the colonies, salt water. And they did so for 200 years. The Erie Canal opened primarily to transport salt. Yeah, they called it the ditch that salt built. Really? Sounds like something you just made up? No, I swear. I've been on the Erie Canal. Oh, yeah. They have this nice system of locks. Sure. And there's still, like, donkey trails where the donkeys used to pull these little flat bottom boats that would carry salt and what not. And now yuppies walk along those trails. Dog yupies are still yuppies. Oh, yeah. Dinks yeah, I heard one the other day. Dual income, large dog owner. All right. And the early 1800, salt was apparently four times expensive as beef, because salt was valuable, obviously, and we were lousy with beef. And in the Civil War, salt played a big part in the Union strategy. There were quite a few battles fought over capturing saltworks and salt mines. Yeah. In Saltville, Virginia. Yeah. Salt. I wonder what they do there. And it actually had a big effect on the salt shortage, on the Confederate troops. Yeah, not just the troops, but the people behind the lines back in the Confederate States were like, we want our salt. And it had a huge impact on morale, apparently. I would say so. And the reason why salt is so important, if you haven't gotten the impression that it is important by now, you should rewind the podcast and just listen to the last several minutes over again. Salt is extraordinarily important because the human body requires it. It's something that we need to survive and to live. So much so that we actually have a taste sense for it. Yeah. You don't need bitter to live. No. Or sour or umami as a matter of fact, things like bitter and sour are there, I think, to detect things that we shouldn't be eating. Sure. Salt is to detect something we need. That's right. And we can actually this is so mindblowing to me. I love the human body. I think it's amazingly wonderful in ways that we don't even fully understand yet. But consider this. When you need salt, your body produces a craving in you for salt. That is awesome. I'm one of those believers. I don't follow it necessarily myself, but in a diet well, think about it. In a diet where you just eat what you crave. Right. I think you can go off the rails because I think that we trade the wrong things. Now. Yes, now. But if you could go back 150 years, maybe sure. I would bet you could survive pretty easily and thrive on a diet where you were just kind of led by your cravings, like, oh, I need some eggs, and eat a couple of eggs, steak. No. You should pay attention to yourself. Listen to what your body is telling you. And I'll bet you find that you do have specific cravings for specific moods, for foods that are like very simple meat, like, Chuck, go eat a steak. Chuck, go eat some eggs. Like things that are basic staples. I'll bet you'll notice you have cravings. Salt. Let's break it down. Chemically. Okay. It's sodium and chlorine are the two basic elements in salt. I think we all know this. Which are electrolytes. That's right. And we'll get into that in a minute. Sodium is silvery white metal, and neither one of these are super friendly independently of one another. No. Especially chlorine. Yeah. Sodium reacts violently if you mix it with water and oxidizes and air. Chlorine exists in gas at a room temperature. They're both really volatile, but when you put them together and you have sodium chloride, they make beautiful music, makes beautiful highlight and beautiful music. And sodium chloride is about a 60 40 mix. Sodium to chloride, by the way. Is that right? Yeah. Nice. It makes little cubes, right? Yeah. The molecules are cubicle. Right. The sodium packs in pretty tight, and then the chlorine fills in the rest, and they make tiny little cubes. It's actually reversed. That's what I said. Yeah. The chloride is packed, and then the sodium fills in. I would have thought the sodium was bigger, but what you have is NaCl. That's right. And you mentioned electrolytes. Those are minerals that conduct electricity in our body, in our fluids and tissues, which is very important. Super important. Like muscle movement we run on electricity. Heart contraction. Yeah. Involuntary muscle moves through electrical impulse. I guess all muscles do. Yes. You want your eyes to blink, buddy? Yeah. Eat some salt. Right. And so there are two conditions that you can have conceivably. Well, three would be just all systems are normal, but the other two is too little salt and too much salt. Too little salt is called hyponatremia. Yeah. That's what that lady died of. The holds your wee for a wee contest. Is that right? Yes. You can OD on water, and I guess that's what you would ultimately die from is hypo nitremia. There's water toxicity. If you have too much water, you probably have too little salt, because water flushes salt from your system. It's the method that your kidneys use to maintain the balance of salt and other electrolytes in your body. And that's why you might drink Gatorade if you're working out, because it has electrolytes in it. Right, exactly. Salty. You don't want to water your cropland with it, though. No. As we found from the movie Idiocracy. Yeah. And I actually found, too, that in the 1980s, there was a lot of controversy over salting roads killing roadside vegetation. Well, yeah, for sure. If you were into conquests and that kind of thing, and you wanted to make sure that the land you just occupied couldn't be used to grow crops to feed an opposing army, you would plow the land with salt. Salt the earth. Yeah. Which is not the salt of the earth, because that means you're a good fella. Right. But not a good fella, because those guys are salty. Wow. Look at you. That was a team effort. That was clever wordplay, my friend. If you take diuretics, or you have massive diarrhea for a period of days, or vomiting or some sort of stomach bug, you might be at risk for hyponatremia. Yeah. Because you're flushing out all of the electrolytes. Yeah. This is salt that your body needs. So if it's out of balance, you're going to suffer things like, well, an inability for your heart to beat, which is often fatal. Yeah. Kidney problems. Yeah. On the other hand, you can have Hypertens tremia, which is too much salt. And like you said, if you're a Chinese aristocrat, you may die from hypernatremia. Yeah. They even had a sometimes a blanket on the word how to manual. Well, it's sort of like how many grams of salt you needed per pound in your body, like a chart, I guess if you want to kill yourself in China, you're trying to do it here's how much salt you need. I don't think that was rough. Did you like that? Yeah. I'm off today. No, you're not. I'm a little off. You were on my microphone. Just swerved to the left. That never happened. It's a ghost in here. So too much sodium, I think you said already, is hyper neutrimia instead of hypo. Yes. Hyper hypo. Exactly. It's like Glycemia, but with nutramia. Exactly. And with hyper neutremia, basically. Remember how salt, if you introduce it to, say, a jerky of some sort, it will dry it out or slug. Yes. It's just a shameful thing to do. Don't do that. If you introduce it to a meat or something like that, it's going to dry it out, because through Osmosis In Search of Homeostasis, it does the same thing to your blood and your extracellular fluids. That salt will draw out the fluids in your cells, but will maintain it in your blood. Yeah. It's water retention, basically. Yeah. Your kidneys, when it has too much salt to deal with, kicks it around the blood supply. Just like remember in the hangover episode, why drugs are so fatal when you drink a lot of alcohol because your kidneys are trying to process the alcohol, so it keeps the drugs just going around and around in your blood supply. Right. Same thing with too much salt. If your kidneys have too much to deal with, they just keep the excess going around in your blood. And since that salt is drawing out all the excess moisture, it increases the volume of your blood, which makes your blood pressure rise, which makes your heartbeat harder. Yes. Which supposedly, logically, would put you at risk for a stroke or heart attack. And that's how you would die from hyper natrimia. Yeah. I have high blood pressure. Well, supposedly sodium cutting your sodium down isn't going to help. Yeah, there's a lot of conflicting data on that, for sure. We'll get the nutrition soon. We'll cover that. Well, how about before we move on, do you want to do a message break? So, Chuck, like you said, there's a lot of controversy over how much salt or how little salt you should have on a daily basis in your diet. Yeah. The National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute say no more than 24 grams of sodium. It's about a teaspoon per day. Americans, they found, consume an average of about 3.4 per day. So that's 1 gram too much on average. And you actually don't need more than about a half a grand a day if you want to maintain that stasis. Yeah, just for your electrolyte intake. The thing is, though, there was for many years, because it makes sense that if too much salt increases your blood pressure, then too much salt should put you at risk for strokes and heart attacks, right? Yeah. Well, the CDC panel surveyed material and all sorts of studies that found no, cutting your sodium intake doesn't really decrease your risk of heart attack or stroke. And as a matter of fact, there is. Was it just more hereditary? They don't know what it is, okay. They just know that basically below 3000 grams or 3000 mg of salt and above 7000 mg of salt a day were two groups that were at higher risk of heart attack. Okay? So if you have too little salt, you're at higher risk of heart attack, too. Okay? So try to keep it between 3004 thousand mg. 3007 thousand, 7000. The thing is, they weren't comfortable making any recommendation. They were just scared. This is what we found. Everyone scared to go on the record. Yeah. Because we just don't know. It doesn't make any sense that you would have a heart attack if you ate less than 3 grams of salt a day. That flies in the face of conventional wisdom and nobody's figured out why yet. Interesting. Well, it's something you should monitor at the very least, because I think a lot of people look at fat grams and calories and all that stuff is great to look at nutritionally. But when you start poking around on the soup can and you see, wow, this chicken noodle soup has 890 milligrams of sodium. And this one little can, which is almost a gram of sodium. Yeah, close to it. A quarter pounder with bacon and cheese. You didn't do Big Mac. No. I should have done Big Mac. You're communist? I think Big Max actually, I did see, this is 1440 milligrams of Big Mac, I think was around 1000. Wow. Quarter Pounders. More with the bacon. I think they have, like a whole bacon, onion, ranch or something topping that you can put on Quarter Pounders. Now, I've not yet tried this, but I think about it from time to time. Like right now? Yeah, right now especially. At any rate, just give it a look. Like, soups are notoriously high in sodium. Packaged foods are notoriously high in sodium. Don't just think about the table salt that you use. Like, oh, I didn't solve my food that much today. If you eat a lot of packaged foods, you're eating a lot of sodium. Yeah. And nobody can tell you how much you should be eating or shouldn't be eating. But like you said, it's good to just pay attention to that kind of thing because you probably are eating a lot more than you realize. Yeah. And you should be eating a lot of packaged food anyway. I'll just go ahead and say that. So, Chuck yes. What kinds of salt are there? Well, first of all, I should say I love salt. I do too. Salt and pepper are my favorite two spices. I'm from the south. I have a taste for salt and pork fat. Yeah, that's pretty southern, too. Yeah, for sure. So I love salt. I like good Mediterranean sea salt. That's what I use at my house. And I'm going to plug this local saltya. I just made that word up later in the show. Okay. But I'm a big salt fan. I like salt, too. I like sweet. I like, umami, I like sour. I'm training myself to bitter. Through the use of Campari, I found out that I'm a bitter super taster. So things that seem like normal to other people are, like, really bitter to me. One example grapefruit. Grapefruit campari. Oh, that's bitter. Yes, but it's disgustingly bitter to me. I can't understand how the rest of humanity eats grapefruit. I don't like grapefruit. Well, maybe you're a bitter super taster too. You and me, buddy. But I have to tell you this. I've trained myself to like grapefruit and Campari just by exposure. Like, I've come to appreciate them more like a bitter digestive for aperture. Okay. You do like a Campari and soda it's in a Negroni, right? I think I've seen people like, if their stomachs upset or is that bitters and soda? Well, Campari is a type of bitters. Okay. It's not that super compact bitters, right? Angostura? Yes. But it is a type of bitter. I think it's a digestive. Okay. It's good stuff. Anyway, I like salt. What I'm really saying there is I like well seasoned food. And if you're a chef or a home chef, you know that salt is important to cooking. Super important. And baking, obviously. But bland food can't do it. No. What's the point? What is the point? Agreed. Types of salt. Let's start with table salt, man. If your doctor put you on, like, a bland food diet, I feel for you. But there's stuff out there you can eat. There's Spike, there's Mrs. Dash. You should be seasoning your food to some extent. Sure. Like bland food. It's bland life. Yeah. They even have the imitation salt and new salt. I didn't do any research on that, but I've bought it before. Do you like it? I didn't use it that much, but it exists in my home. I see. Next to the empty thing of Mediterranean Sea salt. I got you. Yeah. All right. So table salt is the first one we should cover. That's the traditional either iodize or non iodised fine grained salt that you see in many homes and restaurants. And it's iodised. I did a little research into this. Did you look up iodized salt? Yeah. Well, I mean, I know that they added it because at one point it was sort of like fluoride. They thought, well, we need this and a good place to put it in salt. Yeah, because most people use salt and we'll just put it in the table salt because it's an easy additive. But there was a real problem with hyperthyroidism, things like goiters, mental retardation, just poor fetal development linked to iodine deficiency. So they put it in salt and apparently it's considered to be responsible for this thing called the Flynn effect, which there was like a three IQ point rise in the middle of the 20th century in Western nations and nobody could figure out what it is. And they think now that it was because they added iodine to salt. Really? And so it had the aggregate effect of raising our IQ by preventing poor fetal development. Yeah, well, it's still a problem in other parts of the world, just not here in North America. Right. Other parts of the world that don't have iodine salt. You know how dumb they are. Oh, man, that is terrible. I'm just kidding. You need to apologize for the rest of the world for that. I'm sorry, everybody. So, like I said, table salt is the most common salt. They remove all the impurities. They have things in there to make it not clump and stick together and so it pours freely. So even when it rains, it pours. Well, should we get to that? Yeah. Don't you have something on there? Yeah, I just for some reason thought of the Morton salt girl and like every great advertising story, they were like, how do we it was sort of a new thing at the time, in 1911, to package salt this way in a container with a spout. How did they package it before? I don't know. The blocks, probably. Is that right? Like a deer lick or something? I'm not sure, actually. But I know that this was a fairly revolutionary product to package it like this and process it like this. So the agency was NWA and Company and Don Draper walks in and says, I've got twelve proposals for you. Which one do you like? And Sterling Morton of the Morton Company, of course, it's always someone else, like his son or his wife or something. It was his son. And secretary pointed toward one of the ads with a little girl holding the umbrella and said, this is the one. And he said, you know what? I think you guys are right. The whole story is right there in the picture. Because the whole point was this salt doesn't clump when it rains, it pours. Right. And little girls can't be trusted to be sent to the store by themselves because they ruin all the salt by keeping the nozzle open on the way home. Some of the different slogans they had, which flows freely, runs freely, pours. It never rains, but it pours. And then they finally settled on when it rains, it pours. Yeah, that's the best one. Because it never rains, but it pours. Doesn't make any sense. They probably fired that person, and she's been updated 12345 times. Oh, really? Yeah, the last time in 1968. And she's been the same since then. Yeah. And there was never a real model for that girl. That's a question they often get totally made up. Yeah, because he was like, it's Morton's granddaughter, is what you want to think. Selma. Selma Morton. So that is the story of the Hersche. It's an old timey name if ever there was one. herskin? Yeah. That's a college, right? No, it's like a person's name. Oh, it's a college, too. Okay. I had a friend who played soccer there. There's a college named Colgate, too. It's like crazy to me. Sea salt sir is next. It's going to cost you some more money because of several reasons, one of which, if they go old school and in some parts of France, they still harvest the stuff by hand, which is pretty cool. You might see it called flair Dasel, which is French for flour of salt. And it's not processed like table salt is. So you're going to have a lot of these trace minerals. It's going to be coarse and flaky and it colors it, too. It can, for sure. Like, you can have white sea salt, pink, black, gray, or combination of them. Pink salts are traditionally associated with Himalayan salt, and the pink is often the result of things like copper or iron or apparently there's a type that contains an algae, a salt tolerant algae, which would make it an extremophile that gives it has the betacarotene pigment in it, and that gives it a pinkish hue. That's salt. You're eating algae, pink algae in your salt, which is pretty neat. That is pretty neat. That's Hawaiian, right? A lot of times, hawaii has a different one. And Aley. Oh, I read that as algae. Yeah, I did two a couple of times and I was like, why would they separate these two out? There's no g. No, it's a Hawaiian alaya. Salt has iron oxide in it from the volcanoes. Oh, that makes sense. And Hawaii also produces black salt, too, from the lava. Yeah. And a little bit of charcoal. I'll have to try some of those, actually. Yeah. And then there's gray salts, too, which is sell gray, which is from France. And then smoked salt is also gray, where they just take some salt and smoke it. They put it over a smoky fire and you have smoked salt. Do you like smoky foods? Sometimes, yeah. It can be a little overbearing for me at times. Yeah. In the hands of, I guess, somebody who knows what they're doing with the smoked I like a good smoked meat all day type of thing, but not necessarily when they'll add, like, artificial smoke in the kitchen to a meal. Right. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Although smoked cheese is good. Oh, yeah, man. Good smoke. Hey, and thanks to fan Hillary Lozar for sending us some great cheese. Yeah, that was very good to you. I had some of that smoke goo yesterday, actually, when I got home, I haven't had it yet. Is it good? And as soon as I walked in the door, I got a knife out. It was like, I got to try this stuff. Yeah, it's delicious. Anyway, thanks, Hillary. So chefs and Gourmet's will say sea salt is what you want to be using because you're going to get a unique flavor from those minerals that are not in table salt. Sure I agree with them. It's tough to bake with, though. Yeah, it's tough to measure. You get a lot more precise measuring, for sure, from table salt. Right. And they don't recommend you bake with sea salt. No, because baking is a specific chemical reaction. Cooking is different. Yes. They say that most chefs don't cook with sea salt, but they will just add it as a topper. But I've cooked with sea salt, and I know plenty of chefs that cook with sea salt, so I disagree with that. Well, with the topper, they mean, like it's finishing salt. It brings out, like, all the flavors if you sprinkle it on the yeah, I mean, it's definitely used for that before you serve it, but I've also seen it used in the food. Right. Well, that leads us to kosher salt. Apparently, some people like to cook with kosher salt, and if you are using following a recipe and you're switching out whatever amount of salt is called for, you want to double it, because kosher salt is larger, coarse grain salt. And here to me is a fact of the podcast on several. Kosher salt is not necessarily kosher itself. It's used to make things kosher. You didn't know that? I didn't. I thought kosher salt was like, salt that had been blessed by a rabbi or something. Really? Yeah. I never understood it, but now I do. It's salt they use to make things kosher. If you use table salt to make something kosher, it's not going to work. Right. Kosher salt, because it's large and coarse grained, makes meat kosher by drawing the blood out, because eating blood ain't kosher. So if you salt it with kosher salt, it's going to draw the blood out of the meat, and bam, you have a kosher cut of steak, baby. Boom. And it's not oddized either, right, by the way. And then we have the red headed stepchild of the salt family, rock salt, which is used. It's got a lot. Of impurities. It's unrefined, it's very large grain, and it's used to melt ice on roads and sidewalks and to make homemade ice cream. Yeah. And probably some other stuff. But do you know of any other uses? I think rock salt is used in some chemical production. That makes sense. Yeah. If you want to make a good industrial brine, rock salt your man. Yeah. All right. Salt mining. That's how you get salt because it is a natural thing that exists in the Earth. The largest producer of salt these days, no surprise, is China. In 2012, they produced about 65 million tons. The US is not too far behind it 44 million. Then you've got Germany, India, and Australia as the other leading top five salt producers these days. Yeah. And India gets the profit from its salt production, thanks to Gandhi. I guess so. Yeah. That's pretty neat. And think about that. They're number four on the list. Yeah. And they weren't even allowed to produce it not so long ago. No, they were allowed to produce it, but all of the money went. Yeah. Okay. Jerks. So there's three types of mining. Three main types. There's deep shaft mining, solar evaporation, and solution mining. And deep shaft mining is basically like any other type of mining, where you just drill a shaft down into a mine yeah. Which an underground seabed is where the salt is. Right. That's where you get your salt. Yeah. I think that's one of the facts of the podcast. Yeah. They're ancient underground seabed, ancient sea beds that dried up and the salt remained. And they form these, basically salt deposits that can be dozens or hundreds of feet thick and massively wide. And you drill down into these things, you create a couple of shafts, and then they usually use what's called a room and pillar system, which really helps. It's very difficult to explain, but if you see a picture of it, it makes perfect sense. Agreed. But you're basically creating a checkerboard pattern going down and mining the salt deposits. Right. Yeah. You blast a room, but you leave a couple of adjacent rooms for support. Right. And then eventually you've mined out all the salt, and then you fill it with industrial waste. That is one thing they do. So that's deep shaft mining. Yeah. And they'll remove the salt there and crush it and haul it to the service and further process it from there, depending on what kind of salt you want in the end. Right. And there's this awesome mine called the Wheelchair Salt Mine in Crack Out Poland. And it has a full on cathedral made out of salt. What amazing, there are several chapels, but then a full cathedral, and it's all made out of salt. It's in this old salt mine. Wow. That's not a UNESCO site. And they went to the trouble of boiling salt. It was a table salt mine. They would boil this raw salt and purify it and then use that purified salt to make crystal chandeliers out of salt. Like the whole cathedral is just salt. It's amazing looking, man. Yeah. Check it out. No goats allowed. They would recap it or no chucks allowed. I just walk around, like, licking stuff. Right. They would ask you not to do that. A deep shaft mining, by the way, I think is usually rock salt is what they're producing there. Right. And then there's solution mining. Yeah. Basically, they take a well over a salt bed and then inject water in there and make a brine and then pump it up from the underground as a wet solution and into a vacuum pan, which is going to seal it up and they're going to boil it and then evaporate it, which is how they made salt back in the old days, too. They would boil it and evaporate it and then scrape the pan. Right. So it's kind of a modern version of that. Right. Then they dry it out and refine it, and then from there, they're going to either add anti clumping agents or iodine, depending on what you want. And then with solution mining, you've got like a salt bed or a salt dome that's exposed because it's somehow, through tectonic action, an ancient sea bed or salt bed has been exposed to the above ground, like the surface of the earth. Right. And then what's the last one? Well, the old school solar method, solar evaporation. This is when you have a salt lake or seawater and wind in the sun cooperate with these shallow pools and they leave salt behind. And you can only harvest it about once a year, once it reaches a certain level of harvest ability of thickness. And like we said, sometimes it's still done by hand, even although it is industrialized in other places, for sure. But they wash it, they clean it, they drain it, but they leave a lot of impurities in there. And this stuff is almost 100% pure sodium chloride. Got you. It's good stuff. And like I said, I use the Mediterranean version generally, but Australia is big on it, too, on this method. And we should probably mention also that salt has a lot of religious significance. It's an ancient important thing to mankind. Yeah. They like, use it to seal important things. Yeah. In the Old Testament, which is pretty old. Sure. Lots wife. I believe her name is Sarah. Was it Sarah or Ruth who was married a lot, turned into a pillar of salt when she looked behind her, even though God said, don't turn around. Turning into a pillar of salt. Yeah. And she did. And apparently there's a salt pillar at Mount Ararat that's called Lot's wife. People are like, that's her right there. Is that Buddhist that ward off evil with salt? Yes. Yuumi has a little shaker of salt that her mom put in her glove compartment of her car. Oh, really? Yeah. Check people if they flick her off on her protector. Yeah, that's nice. See, I would have eaten it. That's why I don't let you ride in Yami's car. That's right. One of several reasons. Stay out of the glove box. You got anything else? I do. This is a good thing. And there's a Roman senator named Cassio Doris, and he said, quote, mankind can live without gold, but not without salt. Wow. Who's that? Cassiokee Bordes. Yeah. Well, you got Jerry again. Yeah, she's giggly today. And I have a plug because here in Atlanta, there's a lady who makes salts. But if you go to Facebook and type in beautiful briny sea salt, go to her Facebook page and click on the about thing, you will see her lovely homemade handcrafted salts. And my favorite is the magic unicorn. See if this sounds good. Sea salt is, of course, the main ingredient, smoked paprika, lemon, garlic, rosemary and celery seed. It does sound good. It's delicious. You get some broccoli and some cauliflower, some, like beets and big chunks of garlic. Throw it out the window. Then buy a steak and put this magical unicorn on it. Some olive oil, sprinkle it with this stuff, bake it in the oven. Delicious to go with that steak. Nice. Magical unicorn. Yeah, magic unicorn is my favorite. And the black truffle salt is delicious. And then she has one called Campfire, which is smoked salt with cumin and ancho chili powder. Nice. And if you email info@beautifulbrinycceasalt.com, you can order some of this stuff. That's very nice of you. And I told Emily, she's a printer, they said, tell her I'm going to plug her so she better get her little fingers working, you know? Nice. Start making some salt. Yeah. Because the stuff you should army is a salty crowd. So if you want to learn more about salt, I don't know how you possibly could, but if you want to look into it, you can type the word S-A-L-T into the search bar howstep works.com. And it will bring up this article, how Salt Works. And since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this. We should apologize to cops. What do we do now? Well, this cop wrote in it. I'll just read it. Is it the police chase's one? Yeah, they didn't like that one. Hey, guys. My name is Glenn. I'm a police officer in Southern California. I've been enjoying the podcast for years. I suspect our political leanings may differ at times, but I always enjoy learning and listening to different points of view. Listen to the December 17 Manhunt podcast. It's not the police chase one. You're right. But I think it involves something like that. I felt it was very accurate with the exception of some information you provided about the LAPD. We bashed the LAPD before for their history of corruption. They have a pretty thick history of corruption. But they're not all bad ladies and men. Well, no, of course not. You mentioned that officers were super jumpy during the manhunt for Christopher Dorner, which was a fair assessment. But here is where you got something kind of wrong. You stated that the LAPD fired on two uninvolved vehicles. It was the LAPD who shot at one in the Torrents Police Department, shot at the other. I could see how someone not from the area might think they were LAPD, so it's not that big of a deal. Okay. However, the bigger mistake is that you stated that these shootings killed two people. Nobody was killed. So I need to go back. I saw in several places that at least two people were killed. Really? Yeah, accidentally from those shootings. I'll go back and look again. Okay. Glenn. Josh takes issue, sir. Well, he's not the only one who's written in. I just haven't gotten around to going back and looking and double checking. But I mean, while we were researching, I came across that and it wasn't like on a forum or message board or something. They were in articles. Okay, well, we'll get to the bottom of it. Gwen says, I'm very surprised you would make such a statement without doing your homework. I did my homework. You typically appear to go to great lengths to fact check. Sometimes I get the feeling you guys are not the biggest fans of law enforcement. I even recognize my profession shortcomings, for sure. Just like you though, I want facts influencing the show, not personal opinions. This email was not intended to justify the actions of those two police departments, just to set the record straight. Understood. And despite the goof and the cop bashing, I still love the show. That's from Glen and Glen. I don't hate cops. I love cops. We've done a lot of super supportive shows on law enforcement. Sure, Tucks like the law enforcement dude, but I don't like jerks. And I think a lot of times people's experience with cops are when they're pulled over and not being helped by a cop, which is unfortunate, sure, because they do so much great work. But when you get pulled over and you're hassled by a jerk cop, you think, man, what a jerk cop. It's like eating at a bad restaurant, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, restaurant is bad. You tell one or two people you have a bad experience at a restaurant, you tell like 20 people it's like 50 full with cops. Yeah. So we have a lot of respect for law enforcement for sure, for all they do. So I hope that doesn't come across any differently. Nice check. Very. Yeah, thanks Glenn. Yeah, thank you, Glenn. I'll go back and double check. If I'm wrong, I'll admit it. I just haven't had a chance to look again. We'll give them 20 licks off of a block of salt from a goat and I might die of hyper neutrimia man that wrapped it all up right there. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck to correct us, take issue with something we said. Whatever you can tweet to us at Sisk podcast. You can join us on facebookcom stuffychno. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, check us out at our coolhome, on the web stuffyhow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Lindacom. Linda.com offers thousands of engaging, easy to follow video tutorials taught by industry experts to help you learn software, creative and business skills. Membership starts at $25 a month and provides unlimited 24/7 access. Try Linda.com free for seven days by Visa. Visiting Linda.com SYSK."
3f4c6c22-5461-11e8-b6d0-73ea01130cbf	SYSK Selects: What is a hangover, really?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-what-is-a-hangover-really	After a night of heavy boozing, many partygoers find themselves the victim of a hangover. But what exactly is a hangover, and what causes it? Join Chuck and Josh as they break down the science behind hangovers -- and how to avoid them, in this classic episode.	After a night of heavy boozing, many partygoers find themselves the victim of a hangover. But what exactly is a hangover, and what causes it? Join Chuck and Josh as they break down the science behind hangovers -- and how to avoid them, in this classic episode.	Sat, 12 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=347, tm_isdst=0)	31984001	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"EW. Hey, everybody, chuck here on a Saturday morning. Last night was a long one. That's all I'm going to say. So my pick for today from October 15, 2009, what is a hangover? Really? We talk about hangovers science behind them and how to fix them. I'll give you a hint. Bananas. 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 Tucker's Bryant. And that means this is stuff you should know, right? Yes. The over 21 years old Chuck Bryant. Yeah. That's a big deal for this one. Chuck, we're just going to go ahead and COA right now. Say that this is about drinking, and if you're under 21, you should not drink. Chuck, have you ever consumed an alcoholic beverage? I have. Still COA. If you're over 21, you should drink responsibly. Yes. Don't drink and drive. If you have a heavy machine. Yeah, heavy machinery is a big one. If you have a problem, you can contact Alcoholics Anonymous. Right. I've always wanted to test that one. Get really proud and just sit down behind a bulldozer. I always imagine forklifts with heavy machinery. I go straight to the dozer. Wow. So, yes, I have had an alcoholic beverage before. What was your experience with it like? Did you feel a little lightheaded, a little crazy, a little uninhibited? I wanted to kiss somebody. Did you end up kissing anybody? I did. I kissed my dog. Didn't you make out with a friend's sister at a YouTube concert once? I did. Were you under the effects of alcohol during that time? I was. Okay. This was give me a break. Chuck, did you end up with a hangover that day? Yes, I did. The same day? The next day? Yeah, sure. How did you feel? I felt I had a headache. I had a poor sense of wellbeing, I had sensitivity to light and sound, diarrhea, loss of appetite, trembling, nausea, fatigue. You have the whole list. Hydration, anxiety, trouble sleeping, weakness. Wow. Yeah. That's a bad hangover right there. That's all the symptoms, you know, the one that always gets me the worst whenever I have a hangover is the loss of the sense of wellbeing, I feel like I am right there on the edge of danger. Everybody's gunning for me. I feel horrible. Really? Yeah, it's really bad. I've always assumed it affects my serotonin level, so I didn't see anything in this article about that. Right. I thought I was going to have to get taken to the hospital in Portland, Oregon, one time. Did you? Yes. The next day, Emily asked me. It was her friend's wedding. She said, you okay? Do you need to go to the hospital? And I went. Maybe. I was serious. Wow. So let's talk about this. Chuck? Yes. What are the mechanisms that lie behind the cursed and dreaded hangover? Vesalgia. Yeah. Is that the correct pronunciation? That's how I took it. That's the medical name for hangovers vestalgia. Yeah. And it comes from a Norwegian word for uneasiness following debauchery, and a Greek word for pain, algae, which is weird. I've never seen Norwegian and Greek put together. I haven't either, but yeah, you come up with Visalgia. Can I say that the Bible verse, too. Yeah, yeah. There's a Bible verse that talks about hangovers. It's Isaiah 511. Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink. In other words. I feel really sorry for you that you had to get up early if you got hammered last night. Yeah. True words have never been written in the Bible. This translation there. Yeah. Okay. So we've got that down. We have the word origin and a Bible quote, as is pretty much whenever you talk about a hangover. Right. So what's going on there, Chuck? Well, there's a bunch of things let's go ahead and start with vasopressin. Yeah. Here is, by the way, everyone, a cocktail party conversation tidbit. So it's your next cocktail party. You might want to just bring this up. Okay. It might be kind of depressing to bring this up, actually. At a cocktail party. Well, this is how you explain breaking the seal, which I know that you have experienced. Sure. It's crazy. Once you urinate and we're going to stick to the clinical terms here, Chuck. All right, let's keep it above the breaking the seal. That's clinical. Once you urinate that first time after you've started drinking, it seems like you just keep going and going and going and you can't stop and you actually can't. Right, right. So vasopressin. Vasopressin, yes. When you drink booze, it enters your bloodstream and the pituitary gland blocks the creation of vasopressin. And without this, your kidney starts sending water straight to your bladder, basically right to the tune of four times more than you actually drink. So you drink 250 alcohol, you can shoot out up to 1000 MLS or a liter. Is that the clinical term too? Shoot out? Yeah. So that's no mistake. If you've ever had a few beers and you're thinking, wow, this is so weird, I use the bathroom and now I can't stop. That's vasopressin right there. Right. And that's called the diuretic effect. As the presence of alcohol increases in the bloodstream, you expel a lot more water. Right. But you're not just expelling water. Also, we should say this leads directly to dehydration. If you're expelling four times more liquid than you're consuming, brother, you're getting dehydrated. Yes. Which is one of the signature results of the hangover. And you get the headache because of that and other things, too. You do. And the headache we've talked about this before, I don't remember where. So we probably shouldn't try to come up with a timestamp when you have a hangover. Your brain actually shrinks the next day. The other organs in your body are like you brain, you've got a bunch of water. Exactly. So a lot of the water is shuffled from your brain to other organs, causing your brain to actually shrink in size, which pulls on the membranes that connected to the skull, the meninges. Right. And you know what? When you have a really bad hangover, you wake up and you feel like the membranes of your skull are being pulled in a different definition. Feels like that. So when I read this, I was like, oh, so that's what that is. Or like there's a 400 pound ham fisted man with her and his knuckles, like, doing little twirls in your head. Yeah. Have you ever speaking of breaking the seal, I don't think they did this in Athens at Georgia, but I know some friends at Georgia Southern, there were bars there that had the drink till you pee for free promotion. Have you ever heard of those? No, but it sounds awesome. Basically, like, starting at 06:00, they monitor the bathrooms and everyone in the bar gets to drink for free until the first person in the bar goes to the bathroom. And I don't think they have that in Athens. They didn't when I was there. And of course, because it's a college, there's like dudes peeing in beer pitchers in the corner sure. Just to not have to pay the two whether or not there's that contest or promotion. So it's science. Science, okay. That's vasopressin, right? Yes. Resulting in dehydration. But when you're urinating everywhere, every which way, whether it's in a beer pitcher or otherwise right. You're also expelling a lot of other needed stuff. Yes. Like electrolytes, salt, potassium. Salt, potassium, magnesium. And these all affect how your cells function, how your muscles function, and you're getting rid of it without putting it back in. So you're going to feel lousy. Yes, indeed. You are going to feel lousy. So you're dehydrated. You've lost electrolytes. Right. And the electrolyte imbalance is really important. If you have too much salt and your electrolyte imbalance is too high, you die. Sure. If you have too little, you get the shakes. The tremors, which I understand is the most uncommon symptom of hangovers, which makes me nervous because I get the shakes just about every time the next day. I've never gotten the shakes. What? I've never gotten the shakes. Wow. It also points out in this article that hangovers are subjective, so for each person, they might experience different. Like, oh, I've never had a hangover. When you get the shakes and you have a loss of a sense of well being yeah. That's like Nick Cage and leaving Las Vegas? Kind of. Wow. Yeah. I've always been like, wow, that would be great to have a grocery cart in a liquor store. What a great scene. Should we talk about glycogen real quick, too? Yeah, that's another thing you lose. Yes. Glycogen is a key energy source, and it goes to the liver and turns into glucose. Is that correct? Right. Well, the liver turns it into glucose oh. And then sends it out, basically your liver, and you're like, what the heck is going on? And does something, and all of a sudden, you've just lost all of your energy. Right. I'll just pee everything out just to be sure. Exactly. Basically, it's what's going on. Yeah. And that actually accounts for the weakness the next day, fatigue. And actually, that's not the only thing that accounts for fatigue. You don't sleep very well after a night of heavy drinking. Gluten. Yes. You have glutamine, which is actually a stimulant. Natural stimulant. Yes. Which is the only good kind of stimulant. And when you drink alcohol, the production of this natural stimulant is actually blocked. Right. So when you stop drinking eg go to sleep. Right. Your body tries to make up for lost time and overproduces glutamine. So it means you're not getting as good as sleep. Exactly. And the next day, you also feel restless and anxious. Maybe you get the shakes. Sure. That's another cocktail party tip. If you start saying all these things at your next cocktail party, you probably won't be invited back to the next cocktail party, though, would be? No. I think you could wow some people. It depends on how cool your cocktail party. I guess I could see them all saying, though, like, why are you telling us all these awful things about drinking? Unless my kind of cocktail party is great for me. Another one. Right. Screw glycogen, screw vasopressin. So what else, Josh? Well, we could talk about the impurities of liquor. Okay. Well, the different alcohols. Yeah. Pretty much the rule of thumb is the darker the alcohol, the more impure it is, and therefore the heavier the hangover. Yes. Which is why I think everyone pretty much knows that your worst alcoholics, they start drinking every morning when they wake up. They're probably drinking vodka. Yes. It's actually a good thing to drink if you are an alcoholic, because you're going to be able to be as close to a functional alcoholic as possible. Right. How about that study with the bourbon? Yeah. They did a study between bourbon and vodka, and 33% of the people who drank amount of bourbon relative to their body weight had a severe hangover, and only 3% had a hangover when they drank vodka. That's a big vodka, white wine, that kind of thing. Light rum. Yeah. Gin. Yeah. Conversely, dark rum is bad. Red Winlight. Tequila is good. Basically, if it's dark, it's going to kill you. I'm in bad shape then, because you know me, I'm a bourbon red wine beer guy. That's funny. I'm like whatever's in the glass guy. Right. Yeah. That's good. You're fun to have at the cocktail party because you're not picky. No. As long as you don't run on ice. Totally not as long as there's not a cigarette butt floating in it. I'll drink it, and then sometimes even then. I don't think that hasn't happened before. Chuck oh, yeah. Basically what I took from this article is when you drink, you are poisoning your body through coningures, through impurities in the alcohol, but also through the body's natural processes of breaking down alcohol, too. Right. Actually, there's a byproduct produced when the liver metabolizes alcohol called acidaldehyde. Yeah. Take this one, because I read it like, three times and I was still a little lost. Okay. Chuck, allow me, please. So basically, when the liver metabolizes alcohol, it produces a byproduct. That's a toxin called acidaldehyde. Okay. And acidaldehyde is actually more toxic to the body than alcohol itself, which is crazy. Yeah. But we have a natural mechanism for neutralizing acetaldehyde called, appropriately enough, acidaldehyde dehydrogenase. Appropriately. So that stuff goes into tax the acidaldehyde. Right. Then we have this other stuff that is called glutathione. Right. And it contains high levels of substance called cysteine. And cysteine actually is attracted to acid aldehyde. So the two things combined, acidaldehyde dehydrogenase and the cysteine in the glutathione combine to neutralize the acidaldehyde. Right? Right. And it does it pretty quickly. You are going to feel some ill effects, but the less you drink, the easier it is for these two substances to neutralize as byproduct as the alcohol metabolize. Okay, here's the problem. You have a limited store of glutathione in your liver, right? So you use it up pretty quick. And women have even less than men. Exactly. Which accounts for why women tend to have more harsher hangovers than men. Sure. Not just body weight, although that does matter. Right. So use up your glutathione stores, and once you do that, your blood is just basically circulating this toxin, acidaldehyde, while the liver generates more glutathione. Hence you've got this horrible hangover and why, ultimately, time is the only remedy for it. Yeah, well, let's get to that in a second. Let's get to the remedies. Let's talk about liquor before beer. Never fear. Or is it the other way around? Year before liquor never sticker you're right. A little bit of truth to that. Turns out I love it when folk should be true. Totally. It turns out that the carbonation and beer speeds up the absorption of alcohol. So if you start with beer, your body's going to have and then move on to liquor, your body is in fact going to have a harder time processing those toxins, even though there's a certain age. My friend Justin and I, you know, Justin, we were talking about this a few years ago. Someone was remarking about we had a big night out and like, well, was it liquor before beer or beer before liquor? I can't remember. And I just said, you know what? It doesn't matter anymore. No, you're going to be hurting. You reach a certain age, and it either doesn't affect you or it's going to affect you no matter what. Those are college rules. I've noted through my own personal observations that at about age 24, you start getting really severe hangovers. I haven't figured out exactly why yet, but that seems to be about the age when you switch over from, I can do this constantly, to, oh, God, why? I've got the shakes. I have a loss of sense of well being. Right. Yeah. I'm vomiting. I have diarrhea. I don't know why. Maybe that's when puberty ends or something to do with hormones still floating around in the body. Buddy, if your puberty ended at 24, then puberty doesn't end in your 20s. Really? My puberty ended when I was, like, 14. I know, Chuck, but it started when I was seven. Hi, I'm Chuck, age seven. Where are we now? Are we talking about vomiting? Yeah. Turns out that actually does help. And also, Chuck, we have a drinking game based on this, and we're talking about hangovers. Allow me. Okay. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. Chuck. That you keep them for a little while. Go ahead, Chuck. Alcohol what's going on there is it is indeed better to vomit, because when alcohol is absorbed directly through the stomach, and when that happens, the lining of your stomach is going to become irritated and say, hey, thanks for putting all this poison in me, and it's going to start secreting hydrochloric acid. Right. And the hydrochloric acid is actually what makes you vomit. Right. It sends messages to the brain that says the stomach is really connected to the brain via hormonal signals. Big time. Which don't necessarily end after puberty. Right. And your stomach says, you've got to get rid of this stuff. Yeah. And it turns out that you probably shouldn't make yourself throw up because it's dangerous. It could become a problem. If you're drinking so much and you're making yourself throw up, then you probably do have a problem. You should check into a clinic or something. Sure. Check into Promises in Malibu, if you got the cash. But it will make you feel a little better, because obviously your body is not going to have to process whatever alcohol is still in your stomach. So there you have it. What are we on to now, buddy? I think we kind of nailed what it is. So shall we talk about some of the cures that people spout? Yeah, there are plenty of hangover cures. Everybody's got one. Yeah. And actually, I'm surprised to find that some of them actually are real. Now that you understand what causes a hangover, you can actually identify what will help cure a hangover. Sure. Because really what's going on is you've expelled. Electrolytes. It's biology. You've expelled your natural energy stores. You are dehydrated. Right. And your brain is shrunk. Yeah, sure. So what do you do to make yourself feel better, Chuck? My personal favorite is hair of the dog. Will that help me or no, it will not. You know where that comes from? It's the Bible. Again, isn't it? No. Nazareth. Medieval times, though, the hair of the dog that bit you, supposedly, if you got bit by a rabid dog, you would take some of that dog's hair and apply it to your wound, and that will cure you. This is the same culture that buried a cat at midnight to cure wars. Yeah, exactly. So just like that is false hair. The dog is fault as well. Having a drink the next day to make yourself feel a little bit better will not work. Might make you feel a little bit better in the short term, but ultimately you're just adding more toxins that your body is going to have to process, and you're kind of just staving off the inevitable hangover. Unless you just drink all day again. Sure. And then you'll have the hangover the following day. Double hangover. Yes, exactly. Unless you just keep going until you die. Yeah. And then it never catches up with you. You won the game. I was taking a walk with Emily yesterday with the dogs. This shows how twisted I am. And I saw it was 08:00 in the morning, 730 in the morning, something like that, and there was a guy down the street from us in the parking lot cracking his first king cobra. And I said, you know what I said, 99 times out of 100, I see those people and I think, God, how could you live your life like just getting bombed from the moment you wake up every day? I said, but every once in a while, I think, what a way to live. Right. She said, what is wrong with you? Basically, we kept walking you in line, doesn't she? Well, she doesn't let me get up and get drunk every day, if that's what you mean. Yeah, it's keeping you in line. Okay. She does. Chuck one of the things that kills me is drinking coffee. I learned a long time ago that if I ever have a hangover, I stay away from coffee. So I was surprised to find in this article that actually, it does have some benefits. Agreed. Which are? It will actually alleviate your headache a little bit because it's caffeine, and that's a vasoconstrictor. So it reduces your blood vessels, it reduces the swelling. So that will help a little bit. It'll help cure the headache, something. But it'll dehydrate you because it's a diuretic. Because it's a diuretic, which is how you really got into this trouble in the first place. So stop being stupid. Coffee along with a lot of water might be a good idea. Possibly. That's just me. Right, okay. So what else? Fatty, fatty food. Fried food the next day. Yes. Which is odd, because I know I crave fried food the next day. Cheeseburger. Me, too. Bacon chili cheeseburger, dude. Emily bacon chili cheeseburger. It's like two hamburgers a year, and they're on hangover days. Yeah. She doesn't eat beef at all, but when she wakes up with a really bad hangover. She's like Quarter Pounder. It's strange because obviously she's not the only person who experiences that craving, but that doesn't necessarily help and could actually make you vomit. It could tip the scales when you've got a bunch of hydrochloric acid in your stomach. Right. But it could help if you ate a bacon chili cheeseburger or two bacon chili cheeseburgers before you started drinking. Why? Because it contains oil and the fat and the grease will line your stomach. It takes longer to digest. Absolutely. And in fact, in the Mediterranean, they have long drank a little bit of olive oil before imbibing. Yeah. It's an old thing to do. I'm not trying that. I'm not either. I like olive oil, but I'm not going to drink a tablespoon of it. No, me neither. Okay. How about a banana? I'm just going to pull that one out of my head. Out of your banana tree remedy? Yes. Okay. Loaded with potassium, electrolytes, and yes, because, remember, you lose potassium, which is an electrolyte. So if you can restore the balance. So banana will help your hangover, as will eggs. Yes. Since we're on breakfast. Because they contain cysteine. Right. Which is something that's attracted to acid. Aldehyde. Right. So eggs and a banana and water would be a great way to start your morning if you had to hang over not just water, but water loaded with sugar and salt, actually. Right. Because the carbonation would do the same thing as it did with the beer. Right. Beer before liquor. So you want uncarbonated water, load of salt, sugar. Not a Red Bull. No, because it has caffeine, not an energy drink. uncarbonated noncaffeine water with salt and sugar, which I think I just described a sports drink. Right. A banana and some eggs. Or you know what else you can do instead of water? Put some fruit juice in there. Fruit juice is the kind of sugar you want, fructose. And studies have shown that it increases the rate at which your body gets rid of the toxins. And that's a good idea. It also gives you vitamins, of course. Okay. What about, say, excedrin acetaminophen? Acetaminophen is well, you want to avoid, et cetera, because it has caffeine. Right. Which can help, but ultimately, no. Right. And acetaminophen, I believe you don't want to take because that can mess with your liver. Ultimately, yeah. If you have alcohol in your skin, if you take a cenaminophen for a hangover, you are probably going to feel a little better. Actually, you'll probably feel a lot better. But in the long run, your liver is going to fall apart. Yeah. You're doing your body damage. You're going to expel that through your urine. So what you want to do is get a non caffeinated anti inflammatory prostaglandin inhibitor, which is also known as aspirin. Yes, which is good. So aspirin will help. It's shown that prostaglandin actually wreaks havoc on your body. During hangover. So if you take a prostaglandin inhibitor, you're going to feel a lot better. And apparently there have been studies that show yes, aspirin helps, especially if you take one before you go to bed and you take two when you wake up. But beware people with tender stomachs often vomit from aspirin. Right. You know what my cure is? Let's talk about each other's cures. Have you got one? Surely you do. What do I do? You want to hear mine? Yeah. Mine is my deal is I can't sleep in anymore. It doesn't matter if I was out till three in the morning, I'm still going to wake up at seven. It's just the way it is. When you're old, you'll experience this one day I get up at seven like I normally do, and I drink, I pound like three or four glasses of water, take a couple of aspirin, and then I get right back in bed and see if I can get like another hour to sleep and then I wake up in a few weeks. Okay. Yeah, that works crazy well, especially works with Advil. If you take a couple of Advil and you have even like a half hour, preferably an hour extra to sleep, for some reason, Advil always makes me sleepy. It makes me fall asleep very easily, never figured out why. But yeah, you wake up an hour later and you are set. It's a great one because sleep is only real key to curing a hangover, they say. Yeah, well, time, well, that's usually what I rely on is time. And I pound a few Coca Colas in the morning, which is not good for me, but it works, right. Black aspirin, is that what they say? Yes. And then I don't make eye contact with anybody because they're all out to get me. That's how I make it through the day when I have a hangover. Sure. And again, we should say, please don't find any of this funny, entertaining or amusing if you're 21 years or older. And if you are 21 years or older, please find it amusing. Responsibly. Right. We should talk about some of these over the counter, like, anti hangover pills that you can buy. You heard of these? Yeah. Like Chasers. Yeah. They're basically multivitamins. And here's the deal. Well, some are activated carbon, which can work. True. But here's the deal. If you read on the package, it will say something like this. Drink a full twelve ounce glass of water before you start drinking and take a pill. And then after your second or third drink, drink another glass of water and take another pill and then do that again. Then before you go to bed, drink a glass of water with the pill and then wake up and drink a glass of water with a pill. Right. So you're basically taking a vitamin dalling, tons of water, which is and that's the key, is the water. Right. Yeah. You're hydrating yourself, so it's a bit of a ripoff. Right. But not necessarily because it is recommended that you do take a multivitamin. Not true. The next morning, but just take a multivitamin. Don't pay for some hangover cure. You know what else helps is to actually be cognizant and not a total drunk while you're drinking. Yes. If you drink glass for glass, water for alcohol, number one, it keeps you hydrated. But number two, it also paces your drinking so that your body has more time to process this alcohol. It's not just like, boom, boom, boom. I've gotten better at that. Have you? Oh, yeah, sure. If I have, like, a big night out, I try to be pretty aware of drinking a couple of glasses of water here and there, and I always will pound two or three glasses before I go to bed. Good for you, Chuck. That's the way to do it. All right. So there you have it. That's the hangover, right? Yeah. A couple of other things you can do beforehand is eat, obviously, alcohol in an empty stomach. It's going to get you there quicker, but it will get you sicker and make you feel worse. You love driving, so water, what else you say? Multivitamins drinking moderation, of course, is the key with everything. Watch what you're drinking. Red wine, bourbon. It's going to make you feel bad. Yes, they taste sugary sweet on your tongue, but it'll make you feel worse. Yes. I'm in trouble, though. I wish I could learn to drink fuck. I just don't dig it. Oh, fuck is so wonderful. It's nice. Yeah. I drink gin and tonics occasionally during the summertime month, but I can't drink this. Gin actually makes me crazy. I have a self imposed ban on gin. I won't drink it. I don't allow myself to drink it because it makes me nuts. And apparently I'm not the only one. In the 17th century, the UK actually banned, or I should say England banned, really gin. Because everybody is so nuts. So gin was banned in England for a little while because people went like I did. Sure, different alcohols do that. Tequila is notorious for making people violent and act out of sorts. I've never had a problem with tequila. Me neither. My buddy Scotty has a red wine thing. Completely personality shift when he drinks it. Really? But, yeah, he becomes a completely different person. That's so odd. You know Alexander the Great died from a red wine drinking competition. Really? One of his soldiers challenged him to it and they apparently drank, like 5 million gallons of peace and Alexander the Great one off and died. Oh, I bet the alcohol back then was rough too, man. Yeah, they loved their wine. These are the good old days. Well, if you want to learn absolutely every last detail there is to know about a hangover, you should read this fine, fine article by freelancer Lacey Perry. Called How Hangovers work. You can just type in hangover in the handy search bar. HowStuffWorks.com. Also check out our Kiva.org page. $2,500 and growing so far. Yeah. Very proud of you guys. You can help fund a loan for an entrepreneur in a developing country for as little as $25. And best part, you get it back. We have a team that's to be found at www.kiva.org teamstepynow. Right. If that's too hard, you can click on community and then search stuff you should know. And we've been posting a link at the bottom of every one of our blog posts, too. Yes, we've got close to 100 members and about $2,500 raised, and it's pretty cool. Let's do listener mail. Let's do listener mail. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this don't kill me. I'm just the enumerator. This is a good one. Hey, guys. Hope this finds you well. My name is Mark and I live in Fishkill, New York, which is an interesting town. I was listening to the Gross National Happiness podcast and you mentioned the census worker being killed. I thought I'd send an email. I was a Census Bureau worker in 2000. I was a carefree 19 year old. On summer break, my friends and I saw the ad in the paper and took the exam and became official enumerators, including a shiny plastic badge from the Treasury Department. Cool to boot, he says. So our task was to travel door to door and talk to the people who didn't return their survey. Some people got the short form, some got the long form and former. I remember the forms were assigned at random. Usually the long formers didn't mail them back in, and that's who they usually had to confront. It goes shake down, it's shaken down. People were downright mean when I knocked on their door. This is a good one. One man asked me to hold on for a second. He closed the door and within a few minutes I heard the garage door open and he drove out and waved goodbye. Such a jerky move. One woman answered the door with a baby in her arms, shouting something at me. I heard dogs barking, and the next thing I knew, she had let the dogs loose on us. And I was running safely back to the safety of my Buick Regal. I quickly learned my lesson. And when someone would open the door and give me the skinny on their neighbors who didn't mail their forms back in, I was happy. And I was even happier when it was a grandma who would offer me a cold drink because the old folks, they're just like, come on in. Let's talk for a while. So lonely. Exactly. I did not know, however, that enumerators were killed. I must have missed that part of the training. Most of the ranks would be anti government. They would say I was the man told to get off their property and all the expeditions that go with it. It's not easy being in a numerator. So give them a shout out. So shout out to all you Enumerators out there. Okay. And that's pretty much it. He said. I thought I'd chime in. Actually, I was chiming in this morning in the car, and then realized that I was alone. Mark so lonely. Mark, the former enumerator, is a funny guy, and he says, by the way, podcast suggestion, how Hippie Rob works. That's a good one. That would be a great one. Yeah, that would be audio. I'm still trying to track them down. Sure. Yeah. So thanks, Mark, and good luck if you enumerate in the future and all you Enumerators out there counting heads. I'm sorry. I didn't know it was so rough on you. And let's see if you're in a numerator or a denominator or you know the current whereabouts of Hippie Rob. Put it in an email to Stuff podcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's House stuff works. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show."
https://podcasts.howstuf…sysk-patents.mp3	How Patents Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-patents-work	What was originally designed to encourage innovation by rewarding the people who create technological advances, the U.S. patent system has become a big mess. Wade into this surprisingly interesting mire to learn how to save this important institution.	What was originally designed to encourage innovation by rewarding the people who create technological advances, the U.S. patent system has become a big mess. Wade into this surprisingly interesting mire to learn how to save this important institution.	Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:47:42 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=14, tm_min=47, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=315, tm_isdst=0)	58224707	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 this is stuff you should know. There's jerry, too, by the way. Away. Hi, Jerry. Who's ready for January? Me. Yeah. 2015. You're ready for a new year? I'm ready for this year to be done, yeah. I think it's been kind of a cool year. No, it's been fun. I'm just tired. I feel I'd be much more rested in 2015. It's October. We got a little ways to go. I know. This is my favorite month, too. It's kind of a drag. I'm so tired. You hippie. You're going to start saying far out next, aren't you? It is far out. So, Chuck yes? I'm very curious. Do you have any patents to your name? No, man, I don't have an inventive mind. I don't, either. My brother does, and he's had some good ideas that have later been made into inventions. Why didn't he patent them? I don't know, man. Every time I see a new one, I sent it to him and say, hey, I remember when you had this idea. Twelve years ago, Scott. Yeah. What are you doing? I know. Well, he's got a bunch of pinball tables, so he's doing all right. Yeah. He doesn't own the patent on them, though. No, but he could. You know why? Because it's America. That's right. So it turns out, Chuck, and doing a little bit of research, that there's mention of patents and patent protection in the Constitution. Yeah, dude, not even the Bill of Rights. Freedom of speech isn't even mentioned in the Constitution. It's in the Bill of Rights. But patent protection is in the Constitution. Article One, Section Eight, clause Eight, which is known as the Intellectual Property Clause, and it says, quote, congress shall have the power ellipse to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. And since this is the late 18th century, a lot of that stuff is just like randomly capitalized. Like a 6th grader wrote it or something. Right. My apologies to all of you 6th grade listeners out there who know your capitalization. We love proper now. So it's in the Constitution. Like, if you invent something that's new and novel and cool, we think you should have some sort of government sanctioned monopoly over that, at least for a limited amount of time. You know why? Why? Because very early on, the United States said, we want to encourage inventiveness and forward thinking and entrepreneurship and great ideas. They were on board pretty early, even though it's sort of a mess these days, which we'll talk about, I guess, in the end. Oh, yeah, we will. Yeah. But yeah, the whole purpose of a patent system, and apparently it's one of the hallmarks of the modern society, I guess. They have a patent office. It says, we value innovation, we value technological progress, artistic progress. Sure. And we're going to show a commitment to that by basically saying, again, I guess the best way to put it is a monopoly on your invention for a limited amount of time. And it harkens back. Apparently, the first patent was issued in 1449 in jolly old England by King Henry VI, who gave it to a guy who didn't even have a last name. Well, yeah, sure of Utnom is not a last name. That's where you're from. Yeah, but that's served. It sounds like I'm Josh of Toledo. I'm just saying this is medieval. It's not the 16th century. No, it's not. No. So John of Utenum got a patent from King Henry VI for stained glass manufacturing. Yeah. Back then, patents in England, it was a little bit different. It was more like, hey, we want to protect the Crown in our country and our good friends and our good friends of the Crown, and make sure that if they have an idea that we can go after anyone else in any other country, even if it's something like stained glass, that's already clearly being done in places like Italy. Right. It was basically like, you now officially are the only person who can make stained glass. It was a bit of a sham. Yeah. They would give out patents not just on an item or an idea or an invention, but like a whole industry. So, like, somebody held a patent on the publishing industry for a while and apparently it got out of hand because it was just royal prerogative left and right. Yeah. It didn't last that long, though. By the 1624, they started to pass statutes and laws to try and curb that abuse of power anyway they could and make it a little more like the patent system that we know and support today. Yeah. They were like, the Crown can't give out patents unless it's for a new invention. So yeah, that is very similar to what we have today. So, right off the bat, America is like new country, we're setting up a patent office and the first person to get a patent in the United States was one Samuel Hopkins. Hopkins is the last name. Not Samuel of Pittsburgh? Samuel Hopkins, Pittsburgh, Vermont. That is, yeah. He got a patent for an improvement in the making of potash. Is it potash or potash? I don't know. I said it eight different ways in my head earlier. Well, one of those is right. Yes. And so he held the first patent, actually, and the person that reviewed his patent was a man named Thomas Jefferson. Yeah. He was big on innovation, as was Lincoln. And Lincoln is the only president to actually hold a patent. He got a boat stuck one time in a river and said, hey, that'd be neat if we could find a way to not get boats stuck. Right. So he devised a system to unstick boats when they were stuck on a sandbar for the river was too shallow or something. Yeah. By inflating some buoys, they just basically let you float over and they're like, president Lincoln, that's a great idea. Here's your patent. Well, he was a congressman at the time, but yeah, he's the only president to hold a patent. And then Jefferson handled the application process for a while before passing it off to other cabinet members. And then eventually they're like, you know what? This is all out of hand. We need to establish our own patent office and so on. Yes. I think they grossly underestimated the number of patent applications they were going to receive. People got their invention on. Yeah. The first patent that Samuel Hopkins received. Jefferson examined. He signed it. He gave it to the Secretary of Ore, who signed it, who then passed it under the Attorney General, who signed it, and then President George Washington signed it. So that wasn't a sustainable process. And then, Chuck, there's, like, tons of millions of patents, I think. Like 5.7 million patents. Tons of millions. Yeah, 5.7 is a ton. Yeah, that is anyway, there was this notable one that I think is kind of hilarious. Mark Twain. A beloved American humorist, I'm sure. Who doesn't like Mark Twain? Man? There's a lot of Twain haters. Well, he invented the elastic bra strap. Oh, really? Yeah. I wonder why. He invented an improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments, which he suggested could be used for pantaloons or vests or other garments. Sure. But basically, if you look at it, you're like, that's a bra strap. Yeah. I bet the old sockgarter benefited from that idea. I would guess so. And then other things. I wonder. Yeah. He also held two other patents. One for witty bancher, a game. He invented a game to help players remember important historical dates. Okay. I don't think he ever saw a dime on that one. I'm sure. Yeah. And then a self pacing scrapbook, which wouldn't become huge until the 90s. Yeah. Self pacing means I don't know. It's already sticky. Yeah, like the photo albums. You peel back the plastic and that sheet underneath is sticky. Uses static electricity. No, it's actually sticky, too, isn't it? I think it's static sticky. I think it's sticky. I haven't looked at a photo op in a while. Well, I'll have to go to, I don't know, the Hallmark store and check them out. Let's do it while we were going. Anyway, I know the new Christmas ornaments are out. So, Chuck, let's talk patents, man. Yeah. I had this idea because I'm a big fan of Shark Tank, the TV show, and there's a lot of patent talk, and I was watching it the other day, and they said, well, we have the utility patent, but not the design patent. And I was like, I got to look this stuff up, see what all that means. Well, we'll get to that in a second. But let's start out and we'll probably do shows on maybe copyright and trademark at some point. Maybe they're worth mentioning here, though. Yeah. Copyright. Those are all forms of intellectual protecting your intellectual property. And copyright is the easiest and most broad and wide reaching and longest lasting form. Right. Because you can just write something and it's yours automatically in the United States, at least. Yeah. And it lasts for your lifetime plus 70 years. Not bad. No. And literally, Chuck, if you write a short little story right. When you finish, you can write C, put a circle around it, Chuck Bryant 2014. And you have your official copyright. That's right. That's it. Legally, you're done just because you created a work of authorship. Yup. And that's pretty great. If you're a company and you have a copyright as a company, it lasts up to 120 years depending on whether they publish it or not. Right? Yes. But eventually it does run out, and then it can be shared and other people can make money off of it. Like, for example, old HP lovecraft stories. Like you or I could take a bunch of lovecraft stories so we wrote them, type them, put them together and publish them, and sell those books. Really? Yes. Like a collection that you don't have to get any kind of permission for that. No, it's in the public domain at that point. It belongs to the world. That's right. Well, we read every Halloween. We have to read something from the public domain. I know. Because it's really expensive to do otherwise. It is. Trademarks are a little bit different. They're a lot more narrow in what they protect, and they protect designs and phrases that businesses use. Or maybe trade secrets, like a formula for a soda. Those are different. That's its own thing. Yeah. But that's still a trademark. Is it? Yeah. I thought it was separate from a trademark. I don't think so. With a trade trade it says it's a trademark trade secret. Well, with a trade secret, it can be beneficial to keep something under wraps as a trade secret, because if you have something that you patent, you're protected for 20 years in the United States, your patent is but part of the patent process, as we'll talk about, is to publish it. You make every detail of it public so that after 20 years, when your patent runs out, anybody can go and look at your patent and recreate it and not give you a sense for it. If it's a trade secret, as long as no one discovers a secret formula for coke by accident or by being this American Life and rooting it out. Right. Yes. So coke could sue this American Life for damages, but once it's out in the public, it's no longer a trade secret, and other people can use it legally. The other way you can do it is to take coke and reverse engineer it and come up with the formula successfully. That way that's not protected by trade secrets. Right. Bank defused that. Well, though, they were kind of like great, good luck. Yeah. Supposedly they keep it in a bank vault here in Atlanta. Oh, really? Yeah. Isn't that cute? Sure. And then the last one is a service mark, which is like a trademark for a company that provides services rather than products. So, like, if you're a plumber, you might have SM next to your logo. Right. Those are the different types of intellectual property protections afforded in the United States truck. But the final one and the one we're discussing, that link is the patent, and that is a copyright for an invention. And the US. Patent law defines that as, quote, any new and useful process, machine, manufacturer or composition of matter, or any new idea and useful improvement thereof, and quote well, we'll get into all that, but the wording there is sufficiently vague and specific. Because when you're talking about inventions, it's got to be a little bit vague. Yeah. Because you don't have it all worked out, maybe. No, because with the copyright, for example, what you wrote down is protected. Right. The sentence structure, the paragraphs you use, the wording you use that's protected the thoughts that it's getting across about the little puppy who got lost and came back home and everything ended really well. The idea of a puppy getting lost can't be copyrighted with a patent. It's the reverse. Like the actual invention. Like the platform shoe with the goldfish tank and the heel that you invented. Right. Yeah. You can't defend that actual tangible shoe, but the idea, the design of that shoe, that's what a patent protects. Yeah. And you can't steal it gets a little tricky with things like writing or like movie ideas. You can't steal someone's idea. Like, there could be two movies about lost puppies, but if you could somehow prove that you met someone in a meeting and pitched him this idea for the lost puppy, and then six months later they came out with a script for lost puppy, you might have a case that they I don't know, man. It happens all the time. Okay, but think about Deep Impact in Armageddon. Let's go back to that. Well, no, I know. That's what I'm saying. You can have two movies. There are lawsuits every day filed in Hollywood over stolen intellectual ideas. But whether or not it's successful is whether or not you can make your case. It depends upon each one. That's a good point. So the first thing, if you want to patent an invention, is that you have to well, it has to be sufficiently novel is what they say. It can be similar to other things, but it has to be different enough to something that's already patented or been published in a publication to grant the patent. Yeah, because that's a really key point. Even if you invented something, right. Let's say you wrote about your platform with the goldfish tank and the hill, right. If you wrote about it and don't file a patent application if it was published yes. Within a year. You can't file a patent after that. Yeah. That's why the first thing you need to do is file the patent. Right. Like no one invents something and writes all about it in the Washington Post for a year and it says, maybe I should patent that. Exactly. So that's your first step. Right. That's what makes it novel. It's new. It's a different idea. And like you said, you can be taking different things that already exist, but putting them together in a new way that people hadn't thought of or that wasn't what's called obvious. So the invention also has to be non obvious. Yeah. And that's what most inventions these days are, improvements on things that already exist. Like there are new inventions, but a lot of it like the great example they use in 1977 when Jerome Limelson invented or patented the idea of the Camcorder. It was so absurd at the time. People were like, you can't record video and sound at the same time. Right. Just denied. Yeah, that's just silly. Get out of here. And he said, Actually, no, that's kind of a good idea, and it's super easy to do because all I have to do is tape the taper quarter to this camera, which is probably what he did. And he was able to get the Camcorder patented, of course. And now if you go to the patent office and do some research, there are probably thousands of patents that have to do with the Camcorder. Got you. Each individual little piece that someone innovates they can patent. Right. Like night vision on it or a light attached to it. Right, exactly. But you couldn't say, I'm going to patent a Camcorder. This other guy's Camcorder ID, but it'll be green. Right. Because that's an obvious change. Yeah. Or this article gives the example of, like, a toaster. Like you couldn't patent a toaster that has an extra two slots for bread, because anybody could think of that. Exactly. That's obvious. It's just a bigger toaster. And then there's also useful. Useful is kind of the last of the triumvirate for what makes a patentable item or invention, and it has to be something that works. So, like, the example given in this article is like, you couldn't patent a random configuration of gears, right. Because it doesn't do anything, it doesn't work, it's not useful. But if those gears transported as a new way of transporting something from one place to another. More efficiently maybe than you could patentable. And then. In the same vein. Something that apparently the patent office interprets. Something that can be used strictly for immoral purposes. That they consider that nonuseful. Because at the end of the day. The patent office is supposed to be doing this for the benefit of society. So I guess they feel that they also can morally interpret things as well. Yeah. What is that? Like, you can't patent, like, a whisky still in your bedroom? No, I think it'd be more harmful than that. Like maybe a doomsday laser that only works on children who haven't done anything to anybody. But the doomsday laser for bad kids is great. You see my point? Patentable. That was a great example, if you ask me. And then, similarly, your device has to be able to be not just work. Like yes. You could say, well, this random configuration of gears will work. Why can't I patent it? Because it's not useful. In the same vein, you can't patent, like, a time machine. Again, the example they give this article is lousy with great examples. Yeah, we tried, actually, to get our way back. Machine patented. Basic guys. That's real cute. They're like this basically just sound design. Yeah. Thanks for wasting your time. We could probably trademark it, though. Although I'm sure the good people who made Rocky and Bullwinkle would sue her. Sue us. Yeah. Sue ourselves. The patent in the United States, and I apologize that this is not patents all around the world. But we don't have, like, 80 hours. No, because you can research each country again. Any modern developed country typically has a patent system. Yeah. And good advice. If you have something that you think could be used internationally, you need to get patents and all the countries you fear might rip it off. Right. Because your patent that you've received in the United States protects you in the United States. That's it not Canada, not Japan, not Mexico, not China, not anywhere for 20 years. Right. These days. That's how long your patent will last. That's right, Chuck. It used to be 17, and I can't remember when they changed it, but it wasn't too terribly long ago. Within the last couple of decades, I think. Yeah. And actually well, we'll go over the types of the patent real quick, too, because one of those, the design patent is only for 14 years. Unless that's changed. Okay. Design patent. You'll hear that on Shark Tank all the time. That is something like if you designed a new chair, like an Ikea chair, that would be design patented. You can't go and rip off that chair. But the idea of a chair itself isn't patentable, it's just this configuration of the chair concept. Right. Or Steve Madden will design a shoe, and Steve Madden can put a design patent on that shoe even though it's a shoe. You can even patent the sole of a shoe if it's some innovative new tread or for, like, a tire that channels water away or something like that. Exactly. Yeah. I don't think those are design patents, though. I think that would be a utility patent. But design patents are enforced for 14 years. Utility patent. There are five categories there. It can be a process, a machine, a manufacturer, a composition of matter, or an improvement on an existing idea. And it might fall into certain categories, like more than one, but it'll only be patented for one of those categories. But it's covered. Okay. And that lasts for 20 years. So basically, the coffee maker that also makes an egg and toast at the same time, that would have gotten a utility patent, right? Yeah. Does that exist? Yeah. Nice. Emily said the best egg she ever had was at a cafe in Utah where they cooked them using what you used to heat the milk that sprays out the steam. They were steam cooked? Weird. Yeah. Like, to make an espresso, they would put the raw egg, like as if you would make an espresso and cook the eggs with that steam. I've never heard of that. I never heard that either. And then there's the super weird plant patent. And that is granted for any asexually or sexually reproducible plant or flower that is novel and non obvious. Yeah, that's kind of a big one, because there was and in Australia, this is the way it is. But in the US. It was up in the air for a little bit that people were worried that naturally occurring genetic sequences could be patented. So where basically, some company could be like, hey, we now own your genes, and you can't do anything with them, even to save your own life unless you pay us. In Australia, one of the federal courts said, yeah, we're totally down with that. Which is crazy. In the United States, I think in 2014, the Supreme Court said, no, we're not doing that. If you can figure out how to manipulate genes to make them do something that doesn't naturally occur, knock yourself out. Totally patent that. Like, for example, Monsanto seeds that prevent themselves from receding or creating more seeds. Yeah. Or some new strain of tree that's hearty against some kind of insect. Sure, you can patent that. Right. But you can't just go out and patent an oak tree. No. Or a human gene. No. You can in Australia, which you should not be allowed to do. But in the US. You can't do that. And that was a big load off of, I think, a lot of people's minds, including mine. Well, that's good. I'm glad you can sleep tonight. I'm feeling great. Plant patents are good for 20 years as well. So I don't know why design patents are only 14, but maybe they just want to encourage more design. No. Nobody values design like they should. That's the problem, as far as we mentioned, Jerome Lemmelson. And as far as inventors go, he ranks second to Thomas Edison. A number of patents in US. History. Not necessarily number of inventions, though, a lot of people would point out. Yeah, he's a pretty controversial guy. Some people see him as a philanthropic genius. I'm talking about Edison. I was talking about Limalson. Yeah, he's controversial himself, too. Yeah. Because he has accused a lot of people of creating what's called submarine patents, which are basically a patent that you sit on and knowing that there's something just like that being developed, and you don't let anyone know, and you just hope it doesn't get their attention. And then later on, when it's huge, you come out and say, hey, you owe me a ton of money because I have this 17 year old patent. Yeah. Now, this Lemilson is basically what you're talking about is a form of patent trolling. That's right. And he does definitely stand accused of that. Or we should say his foundation stands accused of that. But Samuel Lemon was incontrovertibly a genius inventor who definitely did come up with a lot of really great ideas that we all use. Right. Things like the Camcorder, things like barcode scanning, basically, the modern world. A lot of it came out of Lemmleson's head. Jerry Lemelson's head. Right. But you are right. His foundation has racked up, like, a billion dollars in licensing fees and court awards from these kind of lawsuits and litigations until they ran up against one where it was like, I think, a bar code scanning case. A couple of them got put together, and then they were added onto, like, seven others. And the judge in the case found that basically, even though there isn't necessarily statute of limitations, a reasonable statute of limitations had run out on the time between when barcode scanners came out and the time they filed the lawsuit. Right. And they used the term submarine patents in this article and said, times basically run out. These things belong to the world now. Right. And sorry, Lamblesson Foundation, you're not going to get this money. Interesting. Yeah. There was something passed in 1995 called Trips Agreement. Agreement on Trade related Aspects of Intellectual Property rights. And that was supposed to kind of curb submarine patents, but they'll still pop up every now and then. I think TiVo reared their head. I think I saw something about that. I don't know the details, though, with the submarine patent saying, hey, everyone, with the comcast DVR, we actually invented that whole technology. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure how that all panned out, though. I didn't get to look into it any further, but it's interesting. Well, let's keep at it. But we'll start again right after these messages. Okay. So, Chuck yeah. You want to talk about Edison? Yeah. I said Jerome Lambolson was number two with 557 patents held in the US. But Edison eclipses that with 1093 patents, and he had a set up in Menlo Park, New Jersey, that was just like the idea factory, basically, which, ironically, is unrelated to the Menlo Park US. Patent and Trade Office out in California. Oh, really? Yeah, it's just coincidentally named, from what I understand. Interesting. I never drew that connection. When he set up the Menlo Park, he hired a bunch of really bright people and said, let's come up with one small invention every ten days, one major invention every six months, and I'll put my name on all of them. Exactly. And if your hackles are raised right now, go back and listen to our Nikola Tesla episode, which is a good one. Edison was a smart guy in many ways. He was quite a good promoter, like the light bulb he's frequently credited with inventing the light bulb. A lot of purists will point out, like, no, he didn't really invent the light bulb. He took a lot of other innovations that were incandescent light related and he figured out how to put them together into what we understand now is the light bulb. Well, yeah, but that's an invention. Yeah, it is. He went and got the patent and now everybody says Edison invented the light bulb. And I like that too, because that's the kind of the whole point of patents, as this stuff is available to the public to look up. And that was one of the original reasons they made it public, is so people could look up other people's ideas and build upon that. Right. That's one mark in favor of patent offices in the patent system in general, is that it's a way to disseminate scientific information yeah. And encourage growth and inventiveness. Right. And the way it does that is by offering an incentive for inventors to invent, because that can be a very long, arduous, heartbreaking experience inventing. And if you're going to do that and go to all the work of research and development, and then right when you come up with it, somebody can just come along and mass produce it, then you're not going to have any incentive to invent anything. You're just going to go off and work on a road crew or something instead, because it's probably a lot more satisfying at the end of the day. Yeah. And you can't just go to the government and say, hey, you need to look into this guy. They stole my idea that I have patented. The government will be like, I don't care. Well, they may care. It's a little callous, but they say, that's not our job. You can go and take someone to court if you want to challenge this, but there is no government agency that patrols the patents infringement. No. It's up to the patent holder to monitor and police their own patents, which they are big on. So let's talk about the courts. A little bit like 20 years ago, if you held a patent and you took someone to court for infringement, the courts typically sided with the infringer. There was, I guess, kind of either a thought that you are stifling innovation if you're just kind of suing people over patent infringement, or else they just didn't view patents like they do today. Nowadays. It's going to. The other extreme where the courts rule in favor of the patent holders so frequently that a cottage industry of what are known as patent trolls sprang up where you have groups of people or companies or individuals who just go around either applying for patents that are really abstract and really shouldn't have been approved. Yeah, very vaguely written. Right. And they're typically software related too, because I think there's a sentiment that the US Patent Office, it doesn't fully grasp software and the Internet and it and that kind of stuff. Yeah. So you either go and file for and get a patent on something really overly broad and vague, or you buy a bunch of other people's patents and you just start for the whole purpose of going to people and saying, you're infringing on these patents that I now own. Give me some money, I'm going to take you to court. It's a business unto itself. It is. The problem is because the courts move so far in favor of patent holders that people would settle out of court to avoid litigation. And so as a result, this whole cottage industry came up. And then recently there's been some steps taken to kind of reform that a little bit. There was something called the Innovation Act. The Innovation Act passed. The House was sent to the Senate. It was in the Senate Judiciary Committee. And then Senator Patrick Lahey killed it. And the tech community, who's really big into patent reform, accused him of being in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies. That would never happen in this country, who are really big into preserving the status quo. Right. And if you really look at what's going on with patent reform today in this argument, Chuck, you've got the pharmaceutical companies versus the tech industry. Yeah, tech industry is like things are moving so fast and there's so many ideas coming out that we can't focus on patent infringement. It shouldn't be as big of a deal because it's stifling innovation. There are people here that are scaring people from licensing computer software because this guy says that he has a patent that says you could put software onto a CD Rom and sell it. Right. That's the kind of patent roll thing. On the other side, the pharmaceutical companies say, hey man, we make tons of money licensing our patents. And so if people are afraid of infringing on patents because they can get sued, then our investments, our portfolio patents are going to be protected. So there's these huge behemoth lobbies hammering it out right now in the halls of Congress, and it seems like the Supreme Court and the federal government are siding on the tech side. Yeah. You sent that great article from Forbes about just the problems with the modern patent system. And that was one of the great points. I can't remember who wrote the article. The guy who found a priceline. Jaywalker oh, really? Yeah, he said that people are so scared companies are these days of infringing on patents, because if you can prove that you knew about this patent, then you could be in big trouble. Right. So they're not even looking, which is the original idea of making these things published is, like I said earlier, so people would go and look up how someone did something. Maybe I can improve upon that. Right. So people aren't even looking now because they're afraid that it will be traced back and be like, no, we know that you saw this this patent polled three years ago. Yeah. Because the penalties for accidental infringement and willful infringement are vastly different. Yeah. It's a big problem. Well, the jaywalker suggests that you kind of cut the courts out and maybe make it easier to license things. So just create some big national exchange where somebody can go and easily give somebody some money or temporarily license whatever they need. He cites some, I think, a forest research study that suggests 95% of the 5.7 million patents that the US. Has granted 2.1 active patents okay. Yeah. 95% go unused and unlicensed. And of those, approximately half a million are considered to be, like, high quality patents. Yeah. A lot of them are from university research. And they just sit there. Yeah. And so protected. The same study found that $1 trillion of revenue is not generated each year in the United States because of this unused innovation that's just sitting there in this big pot. Yeah. A big guarded vault with a pot in it of unused ideas. Yeah. Which definitely goes against the spirit of the original idea. For sure. Yeah. Which means the system is broken. It is broke. The other way that it's broken, too, is the enormous backlog that's going on at the Patent and Trade Office. Oh. Just getting it reviewed. Yeah. So if you file a patent and we're going to talk about this in a minute, but if you file a patent, Chuck, and they reject it, that is not the end of the story. No. You can keep coming back and back and back and back. In fact, you usually will get rejected on the first try for one reason or another. Right. But every time you come back, you add to the PTO's already big backlog. Right. Yeah, of course. And so apparently there's another study that Ours technica wrote about or carried out that found that there was a huge decrease in the backlog under the Obama administration, but they suspect that it was because the PTO lowered their standards and issued patents for a lot of shoddy patents right. Just to get people to go away to clear the backlog. Because that's the best way to get rid of somebody who keeps refiling their patent is to just grain on the patent and get them out of your hair. Well, they're saying, yeah, that decreased the backlog, but it led to a lot of shoddy patents, which in turn led to the patent troll industry. Yeah, and a lot more burden on the courts to suss all this stuff out later. Exactly. The problem is the Patent Office has an incentive to keep letting people file and file again because they make money every time they generate revenue from that. Yeah. Cost I mean, the actual patent itself will cost you $500 or so that you have to upkeep every year and pay a little bit more in maintenance fees. Yes. Well, it depends. Have you seen the fee schedule? Yes. There's like 30 or 40 different things you could pay fees for. Well, yeah, it all depends on how detailed your patent is and what you're trying to get through. All right, well, let's talk about what you can and can patent. We talked a little bit about it. You cannot patent something that exists in the natural world like a discovery. Like, they give another great example, einstein's Law of relativity. He can't copyright that or patent it. Right. I mean, it's a thing. He might have named it and figured it out, but it occurred long before Einstein was around just in the solar system. It belongs to the universe. It belongs to the universe. Yeah. It's a good way of saying it. You can patent, like, an industrial process, like we said, computer programs. You can. But it gets a little dicey. And if you have something that you think might be patentable or not, the first step you probably should is like hire either an agent or an attorney. An agent or a patent attorney. Yes. And a lot of people do. And this is if you're serious about this stuff, like you really think you're onto something, this is something you do not just say you got this idea for a thing. You're not going to want to spend thousands and thousands of dollars unless you really think you're onto something. Right. So the first step you want to talk about the steps of patenting something? Yeah, I guess so. The first step you can do is to do a search yourself. I think Google even has a search function to search patents in the United States easily. But if not, you can definitely go to the US. Patent Office site and search you some keywords to kind of generally describe what your invention is to just see off the bat if there's already something out there that's patented. And there probably is. Yeah. It's very rare to have a truly, truly unique idea these days. But if you have something and you're like the guy who made the thermonuclear fusion reactor in his garage is 16 year old. Right. If he wanted to patent that, there's probably a pretty good likelihood that he could get that patent and then it's going to be worth a ton of money. So we're going to take that kid and run him through the patent process because it's going to pay off for him in the end despite the enormous amount of money that he's going to have to spend upfront just to get the patent protection in the United States. Right. So he searched the database. Let's say he went to the office in person because that's what kind of kid he is. And he looked through the files and he found you know what, I think I'm on to something. I don't see anything else in here that's super. Like it I feel like it's novel and it's innovative and it's not obvious, but there's a lot of money on the line here. So I'm going to hire a patent lawyer who patent agents aren't attorneys. They function similarly. But an attorney obviously has a little more power under their belts. Well, they have a technical degree typically and a law degree agent just knows about the patents. They don't have the law degree, they have the technical expertise because you have to be able to look at the actual invention and understand how it works or if somebody's just trying to pass off something dumb. Like you're not a divorce attorney and a patent attorney. Right. You might be, but probably not sure. There's probably one out there. So a patent lawyer will review everything and say, yeah, I think you are onto something here with your garage nuclear fusion reactor kid. You're a heck of an inventor and I think we can take this right through the roof. So who's this guy? The kid stays in the picture, dude. He's Lionel Huts. Who's the guy? The producer. Legendary producer. Yeah. Robert Evans. That's who this attorney is. Yeah. Okay. We're getting this nailed, man. Like we're really filling it out with great detail. Although Lionel Hutz, or I'm sorry, Robert Evans may say there is a patent here, don't waste your time. Yeah. It's up to you. But it's really similar in these ways. Or maybe, hey, this thing is super similar, but this actual process within your patent that you're applying for is super unique. So maybe you should just focus on that. Right. And then you can license it to the person who's already got the patent. Exactly. Yeah. And then that's the point where the kids is, all right, I want to move forward on this smaller part or the original patent and I want to fill out my application like anything else. That's the first step is you have to fill out that application and send it in yes. With some money. With some money. Depending on who I have to pay that upfront. Right. It's for the application fee. Yeah. And then after at that moment, once you file your application fee, your patent starts. So that 20 year protection. That doesn't kick in when your patent is granted. Like it kicks in from the date you filed your application so you can go out and put patent pending on your thermonuclear fusion reactor and start selling it to people that's right in your application. You kind of have to spell it all out for them. You can't just throw your idea in there and say you guys do the research and see if there's anything else out there. Right. You have to list any kind of potential roadblocks than prior art that may be similar for them to review. Yes. You have to briefly summarize your invention. You have to give a description of what they call the preferred embodiment which means how are you going to use this thing. Basically. Yeah. Or like what shape is it supposed to take? How do the components fit in together? Right. And then your claims. This is the most important part and this is what you're actually going to be arguing about in court if you have to go that route is your claim and that is the actual legal description of your invention. Right. And if your claim is very well written, if you spring for a great lawyer, Robert Evans, this claim is going to be very well written, very concise, very descriptive. But also sufficiently vague. Sure. Because when you do take somebody to court and you say this guy has totally ripped me off. Here's my patent, here's the description of what my thing does. Now look at what this guy's doing. It's the exact same thing that my patent lawyer described years ago when I filed my patent application. So the claim is extremely important. I mean it's as important as getting the patent itself. Yeah totally. How much you're going to pay that attorney? All depends of course on how many hours they spend. But they put in this article between 5000 and $20,000. Yeah I saw more than that. I'm sure it can get up to as much as I'm sure corporations pay these people a lot of money. Yeah well the patent office actually has a sliding scale of fee schedules. So like if you are a micro entity I think which is like just probably one guy, you're an inventor you're going to pay the least. If you're a corporation you're going to pay the most. And that's for the patent fees not the attorneys fees. Right. They don't care about those. No but if you're a corporation and you have a lot of like a large patent portfolio and you have an R Amp D company you have a patent attorney, a stable of patent attorney who are working on that anyway. Yeah they have their own office in your building. But I saw for in a 2005 article I saw a study had found that for a small size business so probably the middle slot of the schedule fee it would cost about $310,000 to get and maintain patents in ten industrialized countries. Wow. So I mean like if you've got a thermonuclear fusion reactor and it works it's going to totally be worth that. You want to patent it everywhere. You can possibly do that because you're going to change the world with it. Yeah. Probably as many sub patents as you can create. Sure, if you are kind of shaky on your idea or you don't think it's going to end up paying off that much right. Then who knows? Maybe a highfalutin patent attorney isn't the way to go, but maybe you go the route of Inventors help group. Right. Like, there's actually one called Invent Help, and some of those things are scams. I looked up invent help. It appears to be totally legitimate. It's got an A minus rating on the Better Business Bureau. What do they do? Have you ever watched, like, daytime television? They're like inventors. Do you want to help get your invention to market? Sure, they do every step of the way. Like, you submit your invention. I think they help you get it patented, got you to help you market it. They may set up a website to sell it on TV. Yes, they get a piece of the revenue down the street, down the line. Or they may also require fees along the way. Right. But some of them are kind of scammy. Apparently invent help is not. And then another good resource for you if you are an inventor of limited means, would probably be to go to the Lemmelson Foundation. That was established by the inventor Jerome Lemmelson, who spent most of his career suing companies that were using his patented stuff. I think it's called lemelsonfoundationorg. They have a bunch of programs to help inventors, especially young inventors. It's a good place to start, I would think. All right, we're going to finish up on how to finish up the patent process and a few more critiques right after this. All right, so this kid has turned his idea into the patent office. Like we said earlier, it has a pretty good chance of getting rejected on the first pass, and they will tell you exactly why. And then it's up to you whether or not you want to redo it or just bail on it altogether. Or like I said, redo it and resubmit it and see how your luck runs. Right. And the reasons for rejection can be myriad. Like literally 30,000 different reasons. Yeah. So it can be something from the patent office saying, like, we think that this is way too close to another already patented invention. We don't think it's necessarily an improvement. It's not useful. These are the very high level reasons they can be rejected. If that happens, then you might want to go back to the drawing board. But more frequently, I think it's like we think the wording in your claim is a little too vague. We don't quite understand the description. Can you make these changes to this paragraph? Your drawing is missing a label. The patent is supposed to be flawless, well written. Like, if you hire a patent attorney, they're going to hire an artist to do the drawing that's submitted to the patent office. Yeah. So it's really supposed to be professional and well done. And so for any minute technical detail, they can reject it, but then they'll also explain why. And then you can just make the change and refile. Right. If it's something that's just kind of open to interpretation. If you have a patent attorney, your patent attorney can be like, let's negotiate this point and hopefully get the whole thing passed through. I wonder if you have to go back to the back of the line or if you have a new phone number you can call. I don't know, man. That's the key, isn't it? You get that secret phone number to the person who actually picks up the first time and you can be like, please help me. Yeah. And I think one thing we did mention, it gets really dicey if you work for a company and you have an invention as an employee of that company. There have been countless hinky situations. I remember the one they made the movie about the guy who invented the delayed windshield wiper. Is that a documentary that's out on Netflix? There probably is, but I think what's his face oh, I know, you're talking to the guy from as Good as It Gets. Greg Canar. Canar yeah. I didn't see the movie, though, but I think that was a case of someone who works for work for a company, or maybe he didn't work for a company. Maybe he just presented it to car companies and he thinks they ripped them off. But if you work for a company, you might get the patent, but the company might still own the product or the process that you invented. Yes. Because you did it as their employee under their purview, but you might still get a personal patent for it, but maybe you might not benefit like you would as a private person. No. And basically, if you're an inventor, good luck getting a contract with a corporation in the United States where you don't automatically sign over every bit of your invention to that company. Sure. Or if you create anything creative, you probably have a work for hire contract where all of your work that you write, draw, or design, or compose automatically belongs to the company. So the ironic thing is that you are technically the creator of that work or that invention, but if you go and republish it, like on your own personal website, you're infringing on this copyright right, that your company owns and your company can sue you to get you to stop or to do whatever. Yeah. And that's a big critique of the patent system, too, is that there's not a lot of the Patent and Trade Office can do about it, but just the way the system works right now. Corporations have all of the power as far as patents go. Yeah, it's such a tough thing. You hear there are just countless stories from history of so and so invented this thing that we all use, but they never made a penny off of it because they did it for IBM. Or like the guys who invented Superman, they were paid like 150 or $300 by DC and basically told, thanks a lot. Yeah. And over the years, DC made tens and tens and hundreds of millions of dollars off of Superman. These guys were like, this isn't right. And finally, after there was enough outcry, they were granted, like, some back revenue. They got a cape. Do you remember our Christmas extravaganza from last year? The guy who composed Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer works for Montgomery Ward and hit on hard times, and the president of Montgomery Ward granted him the copyright to Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. That doesn't happen. Yeah. And that's a copyright, not a patent or an invention. I see both sides a little bit. I always think that corporations are the ones taking advantage, but if you work for IBM and they have given you the resources and paid you money to do this, then that's quit your job and go and vent something on your own, then sure, yeah. So I kind of see both sides. Yeah. But generally, I think corporations probably sticking it to the man. So speaking of corporations sticking it to the man or humanity in general, is the pharmaceutical industry again, so I said that they're very happy with the status quo. And one of the great criticisms of the patent system now, as it is, is you can get a patent. You can buy a patent and just sit on it. You can buy a patent, say, from a competitor or from somebody who may be a competitor down the road right. And prevent them from making it. Even if this thing benefits humanity, even if it literally saves people's lives, you can sit on a patent. And apparently drug companies have been known to do that. There was one famous case with a company called Amgen, and they developed an anemia drug that treated anemia and iron deficiency, and it worked really well. The problem is the body absorbed it really quick, so you had to take large doses for your whole life. Right. Apparently this researcher, this chemist, found a way to make the drug longer lasting, which in Amgen's mind meant, well, we can't make as much money off of it. They're selling fewer drugs. So this lady was like, can I just see your patents? And I can figure out a way to latch this onto your drug and save lives. And Anthem is like, no, we're not going to let you see our materials, our research. We don't want to make that better. And that's not as overt as buying a patent. It's sitting on it to keep people from doing it. Yes, but that does happen. It's a competitive way to navigate the business climate. Well put, Josh. You've worked your way around that one very nicely. I got something here. It might take like a year to five years to get this patent from pending to approved. And let's say you put in an idea very similar to someone else around the same time. That happens all the time. That happens. They declare in what they call an interference, a dance off. A dance off, exactly. And they have to actually have a little trial. A little trial. They serve tea and everything is in miniature, everything is small. They have a trial where they basically figure out who got there first. Yeah. There's a very famous case of Alexander Granbell and Elijah Gray basically putting in a patent for the telephone at the same time. And I guess for a long time it was whoever could prove they invented it first in the United States was the one who got the patent. Right. And then just to simplify things, in March of 2013, the US changed its patent law. So now the first inventor to file is the one who receives the patent. Right. So even if it's by a minute, whoever got it there first is the one who gets the patent. That's why filing that patent right away is your best defense. Go now. Stop, press pause, and go do it right now. Seriously, if you have an invention, I just got one more thing on the infamous poor man's patent or poor man's copyright. I'm sure everyone's heard, like all you got to do is write it out and mail it to yourself. I think I suggested that on this show before, do you remember? I don't remember that. But that is just an old wives tale that's not going to hold up in court. It's basically worthless. But I don't understand why right. When you create the work, it automatically is copyrighted. Why would that dating it not make it not just substantiated even more? Well, I'm not talking about writing a book. I'm talking about, hey, I did this invention and here's a schematic and I'm going to manage. Okay, so it could work for something copyrighted, but not a patent? Well, no, I mean if it's just an original work of art you've created like a book, then like I said, it's already copyrighted. Okay, so that doesn't even apply. Okay, but if you invented something and designed it and just mail it to yourself, it's worthless. Right. I got you. Basically, you can't prove like envelopes can be steamed open and manipulated. Like, that's not going to hold up in court. You can do it if you want. Sure. If you want, take it to court and show them I have an extra stamp that I don't know what to do with that's. Right. Let's see. You got anything else? I got nothing. If you want to learn more about patents, it's actually surprisingly interesting stuff. Agreed. You can type that word in the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this. Thanks for the panic attack episode. Oh, I'm glad they said episode. We got a lot of great feedback. I think this touched a lot of people because they're way more common than you think. Hey, guys. Love the episode on panic attacks. I had them in college, brought on by normal college stress plus the loss of a beloved uncle. I would often wake up in the night standing in the hall of my dorm, feeling like I could not breathe. Sometimes I would be awake enough to think I'm dying. I just need to get the hallway so someone will find me or my body. Sometimes I would just wake up screaming. What helped and the reason I'm writing was some wonderful therapy offered through my university's health services, along with some antidepressants and the support of my family and friends. I learned coping mechanisms to get me through my anxiety, how to express my stress so I wasn't bottling it all up inside, and the importance of taking time to rest my mind and body. With all the help, I was able to leave therapy. After a few semesters, I was able to recognize that I needed it again later in graduate school, after the birth in my second year, my much loved but very unplanned child. I urge all college students, graduate and undergrad, to really take advantage of their mental health services that are offered to them. For me as a student at my university, each session was only $10. Man, remember that in college? All that stuff was so cheap. Like the doctor, you go see a shrink for like $5. I remember I got Acupuncture for like $3 a section. Really? They had that at UTA. No, I did that in La. Through a university, though. No, my roommate did there's. Just some dude. Exactly. He was good with a needle. And it could also be charged to my Bursar account, which I don't even know what that is. Burstar. Yeah, I didn't have one of those. Yeah, I remember that from college, but I don't remember what it was. I think the word looks familiar. Yeah. The health building was on campus, so sessions fit right into my schedule, and I can't stress enough how beneficial it was for me. Without therapy, I would no doubt have not made it through college. In graduate school, there's no shame in therapy or medication to help you through tough times. Turns out pretty much everyone goes through it to some extent, and no one is weak for getting help. Admitting you need help is what makes you a stronger person, in my opinion. And Rosalie Maltby, researcher at the University of Oklahoma Department of Biology. I couldn't agree more. Well, thanks a lot. Is it Rosalie or Rosalie? Rosalie. Thanks a lot, Rosalie. We appreciate you writing and spreading that message, because it's a good one. Very pretty name as well. If you have a patent, we want to hear from you. Tell us what your patent. Is. So we'll steal it. Oh, no, we can't. It's patented, man. But if you've got a great idea that you haven't yet patented, send that to us. Whatever you want to do, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffychannow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@houseofworks.com. And as always, join us at home on the west web stuffyshoodnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstepworks.com."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-02-13-sysk-pompeii-final.mp3	How Pompeii Worked	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-pompeii-worked	What must be one of the most famous natural disasters in history took place when Mt Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE. But when the town was resurrected 1700 years later, a new chapter in its history was written.	What must be one of the most famous natural disasters in history took place when Mt Vesuvius buried Pompeii in 79 CE. But when the town was resurrected 1700 years later, a new chapter in its history was written.	Tue, 13 Feb 2018 17:16:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=17, tm_min=16, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=44, tm_isdst=0)	48434852	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everybody. We are going on tour in 2018. And where are we going? On April 4, we're gonna be in Boston at the Wilbur. You can get tickets at the Wilbur calm. Chuck and then on April 5, we're gonna be in DC at the Lincoln Theater. And you can get tickets for that a ticket fly. That's right. And then we're going to two new cities, right? Yes. On May 22, we're going to be in St. Louis. You can get tickets on Ticketmaster. And on May 23, we're going to be in Cleveland, and you can get tickets there@playhousquare.org. And then there's one more. Chuck that's right. We're going to wrap it up in Denver, specifically Inglewood, Colorado, at the Gothic Theater on June 28 and possibly adding a show on the 27th. Stay tuned for that. Yes. And you can get tickets@ax.com. So come see us live. We'll have a good time. Come on out. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. We're all wearing togas. Which makes the stuff you should know. The ancient Roman edition or the Animal House edition? Yeah, it could be. I'm Pluto. I just saw that movie, that Netflix movie about oh, yeah. Doug Kenney and Lampoon. Is it good? Well, the documentary is better. Oh, is this like a biopic? Yeah, it's a movie. Movie. I got you. Yeah. I judge what I watch on Netflix just based on, like, the illustration of the drawing or the art. And sometimes that's a good rule of thumb, and other times it's not. But that one, I kind of avoided it because of the art. Yeah. I mean, it's not great. I kind of enjoyed it because I like all the people, and it's kind of fun seeing someone be Bill Murray and someone beat Chevy Chase and John Belushi and a little bit of the making of Animal House and Caddyshack. But ultimately, the documentary is much better. What's the name of the documentary? Drunk, stoned brilliant dead, or some combination of those words. I'm not sure. Yeah, I've come across that. Yes, that's really good. But a brilliant and feudal gesture. Feudal and stupid gesture. Yeah, that's right. I gave it two stars. I don't know out of how many, though. I've just been steady consuming Rift tracks as fast as they'll clear them on Amazon Prime. Oh, really? Yeah. That stuff never gets old. It really doesn't. It really doesn't. All right, Chuck, now that we've gotten our initial tangent, aka. The introduction, out of the way, recommended viewing. Right. Let's talk Pompey. Yeah, because that's what we're doing today. And frankly, it's 2018. We've been doing this for almost a decade now. We're coming up on a decade in a few months. April yes. And this is the first we're doing on Pompeii. And that is just utterly mind blowing to me. It really is, considering we've done shows on both volcanoes and super volcanoes. And our show on tiny volcanoes. Right. The littlest volcano. That was so good. It is weird that we're finally getting around to this. Yes, it really is, because we've also done, like, the Seven Wonders. We've done tons of archeology stuff. It's strange. We did one on the real Atlantis. Remember that one? No. It was a good one. You should go back and listen to it. Really? Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. I was like, oh, Monopoly. We haven't done one on that and looked it up and yes, we sure have. I do remember that one. I was scouring my brain, like, okay, what was this episode like? What did we talk about? Nothing. It's like it never happened. Yeah. I mean, maybe we should just go back and re record some of these for our own benefit. Yeah. Okay. Reboot our own show. Right. Just for us. Okay. Well, we are finally talking Pompeii, and to do that, we have to go back machine and we should probably bring helmets and the dog attack outfits that those trainers wear. Yeah. And also we need to fuel the way back with olive oil on this trip. Oh, that's good. We need to retrofit it because we'll be in big trouble if we don't. Well, let's use the good stuff, like the really high grade stuff, because it burns my throat. I like the mid grade Evo, so let's save that for eating. Okay. Use the high tech stuff for traveling. Oh, you don't like really good olive wood? No, I don't. I want to say that I do, but I don't. It burns my throat. Huh? Yeah. Like when you just do shots of it. Yes. Maybe that's the problem. Shot of olive oil. Shot of crankcase oil. Well, you know what they say, olive oil before crankcase oil. Never sicker, right? No, it's the other oh, God. All right, so we're in the wayback machine. We have our rescue gear. We have our olive oil. It's our dog attack gear. Sure. Why? Because of the dogs there? No, because of the falling pumice and stone that's about to hit the area. Yeah, but I just wondered because they're very famously was a cast of a dog, and there's actually a very famous mosaic that says cave kanam, which is the wear of dog. Okay, so, yeah, there are dogs there. Well, good thing we got that suit, right? And our nice dispositions. Good dog. Okay, so we're here. It's pretty nice. It's a very nice area. It's pretty well populated. This is Pompeii itself. And Pompeii is one of several towns right around here on the Bay of Naples. And if you look up over here, that giant, almost cartoonishly volcanic volcano over there, that's Vesuvius. Yes. Looming large. It's like an eight year old drew a volcano and put it in Italy at the Bay of Naples by Naples. And that's it. That's Vesuvius. It's what's called a strato volcano. That's right. Well, I guess we should you can go back and listen to volcanoes from December 2010 or super volcanoes just last April, but for those of you who don't know, a strato volcano, sort of, if you think about just the run of the mill traditional volcano and a cartoon where it just pops like a champagne bottle, that's a strato volcano. Yeah. And it's actually just built up from previous explosions. So the very presence of a stratovolcano indicates that there's been a lot of activity in that area, and it's blown straight up into the air and then come down and settle down around it. And now you have a new layer, and it just builds up as a cone. And the thing about the strategy volcanoes, like you said, it pops like a cork. The reason it does that is because the lava that's kind of slowly growing and building up over time has gasses that it seeps into the rock, the surrounding rock that makes up the volcano. Right. That's right. And when those gases finally overcome a certain threshold, the pressure threshold, that's when that court goes off. And it's about to happen because it's either August or September or October, 2479 Ce. And we're here in Pompeii. Yes. And we should also mention, too, there are other volcanoes around, if you look around, because this is in a unique area of Europe that is called the Companion Ark. And there are quite a few volcano. Not quite a few, but there are several volcanoes. Vesuvi is obviously the most active and deadly and famous. But what the Companion arc is, or Companion is there's a process called subduction where basically a tectonic plate bumps up against another one and moves down into the mantle beneath the other plate. And that's what's going on here, where the African plate is meeting the Eurasian plate. Right. So there's like all that hot molten earth that's kind of bubbling up through that seam. And one of those holes is the volcano that we know is Vesuvius. Right. Yes. Okay, so we got here just in time to look around for a little bit and kind of take in the culture of the area before the volcano. It's very nice. It is very nice. It was like a very wealthy town, but not really an important town as far as the Roman Empire was concerned. But there was an inordinate amount of wealthy people, and those wealthy people were inordinately wealthy, and they spent a lot of money on the town. There's lots of statues everywhere. There's a good number of temples. There's one to ISIS, there's one to Jupiter. There's a big amphitheater. Yeah. And a big theater as well. Two separate things. Yeah. There's one that holds 20,000 people, which at its peak, that's how many people lived in Pompeii, which is a very democratic thing to do, to say that, hey, we're going to host a show here, and we want everyone to be able to come. Right. That's pretty cool that they did do that, because there was a pretty mixed population in Pompeii at the time, pompeii and suburban Pompeii, which included Herculaneum, Stabia, and what was the other one, Chuck? There's? Appalanis. Okay. Okay. So there's a string of towns, but Pompeii is definitely the biggest of all of them, and that's kind of like the center of the area. Right, but there's a lot of different people, a lot of different types of people who kind of gravitated toward Pompeii. It was like a cosmopolitan area. Right. So you had wealthy people, you have poor people, you had people from different areas. That's right. And it was also kind of unique for its time in that it was a bit of a resort town. So wealthy people all around Italy, actually, some of them would have I guess what you would call it now would be a vacation home. And that kind of got me down a rabbit hole of vacationing. Like, when did that actually begin? Because I had no idea that the people of ancient Italy vacationed. Yeah, but apparently it's the thing. And even Nero is said to maybe have had a place at Pompeii, and I guess it's just the weather here is lovely. There's wine and olive oil everywhere. Like I said, that big theater. They built that and said, one day, Pink Floyd shall play here. Man, I watched that Echoes video like, ten times while I was researching this. It's pretty cool. For those of you who don't know, pink Floyd did a very famous live concert well, not a live concert concert for no one. A live performance in front of whatever, 15 crew people that were filming it. Yeah. In the middle of the amphitheater at Pompeii. Yes, it's a little trippy. Yeah, just a tad. But then David Gilmore, a couple of years ago, I think in 2016, did a show there with actual people there, and it was the first attended concert event there since the volcano incident. Really cool. Since the VI. Yeah. And also, as we'll kind of see in a little while, that really gives away, like, just how accessible Pompeii is, the excavated ruin city that you could go see a David Gilmore concert there. Like I said, wine and olive oil was kind of one of the main trades, but it was just a very rich farmland area because that volcanic soil is so rich in nutrients. And they were right there by the water with the Sarno River and then right there on the bay. Living life there was pretty good. And even the slaves apparently could earn money and potentially even buy their freedom, which was pretty unusual, I have to say. Also, you mean I went to Pompeii, as I told you, and I can attest about that farmland and the fertility of it. They have lemons, no joke. The size of your head, like, they look like you shouldn't sand too close to them. What do you do with that much lemon? I don't know. I mean, make lemonade, I guess, if you're an optimist. Yeah. But it's just like you get one lemon, and you've really got 14 lemons. Pretty much. All right. I think you just slowly but surely cut away at it, squeeze it into your face, pick up another piece, do it again. Got you. Should we take a break? I think that we weren't ready for a break yet until that last joke, and now we are. All right, we'll be back right after this and talk a little bit about the VI sky. All right, Chuck, what is the v i. The volcano internet. Oh, okay. Nice. I didn't realize it had been abbreviated. Or the bo. The big one. That's a good one, too. So let's go with the Bo. Okay. Okay. So Pompeo is this nice driving city of 20,000. It's a resort area, too, and on, I guess, the morning of August 24, and we should say that date is actually up for debate. I guess we'll talk about it a little more later. But we're going with August 24 because that's the date that's still in use. There was a rumble from Vesuvius. There was an earthquake in the area enough to get everybody's attention, but supposedly that wasn't a very infrequent occurrence that vesuvius caused earthquakes pretty frequently in the region, and it wasn't a big cause of panic. Yeah. One reason so many people died is, I think, because they were used to that kind of activity, and they were like, no big deal. We're used to the earth moving under our feet. No reason to flee the town. Right. There have been a pretty substantial earthquake 16 years before, and I think 63 Ce. Where they had to reconstruct a lot of stuff, like entire temples and things have been knocked down. So I'm sure they're like, that's nothing compared to old 63. The quake of 63. Yeah. And they weren't panicked because the previous eruptions, no one really knew about. There were no records of those. They didn't even say volcano. There wasn't a word for volcano. Right. So it wasn't really on their radar as, hey, this thing has happened before on a grand scale. They were just kind of enjoying their life. Yeah. There weren't cartoons back then to be like, that's a cartoonishly volcanic volcano. That's right. So that's kind of ironic, too, that they didn't realize that there was a long history of volcanic activity there, because it turns out that modern volcanologists and geologists and archeologists are pretty sure that there are plenty of human settlements that were covered over by the volcano and that by the time Pompeii was built, it was built atop these old settlements that have been covered over. So it's like lost city. Thanks to the volcano. Everybody forgets somebody's like, oh, this is a nice area. We'll come build here. Covered over by volcano. Everybody forgets and the cycle repeats again. And that's where Pompeii found itself by 79 Ce. That's right. On this day, the Earth rumbles. And I want to direct you to this really great website called OpenCulture and just search destruction of Pompeii. OpenCulture. And they have a video. It's like eight minutes long, which is basically like it's like they placed a camera in the CGI world of Pompeii just and trained it on Vesuvius and left it running for 24 hours. And it really gets the point across of how destructive this event would have been. Yes, I think you shouted that very same thing out on super volcanoes. Had to have. It's a really cool video. Have you seen it yet? Yeah, I saw it after you shouted it out. Yeah, I watched it again this morning and I think just from researching all this stuff, it really drove it home even more. It was kind of unsettling to watch this time, for sure. So little afternoon on the 24th is when the champagne cork popped. And they were not ready for this, like we said, just because of all the aforementioned reasons. And the only account, or one of the only accounts we have is we've talked about Plenty the Elder and his nephew Planet the Younger, before they were not there. They were in Myceum, which is not too far away. It was on the northwestern edge of the Bay of Naples, but that's where Planty the Elder was stationed. And then planning, the Younger and his mom were there as well. And apparently when this started to go down, plenty the Elder got a message from a friend saying, hey, can you come and get me? It's going down. And he took off to go and play. The younger was like, no, I'm going to stay here. Yeah, which is a pretty smart move. Yeah. And how do you pronounce that town? I never tried Mycenam. Mycenam? Is that right? Okay, so he and his mom were there, and it's not really close. I mean, as far as Pompeii is concerned, pompey is way closer to Vesuvius than Mycenam is. But they still had an extremely harrowing experience there on My senium, too, just from the fallout from Vesuvius. Even though Pompey and Herculaneum and Stabia all got the worst of it, the Younger account is the only first hand account of the eruption of Vesuvius. Then it's pretty scary stuff. Like, he says the sky went dark, but not dark. Like the moon wasn't out or there weren't any stars. He said it suddenly got dark, like somebody put a light out in an enclosed room. Like that kind of dark. Like apparently you couldn't see people just a few feet ahead of you. That just got real dark real fast. Yeah. And you can read his entire account online, but here's another nice pull quote. You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men. There were some who prayed for death and their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods. But still more imagine there were no gods left and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness forevermore. It's pretty grim. Jeez. So this is, again in Masonia, I think. I'm not saying that right. Still in Pompeii the situation is much worse. And plenty of the younger was saying that they were kind of huddled in, I think, a house or something somewhere. But even in this house, the ash that was like accumulating around them and on top of them was so much that they had to stand up every once in a while and shake it off. It was. Again. Much worse in Pompeii itself. There's a lot of ash falling and covering people inside their houses and under structures. And either you stay there and start to worry about getting buried. Or even worse. You start to worry about the roof collapsing under the weight of all that gathering ash and pumice. Or you risk going out and being hit by one of those pumice rocks. Which. If you've ever picked up a volcanic rock. It is way lighter because it's very porous. Way lighter than a sedimentary rock of the same size. But you still wouldn't want to get hit in the head by one of those things after it's falling 20 miles out of the sky. And this is actually what they think the height that this ejecta coming out of the volcano reached was 20 miles or something like 32 think. Yeah. So here's a couple of stats for you. Ash was falling at a rate of about six inches an hour. If you imagine that is rain, and if you've ever seen a rain like that, that's an unbelievable amount of rain. So imagine that is ash lava was flowing at abouts 68 miles an hour by the time it started sailing down the hillside, right? So you got a few things. You got the first explosion, the eruption, where, like you said, the court goes off, the ejecta goes into the air plane, described as like a great pine tree with a big long trunk, and then way up high it branches out. And those are now called plany interruptions. And then later on from all this activity, the cone of the volcano collapses. And when that happened, it shot out this pyroclastic flow, which is made up of ash and hot gas from between, I think I saw 400 to 1500 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a substantial amount in Celsius, too. That's a translation and like you said, flowing. I saw 100 miles an hour. You saw 63 miles an hour. 68. But I mean, that's one of those things that I'm sure they can't really tell exactly, but at any rate, it's going to be super fast. Super fast, super hot. And they think now, before they thought that everybody in Pompeii died from being covered in ash, they think now that they actually died much more quickly than that. Right. When that pristine flow was anywhere near them, especially when it overtook them, it would have killed them instantly, which actually will see accounts for some of the faces that have been found around on the people of the pompeii victims. Yeah, and they even think and by the way, we went right past the fact that pyrocastic flow is a great band name. It really is. But they even think now that most of them died from head injuries even before that even happened. Oh, really? I hadn't seen that one. Yeah, well, we'll get to that. I'll just throw that there's a tease. Okay, so this is shortly after midnight, is when herculean am was covered and obliterated. About 06:30 a.m.. The following morning is when pompey started getting hit with this flow. The whole thing takes about 25 hours for about 200 plus square miles to get completely destroyed. Yeah. In 19 hours, it shot out something like one cubic mile of rock and ash out of that volcano. A cubic mile. Imagine looking up and seeing a mile cube, and it's just all coming down on you. Well, again, seeing this and not even knowing what a volcano is, right. Yeah. It makes it any scarier, I guess. But they must have thought the world was ending. Well, yeah. If they thought there were no more gods, I would guess that they would think, like, well, this is it. This is the end of mill house pioneered. Younger, too, wrote about the water, the sea retreating as if pushed by the earthquakes. And so the thought now is that it also caused a tsunami at the climax of this eruption. So now imagine the bay of naples flowing inland. While all of this destruction is raining down around you, right? Yeah. Then you definitely think the world is ending. Actually, there's a very famous beach at herculaneum where there were a lot of bodies found, and there's a 30 foot boat that was just kind of, like, jammed up against them. And I guess that would have been from the tsunami. It would have brought it in. Well, and that's apparently just to finish up with planning the elder. Initially, he was going to go out in a big boat. And kind of just get a better look at what was going on. But when he got this message from his friend saying, hey, come rescue us, he got in a fast boat, a fast sailing cutter, which is probably was his end, because by the time they got there, the winds were blowing in a weird direction. Apparently, the way they usually blow it would have blown a lot of this out to sea, but unusually, it was blowing in the opposite direction that day. So a lot of things kind of came together for the worst possible scenario. But supplying the elder gets nearby. I think they landed at pampa nianas. I think it was at Stabia. Oh, where Planeta Elder Landed? Yes. His friend was Pompanius. Yes, sorry, that was who was going to rescue and Pompanius was at Stabia, correct. This little super ultrawealthy resort area. Yeah. So they couldn't get out of there, basically, because I think their boat was so light and they kept pushing them back in and apparently said, hey, let's ride it out here. That's our only choice. And he basically died. They couldn't get him up. And the theory for a while is that he died of inhaling toxic fumes, but now modern historians and scientists are saying, no, he was fat and kind of old and out of shape and he died of a heart attack. Yeah. I think the consensus among historians today is that he was Boss Hog esque. Yes. Good way to put it. Yeah. So not a good end for plenty of the elder, but that's kind of cool to be able to say, like, yeah, I died at Pompeii, is it? I was a super famous dude in the Roman world and where did I find my end? Pompey, another famous thing in the Roman world. That's how you'd say that kind of thing. Yeah, I think it's neat. So plenty the Elder died planning, the younger lived, though. And we know about all of this because, again, he was an eyewitness. He was also a historian, a statesman, just all around smart dude. But he didn't write his letter to Tacitus the historian, for like, 27 years after the fact. That a little weird. I don't know if he just heard Tacitus was getting a history together and he wanted to contribute, or what the difference was or what the deal was with the gap. But there is a lot of disagreement about whether his date of August 24 is the correct one. The reason everyone says August 24 is because he wrote that in the letter, he said that this happened on August 24. The thing is, apparently there were other drafts of his letter, that same letter that either didn't give the date or give a different date later on, I think, of November 24. And then there's a lot of actual circumstantial evidence that suggests that this actually took place either on October 24 or November 24 rather than August 24. So there's things like there was just an inordinate amount of pomegranates and figs and nuts found around the town, which would suggest that the harvest had just happened, the autumn harvest, which you wouldn't have done in August. There was a coin that had a title of Caesar that wasn't bestowed until September of 79. That coin shouldn't have existed. There's all this evidence that's coming together that says, no, it actually probably was either October or November, but it's just been August 24 for so long now that it's going to be another 1020 years before everybody's like, oh, it happened in October and November. Yeah. And truth be told, that's sort of one of those things that wonky archeologists would argue over. I hear it and I think, what's, a couple of months, really? But I just think it's really fascinating that they found a coin and they said, okay, this coin shouldn't exist. And the reason why is because Britain was conquered by the Romans a little around that time. And so they minted a coin to honor that. And because that coin shows up in Pompeii, we can date when Vesuvius erupted more accurately. That to me is just eye popping. Look at my eyes. Good old fashioned police work, either one. So Vesuvius has spoken. Pompeii is now gone. It's covered in something like, I believe, 10 meters, like about 30ft of ash and pumice. Yeah, I've seen all kinds of anywhere from like eight to 30ft, so a lot of feet. So it's covered up. I don't know if we said this or not, but of the 20,000 people, about 18,000 of those residents left when there was the first sign of trouble because again, Vesuvius gave plenty of warning. But there were about 2000 people in the town of Pompeii itself when Vesuvius went off and covered the town. But now everything's calm. It's quiet. Vesuvius is quiet again. And Pompeii, herculaneum stabia applaudis, they're gone. Yeah, I think about 20 to 25,000 total people in the region died is what I saw. Oh, really? That many, huh? Yeah, among the 200 sq. Mi. So the whole area has just been radically changed. And these cities were so lost that even the people who stayed in the area and continued to live there, they lost track of exactly where Pompeii was and they stopped talking about it. Eventually, there's another city named Pompeii that was founded many, many years later. That's the modern Pompeii. And if they ever even referenced Pompeii, they just called it La Chivita, the city, and they just knew that there was a lost city somewhere in the area. And that's how things stayed for about the next 1700 years. That's right. And you want to take a break? Yes. All right, well, we'll get into the discovery of Pompeii after this. All right, dude, we're back. That's right. So what we've got here as far as Roman history, prepompei and postpompei, is they've focused a lot on what they would call the important people of society. So military stuff, wealthy people, political stuff they didn't say, like, hey, maybe it'd be valuable to record what it's like for everyday people of Rome because they didn't care. That's why Pompey and the rediscovery and the excavation over the years has been so important is because a lot of these people in the shops and all the homes and the art were really well preserved once they started digging into this stuff, which was a pretty remarkable find and continues to be. Yeah. Plus Rome was around for so long. It has been around for so long that it evolved. Right. So over. Time. What Rome once was culturally, historically, is kind of lost and replaced as the culture itself evolves in ages. And apparently it grew more and more conservative the longer it was around. And one of the things that Pompeii also gives us is the snapshot of Roman culture before it became conservative. And it was hypersexual at the time when Pompey was covered over. So that was another thing, because at the time, until Pompeii was discovered, everyone considered Rome, ancient Rome, as this very staid, conservative civilization. And then they started to discover this stuff from Pompey. And we're like, whoa, what were these people into back then? Yeah, there was a lot of highly erotic art. Yeah. I saw a statue of the god Pan having graphic sex with a goat, like a pretty realistic statue. And they found that they dug that out of Pompeii pretty early on. And there's phalluses they found everywhere. Some people put phalluses on their houses, like sticking out into the street. There was Preappres, which is a lesser god who was extraordinarily unsettlingly, well endowed. There was just a lot of fertility stuff and a lot of just explicit sexuality in their artwork back then. And Rome eventually moved on past that, and it had been forgotten until Pompeii gave up its secrets. Yeah. So kind of immediately afterward, up until about the 1700. And like you said, it was kind of forgotten for a little while. But during this whole long period of time, pompey was kind of essentially rated again and again by either people hunting for valuables or kings and queens who wanted to plunder things like statues and stuff for their own palaces. And this sort of happened again and again throughout history until about the 1800s when legit archeology really started to happen, where they could go in there with the name and actually preserving some of the stuff. Yes. I think the earliest ones were the Bourbon King Charles III, who was discovered under his watch in 1748. And then the French came into the area, and by this time, they were crazy about archaeology, thanks to their fascination with Egypt. So they brought in some pretty good practices. But even still, I mean, compared to what archeologists know and do today, this is pretty hokey. Basic, backward archaeological methodology. Yes. Even when they started to do it right, they just weren't as advanced as we are today. But things kind of change for the better. When a man named Giuseppe Fiore Nice came along in 1860 and he said, hey, I'm in charge now. I'm going to get in here and try and do it right. I'm going to be way more careful. My team is going to be more careful. We're going to record all the positions of people, everything that we find. And that's when it really legitimized kind of what was going on as far as excavation goes. And he also made his name, most famously for what ended up being named after him. The fierelli process is, when he saw these, everything is covered in ash and hardened. So they were basically encased in these over the years, the bodies would run away and so they were encased in these hollow cavities. The people were, and dogs and all sorts of animals. So he said, Why don't we inject this, gesso this plaster into these cavities and see what we come up with? And what he came up with, very famously, where the people of Pompeii, like, more than a thousand of them. Yeah. Do you remember our moldorama episode that just came out? I do remember that. So when these people were covered in that ash and their bodies rotted away, it left what is effectively a mold and he filled it with that plaster and made plaster casts of them. Right. And apparently really detailed once I saw him, but I didn't see anything as detailed as Ed points out that you can see the design somebody had shaved into their pubic hair. That's pretty detailed plaster cast of a dead person from 2000 years ago. You can very famously see a man like, agony on a man's face like you've just captured at the moment of death. Just basically flash frozen. A lot like Han Solo and Carbonite. Yeah, it was a huge find and it just kind of shook the world. And reproductions and photos of all these casts became the sensation of the day all over the world. Like I said, there's a very famous one of a dog kind of writhing in pain on his back. One of the more sad ones, it looked like he had a cholera too. Yeah, he did. Which is interesting, although I've never seen where that might have been a fake, which I don't fully understand. Yeah, I hadn't seen that at all because there were no bones inside of it. So they're not quite sure about that one. But there are just some really sad ones of, like, what is clearly a mother, like, holding her child, families and couples in embrace and, like, horrific embrace. And it's just really kind of sad to look through these photos. And they kept finding them, like, all over the place. They were just groups of people huddled. When they would excavate a house, they would find bodies quite frequently. And like you said, those embraces just caught in their last moment. Like, their literal last moment was just caught in time. So it was quite a find. And like you said, it really, definitely caught the imagination of the rest of the world. So much so that there was, like a Greek neoclassical revival in the Enlightenment period because everyone had pompey fever when it was discovered. Pompey fever. Pompey fever. Catch it. So a couple of years ago, I guess, a few years ago now, in 2015, a group did CT scans on some of these cast, about, I think, 30 or 40 of them. And that dog and that boar. And this provided just a lot more detail. You can look at the cast and then look at the CT scan and it kind of brings it to life. And they revealed a few really interesting things. One is that the people of Pompeii had almost perfect teeth. Really? Which have been really unusual at the time. And they think it's because they ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, very little sugar, and the water was heavily fluoridated, so they all had really nice straight teeth. And then what I was talking about, the head injuries, there's an article in the Atlantic called how the People of Pompeii Really Died. And almost all of these CT scans revealed that they had head injuries from getting smashed in the head from this volcanic rock. Man, what a way to go. Yeah. Although I guess it'd be quick, right? Well, either way, if it's that or if it's what you are saying, it's not the slow, suffocating death that they used to think it was. Yeah, which is way better. Yeah. I saw also check, there was an excavation of like a latrine, I guess, and just a normal housing block where poor people or middle class workers would have lived. And they found evidence of really great diets. And they think that the people of Pompeii, the rich people, actually probably ate a little worse because they ate slightly richer food. But everyone there, including the lower classes, were very well fed on very healthy foods, basically like the Mediterranean diet, like you think of today. And that they were also taller on average than the citizens of the area today. Interesting. Yeah. It's usually the exact opposite, if you think about it. George Washington 4ft tall. Everybody knows that. They also found in some of the, I think the runoff into the drainage systems or something. They found you were talking about the rich people eating more exotic meats. They found evidence that they ate sea urchin. So I'll give them that because people eat that. Sure. Flamingo. Hadn't seen that one. I know. It's coming. Then giraffe. Yeah. Who looks at a giraffe and says, I wonder what that tastes like. And it does. It follows through on it. I don't know. It's the following through part that really knocks my socks off. Yeah. So those are some recent excavations, right? Yeah. This is the kind of stuff that has come out with things like DNA analysis. Okay. This is extraordinarily new. As far as Pompeii goes, pompeii, it's really cool because it's got its ancient history when it was covered over by vesuvius. But then it also has a secondary history of its discovery and then its excavation since then. And apparently it's the longest continuously excavated site in the world. As far as archaeology goes, I think it's one of the largest, too. I wouldn't be surprised. It is extraordinarily big. And the fact that it's been around for so long has been excavated for so long. It was basically there when archeology was born. Archeological techniques that have been developed over the age have all been tried and tested and frequently discarded at Pompeii. And as a result, a lot of those early ones that were just not very smart, they've had a pretty tough effect on the town, like the frescoes. They discovered frescoes which are paintings on plaster walls all over the town. Most houses had really beautiful frescoes, and the workers were like, these are going to flake off. This is back in the 1920s, so we need to do something. So they covered them in paraffin wax, which I guess it makes sense, it's covered in wax. We can figure out what to do with it later, maybe we never will, but you can still kind of see through it. The problem is that the pigments bonded to the wax not just rubbed off, like molecularly bonded with the wax. And then as water grew behind the walls and seeped through the walls behind the painting, it pushed the painting off the walls onto the wax. So now if you want to get this wax off, they finally developed a technique where you can use a laser that just removes the wax and leaves the pigment. But that's extraordinarily new, too. I think just in the last couple of years, they started using that. Before then they would do things like use gasoline and stuff to get the wax off, and it would just take the fresco clean off. Yeah. I'm surprised there's anything left between being continually rated earthquakes since then, world War II since then, vandals, tourists, rainwater. It's just like, it's been just beaten up for a couple of thousand years now. But you've been there. There's still a lot of stuff there. Yeah, there is. I think they've uncovered two thirds of it, they think. Yeah. And so they've gotten to this point now where they're like, okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. I think in the 1990s, whoever was the director of archaeology at Pompeii said, we need to stop excavating. We're going to leave what's left for later generations who have better techniques to uncover, and we're going to focus on preserving what's here now, which is a big deal because it's a World Heritage site. And UNESCO basically came in in 2013, and they effectively condemned it, like what a city would do to a building that was falling down. That's what New UNESCO did to the Pompey site. They said, this thing is toast. They put it on the endangered list. And one of the big reasons is tourists. When you're there, you're like, are you sure I'm allowed to be sitting on this thing and taking a funny picture, or I'm really allowed to walk through here? They let you go almost everywhere on that site, touch everything, run around. It's just like a big playground, basically. And you have to stop and remind yourself, this is an archeological site in operation. Still and the fact that tourists have been allowed to do that for so long has had a huge effect on the deterioration of the site itself. Too yeah, well, not only that, but it's been corrupt over the years, the management of these ruins. A lot of the structures have collapsed over time completely and gone away. And then finally, in 2012, the EU and the Italian government finally got together and said, listen, we need to really reinvest in this find here, and it's called the Great Pompeii Project, and they invested about \u20ac105,000,000 to try and repair and preserve what they have left. I'm surprised they haven't closed down more parts of it, because, like you said, you can still go everywhere. But what they have done is restored a lot of these frescoes and mosaics. Like you were saying, a lot of the best work has been done in the last five years. Yes. Easily. To try and get this thing preserved as much as they can at this point. Yes. And one of the things that got them going was the Gladiator School, which is a pretty big structure that housed the Gladiators, where they trained in town. And it crumbled, it fell, it turned into ruins because it had gotten eroded, I think, by drainage. And one of the things they're figuring out now is that there was a pretty decent sewer system underneath these towns, but that pyroclastic flow covered it all up, so the water has nowhere to go but over the ruins. And over the last 150 years, it's eroded some of these buildings. That's another thing they're dealing with. Too yeah. I don't know if you set it up with the Herculaneum conservation Project. Did you mention that? The Great Pompeii or the Herculaneum? The Herculaneum, no. So there's, like, a model for dealing with these sites to preserve these sites, and it's in Herculaneum. It was apparently worse off than Pompeii for a long time, and the public private partnership took control of the thing. And now it's like the model of how to how to rescue sites like this. So it's possible that Pompeii project will be successful, and in, like, 20 years, there'll probably be walkways everywhere that are raised above ground, and you won't be able to touch anything. I would guess if you want to be able to touch Pompeii, you should go in the next few years, because I don't think they're going to keep allowing that for much longer. If you want to touch Pompeii, if you want to touch it you got anything else? No. Well, that's Pompey, man. We did it, finally. That's right. Okay, well, if you want to touch Pompeii, you should go to Pompeii. And in the meantime, while you're waiting to do that, you should type Pompey into the search barhouseofworks.com, which will bring up this great article by the Grabster. And since I said grabs are time for listener mail, I'm going to call this artifacts or Monuments from Germany. Hey, guys. Just finished the episode on public monument removal, and it was fantastic as usual. It made me think of the monument removal in other parts of the world, in particular in Germany. It comes to mind because I studied German all through high school and college, did a study abroad there for a summer. The way Germans treat their Nazi history is different. I'm by no means an expert, but as I understand it, they do everything in their power to prevent their citizens from idolizing or idealizing Nazi Germany. You can't buy mine. Comp, which I think that's true, isn't it? I think so. There are no statues or monuments of any kind. They're not sanitizing their history or pretending it didn't happen, but they don't want to commemorate it either. Anyway, in honor of today being the day the Berlin Wall has been gone longer than it was up, I'd like to recommend that you see the movie Goodbye Linen. If you haven't ever seen it, it's great. It takes place when the Berlin Wall comes down in the first year or so after during German reunification. Funny and thoughtful and sad and just really good. It's one of my favorite movies and no spoilers, but it has my favorite scene ever of a monument being removed. And I looked it up. I think it was nominated for Golden Globe for best foreign film and a host of other, like, Baftas and European awards. So it looks pretty good. Look forward to the new episodes. And that is from Ellie. Nice. Thanks a lot, Ellie. Appreciate that email. Very thoughtful. I don't think Germany was even allowed to have a flag for a while, if not mistaken. Yeah. All right. Well, that's it. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at Joshamclark and s yskpodcast Chucks at Facebook. Comstuffyshowandcharleswchuffbryant. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasthouseafworks.com and it's join us at our home on the web stuffyshehno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housestepworks.com."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-08-17-sysk-accents-final.mp3	What's the deal with accents?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-deal-with-accents	Accents are truly fascinating. Put simply, they are how a person sounds when they talk. From England to America and all over the world, the way people speak in their native tongue can vary drastically. What are the influences? When do accents begin to tak	Accents are truly fascinating. Put simply, they are how a person sounds when they talk. From England to America and all over the world, the way people speak in their native tongue can vary drastically. What are the influences? When do accents begin to tak	Thu, 17 Aug 2017 14:49:27 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=49, tm_sec=27, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=229, tm_isdst=0)	54133736	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. 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. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bright and there's Noel on the wheels of steel So that makes this stuff. You should know the podcast. So, Chuck yeah. How are you feeling before you answer? I'm so excited about this one because there's just no way it's not going to be a Chuck accent bonanza. Well, I am super excited about this because I love accents almost more than anything in the world. I know it, man. I'm not doing accents because sometimes I'm okay, sometimes I'm terrible, but I'd like to try. I just mean hearing there's nothing in the world I love more than talking with someone who has a really heavy accent of some kind, right. I love it. I love it. I love it. So if you encounter somebody with a heavy accident, they are having trouble understanding, how do you feel? Like in, say, Scotland? Sure. Well, what do you mean? Like, are you just like, gosh, this is fascinating, or do you start to sweat and get nervous because the communication is breaking down? No, I'm delighted beyond words and I will laugh and say man or lady, lad or lassie. Like, I can barely understand you and I love it so much I can hardly stand it. That's great. That's a great way to handle it. It's just the best, man. I love it. All accents. I mean, I can't think of one accent I don't like hearing. What about no, I got nothing. I mean, sure, there might be some accents that might be a little grading to your ear on a personal level, but I even like hearing those just because it's so that person in that region. And especially when we travel for these shows and get to speak with fans from Boston or from the Midwest. Canada. Yeah, I love it on the UK towards I was just like flipping out. You were? I had to calm you down like every few minutes. It's just amazing. And it makes me feel a little self conscious that I have such a non accent. But you do have an accent. You just can't hear it. That's one of the hilarious parts of accent is the person with the accent can't hear their own accent. It just sounds normal to them, sort of, but it's like everyone has an accent. They even say that in this article. Right. But unmarked speech, technically, is what we're talking about, which is it doesn't have a Hallmark sign of geographic area. Yeah. Because if anything, what an accent is, it's a telltale giveaway of where you live, where you're from, where you're raised, usually. Yeah. Again, you know what I mean. But you don't have an accent either. No, both of those are pretty unmarked. We have non regional accents. Non regional American accent, I think. Yeah. Or gen am. I've heard it called general American. That makes sense. That's good. It's lovely. I mean, listen to us right now. I love this accent, and I may have told the story before. I heard a cassette tape of myself as a twelve year old a couple of years ago, and it was heavily Southern. Oh, really? Yeah, and I didn't try to lose it. I didn't work on it. I never thought about it. Yeah. Where did it go? I have no idea. What did you do? I don't know. I was shocked. I was like, that's not me. Wow, that's really surprising because we'll talk about it a little bit, but accents, they tend to develop in childhood and they tend to stick. I don't know, man. I can't explain it. That's pretty interesting. The only thing I can say is that at the time, I was friends with a lot of rednecks. Oh, I got you. And I'm not now. No. Even though I love the right kind of redneck, don't get me wrong. Sure, I love the right kind of redneck. The salt of the earth. Good. To each his own kind of redneck. Yeah, sure. That's a good redneck. They're the best. Plenty of other kinds, too. Plenty of other kinds. Boy, do you know what, this is kind of off the topic, but you know what I hate more than anything? I'll just go ahead and say it. When a fellow white dude thinks you think like them just because you're a white dude yeah. And you don't know them, and they'll just start saying stuff and I'm just like, Dude, that's awful. I'm not like that. And please don't presume I'm like that. You just throw your hands to your ears and stomp up and down and go, no, until they run off. That's the worst. I hate it. It's pretty bad. We're all that way. Yeah. All right, let's get into this. We're not into it already. Well, I guess the first thing technically we should say is that dialect and accents are two different things. Yeah. Accent is how something sounds when you talk, and again, it's usually related to where you're from. And usually where you're raised, right? Yeah. And your family, too. Yeah. And a dialect you're probably going to pick up from where you're from, from your family, that kind of thing. But dialect more has to do with the vocabulary you use, like the words you use, the slang, that kind of thing. There's grammar rules that can be different than the standard grammar of the language. So it's more like what you're saying is dialect how you sound when you're saying it? That's the accent. That's the big difference. Yeah. Have you ever taken one of those dialect tests online? No. It's pretty neat. New York Times has one where you basically go through, like, 25 questions that say things like, what do you call the strip of land between two streets? Or what do you call a house on the opposite corner of your own? And stuff like that. It's not just like, soda pop. I got you. Okay. Yeah, that would be interesting. Like, I say median, I say kitty corner. Oh, I say Catty Corner. Oh, see, that was one of the choices, but I would say median as well. Right. Some people say devil strip. One of them was interesting was what do you call it when no, that's the thing. That's not a thing. It is. What do you call it when it's raining with the sun shining? Apparently that's highly regional. Raining with the sun shining. I didn't even know there was a name for that. Yeah, people call it different things. We grew up calling it the devil's beating his wife. What's up with all this devil's stuff? Oh, no, it's all the devils beating his wife is what you call it when rain coming down while sun was shining. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. Anyway, it has an interactive map that as you answer the question, it turns different colors, like from red to blue according to how heavy you're like. No, no, I took that one back. Well, not politically. And then eventually after the last question, the reddest hot zones will be where you are from. And mine was Atlanta or Birmingham. Not Decatur specifically, but Atlanta. Birmingham, Alabama, and I think, like, Nashville, so I was in the zone. So cosmopolitan southern is your dialect, basically. It sounds good. Cosmo southern, yeah, southern mo any, I highly recommend it's kind of a fun test. Yeah, it sounds pretty fun, but nothing to do with accent. Can you put, like, not applicable for the one about the rain when the sun shining? Yeah. Most of them have an option that says, I know what this is, but I don't have a name for it. Got you. Okay, cool. Well, then, yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it right now. All right. So we've established what dialect is. Yes. We've established what accents are. And apparently, now that we're diving into the world of accents, if you are a linguist, there are basically two categories that you would put accents into. If you want to start talking accents with linguist, they're going to be like, wait, wait, are we talking about the accent that a person has when they're speaking their native language, or are you talking about the accent a person has when they're speaking what is not their native language? Explain yourself. Says the linguist. Right. And when you go to learn a second language as a non developing infant, like, let's say, high school, middle school or beyond, I mean, you took language class in high school, right? Sure. French. Was this in Georgia or Ohio? Yes. And there are plenty of thick Southern accents speaking French, and it is about as grading as it gets. Well, it's funny because I took German and it was the same thing, and I always had a knack for spreckensie deutsch. Yeah, that's how it sounded. And it was always funny to me because our teacher would dictate or say something in perfect German, and we would repeat it back individually. Yeah, and I always had a pretty good knack for not accidents, but just sort of parenting and much better. If I hear someone say something, I can kind of say it back like they say it, and I just figured, like, just do that, and then you're speaking correct German, and some of these dudes would park and zee deutsch, and I would just be like, how can you just can you not pretend to speak German, like, with a German accent? And they couldn't? It's just fascinating. I just thought everyone could parrot something back. And that's when I realized, no, not at all. Well, those people have very well formed non plastic. Synapses is really what it comes down in a lot of ways. Do you want to take a break before we get into the development of accent? I guess so. Okay, let's do that. 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. 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 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. All right, Chuck. So there's been a lot of study about accents, about when we develop language. There's a lot of debate about whether we're born with a language instinct or if it's just something we naturally develop as a result of being social animals. Who knows? But one of the studies on accents specifically has found that apparently babies, they recognize accents in the womb. They've tested newborn kids. I don't know what parent let this happen, but apparently in the delivery room or shortly after delivery, the baby was born. It's another way to put it. They've had people speak with different accents to the baby, and the baby, just based on their gaze, tend to prefer the accent that they heard while they were in the womb. Interesting. It is pretty interesting. Right. And apparently. From that moment on. Even from the time their brains developed enough to start hearing and soaking this in. And then after they're born. They're taking all of these little things we take for granted when we speak. When we use dialect. When we form an accent. All of this stuff is sinking in their little baby brains. And it's helping them develop what is called basically a map. A language map. A dialect map. An accent map. And they're hearing how to talk. They're learning how to talk just by listening to the people around them even before they're six months old. Yeah. This researcher speech professor named Patricia Khul. Kuhl at U Dub. Go, Huskies. Yeah. She said that she was describing the map, and she said the sounds they don't hear, their synapses aren't firing when they don't hear those sounds. So they just sort of fall away. And you can think of it as, like, Pruning of that network of the brain. Right. Which I thought was really interesting. It just makes sense. The sounds they hear most often will be reinforced over and over. Right. And that's how a dumb little baby gets an accent. And there's a really good example, if not a super stereotypical one, but speakers of Japanese have a very hard time saying, l making the L sound. Right. Yes. So rather than lake, they may say rake. They tend to replace the L with an R sound. And it's simply because that's what they were exposed to growing up, and they didn't learn to make the l sound just in the same way that you and I might have a lot of trouble rolling our Rs, where if we had been raised in a society or a group or a family even, that rolled their Rs, we could probably roll our Rs perfectly. But for all of this, research is starting to show that accidents are just acquired and developed and they're reinforced through exposure by hearing other people around you and then speaking that way yourself. And that map that's formed, starting before even six months old, it's what you use to navigate through spoken communication with the world. Yeah. She found out. This is cool. Still, in studying babies in Sweden, Japan, US and other places, that at six months old, japanese babies could distinguish between the L and the R, just like American babies. But by the time they were one, they had lost that ability again because that was just sort of pruned away. Yeah. And I looked into this, I'm like, how would you set that up? And it's actually pretty clever. Right. So they would put these babies in a room and let them all hang out. Then there'd be like a loud speaker and then over the loudspeaker, hopefully at a normal, normal wake up baby. Right. They would just have a voice, a nice, pleasant voice saying, like, La la. Right. And then every once in a while, the voice would say, La la. Right. And when that R would come out, instead of a la, a bear would light up and start dancing and playing like a drum or something that babies would love would happen. Right. So they came to associate rather like what would be construed as an error in the accent or the dialect with something going on with the bear. So the babies that were Japanese, by the time they were a year, when there was an error, they wouldn't look over at the bear any longer because they stopped hearing that la la and just heard it as la la. Interesting. Yeah. And apparently they found that babies crying can even sort of mimic the intonation of their nationality. So, like, French babies, apparently French speakers go up and intonation toward the end of a sentence. And so French babies would when they cried, I guess, would go, wow, and go up at the end. Whereas German babies would go down just like German. Yeah. Right. They wouldn't say why. Super interesting, though. Yeah. And so all of this forms the basis of what a lot of people already know, but you might not know why. But it is way easier to learn multiple languages when you're younger than it is, say, when you're in high school. And there's a big push among American educators to start language development, second language, third language when you're much younger, like even as young as nursery school, rather than waiting until high school. Jerry's little baby is being raised bilingual from birth. Yeah. That's a really good way to raise a smart kid. Like you may speak Japanese in English. She was raised in a household that spoke Japanese and English. Right, right. And I mean, it's the same thing. I read another article about a woman who was raised in the Philippines and her father was raised I think her father spoke Tagalog, which is the national language. And then her mother spoke a regional language. She spoke two forms, two languages from birth and then learned English as an older person. Interesting. Yeah. So the whole idea that you should wait until high school to learn language because then you're old enough to understand is the exact opposite of what you should be doing. Like, you're supposed to be teaching kids multiple languages from a very young age because that's when their brains are plastic enough and they wanted to know how that's possible. It turns out that your brain creates multiple language maps. So you have a language map for your native language, you have another language map for this other one you learned in school, then another one for the language your grandmother speaks, and you can just switch between them, depending. Amazing. So when you do learn another language, though, and I guess this is probably true for any age, but as an adult for sure, or a teenager for sure, when you already have your own home language solidified. There's something called language transfer that can happen or that always happens, and it can be either good or bad. So depending on what your language is and what language you're learning, it might be a little bit easier to learn that language and say certain words. Or it might be a little harder, depending on how close it is to your native tongue and accent. Yeah. So, like, a German learning to speak English may have a tougher time with the Th sound, and they may say like A-T-Z or harder s in place of it. Like instead of z germans. Right. Or if you're Italian and you're learning Spanish, you might have an easier time because those are a little more similar, especially with the PS in Spanish. Right. Because in Spanish, the P is a non aspirated short onset time sound. Right. Yeah. In English, we would have a hard time with the P because we say P we aspirate it. Right. P, like you're breathing when you say it stop, and it has a long onset time. Right. That also explains why native English speakers often have trouble distinguishing between P and B when they're listening to Spanish being spoken. Yeah. And so depending on if it's easier or harder, it's called negative positive transfer or negative transfer. And I remember in German, learning to roll those Rs was probably the hardest thing for most of the kids in the class. Sure. Right. And again, it's the same thing. It's like with the Southern accent, with German. Right. So their language map is so well formed and so immovable that they are following the rules of that language map even when they're trying to speak this foreign language. Well, languages don't have the same maps, which accounts for different languages and accents and all sorts of things like that. So on the one hand it's cognitive, but on the other hand there's also differences in motor function, right? Just like when you say L but not R as a kid and they seem interchangeable to you when you grow up. Right. You have trouble actually making the L sound like making your tongue make the L sound. Instead it wants to make the R sound. Right. So you have the cognitive trouble with your language map applying your language map to this new language. And you also have the physical trouble of actually making your mouth and your tongue and your airway do the things that it has to do to make those sounds like rolling in R. Yeah. It's simply unpracticed in doing so. Yeah, but that's it. The good thing about it is that you can learn a good accent, you can learn to speak another language. It just is harder because your brain is pretty well set. You can retrain it though. It just takes practice. And apparently from what I saw, the best way to learn an accent and to learn a new language is lots and lots and lots of listening up front. And you shouldn't just jump in and start trying to speak. You should spend a lot of time just sitting around listening to it first. Yeah, I'm way out of practice now with remembering German and speaking it, but I got pretty good at one point to the point where when I went to Germany, I had German saying you speak very good German. And that's like the best thing that can happen when you travel to a different country and you're trying is for someone to say wow, you speak really good French or German or whatever. Yeah. Here, have a schnitzel on me. It's funny. My buddy and I. Brett. Who did my first big Europe trip with. We went to a beer garden in Germany. In Munich and had a lot of beers. A lot of spines because this local dude who didn't speak English and I spoke very little German and we drank with this guy for about 4 hours and bonded in two different languages over the music of the Beatles. Oh, cool. And it worked somehow and got our picture with a guy and it was just one of those travel moments that just one of the best travel moments of my life. And I always wonder if this guy remembered that at all. And that guy turned out to be Kristoff Walt. Yeah, I have as young as I didn't remember it's one of those things like as a young American, I was like, oh my God, that was the worst thing ever. I could see that happening in germany, but in France, no French person has ever said, hey, your French accent is pretty good. Yeah, exactly. How soon can I help you? Right, well, let's talk a little bit, because this, to me is one of the more fascinating parts of accents is the fact that British, English and England, as colonizers all over the world, we still ended up with so many variations of the English accent. Yeah. Which makes sense. Fascinating. But it's basically like Britain went around the world and said, oh, we're going to have an illegitimate child here, and we'll have an illegitimate child here, and then an illegitimate child here. And they'll all just kind of look like us a little bit. Right, okay. It's a little bit like that, but language wise or accent wise. Yeah. So everybody who speaks English, I should say in India and in Australia and in Canada and in the United States, they all speak English. All of us speak English? We're speaking the same language, but we speak it with different accents. And when you start to look into why, it just becomes extremely fascinating. Like you were saying, like Australia. Right, yes. The Australian accent. Anybody in the world can pick out an Australian accent, no problem. Right. And it's such a unique accent, but it's also a hodgepodge of English accents because you had so many people coming from England, in different parts of England, forced together in these small pockets over this large geography, but relatively small pockets of, like, cities and towns and stuff. And their disparate regional English accents came together to form a common, unique one, which is now known as Australian English. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. I've always heard that English actors have an easier time picking up the Southern American accent because they're so similar. Oh, yeah. And there's actually a lot to that. I read this great article from PBS called Rfolthern. That's the letter R-F-U-L. Southern. Right. From John Fought. And it basically kind of lays out the history of the Southern American dialect, where it came from and how it's changed over the years, and the fact there's kind of two different ones. They call one the r less southern accent and one the RFO, meaning with words. When you have an r before a consonant or less accents, you drop that r altogether. So there are different variations because you see this in, like, in New England, like in Boston, and then you also see it in places like coastal South Carolina and coastal Mississippi and Alabama. And so you think, well, that's weird. But when you think about it, it's true. If you're talking about packing the car, you're dropping the r with that hard Boston accent, but you can also park the car in South Carolina. Here we go. Sorry. I'm getting fired up. But it's the same thing, and it came from the same thing. So what happened was these coastal plains of early European settlements, and we're talking not New York City and not New Orleans, but all these other places came from our less areas of southeastern England. And so as they were settled, they set up shop and farmed around the coast, and the coastline didn't venture very far inland. And so then there was a second wave that started coming from our full areas, and this started to change, apparently. And what we're talking about is ROTIC rhotic and non ROTIC dialogue or dialogue ROTIC is where the R is hard. Yes. Like park. And non ROTIC would be like park. Yes. And apparently in England, especially in southeastern England, when they colonize America, they sounded a lot more like what you would think of as an American accent today. Yeah, probably a lot more. We probably sound very much like they sounded back then. Right. Which has just knocked my socks off, man. Not just this podcast, maybe fact of the year. Yeah. But at some point, and I think there's a little bit of debate on exactly when there became a conscious shift in England to draw class distinctions, to have a more posh sounding accent. Is that right? Yeah. There's something called the typical British accent. When you listen to, say, someone like Hugh Grant speak what you think of as, like, kind of classy British, that's called Hugh Grant. Right. Classiest guy around. Sure. At the very least, he's one of the most charming, which is how he gets away with so much. But that accent is called received pronunciation. Yeah. And it developed in England as kind of an aspirational accent among the middle class. The middle class was starting to grow from what I saw that it was the mid 19th century. I know you saw something like sometime in the 18th century. But regardless, it came out of the middle class in England getting a little wealthier, sending more and more middle class English kids off to boarding school, where they were kind of being instructed in this received pronunciation accent. And it became the educated southern England accepted way to speak. Right, right. It was British that really got cemented in the 1920s when the BBC started broadcasting, they actually held a panel to try to figure out what accent or accents their broadcasters were going to speak in, and they settled on received pronunciation. It became the one accent that all BBC broadcasts were done in from the 1920s to the 1970s or eighty S. It became quintessential British accents, despite the fact that something like less than 10%, maybe even less than that of the population, actually speak with that accent. But that's what everybody else in the world typically thinks of when they think of a British accent. It's fascinating. Again, this came after America was colonized, from what I understand, after Australia was colonized. So at the time, Americans and the British sounded very much like we do today. Yeah. So starting in about picking back up with the. R lesson. Our full stories starting in about the middle of the 18th century, for the next 100 years or so, you had more people coming over from Northern and western England and Scotland and Ireland, and they apparently started entering the US. Not along the coastline, but through the Port of Philadelphia, which that was the busiest in the nation at the time. So these folks move inland instead of hanging around the coast and then west and Southwest, and they had the RFOL accents. And so you had these inland varieties of accents that were Rfoll, these coastal that were RLS. And Rles was far more prominent for a long time just because of the way migration happened and immigration happened. Right. And then our full has since sort of taken over. Our full Southern has taken over, and our full Northern, because it's sort of the same version or two different versions of the same thing. And now our full is what you kind of think more of as that sort of rednecky Southern accent, like orange. You're glad I said orange? Like that. Sure. Okay. What they say here in this PBS article is the prevailing dialect of, like, NASCAR. You think NASCAR, you say that hard. R instead of nascai. Nascai. I feel like I'm going to sing. Yeah. Just think of Judy Davis and Barton Fink. Okay. Well bought. And I always think of Charleston for some reason. Oh, yeah. Because Charleston is super R less in that respect. And yeah, I think just like in, say, England or the UK, that RLS is associated with higher society, I think. Yeah, for sure. The non rhotic speech, for sure. So then the Sun Belt gets populated, and people keep going inland and more inland, and our full accents, both Northern and Southern, sort of became the dominant speaking style in the United States. Well, you know, you said that a lot of those immigrants came to the US. And stayed in the coastal areas or went inland. There's been a lot of speculation that there are pockets of accents. Say. Like. Tucked away in the Appalachians or in the Outer Banks or just kind of in less populated or trafficked areas where those original accents were captured and kind of frozen in time. Which apparently all that's been debunked. That you can't find the original colonialbritish imperial accent in the people in the Outer Banks or in the Appalachians. But it's pretty romantic to think of. Totally. And I got to say this, speaking of the Appalachian accent, I've said before, that airline pilot talk, how all airline pilots sound exactly the same. Yeah. And they're all actually doing chuck. Yeager. Chuck Yeager, whose Appalachian accent was kind of famous because he broke the sound barrier. All pilots kind of aspired to sound like him. So that's why all airline pilots sound exactly the same on the intercom, because whether they know it or not, trying to emulate Chuck Yeager, who actually did talk like that, and that raises, like, something pretty significant, Chuck, is you can acquire an accent just by aspiring to sound like somebody. And that's how a lot of accents have spread over time. That's how received pronunciation spread. People listened to the broadcaster on the BBC and said, I liked the cut of that guy's jib, and they started mimicking him. And that's how that accent spread. Yeah. You want to take a break? Yeah, we'll take another break and we'll talk about media and the movies and how accidents can affect the perception of a person. Right after that, only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. 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All right, so I got a call one day from John Hodgeman, and he if you don't know, he's a writer and actor and more and more so an actor. And he was auditioning for a part where he had to speak with a Southern accent. So he called me up and was like, Dude, I need some help. What do I do? Because I think he's heard me complain a lot about bad Southern accents in movies and TV and how that's just such an immediate turn off for me. That's why I couldn't watch House of Cards because Kevin Spacey oh, his accent, you mean? Oh, yeah. I just turned it off. You meant just Kevin Spacey in general now. He kind of bugs me in general these days. Yeah. I don't see baby driver, then. Oh, no. I love baby driver. And I liked him in it. And that's the first thing I've really? In a long time. Wow. Yeah. I thought it was standard Kevin spacey. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, it was, but I used to love Kevin Spacey back in the day. In what, though? Just in the early days, like usual. Suspects and American Beauty. Okay. No Qualms here with American Beauty. Yeah. I kind of just got tired of it. Yeah. I think pay it forward really killed it for me. You should go see it. See it? Yeah. Go to my bedroom. Yeah. Wherever you have to see it. See it. Well. Baby driver was great, though. How about that movie? Yeah, fantastic. No batting Southern accents in there. Really? I mean, they were although the whole thing was shot and set in Atlanta. Yeah. I mean, Baby and the oh, yeah. The waitress had a bad Southern accent. It wasn't bad. I thought it was okay. Okay. It wasn't too bad. By my standard, at least. Got you. So, anyway, Hodgeman calls me, and I basically told them that even someone like me who doesn't have a very strong Southern accent, at the very least, there's still something we do in the south, which is we soften our T's, generally. Many times t's become DS, and sometimes they become NS. Like no one from Atlanta says atlanta? Atlanta. It would be spelled adlanna. You know what's funny is it's exactly how people from Toronto said Toronto. Toronto. So we live in Atlanta, but we say Toronto. Right. But whenever you hear someone say Atlanta, you just think, get the stick out of your butt, pal. Relax. Don't be so formal. Yeah. So I went through and I took Hodgman's pages and sort of rewrote them phonetically. I hope he charged for this. No, of course not. It kind of helped him out, I think. I don't think he got the part. But that's because of his acting, not because of my poor husband. Just kidding. But anyway, it's an interesting lesson in that accents. I think oftentimes regional accents of the same language often come down to such subtleties as softening certain letters or dropping certain letters or TS or whatever. But you raised a point earlier where people in Boston and people in Alabama both drop their Rs. They're R less. But you would never confuse an English speaker in Alabama with an English speaker in Boston. So there's a lot more going on there. Well, like the Irish immigration in Boston. That had a big impact. Sure, because they weren't immigrating to Mobile. Right. But, I mean, there's a lot more going on, accent wise, to just dropping the R. Oh, sure. But the reason why that one is brought up so much is because it's such a common and identifiable beginning point to differentiate different accents. Yeah. And I guess that's probably a good place to talk about perception because whether we like it or not, if you hear a very thick, like, old school New York Brooklyn thing or a very Southern kind of NASCAR talker, you're going to get stereotyped. It sucks. But you have a very hard Southern accent. People are going to think you're dumb to a large degree. That's because of the hookworm more than anything. Well, true. But I think any really heavy accent can very much affect what a person thinks initially when they talk to you. Well, yeah. So accents are at their base, an in group out group marker. Right. Yes. And despite how long we've been living in a larger, more integrated society full of more and more people that we interact with from different groups every day, we still have this kind of evolutionary spark where we are aware of people who are different from us. Right. Yeah. And we surmise different things, whether correctly or incorrectly, based on some of these markers. And one of the big easy to identify markers that says, oh, you're from a different group than me. Let me just put a little barrier between us here. Is the accent. Yeah. For sure. They've even done studies. I know that the is it babel or babel? Babel. Babbel. The language app. They've done studies and they've had people mark, like, what accents they thought were sexy, which accents they thought were annoying, which ones they trust and don't trust. Right. And of course, like, a French accent was more favorable. The German accent was the least favorable. Right. Just generally, they've done tests that find that people are distrusting of someone with a foreign accent, period. Yeah. And I don't know if that has to do with the fact that it is in group out group, or if there's kind of a much lighter hearted explanation for it, which is that we tend to prefer people with our own accents or people who sound like us are close to us. Sure. Because that's what we're used to. So we're just physically more comfortable hearing that. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. Not hearing something different puts us on edge or guards up, or we're just a little less comfortable physically just from hearing somebody speak with an accent. And then another study suggested that cognitively, we're having to work harder to understand what a person with an accent that's foreign to us is saying. And that one way to put it, is that we kind of resent them for making us work harder, so we're less trusting of what they're saying. Right. Which is just weird. Well, yeah. And all of this is reinforced and born out of and reinforced by movies and television to a large degree. Yeah. Because anyone who's ever seen a movie. They have these kind of go to trope accents depending on what kind of character it is, whether it's the dumb Southerner or in the case of crime, like this New York accent for, like, petty criminals. Whereas the criminal mastermind will usually have a British accent. Yeah, I read an article on that about villains having accents, and usually it's British. And apparently that's just kind of lazy filmmaking in a way. Well, like, many years, for sure. Yeah. No matter if it was, like, on another planet or Russian villain, the villain typically has a British accent. And the article was saying that it had to do with one. It's just an easy, cheap way of saying this person's foreign, this person's other. So right there, they're the bad guy. Right, right. And then, secondly, it was British, so that we can understand what they're saying still very easily. Yes, but on an unconscious level, again, they're others. They're foreign. And then in America, there's something called cultural cringe. It's in America, it's in Australia that there's this idea that the British colonized this country and they were originally, like, the parent country and there's still some kind of unconscious resentment of them. Yeah. So that making the villain British taps into that unconscious disdain for British people, which you obviously don't have consciously. But it's called cultural cringe, where you're just kind of, like, unconsciously comparing your culture to their culture and irritation comes out of it. Yeah. It's funny. Even the Star Wars universe, it was a long time ago in a different galaxy, and yet you have some American accents and some English accents, and it's kind of all over the map. I mean, even in that first Star Wars movie, right. Carrie Fisher sort of vacillated between English accent and regular American. Well, she almost adopted a mid Atlantic accent. Yeah, we're not talking about Maryland. In the early days of the movies, they called it mid Atlantic, which basically meant just somewhere between England and the United States. Right. And that's how almost all of the early movie stars spoke. Yeah. And I think from what I saw, you could trace it back to a single dialect coach who taught, I think, Catherine Hepburn to speak that way. And that combined with Kerry Grant becoming a star and he was born in England and raised there till he was 16. And then moving to America, those two becoming big stars at the same time made this mid Atlantic accent just spread like wildfire because that's what people saw in the movies. That's what they aspire to. So some people started talking like that. Yeah. Super interesting. There was a woman named Nancy Elliott that did a sample of American actors in American movies from the 1930s to the 19 seven s, and she showed a steady decline in our dropping in the Arlace accent, which would support that what you're talking about with the mid Atlantic from 60% of actors in the 1930s to 0% in the 1970s drop their Rs. And then she saw within people's individual careers that had long careers in movies. They modified their pronunciations over time. Right. Really interesting. Yeah. So one more thing about the British villain, or the villain, no matter where he's from, having a British accent. This article called out, and I thought, very rightly. So inglorious bastards is doing it. Right. Because there's like whole scenes that are spoken in German or Italian with subtitles. Yeah. So the Nazis spoke German, which they would have spoken German. Right. You have to read along English with a British accent. Right, yeah, exactly. That's pretty funny. I thought this is interesting with the singers generally, and there are exceptions like The Proclaimers and Oasis and Madness at times, phil Collins, people that would sing with a distinct British accent of some kind. But generally what you hear on the radio is what this one linguist called pop music accent, which is there are a couple of theories on why you can't tell from Mick Jagger to Adele to George Michael that they're not American. Right. And there's been a lot of debate over the years, but there seemed to be a couple of accepted reasons. One is that this is just the pop music accent. This is what's popular, this is what sells. And so this is what people do when they sing, no matter where they're from. Yeah. And the other is that intonation has a lot to do with vowel quality, length of your vowels, and that when you sing, you follow a melody which sort of just cancels out or negates the uniqueness of the accent. That one makes sense to me. Both of them do, actually. Yeah. I think it's pretty interesting. I think you almost have to work. Well, maybe not. I was going to say these bands and singers that still sound very British are doing that on purpose. And that may be the case. I don't know. Yes. Like The Darkness. The guy from the Darkness sounds super British. They're from Suffolk. Yeah. And then have you heard of the genre UK grime? No. Apparently that came along out of East London, the it's sort of descendant of drum and bass and dance hall and stuff like that, but it's just this really heavily accented rap. Is it like dizzy rascal. Is he UK grime? I think so. Okay, well, then I have heard it and kind of like it because I'm not hip at all to this stuff, so I had to look it all up and I think he was on the list. And then I listened to a couple of tunes from some of these people and yeah, really cool sounding. Yeah. Dizzy Rascal's. Cool roots maneuvered. Check him out, too. I think he was on the list. Yeah, man. Okay. Yes. I like UK grime. UK grime, yeah. Speaking of Great Britain, apparently so here in the States, if you have a different accent or whatever. Especially if you have, like, a Southern drawl and you just kind of sound slow. Yeah. People elsewhere in the country think of you as slow. That's just how they take you initially until you have to work a little harder to prove yourself. Right. That's kind of aside from maybe like, valley girl or Valley Guy accent that's really the only accent that's super discriminated against here in the States. But apparently in the UK, accents are taken very seriously and discrimination is quite possible. I wrote a 2013 article from The Guardian that was talking about a study that had just taken place. And the study found that 80% of the employers surveyed admitted to discriminating against people based on their regional accent with hiring. Yeah. And that 28% of Brits said that they felt discriminated against their accents. I didn't see any study that found the same thing in America but I guarantee those numbers would have been in the basement compared to that. Yeah, it's definitely a thing in the UK because I've heard even friends of mine that are English, when they talk to someone else, they're like, oh, yeah, he's from this area, Northern, and not necessarily even disparaging. It's just I don't know. It's just a bigger deal, I think. Yeah, I think it is, too, over there. I wish they all talk like Terrence Stamp from the Limey. I like Michael Caine's accent, which apparently is cockney. I had no idea that that was a Cockney accent. Although once I read that, I was like, oh, yeah, I could hear that. Well, it's funny that I love the terrace stamp in the limy, but I read an article where one reviewer said it was like the worst accent they'd ever heard from The Guardian. That's funny. But did you see that movie? No, I didn't. It's so good. Steven Soderberg movie is it where he and his son build a house together? No, he plays a kind of a British tough coming over to get revenge for his daughter's murder and ends up working at a pizza place in Connecticut. No, man, I know. I haven't seen this movie. Yeah, it's called the lime. It's great. But there's this one scene where he goes off in front of the great Bill Duke who I think late great. Is Bill Duke no longer with us? I don't know who that is. You would recognize him. Okay. Billboard plays an American. I think he's maybe a cop or a detective in the movie. And Terrence Stamp has this great scene where he goes into his office and goes off for like a minute and a half straight in this very thick cockney. Not only accent, but dialect. And Bill Duke's just sitting there at the end, he goes, Bill Duke says, there's only one thing I don't understand. He went, I don't understand every motherf in word that just came out of your mouth. So classic. I got to see that movie. Oh, dude, it's really good. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Does Terrence Stamp hire himself out as a toy for rich kids and Jackie Gleason is the dad? No, that's the toy. It's Richard's movie. The Limey. Peter Fonda is in it. Okay, I'll go see it. Yeah. All right. It's excellent. You got anything else? No. It's weird. This is one of those where it was even kind of long, and I feel like we just didn't even cover half of what we could have. Yeah. No way. We definitely didn't. There's a lot to it. It's pretty interesting. We'll do a part two one day. Oh, yeah. In the meantime, I would direct everybody to, I think, wired to look up movie accent expert breaks down 32 actors accents. This dialect coach is just doing well. He talks about 32 different characters, and some are really good, like Philip Seymour Hoffman doing Capote, apparently is dead on. And Kevin Costner doing Robin Hood is supposedly the worst accent of all time in movie history. You know who I love a lot? But he can't do an American accent. But I'll still watch them just because I love them is Ewan McGregor in the season of Fargo. He was great and I loved it, but he just had such a hard time. That Scottish accent just comes through. Yeah. Same with the men who stare at goats. Yeah, he had trouble in there. I mean, it was fine, but you noticed it every once in a while. He really did the wet behind the ears thing. He's so likable, though. I don't care. I just get over it. Whereas some people, I'm just like, nah, I'm not going to watch it. Yeah, I'm with you. Well, if you want to know more about accents, get out there in the world. Meet new people, listen to their accents, maybe try some on for size. Who knows? And since I said try some on for size, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this switcheroo, and it's kind of funny. It was not really accent related, but voice related. Okay. Because we get a lot of comments about people that share it differently, but this one is interesting. Hey, guys. A little funny anecdote that I'd share. I listened to the podcast for about three years. Shortly after I started listening, I pulled up a picture of you guys just to put faces to your voices. Yesterday, for some reason, I pulled up a video. He watched our Google Talk at Google headquarters. I got you. And he realized that he had been picturing us backwards this whole time. But that was jarring. So that's a little switch on the usual story we get that people don't even know. So he said, since I only saw a picture, I guess I just assumed. I knew by looking who had which voice. I've had that image for all these episodes. As to who is who. So imagine how odd of an experience it was to watch a video. I saw Josh speak with Chuck's voice, and Chuck and Josh's, he's by far one of the weirdest moments of had in recent memory. Thanks for all the great shows. Keep them coming. That is Nick from Indiana. Thanks a lot, Nick. I appreciate that. Yes, that's all I have to say about that. You just imagine that was probably pretty funny. Yeah, he's still laughing about it. If you want to get in touch with us, like Nick did, tell us a funny story. We're always down to hear those. You can tweet to us at syskast or Josh Clark. You can hang out on Facebook at Charlesw chuck Bryant or Stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestepforks.com. And as always, join us at home on the Web stuffyshehno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. 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. 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. 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 petco, pet supplies plus and select neighborhood pet stores."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2016-10-06-sysk-easter-island-final.mp3	Why Did Easter Island's Civilization Collapse?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/why-did-easter-islands-civilization-collapse	When the first Europeans landed on Rapa Nui, which they renamed Easter Island, they were puzzled by what happened there. Only a few thousand people lived there but there were signs of a massive civilization that once flourished. What happened there?	When the first Europeans landed on Rapa Nui, which they renamed Easter Island, they were puzzled by what happened there. Only a few thousand people lived there but there were signs of a massive civilization that once flourished. What happened there?	Thu, 06 Oct 2016 07:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=280, tm_isdst=0)	54574016	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there. Look at those big Stoneheads behind you. We must be on Easter Island. Yeah, we are, Chuck. We just start every show like that little role play. Okay, who are you right now? I don't know. I'm not sure what that was. It started off as me, but then it went into Barney Fife or something. Right? Yeah, there you go. Barney Feifee on holiday to Easter Island. Or rapa newie Mr. Limpet. Yeah, boy, that ages us. Or Mr. Chicken. The ghost of Mr. Chicken. Another good one. I'd say 75% of our listeners are like, who is Barney Five? Who is Mr. Limpet? Who is Mr. Chicken? Right. Go look it up. You'll be delighted. Yeah, man. Don Knotts. Yeah. He also did great turns on Scooby Doo. Oh, sure. And Three's Company. Yeah, man, he had a great career. I love that guy. Rip. Don Nas, is he not with us? Yes. I think he died, like, in the last 5610 years, I think. You never know, man. Some of those people, you're like, oh, sure. Like, abigoda people thought he was dead for years. It was like a part of pop culture that he just died this year, finally back right away. It's very sad. He's like, fine, here I go. I think maybe that's that the ultimate compliment or the ultimate sign of disrespect. That when you pass everyone's like, I thought they were already dead. Disrespect. Okay. Yeah. We're on Easter Island. That's where we are. That's right. Rapa NUI, which means the big rapper in polynesian in rapa NUI language. Did you know that? Are you alluding to Joe versus the Volcano? No. Okay. That's the Waponi Woo. Yes. The big woo was the volcano. I just thought you were playing on that. No, I was looking high and low for what rapanui translates into English. And all I could see were Jackass is he said that it translates to easter island like that's not what I mean. Internet? Yeah. Did you punch the Internet? I did, yeah. But it turned out it was just my laptop. Now, the closest I found was that rapa NUI means big rapa. Rapa no idea what rapa means. Did you see the movie Rapa Newie? No. The Kevin Reynolds movie? Is that who made it? Yeah, I think he wrote and directed it. I know he directed it. I'm pretty sure he wrote it, too. And who is he? What do I know that name? Oh, he's done all sorts of stuff. Water World? No, it's Kevin Costner. Well, no, he was in it, but I think he directed Kevin Reynolds, and Kevin Costner's careers were very much intertwined. Maybe that's what I'm thinking. They got confused a lot. He's done a lot of great stuff. But you didn't see Rapa Newie. No. I assume it's a story, fictional story wrapped in the events of probably the decline of the island would be my guess. Yes. Civil war strife possibly cannibalism. What's interesting, though, is that that fictional story wrapped in the true life events turns out true life events are probably fictional as well. Yeah, this, actually and maybe I should give our own article a break, because most people have been telling the same story for years, which is basically the story that author Jared Diamond told in his book in 2005 called Collapse. Right. He popularized it. He wasn't the first one to come up with this interpretation. No, but he's the one that really he's the gun, germs and steel guy, right? Yeah, one of my heroes. He wrote one of the greatest things I've ever read. The worst mistake in the history of the human race. Oh, really? Yeah. Like a one word book? Erkel yeah, I was trying to think of something, but that's better than anything I could have thought of. No, he was saying that he made the case that moving from hunting and gathering to agriculture was the worst mistake humans have ever made. Oh, really? Great. It's all over the Internet. If you want to go read it. Really great. Easy read. And life changing. Changed my life. Is that why you stalked Buffalo today? By hand? Yes. Raised my own crops. You come home, you're like, Yummy, skin that thing. I need a pelt. She's like, I just got done. Skinning the last one from yesterday. You scan it and you go, okay, where were we? We were talking about Kevin Reynolds rapidly. Right? Sure. We were saying that. And by the way, Kevin Reynolds did direct Water World. He directed Robin Hood Prince of Thieves. A lot of Kevin Costner movies. Probably The Postman, too. No, he did Fandango. That was a good one. Yeah, he's done a bunch of stuff. All right, so I think I remember where I was, which is we should take it easy on our article a little bit. I was a little annoyed that this article didn't say theorize things like that. It kind of just said, like, no, this is what happened. And it was really judgy. Like, the thing that it bought into is an extremely judgy interpretation of things. Yeah. And it bought it as fact. It's the judgiest article on the whole site. Well, what about the one I sent you earlier today? Yeah. How to deal with Brown Nosers. Yeah. Article on our site called how to Deal With Brownnosers. Four pages. Yes. If you're looking for advice, go check it out. Goodness me. Weird times, my friend. So, yeah, I was a little annoyed that it kind of treated us all as absolute scientific fact yeah. When it certainly isn't. It just seems like one of those things that someone said it, someone else wrote a popular book, and then everyone's like, oh, well, that's what happened. Right. And that's really unusual for anthropology and archeology, frankly. Jared diamond should have known better. He's really taking a lot of heat. His star was pretty high at the time. He had, like, a nat geo show. I think he wrote Guns, Germs and Steel. He wrote this book, collapsed how Civilizations Decide to choose to Succeed or Fail. And even though the wording in that title, like, how a Society Chooses to fail, is really judgy in and of itself. So he definitely felt there were a lot of plays on the word collapse and Jared Diamond collapsing as a result. So now he goes to that geo and knocks on the door, and everyone's like, Shh, we turn it off. He'll see that we're in. But yes, the point is that there is a set of facts related to Rapanui, to Easter Island that when you put together, form a mystery, a mystery that's basically been around since the first European set foot on Easter Island and then came back and brought news of this place to the rest of the world. People have puzzled over what happened there. And the problem is, the oral traditions that came from Rapanui, from Easter Island came along in the 1880s, a good 150 years after Europeans came and Christianized everybody, when the population had been down to, like, 100 people. And even today, anthropologists and archeologists say we don't really trust the oral tradition from rapidly et at all. Right. It's not a trustworthy source of information, even, like, in a folkloric way. You're saying the basics of it might not even be correct. So they're having to go back, which is very weird. That's a very unusual position to be in, both for the people, the indigenous culture and the people who are trying to figure out what happened. The challenge is to take what we do know for a fact about Rapidly and then interpret it correctly and not in a way that's like, this is it. This is the end all, be all explanation, which seems to be this weird thing that Rapidly has over academics who should know better. They say, this is it. And the part about Jared Diamond, the reason he fell so hard is that his interpretation or the interpretation that he clamped onto and popularized in his book was really judgy. Really judgy? Really. Like, these people screwed up with their stupid faith and some wacky tiki god, and look what brought them. And now we all need to learn the lesson because we're going down the same road. And that's just not that you're not supposed to do that. All right, so why don't we do it this way? We'll give you the story as has been theorized and popularized for many years, and then we'll hold off till the end. I think that's good for some new insight. Did I give away too much? No, I don't think so. Okay. Just judgy. I was judgy. No. Okay. Just because you say the word judgy doesn't make you judge. Is that right? I think so. Okay. And also just wanted to tease this. We have a very special listener mail later, too. So how about that? Lots of reasons to stick around. All right. So you keep saying these words like Easter Island and rapanui, like they're the same thing, because they are rapanui. Also called east de pasqua, which means Easter Island and Spanish, right? That's right. Easter island actually named, of course, it doesn't matter what your island is called. When the Dutch or the British or the Spaniards would come to call and they would say, oh, no, here's what we'll call it. Right? It doesn't matter what you say. So we'll call it Easter Island because I'm a Dutch admiral named Jacob Rogovine, and it's Easter when I landed here in 1722. So what a great name. Obviously, it's Easter Island. Rogue vine also gets credit for discovering Easter Island. Actually, he was looking for an island that was Easter Island that had been described by a pirate named Edward Davis in 1687. Davis didn't come ashore, but even Roguene was convinced that Easter Island was the island that Davis had described. Did he say there are large stone heads? No, he didn't mention the heads at all. Well, of course, weird Easter Island is. I'm sure everybody knows this, but we should say right away that they are very well known and most well known for their moai. Moai? These beautiful, enormous carved stone statues, not just stone heads. And that whole boy, it's annoying. That Internet thing still pops up, like, once a year when people are like, look, there were bodies, too. It's not just heads they've discovered. Their bodies are buried underground. They've known that since, like, the early 1900s. But it's this weird look up snaps. It's this weird Internet thing where every couple of years, the same stinking article gets shared that shows all these archaeologists have dug down and discovered there are bodies beneath the earth, even though he's known this forever. Got you. So anyway, these beautiful, beautiful statues, which we're going to talk about in greater detail, but let's talk a little bit about how the original island was, what it was like there, who these people were. The Waponi originally colonized. Yeah. The Waponi Woo. The Rapa NUI. The island is rapa NUI. Two words. And the inhabitants of the island are called the Rapanui. Clean, simple. I love it. Right. So the Rapanui, they think, were probably a single family that was headed up by a guy who was considered the first chief of the island. His name was Houtu Matua, or the great parent. Hold on. You know what just occurred to Megoda was the leader of the Woo. Yeah. All right. God, was there a better movie than that one? It's one of my favorites. We've talked about it a lot. Yeah. It's Kevin Reynolds masterpiece. So hutu Matua was originally the first chief of Rapanui. Yes. And he allegedly came with just his family. Yes. They don't know exactly what they were doing out in their canoes, but they had seaworthy canoes because they hailed from Polynesia. Yeah. And they were great sailors, very experienced and hardy at sea. Yes. And this would have been a long standing tradition setting out for new unknown islands because they believe that Polynesians are descended from Southeast Asians who somewhere between 3000, 504,000 years ago, left Southeast Asia, started moving eastward toward the western coast of South America in that general direction, and would come across an island, stay there, populate it, move on to another one, populate it. And that's how Polynesia got populated. Rapanui, I believe, is the easternmost island in Polynesia. So they think that was settled last. Yeah. Go to Google Earth if you're in front of your computer and just type in Easter Island and then it'll pop up this little triangular shaped island and then just start zooming out and keep zooming out, and you'll see a lot of blue. And it's amazing to think that people got there in a canoe. Yeah. Because it's like 3000 or 3500 miles from Tahiti, right? Yeah. Like 2200 miles from Chile. Right. But Chile is not where they came from. They would have traveled by canoe. But that's the closest land. Right. It's still 2200 miles away. Right. It's amazing. Yeah. Remote. But they traveled like 3003, 500 miles in a canoe. Unbelievable. To get from one island to another and probably less. I think there's probably islands between Tahiti and easter island. But even still, they traveled a very substantial distance. Right. And they clearly were intending to either make it to another island or to colonize Rapanui because they brought with them supplies. Right. They brought with them plants to plant, like the tarot root, which is like, I believe, a cousin of the sweet potato. It's like a purple sweet potato. Yes, that is correct. Nanners and tarot and this whole sweet potato thing, too. There was somebody who put out there that hired all. Yes. Maybe they came from south America because that's where the sweet potato comes from. And then other people have since said no. There's a lot of evidence that suggests that's not true. Right. Well, yeah. Thor hired all said, hey, there's sweet potatoes here. Sweet potatoes are indigenous to South America. Close. Therefore they're from South America. Yeah. He didn't really put a lot of thought into that now. Well, he was an explorer. That's what he did. He explored. He built a raft, kontiki and sailed it himself from South America to Easter Island back in the was cool. But he was a doer. A little more than a thinker. Right. Okay. And I believe they've concluded that the sweet potato actually originated in Southeast Asia, which just led support even more, but yeah. So they came here, they settled this island, they landed on the shore. It's tiny. It is. It's about three times the size of Manhattan. Yeah, it's 64 sq. Mi. Like I said, it's triangular and was created, like a lot of the islands from volcanic eruptions, which also come into play with these statues, as we will see. Yes. And when they landed, his family said, well, we're family, but we better get to populating the place. So here's some wine right. Here's some terror route. Let's get to it. Right. The island they landed on, though, was potentially, they think, much different than the island that we know today. If you go there today, you're going to see some white sandy beaches and not a lot of trees. No. They believe that there could have been as many as 16 million palm trees at first. Just like rice with palm trees. Yeah. Like so many of the islands. Like Jim with the palm trees whenever another one grows. Yeah. And it wasn't the friendliest. I mean, I say friendly. It was friendly, but it wasn't hospitable. Yeah, that's the word. There wasn't like just food everywhere and tons of seafood. Apparently the waters around there are low in nutrients, so no coral reefs, and that means not a lot of fish. So you had some lizards, you had some mullets, you had some insects. And if you went fishing, you had to go deep sea fishing, like away from the island. But again, get a dolphin. Right. Dolphin hunting. That's what they ate. I know. So gross. Which they could do because they had really great canoes, but it was an ordeal. They ate a lot of vegetables, basically. Right. And a lot of those they planted. Right. So they're living this way. This article says they settled about 400 Ce, right? Yes. Which was, what, 1600 years ago? I saw elsewhere from more reliable sources. Most people think it was about 1000 years ago instead of 1600. So about 1000 Ce, they settled the island and the population starts to grow pretty quickly. Apparently having six toes was a fairly normal trait among rapanui originally, because they might be in bread. Sure. And everything was going kind of hunky dory. They started ostensibly slashing and burning trees to clear land for fields. And they made their way. Yeah. They were very spiritual people. They believed in the idea of Mana sense of Mana, which is this spiritual and political authority. And they instilled this through their arts, through cave drawings and through these statues, which still haven't really gotten to, and through carvings, music, dance. And it was a big deal. It meant a lot to them. Right. So the rapidweans followed the traditional polynesian structure of governance, which was there was a different clans, right? Yeah. And then there was one head chief, one tribal leader that was in charge of everybody, basically like a vagoda. Who else would you want? And the authority of that chief came from deceased ancestors, other chiefs that had lived and died and were now venerated as basically idols, supernatural idols, by the people who lived on the island. And this power came from these ancestors to the living chiefs in the form of this man, of this spiritual power. And one of the most focused laser focus Mana was emanated was through the moai. That's a great place to take a break, my friend. Thanks. Nice set up. Hey, Chuck. Blue Apron is an amazing way to cook at home using amazing, fresh, amazingly great ingredients, and they're on a mission to bring it to as many people as they can. That's right. They achieve this by supporting a more sustainable food system, setting the highest standards for ingredients in building a community of home chefs. They have established partnerships with over 150 local farms, fisheries, and ranchers all across the United States. Yeah. And in addition to making some great meals, Chuck, you're going to save some money. People who eat out a lot or buy at high end grocery chains can now spend under $10 a person for a delicious meal cooked right there at home with a little bit of love throwing in. That's right. And talk about love, baby. The baked whole wheat rigatoni, delicious little cone, cabbage and sage in there. Delish. Delish, indeed, Chuck. And right now, Blue Apron is making it even easier to give them a try. You can check out this week's menu and get your first three meals for free with free shipping by going to BlueApron. comStuff, you'll love how good it feels and tastes to create incredible home cooked meals with Blue Apron. So don't wait that's BlueApron.com stuff. BlueApron a better way to cook. All right. These moai, which you refer to as heads because you believe that Internet meme well, it's not so much that it's a lot ahead to the body. Yes. Proportionately speaking. Yeah. It's almost all head. That's right. Which some people think that one of the reasons is because they were meant to be a phallus. Yeah. And of course, it's taken as literal fact by the How Stuff Works article. That's right. All right, so these moai, these beautiful statues. It's not something that you will only find on Easter Island. If you go to Hawaii or Tahiti, you will see similar type of things. And this was, like you said, this was like the purest expression of that mana and how they felt about their ancestors. I think how they understood it was that the mana, this divine energy or divine power, literally transmitted through the moai. Man, I'm going to have trouble with that the whole time. That's right. It's a lot of vowels together. Moai. It is. M-O-A-I think that's a mistake you're making. You're thinking a moai. You're thinking Maori, right? Maybe not. Yes, you're exactly correct. So these things were built. There's a volcano there called Reynoraco, and in the pits of this volcano, they have this volcanic ash, this rock that's very lightweight. Even though these things still weigh a lot, it doesn't weigh as much as granite would, let's say. Right. Lightweight rock. It's very porous, it's malleable, it's very hard. And originally it's tinted in, like, orange and ochre. And at first they would start around 1200 Ad. Or what do you say now? Cece. But even that is kind of a nod to that whole thing. Instead, I think scientists just say years ago. Okay, I like that. So that'd be like, 800 years ago. Or they say X years before present. So, YBP, okay, that's not as clean. No, but I still like it. I'm down with YBP. Yeah. You know me. So terrible. They started off kind of small. They were not as big as they would eventually get because they were just kind of learning and teaching themselves how to do this. They were still large, though. But they weren't as large. Later on, they would find some that they couldn't even move. And we'll get to this, but they would eventually move these things. But, like, El Gigante was the largest one they found, and that was almost 72ft tall. Yeah. I think up to 165 tons is how much they estimate El Gigante weighs. Yeah, but the initial ones that they started with were much, much smaller. Right. Let's go with 10ft or so and five or six tons. Yes. Even that's still nothing to sneeze at, though, you know? Correct. No matter how big your head is. Lgbte specifically, though, is representative of, I think, one of the late Moai, because it's still there. It's still left in its volcanic city. It was never even excavated fully. Oh, really? Yeah, it's just laying there, I think, horizontally to the ground, because they would go in and be like, this area is going to be the Moai. And they would carve it out. They carve out the outline of it, and then they start carving down around it and start carving out the features, carve out beneath it. Or if it was standing up, they would carve out around it and then just leave a little pedestal yes. Called a keel. Right. This article says it was flat, but as we'll see later, that may or may not be true. Yes. And then they would separate it from its keel and then bring it down the mountain somehow. Maybe rope, something like that. Yeah. To their au, which would be the platform on which the moai would eventually stand. And they would line them up on the island's perimeter facing in into the island, not out to the sea. Yeah. Which it says here possibly they were watchfully guarding the island, but I would think that they would be looking out toward the sea if that were the case. I don't know, who knows? But yeah. That point though, where they were brought down the mountain and brought to their, ahu, this island again, it's three times the size of Manhattan. That was not just a quick thing, necessarily. And that's actually like a huge mystery. How did they get these things that, again, the small ones weighed six tons, big ones weighed scores of tons. How did they get these things from one place to another? Especially considering that all they had were palm trees? Palm trees are not the sturdiest trees on the planet. And the kind of rope you can make from like palm is not the strongest rope. So it's been a long standing mystery of how they did this. Yeah. And here's one prevailing theory that for many years. And a lot of people still believe this is how they move them was that they would finish the statue. Like we said. Cut it from the keel. Lower it down with ropes from the area and the volcano. And then put it on these palm logs and use those as like a conveyor system. Essentially rolling these things along very slowly over great distances. Even though. Like you said. The small island to the hall. One of these things was no easy task. Right. So that's the prevailing theory, and it's actually been tested more than once. An archeologist named Joanne Von Tilburg, who said, you know what if you took one of these things and you laid it on its back on top of some logs, like basically make a sled out of logs facing say, in north south direction, and then you roll them over logs that are in east west alignment right perpendicular to it. That could probably work. And they tested out their theory and apparently it took twelve people to move like a six or eight ton Moai 150ft. It took him two minutes. Yeah. So that is a theory. There's this other guy that we're going to talk about a little bit later who has some theories that just smack diamond right in the face. His name is Carl Lipo or Lipo lipo. Of Cal State. Long beach. Banana slugs. No, that's San Jose State, right? Yeah. Cal State. Long beach. The Longshoreman we're going to hear from them. The Cal State long Beach Port Authority. I like that. So Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii. Yeah. Carl Lippo and Terry Hunt. Right? Yeah. Okay, so these two dudes who have their own theories about the other stuff, like I said, but they said and tested, they said, you know what? These things, if they had broader bases than shoulders and it wasn't exactly flat on the bottom, you could actually walk these dudes, stand them upright, get three ropes, get people on the side, on each side of this one person in the back holding it up and just kind of rock it back and forth, and it sort of waddles forward. It's amazing to see. There's this really cool there's a National Geographic video on YouTube that shows all these different ways that they were trying all these different theories tried out, done with, like, is that the animation, man action figures or something? Yeah. Well, you can see the real thing, too, right? At the end, they show these guys trying out the real thing, and this thing is like walking down the road. It's really neat. And it actually jibes with the rapanui oral tradition that the Moai walked to their au their pedestal. Yeah. They actually said, we tied her up and walked them. Right. Well, supposedly, whoever had a lot of mana was in charge of making these things walk, and they did it with their manna. But the idea that you could make these things walk with some rope and it tieing into the oral tradition that they walked them, that's pretty fascinating. Agreed. And in their real test, they only use 18 people. So that ties in with their theories about how many people live there, which we'll get to later. Right. But a few ropes, 18 people, and they maneuvered a ten foot, five ton replica a few hundred yards. People poopoo this and say, you know what? Not all these bases were larger than the shoulders, first of all. And second of all, you basically carved a runway to do this. And it wasn't like that for them. They were taking this over terrain. There's no way you could have walked these dudes. I see. But maybe they did both. Well, there's plenty of other theories. This Czechoslov Slovakian engineer named Pavel pavel? Great name, right? Yes, the magician. So nice. You had to name it. Right? He said that. And I say magician because I assume he's going to say magic. Yeah, right. I don't think so. Okay. No, that's Eric Von Dacon who said that it was UFOs that did it. No, Pavel pavel said it was kind of like it was similar to that walking thing, but rather than the thing actually kind of wobbling down the road, he postulated a twisting motion. Right. So it's kind of like walking, but no part of the base actually leaves the ground. It's just like one part twist forward and then you twist the other side forward and it slowly makes its way forward. Kind of the same. Yeah. And then there's big debate over okay. If you had them on a sled that was rolling over logs, were they standing up or were they laying down? Right. The key thing to remember whenever you're talking about or hearing somebody else, more importantly talk about rapid newie is that no one knows for certain anything. No, but they're making their best, not assumptions, but their theories. Hypotheses at best. Hypotheses at best. They're interpretations of the few facts that we do know. Right? That's right. And one of the things that has long been debated too, is the idea of the population collapse. That must have happened on Rapanui, right? Yeah. So when Admiral Roguevine showed up, he was the first European to see the Moai in person. And he was like, these things are amazing, they're huge. But I estimate there's something like maybe 3000 people living on this island. Right. So something must have led to this population decline because it would have taken 10,000 or 20,000 people to build and construct and move these things down the volcano, construct their, ahu, their pedestals and get them up there. So what happened to the Rapanui? From the moment he got back to Europe and shared this story about Easter Island, this mystery has plagued archaeology in the west. What led to this population decline among the rapid NUI? What happened on Easter Island. It's one of the great mysteries of archeology. Alright buddy, well, let's take a final break here and we will come back and talk about our friends. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, or a professional blog, or if you want to sell something in an online store, we have a really easy, convenient answer for you. And it's called Squarespace. That's right. Josh just whispered it so you know it's true. Squarespace. Yes. With Squarespace you can create a beautiful website using very easy to use intuitive drag and drop tools. You can also sell things using their seamless commerce tools. And if you ever find yourself in a pickle, you can just go online and use their twenty four seven chat and talk with a real live Squarespace person right there to help you solve your problems right away. That's right. And it gets even better. In addition to those beautiful templates and seamless commerce tools, you can start your free trial today. Free trial today. That's Squarespace.com. All you got to do is enter our offer code S-T-U-F-F. You're going to get 10% off your first purchase. That's squarespacecom offer code stuff. Squarespace. So Chuckers, we're back and again. Just to go over, Jacob Rogovine admiral landed on the island, by the way. First thing he did was kill twelve rapanuians who apparently I didn't see anywhere were posing any threat whatsoever. Oh, that's what you do to say we mean business. Right. And I'm sure they were thinking could have killed a couple of us and we'd get the picture, right? Even one that would have done it one and then make eye contact for an extended period of time. Does the same thing as killing a dozen people or just fire your boomstick in the air. Sure. So Roguein shows up and he's like, something really bad happened here. The people have built I think it's something like almost 900 Moai on the island, but only a couple of hundred are on their ahu. We didn't say their ahu. Actually. These platforms, according to Rapanui tradition, were burial grounds. The tombs for the sheets that the moai represented. Right. So very much the same way that like the Egyptians built statues or edifices that were likenesses of the person who was buried there. This is basically the same thing. Yeah, they're ancestors. Wow. I said rice. You did. Instead of rice. So he shows up and he's like, there's hundreds of these things. A lot of them are abandoned en route from the mountain down to the Ou, so are left in the pit. This place doesn't have any trees and there's only 3000 people living here. Something really bad took place and everyone wants to know what. Yeah. Like we said, Jared Diamond did not invent this, but the theory that he popularized in 2005 was that what they did was they basically decimated the island's resources because they use all these palm trees. Right. They burned them down, they cleared paths, they built huts, they built canoes, they used them to roll the moai with. Yeah. So they basically took away and didn't understand what the outcome of this would be. So they took all these trees out, made these pathways, and then what happened was there were no roots to keep. And I think we do one on erosion, we do one on desertification. Yeah. Yeah. So if you don't have tree roots, the rain is just going to wash away all the top soil. The land is going to erode, you're not going to be able to plant anything. And they were relying because like we said earlier, they didn't have tons and tons of fish and food everywhere, so they were relying on the vegetation for their food source. Plus the few animals that they did rely on, like lizards, birds, when they cut down the trees, they were ruining those animals habitats. So they affected their food supply and that they stripped the land and couldn't grow crops. But they also got rid of the birds and the lizards that were living on the island as well. That's right. So the population is declining because of essentially starvation. People then begin to turn on one another. The head chief, they split into a couple of different factions, I don't think a couple, like several factions, and then started fighting each other for the small bits of land that were still fertile. Right. Yeah. The chief definitely lost control of the island and apparently warfare broke out, which is evidenced by these things called mata. Supposedly evidenced right. So these are like very sharp obsidian spears that Rogovine even mentions in his chronicle that are supposedly implements of war. And if you scour Rapanui, you're going to find these things everywhere, but not very sharp. Right. So there's evidence of these beer like implements all over the island, which further suggests that there was a lot of warfare there. And then also this motif pops up. This birdman motif. Yeah. I love this. So a birdman cult popped up in the power vacuum that formed when the chief lost control in the face of this ecological crisis. And the birdman cult actually created like, a parallel government, I guess, based on this god MakiMaki. Yeah. So there's a power vacuum. Birdman cult forms because they need to fill the leadership void. There was an idea that if the first person is basically a contest, whoever finds the first egg of this turn of the year gets to be the birdman. The leader of the birdman. Right. And so they would go scrounging around, climbing up the volcanoes in the mountainous areas. Okay. This article says that I saw elsewhere that they went down the cliff, swam to an offshore island and raided some turn nests. Oh, really? Yeah, they're looking for the Sudi turn egg. It's a great band name. Yeah, that's not bad. Or maybe Birdman Colt. That's a good one. With the album title Sudi Turn. You know, the cult. The band, the cult. Oh, sure. They were originally called Southern Death Cult. Yeah, that's true. So whoever, like I said, found this would be the leader of Eggult the Egg. Right. Yeah. And second prize set a steak knives. Third prize, you're fired. Right. Actually, second prize was you would stab yourself with a spear, supposedly. Supposedly. Again, not a lot of evidence to suggest it. No. But this house, the Forks article takes it as fact. That's right. And it sounds like something like a six year old telling the story through into. And if you didn't find the first egg, you had to stab yourself with your own spear. Yeah. So the birdman cult supposedly in this prevailing theory I don't even know if I can say prevailing anymore and this one theory put forward was they were responsible for building back up the population and the culture of Easter Island. They started seeing all these cave drawings of birds and things, which kind of makes sense. And life on Easter Island was starting to pick back up again, supposedly when the Dutch came in 1722. Yeah. So all of this collapse that led to famine and warfare and cannibalism supposedly supposedly all took place right before the Europeans showed up. And then as the Europeans came first, it was the Dutch in 1722, the Spanish showed up in 1772. Captain Cook. James Cook. He showed up in 1774. And when James Cook showed up after that, the missionaries started to come. I think the Spanish actually annexed Easter Island. Yeah. In a very sneaky way. They said, oh, look at this. This is a writing tool, and this is something you could write on. You should practice by just doing whatever you can do with this right here on this dotted line. And they said, oh, well, thank you. You just signed over the rights to the island, to the Spanish. Right? Yeah. This scribble that you just put down yes, that works for us. And I think in the 1888, Chile annexed Easter Island. And today Easter Islanders are Chilean citizens still. That's right. But by this time, by the late 19th century, the population of Easter Island had dwindled down to like 110 people. Right. Yeah. Thanks to the influence of what the Westerners brought. Well, okay, so that's basically the prevailing legend that we just went over, that they overuse the resources available to them in this greed and competition. There is apparently evidence that there was a lot of competitiveness among the carvers of the moai. I guess the idea was that the bigger and better your moai, the more opportunity the manna had to flow from it. Right. Which meant the more powerful you were in practical terms on the island. And they were just using up all of these resources, heedlessly carelessly, and they brought along this ecological collapse. Right. And then you can throw in that they probably would have been totally wiped off the face of the earth had the Westerners not showing up and stabilize their society further. Right. So they Christianized them, they taught him how to read, they taught them how to raise cattle and livestock. And today, if you go to Rapa NUI, there are plenty of rapid Nuisance still living on the island today. I think the population is back to about 2000, 3000. Right, right. So all of that is the narrative that stood for many years until, I think about 2010, maybe 2011. There was an archeologist, and her name is Dr. Marau Mulrune. She's from Honolulu. She works for the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. I have trouble with Polynesian word in Honolulu. And she did a study at Rapanui and said, I think this interpretation is wrong. I don't think there was a collapse, a population collapse at all. That's right. This is published in the journal Antiquity, and some other researchers have gotten on board this train that basically said, you know what? We're just going on this. There must have been 10, 20, 30,000 people there just because someone said, well, there had to be. Look at these statues. Right. And there really wasn't any archaeological evidence to prove anything. No scientific evidence. So their theory is that, no, the population, when the Dutch showed up, 2000, 3000 was kind of about right. That was a normal, stable population and that it hadn't been a bunch of people before that it probably been about the same. Yeah. And that Lipo guy that I talked about earlier, he was in on this and he has demonstrated through evidence how those moai, like I said, could have been moved, constructed, built and moved without 20,000 people. Yeah. He said they had plenty of food. They weren't starving. Like when the Dutch showed up, they even offered the Dutch food, right, and said, I would like your hats. Not like oh, my God, I'm starving. You got to help us. Yeah. Give me food. So there's a lot of evidence here that they were doing just fine, basically. Right. The thing was that there was evidence that some sort of collapse had happened. It's just the idea that there was a population collapses, like you said, based on Roguene's idea that there must have been more people before. Right. Pretty much everyone agrees that there was an ecological collapse, that there used to be way more trees, and that this huge loss of trees led to a loss of cropland of arable soil. But exactly how that happened is what's really an issue. And it's a really big distinction because the Jared Diamond camp says that the Rapanui went crazy in Buckwhile, building their idols to their gods and chopped down all the trees and shot themselves in the feet. Right? Yes. The newer interpretation, led by people like Maruni and Hunt and Lipo, said, we think it was rats, actually. Yeah. So here's the idea these rats throw away on the canoes. They can reproduce at what they say in this article. A furious rate polynesian rat population can double in 47 days in a lab setting. There are no predators on the island, plenty of food, these tree roots. So if they multiply, they said that there could have been as many as two to 3 million rats on this island. Right. And you hit it on the head. They eat trees. They eat little tree chutes, they eat tree seeds. So they keep trees that have been cut down from being replaced. That's right. So the rats are eating all this. There's also evidence that they were potentially eating these rats as a food source. Right. So it all is kind of lining up that it was not necessarily a mystery of population decimation, but they call it a success story that these people learn to adapt to their new environment, do things like eat rats and kind of maintain a stable population. Right. And then somewhere along the way. As a result of that birdman cult taking over power. Somebody figured out that if you take volcanic rock and just basically sprinkle it like pretty decent sized chunks of it. But just spread it out over former cropland. When the wind blows from the sea. It's going to blow through these rocks. And it actually knocks some of the minerals out of the rocks and into the soil. And it does just enough to make the soil nutrient rich again so that they could start growing crops once more. Right? Yeah. So these people had some real ingenious adaptations, like the rats allegedly ostensibly came and kept the trees from growing back, which denuded the island. So they started eating the rats because they couldn't fish anymore because they didn't have trees to build the canoes. So they ate the rats. They figured out how to make the soil arable again, very smart, so they could grow crops. So the normal 20 00 30 00 person sized population learned to sustain themselves even in the face of this ecological crisis. Right. So it's a success. Yeah. That's the new interpretation of it. I like it. Another couple of things that kind of led to this theory is that remember earlier we're talking about the Mata, these spearheads supposedly that they use when they turned on each other and delved into civil war. They took a closer look at these researchers and they said, you know what? If these are all supposed to be spearheads, they should probably all look about the same. And these things that we're finding don't look the same. They're all kinds of shapes. They're not sharp, they're actually kind of dulled and it wouldn't be very good for stabbing and what. We think these are tools for scraping like rakes and hoes and things that were left behind. Right. And they weren't meant to be spearheads at all. Yeah. So this great evidence that there was an enormous amount of war turns out to be farm tools in this new interpretation. Yeah. And then finally, when the Europeans arrived, there was a population decline and they say it's due to maybe STDs smallpox or yeah, the plague, smallpox and STDs. Right. Because again, when Rogavine showed up, 3000 people in the 1880s, down to like 100, 110, it's really important to remember that all this new stuff that refused diamond and the idea, the interpretation that he threw his weight behind, this is all interpretation as well, a new interpretation of very old facts. But it swings the other way. It doesn't say these people created what diamond called eco side, where they killed their ecosystem, they killed their environment and they suffered as a result. They say, no, they were dealt a bad hand with these rats that came aboard and spread and prevented trees, very important trees, from growing. They persevered. It's not a story of collapse. It's a story of continuity. My favorite interpretation is Robert Kolwitz from NPR from Radio Labs. Sure. And he kind of took a look at these new findings and said, I guess I see what you're saying, that this is a success story, but is it really like learning to make do? He's like, if you do want to take the rapanui story and apply it to modern day ecology, which is what everyone tries to do, he's like, this is really scary because it suggests that we'll keep going along in the face of climate change getting worse and worse, but we'll get used to it more and more and we'll make do. We just keep limping along rather than doing something about it. Taking the bull by the horns and moving forward to progress rather than just muddling along. It's a good point. Crowds is full of good points. Yeah. Those radio up guys, they've been doing it right for years. Yeah. Still haven't met those dudes, have you? No, never have. I think our friends from stuff blowing your mind. We haven't. No. I mean, kind of one of the neat things about the podcaster community is that you end up meeting a lot of these people and becoming pals. Not them, though. No. I don't think they've ever been at anything we've done. It's not that they've avoided us or have they? I think they have, but kind of anonymously and booed. Oh, come on. Boo. That's what crowd sounds like. No, it would be very much more well produced than that. Right. Sound effect. It would be good. If you want to know more about rapanui, type those words into Search Barhousoforce.com, read that, and then go do more research on the web to get the full story. Yeah. Come up with your own theory. Sure. It's the fun thing to send it in. I said Search Bar in the summer, so it's time for listener mail. Yeah, the very special listener mail that I promised. Because if you remember, many years ago, we did a special two part episode on our travels through Guatemala with you and me and Jerry and some runs of Kappa. Yeah. We all went down there on special limitation from our friends at the Cooperative for Education Coed out of Cincinnati. And we used to talk about them a lot because the great work they do with their school book program and I mean, they've just done so their life's work helping out the children of Guatemala. Yeah, it's a great program, too self sustainable. Well, they got a new one. We haven't talked about it in a while, so we heard from Anne Demcrpal down there. All right. And this all came about because Anne was a fan and listener. She still listens. Yeah, she says she does. Well, I believe her. Yeah. So here it goes. They have a new program going called 1000 Girls Initiative. And it's very cool. What they're doing is they're ramping up efforts to keep 1000 girls in Guatemala from dropping out of school by 2020. As we learned when we went over there, keeping these kids in school is a real challenge because parents are often like, no, you're ten now. You need to stay home and work. Right. Because we need that. Especially young girls. Educated is a really valuable thing. So they've made it their mission to keep 1000 girls from dropping out by 2020. It's one of the best investments you can make in the developing world, is education. It takes twelve years of education to break the cycle of poverty in Guatemala. Twelve years. But a poor rural Guatemala, which we met plenty of down there they have a one in 20 chance of reaching that milestone. So they have an uphill challenge ahead of them. Yeah. So what they're doing now, you can sponsor them. You can be a sponsor and pledge to keep a girl from dropping out of school $70 a month. Or if you want to do $35 a month, they will actually match your donation with another sponsor to make sure that that one student is able to continue her education. Oh, that's smart. So either $35 or $70 a month, you can literally keep a girl in school. How do they do it, Chuck? Well, they go to have a very special link called Thousandgirlsinitiative.org that's spelled out thousan dgirlsinitiative.org, and you can actually pick out the student you sponsor. Nice. It's one of the great things that Coed does. You can put a real face and a real person, send them 70 or $35 a month, and it's a really great thing that you're doing. Yeah. So that's from Anne and that's from Co ed. And they're still doing great work, and we just think they're lovely people and we couldn't be more proud of their continued efforts. Yeah. Thanks a lot, guys. Thanks a lot, Anne. Thanks for keeping us updated. And if you want to go help them, what's that URL again, Chuck? Thousandgirlsinitiative.org. Nice. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. And Josh Clark, you can hang out with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and stuff you should know. Both with their own Facebook pages. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast athostworks.com. As always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworkworks.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 at Halo. halopets.com."
4595bf54-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-6bfaca481393	Short Stuff: Look-Alike Old Couples	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-look-alike-old-couples	You know how some older married couples (sorry, senior adult married couples) start to look alike over time? That’s a really weird phenomenon if you think about it. So science has looked into it and they think they kind of have it figured out.	You know how some older married couples (sorry, senior adult married couples) start to look alike over time? That’s a really weird phenomenon if you think about it. So science has looked into it and they think they kind of have it figured out.	Wed, 29 May 2019 13:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=149, tm_isdst=0)	13108086	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hello, and welcome to the short stuff. There's. Jerry chuck me. Josh The Short Stuff. This is Short go. And we're all starting to look alike here on our 11th anniversary. We really, really are. We've all kind of morphed into this weird, like, well, this amorphous blob. How about that? We don't even look like we've actually physically merged together. So do old people look alike? Old couples, that is right. That's a big one. Yeah, because yes, there's probably some old people you could find randomly in a crowd and be like, this kind of looks like this person old people anymore either. Right. We should probably say seniors. Yes. Elderly senior adults, I think is what it is, actually. Good call. I mean, I'm right around the corner from being right. So I'm like, I don't like seeing old people. Right, exactly. Okay, so senior adults. Anyway, an older couple, that's what we're going to say. A couple that's lived together, married or in some sort of partnership, romantic or otherwise, for a very long time. They do tend to start to look alike the older they get. And there's actual science to back this up. This isn't just some random hilarity. They've actually done studies about this because it's kind of a weird thing if you think about it. We take it for granted. But the idea that two people who are not related I do. Should come to, like, look like one another over the years, it's a little odd, even though it seems like, yeah, of course, that's what happens. But why, Chuck? Why is the big question. Well, first of all, I have a question for you. Okay. Have you noticed this? Do you think this is a thing? Because I've never really noticed this. Yeah, I have, actually. I've seen some couples that I'm like. I think you guys are brother and sister. Okay. And it's a little unsettling because they usually seem happy and they're holding hands, but no, I have definitely seen it before. I don't know, I'm just trying to think in my life, like, my grandparents didn't look alike, and I don't know, I'm trying to piece it together. I do like the science here, because not much of the science really points to necessarily looking like one another. Right. But let's talk about it. Okay. And I think also, just to kind of clarify your point, it's not like it's an inevitability, sure, but it does happen. And the fact that it does happen still raises the question, Why? Yeah. So there was a study called Personality and Individual Differences. I'm sorry. That was the magazine that was published in The Rag that you can find on newsstands all over the country. Right. And they surveyed, they got 22 people, I guess eleven men and eleven women who participated in the study, and they said, look at these 160 married couples. But they're separate. You don't know, like, who's in a couple and then tell us what you think? Go right. It was who looks alike, who's married to who? And what they found was that people tended to pick married couples out even though they weren't shown pictures and they were shown the men's pictures and then show them women's pictures. And it was basically like put them together. And people tended to do that also. They also judge them based on attractiveness. And the people also tended to be rated along the same line. So like, a seven typically was paired up with a seven. So the fact that the fact that a random stranger could pick these couples out and more often than chance get it right, preparing who was married to who just based on looks definitely suggest that there's something there and there's something there that they believe that is really behind it is mostly genetics. Yeah, I mean, there is non, genetically speaking. I do think there is something to the fact because they make a point in this article that, like, if your personalities are similar, which is probably that you generally seek out someone who you think would jibe personality wise, you may end up being a couple who just laughs a lot and enjoys life and that would affect the same facial muscles and things like that. Or if you look at any picture, like pre 1960, all you see is two dower looking senior adults standing next to each other. Right. So they may look a little bit more like although I think we've done something on people smiling in pictures. Or maybe we just talked about it briefly, but that'd be a good shorty, I think. Yeah, surely. I don't recall that at all. Like, it was the first goon. He put on a big smile in a photo and everyone was like, what did you just do? What is that? You're supposed to frown in pictures? Young man, can I subscribe to your newsletter? But as far as genetics go, and we've talked about a lot of this here and there on the show about people seeking out for life partners and sexual and reproductive partners, people that are more similar genetically as themselves. Right, which makes sense. The idea, the whole premise is that we would seek those people out because our genes have kind of co evolved together. So they fit together, they work together more readily. So some people would say, okay, well, you should stick with your own kind and not marry outside of your own group or whatever. But the opposite of that is when you get too much homogeneity, the gene pool starts to really suffer. So it's good to mix. But at the same time, we seem to be geared, at least according to this school of thought, toward seeking out mates that we might be able to be more genetically compatible with. The question is this, though, beyond, say, something glaringly obvious? Is somebody saying, like, just sticking to their ethnic group or racial group or something like that to marry and have kids with? How else would you like if you're not doing that, how would you possibly pick out somebody based on genetics? How would you know how someone's compatible with you genetically? We've got the question of how do senior adult couples start to look alike? But then if it's genetics, how do we find that out? What are we doing? All right, that seems like a good spot for a break. Okay. And we'll come back and talk about sexual imprinting right after this. So I promised talk of sexual imprinting about 60 seconds ago, and there's this thing, and it's not just like something people say. There's a real thing where they've done studies and found that women I was going to say generally, but studies indicate that women, if they have fathers that they were close to and that they love, that they will seek out adult relationships with men who are like their fathers. And that includes looking like their fathers, looking like their fathers, behaving like their fathers. Like, if their father was stern but kind, they will probably look for that in a maid if their father was like, hey, you, do you. But the key seems to be that the father and the daughter's bond and relationship is very strong, and the stronger it is, the more of this sexual imprinting there is. And so rather than the girl secretly having the hots for her dad or something like that no, but it's what that gets confused for, is it's actually, the father has provided a model saying, hey, I'm genetically related to you. You turned out pretty good. We have a pretty good relationship. Find a guy who is kind of like me, and you can't miss the genetic crap. Shoot. Yeah. And not even genetically, because the same has held true through adoptive fathers and daughters they found in studies as well. Well, no, I think they were saying adopted daughters imprint on their genetic fathers. Oh, no, I read it as they still I got you. Yeah, you're right. That would be the case. But then that kind of undermines the genetic basis of it, doesn't it? Well, a little bit, but that's the nature nurture thing. Yeah, well, this whole thing is one big question of, like, nature nurture. Yeah. I don't know. That's an interesting can of worms there that we're not going to completely open. Okay, all right. So there's some other things that we can so that's one, for women in particular, the sexual imprinting on the father is one way that they are guided toward mate selection. Right, yeah. There's also personality is another one. There's a genetic basis for that. Behaviors, traits. There's all sorts of stuff that you can pick up in somebody's face in their body shape or body style that suggests not necessarily that their genes are going to mix well with your particular genes, but that they are genetically sound, I guess, in one way. And one of the big ones is symmetry, both body symmetry and facial symmetry. It's a classic standard for just universal beauty. Symmetry tends to be equated with beauty and attractiveness. Yeah, we've talked about this quite a bit in the past, too. They've done studies and test subjects, kind of roundly rate, symmetrical men and women as not only just better looking and more attractive to them, but potentially healthier. And they say that's the whole evolutionary basis of a lot of this is, whether we know it or not, we're technically probably seeking out people that we think are healthy and have good genes, and women are seeking women who can carry their child and they even have such a gross term. But supposedly they've done studies where men prefer women with a waist to hip ratio of zero seven, which sounds just like I don't know, this sounds like something some creep would carry around, like a notebook, some calipers or something like that. Yeah. And be like, you're really nice and funny and all, but your waist to hip ratio is not quite right for me. Well, it goes both ways, too. There's a preferred waist to hip ratio among men for women or women that women have for men. And supposedly that sounds really bizarre, but that has a lot to do with fat deposits where fat gets deposited around your hips depending on your sex. And sex is driven by hormones and especially fat deposition, and where it goes is driven by hormones. So if you have your fat building up in all the right places according to your sex, you were basically broadcasting that you are quite fertile and featured and ready to raise ten kids and start a farm. Let's do that. Because what your hips are shouting well, what you want is to seek someone out that you can have a lot of and raise future little employees, basically. Yeah. You don't work in the field. Yeah, exactly. And back to the symmetry thing. They have found also in studies that the more symmetrical you are, you're also going to have more sex and more sexual partners in your life, especially if you're a man. Or particularly if you're a man. So it does seem to come down. The answer to this question, why senior adult couples can sometimes start to look like one another, is that they are probably genetically similar to begin with, and then they go through life experiences together that shape them together. So you put all that together, you've got an older senior adult couple who looks like brother and sister, and they still kiss in front of people. Yeah, you put that all together, throw them both in lavender tracksuits, which always helps. Yeah. There is that thing, too, where couples inadvertently, I guess, start to dress, or maybe very purposely start to dress alike. Sure, I got no problems with that, baby and then dog lookalikes we should finish with because everyone loves those great listicles photos of people that look like they're dogs. And that is the thing that can happen. And they did a study in 2004. I don't know how this got funded, but it apparently indicated that people who shop for pure bred dogs tend to look for dogs that look like them. Yeah, I want to see my face looking back at me in my dog's face. Yeah, I've seen it. But they say that it's purebreds. Only people who, like, rescue MutS from shelters or they're like, whatever. I just like, how your personality? I guess that's right. So there you go. There you have it. I guess that means Chuck Ben short stuff is away. 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 show."
3fef0202-5461-11e8-b6d0-e7b3565a1141	Selects: Southerners Aren't Lazy and Dumb, They Just Had Hookworm	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-southerners-arent-lazy-and-dumb-they-just	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. Find out all about it in this classic episode.	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. Find out all about it in this classic episode.	Sat, 11 Sep 2021 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=254, tm_isdst=0)	46004466	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hi, everyone. It's me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen a rather peculiar episode that peaks in on a strange and fascinating quirk of nature and geography that changed the course of history. A lot of the sciences and humanities are covered here, and it is a gross episode, but it's also engrossing. So please enjoy this one on Hookworms and the south. 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. There's Jerry Rowland. 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 was I, and that's about it. That's good. Razors and apples at Halloween. Yeah. Which is, as we've covered, not true. Any instance 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 hook worm 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? So 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 roundworms. 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. Yeah. 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 parasite. 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 hook worm, nicater Americanis, very open minded. And then there's the Old World hookworm ansilostoma dua denale. A little less openminded. Right. And so both of them thrive in warmer tropicalish climates. And the an Americans in particular, loves sandy, loamy soil. And it just so happens that in the American South, it has just the kind of climate to host an Americanist, 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 out houses. So here's what would happen all the way up until, like, 1985, which is kind of distressing. Yeah, 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, was 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. 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 hook worms are interesting. Tapeworms are hermaphroditic, but hook worms, 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 1000 to 30,000 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 larvae. 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. Now, it's one thing again, you can't really catch. I'm sure you can catch some worms. I know tricknosis is a problem for humans and that's a pork worm 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 a very, very 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 that'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 band name 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. All right, so before we broke, we talked about what the hook worm is and all the different myriad ways which it could spread from accidentally walking in poop to poop slanging fights, night soil, release the night soil rolling in it to ultimately radically 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 on 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 dim witted. You may be lazy. Sure. And this was for white folks, black folks, Native Americans, do 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. 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 at level of devastation and death. But coupled with their 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, 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. It's obviously not a majority, almost a majority that would have 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 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 hook worm, but in that time, you probably would have taken on several more. All right, so what does this mean? If you get hooke worm 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 Americanist 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 were 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 pre existing 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 these 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, 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'd 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 Styles and Hookworm, the big roller coaster, right? 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 really well in the south. Yes. Which, as you'll see, was 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 just 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 and said, like, 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, but 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. Because again, you have to be trading in FICO 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 slinging bite. It makes the most sense that he's like, something is on teeth. Oh, 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 to Europe. The 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 is 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 a 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, 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. 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 flusounding 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 it 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, his number one. 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, and 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 a million bucks. Just how much today? 26 million. 26 million. That's 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 help lead the charge. Definitely this person named Wickliff Rose. Great name. If there's a hero of the story, it's him, if you ask me. You think so? Not what's his face. No. Styles. Yeah. No, he did some great work. It was good. But Wycliffe Rose was the one who wycliffe. 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 that 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 as 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, you know, 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, well, he was a kid at the time. Oh, 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. 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 why 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. Right. But they would bring picnics. And it says in here that some people even wanted to get married in the hookworm tent. And I was like, that seems weird, and kind of like Kitchy. But then I also was like, I'll bet a lot of these people have never seen the tent before. So they were like, this is our one chance to just stay in the tent. 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 hookworm. Right. A young doctor would ride into town and 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 cookworm, 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 outhouse. 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 like, 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 re infected fairly easily. So they get that part across as well. Yeah. And like, again, you can't buy everyone 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. Well, and if the bag was vibrating, they didn't even have to look. Yes. 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. There's this extraordinarily toxic stuff called thymol. Yeah. T-H-Y-M-O-L? 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 thymol 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 did 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. 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 slang in fights. Right. 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 said, we're done with this, we've done our work. Right. 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 a 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 40s that 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, which is 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 Boroughs. 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 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. 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 a hookworm infection, along with certain other infections they're 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 1990, it's declined globally by just 5%. Yes, 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's 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 hookworm's 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 Ebola comes along and 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 that'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 has Eradicated by 2020, we'll have played a rather large role in that. But now we have a final twist. Right? Yeah. There's this really great quote from the 60s from a 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, Chuck, that 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 are 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 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 took worm, 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. 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 humans. So we shall see. It's only one way to find out for you and I to volunteer. Well, 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. Yes. You got anything else? I do not. Well, we want to recommend the articles how a Worm Gave the South Bad Name by Rachel Newark and War on Hook Worms from Andy Borrowitz. 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 and 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 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 of 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 an adventure to see you there. All the best. That is Joyce Olsen and Lair Broward. And again, check it out@talltalesentravel.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 knocked my socks off. Yeah. So I haven't listened to show yet because it 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.com stuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstoughfours.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyyshow.com up. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheartradio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1217365548248sysk-knife-hunting-2.mp3	Is knife hunting the fairest way to hunt?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/is-knife-hunting-the-fairest-way-to-hunt	Fair chase is the idea that a balance should be struck between the hunter's ability to kill prey and the prey's ability escape. Take a look at our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about knife hunting, and whether or not it's the fairest way to hunt.	Fair chase is the idea that a balance should be struck between the hunter's ability to kill prey and the prey's ability escape. Take a look at our HowStuffWorks article to learn more about knife hunting, and whether or not it's the fairest way to hunt.	Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:08:46 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=21, tm_min=8, tm_sec=46, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=211, tm_isdst=0)	6987268	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Stuff you should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things we like to think about. Online fraud shouldn't be one of them, because with every purchase, visa prevents, detects, and resolve online fraud safe, secure, decent. I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, the staff writer. Here@housetopordsks.com with me is my fellow staff writer, Charles W. Bryant. How are you, Chuck? I'm here, Josh. I'm feeling good. I'm glad to be here with you. I'm glad you're here, too, Chuck. I don't know if you know this or not, but as a special treat, we are trying something new here on Stuff You Should Know. What's that? We're actually running a language module, recorded language module subliminally for our listeners. So you out there in podcast, like, to just kick back, relax, and prepare to learn Russian without lifting a finger while Chuck and I talk about the topic of knife hunting. Do you know anything about that yet? No. Good. So it's working already. Well, let me tell you about knife hunting, Chuck. Okay. Arguably, it's the fairest way to hunt, and this is based on an article I wrote is Knife Hunting the Fairest Way to Hunt? Which is pretty subjective, and I was a little worried about me bringing my own opinions into it because I don't hunt. True. But it's kind of an open and shut case if you ask me. Well, maybe so. And luckily, though, there's a principle out there among hunters and wildlife managers. It's called the principle of fair chase. Right. That there needs to be a balance between the hunter and the prey. Yeah. I mean, like, you can go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars. You've got your ATV, you've got your really super duper camo. You've got your incredible scope, right? You're up in, like, 30ft up in a deer. There's a laundry detergent that removes any odor whatsoever from you. You can put buck lure around feeding. There's all sorts of things you can do to an unsuspecting animal to raise your advantage, where it's not even sport anymore. It's just blood sport or target practice with live animals. Right? Right. Now, the principle of fair chase is you were saying? It's basically trying to strike a balance between the deer or whatever you're hunting. I guess it doesn't matter what you're hunting, so yeah, it applies across the board. Right. And you can't give it to your gun. No, you can't. And frankly, I think that would be a really bad idea. All we've done to them with our cars and with the hunters. Right. Don't give them cars or guns, and we'll be fine. Right. What fairer way to hunt is there than hunting with the knife, right. I think that would be the only fair way to hunt. That or bare hands. Yes, obviously. Bare hands. Going toe to toe with, like, a bear, dude. Actually, you're at a disadvantage there's. No bear chase should be balanced in your favor at that point. And frankly, I mean, probably all you're wearing is a loincloth, so everything's going to hurt extra bad. Right. A soiled loincloth at that. Definitely. So do you know much about knife hunting? Not personally from experience, but I know you and I were talking about this a lot when you wrote the article. One thing I did want to talk about first, though, was this thing you found about internet hunting, which thankfully was shut down soon after it started. But, yeah, this is like the opposite spectrum. Completely opposite. This guy in Texas launched a website where you could hunt remotely from your computer, and it was literally attached to a gun. You had a camera and you could look out on the wild range and see something pan over to it with your mouse, click it, and the gun would fire. And Lawmakers shut that down, toot. Sweet. Thankfully, yes, which is I frankly applaud that. Apparently it wasn't just animal rights people. Hunters as well, like sportsmen groups were like, this go away. This can't be good. Yeah. Which is good to know. Yeah. So we've got Internet hunting ban. I don't think you're going to see any bands on knife hunting based on questions of fairness now. And it's mostly used for wild boar. Yeah. Which is kind of I'm no hunter, but I think that'd be kind of cool first. Yeah. Well, I mean, they get up to \u00a3750 6ft long. There was one that went around on the Internet, and I actually went on to Snopes, and it was verified. There was one that was, I think, 11ft long. Right. What's the name of that one? They called it like, Jurassic Pork or something like that. And so I was like, obviously this is a fake. I went on the steps. They're like, no, we verified it. It was part of an AP article. Right. Was that killed with a knife? It wasn't. It was shot with a pistol. And it turns out that it had been a family pet that was sold to this hunting preserve, like two days before the guy shot it. That's kind of sad. Yeah. So we've got knife hunting, and basically what it is, is you send dogs out to go run after some hogs who hide in the brush, and they are startled. They're generally tranquil and they're not aggressive towards humans. But if you start alone, they will run. When they start running, you want to kind of get in between them and wherever they think they're going. Right. And when they get close enough, if you actually push this 700 pound board to the ground and stab it and stab it to death, it still results in the death of an animal. But if we're talking about whether or not knife hunting is fair, then arguably it's a lot fairer than being up in that tree? Yeah. I would say if you have the fortitude to leap from a bush on top of a 700 pound pig and stab it to death, then I'm not going to get in your way. Right. And there was this one hunt who actually happened in 1976 with this guy in Florida who not only knife hunted, he used throwing knives. That was crazy. Yeah, it was crazy. I'll have to forward you the link. It's pretty interesting. And while I'm forwarding to Chuck, you guys should go read is Knife Hunting the fairest way to hunt on how stuff works.com? And stick around to find out what famous person celebrated her 30th birthday on July 25, 2008, and why you should know her name right after this. Stuff you should know is brought to you by Visa. We all have things to think about, like, say, what's the best site to buy a new leather jacket? Or whether to buy the three or six megapixel camera? But thankfully, we don't need to think about online fraud because for every purchase you make, visa keeps an eye out for fraud with realtime fraud monitoring and by making sure you're not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace of mind? Safe, secure Visa. Chuck, do you know her name? I don't know her name. Do you want me to tell you I know why she's famous. Okay, good. Well, it's Louise Joy Brown from Manchester, England. Do you want to tell the people about her? Yes. I believe she was the first person conceived in vitro, which is Latin for fake baby. Is that right? No, it's actually Latin for within the class. Nice. Okay, well, more commonly, people refer to in vitro fertilization as test two baby making within the glass. Yeah. So if you want to know all about that, all you have to do is type in how in vitro fertilization works, on howstepworks.com and presto, you'll be informed. Happy birthday. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housework.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. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen than today."
https://podcasts.howstuf…lyfish-final.mp3	Jellyfish: Even Cooler than Octopi?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/jellyfish-even-cooler-than-octopi	Jellyfish are among the most adaptable, competitive organisms on the planet. They can grow back into their juvenile stage when resources are scarce, reproduce in massive groups and kill an adult human, among lots of other neat stuff. Learn all about em!	Jellyfish are among the most adaptable, competitive organisms on the planet. They can grow back into their juvenile stage when resources are scarce, reproduce in massive groups and kill an adult human, among lots of other neat stuff. Learn all about em!	Tue, 23 Aug 2016 16:10:19 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=16, tm_min=10, tm_sec=19, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=236, tm_isdst=0)	50102108	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant with Jerry. This is stuff you should know. Wow, man. Let's start over. All right. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm jet lag still. I'm coming out of it for sure. But, yeah, I'm a little jet. Like, I just was explaining off Mike, that my body is at 430 or five every morning. Just get up, dummy. It's ten. 1511. Yeah. And I go, no, it's not as dark. No internal struggle. And it's a British voice, too. It's like, Get up. You need your beans and blood sausage and pork pies. How was that? Man, I want another one so bad. Save that. Okay. My jet lag is not so much pronounced in the morning. It's just at 930 at night, I fall over wherever I'm standing or sitting here, just like cooking in a walk. And you just fall face forward and face first. You notice the burned face? Yeah. That's dangerous. Well, it hurt pretty bad because that walk grease gets pretty hot. It does walk. What is this? Like what walks? Who walks still? Dude, are you kidding me? No, it's our continents of people walk. Oh, well, sure. But I guess I just imagine, like, wearing a tennis sweater tied around my neck. I didn't say fondue. I should have. Yeah, you're having a 70s pot of boiling cheese. That's pretty seventy s you know what? If you ever want a fondue pot because you think it'd be fun to have a fondue party, don't buy one new. Just go to Goodwill. Sure. Buy one for, like, $3. Yeah. You mean I have an unused one? Sure. Is it pee green? No, I don't know if I would cook out of a pea green anything. No. Yeah. All right. No, I wouldn't. Pea green refrigerator. Would need out of it. Pea green car. I just throw up any time I went to go drive. I'll tell you what I am excited about, though. Jellyfish. Yeah. This is now officially my second favorite seafaring creature after octopus. Yes, for sure. Yeah. And this was close, too. Like, the jellyfish was really tugging at my heartstrings. Oh, really? Yes. And the octopus just kept saying, you know what? Remember me? Remember the chromatophores? Watch this. Bam. That looks like something completely different. And then I remember it, I was like, all right, octopus. You're right. Jellyfish can't do that. I'm lucky to squirrel. Now. I'm a Roman soldier. Now I'm a cornucopia, vegetables and an oil painting. They are pretty cool. Yeah. But the jellyfish is really amazing. Yeah. The octopuses, though, they're doing it on purpose. The jellyfish just accidentally kind of stumbles backwards into awesomeness. Well, after 500 million years of practice, maybe 700 million. Yeah, we'll see. It's amazing. So when you're talking about jellyfish, a lot of people say, well, there's a jellyfish that's jellyfish. That's a jellyfish that lady walking down the street with a leash got a jellyfish on the end of it. Right. And you would say jellyfish. Jellyfish, comb, jelly dog. Right. Or weird cat lady who walks her cat. Yeah. That's unwholesome. That's as unwholesome as walking a jellyfish down the street on a leash. So there are such things as comb jellies. Yes. And there's jellyfish. And you out there who lived maybe 1020 years on this planet or more have probably seen them both, but it turns out that they look very similar. But as we're finding out, as we get deeper and deeper into using genetics to do taxonomy rather than our peepers sure. That doesn't necessarily mean they're related. And actually there's some tremendous debate between just how closely related jellyfish and comb jellies are. Tremendous debate. Yes. We're very subdued. It depends on where you are among, like, 50 people. If you're in the jellyfish department of the Monterey Bay Aquarium yeah, I'll bet it gets nuts. Little vigorous. Yeah. They down some old English 40 malt liquor and argue and get out the brass knuckles about taxonomy. So the two phyla, they are different. We're talking respectively for jellyfish and comb jellies. Nadaria and Sonophra. Yeah. Nice. And there's seas before both of them both silent. So it looks like centabytes and sephora. Yeah. Centibytes. Yeah. What is that, a cinnabun? No, cenobites. They were the monsters in hellraiser. I thought it was like a cinnabun. That was in handy. Bite sized pieces. That's a cinnabite. These are cena bites. Got you. Where did this research come from, by the way? Big shout out. Smithsonian. They have a site called the Ocean Portal. Amazing. That has all sorts of great stuff on it. Yeah, you can't go wrong with Smithsonian. That's their logo. That forms the basis of this one. But I also want to give a huge shout out to another article I read a while back that I went back and reread, actually. It's called? They're taking over. And it was a New York Review Books article on it. Reviewed a book on jellyfish? Yes. Specifically, jellyfish blooms. Or when you see on the news, like, oh, my gosh, there's 5000 jellyfish right here, right now. Right. Or 33,000 sq. Mi of jellyfish. But we'll get to that. Yeah, we're getting ahead of ourselves. So there's jellyfish and comb jellies, and we don't know if they're related. They look a lot alike. Very much they seem related. So we're going to talk about both. Yes. Right. So let's talk about them. Chuck. All right. Well, we'll start off with the body because they're kind of all body. Both jellyfish and.com jellies, they have a lot of differences, but when you look under the hood, they have a lot of similarities, which is why you would expect when people use their peepers, they would just think, oh, yeah, of course. You're the same. Look at them. Yeah. Don't think too don't overthink it. That was early science. Right. Don't overthink it. Yeah. So both of them have a couple of major cell layers, the external epidermis, and then the internal one called the gastrodermis. And in between those is what you think of as jellyfish. Yeah, that's mesoglia. Yes. Which is a great name for that. And it's the filling. Yeah, it's 95. And in fact, jellyfish and comb jellies are about 95%. Water. Yeah, sea water, actually. Salt and water. They're basically made up of the sea I saw put somewhere. It's amazing. So they have basically one mouth where stuff goes in and comes out. It's like an oral anus, basically. Yeah. I don't even know if they refer to it as a mouth. Do they? Like, somewhere in this thing, didn't they call it literally like, a body hole or something? Yeah, it's a pretty basic organism, but it does a lot of things. Yes. When you think of mouth, you just think eating. Not necessarily, hey, let's put some sperm and egg in there, too. Right. It's like all purpose. Yeah. But they don't necessarily need a mouth for eating because apparently they can absorb nutrients, like, just through their skin. Yeah. So they don't have a stomach. They don't have intestines. Right. They don't have lungs. They just get in my skin nutrients. Yeah. And oxygen. And if you think about it, then they don't need lungs. No, they don't need a mouth. So they don't need to chew. All this stuff requires a lot of energy. They actually are extraordinarily efficient organisms. Sure. So they get a lot more energy out of the stuff that they take in than other things, which actually gives them a huge advantages. We'll see later. So the outer cells, they have this epidermis, like we said, and it has what's called a nerve net, and it's just this net of nerves, literally. And that it's their nervous system, basically. And it's the most basic, I guess, brainlike structure of any organism on the planet. Of any multicellular organism. I guess. That's right. And so in the nerve net, not only does it have nerves, it also has some sort of specialized cells, like some that detect light, so they can know that they need to move away from that boat spotlight. Sure. And then some that tell them whether they're moving up or down or whether they're upside down. Yeah. You big dummies. That's a big one. You think about it. But, I mean, if you don't have eyeballs no, but this is the weird part, man. This is so disturbing to me. This is almost as disturbing as squid having beaks. Okay. Some types of jellies box jellies in particular. Yeah. Box jellyfish have eyes. Yeah. They have retinas that's creepy lenses, but they don't have a brain. So scientists are like, how are you processing these images that you're clearly taking in and responding to? Like, we've shown you pictures of, like, Cheryl Ladd and you gave a thumbs up, so obviously you can use these eyes. But how are you sorting these images? Yes, they think it's that nerve ring, but they're not sure. Right. And that's a ring around concentration of nerves, basically, that they haven't figured out yet. But they think that's there and it's the secret. Right. Now, I can't come up with a good analogy. There's a million of them out there, but I'm not still jet lagged. I guess you'll think of one. I just want to apologize to everybody because that could have been great. I was on the edge of my feet. So, comb jellies, they have a few things that the regular jelly does not have, most notably the comb. They're named for these celia, these giant fuse cilia. There are eight rows up and down their bodies, and they basically are their ways of locomoting. They're like little bitty ores paddling around in the water. Yeah. And there are other animals that do this, but the combjelly is the largest one to do this and to use this kind of locomotion. Right. And it looks like a rainbow. If you look one up, you think it might be bioluminescent, but it's not. It's just light catching the cilia and scattering it. It's beautiful. Yeah, it is quite beautiful. But that's the thing that separates comb jellies from jellyfish, most pronouncedly. Right. Yeah. Because a lot of their activities and just the stuff that they do is fairly similar. The TV they watch. Yeah. But their means of locomotion are really the big, huge distinction. Yeah. A lot of the comb jellies have a single pair, just two tentacles, but it looks like more because they branch out. Right. And they use those, like, little fishing lines because they have sticky cells, color blasts at the end. And this is different big time than jellyfish. They don't sting. No. They use glue. Yes. Which is pretty neat. So you won't be stung by a comb jelly. So just swim up and hug one. Yes. They love it when you do that. So when you think of a jellyfish, like a true jelly is what they're called, you think of kind of this bell shaped, umbrella shaped thing with the tentacles hanging down. Yes. Beautiful. And if it's a jellyfish, that's actually one of two forms that it will take in its lifetime. Yeah, right. That's the medusa form, and it's the adult form. There's a juvenile form called the polyp. And depending on when it is in its life cycle, it will either be in medusa form or polyp form. Yeah. And we'll get into the more of the life cycle. But a polyp can end up becoming a medusa or just might be happy as a polyp and just stay as a polyp and create more medusa. Yeah. And the polyp looks like it almost looks like a plant. It looks like a little stalk attached to something, usually the sand or, as we'll see, maybe an oil rig out in the middle of the ocean or something for Cheryl Lad. That's right, because she's a deep water dweller at this point. So it looks like a little plant. It looks like a little stalk, and then the tentacles are blooming out of it. Almost like a flower. Yeah. Like anemone or something like that. Yeah. And sometimes you see them, many of them, together in a colony, you think that's an amazing plant. That's actually a jelly. Yeah. Pretty cool. You would be able to tell if you poked it with your finger. That's right. So the size among jellies and comb jellies, some are just microscopic, others get pretty big. There's one called the lion's main jellyfish, which on the whole across, like, the whole species, they are the largest jellyfish known to humankind. Did you see this thing? Yeah. It looks like photoshop when you see a scuba diver up next to one of them. Yeah, it definitely does. The bell actually gets to be 6ft wide. Yes. Unbelievable. Yeah. And the tentacles are like 49ft long, 50ft long. Yeah. And some get bigger than that, but that's the average size of one of those. That's pretty neat. Yeah. I mean, they're not to be feared, but swimming up to something that large and that kind of creepy looking is not for me. That's all I'll say. That eats anything. It will eat anything, like people? Yeah. No, it won't eat a person. I don't know if it was big enough, it might. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the various types. We'll start with Nadaria, which is the jellyfish itself, not the comb. There are more than 10,000 species, and about 4000 or fewer actually are what we think of as the true jelly, the medusa that we know and love. And within that, there are quite a few different types, one of which is the skiffozoa. And this is the most common true jellyfish that you can imagine. When you picture jellyfish in your mind, you're probably thinking of the schiff Azoa. Right. The hydrazoa are imposters. Well, they're the ones who they spend most of their time with polyps. Right. So the Skiffahoa spend most of their time in the medusa phase. Yeah. The hydrazoa are the ones that look like plants at the bottom and are just reproducing like mad. Right. And they actually can come together and create what are called colonial siphon, of course. And that's a Portuguese man of war. Yeah. Okay. So that is actually not a true jellyfish. It's actually a collection. It's a colony that comes together to act like one large organism. Right. Oh, wow. And it's made up of persons. So, like, there's the person that is in charge of digestion, there's the person that's in charge of catching prey, there's the person that's in charge of locomotion. And rather than these things being body parts, they're actually individual organisms that are genetically identical to one another because they all come from the same egg but they're actually a colony. Does that make sense? Imagine if your organs were various actual organisms that came together to make you it's like the polyphonic spree of the ocean world. Exactly. It's amazing. That's exactly what I was driving at. Next up, we have the Cuba Zoe and that's you mentioned, the box jellyfish. They look like a box. It's more squared looking. Those are the most dangerous ones. Yeah. They have the most potent venom, and it is of serious stuff, not just of jellyfish. Of any animal on the planet. Yes. The sea wasp has the most powerful venom for humans, I should say the sea wasp. Isn't that just awesome sounding? Yeah. That sounds like something you want to avoid at all costs. Yeah. So these guys are the ones that have a more complex nervous system, that have the eyes, right? Yeah. With the corneas and things. Yeah. So they're the most deadly, and they're looking at you. Yeah. It's saying, I'm coming for you. The star rozoa stalked jellyfishes, and they don't float. They actually like to cling on to things and attach to things. And they're mainly cold water, but not all kinds. You can find some kind of jellyfish in almost any kind of ocean water in the world. Well, not just that. Some thrive in freshwater. There's a type of jellyfish that is all over the Great Lakes. It was originally it's native to China, and they think that it was brought over originally from China to England in, like, a water lily shipment, because it was first discovered in the west and garden ponds, and it somehow made its way to the Great Lakes. Now, there's a freshwater jellyfish that's about, I think, the size of your thumbnail, depending on what size your thumbnail is in the Great Lakes, that's a jellyfish, and it's a true jellyfish. Wow. And we should say also with jellyfish locomotion, they don't use the cilia like a comb jellyfish does in medusa form, expand and contract the bell. Right. So beautiful. And I was reading I think it was a Scientific American or Popular Science, one of those two. I'll post it on the podcast page, but it was some researchers examined how jellyfish move, and they found that not only are they able to move, when they expand and then contract in the resting motion of their bell, a vortex actually forms in the water above them and moves beneath them and moves them up that way. So they're constantly moving, but they're only exerting, like, half of the energy needed to move forward to propel forward or upward. Right. So that's even one more way that they're incredibly efficient type of animal. Yeah. Without a brain. They're pretty smart. You know what I mean? Should we take a break? Yeah. All right. We'll take a break, and we're going to come back and dive into the wonderful world of comb jellies. All right, so we talked about just a few of the standard jellyfish. The comb jellies are way fewer species of the tennis. We're talking, I think, 10,000 for the other. This is about 100 to 150. Yeah. Not even $150,150. Yeah. But they're saying that it's possible that these are just the ones we are aware of because we've encountered them in coastal waters. May be way more in deep sea. Yes. They don't know much about those guys. Right, right. And the ones that are in deep sea that we've encountered tend to be so fragile that we can't collect them. Yeah. Because they're not tough. Because you don't have to put up with the currents and waves, and they just float out there, and you look at them too hard and they crumble. So one type of a comb jelly is sidipid, and they are all round. They're spherical or oval. They have those branch tentacles that we talked about. Those tentacles are a little unique, and they can actually draw them back into the body when it's cold. Yes. Which is pretty cool. Really? No. Okay. So I believed it. And then they have, like, sheets on the sides of their mouths that it draws back into, which is pretty cool. Amazing. Yeah. Then there's lobates, which have lobes on the sides. Right? Yeah. And that's about it. They have the lobes, and that's what they're known for. Yes. Barroids. These are kind of cool. These are the dudes that have no tentacles. So the way they eat is they have a big mouth that draws in a lot of stuff and then a very tight, almost zipper like thing that shuts, and then they can shut that mouth really hard and just mush all that stuff up. Well, they have cilia inside their mouths that act like teeth, that pull their prey apart alive. Teeth? Tooth. Teeth. Yeah. Oh, man, that was weird. Jet lag. But the little teeth just pick it like their prey and just pull them apart. It dissolves them, basically mechanically. Amazing. Have you ever seen a video of the pelican who's just standing there, and there's a pigeon, like, on the ground right in front of him? All of a sudden, the pelican just eats the pigeon, and the pigeon is trying to get out of the pelicans, like, huge mouth. Oh. And the pelicans are sitting there like nothing's happening. And then finally, the pigeon stops moving. It is really disturbing. Wow. Because pelicans don't normally eat live pigeons, so it was like, there's something wrong with this pelican. Yeah. It was just, like, no remorse whatsoever. Yes. It's a disconcerting video. Wow. Especially if you're a pigeon lover, which I'm not. It's not only like, I hate pigeons, but you don't want to see them get eaten by a pelican. Yeah. It's weird. That's totally strange. Where do you find this stuff? Around. So weird. I think Yummy showed me that one. Yeah. You guys always have a lot of weird videos at your fingertips, you and Yummy. Are just always talking about, like, did you see the one where the pelican ate the pigeon? Yeah, I guess so. That's pretty neat. Sure.com. Jelly's distribution wise, they are also all over the ocean. They do prefer a little warmer water, though, but you can find them anywhere. Right. So we were talking earlier about the fact that they are from different phyla and that there's this drunken argument going on among scientists at the Monterey bay aquarium about how closely related they are. They used to all be described as selenarata, which is hollow. Bellied oh, yeah, makes sense. But they don't say that anymore, not in these pieces. And if you want to be ridiculed by your peers, call them that. But some people say their sister group, some people say no, they're not even that closely related. So the debate rages on, I guess. Yeah. So what's interesting is that we even know how long jellies have been around because they have no solid parts. Yeah. You'd think it'd be hard to find a fossil. No, they have gelatinous parts. They don't have any hardened parts. Yeah. That would be fossilized easily. But there have been some discoveries, some amazing discoveries of jellyfish and comb jellies from about 500 million years ago, I believe the oldest known specimens found. And there's this one found in Utah. Apparently Utah used to be a shallow inland sea, and it had these jellyfish in it. And I guess something happened to this jellyfish that was crushed by a rock impression. It's a lot of pressure, I would think, but all of a sudden, it just captured it because it's like a drawing of a jellyfish in a rock. It's amazing. And it's the oldest fossil, and it's 500 million years old. So it was a pretty lucky find, actually, to find this jellyfish that should not have been fossilized that was fossilized. So we do know that they're about 200 or 150,000,000 years older than fish. Fish weren't even around by then. And they think that possibly sea or sorry, comb jellies. It's possible they were the earliest animals to branch off, even earlier than sponges. Well, didn't they find that the jellyfish was the first animal in the sea that didn't just float along like a dummy, that actually used muscles to swim places? Yeah. And it was possible it was the comb jellies that did that. So it's possible the comb jellies branched off from the tree of life. So it's just one type of animal. Then all of a sudden there's a comb jelly. Right. What is this black magic you speak of? Right. And then maybe the jellyfish at some later point branched off of the comb jelly. Right? Yeah. But either way, it would have been the comb jelly and or the jellyfish that were the first to say, we're going this way. Yeah. You guys are just floating around like a bunch of morons waiting for food to hit you. We're embarrassed for you. Well, speaking of food, they are all carnivorous and they eat, like you said, they'll eat anything. They love plankton, but they eat fish, they eat crustaceans. Some eat other jellyfish, which is disgusting. And those nematocyst and color blasts, the stingers are the glue guns. They are good for defense. But there are 150 animals that also eat the jellies, fish and sea turtles. The sunfish loves them. Leather backed sea turtles love them. They journey to find them. Yeah, that's how much they love them. The Chinese. Yeah. They eat human beings eat jellyfish. Yeah. It's apparently a wedding delicacy in China. Oh, really? And has been for about 1500 years. Ours is catered salmon and chicken marbella. Yes. 425,000 tons of jellyfish are caught each year in 15 countries, mainly in Southeast Asia is where they're eating these. Yeah. But I read that Georgia, our state of Georgia oh, wow. Has a commercial jellyfish fishery. Really? Yeah. Big Jim's jellies. You would eat preserved a moon chime. You totally eat jellyfish, wouldn't you? Sure I would try it. Yeah. Apparently it's served in Japan too. It's salted, which would be good. I would try it. I would try raw jellyfish and sushi or something like that. But I would guess that salted strips of jellyfish are probably vastly preferable. I'm not nearly as adventurous as you with my mouth and my stomach, but I might try jellyfish, even though I'm talking about how much I love it. Right. You just cry while you ate. Yeah, exactly. You were so beautiful one. Well, I would eat woolly mammoth. Yeah. And you like them? Yeah. You got to bring floss when you eat wooly mammoth, supposedly that does nothing. Have you heard about that? Oh, yeah. Then the new studies that flossing is no good. Well, we talked about that. It depends on who you talk to. Some people are saying, like, no. They just realize that no one's ever done a scientific study to back up that flossing is good for you. And other people are saying, like, no. They did some studies and found that it doesn't do anything. Which I cannot believe. We either just talked about this, the last recording session or we talked about it on stage. We probably talked about it on stage because it came out while we were in the UK. Okay. Yeah. All right. But the idea that getting rotting food out from between your teeth has no positive health benefits for you, it defies explanation. Agreed. It was on stage because I made a crack about missing my teeth. Oh, yeah, I remember. Now, as far as them feeding on other things, we talked about these tentacles that they have to capture prey and these nematocysts. It's amazing. Basically, they're described in the article as venom bearing harpoons. So what happens is there's a queue. It's either something has touched them or it's a chemical cue that something is around and they shoot out this little harpoon and within 700 nanoseconds, it spears the prey and releases a toxin. Yes. And it's frightening. Yes. If you're a fish, you're in trouble. If you're another jellyfish, you're in trouble. Something smaller than that, you're just totally dead. And depending on the jellyfish, if you're a human being, you can die, as a matter of fact, too. Yes. We talk about that, dude. Yeah. So there's the sea wasp, obviously, which has the most toxic venom on Earth as far as humans are concerned. But then there's also another type of box jellyfish that are much tinier. I think they're about thumb sized or peanut sized. Yeah. You don't even see these things. Or if you do see them and they brush against you, you're probably not even going to feel the sting. It's called irakanji. Yes. Which is an Aboriginal word for this type of jellyfish. Right. There's a dude in the Westerner who was like, what is with this jellyfish? I've heard weird things about it. I don't know much about it. I'm going to go out and let myself get stung by one. Can you get killed very easily by something at any given point? Australia. Yeah, exactly. Because they're the ones. They've got the sea wasps, too, and they have to deal with the sea wasps and these little guys, the arubanji. Is that how we agreed we were going to say it? Yeah. Irukanji. Irukandji. So this guy survived, but he not well. He had a hard time getting to the point where they're like, you're going to survive. Yeah, he was lucky to survive. Yeah. So you get a sting from one of these things, just a single tentacle. Apparently, in about 20 to 30 minutes, what's called irukandji syndrome starts to set in and you feel it in your lower back first, right? Yeah. And you don't know you've been stung, so you're just like, oh, man, like, I tweaked my back out there in the ocean. And then things really start going south. Yes. Then you go and throw up your right kidney. Yeah. And the article, you said it feels like someone hits you with a baseball bat and your kidneys. And then comes the nausea and vomiting, which continues every minute or so for around 12 hours. Yeah. You get spasms in your arms and legs, your blood pressure increases, your skin begins to creep. It's as if worms are burrowing through it. Yeah. I saw a video of a guy who was stung and he said it felt like someone was pouring acid all over my body. Yeah. From just being brushed by this thumb sized, tiny little jellyfish. And then this is the creepiest thing to me. It says, victims are often gripped with a sense of impending doom and begged their doctors to kill them. Yeah. Can you imagine? And they're spreading their range, actually, they found them off the coast of Florida. They found them off the coast of South Africa. Jeez. Yeah. So, yeah, they're. Not to be messed with. All right, so down with Iraqanji, right? Have you ever heard that you should pee on somebody who's been stung by a jellyfish? I've seen friends so that's not true. They've actually found that could make it worse. Total myth. Yeah, but there's actually some science to it, right? Yeah. So if you get stung by a jellyfish and it's tentacle hits you and you're stung by a nematocyst, there may be some leftover ones still attached to your arm, right? Yeah. And you want to get rid of those. But if you get rid of them, if you pour, see, just fresh water on them, you're going to trigger the little harpoons inside because they're held in place by a specific concentration of solutes. Right. So if you change that concentration by hitting it with fresh water, you're going to set them off. You want to do seawater, right? Use sea water because they're held in check in seawater normally. So use seawater to wash it off, and then you take a credit card and scrape the rest of them off. Yeah, but if you don't have your credit card on you, sure. If you're not but supposedly you're supposed to keep sand out of it, which is tough to do. I did the beach. I did don't be dumb on it years back. Oh, really? Yeah. What did you do in the chair? All sorts of weird stuff. You remember. All right, well, getting back to the feeding, we covered the harpoon, the nematocyst of the jelly, but the comb jelly, like we talked about earlier, this is the nematocyst. They have the glue instead of the venom. Right. So what they do is they just send out that fishing line or release that sticky glue, and it reels whatever it catches right on into the mouth. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. Like something being stuck toward the Death Star. Yeah, exactly. A tractor beam. You got caught in a tractor beam. Basically. Should we take a break? Oh, wait, there was one other thing. So one type of comb jelly. This is so awesome. They actually eat true jellies and then they take their nematocysts and use them for their own hunting. How so? Like, they absorb them and shoot them out in their they save them? Yeah, they took them in their cheek for later. Can they get an unlimited supply of these? I don't know. Just curious if you could see one with like 300 of them. Look how many I've eaten. It's like don't be a pig. Sure you spit some of those out. Now can we take a break? Yes. All right. By the way, we just satisfied that one listener because you rejected my break. Oh, yeah, that's true. How about that? Man a lie. All right, we'll be back and talk a little bit about defense. All right, so I promised talk of defense, these things you've probably seen jellyfish and comb jellies that produce light. This bioluminescence. Although when I said earlier, the comb jelly, when it looks colorful, that is not bioluminescence. They are still bioluminescent, just not in that way. Right. So confusing. They actually do produce light. They have these proteins that have a chemical reaction that produces blue and green light when something might touch it. Yeah. Like moon jellies are well known for this. Oh, yeah. And they're not exactly sure why, but they think that this could be a defensive mechanism to either scare someone trying to eat you by turning a light on in their face or turning a light on and attracting something larger to eat that thing. Right. Either way, they think it's defense. And then alternately, some jellyfish have camouflage. Actually not as good as the octopus. No, not at all. Okay. But I mean, obviously some are most are transparent. It's pretty good camouflage. Yeah. And then some of the deep sea ones are actually red. They produce a red pigment. And the red apparently is very difficult to see in deep water, which is like 200 meters or more. There's no light. Yeah. You'd think it would be black, but they say that the red is easier to produce than black. Exactly. So black would work. It's just you try making black pigment. No, red. And red is the same down there. Red, it's all the same. So some of them do that, and then others have just red pigment in their gut so that if they eat a bioluminescent organism, it's not going to accidentally attract a predator to come check them out. Interesting. Yeah. See, this is really the octopus is threatened in my heart still a little bit now that I'm talking about this. Again, it's unstable. We'll see. I'll give a final vote at the end. So to me, now we get to the most amazing part. Well, one of the most amazing parts about jelly's. Sexy time. Yeah. Which is not very sexy. No. Although it's like every kind of sex you can imagine jellyfish engage in. And not just different species like individuals. Sure. Some are hermaphroditic, some are sexually divided, some are asexual. Yes. Some reproduce asexually. Sometimes in some species, like the moon jelly, I believe, they'll all get together in one big mass and just start swapping sperm and eggs. Spit them out of that mouth hole there, get some boxed wine, the party's on. Put on Michael Bolton your house keys in a big wooden bowl. Right. There you have it. That's the jellyfish way. So the medusa that you know and love is the main true jelly they spawn. So what they do is they release a bunch of eggs and sperm into the open ocean a lot of times altogether. And they do this from their mouth hole and take it in their mouth hole and the sperm meets the egg. And that's how it happens. Yeah. Ideally, or in some kinds of eggs stay in the mouth of the female and the male just shoots sperm out into the water and the sperm finds their way into the mouth. It's a way to go. Yeah. Or they fertilize outside in the water, like you were saying. Yeah. And then another. They don't even necessarily get together through the polyps. Yeah. A polyp will just be sitting there spewing out sperm or eggs gametes, like, all day long. One type spews out, like, 46,000 a day, every day, all the time. And then the whole idea is that eventually maybe it'll run into another game, eat and fertilize out. That's the comb jelly, actually. Oh, is that a comb that does that? Yeah. Okay. The polyps are the ones that are asexual and they just bud and divide in half, basically, to produce a little identical buddy. And then that can stay a polyp or it can eventually become a medusa. Yeah. Cause that's the thing. Like, the polyp is a stage of a jellyfish, the jellyfish life cycle. So it can be which is it? Yeah, that's true. You can just stay a polyp or you can eventually become a medusa. Yeah, and we didn't say that. Depending on the jellyfish, it might live for a few weeks or a year. Apparently they do better in captivity and tend to live up to several years in captivity. Yeah, I get the idea. They're pretty fragile out there in the ocean. Yeah. But they can reproduce so frequently and so early on in their life cycle that they can populate an area very quickly despite having a very short lifespan. And then in the polyp stage, some species can stay there for, well, basically almost indefinitely and just sit there and reproduce. There's a type of reproduction in the polyp stage where it's called strobilation. And the little polyp is sitting there just shooting off these little discs, ten to 15 at a time. And they found that depending on the temperature of the water and the warmer the water, the more they struggle at, there'll be more and more jellyfish that they just kind of shoot off. Like this article put it like shooting off clay pigeons. Yeah, right. And then each one just transforms into a medusa. Man, that's amazing. Yeah. Octopus. Yeah, it's in trouble. And then this is super cool, the hopsys nutricula. It is basically immortal. It is a hydrozoan, and it can actually revert back to the polyp stage after the medusa stage through trans differentiation and live forever, essentially, unless it gets killed, obviously, by something. And it is the only animal that anyone knows of that can do this. Yeah. Amazing. There's another type of turretopsis, too, that when it dies, it disintegrates, but some cells, as it's decaying, come back and form another individual. So it basically fertilizes itself using its dying body and regenerates. This is like it lives forever. Yeah, it's tapped into the force. All right, so we talked earlier about these jellyfish blooms or outbreaks or plagues that forms what else? That's it. Okay. It's great that these things are proliferating like other species that aren't, but it can get out of hand. It can interfere with people. It can interfere with machinery at power plants on the coast yeah. Cause power outages fisheries, they can get in the way. Where people are trying to fish for something else. All they're getting are jellyfish. Yeah. And there's been examples of all this stuff happening over time. Like, they shut down the USS Ronald Reagan once, which is a nuclear powered warship, because a bunch of jellyfish got sucked up into the cooling system. They shut down power plants in India and Japan, in the Philippines, and they think if there's a debate over whether comb jellies and jellyfish are related, there's a huge debate over whether or not we're seeing a natural outcome of just jellyfish life cycles, blooms. Like, this is just happening. Yeah. Is this a normal thing, or are we humans contributing to it? And if we humans are contributing to it, they basically say there's probably one of four ways that this is happening. Yeah. One of them is overfishing, basically just less competition for food. They're eating this zooplankton, and if other fish that normally eat that aren't there, then the jellyfish like, sweet more for me than buffet open. Apparently, jellyfish are not known to go on diets. They just gorge themselves constantly. Really? Yeah. What else? Nutrients. Yeah. When we release fertilizers from cropland into areas where jellyfish live, we can cause algae blooms. Yeah. It runs off eventually into the sea. Yeah. And it actually can deplete oxygen. So there's two things. One, you've got a bunch of zooplankton and phytoplankton, which well, I guess they're eating the zooplankton that jellyfish eat. Right? Yeah. And then you have lower oxygen, which jellyfish can live in and survive in a lot more easily because, again, they have a much lower metabolism than most other organisms that they're competing for food with. So their competition, again, is dying off while they're just like, this is great. I'll just keep eating more all day. Thank you, humans, for putting all this nitrogen and phosphorus in the water. You start to get the idea why these things have been around for 500 to 700 million years. Yeah. They can compete climate change with the warming ocean. Some of those jellies love it. Their embryos and larvae develop better and more quickly, so the populations grow more quickly. And a lot of them prefer that warmer water. So they say, bring it on. Yeah. And like I said, there was at least one study that looked at how jellyfish reproduce in warmer water and also water that's a higher acidity, which they're predicting through ocean acidification, which is the result of higher CO2 increases. And both of those suggest that jellyfish are going to do just fine under the climate change that we're facing. The cockroaches and jellyfish are the only things that are going to be around one day. Yeah. And then finally, what they call ocean sprawl. We're building things out in the middle of the ocean now, drilling platforms and docks and oil platforms, hard structures and jellyfish. The polyps especially, that we are talking about, that they attach to something sand or Cheryl Lad's belly button is not the easiest thing to attach to. Oh, cheryl Lab was born without a belly button. It's their claim to think that was very insensitive about me. You just threw me there. So what they do love to attach to is something solid. So they love attaching onto the ocean sprawl and oil rigs and whatever else is out there, and they do very well attached to a firm not the chair. Lads belly button isn't firm. It's nonexistent. Certainly not an iron girder. So there's this really great story about jellyfish and just how quickly they can take over in the Black Sea when a ship releases its cargo. Is it off the coast of Germany? Yeah. No, it's the north and the Baltic. Okay, don't try and screw me up here. Sorry. This is the Black Sea where they make caviar. Right. And actually there are some entire national economies are based on things like caviar and sardines and anchovies and just all these amazing fish. Oh, wow. And this ship apparently took on some seawater after it released its cargo to keep itself stable. And when it got to the Black Sea, it released it. And one of the things it released was this type of jellyfish called the sea walnut. And this was in 1982. Sounds cute. So the first sea walnut makes its way into the Black Sea in 1982. In 2002, the total biomass of sea walnuts in the Black Sea, just the Black Sea, was ten times the total biomass of all the fish that were taken from the world's oceans by commercial fishing. Wow. It got jellyfied, basically. Yeah. And they were competing with the other fish for the zooplankton and the food source and winning big time. And so all these fisheries collapsed, all these economies were in trouble. And then it just so happened that some other ship had picked up a different type of jellyfish that actually was a natural predator of the sea walnut and came along and saved the day totally. By a stroke of luck. The sea walnut cracker. Yeah. Wow. Yes, I did see that, actually. You sent me that. That's amazing. So it all worked out. Everything about jellyfish is amazing. Yeah. Final score for me. Octopus 100, jellyfish 97. That is close. It is nice. Just one three pointer at the end. Could have won it, but it didn't. No, it rimmed out. So if you want to know more you got anything else? No. You want to know more about jellyfish and comb jellies and that kind of stuff, you can type those words into the search bar. Howstep works.com? And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. That's right. It's 03:00 P.m., which means our bedtime is just in about four short hours. I actually tried to go to bed before my one year old daughter the other night. Yeah. And I said no. That's bad parenting. You put yourself to bed. Oh, wait. And she finally drifted off at 830 and I was out at 832. Nice. All right, I'm going to call this. You helped me get married hey, guys. So recently got married to my beautiful wife congratulations. With whom I've been with for over eight years. While the prospect of being married to her never frightened me at all, the thought of having to be in the center of attention, professing my love to my then fiance in front of all of our guests and try not to look like a dummy during the ceremony was, how do you say, nauseatingly? Frightening? Terrifying. Excuse me. Yeah, steven, he's not a public speaker, I don't think. However, during the hours leading up to the ceremony, I kept my mind occupied by listening to the melodious, the tones of your voices teaching me about, well, some things I really don't remember. Honestly, I was a little occupied. So we were literally just like, what is it called? ASMR. Yeah, just his tones. He didn't even know what we were talking about. It was just the sounds of our voices soothed him. Which is very nice. Yeah, it is nice. Regardless, guys, everything ultimately went very well, and we are both now very happy to be together for good and to not have to plan a wedding again. Thank you for helping me get through the worst of my pre wedding anxiety. I was going to say the worst day of my life at first and for making such a terrific podcast. And that is Stephen Hall, who's a PhD candidate in pharmacology. Well, thanks a lot, Stephen. Congratulations. Send us some Xanax. Pop it in the mail. He's a candidate. A PhD candidate. He doesn't have access to that kind of stuff. Well, I guarantee you he won't be a candidate anymore if he starts sending out mailing people pharmaceutical. Give him his badge. Steven, don't listen to Chuck. If you want to get in touch with us for any reason whatsoever, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshonow. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@howstepfworks.com. And as always, join us at home, on the Web stuffyousthenew.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. 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."
c898f7a0-3620-11ea-b32d-8f4631475aea	Short Stuff: Squirrel Nuts	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-squirrel-nuts	We know squirrels hide nuts. But it's actually more complex a system than you think.	We know squirrels hide nuts. But it's actually more complex a system than you think.	Wed, 18 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=323, tm_isdst=0)	11271565	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey there. Hi there, joe there and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck. And I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Chuck's here. And I'm Josh, and let's go because we're talking about squirrels. So zip, zip, zowie. Yeah, this is a continuation of our squirrel talk. We've never done one on squirrels, but I know a couple of years ago you talked about the squirrel being your foe, and then you had since turned to love and embraced squirrels. I love the squirrel. I had a squirrel attack me, which you can see on my video doorbell. If you go to Instagram, chuck thepodcaster at Chuck the podcaster, you can see my squirrel attack. That where the squirrel ran up my leg. And now we're going to talk about something I thought was pretty interesting, which is squirrels and the notion of them gathering nuts and things for the winter and hiding them. Okay. Wow. Or storing them. Rather heck of an intro, Chuck. That's it for short stuff, everybody. Yes. So I heard about these studies before, hadn't you? Like, this isn't news to me. It was news to me. Okay, so what we're talking about, it turns out that squirrels that live in trees called tree squirrels, they're different from ground squirrels. And one big thing that differentiates them. Aside from where they nest or den. Either in the ground or in a tree. Is that tree squirrels typically don't hibernate. Which is cool. Because then that means you can see squirrels year round. But it's rough for the squirrels because then that means that they have to sustain themselves nutritionally throughout the year. Which can get kind of hard in the winter months. Which is why everybody. Squirrels. Especially tree squirrels. Tend to stow food. They gather food during the fall to last them through the winter. That's right. And it's also why this time of year, especially in Atlanta, aka. City of 10 Million squirrels, it seems like they are everywhere. This time of year, nuts are falling on the ground, little acronyms are falling on the ground, and squirrels are very busy. And you kind of take the squirrel for granted because they're everywhere. But occasionally I will be driving around and I will just sort of laugh to myself about the fact that in my view, let's say walking or driving, I see like ten wild animals just running around in the middle of a city. Yeah, they're everywhere. They are. Well, Georgia and Atlanta in particular is particularly wooded metropolis, so it makes sense that they be everywhere in Atlanta. I think if you went to, like, Kansas City, you'd be sorely disappointed. It's just a boy's life metropolis. Okay. I'm trying out some new ways of saying things. I love it. I hope that catches fire. Thank you. With these squirrels, when they're storing stuff for the winter and when they're gathering all this stuff, what are they eating? Well, they're eating what's called mast, which is one of my favorite words. It's also called tree fruit. Things like acorns. Basically any nuts that grow on trees. I didn't know this truck apparently also will eat baby birds while they're in their nest. Nestling? Yeah. I didn't know that. That was disappointing to hear. It's a little rough. But there's one other thing you need to know about squirrels. It's pretty amazing when they jump off of a tree and land on the ground. If you take a snapshot photo of them landing, they land like they're superheroes in like a three point stance with one of their arms balled into a fist and pulled up by their side. Like they should have a cape and a mask on, basically. It's pretty amazing. I think we might have mentioned that in another episode, but it is worth looking up on the internet for sure. Yeah. So they're gathering nuts while they're wearing their little cape or their mask. And as fall comes, they really have to step it up because they want to gather it for winter. But the thing is, when they gather this stuff, they don't actually gather it and store it in their nest or in their den because there's not enough room. And this, actually. Finally chuck. Finally. Several minutes in. Four plus minutes in. We get to the point of this short stuff. I think we should take a break. That's the best cliffhanger we've ever had. Are you kidding me? All right. All right. Let's take a break and we're going to talk about what happens from this point forward 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 Stampscom. 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. Alright. Superhero squirrels. Winter is coming. Game of Thrones style. They know they got to hoard those nuts. They're also eating nuts. Yeah, they've got to sustain themselves along the way. So they will eat stuff that they find, but they also bury their stuff. That's what they do. They don't actually have, like a pantry or area of their den or nest where they're storing the nuts. They store them in an area around their tree, usually, or where their nest or den is. But apparently, Chuck, they'll expand out, like, to a seven acre radius around that tree, too. Yeah, they can. They're called scatter hoarders. And I think generally, they like to kind of stick close to home, but if forced to, for whatever reason, they will expand, like you said, up to seven acres away from their tree. And I think Chip and Dale did a lot of disservices. I don't know if Chipmunks are the same, but all you can picture, because of those Chippendale and Alvin and the gang, well, I guess Alvin and then all they did was perform concerts. But all you can think about with Chip and Dale is running up and stuffing a tree hole full of nuts for the winter. Right. So that's kind of what you figure happens. But they don't. They know other squirrels are going to be watching out, and they can combine and steal their sack of nuts is buried. They bury them, it's called caching about an inch underground, and cover them up again. They'll even crack open nuts sometimes to keep them from germinating. That's pretty smart. And there are two really great parts here to the end of this one. The first one really gets me was in 2008, they did a study that found that eastern gray squirrels have deceptive casing, so they know other squirrels are watching. So they will literally go dig a little hole and go, all right, I'm just going to put this acorn right in here, stuff it in their mouth real quick, cover up the hole, and then run off and be like, all right, I've just left that acorn buried over there. Nothing to see here. Right? Isn't that amazing? It is pretty amazing. I love that, too. They're protecting. Yeah, that's another way to put it. The other thing that they do, as far as burying this stuff is that they will put them in areas where they're at risk to go dig them up, like at risk of predation, kind of out in the open, far enough away from their tree where it's just getting increasingly risky to go retrieve that nut. But that they'll put high value nuts there, and we'll talk about how squirrels sort nuts in a second, but they put high value nuts there because if it's risky for them, it's just as risky for another squirrel who it doesn't belong to. And so that might cut down on another squirrel coming along and pilfering their buried nuts. That's right. There was another study. This one was by Michael Delgado and Lucia Jacobs, professors at UC Berkeley. And they said, you know what? This caching thing is a lot more complex than even we knew about. They did these experiments over 19 months, from 2012 to 2014, they fed 45 marked, free ranging eastern fox squirrels, one nut at a time, 16 for each squirrel, and all different kinds of nuts hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, almonds, the good stuff. And if the squirrels didn't eat the nuts, like we said, they had to take care of themselves. But if they had been fed for the day, they tracked using GPS, where they buried their little nutrition. And what did they find out? They found out that they bury them basically according to things like size, type, potentially calorie, density, taste. And so they graded them basically on value. And so, like, say they gave a squirrel a bunch of walnuts, they would bury the walnuts generally in the same area away from, say, where they buried the almonds or the acorns or whatever. And this is called spatial chunking, and it's a mnemonic device that we use, but it's pretty amazing that squirrels use it, too, to remember where they put something. Generally, like walnuts are generally over here, so if I'm hungry for a walnut, I can just go over there and I'm going to dig up a walnut. Yeah. So it's literally a device to remember things because it's a strategy, they said in their quote, it's a cognitive strategy to decrease memory load and increase accuracy of retrieval. So how you translate that is squirrels have a lot going on, and they're bearing a lot of nuts, so they use this little mnemonic device to remember where all the good stuff is. Plus, also, don't forget, they have squirrel sized brains. So, yeah, they want to take as many shortcuts and use as many mnemonic devices as they possibly can to remember where they bury these nuts. It makes sense that they would be good at this because their survival depends on it, which is to say huge brains. No, very small brains. Very small brains that are good at taking shortcuts, because it's true. One of the other things, though, is this really indicates that squirrels remember where they bury nuts, and they do. They have devices for that, but they also forget a lot, and they don't always crack open enough, which means that squirrels go around and plant lots of trees every year by going and burying acorns in the ground or walnuts in the ground. That's one of the ways that a lot of trees are propagated is through squirrels who go basically garden. So that is squirrels, everybody, they have their favorites, and they hide them where they don't want them to get found, just like I would do. You know what's weird, though, Chuck? I have one question real quick. Why don't humans eat acorns? Everything else, all those other nuts that they use to test the squirrels out with almonds, walnuts, all that, those two, basically, why don't we eat acorns? Any ideas? I don't know. I think they might be toxic, and they're bitter. Okay, you have a roast one, a roasted acorn? Yeah, like on a campfire. I didn't eat it afterwards, though. Acorn squash? Yeah. I don't know if it's actually acorn. No, it's not. You got anything else about squirrels or acorns or anything like that? Nothing else. Okay. Well, everybody, since Chuck said nothing else, that means that we have come to the end of the short stuff, and short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio App podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
https://podcasts.howstuf…ertilization.mp3	How In Vitro Fertlization Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-in-vitro-fertlization-works	In the U.S. alone, more than 6 million people are affected by infertility and science has taken up the mantle of helping them to conceive. Learn about the clever, though intuitive, methods of assisting infertile couples to have a child.	In the U.S. alone, more than 6 million people are affected by infertility and science has taken up the mantle of helping them to conceive. Learn about the clever, though intuitive, methods of assisting infertile couples to have a child.	Thu, 17 Jul 2014 14:29:02 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=29, tm_sec=2, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=198, tm_isdst=0)	35300497	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Yeah. And this is stuff you should know. That sounded sardonic. Yeri yeri. The J silence. Yawking yawking. I never get sick of that movie. No, it's a good one. I haven't seen the second one. Don't really intend to, but I'm afraid to. Yeah, because it might tarnish my love of that character. I've heard it's not very funny. Just keep it with the first one. I'm totally going to watch them. Just waiting for cable. Oh, yeah. TBS knows what they're doing with movies that were for the big screen. Yeah. Sizing them down. Best start ever. So you're doing good? I'm great. Okay, good. So we're talking today yes. About IVF. Yes. In vitro fertilization. Yes. And I have to say, Chuckers, I don't really have by the way, I don't have an intro for this one. Okay. Although I do have a bit of one. All right, let's see. In 2013 yes. A lady named Louise Brown celebrated her 35th birthday. And with her birthday coming and going, she announced that she was pregnant with her second child. This is like mind blowing crazy stuff all over the place. Because Louise Brown was the first human being ever conceived using in vitro fertilization. Yes. They called them test tube babies back then. Remember that? Yeah, totally. Testtube babies. You don't call it that anymore? No, we've gotten a little more scientific as a society since the plus, I don't think they eat test tubes. Yeah. If they ever did. Yeah. I think maybe petri dishes. Culture dishes. Not test tubes, but culture dish baby. Right. It's weird. Test tube baby. It kind of rolls off the tongue. It's got the two T sounds, which makes it a little funnyish and intriguing. Yeah, but that's what she was. She was the first tattoo baby. It was 1978 in England and she was born July 25, I think, just a few days later. I think the second IVF baby was born in India. Oh, yeah. In very short order, too, I'm sure. Their doctors were like, come on, will you give birth already? I want to be the first. Nobody remembers number two. And then the following year, in 1979, the first American IVF baby was born. And that's the history of IVF. It just goes back that far. Yeah. Since then, I think more than 35 million IVF babies have been born. Yes. A couple of 100,000 each year in the US. Alone now. Yeah, it was like in the it's up to like 100 and something 100 and change. I think I got over 200,000. Do you really? Yes, really. I saw 61, 740 in 2012, or maybe 200,000 worldwide. Okay. Alright, let's just settle on that. I'll bite on that one. But yeah, that's a lot of babies that are born through IVF. It's crazy how the thing that struck me and finally we're getting to the end of the intro. Is that what IVF is? It seems so, like, whiz, bang, crazy futuristic. Really. Not. No, it's figuring out we figured out how a woman becomes pregnant and figured out the ways that we could possibly best help that process along. And that's what it is. Really? There's no, like, crazy new technology. They don't buzz her with a prego laser, nothing like that. It's strictly, like, catheters and timing and hormones. It's crazy how simple it is, but it's also equally crazy that it's as successful as it is, considering what in vitro fertilization consists of. Yes. I guess we can go ahead and talk about success rates. In the US. Women under the age of 35 have a 30% to 35% chance of conceiving with IVF. It drops to 20% to 25% between 35 and 46% over 40. And that is percentage of live birth cycle, which is yeah. Per cycle. So, like, if you go through a cycle of in vitro fertilization yes. You have the percentage chance, typically, which is pretty much in lockstep with natural birth rates according to age. Oh, is it? Yes. Well, I mean, it definitely decreases with age. I'm not saying it's, like, one for one. Sure. Yeah, totally. But I'm saying that I think the depreciation of possibility, it goes down with age naturally as well. With IVF, too. Yeah. And live birth is the key here because many times there will be conception and there will be a pregnancy, but any number of things can go wrong from there. Oh, yeah, sure. Chemical pregnancies. Apparently, some Chinese researcher did a survey of 100,000 plus live IVF births and found that there's a correlation. You were three times, likelier, to have a major birth effect if you were born via invitro fertilization than natural. Oh, really? And he just found a correlation. Not a cause, but just the numbers for some reason. Spit that out. Yeah. Well, now one of the new things you can do is up for, at a certain point in the process, PGD, which is pre implantation genetic diagnosis. And this is a test that will cost you several thousand dollars. And basically, it allows you to root out certain monogenetic disorders. Like, you can get PGD testing and find out if the baby might have, like, sickle cell or Huntington's disease or cystic fibrosis or downs. And then you can make a decision at that point whether or not you want to continue with the process. Yeah. There's a real concern that there won't be. Like, that down syndrome. People will be extinct eventually because all the testing have gotten so accurate. Yeah. I don't think that'll happen. Well, and there's also ethical concerns with PGD about do you do selective termination if you find out it's a boy and you wanted a girl right. Or I didn't want to keep with brown eyes. There's a lot of ethical quandaries yeah. Associated with it. And it's even more basic than that for a lot of people, too. Like, if you have a fertilized egg, or even just an egg, it's a potential human life. To some people, that destroying just the egg that was never fertilized is like a moral problem. Yeah. Or let's say you have a chance of multiples twins or triplets or quads or more if you're a certain age that is not good and can be dangerous for you as the mother and for the kids, too. Yeah. So at that point, you might have to go through what they call selective reduction, which is choosing which ones to go with. Well, there's a lot of pitfalls to this, but there's a lot of people who are helped by it as well. And at the very least, there's a lot of people who seek the help from it. I saw something like in this article, which I think was written in 2006 or seven. Yeah, it's a little outdated. It's had they said, 6.1 million Americans are faced with infertility, which infertility is not like, bam, you're infertile here's. What's wrong with you? Right. Infertility can be right, but it isn't always. Yeah. Technically, infertility the definition of infertility is that you have gotten it on for a year unprotected, and no baby has been produced for six months if you're over 35. Okay. But it depends on the doctor. This article talked a lot about, well, if you've gone this far and you've done these procedures, then they'll move you to this. A lot of the places are fertility clinics or baby factories, and you can go right to IVF if you want to. And they say that they believe in it. So there's not like, any hard and fast law. Right. That's the impression. After doing this for how many years have we been doing this now? 80. After 80 years of doing this, I've learned that How Stuff Works article is like it deals in ideals, not necessarily like, this is how it works in the real world. It's like, this is how it works according to the law. That's true. We do our best. Yeah. So apparently about 7.3 million people are faced with infertility, and they turned to IVF. And IVF is far and away the most popular form of what's called assistive reproductive technology, which, as we said, sounds wiz, bang and futuristic, but not necessarily. Yeah. About 50% of art methods are what they call lowtech, which is maybe we'll put you on some hormones. Antibiotics, apparently, are huge. One really a huge tree. In for infertility. Yeah, supposedly. Especially unexplained infertility, which affects something between 10% to 30% of infertility cases are just unexplained. They're like, there's nothing structurally wrong with you. Right. Your husband's sperm is fine. We can't figure it out. Well, getting pregnant isn't the easiest thing in the world. No, it's not. It seems that way in the movies. But there's an explanation for things even when it's unexplained. And because there's this whole unexplained thing, Chuck. There's, like, a lot of suggestions as to what's at play. Yeah, but you're right. It is kind of like man, woman, get together, have child, have another child, maybe a third, and, like, it's no problem. Like you said in the movies. Well, especially when age comes in, people are getting married later, you see 16 year old have a baby without any problem. Right. It's sort of weird that things haven't changed, reproductively speaking. Like, people are getting married in their mid 30s, but you can still get pregnant when you're 13. Right. And it's like, as it shifted not going to shift with any cultural attitudes. No. Which is why we're like, okay, well, we need technology then. Right. But like I said, about half the assisted reproductive technology methods are low tech. Chlomid is a big probably the most popular fertility drug treatment. Yeah. They've been using that since, like, the don't know, they say 50s either 50 years or since the well, it's an oral medication, and it is used to induce ovulation. And actually, now men I've seen have used it to increase testosterone oh, yeah. Because an NFL player just got banned for using Chlomid for fertility because they said it increases testosterone. So it was a performance enhancing drug, but he was using it to try to get pregnant. I mean, that's what he said. That's not fair. Yes. Robert Mathis of the cult. So he was suspended, but with Clomid alone, you have an 85% chance of ovulation success and about a 43% chance of pregnancy success over three cycles. And after three cycles, that number goes way down. Oh, really? Like, it becomes less and less probable that you'll conceive after three cycles? Yeah, it's the same through three. And then that's just with Clomid. Okay. And then after that, what people generally do is try a few different methods before moving on to IVF. Right. Like, just the hormones or what we'll talk about now, which is artificial insemination. Right. And that assisted reproductive technology is an umbrella term. Artificial insemination is an umbrella term underneath the AR T umbrella. Yeah. And it's basically any time you try to give the sperm a leg up and it's raced toward the egg yeah. It's inseminated artificially. In other words, it doesn't come directly from the penis into the vagina. Right. Why does that make you laugh? I just felt like I was in the Kindergarten Cop class. Yeah. It's when the sperm is harvested for AI, for artificial insemination, it's either implanted intravaginal or intra cervical. Right. So in the vagina and the cervix. But if you're going to put it directly into the uterus, you have to wash them. Yes. You can't put untreated sperm directly into the uterus because you will have what's called a uteral contraction, which apparently is extraordinarily unpleasant. The sperm has some sort of it's called protoglandins, I think. Yeah. That you have to wash off the sperm if you don't, the protoglandins will set off these contractions in the uterus. Exactly. And I said uterine. I think uterine contractions, they're pretty violent. Yeah. So, yeah, you wash the sperm, and not only does it remove those protaglastins, it eliminates any substance that will get in the way and make the sperm motile and motel means they're good swimmers. Right. That's another advantage of using artificial insemination, is you can say you're cut. You're cut. You made the team, you're cut. Right. And then you put together the stream team of the best sperm and you say, Go get them. That's right. Yeah. So if you're using the wash sperm and directly onto the uterus, that's called IUI intrauterine insemination. And that's just kind of one step further than AI. Like artificial insemination. You can do the turkey based at home. Sure. If you want. So that's the thing. Yeah. Like, they have kits that's a form of artificial insemination. That is artificial insemination. Yeah. I mean, it's an umbrella term. Well, yeah, if you're using the turkey baster at home, you're artificially inseminating, but you're probably inserting it directly into the vagina, maybe the cervix. You're not doing intrauterine? No, you can't do IUI at home. Unless you have a sperm washer, which you can afford one of those these days. That's right. So if those fail, then your next step is probably going to be IBF. But like I said, depending on your age and what's going on, you can skip straight to IVF if your doctor says that's. Okay, well, we'll skip straight to IVF after a message break. How about that? All right, so let's talk about the IVF process, huh? Yeah. Again, pretty low tech. High tech stuff. It's neat. Yes. It will cost you about twelve grand. Twelve to 20, I saw. Yeah. I hate the ranges for these procedures because it really depends on where you are and if you have insurance. I think 15 states require insurance to cover it. Let me interject here. There is an argument that the lack of standards in pricing for medical procedures is the single problem for why the health care system in the US is broken. That it's not necessarily insurance, that it's not necessarily chronic disease. That if you came up with standard pricing, you could solve quite a bit of the like, car mechanics. Yeah. That's supposed to be a standard. Yeah. I never knew that. With car mechanics, when they say how much time it takes, it's really not how they don't time how long it takes. There's a manual that says changing the carburetor is 1.5 hours. I didn't know that. Yeah. I just know that Mr. Goodwin posts his desk on the board. Well, good for him. Like McDonald's. What, like a menu? Yes. Anyway, I agree with you about the medical standards. It makes a lot of sense. I mean, surely, yes, chronic disease is a huge problem, especially preventable chronic disease. But that's not the only issue here. It's the fact that you can be charged almost literally an arm and leg, depending on where you go. That's right. Yes. It will cost you some money, but if you have good insurance, then they'll help out. So here are there are basically five steps. The first is ovarian stimulation. This is when you're going to be taking fertility drugs. It could be a couple of weeks of that. Some are oral. Sometimes you're going to be given shots to your wife or if the ladies on her own should be given shots to herself. Because the good thing about IVF is you don't need a live man necessarily. No. You just need the sperm. Yeah. And it could come from anywhere. Yeah. Single ladies or all the single ladies or ladies in the LGBT community. I always want to mix up those letters. Yeah. Like, there doesn't need to be a man involved. No. At some point, I guess if you could grow sperm in a lab from stem cells, not directly, then technically you could do that. But no, it doesn't have to be involved. You can harvest sperm from a sperm bank. Yeah. Anonymous donor, friend of a friend, transient who's just passing through town. Sir, whatever your standards are, you could conceivably, get your hands on some sperm. Yeah. And then, bam. You don't need a man. Was it from Lebowski? I could get you some sperm by 03:00 p.m.. That is a great movie, man. I saw that again for the first time in a while recently. Oh, man. I think he's talking about a big toe. I can get you a big toe by 03:00 p.m.. But, yes, you will need sperm. If you're the husband and it's just your regular old husband and wife trying to conceive or just man and woman. Right. Then the husband will deposit that sperm in a little room designed to make that happen, and then they will take the sperm and wash it and hold it. And it's all timed out appropriately, of course. Got you. They can't hold them to it forever. And so that's the ovarian stimulation. Like you're trying to get the eggs to come along, and not only are you trying to get an egg to come along, you're trying to get several to come along. Yeah. That's the whole point if you want multiple eggs. Right. So, you know, a woman is born with all of the approximately 400,000 eggs she'll ever produce in her life. Number just goes down. Right. During her menstrual cycle, one of those eggs enters a fallopian tube and becomes mature. Right. So what these hormones do is get a bunch of those eggs into their fallopian wrappers and get them to mature over time. And the doctor, I guess, pays attention to how they're maturing, and when he decides these eggs are ready to go, that's when you hit step two, which is the egg retrieval step. That's right. And that is not super complicated either. It's called the name sounds complicated, trans Vaginal Ultrasound. Aspiration. But what it really is is a mild sedative and a suction device that sucks out the eggs. That's really all there is to it. It's pretty amazing. If you cannot use the tua method, you will have to undergo a more involved procedure called laparoscopic surgery, which isn't super involved either. It is also a short process, but there's a small incision in the abdomen to locate your ovaries. Yeah. They put a little video camera in there. Yeah. So more involved, obviously, because it is a surgical procedure, but it's not like you're staying in the hospital for a week or anything. Right. Yeah. It's just more involved because you have to use more anesthesia, too, which automatically increases the risks exactly. With the other one, aspiration. Yeah. I guess you just need a mild sedative, it says here. Yeah. It's like Twilight sleep. Got you. All right, so step three. You've got your eggs, you've got your multiple eggs. They're all looking good. Yeah. Because they go through and they look at them and say, this one looks good, this one looks good. Not this one. Yeah. And I'm not sure when PGD can take place. I think after fertilization. Sure. I would think, yeah, I guess it would have to be. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. So then you've got your insemination and like I said, you've got your sperm. However you got it, we ain't asking. It was a transient on the street. More power to you. They examine the eggs and say, these look robust and juicy and full. These are the best ones. So we're going to use these. That's when the sperm is added and the best sperm is picked. And then it's in a culture and it's doing its thing. Right. And depending on the sperm, they might inject it directly into the egg, which is called intracytoplasmic sperm injection. They could also right. The sperm doesn't have to go into the egg, it gets put into the egg. Right. But more traditional methods are just inserting it into the near the egg in the culture. Right. Yeah. And the culture can be artificial, but it's also often made of the endometrium from the woman or in addition to possibly like her cervical fluids. So it's basically mimicking what would be going on in like the fallopian tube or something. That's all they're doing is taking the process that normally happens inside the woman's body and doing it outside for a little while. And so you've got the egg and the sperm in the same culture and within possibly an hour yeah. Fertilization might have taken place. There's an open bar, everyone's getting to know each other, everyone's getting friendly. Little ice breaker happens. And like you said, it can be hours when they are doing the fertilization dance. Right. And the next day, your doctor is going to confirm visually that there are two pro nuclei and that is the basis of your embryo right there. Do you see that? Then that means things are headed in the right direction because the pro nuclei from the sperm and the pronuclei from the egg are going to fuse to make a single nuclei, and that becomes the embryo, which divides into well, that becomes a zygote. I'm sorry. Which divides into two cells. And then I think by the time it's either two or four cells, it becomes an embryo. Right. Yeah. And that's a couple of days after fertilization, is when you get to that stage. Yeah. The cell division is very slow at first, but then it starts to pick up time. By the time you reach day five or six, you've got what's called a blastocyst. And by this time, there's fetal tissue growing and like, embryonic fluid cavity. And this thing is a placenta. Yeah, pretty much. The doctor is not normally going to see this. They're going to observe the egg, the fertilized egg or embryo for maybe a couple of days to make sure everything's progressing normally. And then they'll put it back into the mom. Yeah. I mean, that can be done after one day. But your doctor, they'll have a plan of when they think the best time is and you're being monitored and not you the man, but the woman is being monitored, so they don't care about the man. And then depending on where they put it, that's the type of assisted reproductive technology that's being used. Right. Yes. So, like, if you are using IVF, the thing has been fertilized outside of the womb, outside of the body, and then introduced into the uterus. Yeah. It's called the transfer. Yeah. And they basically just use the catheter, right? Yeah. It's suspended in fluid, I guess, just make it easier to get in there. It's like there's peanuts, the foam peanuts for shipping it's that version. Exactly. So it's suspended in the drop of fluid and it is a long, thin catheter, and it's placed into the vagina, pass the cervix right there in the uterus and squirt. There it goes. Yeah. And it's really that easy. There's another process called Zygote, intra fallopian transfer, where it's the same process, but instead of depositing the fertilized egg into the uterus, they put it into the fallopian tube. Right. And I think that has not as great a chances as IVF. Is that right? I think you try. Zift is what it's abbreviated as before IVF. Okay. But again, all those rules are subject to change yes. Depending on your doctor and your situation. And then your embryo hopefully will attach to the uterine wall. If it attaches, I think we said EP topic, pregnancy is when it does not attach to the uterine wall, but outside of the uterus. But usually the fallopian tube, I think. Right. It never descends into the uterus. You can't get pregnant that way or you can't have a kid that way. No, you can't like, even if the kid starts to develop, you have to terminate the pregnancy because it will kill you. That's right. Or you can get what's called a chemical pregnancy, which is basically just a really early miscarriage, super early in the process. Chemical pregnancy. Yeah. Okay. And those are just a couple of things that can go wrong along the way. It's a stressful time for the couples because it's probably their last step toward having a natural, as they call them. Sure. And then the woman is also getting injections for hormones throughout. That can be rough on the lady as well. I can imagine. Yeah. So in addition to being infected with hormones, having your eggs harvested, getting laparoscopic surgery, like your husband being in a room where he has to ejaculate into a cup and all of this stuff, there are actual risks involved, like physical risks. So like we said, if you get the laparoscopic surgery when your eggs are harvested, like, you have the risk that comes from any kind of anesthesia any kind of surgery like that. So there are things like chest pains. What else? Well, there's one risk called, oh, ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, and that's when your ovaries swell up, which is super painful, and about 30% of patients experience that. But it can range from mild cases where you just take over the counter meds, to more severe cases moderate to severe, where gas and nausea and vomiting and no appetite. And I think only 1% to 2% of women experience severe. Of course, that means you're probably going to go to the hospital and gain a lot of weight, like things that women don't like. And that's the result of those fertility drugs. Like the ovary is like, whoa, whoa, I did not sign up for this. You're overstimulating me, and I'm fighting back. Pretty much. But yes, it does sound like it's fairly common, at least in a mild form. And in the mildest form, apparently, it clears up on its own. Yeah. So then, like I said, with egg retrieval, you have the general anesthetic issue, and then even with the lighter aspiration procedure, there are still problems. Like you can get an infection. Yeah. You can have structural damage. But speaking of structural damage, in addition to in vitro fertilization, you could also try surgery. That's another avenue that some people tried to solve their infertility. Like if your fallopian tube is blocked or whatever, they can go in. Yeah, like if you have a physical problem. Right. Yeah. So checkers. We already mentioned Zip. Have you heard of gift? I have Gamit intra fallopian transfer similar to IVF, but it's in the fallopian tubes now. What's the difference between Gift and Gift then? Okay, I'll explain. Oh, wait, gift is in a lab. Gift is in the Fallopian tubes? Yeah. Like you go in and artificially inseminate the egg in the fallopian tube. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. But if you have damaged fallopian tubes. You can't use the gift method. No, but the gift method, the advantage of it is much more closely mimics natural birth or natural pregnancy because the egg is inseminated in the fallopian tube, and then it just goes about its normal process from there. Yes. So aside from having sperm introduced through a needle, it's totally natural. Yeah. But it's not used. It's only like 2% of cases, and I think Zip is only 1%. Yeah, I saw even less than I saw that both of them are less than 1%. And the big blockbuster is in vitro fertilization. And then there's something called ICSI interest Cytoplasmic sperm injection. And that's a treatment you'll do alongside IVF. Yeah. Remember I was saying, like, depending on how the sperm is introduced, that's one way that it might work. Yeah. In about 40% of cases, I think they use the ICSI method. And that's just injecting the sperm, basically into vague itself. Well, a single sperm that's like your sperm has problems, and so we're going to pick out one dude. Hercules. Hercules. Hercules. And the cool thing about IVF is literally yeah. If you have multiple eggs that are really great, you can freeze the ones you don't use. And if you want to go back for round two, you can skip the first part of the harvesting and go directly to the next steps. Yeah, I guess you could skip all the hormones and all the possible overstimulation of ovary. Yeah, the initial hormones, but you still have the ones on the backside. Being able to skip that first bit is a big relief to a lot of women. I can imagine. Yeah, I'm sure it's worth the expense, too. How to freeze them. Yeah. So what's crazy about all this, Chuck, is that not all insurance covers this. A lot of insurance treats IVF procedures as an elective procedure. As a result, some states, I think 15 states have laws on the book saying if you're an insurance company operating in our state, you have to, at the very least, cover infertility treatments. Yeah. Just check with your insurance if you're interested. They may cover some, but not all. But you'll probably get some assistance, you hope. Yeah. Or you can just move to a state like Massachusetts that has the law. Yeah. Basically the law is like, you cover IVF. Some of the best IVF doctors up there. Really? Yes. I read an article that interviewed this one couple, and they were some state that didn't have any insurance laws about IVF, and they moved to Massachusetts and they said it was like going from a hospital that didn't even have x ray technology going into, like, the most cutting edge type of hospital you could possibly imagine just because it's required there. The doctors, by nature, are all the experts at it because they've done so much work on it. They're trying to make little baby liberals right. Little Ted Kennedy running around. Exactly. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Feed couples out there going through this stuff. Yeah. God speed and good luck. We wish you well. And if you want to learn even more about this, you can type in vitro fertilization in the search bar@householdworks.com. And that brings up listener mail. I'm going to call this work surveillance. Remember we did that one? Yeah. People, employees spying on you. Employers spying. This is true. Hey, guys. I work for Blank company, large shipping Corporation. Let's call Shipco. Yeah, Shipco. For seven years when I started. I love the company and the job. Things shifted more towards the bottom line oriented attitude with the company. I started to get pretty burnt out, began looking for something else to do with my life. I'd always had an intense I'm sorry, an interest in electric guitars. Not just as a player, but something I studied from a historical standpoint. I would always enjoy taking apart in messing with my guitars. At some point, I became interested in Lutheran and decided to become a guitar maker. So what I ended up doing wait, Luthery. Yeah. Like a Luther is a guitar maker. Like a Cooper makes the barrels. Yeah. Wine barrels, I think. Yeah. A luther makes a guitar. I did not know that. L-U-T-H-I-E-R. What ended up happening, I would finish up my workload for the day and tidy up the store. And if there were no customers, I would work on my guitar designs at work. For a while, the management didn't care. But as the pressure started being put on them, they had to tell me to stop. But I didn't, because I'd found my passion. Finally, one day, I was pulling to the office and handed screenshots that I hadn't taken of my guitar design work that I was doing on the clock. So they had a program that wasn't just sending keystroke information to their security team, sending actual screens of everything going on on it. Yeah, we talked about that one. Yeah. I don't remember what it's called. Man, I would freak out if someone handed me screenshots. Yeah. Needless to say, I was put on disciplinary probation. I didn't make it to the end of that because I quit to pursue my dream. I'm happy to say that I've been a full time professional Luther ever since. That's awesome. One of my guitars is even on the cover of a recent issue of Premiere Guitar Magazine. Wow. That's like the premiere guitar magazine. There's a second story about a robbery that happened while I was on that probation period, but I'll leave that for anyone curious enough to Google my name. Tandalizing all right. That is from Paul Roney Rhoney. And he says, if either one of you guys wants a handmade USA electric guitar by a company that doesn't spy on its employees and hit me up, I will hook you up. Wow. And I checked them out and they're sweet. Yes. I'm going to see what hook you up means and then talk 10% off when you use coupon code stuff. Yeah, we'll see. But yeah, that is from Paul. Ronnie and good for you for fighting ship co. Yeah. And pursuing your dreams, Mr. Ronnie. Congratulations. And you're doing a good job since you're beautiful. Yeah. So if you want to let us know about how you stuck it to the man, you can tell us via Twitter at syskpodcast, on Facebook.com, STUFFYou, know through email, it's stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. And check out our website while you're at it. Stuffyoushouldnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com."
4540753a-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-83a4060af5e4	Short Stuff: Khipu	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-khipu	Listen in to learn all about the fascinating "language" of the Incan khipu knotted ropes.	Listen in to learn all about the fascinating "language" of the Incan khipu knotted ropes.	Wed, 02 Jan 2019 16:10:44 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=16, tm_min=10, tm_sec=44, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=2, tm_isdst=0)	14831384	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"What if you are a gigantic snack food maker who needs to satisfy cravings from Tokyo to Toledo? So you partner with IBM Consulting to manage your supply chain with realtime datadriven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM's, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm inca Josh, and there's inca Chuck, and inca Jerry is over there. So this is an inka cast stuff you should inka. Short stuff you should inka. You like that one, huh? Yeah, I'm surprised. Just dumb enough. Wait, what do you mean? Oh, I mean dumb in a good way. Okay. A dumb joke is one of my biggest compliments. You know, we have really been hit with the accusations of dad jokes a lot more frequently lately. Have you noticed? Well, more than we did ten years ago. Yeah, we're getting older. And that's when dad jokes started creeping in. So these people are right. They are correct. Man, never would have thought I'd live to see the day, literally. That's right. We still stop before we hit puns. Yeah, we're no strickling. No, that's ageless. That's just some sort of mental defect. It has nothing to do with age. Yeah, not ageless is in timeless, and you can do that anytime and it's great. Right? Yeah, the opposite of that. So, Chuck, speaking of opposites of that, let's talk about whether or not the Inca actually ever created a written language of any sort. Yeah, this is cool. And I would love to do a longer form show on the Inca period, the Inca people, because, man, when you start poking around a little bit things that they achieved and when it happened, it's pretty striking. Well, you know, we did an episode called how did 168 Conquistadors Bring Down the Inca Empire? Did we really? That was a good one. But I'm sure there's still plenty more to talk about with them. We could do one just on the inc. I'll bet. Yeah. So, I mean, here's a couple of things in the way of an overview. They had the largest precolumbian empire in the Americas, a lot of people during the Bronze Age, and you're not successful as a people that can grow and thrive like that unless you're doing some of these things, like building roads to the tune of 25,000 miles of highway. Right. That's amazing. Yeah. There was something like twelve I saw ten to 12 million people in the Inca Empire who were walking along the 25,000 miles of highway, which, by the way, cut through the Andes. It was largely in the Andes, up in the Andes, which is not a hospitable place to form a civilization in the first place. No, man, but they did. They thrived where it was dry and harsh and steep, and they were able to engineer the kind of farmland at the altitudes, at these altitudes that you would never think would be possible. Right. Like millions of acres of really high altitude terrorist farms. And the way that I saw that the whole thing worked was there were clans and villages and groups that all kind of did their own thing, and they paid tribute to what you would call kind of the federal government. The Inca chiefs, the people who had the whole empire together, and then the Inca who were running the show, would in turn provide these people, like the farmers and the villages and the clans, with stuff they needed. It bore a striking resemblance to Soviet Communism. Interesting. Yeah. And they kept it going for about 150 years, again, until the Span showed up. They were a very powerful empire. But the weird thing about the Inca is that they were able to do all this. They included math and abstract thought and major like sociopolitical administration. They appeared to have done it without any written language whatsoever. That's been basically the way that people have viewed the Inca for a very long time. Yes. Which is remarkable, because it's not like, oh, well, this was back during the Bronze Age. Like, the Maya had written languages, the Aztecs did, Mesopotamians did, egyptians, of course, did, chinese did. So a lot of people were writing things down and it appeared and we're still not super sure, or are we? Can we say definitively? Almost, but no, I don't think we can definitively say it. It sure is starting to look that way. All right, so let's get to the sort of the heart of the story, then. I believe it's pronounced Kippoo Khipu or Q-U-I-P-U. Right. Which would also be pronounced kipu. Right. But if you look this up on the Internet, if you can pull your car over or whatever dangerous they are, these really kind of cool. It looks like macrame, almost. These knotted which I know you like. Oh, yes, these knotted links of cord made from cotton. Sometimes. Sometimes it's llama or alpaca wool, and you would see them hung up in rows. That looks like from a curtain rod or something. But that curtain rod is really like a thicker central rope, and these things would just hang down. And for many, many years, some of them were color coded, but for many years, people thought that these were just like art, right. Arts, crafts, that kind of thing, like something some people do when they were bored. And a lot of them were lost because the Spanish, when they showed up, they found them everywhere, and they were like, well, I don't know what this is, so I'm just going to burn them. Yeah. I'm going to kill everybody and burn everything. And so for a long time, people yeah, they just had them in museums. They were inkan relics of an empire that had crumbled and gone away. So people were like, we got to preserve these, and they took them to museums. But it wasn't until the 1920s that a guy named Leland Locke, who was studying them at the Museum of Natural History in New York, who said, you know what? I think these actually are symbolic. I think they encode information, and I think that they probably are used to kind of tabulate things. And he was right. Boy, that sounds like a good cliffhanger, my friend. Okay, I should take out the he was right part then. But was he? No. We'll find out right after this. He was. 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. Yeah. 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.com stuff. That's lifelock.com stuff for your first year, LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. OK, 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. Okay, so he was right. Yeah, he was totally right. Lelandlock was correct. And what he found was that these ki poo knots were definitely used. And this is the part that we for sure know. It was sort of like a calculator, an abacus or a file that you would use. Instead of writing down numbers and putting it in a file cabinet, you would knock this thing up to represent, like, a census or something like that. Or maybe how many cow brains you had on hand in the back, or how many llamas. You had cow brains. Sure. They probably had cow brains, right? I don't think so. I think that's how rumors get started. Chuck okay, well, whatever they want to keep track of, it served as an abacus, essentially. Yeah. It's stored information. Like, they kept track of all that tribute that was coming in from 130 different clans under them. It was a way to store information. But that is boring and pedestrian. And it still says that the inca managed to keep track of all this and do all this stuff without a written language. Like, that does not happen. Usually you have a written language and then math develops later. The inca developed all this, or it appeared that they did without a written language. But that's just what it seemed to be. Like, nobody could figure out or see any written language in this for a very long time. Well, and here's the thing, too, that I didn't mention. It's not as simple as I have ten llamas, so I'm going to tie ten knots on the string. Yeah, good point. So it was like the height of the knot and where it was positioned on the cord, it all symbolized different things. The color symbolize something. They had multiples like, it could be done in such a way, represented 100 or 1000. So it wasn't just like eight beads means eight cows, right? Yeah. So if you have three knots, right? And the top one has, like, five loops in the middle one has five loops, and the bottom one has two loops. What you're seeing is 552. Like, the top one is the 100 column, the middle one is the tens, and the lower ones is the singles. So, like, there was it wasn't just like one counting off like that. It was much more sophisticated than that. And the color that they used, the type of material that they used, the direction the knot was tied in, the number of loops that had. So cool. There are all sorts of things. So when you take that, if you have three different dimensions or five or seven or ten different dimensions of something, those things start to interact. And now you have a lot of different symbols to choose from, to encode information. But again, everyone just thought that it was just numbers that they were encoding until, I think, the 1990s, when a Harvard anthropologist named Gary Erton, who spent years working on analyzing these, finally was like, no, there's words in here. There are names in here. And if there are names in here, symbols of names, then that means that they're encoding more than just numbers. They're encoding abstract thoughts like a language does. Yeah. And Erton started to look into this because despite all the great work Lock did to crack this code about accounts he pretty much did, there were still a bunch of these configurations that did not fit with the rest. And he always just sort of thought those were outliers, and maybe those were arts and crafts or for ceremonies or something. But it was Erton who picked that back up and was like, I don't know, man. Why would they go through all this trouble to design this intricate numerical recording system and then just have the same exact thing? Just be crafty. He's like, there's something else going on here. Right, exactly. So he was, I guess, teaching a freshman economic student named Manny Madrano who managed to crack a little bit more of the code and was the one who showed I can't remember exactly what he showed, but he took Urton's decades of work in a spring break. Yeah. Here's some indications that the colors are actually indicating, like, abstract thoughts. Like, green might be like cattle. That's a concrete thought, but red equals war or something. So he cracked the code a little further over spring break. Over spring break. And he was like and I figured it out and passed me the beer bong. Right. Which we called we call them funnel. Yeah. Beer funnel. I guess it makes sense because there's a I'm sure it's a regional phrase. I'll bet you're right, too. We just called it funneling beer. And by the way, you shouldn't do it, everyone. It's dangerous stuff. It is. And it's just dumb. I've never funneled the beer. Oh, I did it a few times. This is stupid. Actually, let me change that. I can't recall ever funneling a beer. I never did any of that dumb stuff. Keg stands or funneling. Just stupid. It is a little stupid, but, I mean, yeah, it is stupid. I just sat there as a 19 year old on my credit corduroy couch stirring my martini. Right. Clucking your tongue at all the philistines. Yeah. All right. So he figures this out on spring break. It was a big breakthrough that not only were these used for numbers that were in record keeping, but like you said, potentially, we do have an entire not language laid out in front of us, but most of the stuff is gone. That's the big tragedy. Yes. This is the current thinking is that, yes, there are definitely abstract thoughts, possibly even phonetic sounds encoded in these, along with numbers. Like Leon Lock wasn't wrong. He didn't misinterpret it. But he found that over time, they found that. No, there's abstract thoughts in here, too, and there's a couple of pieces of evidence to really back this up. One, they found ki poos in burials. Why would you be buried with an abacus, a census document? Nobody would. But you might be buried with something that's basically like a narrative of some battle that you showed your bravery in, and that was, like, the greatest thing you ever did in your life. You might be buried with something like that. So that's one point. And then a researcher at St. Andrews University in Scotland, Sabine Hyland, did some analysis of two ki poos that are inkan that were from the Spanish colonial era. That supposedly the people, the villagers who were preserving these things said these tell of a great war. Yeah, that was key, for sure. So these things are supposed to have a narrative code within them, and she analyzed them and found, like, yeah, there's something going on here. Yeah. I mean, she got back up because they said the different materials mean something. And you guys are figuring this out? She found that there are 95 different symbols encoded in these ki poos, which is way more than you need for accounting system, but much more in line with something like a language. We still haven't cracked it yet, but it's starting to be clear that the Inca did develop a written language. We just can't understand it. And the way that it was lost to history is the same as if all of the monks in England have been killed off in one 10 when they were the only ones who knew how to read and write. That stuff that they encoded in English would have been lost to the English people who survived and who are still around today, but have no I couldn't tell you what this Bible says because it's in English, and the monks didn't live long enough to pass along how to do this. I loved that last analogy. Thanks, man. That's fantastic, Chuck. I appreciate that, and I don't want to push my luck any further, so let's end this one. Agreed? If you wanted know more about the INKAS or ki poo, there's a lot out there to learn. Just go check it out on the Internet. And in the meantime, you can reach us via email at stuffpodcast@howtofworks.com."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-08-31-sysk-satanism-final.mp3	How Satanism Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-satanism-works	Satanism may be the most misunderstood "religion" in the world. Part of that is because there are, and have been, many offshoots of Satanism, from The Church of Satan to The Satanic Temple. One thing is sure though, none of them are filled with evil human	Satanism may be the most misunderstood "religion" in the world. Part of that is because there are, and have been, many offshoots of Satanism, from The Church of Satan to The Satanic Temple. One thing is sure though, none of them are filled with evil human	Thu, 31 Aug 2017 15:35:41 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=31, tm_hour=15, tm_min=35, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=243, tm_isdst=0)	50362061	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everybody. It's us, Josh and Chuck. And we just wanted to say that if you have very strong religious beliefs, I don't know, you may want to skip this one. Yeah, you know, we talk about Satanism in this episode and what seems like glowing terms, but for my part at least, I was just trying to have a little fun with it. So I hope that comes across. Yeah, we have an intellectual conversation about Satanism. How about that? All right, agreed. All right, well, onto the show, Chuck. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstepworkscom? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. Seated directly across from me is one Charles W. Wayne. Charles, chuckers. Chuck Bryant. That's pretty good. Old Yells above himself. Yes. And there is old Scratch to my right, Matt. Matt, do you let people know your last name? Oh, yeah, you're a personality. Matt Frederick. I don't want him to get kidnapped. Guest producer Matt Frederick of the Old days, co host of Stuff They Don't Want You To Know. And now supervising producer for podcast Matt. We don't let our producers talk on our episode. They're going to have to beat that out. Matt says that was a huge announcement you just said. Yeah, nice. Well, congrats, Matt. And Matt has been working here forever, just like us. Nice. Lovely wife, lovely child. Yeah. Great family loves Indian food. I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. It's bread and butter, as it were. It says gee and non. Now he's afraid to talk, which he should be. That's good. Matt's here. Yeah. So thank you, Matt. And hail Satan. I was going to say hail Satan. Hail Satan. Chuck hail Satan. Josh it's funny, I went from when reading this to thinking Satanists are just libertarians to no, saints are kind of Republicans. And I don't mean that. You'll see what I mean philosophically in some ways. And then I thought, I'm a Satanist. Okay. Did you have an awakening? I read some of the stuff in their FAQ on their website and some of their fundamentals and their eleven rules of earth and their nine Satanic statements. We'll read all that stuff. I thought, geez, I agree with a lot of stuff. There are 13 things to avoid getting gouged at the grocery store. What? Satanists are not, almost assuredly, are not evil people who meet in dark churches to perform ritual blood sacrifice and eat hearts and draw pentagrams. They may draw pentagrams. Yeah, that part is actually true. But there's more things that Satanists are not. I think if you're coming to this blind without knowing anything, you'll probably be surprised about just how kind of groovy they are. And this is the church of Satan that I'm talking about, mainly. No, I think you can apply what you just said to all Satanists. Yeah, true. Because if you're a Satanist, you would take umbrage at the idea that somebody who actually believes in the supernatural entity satan is not a Satanist. Right. Because Satanism by definition, at least modern Satanism by definition is an atheistic philosophy. So there's no supernatural entities of any kind to Satanists. So somebody who worships Satan would be a devil worshipper. A completely different kind of thing. Yeah, and I didn't even finish the last thing. Well, no, I mean, I got off track. The last thing I thought when I was reading about the temple of Satan is that these are just liberal hippies temple of Satan. The Satanic temple? Yeah, Satanic temple. I saw them compared to or analogized as a dark. Yes. Men. You know, the yes men. No. Oh, you got to check out the yes Men. There's a couple of yes Men documentaries and they basically do this, but it's not Satanically associated. And I wonder why it was Satanically associated. I'm like, sounds like you're a bunch of liberal hippie scientists to me. Well, we'll get into all that. Okay, okay. So we're talking Satanists and Satanism, if you couldn't tell, because we have been saying Satan a lot. And if like Chuck said, you're coming into this blind, let us illuminate for you, let us bring the light to your eyes. And we both grew goatee for this episode. Exactly. And shaped our heads and horns. Johnson Strickland actually could do a sort of an amateur Anton Lavey if he wanted to. He could. I'm sure he does at home, if you know what I mean. All right, so let's go back and this is a Grabster article, so, you know, it's got the goods and talk a little bit about the origin story of Satan, which we will lead up to sort of what the modern version of that is. But if you're thinking red guy with a pitch fork and pointy hoofs, it tries to lure people away from God to do bad things. That kind of came around later. So we need to go back further to the Hebrew Bible, which the Christian Old Testament is derived from. Right. And there's a lot of uncertainty on what Satan actually meant, depending on how you want to translate the Hebrew term. Right. And the reason there's uncertainty is because Satan wasn't a figure in early Judaism, because the early Jews believed that God was all things, god was good, God was evil, god was responsible for everything in the universe. There wasn't what we understand now, or anybody who thinks of the JudeoChristian ethic now, there wasn't dualism, which is there's good and the bad, there's light and the dark and they equal each other out. In early Judaism, this didn't exist. It was all in one. So there was no need for Satan. Right. But as this concept of an all benevolent, loving God spread, this question arose, which was, well, wait a minute, if God is just so benevolent and loving, why does he or she let bad things happen? And so the need for the concept of Satan emerged later on. And because of the early Judaism's proximity to Persia, which was ruling the land at the time, at about the 6th to third centuries BCE, persia had Zoroastrianism, which had dualism. So they kind of introduced the Hebrew faith to dualism and hence Satan was originally born. Yeah. So there's no consensus when you look at these old texts, what these translations mean. Sometimes it is an adversary or an opponent's god, sometimes it's not. Sometimes he's like an attorney in heaven's, legal system thrown the bucket. People like Al Pacino. Yeah. Quite literally. Didn't he play the devil or did he as a lawyer? Right. Devil's advocate. Right. With Keanu. I don't think I ever saw that. I didn't either. Okay. But we were both alive at the time, so we know. Yeah. You look at all these different forms of what the word meant back then before it became the modern version we all know. And the one kind of common thread through all of them though, is that Satan was an outsider who was sort of against the man and these established values that everyone else seemed to believe in. Right. Or established rules, or just even the establishment in general. Yes. He's the antithesis of that. Correct. You get into the Christian New Testament and it starts to clear up a bit where there is a single being called Satan who is supernatural and it's direct opposition to God and is usually used as a tool God uses in the Bible, at least as a test. Like go down there and test these humans, go get that guy to see which way their allegiance lay. Right. That Satan is called the scriptural Satan or Satan of the scriptures. Right, yeah. He also kind of comes out of nowhere in the New Testament to tempt Jesus in the desert, I believe. And I mean, you know all this, right? Am I right? It was in the desert. Well, yeah. And I think, by the way, just to back up to that last episode when Stuttering, when I didn't hear the story about Moses, the Bible with a cold in his mouth or whatever, everyone wrote in was like, it's not in the Bible, don't feel bad. Oh good. It was from something else, right? It was from the Disney movie. Yeah. In one of the gospels in the New Testament, and no need to write in to let us know, but it's in one of the gospels in the New Testament that Satan appears to Jesus to try to tempt him. And he's kind of brought in almost like he's a character that everybody should know. But if you're just reading the New Testament from beginning to end, you're like, who is this guy? But apparently another gospel makes mention that Satan was the serpent in the Garden of Eden. So he's a big tempter, he's bent on corrupting man and getting man to stray from God's flock. Basically. Yeah. And there are certain demons that are named properly in the Bible, like the Elzabeth and Belly all. And again, it's just sort of conjecture on our part whether or not that's referring to Satan or whether it's a generic evil. It's just sort of difficult to what it wasn't was the Devil with the horns and the pitchfork that we all think about. No. And those earliest names for the Devil, like Beelzebub, are actually corruptions or alterations of competing religions gods. Right, yeah. So early Christianity, and I guess Middle Judaism had this kind of tendency to take other religions gods and make them the evil characters in their religions because they wanted Christianity to flourish. Right, exactly. They wanted to make the competition look bad, is a way to do it. It was a smear tactic and a campaign to get converts. Right. So Balza is actually a corruption of Balalzev, which is no, I'm sorry, balalzeval or Baldi exalted. I think if you say that one more time, he will appear and Ball b a apostrophe al, was the main deity of the Canaanites and the Phoenicians, who were competing with the early Christians at the time. And if you say balls of, that means Lord of the Flies, not Lord the Exalted. So it was a slam on their competition's main god, and that's where B Elzabeth came from. And that's actually that will become a commonplace in the Christian playbook of smearing the other guy's gods by making them evil figures in Christian mythology, platoota, Bailezbub, remember there was a Dead Milkman album called Bluba? Yes. It had, like, that guy and a tractor on the cover. That was B l Zebaba. Yeah. Well, the same with Lucifer. And when we finally got the English language King James Bible in 1611, lucifer was really a Latin term for Morningstar. But in that version of the Bible, I say no, what that really is is the name of Satan. Right. And he was the light bringer, the one who would reveal the truth to people that they were actually being held down by God. Yeah. Which is not the Christian way. Right. So what you're saying by co opting all these are not co opting, but kind of co opting these bad religions, another band that's actually a real band name. Yeah. Correct. These bad religions and saying those are the bad ones. That's how the Devil that we know today the Satan sorry. That we know today, has taken shape because the Greek god Pan had the cloven hooves and the horns. Bacchus, the Roman god, is where you get this insatiable Bacchanalian decadence, which, as we'll see with the Church of Satan, is it too far off. They certainly love their orgies. Sure. And they're trays of fine meats and roasted meats and cheeses, jugs of wine. So, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, then, this mythology, Christian mythology, has expanded. You get a couple of books that were very key into shaping who we think of today as Satan. Right. One was John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost. Then, of course, Dante's Divine Comedy. This is where we got the idea that Satan was an angel expelled from heaven because of his pride, who then said, I will defeat the Lord. Wow. These are actually from two books written by dudes. Yeah. A lot of the mythology about Satan that Christians understand as Satan just people in the culture generally understand that Satan don't show up anywhere in the actual Bible, old Testament or New Testament. All that stuff came afterwards. So Chuck the Enlightenment was another turning point then big time for the conception of Satan. His evolution as like, a scary, supernatural otherworldly figure takes a different turn. Because the Enlightenment was based on rational thought. Secular humanism finds its roots in the Enlightenment, and they started to come to see Satan as a kind of a creative force, almost. Yeah. Foil to the establishment, this idea that Satan is the opposite of the established norms and customs and moral goods. Yeah. He's kind of like a handy archetype for that. So he loses some of his supernatural Jewish yes. And is replaced by metaphorical Jews. Yeah. And I think that seems to be the one that the Church of Satan sort of identified with a little more. Was it Satan was just a free thinking dude. Yeah. Apparently that's where they got that's where it finds its roots with the Enlightenment. Very interesting. Which makes sense because most Satanists would be humanists, secular humanists, although they're individualist. But you could make a case that that's an individual humanism. Yeah. And that comes out of the Enlightenment as well. So you want to take a break and then keep going, or you want to keep going? No, let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about witches right after this. So I promised talk of witches. We did it in the Jeez. That was a long time ago. We did an episode on witchcraft many years ago. And if you are a witch or a Western esoteric, you are probably one of two groups of people to be accused of worshiping Satan in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Basically anything in opposition to organized Christianity was Satan worship. Right. And that's the same thing as saying your God, your creator deity is like Satan and our religion, it's the same thing. Anything that's in opposition to Christian thought is automatically heretical and kind of almost like the lazy shorthand way of describing it is Satanic, you know, Satan, he's scary and evil. Right. Well, what these people think is Satanic. Yeah. And if you listen to the episode on witchcraft and we have it, I know stuff you missed in history class did a good episode on what really happened in Salem, which will probably cover that at some point I mentioned. But I think everyone pretty much knows at this point about 60,000 people, mainly women, were put to death in the American colonies in Europe and under the guise of being Satan worshippers and witches and practicing witchery. And by all accounts, they generally were. I don't like the way that lady looked at me in the town today. Or you know what, I think she stole milk from my cow. Oh, I want her land or I want her land or my wife is jealous of her. Right, so they're all witches. Let's burn them. Let's throw them in lakes and see if they float. And let's burn them because if they don't float, then they're not witches to drown. And early physicians had more than just a small hand in this as well in accusing especially like folk healers and midwives of being witches again to basically force the competition out. Yeah, what do we talk about that one in that seems more recent. Can't remember. Maybe Gray Robbing. Can we talk about that in Gray Robbing? Feels like it does. There were also things called esoteric orders, which were, I don't even know what you would call that today, basically kind of any group that didn't subscribe to mainstream Christianity like the Masons or the Illuminati today. Yeah, they were Christian at base Gnostics, but then they had this other occult ideas in addition to it. Right. So like the Catherine or Catherine's are a good example of that. They were in, I think, like the 12th of 14th century France. And they were like, Christian. Plus the Catherine means like the pure ones. They were so Christian that they felt like just being a normal pious Christian wasn't enough. And you actually had to be baptized again, basically like a born again Christian process. But in again, like 12th 13th century France, they were considered heretics and they were persecuted. You could call them an esoteric order because it didn't follow prescribed Christianity, orthodox establishment Christianity to a T. It either was lacking some or had extra. And then you're a heretic and hence Satanist and esoteric order believed in Dan Brown books. Basically all that stuff is true. All the stuff he writes about is about like esoteric orders. Well, and here's the thing though. They were all labeled as Satanist, but there's no evidence whatsoever that any of them were Satanic in truth. Yeah, well, I was reading about one, the Luciferians. They actually they may have been, although their concept of Satan wasn't that he was evil. Their concept was that he was the one true deity and that he had been tricked into being kicked out of Heaven unfairly by a treacherous Jehovah. Oh, interesting. And that it was actually Lucifer who was supposed to be in charge and that Jehovah was oppressing everybody. So if that's true, then yes, as far as the church goes, that is as Satanic as you can possibly get in your beliefs because they were in total opposition to the Church in their beliefs as well. But for the most part, most of these other groups were not in any way, shape or form Satanic as you would think of it today. Well, yeah. And Ed even points out in here the grabster that there's no evidence in world history that there's ever been any long term organized group of people that worship Satan as some evil entity. Right. That's a huge one because that's one of the ways that Christianity was able to smear its rivals by suggesting that they were part of a huge massive cult, satanic cult. And I mean, like, if there's a supernatural entity that's bent on getting you and making your life terrible and there's actually people on earth who are following this person, it's going to make you stay to the straight and narrow of your prescribed religion even more. Right. Bar and brimstone and whatnot? Yes, I grew up with that. Yeah. I can't remember which show. I think it was during Satanic Panic, we talked about the devil worship house in Stone Mountain. That it was the scariest place I had ever driven past on the way to steak and Ale. Man, I miss steak and ale. Are they done? Surely they're around. Right. There's probably like one in Vegas and one in Hong Kong or something weird like that. It'd be funny if the one on Hong Kong was like this retro bot themed American thing, you know? Yeah, like America in the eighties. Alright, alright, well, let's talk about Antonio Bay then. What time has come? Oh, wait, I want to say one more thing. Okay, so in the I think the 14th century, the Knights Templar, another esoteric order, but a military order. We're accused of worshiping Baphomet. And Baphomet is Satan with like the goat's head and horns. That's the great looking statue they tried to put up in Oklahoma. Right. Well, Baffamtt is most likely an alteration or mistranslation or something of Muhammad. And that it was used to basically include Muhammad as Satan in the Christian ethos when the Christians first encountered Muslims during the Crusades. Yeah. So it's like the same thing, but a thousand years after they did it to be elder, they did it to Muhammad. And we should do like a ten parter on the Crusades. Yeah, we should. Starting now. Just trying to think if I would be up for that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think so. All right, can we invite Anton LeVay in? Yes, now he can come in. The ghost of Anton LeVay. It is Jonathan Strickland. So this dude, he was born, he's the founder of the Church of Satan. If you did not know that, look up a picture of him. You've probably seen them before. Bald head, goatee. Look at that guy. You know what does bug me about allstateness is if you just look up photos of prominent ones or meetings, they're always doing these faces. Yeah. Actually, ironically, the only one I've ever seen smile in the picture is the current high priestess. His name is Peggy, which I think is adorable. Sure. This is a cute old lady. Yeah. I'm not even that old, but she's like, oh, really? Old lady? Yeah. Oh, no. She smiles in Photos, but every other picture, like, you know, their eyes are big and they're frowning or they're licking their teeth or something. Yeah. Come on. I was on the Church of Satan website yesterday, and I saw a picture of some Satanists all smiling. Yeah, but it was because Anton LeVay had a naked woman over his knee and thanking her. So they do smile in some pictures. Okay. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. So LeVay was born. Howard LeVay, Howard Stanton Levy in 1930 in Chicago. And the more I read about him in his early years, supposed early years, the more he sounded like Elron Hubbard. Yeah, kind of, because L. Ron Hubbard and Anton LeVay both, if you ask them about their backgrounds, they'll tell you one thing. If you ask someone else mothers like Lawrence Wright, who does research, they say, I really can't find any evidence of this stuff that they claim. Yeah. I mean, if there was anyone who subscribed to lying just as much as you possibly could as a form of showmanship, anton LeVay was definitely that guy. Yeah. So he says that he had a very colorful upbringing. He worked at a circus. He worked at Sideshows. He was a police photographer, which may have been true. He was a very talented organist who worked birlesque shows. If you ask other people who have done research, they say, no. Kennel was this suburban kid in suburban San Francisco. Not super interesting. One thing that everyone will say, though, is that he was interested in the occult. He was interested in pulp horror novels and magazines like Lovecraft Lovecraft. And he was interested in he was very much turned off by the double standards what he perceived to be the double standards of mainstream Christianity. Right. Because supposedly he would play in these burlesque shows and see all these men there, then the next day see them in the churches. And that had a real impact on him, supposedly, that he was just like, this is BS. Yeah. He didn't like phonies. Didn't like Phonies. Phonies driven crazy. M and Holden Caulfield. Right. So in the 1960s and this is kind of like with El Ron Hubbard again, levy started hosting these lectures on paranormal, and he had a lot of flair, and everyone was like, man, who is this guy? He's really got something. He's kind of cool, and he talks about things like indulging in all the worldly things. You shouldn't feel bad about it. You should masturbate and have sex and have sex with tons of people at once if you want, and just do whatever pleases you. It's fine. Don't worry about it. Sure. And so people in the 60s were like there was a time in the late 60s where he was there's this great article in the Telegraph when Satanism seduced Hollywood or something like that. Where it was sort of the thing to be a Satanist and to go to these parties because you would go in and there would be drugs and drink and nakedness like Eyes Wide Shut up in there. Right. And everyone from some of the Beach Boys to Sammy Davis Jr. To Liberatchi. Liberace was the sadnesses he said he was for a while. I didn't know that. Sammy Davis Jr. Definitely was. Even had a TV pilot that he tried to get made about like a sitcom that was Satan friendly. Did he work for the devil or something? We have to find that it was supposed to be really bad and they only made one of them. Oh, so there is so it's out there somewhere. Well, supposedly he made a pilot that never went beyond that. Got you. Jane Mansfield was another famous Satanist. Yeah. So it was a big thing. And Charles Manson kind of ruined all that. Yeah, as far as Manson ruined a lot as far as it being cool to go to the Church of Satan. But at any rate, Levy was making waves and in 1966 created officially the Church of Satan and in 1969 published the Satanic Bible. Which is pretty interesting to read through. Yeah, I haven't read it all, but I read quite a bit of passages. So one of the things that he's accused of is plagiarism. Yeah, for sure. And his adherence still to this day. They kind of acknowledge it a little bit, but they more put it like no, he was building on an earlier work that he didn't really give credit to. But there was a book so he wrote the Satanic Bible in there was a book published in 1890. I think it was called Might is Right. And it was written Susan Omgy by a guy named Ragnar Redbeard. Ragnar Redbeard wrote this book and it was extremely into social Darwinism. It was individualistic to the point of being anarchistic. It had all of the requisite 1890s racism and sexism attendant to it as well. Sure. But the point of it was why would you love your enemies? This whole doctrine of love is BS. We're animals. And if you have an enemy, you should go out and beat him up because he's your enemy. You don't need to love him, you need to love yourself. And it was really just a surprising book that apparently still a lot of people read today. And apparently Anton LeVay read it and adopted a lot of it. But then he also wrote a lot about ritual and stuff as well and prescribed certain kinds of rituals in the Satanic Bible. And supposedly the three main types of rituals of greater magic. There's greater magic and lesser magic. But in the greater magic rituals there is compassion. And that's not just for others, but also yourself. There's lust and then there is destruction. Yes. And all of them are meant as they're meant for you. The person doing this, they're meant for you. They're meant as called the intellectual decompression chamber, where you can just get rid of this baggage that you've got. And they're like, it's nothing more than this little psycho drama that you're performing for yourself to just make yourself feel better. Yeah. Like, lust is to release your sexual urges. Like, they'll say, Christianity teaches you to repress all that stuff that ain't no good for you. Right. You need to go release these urges. Yeah. You're walking around with all this stuff that's, like, hanging on you, like, get rid of it so you can go be happy and stop dwelling on the things. It's the same with destruction. Cleansing oneself of anger towards someone who has done you an injustice. Like, why sit on that? Deal with it. You're sitting there stewing about it. Smash the face. Go put on your velvet robe. Well, no, but that's something that Satanism has long been accused of, is like, being violent toward others. And I don't think that they say, no, don't be violent toward others. They even say, like, you don't certainly don't owe anybody being nice to them or anything like that. But there seems to be kind of a I haven't seen any overt calls to violence. It just seems to be like, if that's what you deem is right, as long as you're following these other prescribed paths that seem to kind of avoid violence, that it's more just like you. It's centered on you, and you need to focus on yourself. And if you focus on yourself, then you're probably going to stop wanting to smash that other guy in the face because you're going to get rid of that baggage. Can I read the Eleven Satanic Rules of the Earth, please? Number one, do not give opinions or advice unless you were asked. Okay, not bad. Yeah. Number two, do not tell your troubles to others unless you are sure they want to hear them. Yeah, not bad. Number three, when in another's lair, show him respect or else do not go there. Yes, respect someone's home. Number four, if a guest in your lawyer annoys you, treat him cruelly and without mercy. Number five, do not make sexual advances unless you are given the mating signal. That's sort of that's a 60s way of saying, I'm down with affirmative consent. Do not take that which does not belong to you unless it is a burden to the other person and he cries out to be relieved. Okay, don't rob people of stuff. Relieve me of this glass of Diet Coke. I can't stop drinking it. Number seven, acknowledge the power of magic if you have employed it successfully to obtain your desires. If you deny the power of magic after having called upon it with success, you will lose all you have obtained. That's a little fruity. I didn't even hear. That full one. I trailed off so long. Number eight, do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself. And finally yeah, that's a good I think that one bears repeating. Oh, wait, I say finally that's only number eight. You want me to repeat that? Please do not complain about anything to which you need not subject yourself. Yes. Number nine, do not harm little children. You should probably repeat that one, too. Do not harm little children. Because that's a big deal. There are these people that think like, you sacrifice children and you perform sex with children and that's what Satanists do. And they're like, no, we're not into that at all. No. One of the things the Satanic Temple who will talk about in a little while point out is that there have been a lot of cases of people who are supposedly exercising demons from children who have actually harmed and in fact killed children. And that there's no I think we talked about this in the Satanic panic episode, too. There's no documented cases of Satanists harming children. Right. Because they're against it. And in fact, they won't even accept anyone under the age of 18 into the Church of Satan. Yeah, because self consent is extremely important to Satanists of all stripes. The idea of being forced into indoctrinated into any church before you can make a decision for yourself really goes against the idea of individual liberty. And thus Satanic thought. Number ten, do not kill non human animals. Because as you said, they called humans animals, too. In fact, they said that we're not much better even than animals. No. Which is an animal reminder. It is do not kill non human animals unless you are attacked or for your food. Like if a cheetah pounces on you, kill it. Yeah. If you want to eat the cheetah, kill it. And then finally drumroll eleven Satanic rules of the Earth. When walking into open territory, bother no one. If someone bothers you, ask him to stop. If he does not stop, destroy him. Nice. Sounds like a tenacious d lyric. It does. But the way you counted down, it was like a Letterman list. I like that. That was good. Man, I missed Dave. I wonder how many longtime listeners we've lost at this episode. I don't know. You want to take another break? Yeah, I mean, there's still so much more, but we got a break at some point. Yeah, we're going to take a break. Alright, Chuck, we're back with Satan. Remember the kids in the hall? Oh, yeah. Kevin McDonald. I think with Satan. Was that him? Yes. So we've been talking a little bit about the philosophies of the Church of Satan. Just really quickly. There are nine Satanic sins, and again, I hate to say it, but this is sort of appealing to my brain. The nine Satanic sins are stupidity, pretentiousness solipsism, selfdefeat heard conformity, lack of perspective, forgetfulness, forgetfulness of past orthodoxies counterproductive pride and lack of aesthetics. A lot of those are really tough to explain. I don't think so. Anton LeVay, well, some of them are pretty self evident, but forgetfulness of past orthodoxies. Levy wrote this list in 1987 and it's on the Church of Satan website. If you're interested, go check it out because some of you are like, oh yeah, it kind of makes sense. 87 67 87 I saw. Oh, really? Well, it's copyrighted. So the takeaway is that what the Church of Satan and Levy and Satanism, right. What it really is is atheistic antichristian ideals. Well, that is something that you said that is really important. The Church of Satan, specifically the one founded by Anton LeVay, has positioned itself as counter to Christianity. It really does not like Christianity. Right. And as a result, it's allowed itself to kind of be drawn into a lot of pedanticness and arguments that it shouldn't. It almost seems like they feel they need to justify themselves because of putting themselves in that position. So if that kind of turns you off, well, then, friends, you're going to love the Satanic Temple. Yeah. And if you were interested in that, you can become a member of the Church of Satan by sending $200 to a PO box right. That you can find on their website. But you get a membership card and that's it. That's all you get. Yeah. And there's actually a lot of criticism among Satanists of the Church of Satan because they haven't done anything for a really long time. And a lot of people give credit to LeVay for founding the Church of Satan and that while he was alive, the church was thriving. But after he died, the Church kind of died with him in the eyes of a lot of Satanists, especially Satanic Temple adherence that I've seen. Yeah. It's now headed by Peter Gilmore, who I think John Hodgman is actually sort of a pal of his. Now, I believe that I have to say it showed a lot of restraint by Peter Gilmore not to change his name to Peter grimmore. And then, as I mentioned earlier, Peggy Nadrama is a high priestess right now. Yeah. But I agree. Moving on to the Satanic Temple, it's pretty fun because they have something out there called the Satanic Children's Big Book of Activities. I think it was given to me by Matt Frederick. It was given to me by someone, but it's called the Satanic Children's Big Book of Activities. And it's wonderful. We talked about that for sure on Internet roundup. Yeah, for sure. And that was just like one in a string of I don't want to say countless, because if I bothered to, I could count them. But there's like a string of basically satanicbased political projects that the Satanic Temple is taken on that really kind of define who they are. Right. They are part performance art, very much political activists and are trying to basically use they say that they're using Satanism, although they all subscribe to philosophical atheistic, human, secularism Satanism, minus the social Darwinism right. And the iron libertarianism. Yes. They're using Satanism, though, and the popular conception as a poison pill for the church versus state debate. Right, yeah. And you can also buy shirts and hoodies and coffee mugs. So with this, they use this poison pills, these list of projects. One of them was the Satanic Children's Activity Book, which they printed up to distribute at schools. I think there was a school in Florida where Christian evangelists were handing out pamphlets at a public school. So the Satanist said, oh, well, great. Well, if they can do it, then any religion can do it because the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of any religion or endorsement of religion by the government, so we can go do it too. So they start handing out Satanic stuff and anytime the Satanists roll into town and say us too, that usually means that the local city council or the state even puts an end to the implicit Christian endorsement of what's going on. Like sanctioned Christian endorsement via politics. Yeah. And by the way, when I say that children's workbook is wonderful and if you're out there going, why would you say that? Go check it out. It's literally stories about kids being more accepting of others and being friendly and sharing. And it's like any children's book, but the kids wearing, like, pentagram tshirts. Right stuff. Which makes me wonder, like, what about this? Why call themselves that? It seems like they just are. I know they're trying to rabble rouse and get attention, but I think they might get a little further or maybe that's the whole point. I think we'll in part using it as the like, if you this actually happened, there's a town in Arizona, I'm not sure which one, but they had a habit of opening their city council meetings with a Christian prayer. Right? Well, most likely every single person in that town that the city council represents is not Christian. Right. But since there was some landmark court ruling, I can't remember when, May 2014, or the Supreme Court said, no, it's actually okay as long as they don't prohibit any religions from doing this. The Satanist showed up and said, well, here comes Satanist. We're going to give a benediction to open up your city council meeting. And the city council said, okay, nobody's going to do prayers anymore. Well, that's kind of what their job is, right? To shut it down. But if they just did it like, well, the secular humanists are here and we're going to say a prayer, they'd be like, well, who cares? That's fine. But the people who are so afraid of Satanists are so afraid of Satanists, that they would rather stop the city council implicitly endorsing the Christian prayer than to allow the Satanic prayer as well. That's how it works. Yeah. And it's the same with the statue in Oklahoma. He said, oh, well, you're going to put up your statue. We're going to put up one of what's it called? Baffamat baffamat, which again, I know you've seen the statue, we both love it just because it's so cool looking. Looks like the cover of some great heavy metal album. It does. But it's like 9ft tall. Yes, the two kids looking up Adoringly and Chuck. The Satanic Temple has another thing going on right now, too, the new initiative that they started, right. Which is the after school satan club. And again, I have to laugh, it just sounds funny, but what it is, it's an after school curriculum to teach reasoning and social skills to kids. And again, as a counter, something called the Good News Club, which is an evangelical Christian after school program. So again, they're saying, you got yours, we'll have ours. Yeah. There's another 2001 Supreme Court ruling that said, you know what? Sure we can have religious after school programs. And the floodgates opened and the Lucian Greed, whose name is Doug Mesner, he's one of the founders of the Satanic Temple. He says, we're doing this because the Good News Club is creating a need for it. If they were just doing this in churches rather than public schools, we wouldn't have our after school Satan Club. But they are, so we are. Yeah. Here's a quote. While the Good News Club focuses on indoctrination instilling children with the fear of hell and God's wrath, after School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism. We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of an everlasting otherworldly horror. However, being a member of the Satan Temple or the Church of Satan is not to say that you can just be very much out with it these days. A lot of those folks, even if they are really just secular humanist, atheists at heart, they do want to associate with the Satanic Temple of Church of Satan. A lot of times we'll still keep it quiet, keep it a secret, because people don't get what it's about. And they will think, well, again, people still believe that they have blood sacrifice and sacrifice animals and eat the hearts out of goats and things like that, right. And there have been people in history who have killed in the name of Satan. Sure. And that's who people point to and say, see, Satan, it's a killers. It's like, no, that person was out of their mind. Yeah, they're mentally ill or they were pretending to be mentally ill so that they would get a lighter sentence and that's what they were doing, that they weren't actual Satanists. Again, a true Satanist will point out that Satanists are atheists, right. That they see Satan as a construct, as a metaphor shorthand for something that goes against the norms, that questions the establishment and says, how do you know what you're saying is right. Who says, yeah, and we don't even worship Satan per se. We really, if you want to say anything, worship ourselves, right. As individual gods. Peter Gilmore calls it atheism. Oh, that's catchy, isn't it? The lower case I he's like, yes, Gilmore, you genius. What did you say his name should have been? grimmore. grimmore or Kilmore? Yes. Richard Ramirez. David Berkowitz, Son of Sam. Talk about demons. Ricky Castle, famously in the 70s, was an American teen who killed someone in the name of Satan. And much to Angus, young Shagrin was hauled into court with his AC DC T shirt on. Right. We're not going to get too much into this because you can go listen to our great episode on the Satanic Panic of the 80s from January 5, 2016. But in short, it was a time where people like Ozzy Osborne and Judas Priest were making use of Satanic imagery purely for gags and selling records. None of it was. I mean, today there are some legit, creepy, dark metal bands that are very much more overt with their lyrics and things, but I think Ozzy Osbourne has definitely been outed as not some Satan worshiping ghoul. Anyone who's ever seen him on television can tell you that. Yes, it bears fleshing out. There are supposedly the Goth scene in Germany in particular is where neonaziism and neopaganism kind of come together. A lot of people point to that as some sort of neostatanism. But again, if you're talking about Satanism with a capital S as an atheistic philosophy and somebody murdering in the name of Satan holds about as much water as somebody murdering in the name of the Easter Bunny. You got anything else? Yeah, just let me quote finish with a passage from the Satanic Bible on love. Satanism has been thought of as being synonymous with cruelty and brutality. This is only so because people are afraid to face the truth. And the truth is that human beings are not all benign or all loving. Just because the Satanist admits he is capable of both love and hate, he is considered hateful. On the contrary, because he is able to give vent to his hatred through ritualized expression, he is far more capable of love, the deepest kind of love, by honestly recognizing and admitting to both the hate and the love he feels. There is no confusing one emotion with the other. Without being able to experience one of these emotions, you cannot fully experience the other. Wow. Either Dr. Seuss or Anton LeVay. Yeah, that's zoroastrian dualism if I've ever heard it. Yeah. Well, if you want to know more about Satanism, well, go look up this article. It's the Grabster article on House ofworks.com and since I said Grabster, it's time for listener mail. Hello, chuck Bryant and Josh Clarke. Hello. Very formal. This is unsteadering. I've stuttered for most of my life. I say most of my life because it started when I was five. As you mentioned your show, there are several different ways it can happen. I would always try to think of a different word to use when I got stuck and that would result in very strange sounding sentences. I would define stuttering as inability to coordinate breath flow with words. Blocking on a word or sound would often result in a cessation of breathing entirely. Kind people often tell me that stuttering does not bother them. But the fact is, when I stutter, my internal reaction is that I feel and sound like a fool. Rationally, I know that is not true, but that is what I often feel nonetheless. And of course, unkind people abound. And I often heard as a child reactions like don't you know what you want from other kids and adults? Laughter and derision. Often I hear just sing it. And while it's true that singing and speaking are operated by different parts of the brain, life is not a musical. And besides, I hate musicals. So at the age of 67 I would never have thought that I'd end up talking on the phone and dealing with the public for a living. I still occasionally stutter and sometimes feel pretty badly, but I've learned to just live with it, sometimes feel as I get older, I just don't give a darn anymore. That allows me to relax and stutter less. It is a perk of aging. Sure not caring. Yeah. Stress brings it out and does as talking about my difficulty as our childhood. I'm a singer. I'm one of the resident Shanty singers at the National Maritime Historical Park at Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco. Nice. And have performed in front of large audiences. Singing is not a problem, but introducing songs can be. You might say I'm the mel tillis traditional song. And that lovely email was from Richard Adrian awards. Thank you, Richard. I love that one. Yeah, good one. Nice. And everybody who's in San Francisco goes down to Fisherman's Wharf and see Richard. Yeah. Check out the show. The mel tillis of shanty singing. I love it. If you want to get in touch with us, you can hang out with us on Twitter at S-Y-S Kpodcaster joshua Clark. You can hang out with Chuck at Charleswchuckbryant on Facebook.com or stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com there's always. Join us at our home on the web stuffyshorenow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.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 Caring Kilgarrath and Georgia Hardstarke, 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."
f4c1083d-5555-44f8-bd1c-aea700f2903f	Kidney Donation: You Could Be A Saint!	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/kidney-donation-you-could-be-a-saint	Kidneys are one of the few organs that you can donate while you’re alive. And the vast majority of donors experience no complications and their remaining kidney functions just fine. Yet thousands of people die each year waiting for a donated kidney. Why? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Kidneys are one of the few organs that you can donate while you’re alive. And the vast majority of donors experience no complications and their remaining kidney functions just fine. Yet thousands of people die each year waiting for a donated kidney. Why? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Thu, 02 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=2, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=153, tm_isdst=0)	45512044	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Two kidney. Bryant and there's Jerry over there. And this is is stuff you should know. The kidney donation edition. Yeah. We did one on organ donation, right? Yeah. And we did one on stones and kidney stones. So you put them together, you get this episode. That's right. And this is from Dave. Ruse or pal. And this good? Should we this good. That kind of day. How it's going? Yeah, we're in person again, by the way. We should just tell everyone that I'm making a fool of myself right in front of you for a change. It's nice to see in person. And I should also point out that this is a double Dave day because he did the last one, too. That's right. Our inflation, right. Interest rate. I forgot what we talked about. I've already forgotten all of it. So Dave did some digging for us and came up with some pretty surprising stats that I certainly had no idea about with kidney disease in particular. But something like 15% of all American adults have some form of chronic kidney disease. 37 million people right now, 37,090,000 Americans are on the list waiting for a kidney transplant. And each year this is very sad, about 5000 Americans die while waiting and another 3000 more become too sick to get that transplant. So basically 8000 ish people are either dying or on their way to dying because they don't have a kidney that they can get. Right. And then with 37 million adults, just the adults alone with some form of chronic kidney disease, as their disease progresses, they end up on the list, the transplant list, which we'll talk about in a second. What's really interesting about kidneys, and in particular kidney donations, is it's one of a very select few organs that you could donate while you're alive. That's right. And then whistle off back to your normal life. Down one kidney. Yeah. You can't donate your heart to somebody. No. Sweet gesture. Sure. But you got two kidneys. You only need one. I think the number the percentage is if you donate a kidney, which is interesting, because the one kidney you have must ramp up production because your kidney function only goes down, what was it, 15% to 20% or something like that? Yeah, nothing 25 to 35, maybe. Yeah. It's not 50%. Right. And that's definitely doable like, you can go through life with one kidney performing 65% of your previous function. That's right. That's not bad. And we should probably just kind of point out some of the amazing things the kidneys do. There are these two fist size organs, or one, depending on whether you've donated or not. That's right. Or three, which will back to the show just under your rib cage on either side of your spine. So have your loved one make a fist with each hand, come up behind you, put their fist under your ribcage gently. Yeah. Just on either side of your spine. And there's your kidneys. Right. And kidneys do a lot of things. The main sort of the money job that the kidneys do is they act as the filter system for your blood. And that's the big thing. They filter about 200 quarts of fluids every day. And that's not just blood. That's blood and waste fluid. That's so much that's a lot. 200 quartz is a lot of kidneys are always working. Yeah. And within the kidneys, there are about one to one and a half million tiny little filters inside the kidney called nephrons. If you just think Nora Efron or nephrotiti or nephrotiti, and those nephrons are what's doing the actual filtering, they're just tiny little filters. What else they do? They also release a hormone called Erythropoietin EPO. It regulates production of red blood cells in bone marrow. Very big deal. Yeah. They also convert vitamin D from a non usable form, from the sun into a usable form, which is pretty important because vitamin D helps you retain and absorb calcium and phosphorus for building bones, reduces inflammation, possibly combats tumor growth. And all this is coming from your kidneys doing its thing. And then one other thing we kind of skipped over a little bit that I think is worth pointing out of those 200 quarts of fluid every day, two quarts of it, I think you said, is waste. Yeah. You pee it out, it gets converted into urine, sun to the bladder, and you pee it out. Yeah. And finally, Chuck, finally, the eight ounce glasses of water a day. Makes sense. It's not arbitrary anymore. You never realize. No, I never understood. I thought it was actually made up an arbitrary number at 64oz, because that's how much you pee out on a normal day, because that's how much your kidneys filter out as waste. So you got to replenish it. Yeah. This is funny. Well, I'm this days old when I finally realized it's. Many days old. Yeah. What else? They also release a hormone called Renin. Regulates your blood pressure. And we'll see blood pressure and kidneys have a lot to do with one another. Yes. And what else? Anything. You know what? I bet you there's other things the kidney does that it just doesn't like to take credit for. So one of the problems with your kidneys is that they can break down. They're susceptible to all sorts of other stuff going on in your body. And one of the big things that puts stress on your kidneys well, two of the big things that puts stress on your kidneys is such chuck colon. Colon. You've got blood pressure, high blood pressure, which exerts pressure on the walls of your blood vessels, which in turn exerts pressure on your kidneys, damaging their function. And the big one, the big daddy of what causes chronic kidney disease is diabetes. That's right. That's the number one. High blood pressure is number two. And basically, high blood sugar is going to damage the blood vessels in the kidney. It's going to kill those nephrons that we were talking about. Those are the filters that actually do the filtering and CDK, chronic kidney sorry, CKD. Chronic kidney Disease. They call it the silent disease because you can be through the first few stages of chronic kidney disease and not feel any symptoms at all and not know what's going on. So it's very dangerous. There are five total, and stages one through four, your kidneys are still doing their thing. They're struggling. But stage five is when you're an in stage, renal disease or renal failure, and that's when your kidneys maybe aren't working at all and you're going to dialysis every day and you need a new kidney. Yes. And we'll talk a little more about dialysis, but yes, once you hit stage five, your kidneys just aren't doing the work anymore. It's not like they just stop functioning. Little by little, they're unable to filter out waste, so the waste starts to accumulate and build up, and you have all sorts of terrible symptoms like nausea, fatigue, vomiting. I think you feel poisoned is what I've heard. Yeah, I think that's basically what's going on. Your body is being poisoned because it's no longer able to filter it out. So there's a lot of racial disparities, too, as far as kidney diseases go. And apparently it tracks very closely to diabetes. Yeah. Apparently, if you're a black American, you are four times more likely to have kidney failure than a white American. Hispanic Americans 13 times and Native Americans 12 times. And again, those same rates are pretty close to the disparity in diabetes. But also it has to do with things like access to health care, access to certain kinds of food that may not lead to diabetes or will lead to diabetes. There's a lot of stuff kind of caught up into it that it's not entirely straightforward, that everybody has an equal opportunity to develop kidney disease. Yeah, it's really sad that it seems like everything comes down to money and access to money. And if you live in the United States and you are somewhere on the poverty spectrum, then you're more likely to not have health care, not go to the doctor, eat worse food, get diabetes, have kidneys fail. It's all sort of in lockstep with one another. And then it gets even more insidious than that, because once you get to stage five, you might not have reliable transportation to go through dialysis. And dialysis is extremely time consuming. It is. So it's going to be hard for you to keep down a job. Yeah. My neighbor, before they moved, and sadly, he passed away, ms. Jesse and Mr. Otis, he had the ambulance come. It looks like an ambulance, but it's not an emergency one. It's just the transpo they picked him up every day, took him to dialysis well, brought him home, and this was for the last couple of years of his life going every single day. It's a good dude. I wish I would have gotten to know a little bit better before you pass. So dialysis is short for hemo dialysis, and it is literally just a machine that does the filtering that your kidneys do. So you sit there for what is it, like 4 hours? Yeah. Usually about three times a week. Yeah, three times a week, four hour sessions. And they just clean your blood in full with each session. Yeah. There's like a little membrane that doesn't let the important stuff, like red blood cells get through, but it does let those waste products get through, and they just get sloshed out, whereas the blood that doesn't go through, the membrane gets put back into your body. Yeah. And you're on dialysis for life unless you can get a new kidney. And then even if you do get a new kidney, you might be on dialysis for a little while, as we'll see. Yeah. So, Chuck, I feel like this is a good time to take a break. Just off the top of my head. Let's do it. Okay, so we're going to take a break, and we'll be right back, everybody. It's not fun to have kidney failure, especially stage five kidney failure. Yeah. Because you're going to dialysis a lot, and there's a lot of terrible symptoms involved in it. If you are at that point, you're going to be put on an organ donation list. You're going to become a recipient or potential recipient of a donated kidney. That's right. And that means you have signed up with the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which is managed by a nonprofit called the United Network for Organ Sharing. A lot worse places you can donate your money to, by the way. And Dave points out astutely that it's not like a waiting list. As in there's 90,000 people or more waiting for a kidney. So if you sign up for one, then you have 89,999 people in front of you, and it just very slowly that time ticks away. Yeah. It's a network. It's a pool of candidates. And because you have to get matched with a kidney and there are all these criteria, one of which is blood type. Don't have necessarily the exact blood type. I think if you have, like, A, you can get AB. So there's a little bit of cross over there. And O is universal. Right. Is it O? Negative, I think, or just O? We did a thing on blood. It was a good one. We did a live one. That's right. Remember my father in law spoke up when I did a blood test? He said Josh is pregnant. That's right. He got more laughs than all of mine combined that night. I remember that. That was one of the only funny audience jokes that we've ever had. It really was yelled out, high quality. Heckling, that was really good. That's for the Atlanta Science Festival. Where was that? It just totally threw me that. I'm trying to picture you pregnant now. Will. Get a load of me, buddy. So, yeah, blood type is one the size of the organ. It's got to be a good fit. So like, a little kid can't get a big adult kid. You wouldn't think about that. But it is true. And I mean, it's not just true with kidneys, with any organ. Like, I saw it put like a basketball player's long. Won't fit in a child. Right. It's like sure. Yeah. Those are wise words. Good point. And then geography is one, because as you'll see, if you get a kidney donated from someone that you don't know, it's not like a family member, then that kidney is going to be on ice, basically for a little while. That's going to be transported, maybe. Or maybe you're transported, but there's going to be a little bit of time. They don't just put you on the table like in the movies. They put you on the table next to your brother, and they would just, like, slide one kidney right in, just across the room to the other. Make the bee. Right. So geography is a consideration. So within this network, there's a big algorithm that's going to match blood types and all these things, and like, hey, you live in Birmingham. We got a kidney in Tuscaloosa. So you guys are pretty good match. Yeah. And so with each new organ that comes up for donation, you get a new score calculated by the computer. It's not like you get your score assigned. It's all contextual based on your relation to that organ that's being considered that's being donated. Yeah. And also we should point out that it's also based on your needs, like, if you're how urgent it is in a lot of cases. Yeah. It's also based on on some other stuff, too, which is kind of calculating. But it makes sense, your age, the younger you are, the higher your score, which makes it likelier for you to get that the likelihood that you will survive the procedure, the likelihood that you will reject the organ or not. Sensitization, I think is what they call it. There's a bunch of different factors, and this is fairly recent, this pool method, and it's kind of revolutionized things and apparently made it a lot better, from what I understand. It's a lot more sensible and fair. Yeah. And it also makes sense, like, once you see the numbers, every kidney is super important. Sure. And so they want to give them to people where you have the best chance for that kidney to work for ten to 1520 years. Right? Yeah. Can't waste no kidney left behind. No. Oh, man. Can you imagine if they were just like we left it on the plane, just forget about it. You're like, I just donated that kidney for nothing. It's in the trash. Now, there's a story out there, and I kind of want to hear it. See, I pictured more like Cheech and Chong were piloting the plane, and they're like, what's in the cooler, man? Right. And all of a sudden, it's a movie. They're looking for some good marijuana. That reminds me of snoop Dogg is the pilot in Soul Plane? I never saw that was, I guess no, it wasn't at all. At all. Yeah. It looks like a sort of homage to the sort of bad 70s comedies. It was like, hey, here's an idea. Let's get a bunch of funny people and get them really high or drunk. There's your movie. That was exactly what the airport right? That's the twist. All right. I'm not going to see it, then. No, there's no reason to. I demand that you not see it, actually. Don't waste your time. How are you going to sign up to be an organ donor? What are the couple of good ways you can do that? Well, one way is whenever you go get your license renewed at the old DMV in the United States or the DMV in France, they're going to ask you if you want to be an organ donor, and you can say yes, and they will put it on your license. Yes, organ donor. So that if you buy the farm out and about and you've got your driver's license on you. The doctors and the people at the hospital are going to look at your ID. And if they say yes. They're going to go to your family and say. Your loved one here. Who's now regretfully deceased. Said that they want to donate their organs. Or will you sign off on this? It seems to have been their wishes. You could still say no if you're a family member, but probably you're going to say yes, especially if your deceased loved one said, hey, I marked yes that I want to donate organs on my driver's license. If I die, make sure my organs get donated. They're probably going to go along with it. Yes. I think it's kind of funny that I wonder what percentage of people that sign up at the DMV for organ donation and the kidneys that actually go to other people and organs that successfully save lives. How many of those start with the two words, why not? Yeah, I don't need them. You're at the DMV, you're bored out of your mind, you've been there for far too long, and they ask you this question. You go, yes, sure, why not? Yeah. That is the most interesting question you've been asking that whole experience. Yeah. Maybe the biggest question you can answer in your life is whether or not you will donate your kidneys and your organs to save a human life. And people probably just go to the DMV. Yeah. Why not? So if you've been to the DMV and you said no and you regretted it, okay. But if you said no, you wanted to, you can still go and register, right? Yeah, you go to RegisterMe.org and you can register there. And here's the deal. In 2021, here are some more stats for you. There were 40,000 total organ transplants. I think most of those are, I think, was it like 85% of kidney transplants, far and away the most kidney transplants, and only 6500 of those 45 came from living donors, which was, I have a relative or I'm just a benevolent human who wants to give a kidney to anonymously to somebody I know, man. I mean, yeah, talk about sainthood. So two thirds of all kidney transplants are from deceased donors. So like you said, a lot of times it's accidents, car and motorcycle accidents where there's like, traumatic head injury, but the organs are still in pretty good shape. You're young, you're in good shape, and so you may be brain dead and the word harvest always sounds so cruel, but they can harvest. Borrow your organs? No, it's harvest. It's definitely harvest. Remember in our book, that chapter on Jack Cavorkian? He had that idea in the 60s or 70s where he was like, well, if we're going to execute people, let's just execute them through organ harvesting. We had to perform surgery on them and we harvest their organs, and then once we're done, they're dead. Right, but we're organs. Yeah. Then we're donating their organs and everybody's like, that's a really great idea, but you're a creepy dude and I think you're the last person who should be espousing this kind of stuff. Well, maybe he shouldn't have expressed this idea while imitating Vernon Herzog. Right. And where are your pants? That's right. So that means at the end of the day, one human body can save up to eight. Noel does a pretty good runner. Herzog he's doing, but the best ever is Paula Tomkkins. His Fernando herdsaw is fantastic. I haven't heard his just look it up on the Internet. Okay, that's great. One single human body, an organ donor can save up to eight lives, and that is just with the organs. And then you've got tissue donation, you've got eyes that can bring sight to someone. We should totally do one on the transplants. Yeah. It might also show you the killer of the person whose eyes you got, in which case you're morally responsible for chasing that killer down and turning them into bringing justice or executive revenge. If it's a really good movie, sure. A Bridget Fond type movie. Was that the actual plot of one or was that just a typical movie plot? I don't remember who was in it, though. Is it Jennifer Eight on or no, no. Jennifer Eight was a blind woman, a sightless woman, who was going to be the 8th victim of a serial killer who is targeting blind women. Okay. And I could spoil it for everybody. I'm not going to. It's actually worth seeing. It's a good 90s movie with Andy Garcia. Yeah. Good movie. I think it's out there still. I'm thinking of the movie where the guy got the hand transplant. Encino man. The hand was from a serial killer, and so he got a bad hand that wanted to do bad things. Jeff Fahey. I think the Lawnmower Man. Jeff Fahey was the lawn mower man. Okay. I never saw that one. I mean, it might have been called something as basic as, like, bad hand. Was it called? Idle Hand. No, that was different. That was not good. I'll look it up. How about this? So, folks, stick around for listener mail. We'll look it up in the interim. Okay. We'll announce it at the beginning of the finally, year 14, we got a new hook for the show. Or maybe I can just make up an email that fake Jeff Fahey sent in. Okay. Remember me? We need a fake Jeff Fahey sound effect. Like our colon sound effect. All right, so living donation is something we should talk about. This is, like you said at the beginning, one of the only organs you can donate. I mean, is it the only one? No, you can also donate a portion of your uterus and a portion of your liver. Okay. Portions, yes. But other than that, that's it. Right. So I got a little bit of history here. If you're talking kidney transplants, you got to go back to when they did a dog kidney transplant in Austria. The dog did not make it, of course, but it did produce urine for a couple of days. The kidney man. Not bad. I know. And that really just kind of takes you back to some really unsettling black and white view of some terrible experiment. Yeah. Let me see. In 19 nine, apparently there were efforts to transplant kidneys from dead humans to monkeys, as you do 39. The first deceased human donor, I think, was performed in Russia, but it didn't take. Oregon never worked, but they tried it in 39. They tried their best from human to human. 53, you finally had your first successful temporary human kidney transplant in Paris. It was twins. Right. 16 year old boy received one from his mother okay. As a living donor. And then 54, I think, was the twins. It was the first long term successful kidney transplant by Joseph Murray, who won a Nobel Prize for that. Sure. And then 62 is the first nonrelated no genetics involved whatsoever. So it's only been since the 1950s, 1960s that we've been able to successfully transplant kidneys. But once we got it, we got it pretty good. Yeah. We have it down path. Let's do this a lot, guys. This is fun. So if you are a living donor and you do donate your kidney, I think it makes up about a quarter of kidney donations today, right? Yeah. It's a living donor. Somebody saying, take my kidney, put it in somebody else. More often than not, it's, Put it in my brother, put it in my spouse. Yeah. Three quarters of the time you're related. Right. But that still means that 25% of 25% of all kidney donations so that means however many thousand kidney donations are donated by people who are just saying, like, here, take my kidney and give it to whoever needs it. That's right. And sometimes that is anonymously, sometimes it's a friend, sometimes it's a spouse. Sometimes you hear about someone in your community, but yeah, sometimes you don't even know anybody, and you're just like, you know what? I'm going to save a life. Yeah. I'm at the DMV, right? I don't want to save a life. Yeah. I'm going to do it. So if you do do that, you're a living donor, and there's a lot of advantages to a living donation compared to a dead deceased donation, an organ taken from somebody who's died. Right. So if you donate your kidney, the chances of the kidney being rejected are lower compared to a deceased donor, the kidney will probably start functioning independently, like, on its own, much more quickly than a deceased owner one, because the deceased owner one is going to be basically put on ice for a little while while it's transported by Chichen Chong kept. Yes, exactly. There's also a difference in the amount of time that the average kidney lasts between a deceased donor and a living donor. Right? Yeah. Well, you tend to live longer, and your kidney lasts between 15 and 20 years on average, from a living donor. It's only about a decade from a deceased donor. And you also have a better chance, if you are genetically related, of avoiding rejection. Right. Genetically related living donor is like the crim de la creme of getting a kidney. Right, exactly. There's also more convenient, too, if you are a living donor, you can say, let's do this, like, a week from Tuesday. Right. That works best for me. Not, this guy just died. We need to get this into a recipient, like, as soon as possible. Let's find somebody, kind of thing. Yeah. You know what I mean? So that's another big advantage, too. So I think we've established here, living kidney donations are the way to go if you can do it yeah. From a relative, ideally. So let's take a break because there's actually ways to maximize how kidneys get donated. Chuck and we're going to tell everybody about it after this. Let's do it. All right. So on the kidney exchange, it's pretty cool how they've worked this out over the years. There's something called paired exchanges, and it goes a little something like this. You want to donate a kidney to your relative, to your niece. Okay. But you don't have the right blood type. You can get paired up with someone who does have the right blood type, who needs your kidney to be like, wait a minute. My niece needs a kidney. You've got her blood type, and I've got your niece's blood type, so let's just get together and make this all work out. Crisscross compared exchange. But then that is multiplied exponentially by the donor chain, right? Yes. If you have a good computer handy to run an algorithm for you, because apparently it's very difficult to do. You can take a bunch of these mismatched pairs rather than four people. You can take, I think, up to 70 people and one Good Samaritan donor who says, take my kidney, I don't care who gets it, can set off a chain of paired matching that can satisfy up to 70 recipients. Yeah. So cool. Through a combination of one person donating it without any just saying, take my kid and put it in somebody, and then a bunch of paired matches, like 70 people. So it makes it really difficult to say, like, I don't really want to donate my kidney. Not only are you saving one person's life, you're setting off a chain reaction that allows for 70 different people to get their kidney because you donated yours without directing it toward anybody in particular. Yeah. And if that's not the first thing you say on every first date you go to for the rest of your life, then you're doing it wrong. Yeah. We should mention that there was a Nobel Prize winning economist named Alvin Roth who came up with this donor chain idea. And I don't think we said you have to be 18 to donate a kidney. You have to be in good health, and you have, like, rocking kidneys, basically, and also in good health. Otherwise yeah. Like, a 16 year old can't donate the kidneys. That's the other reason why a living donor is advantageous, because of that luxury of time. Because you can run a battery of tests. Yeah. You have time to run tons of tests to make sure they're a perfect match for this other person. That's right. So when you do say, okay, I'm going to do it. And by the way, Dave said from researching this, he was inspired to do it. I think he may have put himself on A lister. Was going to, although it may have worn off by now. Who knows? We'll have to ask him. But if you do this, you are going to undergo surgery. It's just as simple as that. And it's a serious surgery. Like, they're removing your kidney. As I said, we've got it down pat since we've been doing it since the 50s or sixty s, and now they can usually do it laparoscopically. Yeah. How does that work? I think they just squeeze it real tight into this really long pencil. Like, really? No. How do they get the kidney out? I don't know. I have no idea. That's the one thing that flomx me, and I. Almost like Google to see if I could find a surgery I could watch laparoscopic kidney removal, because laparoscopic means it's like a very small incision. You're using very thin cameras and very thin tools. But then how do you get the kidney out if it's fist size? I don't know. I mean, this is larger than a laparoscopic incision. Yeah. This is a widowmaker right here. And here to me, it's the fact that the show never knew this. They don't take out your bad kidney. Did not know that they just leave it in there. I guess they did the research and found out that they didn't need to, and that doesn't do any harm and maybe more dangerous to take it out you can see that than to leave it in. But you end up if you have a kidney with three kidneys yeah. Surely they detach those kidneys. Yeah. Because you got to attach the other, right? Yeah, I guess so. That's what they do. The surgery is to they take it out of you, and at that point, you're like, okay, I'm done. It's all recovery for me. But they have to put it in the other person. And like you said, they leave the other kidneys. They attach the one to the blood vessels so that it's getting the blood supply to filter, and then also they attach it to your reader so that it can transport waste to your bladder. And supposedly it's actually a pretty effective surgery and with minimal negative outcomes. Yes. Recovery time for the donors, a couple of days in the hospital, one to two weeks at home, six to eight weeks total. And then you got to come in at 612 and 24 months for checkups. Like we said, you lose 25% to 35% of your kidney function, but that's not 50%. So your one kidney must, like, ramp it up. And then you said pretty good outcomes. I think this is between 2006 and 2008 of the 17,000. Oh, there's your number right there. If the numbers hold, that would be 17,000 over three years. So about 5010 a year, at least back then. Yes. Unless there's been a rush. Yeah. Only twelve donor deaths out of the 17,402, and only one of those was from the surgery. From Hemorrhaging. It's close. Hemorrhaging. Hemorrhaging. God, that sounds weird. Hemorrhaging. Hemorrhaging. Yeah. Okay. It was purposely weird during surgery. Yeah. Bleeding too much. Don't forget to complete the sentence. That was very forky pig of me. So, yeah, that's a pretty good track record. Twelve deaths out of 17,402 transplants. They also studied people for long term effects and found that somebody who had donated kidney had about the same chance of suffering end stage renal failure as the general population. It didn't increase their chances one bit. And I was like, okay, all right, Internet, let me go a few more pages deep, like, where's the real talk about the long term consequences of donating a kidney and from what I can see, study after study, it shows that there's really not any long term effects, that after about six or eight weeks of recovery, you can go back to a normal life. During that time, you're going to feel very fatigued. Your function is going to be decreased. But if you say, I'm donating my kidney, I'm just going to take two months off, basically, of life, like stressful life. That's really not too bad, considering that you basically go back to normal life after two months and the one kidney you have is still doing 65% of the original function. Yeah. Like, if you work from home, you have no excuse. Exactly. Dave did put in here, and I've looked into this a little more, that a drawback might be it might affect your life insurance or disqualify you or increase your rates. Yeah. So I poked around that because that sounded like a horrible thing, and it wouldn't have surprised me, but it looks like there are a lot of protections in place from the Affordable Care Act for stuff like this, thankfully. And if you have never had insurance, you have your kidney removed and you go to get life insurance for the first time, then you may not be able to get it as easily, but you're not booted from your life insurance policy because you donated a kidney, or your rates aren't going to skyrocket because you donated a kidney. Got you. It's against the law. It should be. Yeah. So there's a risk of rejection. That's something you have to go into it knowing. Like, you might donate your kidney and it just might not work. Despite all the tests, despite all of the care given and matching you and your kidney with a recipient, it still might get rejected. But they have developed a lot of different drugs to cut down on the chance of rejection, right? Yeah. They're called anti rejection drugs or immunosuppressants. And there are a couple of kinds. There's one that are super powerful that they give you at the time of the transplant called induction agents. And then you've got maintenance agents, and there were basically four different kinds of maintenance agents. And the way this one website I saw put it, I think it was@kidney.org, or whatever that sounds made up, was that they said, look at it. It's like a mortgage. Your down payment is the induction agent, like the heavy duty drugs they give you when they do the transplant. And the maintenance agents are like your monthly payment. And the bigger the down payment, the lower the monthly. So if the induction agents are really work, well, then you're not going to be on as many long term medications for maintenance. And I didn't really recognize any of the drugs except for prednisone the steroid. Yeah, I didn't either. I saw the most common combination of drugs is three things. One called tacrolymus, which is a calcineverine inhibitor. One called mycophenylate Mophetl, which is an anti proliferate, and then prednisone. Okay. And I saw that you're generally on these for life, but they can scale down. I don't know if you're ever off of them completely, but yeah, I think 30% of kidney recipients experience some sort of rejection, but it doesn't mean that it didn't work, I don't think. So back to square one. Necessarily. Yeah. I think in a lot of those cases, you can keep that kidney if the drugs are working right. So this entire thing, whether it's a dead donor, a deceased donor I keep calling a dead donor I know it's not quite right, even though it's accurate, or living donors of kidneys. All of this is based on altruism. The entire organ procurement, organ donation system everywhere in the world, say, for one country, is based on the kindness and generosity of donors who do it for no money whatsoever, just out of the goodness of their heart. Yes. And that's the way that a lot of people think it should be. That's the way that it's enshrined in law. That that's the way that it has to be. In the United States, there's a law called the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 that says you cannot gain financially. I can't remember exactly how they put it, but you can't make any kind of gain from donating your organ. And I was like, where did that law come from? What prompted that? Well, probably the black market for Oregon. It turned out there was a guy, so that was the actor, and there was a doctor in Virginia named H. Barry Jacobs who announced that he was setting up a market for Oregon. He was going to create a brokerage for Oregon. It's like there's no federal law against it. That's exactly right. And so they went and made a federal law against it because they're like, that is objectively, unethical, and immoral. And that's kind of the basis for organ donation in this country, and again, every country in the world except for Iran, that it's unethical to make money selling organs or to pay someone for their organs because they're worried that it sets off a whole cascade of problems. Yeah, I think they try and make it cost neutral for the donor, which means your expenses are covered. Like, you're not going to be paying like the recipients insurance is going to be paying for all the operations and surgeries and all that stuff. Yeah. And then there are private nonprofits that can also help cover, like, travel, and if you're a low income donor, help pay for stuff like that, but you're still not getting paid to do it. And the idea there is ethically is that the dystopian science fiction plot, which is there is a class of wealthy people who harvest the poor on organ farms, and it's like something out of a movie. But it's also something that could very well happen if you let that kind of thing take place. Black market and human trafficking again, like you mentioned. And then another, which I didn't think of, is that the motivation for someone doing it, if you're getting paid, like, you may fudge a little bit on your questionnaires and, like, fake something to make money to get an organ taken out of your body? Yeah, it's almost like they've identified it as such a valuable thing that you can't assign any kind of monetary value to it. You can't allow that to happen, or else nothing but bad things are going to happen. And there's actually polls that support this. Although some people say that's stupid. No matter how many generous people are donating organs, the demand is still not there. I mean, you said it yourself. Like 50 people die on organ transplant waiting lists every year in the United States alone. That's just in the US. Alone. People die all over the world on organ transplant lists every year. And some people say that's stupid. If people are willing to sell, like, their kidney in particular, let them do it. It's a free world. It's a free country, at least. So what's the problem? Yeah, I mean, I think the idea I'm not lobbying for this, but they have floated things like a $50,000 tax rebate that you can absorb over, like, a decade or wipe out your student loans or something like that. Like, they're not literally just cutting you a check. Things like that are interesting because donating a kidney saves taxpayers close to $150,000 in medical costs paid out by Medicare for dialysis and things like that. And there was another analysis that found that paying donors $45,000 for kidney would result in a net gain of $46 billion in lower medical cost and better health overall health outcomes. So, like, something like that is interesting. Not just like, harvesting organs for cash, but if people want to take a big fat tax rebate over a decade, it leads to less taxpayer payouts for Medicaid or for Medicare, better health outcomes. I don't know. Something we're thinking about. Yeah. And other people would say that's already going on. There's a very healthy black market for organs all around the world. Right. I saw an estimate on some human trafficking website that was something like 10,000 kidneys a year are procured and transplanted on the black market. Wow. But then, Chuck, ultimately there is one country, Iran, that allows payment for organs. It's like $4,500, something like that. And then also right. Yeah. It's a pretty insubstantial amount if you're selling a kidney compared to, say, like, the 45 deg in the US. Is considering. Right. Or I shouldn't say the US. Is considering. Americans have come up within a study. Right. There is one stat that stood out to me that I think kind of suggests not applying money to Oregon procurement is that 85% of a 2001 study of 300 Iranian paid organ donors, 85% said that if they could go back, they would not have sold their kidney. No, they haven't. There you have it. Pretty much. Anything else about kidney transplants and donations and all that? No. Well, again, if you want to donate your organs and you aren't going to the DMV anytime soon, go to RegisterMe.org. And since I said RegisterMe.org, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this DB. Cooper follow up. Oh, wow. No. Pretty interesting. And this is from Holly. Hey, guys, holly from Texas here. Been listening about six months and I'm obsessed. I turned to the Facebook groups to suggest some fan favorite episodes and DB. Cooper. The live episode was mentioned a lot, and it reminded me of a story you might enjoy. Several years ago, I was at a small family gathering at my grandparents, and we were sitting around chatting about different topics and memories, and my grandma casually says, oh, that's just like the time when the FBI tapped our phones because they thought grandpa was steepy Cooper. Wow. I, of course, did a dramatic double take, slammed both of my hands on the table, exclaimed, what? I mean, I was floored at the time. I was in my late thirty s. I had never heard this story in my whole life. That's the thing with grandparents. You hear this stuff. And like, how did I not know that? I know. I, of course, had to dramatically turn to my grandpa with narrowed eyes and say, who are you? My grandma was very nonchalant about the whole thing, and I was like, wait, explain, please. She didn't have much more info, but I guess my grandpa was cleared, obviously. And it's still a mystery why they suspected my grandpa, mainly considering the fact that they lived in New Mexico at the time. We sadly lost my grandma in July 2021. But I'm happy to report that my grandpa is still doing well, even though I could never picture my cowboy boot loving, heavily starched wrangler Jeanwearn grandpa and a skinny tie from JCPenney. Although he does enjoy his daily bourbon. Oh, that's a clue. Maybe that was it. Yeah. So that's from Holly. That's a great email, Holly. That's one of the all time greats. Holly. I love that she's like, also, my grandpa pays for everything from a bag of money that he keeps his shed out back. Yeah, we always got on March $100 bills for birthday. If you want to be like Holly and tell us one of the great family stories that you heard from your grandparents about, we want to hear those, too. You can send them to us at stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
8a650434-4a58-11e8-a49f-8f54bbdbd7b4	SYSK Selects: How Commercial Jingles Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-commercial-jingles-work	You probably can recite five right now. Commercial jingles are designed to hijack your working memory and implant a product or service and they really work.	You probably can recite five right now. Commercial jingles are designed to hijack your working memory and implant a product or service and they really work.	Sat, 15 Sep 2018 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=258, tm_isdst=0)	34284449	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everyone, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen how commercial jingles work. You could also call it how commercial jingle earworms work. And I have to say, if you make it through this episode with no ear worms in your head, then your brain is broke. This episode was also actually the origin of the first commercial jingle. We got the stuff you should Know, which was done by Rusty Mattius of the Sheepdogs, a Canadian band. And thanks again to Rusty for kicking that tradition off for us. Hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetofworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Have you noticed that Jerry has a more aggressive countdown since we're shooting video now? Yeah, we're shooting video now. Yeah. For those of you not watching and just listening, like old school, we have these on video. Potentially. Yeah, Jerry's aggressively counting down now. He just yelled at us three to one. And we do two of these at a time. And I always bring a shirt and I always forget to change into it. I feel like a jerk. No, I did change once the first time. Well, today you have on your Mystery Science Theater 3000. I sure do. Shout out to Kevin and Bill, guys, if you're listening. You know everybody. Mike, Joel, anybody ever had anything to do with that show TV's Frank, who is now a successful tweeter? I don't know if you follow him. No, he's pretty liberal. Joel went out and did his own thing as well. Like, they're both doing similar versions of their previous job. What is it? Cinematic Titanic is Joel's and then rifttracks as Mike Yeah, I'm well aware. Robert Lamb interviewed Joel Hodgson. Oh, yeah. And there's, like, a really awesome lengthy blog interview on this Stuff to Blow Your Mind blog. Cool. Check it out. Yeah. So that's the intro for commercial jingles, which is what we're talking about. That's right. I really don't have anything except Chuck. Have you ever heard of a little songwriter named Lynn Duddy? No. I had neither. Apparently, Lynn Duddy wrote the I Love Bosco jingle, which I've never heard before, but it's listed as a famous jingle, so I feel like I'm missing out. Yeah, I didn't know half of these, actually. I love Bosco jingle. That's the one that we list. What's with this? And Barry Manilow wasn't in here. No, let's just get that out of the way. Manilow, who I love. Sure, you mean I have seen him. Front row center in Vegas. It was an awesome show. He looks a little scary now. He's a great guy. I don't know if I want front row, is all I'm saying. It was cool. He said something to me. I had to go to the bathroom, and I went and left in the middle of one of the songs. And while he was singing, I didn't miss a beat. He says to my back, don't leave now it gets better. And I just went into the song. Did you know what was driving? No, I didn't hear. I came back and she was still like, oh, my God. Did you hear? Wow. Yeah. But Barry Manelo, in addition to his incredible singing career, also is one of the better commercial jingle riders of all time. Yeah. Performed and co wrote jingles like a Good Neighbor State Farm is there. That's a big one, man. They're still using that stuck on the bandaid. Because the bandaid stuck on me. That's huge. Grab a bucket of chicken. I haven't heard that one. Grab a bucket of chicken. It was, like, 70s. Yeah. And that was for KFC, obviously. And you deserve a break today at McDonald's. Yes. Big one. And he apparently recently did one for Dodge, I saw. I haven't heard it either. Randy Newman, obviously, he writes whatever pays the most. Right. He wrote a bunch back in the day. And then this guy, Jim Brickman, who made quite a name for himself with ads like, we are Flintstones kids. Oh, yeah. For the vitamins. I used to love those, but every once in a while, my mom would just buy the cheaper knock off one, and the difference in taste awful. So there is a spell where she would find sticky knock off Flintstone vitamins, like in my Lincoln Logs, just stuck to things, because I'd just be like, I just put it in my Lincoln Logs because I guess throwing it away was too difficult. Yeah, that's pretty good. And then, of course, Lynn duty and Lyn duty, and Brickman's other big one was GE. We bring good things to light. Do you know how rich these people must be if they had even just a halfway decent agent? Well, it points out on this article I don't know if it's still the case, but if you wrote the jingle, you own the rights to it. I know. I don't know if that's still it seems like it should be. I guarantee you Manila owns the rights to the ones that he wrote. He didn't need the tour, but he still does. Although he likes to cancel once in a while. I had tickets for his Atlanta show. Oh, really? He just canceled it. I'm not playing. Sorry. Days are off. Oh, really? Yeah. That's pretty lame. Yeah, I thought so, too. Well, I hope he's all right. I was really into Barry, manley, when I was a kid. I know. For someone who ended up being, like, fairly cool with my music taste. Hey, I've got great music taste, too. And I love mailing. Oh, yeah. No, I'm just saying. All right, let's get into this. Okay. So, Chuck, what is a commercial jingle? It's one of these things that anybody can define it, but it's actually a little specific. Yeah, well, it is a song or a snippet of a hopefully memorable melody written about a product. Right. And that's the original jingle. We'll get into how it's changed over the years. Right. So it can have just about anything in it, like a slogan, like, a good neighbor State farmers there. It can have a phone number, like 805 eight 2300 Empire Today. Yeah, good going. It can have call letters like NBC. Yeah, I looked into that. That is what they now call audio branding, or an audio logo. Okay. Like the sound your computer makes when you open it. Oh, yeah. Apple has theirs. PCs have theirs. Or the ding ding ding from NBC, like you just said. But that's a big business now. Or CBS. That jingle. Like, who can never get rid of that one once it's in your head. But that's a new thing that's even more specific now than jingles are what they call audio branding. Every time I hear the word branding, a little piece of me die. But the dude from the Human League, remember that band? Yeah. He has a company now. That's like getting rich doing this. Oh, yeah, yeah. Basically, it's a little more complex than a jingle because they're trying to capture the essence of your brand with a few notes, maybe. Or in the case of, like, an LG dryer. Instead of hearing at the end, it plays this little melody. It's like laundry time. No. What is that? No, it's a little melody. Like a little dinging chiming melody. Who was it that wrote the yahoo one? Yahoo. Oh, man. Who was that? We were just talking about that recently. It was the guy who wrote oh, man, I can't remember. Sorry. Oh, well, somebody wrote in it was the a previous podcast. That's less than two months old. Yeah, it's all gone now. Yeah. All right. So anyway, that's audio branding. We left out one other part of a jingle. It can also doubt the benefits of a product. Yeah. Especially back in the day. That was huge. Like you'll wonder where the yellow went when you brush your teeth with Pepsi. Really? You're not familiar? No. Yeah, I remember the Crest Patrol. We make holes and teeth. Remember that? No. Oh, man, I wish I would look this stuff up in the 70s. There was the cartoon of the Crest. I remember that. Yeah. And then there were the Yakmus. Who were the bad people in that? I don't remember. The enemies were the ones we make holes and teeth connect to. The cavity creeps. I know they're the cavity creeps. Nice. Wow. All right, I'm firing on all of the you know, I remember being in, like, third grade, I think, and we got a bunch of promotional materials from the Crest Patrol, and it included a play of which I was, I think, a toothbrush. Oh, really? Talk about infiltrating schools. Yes. Seriously. Like, we put on a play about the Crest Patrol in school. Wow, that is weird. It's a little weird. So Chuck jingles, they've been around since the Egyptians, as I understand it. That is not true. Technically it is true, because the Egyptians were around in the 1930s. Funny guy. Christmas Eve 1926, they have credited the Wheaties quartet was singing about the Wheaties breakfast cereal as being the first, appropriately enough, first ever jingle. And apparently Wheaties was in pretty bad shape. And they're even going to get rid of it until they notice that in markets where they were playing the song on the radio, we need to picked up. And they said, hey, maybe this jingles, maybe it's got something to it. They probably didn't call it a jingle at the time. And then they put it nationwide and weedy was saved. Yes. Did you listen to it? No. Is it pretty bad? No, it's great. It sounds like the B sharps. It's barbershop quartet. It sounds like baby on board. Yeah, except they're singing about weedy. So that whole Weeds thing is pretty well established, but some still dispute it. And it depends on how you look at what a jingle is, whether that's the first one or not. But there's a song that was written in My Mary Old Mobile by Gus Edwards and Vincent Brian, and I didn't realize that people were named Vincent back in 19 five. Does that seem like a modern name to you? It seems more like 1940s to 1970s, maybe. You know, there's a website that charts popularity of names in a graph. I believe that. I bet you Vincent's pretty low back then. But those two guys made In My Mary Oldsmobile and Oldsmobile used it in the 30s, but it wasn't originally recorded or written for Oldsmobile to use. I think the guys just really liked their old mobile. Really? And so the author of this article, Tim Faulkner, points out that you probably more accurately call it the first pop song licensed for commercial use. Okay, that makes more sense. So it's technically not a jingle. So the Weedy's quartet still stands, right? Christmas Eve 1926. Minneapolis, Minnesota. Is there any place more desolate then? Hey, it worked. Yeah, because we still have Weeds today. So the whole reason jingles came about too, is because I'm all about my 1930s consumer history. And in the 30s consumer protection was like way stronger. And one of the things was direct advertising was very strict. It's so funny now. Yeah, like noholds bar now. You know, Australia is like going to town, like preventing direct marketing to kids. Oh, really? Yes, they're really protecting their kids. How cool it is. Very cool. You can only market fear. Exactly. Do you remember when there used to be like cigarette ads? Oh yeah. Cutty sark ads and things like that. It's funny to look through. If you go to antique places and they have old Life magazine and stuff, you just look through the ads and it's like these happy people slowly killing themselves. Right. With merits. But in the 30s. Like, if you wanted to get an ad on the radio, you pretty much had to buy some time, like a half hour or an hour and put on a program. And hence we have things like the King biscuit flower hour. Oh, yeah. Or the General Motors car thriller mysteries. Right. Whatever. And at first, I think it was really boring and dull and dumb, and they figured out that consumers were a little more savvy and were not really willing to share their time for something that's just an ad, like an infomercial. Right. So they started to make things like The Shadow and the Lorefinance and they made them so they could advertise. But eventually it gave us radio programming and then ultimately TV programming as we understand it today. We're basically born out of this desire to advertise to radio listeners in the 30s. Pretty cool. Yeah. And I didn't realize this, or I realize, I guess, but it's just hard to imagine these days because advertising is so all over the place. But back then, you had direct to consumer sales one on one. You go to a store or you have a traveling salesman come to your house to sell a vacuum cleaner or whatever. And the ads back in the day kind of bore that out. They were basically real matter of fact and kind of dry and really just bullet pointed how our product is better than the other. What? Exactly. It's very boring, very dry. Like, our spats are better than our competitors spats because they're made with virgin baby goat skin. That's right. But with the popularity of radio, things changed and they realized that jingles could make a real impact. And they did, because it's music. The Wheaties Quartet proved pretty early on and just right out of the gate, people started really paying attention to this and they brought the field of psychology in. And psychology started cranking out books that basically guided advertisers and companies on how to reach these audiences, like who's listening, when and how to talk to them. It just basically exploded overnight. And it was all largely thanks to the jingle. Yeah. And early on, and I think it still holds true today. If you want to be a successful jingle, it's got to be very simple. You got to have repetition, you got to have rhyming is good. It helps stick in your head a little more, and before you know it, it's become part of your consciousness for life. They point out here in the article the Oscar Meyer Bologna song. Anyone who grew up in the 70s can sing that word for word today unless you just weren't paying attention as a kid. Do you want to sing a little of it? Well, no. Do you? No. My Baloney has her first name. It's O-S-C-A-R. Yeah. And the plot fizz. What a relief it is. These things get burned into the collective consciousness Castanza what's that from? Seinfeld. Remember, George gets a girlfriend because he associates his name with that by Men. Oh, really? But he goes, stanza the woman doesn't even like him, but she can't get him out of her head because that Castanza is in there, which you would call an earworm. Yeah, which we've talked about. It feels like before, right? I think so. But we may as well talk about the orworm. Is that how you pronounce it in German? It's orvarm? Yeah. And everyone knows what an earworm is. When a song or a part of a song gets stuck in your head, sometimes inexplicably something weird got stuck in your head. Like, you wake up in the morning and the song is in your head. You hadn't heard it in weeks, months, years, who knows? But it's just there. And they don't really know how it works either. No, but a couple of very smart guys in the 70s got together. Their names were Allen Badly and Graham Hitch, and I think they're responsible for coming up with the idea of the working memory. Badly and Hitch? Sounds like a seventies pop group. It does sound like research. Well, they went on to write the Hustle, okay. But the Badly and Hitchfirst, I guess I've investigated working memory, and they came up with this thing called the phonological loop, right? Which is an earworm or a snippet of music or a sentence, whatever. It's running around. You can almost see it racing this track in your head over and over again. That's the phonological loop. And it's made up of two parts, right. The phonological store, which is your inner ear, which hears it, and then the articulatory rehearsal system, which is you're driving yourself totally insane by saying it over and over again, repeating it. It's how we learn to talk, right? Yeah. Or learn a foreign language. And they think that this phonological loop is basically an earworm hitching a ride on this neurological process that we have naturally, and basically exploiting it for commercial purposes. Wow. Happens more in women, supposedly. More in musicians, supposedly. And if you have OCD, it might really present a problem with you. That was a really good episode of ours, if you ask me. OCD. Remember he talked about David Sidaris licks light switches, I think. Yeah, in his book he did. I don't know if that's real. I think it is, though. How to get rid of an earworm. There's all kinds of things you can try, like actually hearing the song in full. Like, if you can't get Call Me Maybe out of your head. Right. Just go listen to Call Me Maybe sometimes singing it yourself all the way through. Can do it. You could sing. Call me maybe. It could vanquish it from your mind. But there's really no surefire way. Those are just little tricks. Yeah. I heard someone say something about listening to Rush. We'll get rid of it. Rush Limbaugh is that what it was because you just get so mad. Right. Who's Professor Caloris? So he's the one who's basically the University of Cincinnati professor. He's in the earworm article. Okay. And he has dedicated his career to basically exploring earworms, figuring out how they work, why they work, as he helps. I think he's made a name for himself in it. All right. He appears in not one but two how stuff Works article. So he's arrived. So what he's done through surveys, he said it's obviously all up to the person that's very individual as far as what songs get stuck in your head. But he put together through some surveys what he calls the playlist from hell. And I would have to agree. Well, I'd like to see this updated because it's a little dated a little bit. I mean, I'm sure that one, Party Rock has got to be at the top of the list. I don't know that one. Party Rock is in the house. I don't know that at all. It's literally impossible that you have not heard Party Rock. Is it a song? Yes. I have not heard it. I will play it for you. You'll be like, oh, okay. Is it like a pop song? Yeah. It's not a commercial. It's everything it's inescapable. It is the alpha and the omega. Yeah. It's just not possible you haven't heard it. All right. But his playlist from hell includes the Baby Beck Ribs chili's Jingle, which we won't even say out loud. The baja men's who let the dogs out. That's a good one. Queens. We will rock you. That's another good one. That's a good one. But I don't know, that doesn't strike me as particularly earwormy. Give me a break. It's a good one. Kit Kat Bar the Mission Impossible Theme I think it's funny that this is on here because I had an experience with that when I lived in New Jersey. It was when I think the first Mission Impossible movie came out and YouTube did the update of the theme. That thing was stuck in my head for like, three days. I was walking around, just going and coming up on corners really quick and looking around, doing a tuck and roll. It was crazy. So it didn't surprise me to see that on here. YMCA. There's nothing wrong with that. I kind of like this playlist. I wouldn't call it from hell. I'd call it maybe from heck at best. Okay. I do hate the lion sleeps tonight. I hate that song. I think that's probably on there for the very first time. The Weemaway. Yeah. Wimp. There it is. By Tag Team. It's a Small World. I guess that one. Because you go to Disney World and you just hear it over, over and and over. What ride is that? It's a Small World. Is that the name of the ride, too? Yeah, I think so. It's been a while. There's still plenty of jingles out there. I'm trying to think of a new jingle. Well, they're all over sports radio because I listen to a lot of sports talk and me and my lead guitarist, Eddiepo eddie Better. Eddie Cooper. We have been joking around about doing, like, a medley of radio jingles in our set. Yeah, because if you listen to sports radio, man, it's like the same ones. Like what? Well, looky, lookylookie, here comes Cookie. Oh, yeah. Cook's Pest Control Alarm force. I haven't heard that one. Alarm force, man. I can't think of them. But yeah, I mean, there's just like if you listen to any kind of sports radio, it's like the same ones. The ad that always sticks out to me when I think of sports radio or talk radio is that one guy who's trying to sell some sort of refi. Like he's a refinance guy. It's the biggest no brainer in the history. I love that guy. Or if you've heard and this isn't even a jingle, but a full on song, have you heard any of the bluebell ice cream commercials? I don't know. It's pretty great. How does it go? They're all different, but it's all like this guy singing about, like, country morning and the sound of birds chirping and it's like the sound of coming home is what you taste when you eat blue Bell ice cream. Right. It's pretty funny, which is a lie. But like you said, they sort of have gone out of fashion a little bit, at least from the heyday, even though they're still around. Yeah. They are viewed somewhat as hokey. I think if you stop and think about a commercial jingle or the concept of a jingle, it's hokey. Even though you probably have 500 of them in your head that you could recall at any moment. Exactly. But yes, if you are, say, the company responsible for running VW's advertising campaign, you're probably not going to use commercial jingle. You're going to go the other route, which is to appropriate a pop song. Yeah. In VW's case, they use Nick Drake, which is great. One song, pink Moon. Yeah. That's how I came to find out who Nick Drake was. That's how a lot of people came to find out. And that's what the article points out, is a lot of times they can resuscitate careers. Although in his case, he passed away. But he definitely was way more popular after that commercial than he was before. Yeah. Stereo lab was also VW. Yeah. Who else? I don't think they needed any help, but it was like a perfect fit. The Polyphonic Spree. Oh, yeah. I can't remember the name of this time. It was like their huge hit that was on a VW commercial. Like when VW first came out with the New Beetle. Hey, and shout out to Toby, right? Yeah, Toby. He was in the polys. Pray. He's shooting a feature film right now. Oh, really? Yeah. Wow. In Louisiana. He's shooting it. Yeah. Toby is a friend of Josh and Yumi who was in the Polyphonic breed. Yeah, he played theremin and now he is. Oh, did he really? Yes. I don't think I knew that. Yeah, he was like friends with a couple of them and said, hey, I want to be in the band, what do you need? And they're like, how about thermal? And back then anyone could be in the Polypole. And it was huge, it was extensive. And he went out and bought a thermon and taught himself how to play it and came back and was like, I don't want to be and he went to Japan, like toured the world with the Spree for a while. That's what the Spring? Yeah. That's awesome. He's making a movie now. Yeah, they had that short. He produced one with South By South Wales. Yeah. Starring Bonnie Prince. Billy was amazing. Now they're onto something else. It's like a feature film. Same company. That's awesome. Yeah. Anyway, pop songs going back to that. They credit the Beatles 1987 Nike commercial when Nike famously used revolution. Do you remember that? Yeah. It's kind of starting this whole new wave of let's pay a lot of money to use really popular songs because it's not enough anymore. You can't just say, Our brand is better than yours. You want to identify your brand with public consciousness and a lifestyle like that Cat Steven song Wind of My Soul and like the Timberlain ad that kind of struck great song, where it's like, put these shoes on and you will automatically I'm surprised he went for that. I am, too. I'd like to look into that. I wonder if he doesn't have the rights. It doesn't seem like something he would do. There's no way he doesn't have the rights to the song. Yeah, that's true. But you raise a point, like it is surprising that he would have gone for that. But apparently if you work on artists long enough or just wait for them to grow old and need money, they will eventually cave. Or Sting. He didn't need the money, but who? Sting? No, I doubt if he did it because he needed the money or reloaded. I guess. That's right. He has a castle. He did it for a reason, though. And it was probably money. So in the 80s, when Sting was still because the Police started out as a punk band and in the 80s it was post punk, but Sting still thought of himself as a pretty cool dude. Sure. And apparently I don't know the company, but they approached Sting and said, hey, we want to use don't stand so Close to Me for our deodorant commercial. Awful idea. It's a terrible idea. And he very wisely said, no way. But then Jaguar said, hey, you know this terrible Desert Rose thing you have going on? We want to use that for our ad campaign. Instinct said Way. Right. Cheers to that. Yeah. And that's a big. Bands get accused of selling out less these days, I think, because especially smaller bands, people think music is free now, so they're not making money selling records like they used to. They break even on tours, these small bands. So I've done a 180. I used to think, like, don't sell out. But now I'm like, dude, make whatever money you can while you can. Yeah, I know. Band of Horse is one of my favorites, and Jerry's favorites, they were kind of taken to the map by some of their fans because they licensed their movie to Chevy. And the dude, Ben Bradwell came out and was like, no, you know what? I drive a Chevy. It's old, and maybe now I can get the AC fixed. He drives an old pickup truck, and he's like, what's the problem? Yeah, like, we're trying to make a little dough here, and it's a product I believe in. Yeah, that part in the movie The Doors where Jim Morrison is off on whatever for a while and comes back and sees that My Fire has been a Chevy commercial. Yeah, the Ray Conife Singers or something doing it, and he's like, it's catchy tune. And then he starts breaking stuff. That brings up my biggest pet peeve today, okay, is this new thing. And it's not super new because they've been doing it, but it's like worse than it's ever been when they will take a great classic song and bastardized it and have some lady session singer come in and sing like Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones, but in a different way and talking about being satisfied with your new car. Right? It's all over the place now, and it's just the worst. I would rather hear someone license their real song than hear them remake it with some awful session singer and change the words to fit their product. You know what I'm saying? But then that corporation would take the Ben Bradwell stance ben what? Ben Bradwell stance? And be like, hey, man, we got to make our quarterly earnings. Yeah, that's true. It's not true. I was being totally facetious, but it doesn't count. It's not the same thing or the other thing now that the Black Keys are suing Pizza Hut right now because what companies will do and Tom Waits is sue people a bunch of times. Like, every other year, he sue someone because they'll go in and they'll say, give us something, Tom Waits. Or, boy, listen to the gold on the ceiling by the Black Keys. Can you do something like that? And these dudes that write these songs basically rip them off. And the Black Keys are watching Pizza Hut, and they're like, wait a minute. That's my song in a slightly different way, selling Pazones. And so we're going to see you and take you to court. And that's when they get in court and, like, compare them side by side. Ray Parker, Jr. Famously got messed up because he apparently ripped off. I need a new drug. He loses him. That's right. And I never really heard it. And then finally it clicked and I was like, oh, wow, that is really sick. Did he settle? He lost. I don't know if he settled or what, but he definitely lost that case, I guess. Finally, we should talk a little bit about product placement. Well, we had a whole product placement episode. Yeah, that's right. Well, obviously with TiVo and DVRs now people are speeding through commercials. So you are going to find some product placement in your shows, quite possibly our own, even. It happens. But there are better ways than others to do it. And if you want a good laugh, go to the YouTube and Google Soap Opera cereal and just watch it's. Great. That's all I'm going to say. I watched that the other day. Did you? Yeah. It's so funny and awful. It's colossally bad. Yeah, but it's so bad that it's earned a place in the pantheon of pop culture now. So it did its job. Turn in some. Yes. I bet you there's a lot of hits on that on YouTube. Honey, what are you doing? Just having some delicious Honey Nut Cheerios. Yeah. Boy, these things are really packed in fiber. The thing is like a seven minute long scene. Yes. They just start talking about Cheerios the whole time. Yeah, it's pretty funny. And there is a little product placement right there for your Cheerios. It's all over the place. Bonus. No, I mean just now. No, but I'm saying jeez, all we did was talk about brands. Oh, yeah. Cook's. Pest control always is a check. Yeah, we'll just combine. Get the termites out of my house. That would be nice. I want to check. Let's see. If you want to learn more about commercial jingles, you can type those words into the search bar. Howstepworks.com? And I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this. Remember you asked for good causes and the white collar crime? Yeah. This one's from Athens, Georgia. Oh, hey. So it made the cut. I've been there. Love the show, guys. And now a segue into a shameless plug right to the point. For a non profit in Athens, Georgia. I represent Free. It Athens Frieda. It's an all volunteer nonprofit, and it is a grassroots organization dedicated to reclaiming discarded technology like computers, refurbishing it and distributing it to those in need. That's awesome. That's great. Makes perfect sense, too, I think. In fact, I have some old stuff I could donate. You know, there's gold in there. There's like all sorts of rare earth and precious metals that like if you and the computer bind them a bunch of computers, you'd have a little gold nugget. Really? Yeah. Well, maybe I'll do that instead. We serve mostly low income populations that cannot afford the latest and greatest technology we also aim to reduce e waste through computer reuse and responsible recycling. We are currently in need of working laptops for a volunteer program. I know a whole room full of them. Seriously? Laptops are distributed to volunteers that complete our computer refurbishing program. We are interested in laptop computers that have been made within the last five years with little to no damage. Donating your computer can change someone's life. And imagine you can write that off. You know, we really should see what they're going to do with this. See if we can get a discount. Donating can change someone's life. I already said that. But it can really change someone's life. Competition financial donations are also welcome, so you can visit www.freeitathens.org. And thank you so much, guys. That is from Joelisler in Athens. Thanks, Joel. I appreciate that. That is a very good cause. We'll see if we can help. If not, we're in addition to hopefully there's a lot of listeners in the Athens in Atlanta area that can help. Agreed. Or maybe people can mail them from all over. I'm sure you could. Or just go there and give them a little cash. Give them $10. Oh yeah, you could do that too. What was it? Freeitathens.org? That's right. If you have a commercial jingle, we want to hear it. Send us a link. Sure. Some great forgotten commercial jingle. We want to hear about it. Or the worst one ever. Yeah, let's just start talking about this. Let's get a conversation going. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyhealth, and you can send us an email. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.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 the 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."
a69d8ba8-5462-11e8-b449-67d75c7edaed	When inventions kill!	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/when-inventions-kill	Few things are more ironic than an invention killing its creator. The stories behind real life cases of death-by-invention are pretty interesting too. Pull up a chair and hear about a few from Josh and Chuck.	Few things are more ironic than an invention killing its creator. The stories behind real life cases of death-by-invention are pretty interesting too. Pull up a chair and hear about a few from Josh and Chuck.	Thu, 11 Oct 2018 13:30:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=11, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=284, tm_isdst=0)	42685408	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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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Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Rowland. And this is stuff you should know. I don't know what edition this is. Should be pretty interesting and entertaining. How about that? This is the interrupting Chuck from watching the Kavanaugh Hearing edition. Yeah, really? Man, talk about historic, huh? Oh, I was glued to it and then like, I got to go do my job. Sorry. For some reason I feel guilty, like I'm responsible for that. No, it's not your fault. Thanks for letting me off the hook. We got to make the donuts, man. Don't get me. I'm recording it. So I'll just go back right after this. Okay, cool. Well, we'll talk really fast. I'll go back to seething Rage right after this. You'll just be like you'll be like, no one tells me what happened. Oh, goodness. Alright, let's do it. Death by invention. Yeah, I guess this would be the horribly ironic twist edition of Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, and we are talking about people who died by their own hand in a way. And it's really sad. I mean, all these people are pursuing their passions for the most part. And to die because you are a creative, inventive, passionate person, except maybe in the case of Lee C. It's really sad. It is. I think to die in any way at any time, for any reason is unnatural. It's just wrong. Yeah, they listed out a couple before the official list of five. Yeah, there's like a whole very long list of them. Yeah, we could do the same show like every like once a quarter. Maybe we will chuck five more people. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how this one goes. How about that? Did you want to touch on a couple of those other people though? Yeah, I mean, henry Windstanley is definitely kind of a famous one. He built a very famous lighthouse, eddie Stone Lighthouse, back in 1698. And I think that was the first iteration of it. I think there's been four total, and we talked about it on the Lighthouse episode. Yeah. I think this was the first one on rock. Right. And this is like, out there on some rocks in the ocean or in the channel, one of the two, or the sea. It's out in the water. Yeah. A light, old school, candle lit lighthouse. Very romantic lighthouse. Very romantic. Invented by like you said, Mr. Henry winstanley. Great name. And speaking of great, five years later, there was a great storm and this lighthouse, actually, that he built collapsed on him and killed him while he was trying to shore it up. Yeah, he and five other people, and they were never found. That's just sad. I guess the sweet swept them. That's the sweet. Does sweet swells by the sweet sword? Yeah. It's really such a tragedy. What about Marie Curie, who died at 66 from radiation poisoning, which technically she didn't invent radium and polonium. She discovered them, but her work, she won Nobel Prizes for it. Yeah, like work. The dangers of working with, I mean, always dangerous, but especially back then. And then in 1045 again, physicist Harry Daglion. I'm going to say dalian dallian. I like Daglion. Okay, Dahlian. That's what I'm going with. But hey, man, it's up for grabs. So silent. G silent. H yeah, kind of. I mean, there's a little bit of a guttural in there. Why do you hate letters? Right? Those are superfluous letters right there. So Harry Dallian was another scientist who was working on the Manhattan Project on the demon core, the core of the plutonium bomb, and he died by his own hand as well. He was stacking carbide bricks, tunsting carbide, around the core and dropped one, which I can't imagine. Like, what a frightening moment that would be. Yeah, even more so. Chuck he had a monitor. He was trying to see how many tungsten bricks it took to make the plutonium go critical, which is like, once it goes critical, you got a nuclear explosion on your hands. So he's just sitting there messing around with this. He's got a monitor showing them, and the monitor said, hey, man, that last brick will make this go critical. It was a monitor from the 70s, so it said things like, hey, man. So he knew, I got to get that brick away, and he went to go pull it back away from the stack. But in going to pull it away, he accidentally knocked it onto the core. So he had to go into the stack after it to get it away from the core to make sure that the thing didn't blow up. And he did, but he supposedly suffered tremendously from radiation poisoning. Yeah, I mean, he died within a month, so that's pretty tragic. And it sounds like he was a hero, because if that thing would have exploded, many lives lost. Yeah, he's definitely honored as a hero. He also was not willing to follow the rules, apparently, because he was in the lab by himself, which was against protocol. I think he went back to work after dinner and was sitting there working on a nuclear pile by himself, that he was trying to see where the threshold was for getting it critical. Jeez, that's a little crazy. So these examples just serve as a set up, though, to the official Five. And we're going to start with Lisi. L-I-S-I-I got no love for Lee C. No, this is not one of the ones where just a great creative following their passion. I don't know, maybe he was passionate about harming others and taking advantage of people and core intrigue, for sure. Yeah, that's a good point. But we're going back to ancient China here, roughly 221 BCE. Is that what we're saying now? Yeah. And China at this time was making the conversion from just a big mess of warring states into what would be eventually be the Keen Dynasty. Is that right? Chin. Chin. We've been corrected by that officially, too. In emails. I looked it up again. I was like, I'm not falling for this again. Here. I did it. I think it was you last time. It definitely was, yeah. The Chin Dynasty finally being ruled by one dynasty. So it was a big change for China. It was. But the way that they assembled all of these kind of. Like. Fractious states into a single empire was through this practice called legalism. Which is a political doctrine that basically said it basically assumes the worst about people. That they're selfish and dumb. And that the best way to make a state out of your citizens is by exploiting them and lying to them and passing a law for everything and then brutally enforcing it. Yeah. And kind of the government just fully ruling with an iron fist its citizens. It's like proto fascism. Like, the point of your citizenry is not to serve them. It's for your citizenry to kind of give all their power and work and attention to the state, to the emperor. Yeah. So there's this sort of an outlier as far as where this guy started out. Lisi, he became very prominent with the Qin Dynasty, but he was not born into it. He was a commoner, and he was a clerk at a local government office, and he really worked his way up through the system. Pretty impressively. Yeah. All the way up to prime minister. So local government clerk to prime minister. And, I mean, this guy makes, like, Machiavelli and the Medicis look like cream puffs. Wow. Yeah. Medici's cream puffs. Yeah, I am compared to Lisi. Yes. Not just Lisi. So, like, the emperor of the Qing Dynasty, the founder of basically China, was an emperor named Xiwangdi. I'm pretty sure that's how you say it. I'm almost equally sure that I've gotten it wrong. But he was the King of Chin, the first Emperor of Chin, and he was pretty brutal, but he found good company with Lisi and his brutality and the way that he saw citizens and people. And then also the King's Eunuch, who was basically tied for second place with Lee C. He was the king's official spokesman. His name was Chow. Chow. And the three of them together just ruled quite brutally. You bribe people, and if they didn't take bribes, you killed them. You tricked neighboring states into accepting your rule. Book burning was huge, and this is what Leasey is most commonly remembered for, is instituting a policy of burning most books, especially history books, in an effort to kind of form a single way of thinking for all Chinese to fall in line with. And the way that you start that is to get rid of everything that's been written that doesn't fall into that line of thinking. So he instituted, like, an empire wide book burning drive. Yeah, I think the only thing that he said it was okay are books on medicine, books on growing things in agriculture, and then divination, which I can't believe we haven't done a podcast on that at this point. Is that Water Witching? Yeah, I think so. Right? Yeah. I think that's probably also like, reading frog guts and tea leaves and stuff to see the future. Oh, well, that part totally makes sense, right? Because you got to know how it's going to come. And had Lisa been at all capable of divination, he would have seen that his end was coming horribly, ironically, and it was going to be very painful for him. Yeah. So speaking of machiavelli, they definitely led the path and do anything necessary to get what you want. And he said, you know what? I'm pretty into torture as a means of getting what I want. And I've invented a pretty foolproof way to ensure that someone is dead or gives us what we want, and I imagine ended up dead anyway. It was called the Five Panes, and it's basically cutting things off of the body one at a time until you get to five, which is the body. You cut the nose off first, then you cut off a hand, then you cut off a foot, then you cut off the penis or the vagina. Sure. Castration. Yeah. And finally you just cut in half. Your body is cut in half. They're like, I'm done with you. Yeah. The five panes really undersells it. It really does so because the Five Panes, for me, are traffic. Right. Traffic. This is the five unbearable. Yeah. Social media, none of them involved cutting off hands and feet. A nose, man. Can you imagine losing your nose? That's first, too. Yeah. So Lisa is credited in some circles with inventing that others say it's not entirely clear. But she wang di the emperor when he died. He died abroad suddenly. And Chao Chow and Lisa decided to conceal it because the king had said, my eldest son is my heir. I want him to take over after I die. So Lisa and Joe got rid of that decree and forged a new decree to the oldest son who had been exiled for opposing that book burning idea. Yeah, that was the reason. It was a problem. Because he was no friend of Lisa. Right, exactly. So Lisa and Jao Chow drafted a new decree from the king and it said, Son, kill yourself. And they sent it to him. And the son killed himself. Yeah. So now they had consolidated their power and they named an infant son of Shi Wangdi to be the new ruler. They decided that wasn't any good, so they killed the infant and then they turned on each other. And Chow Chow got the upper hand and said, lisa, I have some terrible news for you. You're about to face the five panels yourself. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, is when you've got two psychotic creeps working together, eventually one of them is going to turn on the other. That's how it always goes. Let's hope that never happens to us, because we're Paris. I got a creek working together. What is the King's unit? So the unit was castrated? Well, I know what the unit is. Why did they castrate them? Just to render them subjugated or whatever. Or trustworthy. Like, now I can trust you around my wife, or whatever. I'm pretty sure that's why people were criticized. Got you. But in this case, he was like the spokesperson for the emperor. He was like the highest imagine the press secretary and the chief of staff combined. Right. That's kind of what he was. But no penis. No. So Joe turns on Lesi and has him executed through the five panes. His invention, supposedly. How about that? Which I looked into that five panes thing. It seems to come under the tradition of Ling chi, which is called slow slicing, which is as bad as it sounds. And I think it's way worse than the five panes. There can be 24 cuts or 1000 cuts, they call it. And they actually last used it in there's a horrible picture of the man who was executed in 1005 by this, like, being executed through the slow slicing method. Was he just cut all up and bloody? Yeah, it's pretty rough. Pretty awful to see. But they did it up until 19 five. Remember the days when we would send each other those awful pictures? Yeah. I think we got to a certain point where we're like, yeah. Seem too much. You find it on your own. More power to you. Yeah. You become a father. I'm a father in my own way. So I feel like we have to protect ourselves from that. Oh, boy. All right, well, let's go take a break. I'm going to go watch four minutes of the Kavanaugh hearing, okay? And we'll come right back right after this. 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 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. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy. Which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's Lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, we're back. Now let's talk about parachuting franz Reicholt. Yeah, I know a little bit about this one because I did something back when we were doing videos. I can't remember exactly what it was, but one of our half hearted attempts at a video series, I think it was a blog post. Was it? Yeah, those didn't work either. It was like in that same series of the baby cage that hung out over there. Yeah, that's right. Remember what a relief it was when we were finally told, hey, guys, why don't you just podcast? Because that's a job. That was nice. Wasn't that great? Yeah. You don't have to dance like a monkey on YouTube or blog like it's. People miss that stuff, though. It's crazy. I know. But we enjoy this. Yeah, I love podcasting. Chuck all right, so it's the late 17 hundreds. We're in France, and there's a series of men that are intent on jumping off of things and testing out this new thing called a parachute. Yeah. And so in the 1470s, DaVinci is credited with designing the first payer. She was just on paper. I've seen pictures, and apparently somebody built it. And they're like, yes, it works. Of course it's DaVinci. But something and I couldn't figure out what it was, but something in the 18th century and 19th century just caused, like, parachute fever in France. And there was like you can't really attribute it to anybody else but the French, the development or the early development of the parachute. There was just a bunch of Frenchmen working on the parachute at about the same time. And maybe it was the advent of hot air balloons, which was another huge thing in France. Sure. And they were like, well, I'm up here, and how am I going to get down there if my balloon starts to crash? So it's possible that was it. But there were a lot of French guys jumping off of buildings in the late 18th and early 19th century trying out parachutes. Yes. Over a ten or 15 year period. There was a guy named Joseph Montgolfier. That means golf mountain. Oh, nice. Louis Sebastian Lenomar. That's okay. I just dropped the last couple of letters on anything French in the how they do it? Yes. And then a third guy named Bourgeois, he's like Cher. All of them were kind of making parachutes. There was another one, too, Jeanpierre Blanchard, who actually realized that silk is pretty good for getting out of a hot air balloon as a parachute. He had to ditch once back in 1793. So there are a bunch of them, and Leonor Manmond is the guy who actually coined the term parachute, which para in the Greek means against, and shoot in French means fall. So it's against falling. The parachute is yeah, in a way. The parachute was invented by a number of people, but there was one specific parachute, kind of like a wingsuit, but differed from a wingsuit in that it didn't work at all. And it was invented specifically by a guy named Franz Richards. And I would love to hear you say his name properly. Franz Richards. That's pretty good. Yeah, that's an interesting case, too, because this was close to 100 years after people were successfully using parachutes. Yeah. So it wasn't like he was like, oh, man, these things have not worked yet, and I really need to figure out a better way. I don't think he had a death wish, but I think he was shooting for the stars. He was an eccentric is what I've gathered. Yeah, he was an eccentric. He was a very talented tailor. But this article points out, I think, quite astutely part of being an inventor is knowing where to draw inspiration from, among other inventions and inventors. Right. And this guy apparently just went through to first principles like Elon Musk does, where it's like, oh, I can buy batteries on the market for this. Let me instead figure out what you need to make a battery, and I'll go buy those parts and make it for way cheaper. Franz Richard seemed to have the same impression about his flying suit. He just kind of made it up, not based on anything else. He just did it himself, and he was quite proud of it. And he took it to the Aero Club of France and said, Check this out. And they said, do not use that ever. The thing is not going to do anything. And he said, oh, nuts to you. And he started doing trials from his fifth floor apartment window with a dummy, and it didn't work. But he wasn't dissuaded by any of that. Yeah. The only thing I can figure out is that because, again, I don't think he had a death wish. I think he must have thought the only thing I can figure is he must have thought a dummy. Like, it needs to be a real rigid human that can move their body, and a dummy is just not going to cut it. So I need to try this thing out because I think it's going to work. It was a time in 1912 when apparently you could go to the Eiffel Tower and just tell the cops, hey, I'm going to throw a dummy off of the Eiffel Tower to try out my flying suit. And they said, Go ahead. So he went up there, but I don't think he changed his mind. I think by all accounts, he intended fully to do this himself the whole time. Right. And the suit, like, you have been hinting at it, didn't do anything. It didn't. And actually, I should have sent you this one, too. British Pete or Pete, I'm not quite sure what the old News real Service, they were there and filmed it. And there is a haunting video of him. There is close up, like, it's not far away, but close up, like, on the ledge of the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, 190ft, or almost 58 meters high, just like waiting, waiting. And then he jumps, and he just goes straight down like a sack of potatoes and dies immediately. Yeah. 190ft. Very tragic. Yeah. And on the film, you should see the police measuring the depth of the impression he made in the ground when he fell, when he hit the ground. It's really sad to see you're like, don't do it, don't do it. But, you know, obviously that he's going to do it and he died. Well, there was a time, too, where people were trying to figure all this stuff out, so they're all kind of crazy. I know we haven't done one on the Wright Brothers yet, but you've seen all the crazy flying machines that people were trying to come up with. Right. It was a time of the spirit of adventure was in the air, and everyone there was probably like, man, check out this guy. He's going to fly off the Eiffel Tower. Yeah, I mean, they thought that, or they all had a lot of blood left and we're coming out to see this guy die. I don't think he had a death wish either, Chuck. And he actually applied for a permit. That's sweet. So, I mean, why would you apply for a permit if you had a pretty good idea you were going to die? I think he thought very much that it was going to work and he was going to live and he didn't want to get in trouble, so he applied for a permit first. That's a good point. How about moving on? Yes. Number three, Max Valerie. What do you say? Valier Valley. I don't like extra letters, man. I need to take French. Sure. Although this guy wasn't even French, was he? No, he was born, get this, he was born in Austria Hungary, in the town of Bozen, but Austriah Hungary broke up. It was very sad. And that town is now known as Balzano, Italy. But the guy's last name is Valley. That was the Italian, or what we would consider Italian. If he had been born after the Austro Hungarian Empire collapsed, he would have been Italian. But he was Austro Hungarian. Well, yeah, but you know what I mean, it's not like they said, all you Austro Hungarians, get out of here. I don't know. I really don't know. I would guess because it was an empire, there was probably a lot of movement around the Empire, so who knows what his ethnicity or pedigree was in his family. Well, we know one thing for sure, is that he was a smart dude and he did not have a degree in science, but he was very good at figuring stuff out. I guess an amateur engineer would be the best thing to call him. Yeah, no, bit of a groupie, sure, but like a groupie who put his actions where his mouth was. Yeah. So he reads a book by a German engineer named Erman Oberf, and it was called The Rocket into Interplanetary Space, which is just wonderful in the early 20th century when books like this would be written. Yeah. This is, I think, credited with helping inspire the idea that we actually could do this. This guy gets inspired by this book on an amateur level. He develops a four stage program and starts to get to work on what would be with a car company, Opal, at his side, like, in partnership on a rocket powered car. Not a space rocket, but a car. And he built these things and they actually worked. Yeah. And Opal was involved in this to, like, a Red Bull degree. They were like, look at this crazy stuff. Check this out. We're making a rocket car. But Volley was like, no, this is the future. Rockets are going to power everything. And he actually, I think, some of the first tests were pretty pussy. Like, one of them went 125 meters in 35 seconds. Not super fast. I mean, like a football field and a quarter in 35 seconds is not fast. But later on, he got some of these rocket cars up to 145 miles an hour. Yeah, that's impressive. And then he got a rocket sled up to 250 miles an hour. Yeah. This is in the 1920s. Yeah. These rockets are working. He's making them work. But then there was a phase three and four of his four point plan, and it went from static engines just the rocket engine test themselves, to rocket cars and rocket sleds and then to rocket powered aircraft and then space rockets. Yes. And to his credit, it's not like things were going really poorly and he was just pressing on. Anyway, like you said, he got one of them up to 250 miles an hour, so it would make sense to go to a stage three, the rocket assisted aircraft. And then, very tragically, May 17, 1930, he died working on phase three. He's working on a liquid oxygen, gasoline fueled rocket motor. This thing explodes a piece of shrapnel, severs his aorta, and he's dead immediately. Yeah. Everything I saw was that he just dropped it. So it must have been a heck of a severed aorta. I mean, right through his heart, I guess, then, huh? I guess so. Jeez, man. Yeah. An explosion that shoots a piece of shrapnel that covers your aorta, you're not going to last much very long after that. And he was only 35 years old at the time, too. He had a pretty bright future in all of this. A selftaught rocket guy. It's pretty impressive. It is. But this article is hilarious. It talks about how his legacy continued. Yeah. So he helped found an organization called you want to take that one? Sure. I love that. I take German and you take French. And both of us should have taken Spanish. Neither one of us can do Chinese. That's right. I'm going to say beren fioram shafat. Not bad, Chuck. That's what I would have said to you. It means the Society for Space Travel. Because, again, at the time, this is like smart people are saying, like, we can actually do this. Let's figure out how to do it. And some very famous people were members of this space society. And some of the members actually went on to work on the Saturn V project, including one member named Arthur Rudolph. And the thing that cracks me up about this article is arthur Rudolph was a Nazi war criminal. Yeah, they didn't mention it at all. Right. Who was basically plucked out of Nazi Germany at the end of the war from the V two rocket program, which just devastated Britain and other parts of Europe and put to work on the Apollo space mission. And then after that, they said, okay, you have to. Go. Now you're being accused of working people to death in your V Two factory. But he carried on Max Valley's legacy. Yeah, in a way. I guess so, yes. Have you seen the trailer for the Neil Armstrong maybe? No, I haven't. All I've heard is Oscar buzz. It looks good. Oh, I'm sure, man. He's pretty good. He's great. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Hey, Chuck, it's summer, which means school is out, sun's shining, the daylight lasts longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story, isn't there? There sure is. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, you can tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder from Exactly Right Media. That's right. Part true crime and part comedy, my Favorite Murder takes you on a journey through small town mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. That's Right hosts Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark Banter with each other, sharing their favorite true crime tales, and explore unique hometown stories from friends and fans alike. And they're both great, and it's a fun show, and you should listen. So listen to new episodes of my favorite murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. 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.com stuff. That's Lifelock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, Chuck, I think we're down to two. And this is weird because normally we do top ten, but we only do seven or eight of them. This is a top five, and by God, we're doing all five. That's right. When the couple added on. Yeah. This one William Bullock, old Bill Bullock in 1832, there was the Printing and the Printing Press, the history of the printing press. In fact, we should do one on that, too, at some point. You bet. Really fascinating. And many people contributed to the printing press, gaining traction and gaining speed and just getting more efficient and being able to pump out more and more what you would call sheets per hour. Paper sheets per hour. Right. By 1832, they're up to about 400 sheets per hour. That's good. Yeah, not bad at all. It was a flat press. You have the type set on like a flat board that came down and you take the paper off or flip it over and then print another one. Another one. They could do like 400 sheets per hour like that. And then this guy named Richard Ho came up with he replaced that flat thing with the type setting, with a cylinder with type setting. So it just spun and you just moved that paper on and off as fast as you could. And all of a sudden you could do like 1000 to 4000 papers pages an hour. That's a huge leap. Right by I think 1830, too, is when Richard Hoe's invention came along. Yeah. So FlashForward another 32, 33 years and William Bullock comes along again. A great period of invention in the world and in the United States. And he created the Bullock press, which was I think this is sort of the one we're more used to seeing now, which is a rotary press which had not sheets of paper, but one big, huge roll of paper. Some of these were up to 5 miles long where you're just continually cranking these things through and all of a sudden you could get 12,000 sheets per hour. Yeah. What was amazing about it, so before it didn't matter how fast that cylinder was moving, you still had a human who had to take a paper off after it was printed and put a piece of blank paper on to do the next one. With this, it was just fully automated. You had a cylinder on top doing the front and you had a cylinder on bottom doing the backside of the paper so you could print two sided 12,000 sheets per hour. And today, from what I saw, those rotary presses that Bullock invented move paper through it like 20 miles an hour and can do like, I think, 64,128 page booklets in an hour. Now they're that fast. I'm impressed. It's come a long way. But Bill Bullock, like you said, kicked the whole thing off with his Web rotary printing press. And, I mean, think about it. Think about making an improvement to a machine where it was 4000 pages an hour. Now it's 12,000, thanks to you. You feel pretty good about yourself. Plus, he was a newspaper editor, too. So he was kind of doing this based on his own observations and how to make improvements in his own industry. And he was an orphan raised by his brother, who is self taught in mechanics just from reading books. Amazing. I'm impressed with William Bullock, except for one of the last things he ever did in his life. Yeah. So because he was inventing this machine, he would work on it himself. He would adjust it and make repairs himself. And that was at the Philadelphia Public Ledger. In 1867, one of his bullock presses needed some work, so he went in there himself, was working on it, and exactly what you think happened, happened. His leg gets caught in one of these rollers and there was no pulling out at that point. And crushed his leg. That turned gangrenous. And he died a few days after that. Yeah. During an operation to amputate the leg. Yes. I feel like he was close to making it. He was. Here's the thing, though. From what I saw, what got him was he was trying to kick a belt back onto a pulley. And if his leg got caught in there and sucked in that means he was doing that while the machine was operating. Oh, yeah. That's exactly what happened. So, yeah, not that impressive, but yeah. That's a terrible way to go. Gangrene through complications of surgery from gangrene brought on to leg crushing. Brought on by not just stopping to turn the machine off. Brought on by being a brilliant adventure. Great guy. Nothing makes me more relaxed and enthralled than watching a newspaper operation being printed. I said it before. Have you? Because it doesn't ring a bell. Yeah, I think I said it when we were talking about the movie that last year was called The Paper. No, the Post. The Post. One of the hookiest shots I've ever seen in my life is in that movie. What is it? Where the lawyers and the editors are all at? I think they're at Tom Hanks's house and they're arguing and the camera is just moving around the room just taking in all this frenetic scene. And one of the shots is Bob and David from Mr. Show, like, pointing into the chests of the lawyers, like, in rhythm. And then the lawyers are backing up in rhythm. Almost like it's like a Rogers and Hammerstein musical that suddenly is breaking out. It's crazy. I was like, who directed this? And then I saw that Steven Spielberg directed this and I thought, I think his maybe B or C director maybe came up with that one. Oh, like his second unit, I'm hoping. I just love any cast. Mr. Show, when he was at it, was pretty great. Did not expect to see that in that movie. Have you seen the paper? The Michael Keaton? Yeah. That's what I was thinking of. That is a world class one. That was a Ron Howard movie. Yeah. Most guys know how to make movies for the most part. Yes, they do. Unless it's a Star Wars movie. Did they make one? Yeah. Ron Howard made the Han Solo movie. I didn't know that. Did you see it? No, I didn't care for it. The one I saw that I liked was Rogue One. That was great. Yeah. It had nothing to do with anything. Right. It was just its own thing. Sure. I mean, that's great. Yes. I wouldn't say it had nothing to do with anything, but it wasn't like part of the I don't even know what Star Wars fans call that. The canon. Yeah. We're just going to get slaughtered for this. That's fine. I've been slaughtered for less. So let's move on, then. How do you pronounce that guy's name? Dacre. Michael Dacre. That's what I'm going with. All right. You're keeping all the letters. I looked it up and I couldn't find any news coverage of it. That's usually how you can find somebody's name. Yes, and this is surprising because this was very recently and we're going back to rockets again with this one. And this is a really interesting idea for an invention. If you look at these things, I assume you checked out the pictures oh, yeah. Of the JETPOD dude. So this guy's idea, he was born in the UK in 1956, was a pilot in the British Army, but good pilot, and he had this idea for something called a JETPOD, which is basically an air taxi. So he was like, I think if I can invent something that doesn't need very much runway to take off, can go really fast in a quick time and land in a kind of a truncated area, then I can speed up, I can make, like, a jet taxi where people can get from an airport to a city center. In the case of London, he said, in four minutes from Heathrow to central London. Yes, dude, which I'm sure you know this from when we did our UK tour, it takes an hour at least to get there by regular car taxi. Yeah. By black cab. It's horrible. So the idea of getting from central London to Heathrow in four minutes is a dream by itself, right? Yeah. And these things are cool looking. They really are. And from what I can tell, this is not just like some pie in the sky kind of thing. Like, this guy was on track. This thing was like the real deal. It was something called very Quiet Short Take Off and Landing Aircraft. Which is a type of VTOL vertical takeoff in landing. Which. Like you said. It just needed a very short strip of land. Which meant you didn't have to have an airport. You could have. Like. A dedicated city air strip. But it would just take up a very small amount of land in the middle of the city and they were going to sell them for a million dollars. Which meant that trips on these things would have been like. 50. $60. That's as much as a cab ride yeah. In four minutes rather than an hour. And the whole point was, this is going to ease congestion. It was going to be a cheap and easy way to kind of hop short distances or medium distances. And he had some ideas for military and ambulance uses for it as well. So it was close. And who knows if we might have these things by now, because in 2009, the guy died and it was during a test flight of one of the jet pods. Yeah, there were a few of them. I don't think we said. I mean, feet, about 410 ft to take off, which is about 125 meters. And it would go like 350 miles an hour, which is awesome. But he had three models. The T 100. If you look these things up, it looks like a little ultralight plane, but it's a jet. This would take about 50 trips a day back and forth between the airport and city centers. It looks like a short bus plane, is what it looks like. Because it's yellow. It totally does. And it's like stubby. Yeah, it's stubby with wings and goes super fast. Yeah. Then he had the M 300, which was bigger. This is the one that he thought could take the place of military helicopters. Right. Or not take the place of, but assist with removing injured soldiers from the battlefield. And then the E 400 was like a flying ambulance. Yeah. So these things, like you said, they were speeding along again, not pie in the sky. This was a real thing that was happening. And then on August 16, 2009, not very long ago, he took one of the eight cedar models, a prototype in Malaysia, for a test flight. I also saw it was in Taiwan. Oh, really? Yes. I couldn't tell where it actually happened. Interesting. And this is where it gets a little frustrating because he could not get airborne on three attempts. And that, to me, is when you're like, all right, let's just ground it for the day and figure this out. But he tried it a fourth time. The aircraft went right straight up into the air, vertically, and then right back down and killed him. Yeah. It shot up 500 to 700ft and yawned, left and crashed. And that was that. And that was that. I'm curious. I would imagine that this thing wasn't completely scrapped after that. I'm curious what the status is. I couldn't find anything about it. The company that he founded that was developing it is Avseen. Avcen. And I couldn't find what the status of that thing is. I hope they continue on with it because it would just be wonderful to have these things. Because another thing, I mean, these were jets, but they had some sort of technology that cut the jet noise in half by 50%. Yeah. So it's not like we would just hear jets in our city skies constantly. It was much quieter, relatively inexpensive. Yeah, but you need to solve that straight up and straight down thing. Well, rip Michael Dacre and Rip, all those inventors except Lee C. I'm not really interested in wishing him well. Who died by their own invention. Hats off to you for your spirit of curiosity and ingenuity. Agreed. If you want to know more about inventors who die by their own inventions, go on to the internet. There's all sorts of stuff about that. And in the meantime, it's time to listen or mail. I'm going to call this I love it when we get answers to questions that we ask, because this is from Scott Miller and we asked about how they test for color blindness in animals and he knows because he does, that guys just finished that episode and Chuck's question about how they test. I was very excited because this comes from my own area of study and behavior analysis. It's actually a very simple and clever experiment. Experimenters will teach an animal to respond to a color, often by pressing a lever or button or performing some action that is easy for them. And in doing so, the animal earns a treat. But the animals only get treats if they press the lever when certain colors are presented to them. So in this way, if an animal does not respond differently between two colors, eg. Green and red for dogs, then that would indicate that they are deficient in detecting those colors. The same is true for birds, rodents, cats and anything else they have tried this with. Congratulations on being one of the greatest podcasts ever. Love, Scott Miller. Thanks, Scott. Geez, how sweet is that? Yeah, that was very sweet. And thanks for explaining it makes total sense. The poor animals, they're like, I can't tell, between red and green. They don't give me mouse heads anymore. Can I get another mouse head? If you want to get in touch with us like Scott did, we would love to hear from you. You can hang out with us at our homeland, the webstaffysheno.com. You can also find links to our social media accounts where you can sometimes find us lurking around. Or you can send a plain old fashioned email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.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 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. 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 responsible sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopets.com."
41389ba0-53a3-11e8-bdec-8b16e5af4c4d	The True Story of BlacKkKlansman	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-true-story-of-blackkklansman	In 2018, director Spike Lee brought the story of Ron Stallworth to the big screen to great effect. Today, Josh and Chuck discuss the true story behind the Oscar nominated film.	In 2018, director Spike Lee brought the story of Ron Stallworth to the big screen to great effect. Today, Josh and Chuck discuss the true story behind the Oscar nominated film.	Thu, 07 Feb 2019 14:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=38, tm_isdst=0)	43654666	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles Bright. There's Jerry over there. You put the three of us together, it's Movie Crush. I mean stuff you should know. This does have some stank on it, doesn't it? Some movie stank. I know your game is cool. I didn't even ask you, have you seen BlackKlansman? I was like, I can't do this episode without having seen it. So I watched it last night. Oh, nice. Yeah, good. Yeah, it's pretty good. I like his choice at the end to completely pull a somersault on the viewer. Oh, sure. With that last bit. Yeah. Like, spoiler alert. Pretty powerful. There's an end spoiler. Yeah, for sure. We should probably say that out of the gate. If you haven't seen this yet and you don't want it to be spoiled, don't listen to this episode first. Yes, but yeah, I guess now that we said that, we can speak freely, right? Yes. So if the entire movie was basically to disarm you up to the end, then I think it's one of the greatest movies I've ever seen in my life. And even if it wasn't, that wasn't the entire point of the movie. It was still great. And how he pulled it out at the end, I think. Yeah. Well, this was I don't know if you remember, but this is the movie I saw in Perth, Australia, that happens at the end. That big sort of gut punch of realism at the end. And I stood up and I was like, what? What they're thinking here in Perth? They're probably thinking, what just happened? What's wrong with America? Yes. And I'm going. Hey, Mike. Good to see you. I'm not American. I'm Canadian. Can't you tell? Bloke. Oh, goodness. Yeah. It was one of those things where I was like, I'm kind of slightly embarrassed right now. Yeah. I enjoyed the movie, though. I thought to see Spike Lee. He's one of my favorite filmmakers in his 60s. Still just bringing the juice like this. I loved it. Yeah. I also loved that it was controversial, too. And that some people criticized Spike Lee for not going far enough for maybe kind of glossing over some of the ugly aspects of the story. Yeah. You'll want to get to that at the end, maybe? Yeah, for sure. But we'll give it a premenson shout out, which is what we just did. Right. So we are talking about the true story of the film. BlacKkKlansman Spike Lee's movie that won the grand prize at the Con Film Festival. Nominated for Academy Awards. Yeah. Three Oscars, I believe, including best picture. Yeah, I think picture director and supporting actor for who? I would guess Adam driver. I didn't see. Really? Yeah. I was surprised because Denzel's Son did a wonderful job as well. He loves that being known as that. Right. I can't remember his first name, but, you know, Denzel's son. There were several times when he was talking, and I was like, oh, you are definitely Denzel Washington's son, man. Just the way he talked, the sound of his voice, but also his acting, too. He's a good actor. Yeah. All right. Best Picture, best supporting Actor for Adams Driver. Best director and best original music score. Oh, nice. But yeah, I didn't know he was Denzel's son until after the movie. Yeah, I could see that. And he was a football player. Do you know that? I didn't. Who do you play for? He played for Morehouse here in Atlanta. He was a running back and then played NFL on the practice squad for the Rams and then eventually played a few years in NFL Europe and the UFL until he hung up his cleats six years ago. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Playing football in Europe has got to be a surreal experience. Yeah. Because it's a soccer ball. Everyone is like, what are you doing? This is all wrong. All right, so should we weigh back it to the Groovy Seventy S of Denver, Colorado? First. We should say his name is John David Washington. Oh, sure. You were getting Denzel son. Yes. So, yeah, let's get in the way back machine and see go inspect their terrible low quality pot. So Ron Stallworth is the true to life character's name. Who? There was a football player growing when we were growing up named John Stallworth. So I'm always wanting to say John Stallworth. This is not him. This is a cop named Ron Stallworth. That's right. And he had a few designations that are pretty important. He was the first African American police officer to work for the Colorado Springs Police Department, which he joined as a cadet at the age of 19 and 72. And then a couple of years later, on his 21st birthday on his 21st birthday. That's what I saw. On June 18, I believe. Nice. Was sworn in as a full on officer of the law. Right. And I'm not sure if they just swear you in on your 21st birthday or if it just so happened that the ceremony was on his 21st birthday, but regardless, there was a big deal. He's the first African American cop and then later on, detective for Colorado Springs. So that's a big deal. Especially starting out at age 21, too. That takes a lot of cajones, as they call it in Colorado. I think they call those Rocky Mountain oysters. That's right. That is what they call them, for sure. So he worked undercover for about 30 years. Long, great careers in undercover detective. But it was this case, which only came out about four years ago when he wrote a book about it about his career when he went undercover as a Klansman. But it's a little more complicated than that. It was a very complicated operation. Right? Yeah. And this wasn't something that he even says in this NPR interview that it was just a job at that particular point in time. And when that particular job ended, that is the undercover stint, which was about eight or nine months, we moved on to something else, and it just happened by circumstance. So he didn't come in there with a bone to pick with the clan, aside from probably every bone to pick that he had with the clan. Right. Just as a black man in America. Yeah. And it would probably help to give a little background on the clan at the time because the clan was very well known for being really big and really violent at over three waves is basically how the clan history is divided. Yeah. Like, the first wave was when they were founded in the wake of the Civil War. Then the second wave came around the 19s, like 15, I mean, that era. And then they had another big resurgence during the Civil rights era in the but in between these waves, and after that third wave, it's not like the claim just went away. They kept on going. Their profile was lower, and maybe the public violence or terrorism that they were engaging in wasn't quite as pronounced, but they were still there. And in Colorado in particular, they had a really long history with the clan where basically the city of Denver was under the control of the clan back in the years before Ron Stallworth started working there. Yeah. When he got hired there, he got access to files, like secret FBI files. Right. And he got to go in and dig in and look at the history of the clan in Colorado. And boy, like, you ain't kidding. They were in the House of Representatives. There were senators. Both senators were clan members. The mayor, Benjamin Stapleton, who the airport was named after until 95. Yeah. His great grandson ran for governor on the GOP ticket this past election and lost. Who is Colorado's first ever openly gay Jewish governor. Oh, wow. Colorado is a weird state. It is an odd state for sure. Different ideologies all packed in together. It's very purple in all sorts of ways. Yeah. So Mayor Benjamin Stapleton was a clan member. The governor, Clarence Morley, was a clan member. The chief of police, which is you don't want anyone in these positions to be clan members. But I imagine the chief of police is one of the more problematic areas to have a person in that kind of control, particularly that one, too. He was picked by the clan, the Colorado clan, and basically Foisted on Benjamin Stapleton, who was even like, wow, this guy's even too much for my tastes, and eventually fired him. But the clan picked the chief of police of Denver, Colorado, back in the they tried to recall Stapleton at one point. It didn't work. And when that effort failed, the clan burned across on the top of Table Mountain as a celebration, a show of public celebration. Right. So the clan has deep roots in an old story in Colorado, or at least they used to. And they were still very much around when Ron Stalwart started his investigation. Or started as the first black detective in Colorado Springs, right? That's right. And so he started out, I guess, as kind of plain close and was assigned undercover work pretty quickly just by being the only African American officer in the police force. Because Stokely Carmichael came to town once. That's right. And this is in the film. We're going to talk about a few differences between the movie and the real story. But he did, in fact, go to a speech at a rally by famous Black Panther Stokely Carmichael, and he was fully kitted out in his bell bottoms and wearing a wire. He picked his afro out. And he, in fact, did make a point to meet him, just like he did in the film. And Carmichael did apparently say, arm yourself and get ready because the revolution is coming. And I imagine Stallworth had some mixed feelings about that assignment. Yes, I would guess so. I don't really have any idea of what he personally was like because the movie mixed things up so much and added layers that weren't necessarily there. So I have no idea what that experience would have been like for him. Yeah. One thing we do know is not true is the character in the film of Patrice, whom he meets at that rally, young woman that he falls in love with, she was made up for the movie. Spike Lee wanted a love interest, basically, and to represent sort of the female Black Power movement as a whole. So she was completely made up. But she was terrific in the film. Yeah, yeah. Laura Harrier, she's in the new Spiderman movies, too. She's awesome. Cool. The new Spiderverse movie? No, that's animated. Okay. Well, she could have been a voice actor, I guess, right? Yeah. No, she's in the new ones with the new kid. Okay. The current Spiderman. Current Spider Man, which is great. Those are good movies. I haven't seen any of them. You're not super into that stuff, though, are you? Well, I saw the Infinity War when he was in that, I think. Yeah, he's a bit of a smart alec, frankly. He is. Okay. He does his research on the deep roots of the clan in Colorado. He goes undercover and then I don't think he was even assigned this thing. I think he kind of came up with it on his own, by chance, almost in October 1978. He was 25 at this point, and he was looking through the local paper. Well, that was part of his assignment, to gather intelligence by reading the paper. Well, right. But I think this was his idea to go undercover like this. That's the impression I have, too. He seemed like a self starter in a lot of ways. So he found this ad, a classified ad in the paper for the clan said, get in touch if you want further information. He sent a letter posing as a white racist to a PO. Box, just thinking that he would just get back some pamphlets or something. So he signed his real name, which is he didn't really think that went through. No, he didn't. And he never really fully explained it, aside from the best explanation I saw is that he didn't think anything was going to come of it. He thought he'd get, like you said, a couple of pamphlets, and that would be that. And he just wasn't planning to create, like, a large investigation out of making contact through this ad. And again, we should probably state this. It was an ad in the paper for the client to get in touch with the clan, to get more info about the clan, and maybe you might want to join. Who knows, right? So he makes contact with them by sending off a letter. And if you ask me, if Spike Lee were directing this episode, he would put an ad break right here. That was good. Who are we to disagree? All right, we'll be right back. Okay, so like we said, Ron Stallworth is thumbing through the newspaper. He mails off a letter to get more info about the clan, and he uses his real name, like you said, Chuck, he was expecting, like, a pamphlet or something in return, like, so you want to be a Clam member or something like that, right. Instead, about two weeks later, he got a call from the number. So he used everything as far as the undercover operation would go. He used all of his undercover info except for his name. So he got a call on his undercover phone line from a guy named Ken Odell. And he was pretty surprised to get this call because, again, he was expecting a pamphlet. And instead, he had a real life, living, breathing Ku Klux Klansmen on the other end of the line saying, hey, I got your letter about hating black people and other minorities. Let's talk. Yeah. He was like, Why are you interested? And Stalwart immediately just kind of goes into character, and I guess that's what when you're undercover, you got to be part improv actor to be able to pull that off. Well, he also said he drew from his own personal experiences because he grew up in El Paso and encountered a lot of racism there, and I'm sure on the force in Colorado Springs, too. So he drew from his own experience as well. Yeah. So he basically right out of the gate, says, well, my sister is dating a black man, and every time he puts his hands on her pure white body, I cringe, and I want to do something about it. And Ken Odell says, you sound like a great guy. Why don't you come on down and let's meet because you are just the kind of dude we're looking for. You sound like real Clan material. Yes. I thought about maybe doing an episode on the Clan. I thought about the two, and then I'm like, you want to give them a platform? Yeah, but then I thought, or you could just talk about it and how stupid they are. All right. When I was a kid, of course, being in Georgia, that stuff was around. I never saw it firsthand, obviously. Yeah, but you heard things even, like growing up in the 70s in Georgia, and I was always so scared of the whole thing because of the outfits and everything and the fire, and I was a good little Baptist boy, so there was a lot of fear. But then I got a little older, and I was like, they're just dumb rednecks wearing sheets. Right. That's sort of demystified it's the moment you become an adult. Yeah, but I mean, of course, then I would later learn that they did real horrific things and took lives or a terrorist organization. Right. But I think what you're saying is they made themselves up to be boogie men. Yeah, exactly. And they definitely can be that way, especially in a young mind or something like that. Sure. So back to the story. Ron Stallworth is on the phone with this guy named Ken Odell who wants to meet him to see if he'd like to join the clan. And this is a big problem, because I think, as we mentioned a couple of times, ron Stallworth was African American. Yeah. He's like, oh, boy, what do I do here? Right? So he actually recruited a fellow detective who he, in his book, calls Chuck. That's all he's ever publicly referred to the guy as his Chuck. Wait. Was it you, Chuck? It was not me. That gentleman is, I guess, either still undercover or just never wanted his identity out there. Right. So, yeah, he may still live in Colorado Springs. Who knows? Maybe he's on the case right now, for all I know. So this Chuck guy, he was recruited by Ron Stallworth to play Ron Stallworth to the clan because Chuck was white. He was already an undercover narcotics agent, and apparently he was friendly enough with Ron Stallworth to say, yes, I will join this investigation, but let's do it. Yeah, and here's the thing, though. This wasn't his primary case, so Chuck is undercover on a lot of different assignments, so he's not around as much as Stalwart needs him. So, like, in the movie, most of this stuff is done over the phone. Like, he spends a lot of time in this investigation on the phone, speaking to these clansmen who think that he's a white man, and when they needed to meet, he would send Chuck in, and we'll get to the voice part in a minute, because that's when I was watching the movie. I was like, do nothing. These dummies not realize that they don't sound anything alike. Right. Because they've been talking to them on the phone at length. Yes. But they had their first meeting. They got together and I believe they met they met somewhere at first and then went to a bar at the second part of that meeting. Yeah, they met at a convenience. So the movie supposedly portrays this realistically, this Chuck guy who is portraying Ron Stallworth to the Clan. They met at a convenience store and he was told to get in the car and then they drove to a second location. That's scary stuff. And he's also wearing a wire at the time. That's something that the movie kind of gets across. But especially in articles about the story, don't necessarily dive into this. Chuck Cat was putting himself out there. Oh, sure. As every undercover detective does. Right? I mean, Ron Stallworth is conducting this investigation. He's the mastermind of he's leading this whole thing. But this poor Chuck guy has to go hang out with these violent clans members or Clan members fairly frequently, from what I understand. So hats off to him. Yeah, absolutely. It was definitely like it required both of their best efforts to get away with this for that long. Right. It was quite the ruse. So Chuck meets with them, eventually earns their trust along with the phone work of Stalwarts. And then he actually gets successfully admitted about two months later and got his little I guess you get a little membership card. He still has it. He does. He did not throw it away like in the movie. He has it framed, in fact. And on the back of the card were six codes of conduct, one of which said, never discuss any Clan affairs with any plain clothes officer on a state, local or national level. Right. So there is a lot of comedy in the movie. If you haven't seen it, it's a serious thing that they're doing. But there are a lot of laughs as well. A lot of laughs and a lot of movie formula steps that Spike Lee purposely follows. Very faithfully too. Yeah, absolutely. So there's a big point there that we left out Chuck to get that membership card. Supposedly, again, as they say in Colorado, the oysters on this guy, he met fake Ron Stallworth. Chuck met with the Clan, impressed them enough. Between the real Ron Stallworth's phone calls and Chucks, whatever Chuck was saying in person. All this combined made the Colorado Springs Clan members say, okay, we like you. We want you to be a member, fill out this application and we'll send it off to the national director. Again, the Clan, we should say I don't know if you ever said this the Clan calls itself the organization, right. Rather than The Clan. And the guy who ran the thing, I don't know if he still runs it or not, but he definitely did at this time, during this investigation, there's a guy named David Duke who if you grew up in the think even the were probably pretty familiar with David Duke. I believe he ran for president once, didn't he? I don't know. Wasn't he the governor of Louisiana? I don't maybe that's what it is. Maybe he ran for that. But he was the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, and he was trying to make it a more political organization, less of a terrorist organization and more of a political organization under his guidance. But it was still the Ku Klux Klan. There was still plenty of times when he was wearing robes and stuff he just never did in public. So during this time he was the national director, the Grand Wizard of the Clan, and when Ron Stallworth didn't get his application pushed through fast enough, he picked up the phone and called the national headquarters and ended up talking with David Duke and saying like, hey, my application is taking a while, is there anything you can do about it? And this kicked off like what Ron Stallworth would later characterize in a weird way as a friendship between him, a black undercover detective in Colorado, and David Duke, the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Yeah. And by the way, I don't want to get angry emails from David Duke supporters. He was a Republican. Louisiana state rep. He was not governor, but I think he ran for some high office. He did. He was a candidate for the Democratic presidential primaries in the late eighty s and then the Republican primaries in 92. He ran as a Democrat and then I could see that solid south kind of thing. Yeah. And I think he ran for state Senate and lost US. Senate and lost US house and lost. And he did run for governor of Louisiana, but he lost. Got you. Okay. If you didn't grow up in the heard his name more recently because he fully endorsed Donald Trump's campaign. And after Donald Trump won, this was his quote on Twitter make no mistake, our people have played a huge role in electing Trump. So he was in the news again more recently while he was also in Charlottesville, if not leading the rally to Unite the Right. Definitely a big speaker at it, a big part of it. And Spike Lee uses some of his footage from that rally to kind of get across that this stuff is still going on. This isn't from the earlier how great was Chauffeur Grace? He was wonderful. So good. And he looks a lot like David Duke of the 70s. He really does. Unfortunately for him, the stash and the three piece suits and all that. Yeah, he did a good job in the movie Topher Grace from that. He will always be from that 70 Show. Yeah. He plays what do you want me to say? Like he had a bit part in Ocean's Eleven or something. Character was teaching him to play poker. I think I forgot about that. You know that guy? No, he's that 70 Show, of course. So he plays David Duke in the movie. It's really funny. Like, Spike Lee added stuff that just you would think, like, well, yeah, of course it's totally believable. Like Chuck being Jewish in real life, right. And he actually wasn't that's fabricated by the movie, so you would just not even think twice about that. But it turns out that's not true. The stuff that seems the least true is actually the stuff that actually happened and for a very long time, at the very least. Over the course of this nine month investigation, there were multiple phone calls that were very cordial and friendly where Ron Stallworth would call David Duke imposing as a white clan member and pump information. They would talk about David Duke's family and just have normal conversations that would inevitably turn back to racism and the weakening of the white race at the hands of the Jewish media and all the minorities who are taking over. And so it would inevitably turn disgusting. But he said later, I think in the book and in interviews where if you could separate that stuff out, he was actually a pleasant person to talk to. And that's where that weird friendship that he characterized it as kind of developed from those conversations. You couldn't make this stuff up. Exactly. But there is at least one video of David Duke basically admitting that, yes, he had conversations with this guy. He tries to downplay it, sure, but he does basically verify that, yes, that's true. That really happened. Well, and Duke's probably like, I can't remember every phone call I had with every random racist over the years, right? There were a lot of them. Even the sky posing is one. All right, well, let's take another break and we're going to talk a little bit more about this weird David Duke relationship right after this. All right, so he's buddying up with David Duke on the phone. He's fooling everybody. And you get the sense that he does have a little bit of sense of humor, Stallworth, because at one point he even goaded him on the phone a little bit. And this is in the movie, and it was totally true. He said, Mr. Duke, have you ever worried about, like, a black man posing as a white man and infiltrating your organization? And Duke said, no. And he said, and this is from the NPR interview of Stallworth. He said, I can tell you why, because you don't talk like a black man. He said, you talk like a very smart, intellectual white man. And I can tell by the way you pronounce certain words. And he said, Give me an example. And he said, Black people tend to pronounce the word. And I can tell by listening to you that you're not black because you do not pronounce that word in that manner. It's science case. Close. Oh, boy. He was so easily duped. I love it. And then they also did, in fact, meet in person. That part is true as well. Duke came to town and was having lunch. It was not a big ceremony like in the movie, but he came to town to have lunch, and the department assigned Stalwarth to protect him. And so he goes there to the restaurant, introduces himself to protect him. Duke says, all right, I appreciate you sending someone my way. And Chuck is undercover there as well. And he does, in fact, sawworth pose with David Duke and gets a Polaroid with him. So this sounded to me like what was going on here? You've got this investigation going. This takes place during this undercover investigation that Stalwart is conducting. You have a guy who's already, like, putting himself out there, chuck as the white Ron Stallworth. And then the chief says, oh, yes, by the way, you the only African American police officer in our entire squad. You go beat David Duke's bodyguard for the day while he's in town in Colorado Springs. That was just bizarre. And not only do it, do that very obvious, over act, slap in the face to David Duke, which is great, but it could have jeopardized this whole thing because you had the guy portraying Ron Stallworth in the same room at the same lunch, it just seemed really strange. And again, that was one of those things where when you watch the movie, you would think, like, well, that's just made up. Now, that actually took place, at least according to Ron Stallworth's memoirs, that Chuck was in the room, was asked to take a picture by Ron Stallworth with David Duke and the Grand Dragon, I guess, who must be, like, the head of the state in Colorado. And then the last second, when he was counting down, he put his arms around the shoulders of the two clan guys, and they got his hands on the picture. Apparently all of that was the case, but he since lost the picture. Yeah. And Duke really did try to get it back, and Stalwart got to it quicker and said, basically, if you try to take this thing, I will have you arrested for assaulting a police officer. Don't do it. Don't think about it. All right. He said he lost it in a move. He wished he had taken better care of it. But the idea that it was, like that's just so nuts. It tells you a lot about the investigation, though, to me. It makes you say, like, okay, how seriously were they taking this investigation at the time if Stallworth later said, all right, this is just another job, to me, when I started it, I did the job. And then when it was done, I moved on to another job. The fact that he didn't talk about it much until I think he spoke about it. To the press once in 2006 in a Desert News article, and then didn't talk about it again until 2014 when his memoirs came out. It was just like a thing that they were doing that other people were doing other stuff, too. And then to have that part of it, the idea that you would jeopardize it in that way, just makes it seem like they weren't taking it as that big of an operation as, like, the movie would like to believe. I'm not sure. Well, I think in real life, it was an information gathering investigation. Like, it was never, we're going to take down the clan in Colorado. It was, let's infiltrate and get as much information and fact finding as we can. And in the end, after eight months, that's kind of what happened. He considers stalwarts considers it a success in that they fulfilled their mission. They did prevent three cross burning ceremonies during that eight month span or nine month span. Right. And they did identify clan members who worked at NORAD. Right. Who apparently they said they I mean, these days they would be fired, probably, but they said they reassigned them to Greenland or something. Right. Because they had access to nuclear weapons. Apparently they had very high level clearance at NORAD, which is scary. And then they also found plans that they didn't act on. Like the whole bomb plot in the movie was made up for dramatic purposes, but they did find links for a plan to bomb a gay nightclub and another plan to steal automatic weapons from an army base, like an inside job. So it was valuable work they were doing, for sure. It just wasn't like, we're going to take the clan down. I don't think it was the department's big job at the time. No, certainly not. And in the memoirs and in the movie, too. The reason that's given for the undercover operation to end is because it started to become successful. Ron Stallworth was nominated to lead the Colorado Springs chapter of the clan. Like, Ken O'Dell basically said, you should take my job. Everybody likes you. You're really good at this. You're smart. You should lead the clan here and the police chief of Colorado Springs, so that's it, close it down. Burn all the evidence of this investigation. He apparently was worried about what a PR nightmare it would be if it got out that some of his detectives were in the Colorado Springs clan. But at the same time, what strikes me as odd is that the FBI wasn't like, oh, well, jeez, this guy is being nominated to lead the Colorado Springs clan. He's talking to David Duke. Like, really? That this could not be kind of blown up into a larger investigation or a larger sting or something like that. And then secondly, and Ron Stalwart himself addresses this, there's a very frequently criticism of, well, if this is such a big operation, and they found all this stuff. Why wasn't anyone arrested? Why weren't there any arrests? Well, that's what David Duke says, right? Not just David Duke. Stalwart says also that in law enforcement, too, people question that, like, Why wasn't anyone arrested? And he said it was an intel investigation and that's what they did is they gathered stuff. But then he very rightly points out, like you said, the fact that they prevented cross burnings alone makes it a worthwhile and valuable operation. I think just some people on the outside are saying, well, why wasn't more done? Why didn't we come out of this? And I'm not quite sure what they're driving at, but Stallworth brings it up in an interview I read with them that people do ask that and wonder about that. Yeah. And Stalwart is very proud of the fact that with the cross burnings, he was like, no, I can't remember the quote. But he said something about, like, no children in Colorado Springs. No young black kids had to see crosses on fire during that eight or nine month period. And he's very proud of that. As they should be. Yeah, for real. So I mentioned the voice earlier and the fact that he had a different voice, obviously, than Chuck, and he said one time, only one time, and I think this was in the movie, wasn't it? Or was it? It's been yeah, it was actually. No, it was, I remember. Yeah. So one time in the whole investigation, did someone say, like, Wait a minute, you sound different. Chuck had just been at an in person meeting, came back, and then Stalwart wants to follow up on the phone with Ken Odell about something right afterward. So he had just heard Chuck's voice for whatever, this whole meeting and was talking to him, and he was like, Wait a minute, you sound different. What's going on? And he just pulled it off. He coughed and said he had a sinus infection. And Kennedy was like, oh, well, here's how you clear that up. And gave him some good sinus medication advice. Right? Yeah, they definitely appeared in the movie. You could not make this thing up. It's crazy. No, for real. Apparently for a long time, Stalwart was saying, like, yeah, it was just another job. It was just another operation. And I guess he told some fellow law enforcement friends or whatever about it, and they're like, Dude, this is a movie. You need to write this down. You need to get this out there. This is a one in a million story. Yeah. I wonder one reason it didn't go bigger operation wise was because the sort of hackneyed way they got into it, like, he's the voice, but they're sending a white man. I'm surprised he pulled it off for that long. Yeah, I could totally see that. One final thing that did not happen in real life, but did happen in the movie. And this is what, when you usually will change real life is to get a more satisfying ending. But Stalwart did not, unfortunately, reveal his true identity to David Duke like he does to hilarious effect in the film. Unfortunately, no. I'm sad to learn that he was saying, like yeah, he didn't really talk about it until the 2000s, so David Duke didn't know until, I guess, the memoirs came out. Yeah. Well, I guess we should talk about Spike Lee getting criticized. Boots Riley director, who I had a movie crush, by the way. I know. What was his movie? Sorry to bother you with his film that he made. No, I mean his pick for movie crush. His pick was a movie called Mishima a life in four chapters. Okay. Yeah, it was a great film and his knowledge on movies was deep. He turned me on to a lot of cool things. That's all for a very terrible second. You were saying his pick was his own movie. No, but Boots does not hold back on what he thinks. And while you would think that he would be like, oh, no, I'm going to be a champion of Spike Lee and telling the story, he came out very publicly on Twitter and very intelligently criticized it. He didn't just bag on it, he wrote a big, long statement on exactly what he thought was wrong with it. Yeah, he basically said, look, man, if you take away all the embellishments that Spike Lee added to this movie, what you have is a guy who's probably biggest assignment. And I'm not sure where he got this, but he focused on that Stokely Carmichael thing and the fact that Ron Stallworth had worked undercover to infiltrate the Black Power movement in Colorado Springs and that he had worked on that for like three years, that this clan thing was just like a nine month thing. And they also criticized Spike Lee for making the movie seem like law enforcement and the Black Power movement came together to fight racism. Right. And that was a larger point or that was historically accurate or something like that. It was really interesting. It was like a three page essay that he posted on Twitter that made some good points. He basically said, from what I can tell, it looks like Ron Stallworth was working for COINTELPRO, which is the FBI's. It was their program to undermine groups, including Black Power groups, which we mentioned it in the Black Panther episode we did. And the Cohen telepro definitely deserves its own episode. Yes. And it was ended officially in 1071. But I think Boots Riley's point was it might have been officially ended, but the work was still going on. And if this guy was infiltrating Black power like groups in Colorado Springs, he was almost certainly trying to break them up one way or another, probably using co intelligence. And Ron Stallworth, he had a pretty great quote in response to it. He said, I pray for my demented, dissolute brother in response to Boots Riley. And Spike Lee has no comment about it whatsoever, so who knows? But you make a good point that he's not just giving, like, blind allegiance to anything. Sure. Well, Spike did comment eventually. Oh, I didn't see that. Yes, he was in an interview and the first thing he said was, like, hey, I'm a young man of 61, or something like that. Young me might have kind of gotten into a war of words that he's just not into that anymore. But he did say briefly something about, listen, I'm not going to come out and say that all cops are racist and all cops do bad things, because they don't all do bad things. There's a lot of great cops. There's also bad cops. And he kind of just couched it in that and then was like, but I'm not going to be really talking about this anymore. Right? Yeah, I hadn't seen that. He'd even had that comment. Yeah, it's interesting stuff and it's a good movie at the very least. Oh, for sure. I think Ron Stallworth's like, man, they made a movie about my story. That's pretty awesome. And at the very least, it's a pretty great movie. How about that? Totally. Totally. So if you got anything else I got nothing else. If you want to know more about Black Klansmen, you should probably go see that movie. And I guess we probably should have said at the outset, this episode is not an ad. Of course not. We just like the movie a lot, right? Yeah. I mean, you could say it's an ad, but no one gave us money or asked us to do this. Sure. But I am endorsing it. Okay. There you go. I am endorsing it as well. It has two thumbs up, as it were. Yeah. Rest in peace. Roger Ebert and Jean Sisco. Two thumbs. Okay, I already said that. How about some listener mail? Yeah, I'm going to call this ping pong response from a former pro. No. Hey, guys, I want to commend you on the job you did covering a sport that you didn't have an extensive knowledge of. I'm a professional table tennis coach and former player. I started playing in college, thought I was really good until I was coerced to go to a tournament at Princeton University about 20 years ago and I got destroyed. I didn't like that, so I sought out to coach and the rest is history. You guys clearly did a lot of research and to highlight the things that most novice players aren't aware of, but there were a few things I couldn't help but point out. Josh, you mentioned the components of the modern racket. You said the Pimpled sign, those are called pips, are for spinning the ball, that the smooth side is for defensive play, but the opposite is actually true. Oh, no, I didn't catch that because I would have pointed that out I thought everyone knew that. Thank you for that. You get a good spin on that smooth side. For real? Oh, yeah, it's grippy all right. He said the smooth side is very tacky, as in sticky, and that, combined with the sponge underneath, allows the ball to sink in just enough so that the techie service grips the ball and generates a lot of spin. Also, you can really have any combination of rubber that you want as long as it's ITTF approved. Players are not restricted to having one smooth side and one with pips. But one side does have to be red and the other black. Most defensive players use pips on their backhand because pips vary the spin that is coming back at you and it's very hard to read. Also, Chuck, you mentioned that defensive players are called chiselers. They're actually called choppers as they chop the ball back with varying backspin. I've never heard the term chiselers. I'm wondering if it is extremely outdated, maybe. I bet you that was the case. Yeah, I had old research. Chisels, that's what they call in the 20th, you said. If you guys are ever in the Dunley, New Jersey area, stop by where they are right now. Stop by the Lily Yep table tennis Club and I'll gladly hook you guys up with a lesson. I will gladly humiliate you in person. And that is Thomas from Philly. Thanks, Thomas. Much appreciated. We like it when we are gently corrected because we like to be right. So thanks for that. If you want to get in touch with us, let us know. I don't know, something we got wrong about BlacKkKlansman, let us know. You can find all of our social links on stuffyshow.com. And as always, send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseepworks.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."
c613c710-5460-11e8-b38c-b34f930d6fbe	Selects: How Tabloids Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-tabloids-work	Having started as an egalitarian answer to 19th-century newspapers, tabloids came to peddle shock and sleaze. They've cleaned up a bit, but they remain the world's guilty pleasure. Learn more about the fascinating history of tabloids with Chuck and Josh in this classic episode.	Having started as an egalitarian answer to 19th-century newspapers, tabloids came to peddle shock and sleaze. They've cleaned up a bit, but they remain the world's guilty pleasure. Learn more about the fascinating history of tabloids with Chuck and Josh in this classic episode.	Sat, 05 Mar 2022 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=64, tm_isdst=0)	48614164	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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, 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. comSK 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. Hello, everybody. Have you ever been followed around by a person with a camera taking pictures of you and your family and your children and then publishing them in a newspaper or a weekly rag? Well, that happens to people. It doesn't happen to me. Probably doesn't happen to you, but we're the lucky ones. But if you're a celebrity and I know you kind of sign up for this, it's not great to be followed around by tabloid photographers and be splashed across those tabloid magazines. And this is all about tabloids from July 5, 2012, how tabloids work. 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 this is stuff you should know. It's podcast. It's audio only, but coming soon, it will also include smell. Oh, yeah. Smello. Vision. Not vision. smellow. Sound. We'll just call it smellorama. Man, grumpy people today. I'm not grumpy. You're grumpy. I'm grumpy. Jerry's grumpy. I'm fine. You all were grumpy at each other when I came in here. No, Jerry was mad at me for being mad at her. It doesn't count. It's just everyone's grumpy. Such a grumpy day. I'm not grumpy. I just had legitimate gripes. Grumps. Gripes. Gripe. Everyone's gripy. All right. So, Chuck yes. I want to tell you about a great American hero, william Cat. No? Okay. Many years ago, in the wilds of I wish I could remember where he was found mississippi. A little guy known as bad boy was captured. He was caught on a rooftop during a flood in Mississippi, and the authorities seized him and took him into their care. He became a ward of the state. That makes sense because bat boys are known to go to higher ground during flooding. Yeah, and he did. True to form. So bat boy, at first, he didn't like this captivity, but eventually, he kind of became something of a patriot by volunteering to go search for Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives in the caves of Afghanistan. The reason bat boy was so good at it is because he was raised in caves. Sure. Half bat, half boy son. Are hearing his name? Sure. Yeah. He wasn't able to find Bin Laden, but he still returned to the US. A hero after long, long flight because he just flew himself. Of course. And we know of Bat Boys exploits thanks to a little newspaper known as the Weekly World News. Have you heard of this? Two things. I used to subscribe to the Weekly World News. Did you really? Yeah, for like a year in high school. Me and my buddy Rad did because it was fun. Radcliffe, radford man. And two, I didn't realize that Batboy continued his exploits. I think Bat Boy sold a lot of papers for the well, I knew he did, but I didn't know they kept it up. That's awesome. I'm glad to know that he was fighting the terrorists. Yes, he did. He tried to. I don't know if he was successful. At least he went equipped more than with just a sword, right? But yeah. So Batboy was a prominent character, I guess, in the Weekly World News, which also bills itself as the world's only reliable newspaper. Really? Yeah. I don't remember that subtitle little tagline or whatever. Oh, that's great. Yeah, it's not around anymore in print. Yes. I think I remember shutting down and being sort of sad. It's online, I guess. Yeah. In 2008 it moved to and moved online. Yeah. So really every aspect of that story from this outrageous claim that the bad boy was captured and sent to Afghanistan to calling itself Tongue in Cheek, the world's only reliable newspaper, to it shutting down and going online because of massive profit losses after being purchased by this huge conglomerate of tabloid papers. The Weekly World News is a perfect analogy for the course of tabloids over the last like 20 years as a whole. Yeah, and we're going to dig into that. I think it's funny because I didn't know the little tagline, but I guess they figured if we're just going to be making up stories because the Weekly World News, for those of you who haven't read it, isn't just a tabloid, it's fan fiction. I mean, it's completely ridiculous. They don't pretend, but that's why it's funny that they said that the only reliable thing. Yes, they said, well, we might as well just say that in the thing. Get it? Yes. And apparently one of their editors is quoted as saying, I could only find one source for this quote, so I don't know how true it is to be made up, which would be kind of like this apropos metaparity of the whole thing. But he said if our readers are informed, it's usually by accident. Really? So they are well aware. That's great. And it is an extreme example, but there are some aspects of the Weekly World News that do fit the bill of a standard table. Sure. So, I mean, let's talk about it. What is a tabloid? Well, should we start at the beginning, or should we just talk about it a little bit, then do the history. Do you want to do the history first? Man yeah, let's do the history first. Roof positive that we don't practice. So I did see there was one slight error. This is an Ed Grabanowski article, which are always great. Yeah. But did you see this other etymology for the word tabloid with the pill company? No. In the late 18 hundreds, apparently, Burrows Welcoming Company was a pharmaceutical company in England. They produced at the time, medicines were all like, BC powder and goodies powder. They're all powdered. And he, I think, was the first one to make into a pill by compressing the powder. And he called it a tabloid of cocaine. Yeah, it probably was. And that word became to mean anything figuratively. That was a small dose of anything. So the word tabloid actually came before, I believe, about ten years before the shrunken newspaper, the physical newspaper shrinking. Well, it still works. It's like the origin of life on Earth comes from another planet. But really, where did the origin of life begin? Right. It doesn't answer the question. It's the same thing, like, okay, so maybe that's the origin of the word tabloid, then it was associated with newspapers. The tabloid paper is printed on a smaller, more compact version of the normal newspaper newsprint. It's called a broadsheet. Right? Yeah. So the tabloid is a smaller, more compact version. The broadsheet is longer and wider. And then the tabloid were usually printed on the smaller paper, hence the word. Yes. At first it was a pill, right. Then it became the size of the paper, and then later on, it just became the style of the paper. Right. And size, but really the style. But tabloids, as we're explaining them, are basically like they are also commonly referred to as rags, as gutter public gossip rags. Yeah, they're gossip sheets, whatever slightly shifty underhanded newspaper and tabloids, one of the ways that they exist and always have existed is in comparison to, quote, legitimate newspapers. So, like, originally, newspapers that say, like, the beginning, the early 19th century, they were extremely stuffy. They were extremely expensive. They were like, six cents per, which was like half a day's pay for the average labor. Really dry. Man have you ever read these old New York Times articles? Yeah, they lay out the facts and then say the end. Exactly. Like the AP used to do until a few years ago. The AP always did that. It was sort of straight who, what, when, how, where, and why the old journalistic pyramid. Exactly. And then maybe a quote in there, and that was it. So out of this, I guess, kind of boredom, and I need for the working class to be able to get their news, too. Yeah, because I couldn't afford it came the predecessors of tabloids called the penny press, so they were cheaper. And they also did something different. They took stories from just these boring facts, political stories, business stories, that kind of thing and started working on human interest stories. Yeah. And they changed the style of writing. Sentences were shorter. Paragraphs were shorter. They kept a little emotion, way more emotion. It was designed for that. Listen to the triumph of this family over their evil landlord or whatever. Kind of what we see now in mainstream newspapers. Exactly, yes. A lot of our mainstream media owes quite a bit to the evolution of tabloids. Agreed. And there's actually a point where it kind of spread. Finally, it made a jump. But you can see throughout the history of tabloids and newspapers, this interplay where tablets almost kind of break ground, take a bunch of heat and flak for it, and then newspapers latch onto what they're doing after it becomes co opted and normal behind the guys of we're, the upstanding publication. Exactly. But disgusting. You're right. I'm disgusted by it all. Yellow journalism came about in the era of William Randolph Hearst with his New York Journal later called the New York American. And he was the first person in the United States, at least because I think in England it even started out before us, if I'm not mistaken. In England. I think they were kind of like the birth of some of the more tabloid style writing. Okay. But in America, William Randolph Hearst did with all of a sudden, he started doing some celebrity stuff and some murder and little sensational gore here and there. And he found that it sold really well up until the Depression, when nothing sold really well. Right. Pick up after the Depression when a very monumental figure in tabloid history named Jeanette Janeto Pope or Jean Pope jean Pope Jr. He bought a Hearst paper called the New York Enquirer for 75 grand, changed it to tabloid size, started printing stuff that he figured people like to stare at a car crash. He was actually inspired, literally, by seeing people like jockeying to see the blood in the gore and a car crash and thought, wow, people really are disgusting and crazy, so I'm going to give them what they want. And he did you remember the crime scene photography episode we talked about? Ouija. He sold a lot of stuff to Jean Pope. Yeah, I bet he printed a lot of his gory crime scene photos. What's his name? Wegee. That's right. Lewis Felix, I think. But he went by W-E-E-G-E-E. Interesting. Yeah. So I said it again. Yeah. I was queueing the Executive Orders episode. How many times? Like a bunch. Do you know why? Because it was super interesting. So he starts selling a lot of papers based on this new style. And then a guy named Rupert Murdock, who you may have heard of, who proved that you could actually have pretty wide circulation and began selling News of the World in England. Millions of copies, sex scandals. And then the Pope said, you know what? If he can sell millions and millions of copies, so can I. Let me change the name to the National Enquirer. Boom. Right. The National Enquirer was born, but the inquirer as we know it still wasn't born yet. There were crazy headlines about interracial sex and lesbianism and horrible acts of violence, posthumous violence. There is this one headline about a teen ripping the head off of a corpse to get at its gold teeth. And always with the gory crime scene photos. It's like the pulp comics we're doing too. Yeah, very much comics. It was just very tawdry. If the stuff and the inquiry today is taudrey, this was just like, it's unfathomable today. But the reason it's not is, again, because of Gin Pope. So he had a lot of competition, not just he, but the whole industry was facing a big problem and that news stands were starting to dry up. Yeah. Sadly. So. Jean Pope came up with an idea. He's like, supermarkets. Everybody goes to supermarkets. They need to get in there. Now he's standing in line at the checkout stand. Right. But he knew there was no way that any respectable supermarket was going to sell his tabloid, his rag. Right. So he cleaned the thing up. Right. He added way more. He took a queue from Rupert Murdoch in his News of the World and added way more celebrity stuff, sex scandals, but nothing taudry like, nothing he was talking about before. It was more like the Senator got caught with somebody or whatever. Right. And there's this guy named James Walcott. He wrote for Vanity Fair and he wrote this article called US Confidential. It was in the June 2002 issue of Vanity Fair. It was about this and about that transition going from the crime scene photography to astrology overnight so he could get into supermarkets. He said the inquirer staff was aghast. It was like asking an experienced team of grave robbers to take up gardening. So that's pretty much how the Enquirer staff took. We got to clean up our act and start writing about astrology and celebrity sex scandals. And it wasn't even cleaning up that much. It's not like you said we're going to become the New York Times. No, but that's why they're there. That's why when you stand in line at a supermarket checkout line, it's because in the 1960s, Jean Pope was like, we got to get in the supermarkets. I think people either read these or they don't. I don't think anyone dabbles in tabloids. You know what I'm saying? It's kind of like soap operas. No one says, Let me watch a little bit of Days of Our Lives. Like, you're either hooked on this stuff or you're not. I agree with that. But I think a lot of people are guilty of picking up the tablet and thumbing through it and then not buying it in the supermarket check out line. Well, now you know what they do now, and of course we were going to get to this. Might as well bring it up. They look at People magazine and US Weekly, right? Because they have nicked from tabloids as well, and become a quote unquote respectable thing to pick up and read. Right. Even though come on. You ever read a People magazine? I have. It's sort of tabloidy at times. It is. And actually, you can thank the Star for that. Star used to be a tabloid sheet. Tabloid. Yes. And it went over to the glossy format at some point. I think it was maybe the late ninety s, and it married those two things, glossy People magazine format with tabloid. And it was enough of a success that People was like, well, we've already got the glossy magazine part, let's just start doing the tabloid thing. Yeah. People have legitimate articles still, and they're not like, making stuff up, but they've definitely gone way into the look at the cellulite on the beach in Malibu and look at this person, and look at that person and who wore it better? Plastic surgeon disasters. Yeah, exactly. Stuff like that. Who wore it better? I know somebody who's been reading People. Yes. When you have the two ladies with the same dress, it's so mean. Especially when it's like 82 to 18. I know. Especially when it's like it's just mean sometimes. Yeah, I'm going to start wearing hockey jerseys. And they'll be like, who are better, kevin Smith or podcaster Chuck Bryant? People go, I guess Kevin Smith, because I never heard of this other guy. Right. This is the same guy. It's the same dude. Anyway, 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, 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. All right, so that's pretty much a quick history of tabloids. Yeah. Here in the States, at least England. We keep mentioning England because they're lousy with it. Well, they're kind of on the leading edge of the decline of tabloids right now. Yeah, we'll get to that. All right, so before we go on to tabloid stories and how they get these stories, we should point out that in 1999, the National Enquirer, the star of the Globe, the National examiner, and Weekly World News were all purchased by American Media Inc. Like, all those just snapped them all up. Basically, we're on the show now. Every big tabloid in the United States was purchased by this one company. And, yeah, I think that's never a good thing. Or maybe that's just me being it. Well, that's the funny thing. The title of this sidebar is they control everything you read. Unless you don't read any of those things. So the AMI, actually they're the reason the Weekly World News shut down. They were like, okay, this thing's losing money. AMI posted $160,000,000 loss in 2006 and was facing like a billion dollars in debt that's a bat boy had to go. Yeah, bat boy went to the Internet. Yes, that makes sense. That's where bat boy belongs. So, okay, let's talk about this. What makes a tabloid? It's not just subjective. I mean, tabloids like pornography. You know it when you see it. Right. It's tough to define true. That's not entirely the case. There are some actual discernible distinctions among tabloids that make a tabloid a tabloid. Agreed. So what are they? Well, Ed points out here something really important. The key to a tabloid story is not that it be true, just that someone has said that it's true. Right. And they latch onto that person, and as long as they, say, attribute these quotes to this person, then they can't be held accountable. And that person is frequently cited as an expert sure. And a close friend. Sure. It's all the way you present the story. If your whole story is all about how this person said something, it's not really about the story. The story is still there, but you're focusing on this person. It's like the rule of the tabloid industry. It's kind of a trick, though, because very much you're tricking people into thinking you're reading about a story about Brangelina when in fact you're reading a story about a former maid that worked for Brangelina right. And what they think is true. Right. Or some crazy person who has nothing to do with Brangelina, who just maybe saw one of them in a coffee shop, right, and noticed they didn't tip or something like that. Bam. There's your story. Also, like we said, they like to add experts, but the experts are in no way, shape or form qualified in a lot of ways. They have no credentials. They're not vetted. It's more, say, like the example Grabanowski uses is like a bigfoot enthusiast, right? If somebody spends a lot of time searching for bigfoot, researching bigfoot, there's no institute out there to qualify them to give them credentials. But you could reasonably make a case that this person is a bigfoot expert. Right. The thing is, the Inquirer or the Star or the Weekly World News is not going to the trouble of explaining that. They just say bigfoot expert so and so says that there's a bunch of these things out and he's seen a bunch and he's an expert. Exactly. My favorite is the leading quote, like they will get the random person who saw Angelina Jolina coffee shop and they will say they would say maybe something like, yeah, she looked like she looked jittery. And they would say, did she look strung out? And that she had possibly been up for days without eating. Yeah, she sort of looked like that. And then all of a sudden that's the quote witnesses say she looked strung out and like she had not eaten for days. Right. All they have to do is say yes. Exactly. Yes. Or would you say this? And if the person says yes and you just said that? Another hallmark of tabloids is making a huge deal out of something I guess other newspapers would consider small. Right. Back page stuff. Yeah. And like actually looking through other newspapers, find some quasi interesting story and then blowing it up into possibly a front page feature just by getting into the story and really interviewing a lot of people involved and then maybe throwing an expert or something like that. And just basically making a lot of hay out of something very kind of negligible in this by adding a bunch of quotes and stuff. And what do you think about this? What do you think about that? It takes it from being about the story, right, like a man saved a goat from a burning building. Awesome. To what these people think about this man and his goat. And you can do anything with that. Exactly. The love affair, you mean? Maybe. Who knows? If somebody said it, then they could conceivably report it. Yeah, if anyone said it. Celebrity news is obviously one of the biggest parts of tabloids these days, at least. And the writers have informants, all kinds of informants, security people who had worked for them or who work at venues where they might have been hairstylists, nail salon people like anyone that can dish up dirt and they get in the rotation. And I remember we shot you ever heard of Janet Charlton? No. You might recognize her. She was a gossip columnist and I think did stuff for TV, like Entertainment Tonight. Okay. But that's how she made her living. And she was, like, one of the more famous ones. And we shot a commercial at her house one time in La. And she was there hanging out, and I was like, you got to tell me some stories. And of course, she just loved that kind of thing. And she would just sit down and regale us with stories about Michael Douglas and his secret sex addiction. And she always said, like, well, you know, my sources tell me she had a list, a rolodex of people on the bankroll that she would pay a few bucks if it was not a big deal to a lot of money if it was a big celebrity with big news. Right. And that's pretty much standard. Like you were saying, there's this guy named Paul McMullen who wrote for, I think, News of the World and, you know, Denim Elliot. I know that name. Indiana Jones sidekick. Can't remember his name. But the older British guy yeah. Okay. He was just a huge star in Great Britain, and he had a very beloved too, and he had a daughter who was addicted to heroin. And after he died, she took a big turn for the worse, and this cop tipped off, I think, another person who in turn tipped off Paul McMullen, but the cop got a few hundred pounds for it that this girl was like, she's kind of a prostitute. She's so much of a heroin addict. So whatever you want to do with that. Paul McMullen goes and offers to pay this lady, like, drug money for sex or whatever, and she agrees, and all of a sudden, he starts reporting on it. Wow. He's got photos and everything while she ended up killing herself. Oh, my God. And he now says, like, I take responsibility for that, which is meaningless. Sure. But, yeah, it all started with a cop knowing about this and then tipping off the reporters. That's so sad. It is. Cops are not immune to this kind of thing, too, believe it or not. 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. 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Just go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Josh another way they'll get their information is from the celebrities themselves. From what I've gathered, you fall into three categories. You either fight the tabloids, you either are lucky enough and are smart enough to kind of be low profile, and you're not really a subject of tabloids. There's a lot of big stars you never see in the tabloids. Harrison ford yeah. Or number three is you play ball a little bit. Right. Which means, you know what, I'll give you a little information here and there. I'll leak out some stuff here and there. If you play nice with me, I'll play ball with you. Maybe I'll let you know what restaurant I'll be coming out of one night. You can photograph me, give you your little time. And sometimes the movie studios will leak stuff to get up a little press. They did that a lot. A lot back in the day, but it still goes on. Yeah. It's like a symbiotic relationship between the person who needs their star to maintain its position through things like, just basically you're a star because the public is aware of you. Yeah. No such thing as bad press. Like, you might be in there for your cellulite, but what if someone picks up the magazine? They're like, oh, I wonder whatever happened to her? I thought she was dead. And all of a sudden they're like, she's not dead. She just has cellulite. How sad. How sad. But at the same time, I feel better about myself. Exactly. So I guess one of the ways that you stay in the tabloids is through having your picture made, as we say here in the south, a group of people known collectively as paparazzi. Yeah. And they actually, I found out, are named after a paparazzo photographer. You didn't know that? Named paparazzo with a capital p. He was a character in felini's ladulce vita. That's right. Movie. And apparently they were already extant, but they got their name through this character. But even then, they weren't crazy. It wasn't until the 70s, again, thanks to gene pope, that they really became. The kind of reckless, relentless nuisances that we have today. And it was all because Jean Pope was obsessed with Jackie O and Aristotle, and he would pay so much money for anything on them that the photographers were, like, just really became aggressive and assertive because of it. And they're way worse in Europe because of Gene Pope and because they initially started doing this stuff in Greece and in Europe. Right. And that still is connected to the state, to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. They were supposedly the driver had been drinking, but they were supposedly being chased by paparazzi on motorcycles. Yeah, very sad. But that's all. Generosa Pope, Jr. I'll bet that guy wore huge black glass, thick ones like Robert De Niro at the end of Casino. Those are great. Supposedly Felini, too. I dug this up. Took the word from an Italian word that described the buzzing sound of a mosquito. Oh, that's nice. That's unverified. But he said in an interview in Time magazine in the 70s that he's like, yeah, I always just associate it with something buzzing around you and in your way. That's paparazzi. And there's that movie, too. Paparazzi. Is that what it was called? From 2004? Yeah. Where the dude, what's his face goes back and beats up Cole Hauser? Yeah. Did you see it? No, I ran across it on IMDb today. It's not bad at all. It's also it could very easily be based on the life of Alec Baldwin. Yeah, sure. I think the categories you were describing, the people who are just so big that they can't keep a low profile, but they also don't want or need the tabloids on them. But I've also very much gotten the impression it's like there's a lot of people out there who feed it to them, who want it, who crave it, and I can't feel bad for those people at all. Yeah, it's a tough thing because there are people plenty, like you're saying, plenty of people out there who are big stars, but you never see anything about them in tabloids. It's because they just stay out of it. They stay away from it. Yeah, I'm trying to think of one. I mean, there's so many. That's probably why I can't think of it. But like Harrison Ford is a good example, I guess. Except when he started dating Callista Flockhart, they were in the tabloids a lot. But I also suspect, like, most of that stuff was all very pleasant, like hand holding things. Yeah. But she was in the tabloids a lot because of her weight. So that fed into that. Maybe she'll be happy and eat again now that she has Harrison Ford. Yeah. He's just like, eat this. Eat that, too. Here, eat this. All right, let's talk about the law. Yeah, because this was really interesting, I thought, because the first thing you think of wait, the rest of it was not interesting at all. No, I thought this was super interesting, though, because the first thing I think of is, why aren't these people suing every day? Suing these tabloids? Some try, some do. Some have been successful for a while for the early tabloids ones, like what were they called? Like Confidential, I think was one of the early tabloids, like The Toddler, just whatever stupid name about airing dirty laundry. That was the name of some pulp tabloid. In the Dirty Laundry was probably one of those, I'll bet. And they got away with that stuff because well, for two reasons. This guy wrote Bill Sloan. Yeah. I watched A Wild Hog in My Baby, which is pretty much this definitive history of the tabloids. And he's got his bona fide because he was an editor for the National Enquirer. Right. Yeah. And he said there's two reasons in the if you were a legitimate start, these things were so in the gutter that the stoop to suing them was problematic. In one, it was the attention that lawsuit would attract because the regular press was going to start talking about it. It would make you look as bad as well, it would draw a lot more attention to the original story. Right. And then the second thing is, even if you want that publisher doesn't have the money to pay you. Yeah. Good luck then. Gene Pope once again changes everything. Gene Pope and Rupert Murdoch. All of a sudden, these things have enormous circulation. I think Gene Pope took the inquiry from like 150 or 1000 to 5 million at its peak in the 80s. So suddenly they did have deep pockets and things changed. And Carol Burnett kind of still to this day stands as, like a bellwether for the celebrities versus the tabloids, as far as the law goes. Yeah, she sued. And after 1976 article said, and I have to read this quote, it's pretty good at a Washington restaurant, a boister scale, burnett had a loud argument with another diner, Henry Kissinger. She trapezed around the place offering everyone a bite of her dessert. And they didn't put her dessert in quotes. I would have carol really raised eyebrows when she accidentally knocked a glass of wine over one diner and started giggling instead of apologizing. So they basically said she was blitzed at this restaurant. She sued. He's a big fan, probably. Yeah. And she sued and won $1.6 million. And we'll find out here in a second. This is one of the hallmarks of their litigation. Settled out of court for much less. Well, very quietly, she got a big settlement because in 19, like, good money, 100 billion today, I think. And then it was reduced by an appeals court, which is usually step two in these kind of suits. Yeah, like 200 grand. Yeah. And then it was settled out of court. So I would imagine for even less than that. Yeah, but it was still a big deal. It was the first time, really, that a major star was able to win a defamation lawsuit against a tabloid. But it was one of the I don't want to say it was one of the only times. It was one of the very few times, especially if you are going on the premise of all the people who want to sue the tabloids and don't actually bring a suit. All right. Because things have changed now. Yeah. Now the tabloids have these reputations for being extremely fearsome litigators where if you want to sue them, you thought that story that ticked you off was bad. They're going to get anything they can, and they're going to do it through the court. So, like, when aretha Franklin or no. Elizabeth taylor. Yes. When she tried to sue, I think the inquirer or when she did sue the inquirer, the Enquirer's lawyers tried to subpoena all of her medical records for the past 30 years. So they go after everything. They tried to drag your life into the spotlight to make it really not worth your while to sue them. Yeah. It's the celebrity attorney that was interviewed for this awesome New York Times article, vincent Chiefo, everyone's Italian. Everybody is Italian said that it's basically he calls it the scorpion defense, which is you don't attack a scorpion because you will get stung. Aside from not the most complex analogy. I like it. No, it's pretty straightforward, I guess. Do they need to be complex? But you can call it that's the snake analogy. That's the spider analogy. That's the two year old analogy. Oh, like, don't mess with the two year old. You'll get thrown up on orbit, pooped on you. That's what they should use, because the scorpion can only do one thing. Two year old can humiliate you in a number of ways. Have you ever heard so there's this whole thing that scorpions commit suicide if you set them on fire by stinging themselves. Really? And apparently there's a lot of YouTube videos out there. People like doing this with scorpions that's setting them on fire. And then the scorpion will jump about and sting itself and eventually die. I'll be trying to put the fire out. They found that they found that scorpions are almost entirely immune to their own venom. And that really all this is, just a reaction of being burned alive. They're flailing about, and one of the flails is like their stingers moving and sometimes it's things itself. So it appears to dumb kids who set scorpions on fire that scorpions committing suicide. Terrible. Isn't that awful? That's a great tangent, though. Thanks, man. All right. Don't burn animals or insects of any kind, kids. It's just me. And it means you're setting yourself up for being a sociopath later in life. Also, legally speaking, with tabloids, you have to prove malice. Yeah, that's the big one. Not only that what they printed was false, but that they knowingly printed information they knew was false. Yeah. Because it's got to be libelous. It can't just be maliciously libelous. They just printed a rumor about me that wasn't true. It's got to have malice behind it. Libel is printed. Slander is stated with your mouth. These are the two differences. Or I guess you could blink it out with your eyes. That's true. So basically, the Scorpion defense and then the delays, the first thing they're going to do is start filing motions to delay, to delay, to delay. Spend a lot of money. A lot of money. And if you think about it, there's nothing to really gain here, necessarily. Oh, yeah. It's your reputation. So a star who has a bunch of money says, I have a bunch of money, and I'm really mad at these guys, and I want to teach them a lesson, so I'm going to sue them. And basically the first tactic is the tabloids try to make it not worth your while that you'll drop it because you don't really need this money. You're looking for a judgment, and hopefully you'll get bored. Well, and the tablets don't care. Even if they drag this thing out and print a retraction six months later, no one reads retractions or cares about retractions. Well, six months later, that's well put. Because apparently part of the judgment of some of these in successful suits is that you can't write about the star for a set amount of time. Yeah. They'll cut a deal sometimes and say, you know what? I'll drop the lawsuit. Just give me a break for the next year. Right. And then they put on their calendar tom Cruise, one year from now, set reminder to start effing with him again. Another way that tabloids stay out of court is most of their articles are read, screened by an attorney or attorneys they have on retainer. So each article it's printed kind of comes with this implicit stamp of approval from a legal expert that they're like, sure, you really don't have a case if you want to sue against this. Yeah. They want to walk right up to the line of libel and stop there. And they're pretty good at it. And then you're in aid on it. And then you're in aid on it. And I imagine the writers are really good at it. And then as backup, they have their own attorneys that are even better at it. Sure. And so they're like, yeah, this is not libelous. Prove it. Spend half a million dollars trying to prove this. And some people do. Like Aretha Franklin, I think settled. Tom Cruise. Schwarzenegger Kate Cruz. Yeah. Did she win? Because Katie Holmes just filed in March. She is the Star, 50 million. She settled for a donation to her charity. Nice. Unless she has done it twice. She did it just this past March. She filed suit against them for this one cover about the drug bags under her eyes. And they're like, Katie's, drug problem. Why she won't leave. Tom. All this also the article kind of goes after Scientology. Big mistake. Well, based on that list, nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, it makes you wonder, like I wonder how much Scientology encourages Travolta suing for defamation and articles that also include stuff against Scientology. Yeah, because Travolta just had the big rally with his little supposed todry affairs here in Georgia. Right. And then I guess another homework that's not really in the article, but I think you can make a pretty strong case, is that sometimes, a lot of times the tabloid gets things right. Yeah. But the way that they do it often is very much unethical and immoral as far as the standards of the press is concerned. And that's what's been going on with Rupert Murdoch. Like a parliamentary panel basically said you're not fit to run news corps any longer because this scandal is so huge. With the phone hacking scandal. Oh, yeah. I can't remember what episode we talked about in, but there was the girl who was kidnapped and the News of the World writers were hacking into her voicemail and then deleting them. The police thought she was still alive and it was possibly affecting the course of the investigation. They identified 4000 celebrities, athletes, politicians, people of note whose emails were hacked. 4000 and then another thousand that had likely been hacked. Some people have already sued in one, like Siena Miller, Steve Coogan of Toyota for our party people, and Tristan Shandy. Some people have already won, but for the most part these people aren't going to get any damages awarded. It's basically just no. News of the World shut down now, but it was out of hand. Wow. And now they're showing that they were also hacking email, which Great Britain has this kind of computer theft law now, which makes email hacking way worse than phone hacking. So if that opens up to be a big thing, people are actually going to start doing time for it. Good. Yeah, that's what I say. But as I was saying, sometimes they get things right. They do. Over the years, we'll mention a few OJ Simpson case, the National Enquirer, and it seems like it's generally the Enquirer that sort of scoops the legitimate. It's never like the star. So the National Enquirer scooped in the OJ trial the story about his shoes, the Bruno Molly's. Yeah. They scooped the story of the dealer that sold him a knife similar to the murder weapon, I guess. Knife dealers, the way they scooped the shoe story. Remember their bloody footprints? I thought this was awesome. They really went to town because there was a Bruno Molly bloody footprint at the scene. And OJ Simpson said, I've never owned a pair of shoes like that picture. They went back and found footage of him from 1993 wearing them on the field, like reporting of some of the football games, and proved that, yes, indeed, he did have those shoes. And he's like, oh, those shoes, right. Yeah. Bill Cosby's kid, Ennis. Remember when he was killed, the Enquirer offered $100,000 reward for information, and that actually led to somebody coming forward and giving the information that led to the capturing of the killer. That's right. Jesse Jackson's illegitimate child. Yeah. In 2001, he came out and was like, yeah, I guess he found out. It's true. Yes. Gary Hart, when he was running for president in 88 I remember this well. He was on the monkey business down in Miami with what was his name? Donna Rice. Yeah. It's a funny photo when you look at it. Now, I haven't seen it, I don't think. She's just, like, sitting on his lap, and he's just got a big grin on his face, and he's got a T shirt that says Monkey Shines Crew. And it was all over the place at the time, but he dropped out of the race. It was because of this picture in the inquiry. They scooped everybody on it. And Rush Limbaugh. Yeah. My favorite drug addict that was exposed, rush Limbaugh. Yeah. I remember he was buying OxyContin from his maid lot. It was on, like, how many pills a day he bought? Well, I don't know how many a day, but he bought apparently 30,000 pills from her. I think he was on some ungodly amount, like 20 or 60 or 80 pills a day. So I remember hearing it. How is he alive? Or even not standing up. Yeah, but that was the inquiry that did that. But again so there could be a could have come from a tip, right? Yeah. It could have come from they could have gotten this information from wiretapping, from whatever. It doesn't mean it's wrong. But just one of the hallmarks of a tabloid is that they'll follow sometimes looser ethics than maybe, again, a New York Times reporter. So tabloids today, Josh, like you mentioned, at the peak, the National Enquirer was selling about 5 million copies in circulation. Now, all of the leading ones in the United States combined sell about 5.4 million. So they've really gone down. And one of the reasons why is because they were so successful that mainstream media became much more tabloidy and tabloids became much less different. The field of competition increased. Yes. And basically everyone was kind of doing similar stuff now. And they had pointed out the article during the Lewinsky trial, sales went down because stuff you were seeing on CNN and was just as salacious as anything you would read in the Star. And again, it's like the mainstream media kind of took a cue from tabloids, as they have so many other times. They were so pissed off about that with the Clinton thing. They were probably just like, let's make up some stuff. What if he used a cigar? And they were like, well, those crazy stuff about yeah, exactly. It was all true with Clinton, man. That was nuts, looking back. Yeah. So, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, then that's tabloids chuck. Tabloids. If you want to learn more about tabloids and see a picture of the beloved Bat Boy, you can type in Tabloids, T-A-B-L-O-I-D-S in the search bar@housedefirst.com. Which means it's time for listener mail. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this. Don't cry for me. Josh and Chuck. Hi, guys. I'm currently working in Argentina conducting research and teaching English on a Fulbright Scholarship. I wanted to let you know that your podcast serve as a great resource for English learners in other countries. I've been introducing your podcast to students and adults I meet who are interested in furthering their English and learning more about US culture. Right, yeah. We'll scare you, too. The idea of a podcast culture does not yet exist in Argentina. When I introduce the idea and your program to people here, they're very curious and eager to listen. They make great wine, too, by the way. Argentina? Yeah. Okay. That's good stuff. Your podcast is providing a fun, informative way for students here to practice listening to different English accents, to try and pick up on some colloquialisms and jokes, to learn new vocabulary. But I feel a lot of heat all of a sudden and to become more informed on the various issues you discussed. The idea of people listening to podcasts purely to further their own knowledge is a part of US. Culture that I am proud to share. And thank you very much for that. Spreading your fan base in Argentina. Angela Hartley. That's very nice. Thank you very much for that. We're becoming cold like figures like Rodriguez. Who? There's this singer songwriter from, I think the late 60s, early seventy s. And he just went by the name Rodriguez and released a couple of albums that is totally flopped here. And he just went the way of obscurity. Didn't realize that in South Africa, these two albums achieved, like, just incredible status over there, and everyone wondered what happened to him. And finally, years later, he found out he's like a mythical figure in South Africa. Really? There's a documentary that just came out about the whole thing. It sounds like a movie or something. There's a documentary? Well, it sounds like a feature film, like something someone would make up. I saw a movie like that. You mean? I went to Silver Docks and saw the Imposter. It was very much like that, where one of the producers afterwards of the Q and A was like he was asked if they were going to turn it into, like, a feature film. He was like, we can't. There's just too many it's too outlandish that if you fictionalized it, people would be like, this is stupid. Why did you make these choices? I want to see it. Yeah, you should. It's very good. Awesome. Okay. If you have a documentary recommendation. So I guess it'd be a documentary recommendation, a document. Thank you. We're always looking for that. Is that correct? Docu Rek Because I think I've seen that written before. Really? Yeah. I just made that. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyteanow and you can email us your wrecks to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuffychano 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 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."
8a99b3dc-4a58-11e8-a49f-4b878fb30a0c	SYSK Selects: How Fossils Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-fossils-work	A fossil is a piece of once-living organic material that has undergone a transition from an organic state to an inorganic state. But what exactly is fossilization? Listen in as Josh and Chuck break down the process of fossilization.	A fossil is a piece of once-living organic material that has undergone a transition from an organic state to an inorganic state. But what exactly is fossilization? Listen in as Josh and Chuck break down the process of fossilization.	Sat, 29 Dec 2018 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=363, tm_isdst=0)	35299242	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everyone, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen How Fossils Work, which actually is one of the most scientifically interesting, amazing, mind bending episodes that we've ever done. And I just listened to it, and it still holds up, so I hope that you enjoy it. And as they say, on with the show, welcome to Stuff You Should Know from Housetopworks.com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is the intrepid paleontologist. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Terrible. I like it. Okay. I wish I was a paleontologist. What's your new nickname? Or intrepid, at least? Let's just go with paleontologist. That'd be great. Okay. We're talking fossils today. Dude. This is really interesting stuff. It really is. And you can tell that Tracy Wilson, our esteemed head of the writing editor I think she's site director. Site director, right. You can tell that she was very excited. She took her time and really doled this one out. I think saver is the right word. You can feel her smiling through the keyboard. Yeah. She's very happy to write how fossils work, and we're happy to do it because it's one of those very comprehensive articles on the site that has everything you need sedimentary rock, flat bones versus round bones, leaf impressions. It has it all. Unless you're an intrepid paleontologist. Then we'll get an email saying it actually wasn't very comprehensive. Right. You guys royally screwed this up. We just wait until we get into punctuated versus gradual evolution. Chuck, you've heard of Lucy, right? The Australopithecus? Yeah. Okay. Well, she was, I think, 3.2 million years old. That's one old lady. It really is the earliest hominid we found, as far as I know. But there is a part of her foot missing. It's always been missing that we've never found before. So this bone was so essential that we couldn't tell how she walked until recently. Why? Because the missing bone, we couldn't tell how she walked? Exactly. Wow. We can tell so much from bones that when we don't have the right bones, we can't tell anything. So she may have been in a knuckle dragger. Sure. She may have hopped. We didn't know. Well, recently, some people from the University of Missouri or Missouri, depending on whether or not you live in the state, found the group of footballs needed to show what kind of walker Lucy was. And she walked upright. How was her gate upright? Upright, just like a human. She had a hitch in her get along. She had a pep in her step, possibly love. She knew she'd be famous one day. Sure, she was in love with talk talk. But consider this, right. Okay. 3.2 million year old footphones were found, and we could tell from them how she walked. This is the state of the field that you remember. Paleontology. Pretty cool. This is how advanced it is, and yet it's really just kind of using common sense to figure out what old bones mean. Yeah, common sense in science. Fossils go. Let's talk about chuck. What are some of the different kinds of fossils? Well, one of my favorite kinds is trace fossil. Yeah, that's actually one of my favorites, too. It's like that Jesus footprint thing. Footprints in the sand. Yes, it sort of is, Josh. That is, when it's actually not part of the organism at all, but it's like tooth marks and a chunk of wood from a saber tooth tiger. Or footprints. Or footprints or trackways, as Tracy calls them. Yes, footprints. Trackways. It's just unnecessary, but it has a pleasant tone. Science. Yes. They're not footprints. They're trackways. I'm bored in Ethiopia. Let's call them trackways. So Trace Fossils is one of course, there's bone fossils, right? The most famous fossils. Yes, those are great, too. They got nothing on trace fossils, actually. Bone fossils. That's what you really want. If you're going to reconstruct a dinosaur for your museum, you can't do it with footprints. No, you can't. You need the bones. You do. And the bones are, of course, the most famous ones. And the dinosaur bones are the most famous of all the bone types, right? Yes. There's something that I think is often missed by lay people such as myself in that when you find a bone right. So you find, like, a big old dinosaur bone. It's really, geologically speaking, it's not a bone any longer. Yeah. It's not like you find a bone buried in your yard. That was an animal from 35 years ago. You could but that's not a fossil. Well, no, it's still bone. A fossil is a bone or a piece of once living organic material that's undergone a transition from an organic state to an inorganic state. That's what a fossil is. It's gone through the process of fossilization. And most of these fossils, the vast majority of fossils, are found in sedimentary rock. Before we go any further, we should probably do a little brief primer on sedimentary rock, right? Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, it's pretty easy, too. We've talked about the Earth's core and layers when I think we talked about earthquakes and maybe some other stuff. We all know that there's the inner core, outer core. We got the crust. Crust is the thinnest layer, and that's where the fossils are. That's where the goods are. Yes. Most of the rocks in the crust are sedimentary rocks that you've been talking about off and on for the past eight minutes. And that's like silky, sandy stuff that hardened over the years. Right. Remember we talked about what was it? Clouds. Sure. I can't remember what podcast it was, but we talked about how much sand is transferred from Africa to South America annually. Yeah, when clouds. But yeah, you remember the one I'm talking about. Okay. So the Earth's biogeochemical processes equal a lot of movement of particulate matter. Right. The Earth is dynamic, baby. It is. It's also very fluid, too. Right. A lot of that matter is at one point as suspended particles in water that's moving around. Right? Yeah. So as the water leaves and the sediment is deposited, it builds up and up. Over time, it hardens into rock, and eventually we have sedimentary rock, which is below our feet. We don't normally see it unless, say, the Colorado River winds over it for millions and millions and millions of years, revealing the sedimentary rocket that's in the Earth's crust. Hala grand Canyon. Exactly. Is that what you're talking about? Yeah, I forgot the Grand Canyon part. So you know how I said the Earth was dynamic, baby? Yeah. That's important. I didn't just throw that in there as a factoid. It's important because when these plates shift around, that's how fossils are unearthed. Things can be moved great distances and pushed to the surface eventually or close enough to where a dig can unearth it. And it's like just because it's fossilized doesn't mean it's stuck in that one spot forever, because Earth is always moving. So the point of all this is sedimentary rock is, like you said, dynamic. It moves around. Sometimes fossils pop up or it becomes exposed. All of the Colorado River. And that is where fossils are, right, Chuck? Yes. So let's say that at some point in time, there was a dinosaur or sabertoothed tiger or a cyanobacteria wooly mammoth. Wooly mammoth, sure. And it's hanging out around a river bed, and it has a massive heart attack and falls over in the river bed. And very quickly it becomes covered with sediment and silt. Right? Yeah. And that's important because once it starts getting covered up with stuff, it's sort of being protected from, like, all of us. Let's just break the news. Olive fossil means is that something has been protected from the natural decomposition process. Otherwise it would just decompose like everything else, and you wouldn't see anymore. You just totally betrayed Tracy in the tone. She went with the whole drama drawing out suspense. But that's true. So what you said was right. So you'd fall over in a riverbed, you start getting covered up with the sediment and silt, and it's immediately starting to protect you in a way. Right. Not you, but whatever. The woolly mammoth. The woolly mammoth. The thing is, in this sediment, you can't really hide from macrobacteria and other forms of life that are basically dedicated to breaking down organic matter soft tissue, hair, eyeballs, genitalia, all that kind of stuff. It eventually becomes broken down. And what's left is the hard stuff, the bone. Right. But the bone also has organic material within it as well. Yeah. And that will break down. We're talking blood cells, collagen, fat. That's going to break down, too. The key here is the inorganic parts of the bone remain intact. Right. And the other key word here is porous. Yeah. Well, you take calcium, I imagine, for your hips. Yeah. Sure. Glucose, amine, calcium. Sure. So what you're doing is you're fortifying the calcium that's already in your hip, supposedly. Right. Because the bone is made in large part of calcium, which is a mineral which is inorganic. So as all the organic stuff dies out, what's left is, like you said, the inorganic calcium, whatever minerals. And that holds the shape. Right. Yeah. The initial structure is kept intact. Right. But like you said, this bone is also porous. Yeah. That's the key. And over time, other mineral sediment, it enters into these microscopic pores iron, carbonate, and fortifys this, ultimately turning an organic bone into an inorganic rock in the shape of the bone. Yeah. But for all intents and purposes, it's still the bone. It still has the original calcium. It's still the same thing. It's not like a replica of it. It's just become fossilized. Yeah. And Tracy in the article uses a pretty good example. I thought it's like filling a sponge with glue. The sponge is going to keep the shape, but the glue is going to ooze through all the spots that it can ooze, harden. And there you go. You've got a hard sponge. A hard sponge, which is basically what a fossil is. And this takes place, Josh, over the course of millions of years, the sediment reinforcing the bones, eventually becoming rock. It's not kind of thing that happens willy nilly over thousands of years. Right. Takes a long time. And this isn't just happening by itself. All the surrounding area is being deposited with sediment as well. It's also turning into rock. And then the ultimate test of time for a fossil is that it can withstand the pressure that's mounted by the hardening rock, sedimentary rock that's growing around it. So it can be crushed. Is that how sure. Okay. A lot of fossils are definitely crushed. Crushed to death. Poor guys. But if it survives and you can find this, you will eventually be able to get to it, and then you remove the rock from around the fossil, and there's your bone that you can take to the Natural History Museum and get at least $500 for when you were a kid. Josh, let me ask you this. Did you ever go into the woods on a little nature course from, like, a science center, let's say, and do a cast plaster cast of animal footprint? Do you ever do that? No. Really? Really? I did that. We went and found, like, deer hoof prints. You fill it with plaster, and there was some way of doing it where you got an inverse plaster cast of a deer hoof print. Right. That can happen, actually, in a way, with trace fossils. So you can sediment can act the same way. In one of these, let's say, the woolly mammoth makes a footprint in some loose but sturdy soil that fills up with sediment and creates basically a mold, just like I did as a kid with the plaster cast. Yeah. As long as the sediment that fills it in is lighter or thinner than the soil that the impressions made in, then yeah. It would preserve that track. Yeah. And plants can do the same thing. It's not just bones we're talking about. Right. It can also fill in in a different way, I guess the opposite way to where it makes, basically, a cast of the foot that made the track. Yeah. And then so it's like a kind of like a fossil of a ghost foot that's not really there, but it makes the foot it's like an inverse cast okay. Yeah. Of not the track, but the foot that made the track. Yeah. You know what my favorite trace fossil is? It's not a trackway. It's copper light. I changed my mind. That is a good one. It's dung. It's poop. Fossilized poop. That's right. It can tell you a lot about an animal. It can tell you about its fiber intake. It can tell you about what size its poop was. Chuck, you know, in the CIA found out much about Gorbachev and his health. They found out he had cancer or some sort of chronic illness by stealing his poop. Really? When he came on a state visit to the US. They took his poop and analyzed it. And when they poop he was in the US. They just grabbed it from the toilet. Did he not flush? I just want more specifics that you probably don't have as far as I understand. Okay. Probably hotel room or wherever he was staying, they were prepared to do this. Toilet rigged. Probably, yes. Okay. But wherever Reagan went, they had a portable toilet that he used. It was the only one he was allowed to use. I'm not kidding. So no one could steal his poop. Wow. Talk about paranoid. Yes. Seriously, when you .1 finger, there's three pointing back at you. You know what I mean? Yeah. So, Josh, that is sedimentary rock, and that's, to me, one of the cooler ways you can get a fossil. Petrified wood, too. Don't leave that one out. Oh, yeah, sure. It's basically the same thing that we just described for bone, but for wood. Hard as a rock, because it is a rock. There you go. All right. So like I just said, that was sedimentary rock, and that's kind of fun. But you can also get a fossil is that funny? Because one dies in a cave that's really dry. Yeah. Desiccation. Yeah. Desiccation is basically sort of a mummification, but it's not like we think of with mummification, with the Egyptian tombs or anything like that. Well, that's because there's no preservation techniques that have been undertaken. Yes. It's natural. Natural. Basically, it dries out. It's like throwing an orange and a dehydrator. So when it's really dry, there's not going to be any place for bacteria to thrive. The reason beef jerky is not refrigerated, if you refrigerate your beef jerky, you're doing something wrong. Yeah, that's true. Well, if you have beef jerky long enough to need refrigeration, then you're doing something wrong or something really right. So desiccation actually works so well sometimes that it can preserve the skin and soft tissues as well, which is something that sedimentary rock cannot do. Have you been to the Smithsonian? I have. They have a very cool, I guess a prehistoric cow or a musk ox, I can't remember. But it's the thing's head much of its back, I guess, the cape. Wow. Two of its legs. The skin is still there. It's just right there. Probably. It's tens of thousands of years old, and it's just sitting right there. Did they rebuild the glass? Did they rebuild it or just put the parts up? It's just the parts. Okay. But it's laid out so that it gives you the impression of what you're looking at, but its face is still there. It's very cool. Wow. My favorite kind of fossil, though, Josh, I say that like every five minutes is a frozen fossil, because if you get trapped, let's say, your willy mammoth trapped in ice, not only is that going to keep other, like, vultures and things from picking up your bones and skin, but it's also going to keep it from breaking down. And you can get hair fully preserved sometimes hair and skin, and like a big mammoth. Have you seen pictures of Liuba? No. Lyuba is a baby wooly mammoth that was found by a reindeer herder in Siberia, and it was \u00a392 or something like that, but it would have gotten up to several tons. It is adorable because it is a fully preserved wooly mammoth baby with the wrinkles in the skin and everything, yet spent 450 years in the permafrost. But it's like, completely intact. It's very cute. That's why it's my favorite. It's one of the cutest dead things you'll ever see. Another couple of ways you can get a fossil, Josh, which are not my favorite, are tar Labrey tarpitz, although that is one of my favorites, which lebre at tarpit is actually redundant because Labra means the tar. So it's calling it the tartar pit and not the tartar. Did I ever tell you about when I shot a commercial there? Did you go by there in La. No, I want to. I forgot about it when we were there last. Well, for those of you who haven't been, it's right in the middle of Los Angeles, like, south of Hollywood on Wilshire Boulevard. And the main tar pit is tar pits are fenced off, obviously, and they have little recreations. It's actually the saddest thing you'll ever see. The recreation they have in there is of, I guess it's a mother wooly mammoth trapped in the tar trying to get out, and the father and the baby on shore, like, howling. It's awful, but it's still active, like all the tar is bubbling up and everything and shot a commercial there once, and I was on the other side of the property, far away from the main pit, and I looked down, and there was a little mini tar pit, a little tar puddle about a foot wide, bubbling right beneath my feet. I could have scooped it up with my finger if I'd been so inclined. Instead. You're like that stinks. Well, it's just crazy to think that it's happening. Apparently, I looked it up there's, like you said, main pits that are chained off and that are still being excavated, but they have them, like, in neighborhoods all around the area, I believe. Parks, they're just kind of all over the place around there. That's like parts of Stone Mountain popping up all over the place. Yeah. We used to have back down with your foot. He had a big chunk of Stone Mountain in our backyard growing up. Yeah. All right. For those of who you don't know, stone Mountain is the world's largest exposed piece of granite, and it is right here in our home state, and it takes, like, 30 minutes to hike, but you still get to get to the top and be like, I just hiked a mountain. Yeah. Which I have. Josh. You can also get Pete Mossy. Pete can preserve life forms, including human beings, like Toland Man. Who was that? Toland man? I don't know about him. How do you know these people? Two people. The first multi syllable word I could spell was archaeology. Really? I've always been interested in that. I could see that, yeah. Toland man also, you can hate archeology like some people hate art, and you'll still be interested in Tolling Man. He's found in Denmark. He lived 2400 years ago, and he was murdered. Sacrificially, they think, and cast into the peat bog, which Pete is just decomposing moss and lots of it. But it has a tendency I think it's anaerobic. So tissues preserve really well, but it's this guy that they dug up, and he's so well preserved that when they found him in the 1950s, they called the cops because they thought they'd found a murder victim. Really? Like a recent one. He looks kind of funny, but he's got his whiskers are preserved. Wow. He's wearing a cap. He still has the Garrett around his neck. It's really awesome. So what is he dated at, like, 300 to 400 BC. Is when he was killed. And he's wearing a hat. Yes. Sheepskin leather cap. Yeah. No. Last Chance garage for him. No. Well, and then my favorite way, Josh, that you can get a fossil. You're joking. Did you say it again? I did. Is amber. They just keep getting better and better. Like the movie Jurassic Park. Yeah. That's how we get dinosaurs again. Yeah. Dino DNA. So you found something on whether or not that's feasible, right? Yeah, because I always wondered, when you see Jurassic Park, you see the little video they made clearly to explain to the movie going audience how this is done. It's better than Ellen Page running around. What was that movie? An inception. Inception. So the mosquito flies and tree resin. Tree resin eventually becomes hard as copal. Then it eventually becomes inert as amber. You get the little mosquito in there. They extracted the dino DNA from the blood of the mosquito, filled in the gaps with, I think, frog DNA. And that was all there was to it. And at the time I thought, boom, butter, bing, bon jovi. Yes. At the time, I thought, that seems plausible, and it sort of is. But I did look up today, and there was a researcher that was interviewed at the or closer to that time, I think, that basically debunked it and said we could potentially maybe get some DNA, even though it's really fragile and loses his signature really quickly. Even if you could get the DNA, he said that you couldn't construct a dinosaur. It's just you can't fill in the blanks like that. There's way too many blanks. You have a giant frog. Yeah. With little tiny arms, forearms. But Steven Spielberg made us believe when you saw those dinosaurs walk across that field, that guy can make me believe in anything, that aliens came to the American Southwest, that there was a World War II that yeah, sure. Et. Phone home, please. Good stuff. Where are we here, Chucky. We're kind of painting this picture where if you just stick a shovel anywhere in the Earth, you're going to yield, like, all sorts of bones and fossils. Not true. No, it's not. First of all, a mere fraction that I don't think could possibly be calculated because we rely on the fossil record to show us what existed back when, and it's incomplete. Therefore, we've entered at Catch 22. But there's just a mere fraction of all of the species and organisms that's ever lived. Tiny fractures that become fossilized. Basically, a perfect storm of chance has to occur for a fossil to be created. As we've seen, even when it is created, it can still be crushed into oblivion. So they're few and far between. Yeah, to begin with, but we have to figure out where to find them. Well, then you got to find it. That's the other problem. And the way we find it is by identifying rock that will likely have the type of fossil that we're looking for. Yeah. So if you want something from that year so if you know that this animal from yeah. If you know this animal lived 30 million years ago, you're going to go find rock that you know is 30 million years old and start poking around and looking. It's sort of a very chance thing. And we know that. We know, like, say, a layer of rock or strata of rock is 30 million years old because of a technique we have called radio carbon dating. Right? Yeah. Do you want to do this one? Well, sure. Carbon 14 dating is what a lot of people toss around, because that's probably the most well known. But that can only take you back 600 years. Yeah. We're talking millions and billions of years. So they need to study isotopes like potassium 40 and uranium 238. Right. Because that goes back millions of years, evidently to halflife. Yeah. And the halflife is where an atom loses half of its life isotopes to decay. Yeah. Okay. And this radioactive decay takes place at a predictable rate, depending on the atom. The type of atom. Right. Yeah. That's how I understand it. So if we find a type of atom missing x number of isotopes, we can say, well, this is roughly 30 million to 31 million years old or 30 million to 30,000,300 years old. I'm not sure what window we can date it to raise our window, but I think it's enough so that we have a rough estimate of when this fossil lived and the sediment was buried around it. So, Josh, let's say that you're lucky enough and skilled enough as an intrepid paleontologist to come across your fossil. What do you do? Well, as I said, you dig it up and take it to the museum and sell it for $500. Well, I don't know about that, but you should call a museum. Even if you think you know what you're doing, you're probably going to need some help. If it's something major, I think you should probably go on the assumption that you don't know what you're doing. Okay. Unless you're a trained paleontologist. Right. Part of the problem is we assume that these fossils, being rocks, are sturdy. That's not always the case. No. So there's a lot of danger of damage, just an average Joe trying to excavate them. Also, if you just pull a bone up and walk away with it, it immediately loses context. Yeah. It's like removing a piece of evidence from a crime scene almost. Exactly. You can't do that. Well, you're not supposed to. So they have these huge cranes and digging tools where they can remove huge slabs of earth, which is a really good way to do it. And sometimes if they're, you know, if it's something that could be fragile, they will remove the entire slab, cast it in plaster, and just go ahead and ship that thing off to a facility to handle it from there. Right. And the cool thing is, even though rock has formed around this bone yeah. That's key. Right. All up on it. All up in it. If you flake it away properly, if you flake the surrounding sedimentary rock away, you're going to find that there's what's called a plane of weakness, which is where the bone and the rock are still on this very microscopic level. They're not fused together. You're going to hit that, and the rock should chip right away right. And leave the bone. Yeah. And I think sometimes they missed it with water, too, to soften it up and help the whole process. Another thing, too, if they find that it's really brittle, they can actually reinforce the bone with resin and thin glue. But you need to be careful there, too, which is pretty much helping along the fossilization process. Yeah, I would think so. I mean, it's the same thing. It's like reinforcing it with something sturdy. Well, then you can date it using your little mass spectrometer that's in your pocket. Or a Cat scan. Sometimes these Cat scans, computer imaging, stuff like that. Yeah. I didn't get how they were dating it from Cat scan. I don't know if they're dating it with a Cat scan or just sussing the whole thing out. Got you. I don't think it's a dating situation. Tracy was just throwing out some extra tools of the trade. Yeah, exactly. Got you. So, Chuck, what is all this worth? I mean, we have a thirst for knowledge, obviously, and people think bones are very cool, but ultimately, what's the pursuit of paleontology? Just to put together the piece of the puzzle of how we got here. Right. I mean, that's what I think it is. Yeah, that's my understanding, as well. Yeah. You can learn a lot by not only finding the fossil, but finding what was with the fossil in that same strata. It can tell you, like, hey, this is a trex bone, and there's also a bit of pine tree. So we know pine trees were around, and they may have eaten pine trees. Well, not trex, because they were carnivores. Right. Yeah. They were herbivore, let's say. You know what I mean? A bronzeaurus. Sure. And ultimately, all of these fossils come together, plant, annual, everything that we can get our hands on to form what is called the fossil record. Right? Yes. And this is basically the record of life on Earth. It's also used to support evolution big time. And it's here that paleontology gets most contentious. Right, yeah, sure. Because the idea that beings evolve if you go far enough back from a single common ancestor. Right. And so if we can put together a complete fossil record, we would be able to see how everything alive today evolved from this common ancestor or common ancestors. Right. Yeah. The problem is, fossil record is incomplete, and one of the really key parts that it's often missing are called transitional fossils. Right. My favorite kind of fossil, Josh, is a transitional fossil, and one example Tracy used was the Baleen whale. There's a picture of one, actually in the article. 25 million year old fossil of a Baleen whale with sharp teeth. Today's, Baleen whales don't have sharp teeth, but we know that once before, this had sharp teeth and legs. Right. So this is a transitional fossil that shows well, they used to have legs and sharp teeth, and they just had sharp teeth, and now they don't have legs or sharp. Teeth. They're defenseless, which is why they're baleen whales and not sharks or megalodons. Right. So a transitional fossil is one that pops up between old and new. And it makes sense. Our understanding of evolution is that it takes a little while, and something like teeth aren't just going to go away in one generation. It's going to take more and more and more, and then we should be able to find them along the way, where maybe the teeth get smaller. There's fewer and fewer baleen whale teeth and the average Baline whale mouth. Yeah. And you're putting together the puzzle. Exactly. Again, the fossil record is a little incomplete, and there aren't as many transitional fossils as I think people would like to have. Yeah. Tied all together. Right. And then some of the explanations are probably the most famous explanation for this is that evolution isn't gradual. I think Stephen Jay Gould came up with the idea of punctuated equilibrium, and that is basically that evolution takes place suddenly in these huge quick bites and start, which would explain why there's not like teeth don't go away in a generation, but they go away a lot faster than we used to suspect. Got you. And that's why these fossils, accompanied with the idea that not every animal that's ever died has become fossilized, explain why there are huge gaps in the fossil record which will inevitably always be incomplete. Is that a hypothesis at this point? I guess it is not a theory yet. I don't think so. I think it is a hypothesis. I got one more thing. Okay. I'd like to finish with my favorite kind of fossil, and that is a living fossil. And that, Josh, is when you've got a plant or animal that looks so much like ancient fossils that they consider a living fossil, a la the horseshoe crab. Right. Apparently the horseshoe crab has not changed. Didn't need to. It's perfect. Look at it. It's gorgeous. What else? Ginkgo biloba plants. And then a word that I don't know. Oh, the sealakanth. What is that? It's this horrid looking fish that they remember that VW commercial where he's like, it's like the seal of camp. And the guy's like, what? They're looking in the trunk, and he's like a full size spare tire. He's like, it's like a seal of cancer. They used to think it was extinct. There was a fish, and then they found it in the 1930s again. But it's this dinosaur looking fish I think I've seen them that they thought was extinct for millions of years. And they caught him, I think, in South America, off the coast of South America. They're still around, living fossil. And the horseshoe crab and Steven J. Cole and the geeko bologna. Well, that's it for fossils, right? That's all I have. I think we got the point across. That's an overview. A fossil is a rock. Just remember that, okay? If you want to learn more about fossils. Seriously, this is one of the better articles on the site. Tracy did a great job with it. Type fossils into the search bar. The handy search bar howstephos.com? Which means it's time for listener mail. Josh we made a young girl cry. That's what I'm going to call this one. Okay, it's probably happened more than once. Hi, guys. Jerry. My name is Ali. I'm from Indiana. I was in the ISSMA band contest playing a difficult marimba solo today. I was pretty nervous, but being first chair and the only female percussionist in my school really brought up my confidence. I went in, I choked, and I stumbled through my piece. You could get a gold, silver, bronze or a participation medal. I got the bronze, which is equivalent to a score of an F 20%, and I was really upset. Wait, what is participation then? That's sub F. I didn't even know they made metals. I thought it was just a ribbon. It's probably a ribbon. I was really upset. I got home. I was trying to cheer myself up by listening to your podcast on what's the deal with Sinkholes. I really love the show and have listened to almost everyone, but in the beginning, you guys talk about how much the bronze medals suck. Remember that? Oh, yeah. So we didn't lift her spirits very much. Josh and Chuck, I just want to let you know that the two of you made me cry then from Ally. And I've since written Allie back and apologized. And she said that she's feeling much better now and it wasn't our fault. And I told her that I've choked under pressure many times in my life. It happens and it will happen again and doesn't mean you don't have the goods with your marimba solo every single time. Yeah, but you pick yourself up. Sounds like you gave her some good advice. I think so. She's receptive to it. Sounds like you're a sweet girl. I think that's an excellent lead in if you have a story about choking, not physically choking, but there's something you're good at and you didn't do it. Well, say you're a television reporter in Los Angeles and you're supposed to report on the Grammys, something like that. So you're a podcaster and you have to do a show about the sun, not to give one, too. We want to hear about it. You can send it to us via email. Just type in where it says to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? Check out our blogs on the housetofworks.com homepage. 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."
996a1d3e-5467-11e8-9ed6-37c7734b9461	How Attila the Hun Worked	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-attila-the-hun-worked	If you go to the Internet you'll see a few people championed as all-time greatest conquerors - Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun. Listen in today as Josh and Chuck dive into number three on this list, Atilla the Hun.	If you go to the Internet you'll see a few people championed as all-time greatest conquerors - Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Atilla the Hun. Listen in today as Josh and Chuck dive into number three on this list, Atilla the Hun.	Thu, 09 Aug 2018 14:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=9, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=221, tm_isdst=0)	40847227	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's. Guest producer Dylan again. You know, Dylan got a job here because he heard of how stuff works because he was a Stuff You Should Know fan. This might be the most thrilling moment of Dylan's life. The most thrilling 2 hours. Either that or the most illusion shattering 2 hours. I think that since Dylan started working here, it's just been a slow anticlimax down I think so. Leading to this moment of rock bottom. We're like, that guy. Drag them out. How's it going? It's going terrifically. How are you doing? Good. See, he knows he's a fan. Thumbs up. He didn't even try to speak. Noel be like, well, let me tell you yeah, let me see if I can find a microphone. He just shows one of us out of the way. Dylan knows what he's doing. You know what? I couldn't help him when I was researching this. Probably because we just did. This is think about Genghis sure. Khan. And if you go on the Internet and type in Attilo the Hun or Genghis Khan, there are so many nerdy websites where people pit fictional battles against historic leaders. Oh, really? Yeah. Like, who would have won in a cage match? A Til the Hunter. Genghis Khan. Right. But there's, like, actual thought put behind it. Or is it just like, no, gingers is cool. There's a range from that to the people who really put too much effort into it. But those are interesting to read. You got to remember, guys, Genghis Khan had 1000 years of weaponry development to his advantage. And when it comes to personal fighting tactics as opposed to leadership, those are two different things to talk about. And then their voice changes until they become Toby from American Splendor. So Genghis Khan was what? A thousand years after attila the hunt? Is that correct? Well, because I thought the opposite. I thought he was BCE. And again, we just did a show on him and I already forgot. It says here 1162 for Chingis and 406 for Atula Hunt. That is fascinating. Okay. Yeah. I mean, Chinggis had a lot of advancements in that thousand years, for sure. Yeah. And I don't know, I couldn't help but compare these guys. So I might just sort of pepper that in here and there and comparing these because our own article starts out by mentioning Julie Caesar, Alexander the Great, and Chingis gone as some of the most brutal conquerors in antiquity. I really appreciate you moving to Chingis. Might as well. Sure. So atya the Hunt, he was around between he was in the fifth century Ce. Right. They don't know exactly about his birth date, but they're putting it around 406. No, we should do this chronologically. But I think we should say out of the gate that there is a lot of debate in the historical field of just how much we could say about Attila the Hun's early life. Yeah. Over that period between him and Chingis, there was a lot more record keeping, too. Right. That's a great point. We don't even know what language the Hun spoke necessarily. No, we have to wait on that. No idea. Apparently, one of the things you can kind of glean what language people spoke is from their names. And a lot of the names associated with Attila the Hun and the Huns in general are Germanic. So they say. Well, they spoke Germanic. Other people say? Well, no. By the time till the Hung came around in the fifth century, the Germanic tongue had spread far and wide. So that's probably not what their native tongue originally was. It's just lost the time. One of the reasons it was lost the time is because these were, in the parlance of the day, total barbarians. They were nomadic horse people who lacked virtually anything resembling a government, anything like an economy, anything like the trappings of what you would call a civilization. They were, by definition, barbarians. Right, yeah. But all that aside, it's not to say that civilization is just everything perfect definitely has its own flaws, and barbarianism has its own amazement. Right. But the thing that made the Hunts definitive barbarians is because they would come through, sack your town, burn it down, kill you and your family, and then just move on. They would take your gold. They had no desire to subjugate you, to rule you, to extract taxes, to maybe make you grow crops for them. Nothing. It was basically pillaging, raping, and murdering is what the Hunts were known for, because that's what they did. Yeah. And I think the main difference that I found well, plenty of differences, but the main one between he and Khan was sort of, like you said, genghis Khan wanted to rule the world and spread his empire as ruler of peoples. And Attila the Hun, by all accounts, wanted to collect gold. Right. But was also, for all his ferocity, there are also scholars and historians who believe that, man, I might get these names mixed up now that I'm all in my head about it. I've been just hanging on by my fingernails. There are a lot of scholars and historians who believe that it'silda Han sort of a fair person and generally a man of his word, and maybe rustled up a lot of these stories to drive himself, to drive fear into his enemies, and was not as brutal as maybe history believes in some cases. Yeah. So you remember when we did the Chingis Khan episode, like, there was a lot of examples of things you could point to and be like, they improve the world in these ways. Right. You can count the ones about a Tiller, the Hon, basically on your fingers, and when it was an example of him being, like, uncharacteristically magnanimous by sparing somebody's life. It was totally out of character for him. And one of the things about Chingis Khan as well is that if you surrendered without a fight, if you just said, we surrender, take our town, you would live, and you would live now under the rule of the Mongols yes, he and the Huns would kill you. They kill your whole town. Offering no resistance whatsoever. Did not guarantee in any way, shape or form survival. When you encountered the Hunts, they terrified people for hundreds of years in Europe. But at the same time, if you paid your what do you call it, like the gangster movies? Tribute. Yeah. But like when you pay someone to protect your money yeah, sort of like that. Yeah. Protection from you. Right. Basically, generally, and again, there are examples even in this article of ours where he went back on that. But generally, if you paid that gold, he would also leave you alone because he didn't want to lose. Like I said, he wasn't trying to just conquer the world. So it seemed like he would only undertake a mission or a war if there was something in it for him other than just, like, expanding his kingdom. Yeah. Which on a modern map, eventually. What does it say here? Large portions of Eastern and western Roman empires from Germany in the west to Romania in the south to the Netherlands in the north, and Russia and Kazakhstan in the east. And that was generally a till of the Hans area over about a ten year span. Well, 19, I think. 19 what? 19 years. 19 years, period. But in that ten year span is when he really did a lot of his damage. Dude, that's impressive. And put a big dent in the Roman Empire. That was another thing, too. You can say what you want about the guy, and I think it's worth pointing out all of this is to say, like, nobody is 100% bad. And when you get this far away, almost 2000 years away, 1500 years away from somebody, like, their character just becomes cartoonish. So there is not a lot we can say, especially about the nuances of this guy's character. But you can point to what he did and say, this man changed the course of history. And he definitely did. Especially by basically hastening the fall of the Roman Empire. Right there's. Pretty impressive stuff. I feel like we should almost take a break. That was a nice preamble. All right, let's do it. All right. We'll get back to his birth and start over right after this. All right, so 406 Ce is when they think Attila the Hunt was born in Panonia, which what you would now say is Hungary. Yeah, because by this time, the Hunts, well, they first appear in the Western record, and I think 91 Ce. Tacitus, the historian, Roman historian, says, oh, yeah, by the way, there's these people out there called the hunts. They're a barbarian tribe. Who cares? Watch your back. Well, he didn't even say that. He just basically said there's a barbarian tribe out there. But by the time Attila was born, the hunts had made a name for themselves as being fearsome warriors that just basically could overtake anybody. And they had. Yeah. He was not born his story is very different from Chingis Khan's and that he was born already into, I guess, what you would consider royalty. Right. And privilege. Yeah. And they think the Huns came from Kazakhstan, I think you said, or their empire stretched all the way to Kazakhstan. Yes. Central Asia. They think that's where they probably originated. But by the time Attila was born he was born on the Danube in Hungary, where it became the capital of the area they settled. Yeah. And you mentioned that the Huns were known as fierce warriors, much like Khan's army. They really made their hay on horses. I don't even know if that counts as a pun. It doesn't. All right. It was just delightful, though. They were excellent horsemen. I don't know if they rode those little squatty horses like Khan's army did, but they were great on horseback. Apparently so great that they kind of didn't get off their horses to do much in terms of battle. But even beyond battle, I saw that they held negotiations on their horses. Why? Not that they were characterized as being one with their horse. That was one thing. Right. In the true sense. I hope not mainly for the horse's sake. Yeah. But the fact that they were amazing horsemen that's check one and why they were basically impossible to defeat check Two was they had a special kind of bow called the Hon bow. Right? Yeah. These things are beautiful. There's a recursive bow where the bow itself bent, curved back onto itself, which meant you have more torque, which meant you could shoot an arrow through armor at 100 yards. Yeah. There are all kinds of recurved bows, but this one was especially squatty and kind of short. So it's recurved. It's not recursive. Yeah, recurved. Okay. Yeah. It was short, which meant it was mobile. Yeah. So if you picture just like a Ushaped bow, that's just a bow, but a recurve bends back around to face the other way at both ends and both points. And this one was, like I said, especially squatting. And it's cool looking, like bow enthusiasts collect these things. Right. I can imagine. Hon bows, you say this is a till of the Huns very own bow. Everybody says that. Wait a minute. So we've got two things now. We've got they were basically one with their horse. They were so good on a horse, they could shoot arrows through your armor 100 yards away. Almost 100 meters away. While on these horses that's check, too. Yeah. And then number three is that they didn't fight in any sort of coherent battle formation. It was just show up out of nowhere, ride around, start picking people off, scatter regroup out of nowhere, show up again, pick more people off, scatter regroup. And like, you had no idea that they were coming at any point in time and they would just come and basically waste your arm. There was no formation that you could form against. It was just chaos. Yeah. And fast. Like before you knew what was going on, you're getting arrows slung your way and like you said, from any direction. It wasn't like, here they come from the north. Right. Like, they were all over the place. It says here in this one article you sent that the soldiers, they wore these heavy leather greased outfits, greased with animal fat, which separates good body outfit, which I said made them both supple and rain resistant. Maybe that was for the horses. And steel line helmets, chainmail. They're very nimble. They also use swords, of course. And their leather boots, they rode horses so much, they didn't even worry about hiking. So they would wear these leather boots that had very thin soles that I guess made your feet more responsive to stir up action. I don't know. Sure. Or they were just more comfortable. They're like Isotoner boots. Did they make shoes? Oh, no, you're talking about the clubs. They make slippers, I think. Oh, really? I think so. I'll think of as Dan Marino when I hear that. Isoton or gloves and Ace Ventura. All right, so these are the Huns. They're nomadic, they're chaotic in battle, they're fierce. Their stories precede them, their legend precedes them. So when you are getting attacked, that's got to do a mental number on you. Especially when they came upon towns and cities, like sometimes entire cities, they would level them, just utterly destroy. They would take everything they wanted, kill everybody that they wanted. They would take hostages and slaves and prisoners, but then they would just destroy the town. And there was one town in Italy called Aqualia Aquilia, I believe. No one knows where it was. They know it existed, but then the Huns got the Hun, sacked it, and now no one has any idea what was cause they just utterly destroyed the town. Well, that was like the kind of thing they would do almost just out of spite, just maliciously, you know? Yeah. Because apparently Attila the Hun was known for using his fierce reputation as an advantage. And he didn't want to fight or thought that fighting was unwise. He could use his reputation to get you to surrender and then maybe you would survive, maybe you wouldn't. But they didn't necessarily need that because they backed up the fierce reputation. They actually did these things that people feared them for. And they had a name for the Huns and apparently specifically Atela the Hun in the Holy Roman or the Roman Empire, pre Holy Roman. They call them the Flagellum Day. The Scourge of God. And this is what these Christians thought, that God had sent this horrible, almost devil figure to come and wipe their towns from the earth because they weren't living upright enough. Yeah. And I saw some historians think that he might have even made that name up. Oh, really? It seems like he was a big promoter of his wicked ways just to scare people. Well, it's still working on me because I'm passing all this stuff off. He was often drawn with, like, goat's horns and things like that, and I think he encouraged this stuff. Well, he did famously say that wherever he's trod or passed, grass will never grow again. So, yeah, he definitely would play it up. It didn't hurt his feelings that people said these things about him. Right. I don't think we mentioned yet he took over, along with his brother, Blada B-L-E-D-A when they were young, their uncles, actually. There was a lot of biarchy going on at the time with the Huns, which is a little bit unusual for a couple of people to split ruling duties. And their uncles jointly ruled the Hunt Empire. Eventually, the brothers took over as Co rulers in 434, and I think they even had their own territories that they're in charge of. It's not like they were together. And then eventually Attila was like, yeah, I think I'd rather just really operate this show by myself. And he killed his brother. Killed his own brother. That's harsh. I didn't see. How did you see? I didn't I couldn't find it. No, I couldn't either. I saw once a story about a knight, I think, who killed his own brother, but his brother was a priest saying Mass, and the knight came in and cut his own brother's head off while he was saying Mass. Wow. Like, if there is a God, that really upset them, I'm sure. So he and his brother Co rule, and they settled down a little bit on the great what was known as the Great Hungarian Plains. A little less nomadic at this point were the Huns. Yeah. Because they were weighed down with so much gold and plunder, they couldn't ride around like they did. So have we reached the point where he's the single ruler now? Yeah, let's go ahead and get rid of his brother. So we should say, I don't know if this name came upon him ascending to being the Co ruler with his brother or the single ruler, but Attila means Little Father. They do not think that this is his birth name, because that's just no matter what age or period of history we're talking about, it'd be weird to name your son Little Father. They think it was a name of respect and affection, is how I saw it put, and that they think that this was basically his king name, was Attila. They have no idea what his real name was, but they think that Attila was not it. No. But by the time he became ruler, like you said, he was born into a privileged household. He knew what to do. From a very early age, his uncles as rulers brought him and his brother Bletta up to speak Latin. So maybe he did come up with flagellum dee, maybe Goth, which was another Germanic tribe who figure into this picture later on and to understand diplomacy, military strategy, horsemanship, obviously, all of this stuff. So he's brought up to lead. So it was kind of natural that he would kill his brother and take over the entire Han Empire. Yeah. And another thing I thought was interesting was even though he was sort of on a conquest for gold and riches, he lived sort of simply as a ruler. Right. Like all of his upper subordinates, apparently, they did live the high life, and they drank from silver and gold chalices and had fancy clothes and big mansions. Platform shoes. Platform shoes with goldfish in the heel. And Attila lived in a log house with animal skins on the walls and drank from a wooden cup. And even though he wanted to get all this gold, it doesn't look like he lived that way, which is pretty interesting. Yeah. That really kind of opens up the guy for interpretation. It says a couple of things. One, he's surrounded by all these material goods, but his tastes are extraordinarily simple, and he stuck to it. He didn't try to show off at any point. He just was who he was as far as his taste went. And then secondly, he also didn't demand that the people subordinate to him live like he lives. Right. That says an enormous amount. There's so many people at the top who want the people below them to act like them, to live like them, to behave like them. So for him to have like there was a cult of personality around this guy, and for him to allow and maybe even encourage people to live their own way, totally counter to how he lived, I don't know. He's a complex figure. Yeah, for sure. Should we talk about the Treaty of Margaret? Yeah. This is a big turning point in history. Yeah. So this was in he I believe we're going back to when Bledo was still alive. They worked up a peace treaty called the Treaty of Margas with what is this, the Eastern Roman Empire? Yes. And they basically said, hey, if you return all these Hun refugees, basically people that fled my rule, return these people to us. How many were there? At least 14, but I think maybe 17. Yeah, like, not 17,000, but 17 people. But that's how much he prized loyalty, is how I saw it put. Yeah. Like, I want these people back. And he also didn't want them going off into the Roman Empire and stirring up rebellion to come take over the Hanukk Empire. Yeah, exactly. So if you return these people, we'll establish some trading rights that are fair. You guys pay us about \u00a3700 of gold every year directly to me and my bro, right. And we'll lay off, and you can just kind of do your thing here in the Eastern Roman Empire. Yeah, it's extortion. Yeah, I saw that. Atilla, he plundered in war and extorted in peace time. That's what he did. Okay. So, yeah, he said, we won't invade you if you pay us \u00a3700 of gold a year. And he didn't. For a while, he didn't. But then there was another part of this, too. He said that he wanted not just the traitorous Huns who left or escaped his rule to be returned to him. He also wanted a Roman bishop who he believed had come into the Hanukk Empire and desecrated some graves and stolen grave goods from the graves to be handed over to them. And apparently the Eastern Emperor, Thadosius II, said, hey, man, I gave all of the hans I could find in the Empire over to you and this bishop. I don't know what you're talking about. I don't think this is actually true. They didn't give over the bishop, and so Attila actually said, you guys just broke the treaty. We're invading. And he did invade, and they actually invaded through Margas. And the guy who opened the gates of Margas for them to the Huns was the bishop who stole the grave goods. So had the Emperor handed over this guy, the invasion of Italy by the Huns would have never happened. That's the sound that played when he opened the gate. Apparently, they got within about 20 miles of Constantinople, and Theodosius, too, said, Whoa, you're getting a little too close. How about 2100 pounds of gold per year? Three times as much gold. And I believe that quelled Attila's desires temporarily, at least. Temporarily. That just meant with Attila that he just turned a site somewhere else. Yeah. You want to take a break? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Okay. Man we're back. So the Eastern Roman Empire has said, all right, here, take some more gold. Leave us alone. And he did for a little while. But one of the things that Hunt did was he created like, a domino effect. There were other Germanic tribes of barbarians and making air quotes everybody who were in the area, that got pushed out of the area and into the Roman Empire by the Hunt. So the Hunts pushed out the Allens, the Allens pushed out the Goths, the Goths pushed out some other tribes. And as a result, you now had other Germanic tribes living in the Roman Empire. It's a big seed that got planted by the Huns because the Huns pushed everybody out and took over their empire. Right. Yeah. This actually led to the downfall of the Roman Empire later on. Yeah. Was that the great migration? Yeah. Or the wandering of the nations. Now, is this when people split and just fractured the Roman Empire. I don't fully get that. What happened was these different tribes got pushed into the Roman Empire the living, the punks, the postpunks. Right. The vandals. The vandals. Isn't that cool? So the Visigoths in particular got pushed into there, and they were living as Roman subjects under Roman rule, but they were not being treated very well by the Roman governors of the territories they lived in. And they eventually rose up against Rome, against the Roman Empire in the areas where they lived. And these little battles and skirmishes that Rome was having or the Roman Empire was having with these groups that would have otherwise not been in their borders, started to weaken the Empire enough that it actually fell. I think it was the Goths that actually sacked Rome and crumbled the Roman Empire. And the whole reason they could make it to Rome was because they were in the Roman Empire already, because the Hunts had pushed them in there years before and set off this chain of events that led to maybe the most powerful empire in the history of the world attella the Honda. That it wasn't Susie and her banshees. No. Leaving the Goths? No. Did you like them? Yeah. Me, too. They're great. I generally wasn't into that. The Goth thing, though. Was she Goth? Yes. Okay. I don't even know what counts. You didn't like the cure or the Smiths? I guess the Smiths weren't Goth, but the cure definitely was. You didn't like the cure? I love the cure, but Chuck, you're Goth. Really, my friend. You're goth? All right. I'll get my mascara. Okay. Yeah. I mean, some of those terms, I don't even know, like, what the dividing line is. People are still hung up on that kind of thing. Do you like the cure? Yes. Good. You're smart for liking the cure. They're great. And you're a Goth, right? Should we talk about his weird marriage situation? Yes. So this was odd. Well, obviously he had a bunch of wives, because that's just the way it was back then. No one knows how many wives. I don't think it's like anything like Chingis Khan, where they think he fathered, like, half the world's people or anything like that, but he had a share of wives. And this was an interesting thing here. In the spring of 1450, there was a woman named Anna RIA, and she was the sister of Valentinian III, emperor of Western Rome. He was trying to marry her off to an aristocrat, as you do. Like, you're my sister. Here, take this husband. Go. He'll get out of my hair, tired of hearing about it. And she was like, I don't really like this guy who you're trying to hook me up with, so I'm going to do a weird thing. He's got no hair growing out of his nose. And he's like, Everybody has hair growing out of their nose. It's the fifth century. So she sends her engagement ring to Attila, said, hey, I don't want to marry this guy. Can you help me out? This is a very bizarre act. It's a bizarre act because Attila basically sees this as, oh, she wants to marry me because I've got this little wedding ring now I put on my pinky toe and I'm going to go claim this bride. And I also want half of your empire as dowry. Yeah, half of the Western Roman Empire. He demanded as dowry and he was coming to get Enoria. Did you call her anoreia honoria? Honoria. And it seems to me like Enoria was kind of like immediately like, what? Yes. How is this woman not more famous? I don't know, like, what a blunder. This is a crazy blunder that led to a huge sacking of Rome. Yeah. I feel like there's part of the story missing. Why reach out to atilla the hunt? From what I saw, they'd never met before. There was no interaction whatsoever. She just basically said, here's, servant, take this ring to Attila the Hun. I don't know where he is. Go find him. He wasn't like, met her years ago, and it's like, hey, if you ever need anything, right, remember me from high school, Enoria, give me a call. I'll sack whatever needs sacking. None of that happened, from what I understand. Right. I guess this dude was just the baddest, fiercest guy that Honora could think of. And she said, Help. She really made a misstep in including the engagement ring or maybe even reaching out at all. But the engagement ring was it gave Attilo the Hon just enough Entree to say, oh, this is a pretty good reason to invade the Western Roman Empire. Which he did. That's right. Looking for Enoria. That was the pretense. Yeah. But on his way, he took another wife named Ildico. I think so. Alright. And on their wedding night, he actually died. He was not known, especially for the time, to be like, a great drinker. I mean, he wasn't a teetotaler. No. But he was very moderate, temperate person as far as that stuff goes. Yeah. For the most part. He wasn't like the rest of the Huns that were just getting wasted every night or the rest of the Western Roman or Eastern Roman Empire. He was basically the one large area ruler who wasn't just getting wasted and eating like 500 turkey legs at a time. Right. He was different in that sense, for sure. Yeah. He was the only one that didn't have gout. Yeah, I guess, as far as I know. Sure. So he marries this lady. Apparently he did drink a little bit too much on his wedding night, and supposedly he was prone to nosebleeds, and as the story goes, in the middle of the night, had some sort of massive nosebleed. Also saw something about an artery bursting and choked on his blood in his sleep and died. Yeah. That's supposedly. How I told the Hun died. Weird story. Yeah. But believable, I guess. Yeah. I mean, the alternative explanation is that Ildico murdered him or abetted an assassination that was carried out by, I think, one of the other the Eastern or Western Roman emperors. Either way, like they think I got the impression that that's the generally accepted ideas that he choked on his own blood, he basically died of natural causes, which, I mean, it's like, gosh, you over indulge one night and you pay for it with your life. But throughout his reign, we left out a huge chunk of his history. At some point, he turned his attention to Gaul, france, modern day France, Belgium area, and that's where he suffered his one defeat. So out of the entire 19 years, this guy was running around eurasia, terrorizing it. He suffered one defeat and even then it was really a draw. But he attacked Gaul with like 2000 troops. Yes. Amazing. And the Western Roman Emperor got with the Goths and said, you guys, we got to do something about this. And they managed to basically enter into a draw with the Hunts. So much so that the Huns had to withdraw to their camp and eventually left Gall after this. But it was supposedly one of the bloodiest battles in the history of the world. Yeah, they managed to fight him back. And this is after the beginning was definitely going in the favor of the Huns. So it looked like the writing was on the wall and was there a big comeback. But imagine basically spending every day of your life engaged in conquest and battle and you got one loss to your name. Yeah. You got to have one. Everybody's got to have the ups with the downs, right? Yeah. Well, let's talk about his burial after his death. Yeah, this is pretty interesting. After he died, his horsemen, his followers, they cut off their hair, they smeared blood all over their face and they slowly circled him on their horses. I don't know if that was a sign of respect that normally happens or if they were just reacting instinctively or if it was some old ritual, but at any rate, they just slowly rode around his body. That was in a tent. Eventually he went in three coffins, which makes me think that he could still be found. Yes. Because he was in a coffin of gold, silver and iron, apparently. Like what is it, a matureska nest? Oh, I don't know. Matrousca. What is that? You know the little Russian dolls that nest inside one another. Sure. Russian nesting dolls. Let's just call them that. Yeah. Okay. I didn't know they had a I think metroca. Yeah, I think so. I love those. Yeah, they're great. And show me a child that's not delighted by one of those. Yeah. Little things inside of other things. I'll show you a doler. They put them in three coffins? According to legend, they divert a river, like, fully dam up a river and bury him in the river bed, and then release the river once again so that his grave would never be found. They also killed the people who buried him so that they couldn't tell anybody yeah. Who were slaves. So that sounds like a total, like, Paul Bunyan esque tall tale, right? Yeah. There's actually historical evidence that this had been done at least two other times. The emperor Gilgamesh. You know, the epic of Gilgamesh. Sure. They believe that they found his resting place under the Euphrates, and legend has it that they diverted the Euphrates to bury them in the river bed for the same exact reason they think they've actually found Gilgamesh's burying place. And then I think theodocius, I the goth. Yes. The Goth king who was killed in one of those battles in Gaul, the one that repelled athlete dawn almost. I know he was buried in a diverted river as well. They're saying they think this actually may have happened, which means that if you search I bet it was the Danube that they buried them in. But if you search a river, I would start with the Danube, because that's where the capital of the Huns was. Could they divert the Danube, though? I don't know. Maybe a part of it. Who knows that maybe one day, Atela the Huns grave will be found, especially as archaeological technology advances. I guarantee you, in 50 years, we're going to have found a tiller, the Hunscray man, and it will be under a riverbed in three coffins. Yes. I really think that that's for real. I believe it. Believe it. Oh, wait, you said you did. Yeah. You got anything else? No. I mean, there's a lot of Attila the Hun stuff that we did not get to. Can I add one more thing? Yeah. I want to defend my use of barbarian. One of the I think contemporary historians described the Huns as not making no use of fire. Didn't even use fire. Supposedly, they didn't cook their food. They would eat roots from the ground and then raw meat that they would put between their thighs and the saddle to tenderize it, I guess, and then they would eat that. They're barbarians. Okay. I saw that article. It said something like half raw, and they said, we say half raw because they would hold it between their thighs to cook it. Yeah, you got some beef thighs there. You got some red stained thighs. That sounds like I don't know what that sounds like on the menu. Something that's been cooked from the thighs of a Hun. Right. It's kind of like it's one hipster step above sous vide cooking, really, if you think about it. Okay, now we're done nothing like the warm glow of a hunt testicle boy who's going off the rails here. So if you want to know more about the Huns, you can type that word in the search Barhouse to force.com. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this follow up, too. We got a surprising amount of email from that goofy show we did on the Jobs. Yeah, I know. There's, like, a high volume episode. I was surprised. You never know. And by the way, we had a lot of people write in and say, by the way, there is still chariot racing. It's called harness racing pinsetters and I take issue with that. Harness racing is harness racing. Those are not chariots. Okay, what about it's the same thing. There are pinsetters and lamplighters, too. Basically, it was a fraudulent episode, but I'm with you. Harness racing is not cherry. No. Like standing up in a wooden box being pulled by eight horses is not the same thing as a harness race. I've been to a harness race. I have two. My dad used to take us to those. Really? Let us bet like, a dollar on them. I don't think I ever won. Yeah, which is probably good for my gambling bug. It never took off at a young age. Yeah, just the skittles and poker. Yeah, I'm not a big gambler, either. Okay. All right. So, anyway, this is about lamplighters. This is from Carlos in Mexico. Hi, guys. I found the stuff you talk about about lamp lighting fascinating. I like to add some extra info. Back in the day, people used to tip and or threaten the lamplighters to leave the lamp near a park bench or something turned off so couples could have more privacy. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like, hey, don't like that lamp. I got to cure some meat over here. The Hanway, the hunway. In fact, there is a Spanish folk song by the chamberlace suggestion on how to pronounce it. Jerome. Is it a DJ? It's A-C-H pronounced like A-J-U. He says Jerome, all right, about a lamplighter being harassed by couples every night to leave the lamp off, the chorus loosely translates as follows lamplighter, go a little over there and leave this lamp off. In love affairs, the light of lamp always gets in the way. And this song is from the song Farrellero by the chamberlas. How about that? I think you made it through quite nicely. And this is from Carlos from Guadalajara. And he also wants to suggest a topic how capture work. Oh, nice. Do we not cover that? No. We could do a whole one on, like, Captcha and the Turing Test and all that'd. Be cool. Because Captcha stands for something, right? Stands for computer automated something test to tell computers and humans apart. I know. That's the end. Yeah, I think we did something about that on our dumb TV show. That's what it was. You're absolutely right. Yeah. Well, if you want to get in touch with us to find out what dumb TV show Chuck is talking about, good luck, because we don't talk about it any longer. You can follow us by going on to our website, stephaniestudo.com, looking for all of the links to our social medias and then meeting us there. You can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstephorts.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetepworks.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 Kilgarre 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."
870bd6a6-3b0e-11eb-9699-6f7571129eaf	Salem Witchcraft Trials: More Bonkers Than You Know	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/salem-witchcraft-trials-more-bonkers-than-you-know	Looking back 300 years on, it’s easy to overgeneralize why the Salem Villagers decided to persecute (and execute) their neighbors. But as much as this story has become an American history chestnut, we still don’t understand why Salem lost its mind.	Looking back 300 years on, it’s easy to overgeneralize why the Salem Villagers decided to persecute (and execute) their neighbors. But as much as this story has become an American history chestnut, we still don’t understand why Salem lost its mind.	Tue, 26 Oct 2021 12:26:29 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=12, tm_min=26, tm_sec=29, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=299, tm_isdst=0)	47229072	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles w chuck Bryan over there. There's Jerry over here lurking around like a bit of ghoul because it is the Halloween season, after all, and this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Spooky witch trials. Yeah, it is. It's really nice to have stuff like this that you can be removed from by a few hundred years, and it just kind of evokes that Halloween spirit or whatever. But, Chuck, I have found just in recently researching this, if you put yourself into the position of the people who are walking to the gallows and think about how nuts all this was, it is exponentially scarier on a much more existential level. It goes beyond, like, Halloween spooky, too. This is a genuinely frightening event in the history of America. No kidding. I mean, like, it was messed up in every way, shape or form. So I take it you never read The Crucible. I did read The Crucible, but I read it in the matt. Didn't do it. No, it really didn't. Because I don't know if it was me. Maybe I wasn't mentally or emotionally prepared to accept it on that level. Who knows? But no, it was like imagining myself in the shoes of the people who are going to die that got me researching. Wow. Yeah, that's dark. No shade, though, on Arthur Miller. He was great, and his play was great, and it was very timely for the time. Yeah. There have been so many kind of movie adaptations and TV movie adaptations about this time, and I'm still waiting for sort of the one great one that's not The Crucible. Well, I think part of the reason why there hasn't been that great one yet is because historians are still actively competing, explaining just what exactly happened in Salem. It's such an anomaly, even among puritans, even among people who believe there was such a thing as witchcraft and even executed witches, this was a genuine anomaly, at least as far as American history goes. And I think because they don't understand it fully, it's difficult to really get the point across as well. I don't know, man. I think you could make a great movie. Like, look at the witch that Danced around it so well. You just need a movie like that. But based on this. Well, why don't we just save the witch then, is all we need. Well, because it wasn't about the Salem witch trials, but, I mean, it was so analogous to it and took place at the same time. Just pretend like there's a trial scene that they cut out. Okay. And there actually is a lot of other people. They drag the father into court, basically, and excommunicate them. So there is almost like a witch trial scene right there. Yeah, that's true. Forget about that first. Second, the witch is the Salem witch. Trial movie. We've always needed that's. Right. So I'm glad we resolved that. You must feel very satisfied now. Yeah, I completely disagree, but I'm just moving on. So everybody knows about the Salem witch trials, right? But I think because we learn about it in American history, you hear about it, Halloween stories, all of that kind of stuff. But like I said, I mean, we really genuinely don't understand what happened. And that's despite the fact that it is really well documented because a lot of the stuff took place in the courts and they wrote a lot of stuff down, but we only have official primary documents that were written by people who were aware that these were public documents rather than, say, a trove of private journals and letters. The puritans didn't do that that much. And so we don't have kind of the underneath the official line explanation for what happened. Well, yeah, and if people are confused by what we mean, there there were other witch trials in other places in the young America. There were other witch trials in centuries previous in other countries, and there were mild panics and stuff, but Salem collectively lost their mind for a short period of time. And that's what people still don't get. They're like, why did that happen only there to this scope, in this degree? And people have looked at various biological reasons and things like that, but I don't know. I think it was just sort of one of those weird things that could only happen at one place in one time. Yeah, exactly. And there was actually a guy who wrote a book in 1082 named John Demos, and he said not only can it happen under these very specific circumstances, here are the circumstances that could happen. His book wasn't just about Salem. It mentioned Salem, but it was about, like, witchcraft trials and panics and accusations in New England in general. And he basically said that when a town starts out really small and it's like a colonial town, they're living, like, on the razor's edge of existence. A lot of them don't really know each other. They're dying. So there's a big population turnover as newcomers come in, and there's just not enough familiarity to say, I think you're a witch to accuse your neighbor, or something like that. But then after they settle in a little while and maybe there's like, some boredom and everybody gets to know each other and you have grudges, but you're still living in a really small area, that's when the witchcraft accusations can really take place. And Salem seems to have kind of followed that pattern too, that these witchcraft accusations really took hold at a time where the colony was under tons of stress. People knew each other, had had decades long rivalries and land disputes, and they lived still in a very small little village, and they were basically crawling all over one another and saw one another. And you could not get away from people you didn't like. Yes. And this is especially true in Salem. There was Salem village in Salem town, and like you said, they were stacked on each other. And there were a lot of, like, hey, your cow can't graze over this imaginary line because that's my land, and you're not even allowed to build a fence over there. Like, kind of common land disputes that have happened throughout history. But in Salem, they were described as a very quarrelsome people. They fought and argued a lot, kind of more so than it seems like even other Puritans in other parts of the country. Yeah. And the Puritans in general were deeply litigious. They took each other to court at the drop of a hat. At the drop of a hat with a belt buckle on it. But the way that they supported that kind of litigiousness was to say most of the courts would be like, you need to go handle this privately, and then this kind of secondary mediation kind of thing would come in, and there'd be negotiations, and then the dispute would be resolved. But the first thing that they would do is drag one another into court. That was how they would get one another's attention. Yeah. And so this is sort of the backdrop of what's going on in the Massachusetts Bay colony and particularly in Salem village and Salem Town, which I think Salem Village today is Danvers. That's right. And then Salem town is Salem. That's right. Still around and still has spooky connotations. Yeah. And Danvers is where the state asylum was located. That was the setting for one of the greatest horror films of all time, session nine. Oh, that's right. Oh, man, that's a movie I don't even know if I want to see again. It's so good. I saw it a year or two ago, and it's still just as good. It's great. All right. So the Puritans were in control. I guess the back backdrop of this was there were full on human holocaust in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries with their witch crazes, and things got really out of hand over there. But by the time folks got to be here, they were mainly just arguing a lot. And there was a small witch panic in Connecticut. Not small if you were one of the people accused, but it didn't quite get out of hand. Certainly not like it did in Europe and centuries previous. Yes. And I saw an explanation. I want to give a shout out to a couple of sites, but when I got a lot of info from is called the historic present, and they were pointing out that, for the most part, yes, people generally agreed that there were such things as witches. And, yes, you would accuse your neighbor of witchcraft, but it was kind of like it was a way of getting your neighbor's attention. Like I'm serious about this. I'm publicly accusing you being a witch. Let's talk about your cow grazing on my land. And that was another thing that made Salem so anomalous is that it just kept going and going through the steps of the court in trial and then finally executions, and it just got out of hand, basically. Right. So the Puritans are in control in the Massachusetts Bay colony. They've got an iron fist on ruling. They don't like basically anybody who is not a Puritan. It seems like most of the Puritans didn't even like each other, but they certainly didn't like Quakers. They didn't like Catholics, and they did all they could to really establish themselves as the ones in charge and did so well. Yeah. It depends on who you're talking about, though. There were some Puritans who were deeply conservative religious leaders, like increased matter who wanted to just completely secure 100% Puritan control. But there was also, like, a real thread through the Puritan leadership that was willing to give voting rights and the ability to be elected into office to non Puritans who lived in town. And they had kind of a proto democracy in a lot of ways. So, like, the Puritans in general yes, were deeply intolerant of Quakers and Catholics, and they actually tortured Quakers who were unrepentant. But they also did have they weren't just, like the band of theocratic thugs that they're often painted as. There's just more nuance to it than that. But, yes, there were plenty who are like, no, we just need total Puritanical control over this whole colony. Yeah. And as we'll see, once the witch trials were conducted, I said that Salem collectively lost their mind. Sort of true in a way, and that a lot of people in power, and the decision makers did. But there were still people even while it was going on, it wasn't like 100% of the town was behind this. There are a lot of people, and I guess they were probably some of those reasonable people that you were talking about. They were like, what we're doing is it right? I don't think they really spoke up too vocally, but they were like, what is going on here? This is getting out of hand and kind of crazy. Yeah. I mean, it was such a dangerous situation where it was one of those kind of fascist situations where people who did dare to speak out against this and say, this is crazy, this is wrong, or even to testify on behalf of somebody who is accused, you are putting your own life at risk. There is a possibility you would be accused of witchcraft and then tried and then executed. It was that kind of a situation, even with people on the outside knowing that this is wrong, it was just such an inevitable machine that it was like people just stayed out of its way for a little while. All right. I think that is a healthy preamble. Okay. Foundation is laid. I think we should take a break okay. And come back talk about those Mather boys right after this. I concur. Okay, Chuck. So you want to talk some mathers as the Beaver? He's still around, I believe, but, by the way, he still did. He's one of those guys that stayed the same. Yeah. I think it doesn't help that he dresses the same still, too, but you can recognize him even in a tux, I'm guessing. So you can't talk about the Salem witch trials without talking about the mothers. I'm talking about the elder mother, whose name was Increase love these Puritan names. And the younger mother, Cotton Mather, he was the son of a matter, so Increased Mother, he was like you said, he was sort of the staunch Puritan who was in a position of power. He was working to establish a charter that would basically give the Puritans all the power. He was also a believer. And because I mentioned the European witch trials, this is sort of the background that allowed people like Increase Mother and Cotton Mother to really legitimately believe that demons were real and Satan could overtake and possess someone and that there were real witches. I mean, that was just generally the Puritanical worldview, but some people were much more preoccupied with it than others, and the Mathers were both deeply preoccupied with this kind of thing. And Increased Matters gets a lot of the blame for this, and rightfully so, but there's a lot of lesser known people who actually were way more villainous during this and really took advantage of this crazy situation and really just didn't care about the lives of innocent people. But he was not good, and that he helped fan the flames of this initially, big time. That's right. We'll get a little bit more into the matters as we go. Cotton was certainly one of the villains of the trials, and they were both writing books about supernatural things. So this was all sort of the foundation that was laid when the first two people were accused in January of 1692. Yes. So, to start, there were two girls, ages 911. There was Betty Paris. Elizabeth Paris is her name. And Abigail Williams. And they basically started barking and convulsing and just behaving really bizarrely and strangely and would not stop. And so Samuel Paris, who was the head of the Salem village Church, it was actually a pretty divisive figure. Apparently, he brought in a doctor, and the doctor proclaimed this to be bewitched, that these girls were bewitched, and that's ultimately what kicked the whole thing off. And a lot of people have tried to figure out what initially started that, because just about everybody who has a theory about this immediately converts to mass hysteria. But you still have that first case of Abigail Williams and or Elizabeth Paris to explain, and apparently it was, like, really prolonged stuff. They were vomiting. They were doing stuff beyond just behaving weirdly. They seem to be physically afflicted. That's another thing, too, that I think theories that say, like, it was all just a hoax, that these girls perpetrated that doesn't understand just how long these girls carried out this stuff. And I think it kind of ignores the fact that the Puritans weren't dumb people. They were deeply religious. They believed in witches and Satan having a hand on things here on earth. But they also were very smart, very practical, and they would have seen right through a couple of girls just planning a hoax or carrying out a hoax. So there has to be something there at the beginning that no one has ever fully explained that kicked this whole thing off. Yeah. I mean, it's hard not to become a little obsessed with some sort of biological root. I know ergot poisoning has been mentioned. I saw encephalitis. I saw that one, too. That was interesting. Yeah. And just some other possible reasons of, like, maybe something physically was wrong with them while they also happened to be goofing around with folk magic and stuff like that. Not a good combination to get sick while you're being a kid and playing around was essentially what they were doing. Yeah, but I mean, if you think about the fact that the adults were like, okay, this is significant enough that we're going to start looking around for the witches and the girls started accusing people, too. It does seem like there was something going on with at least one of them. And then yes, it started to spread probably through mass hysteria to other girls in the village. When you read the sort of timeline account, I feel like if that original doctor hadn't said the word which it could have gone in a completely different direction. Yeah. He should have just been like, it's anti NMDAR encephalitis dummy. An autoimmune disease that will only begin to grasp in the everyone would say you're a witch. Right. You just use some crazy words, doc, the doctor has breathed the word which the girls are like. They're like, hey, what's going on with you? And they said, you know, it's tetuba. It is my father's slave to tuba, and it's her fault and she's a witch like you said. They started accusing and they started with her. They started with her. And then they very quickly moved on to Sarah Goode and Sarah Osbourne. And by doing that, by accusing those two women or actually with Tituba as well, all three of them. Is it Tituba? I've always heard Tituba, but I've heard I think that for Tituba before, too, but sounds more right. Okay. By accusing those three women, they were following, abigail and Elizabeth were following, like, a well established tradition of focusing on older women on the margins of society as witches. Right. Tituba was easy to accuse because she was a foreigner. She was brought to the colony as a slave, and she worked as a slave in the Paris house. So who knows what she was into before she came over to Massachusetts, I guess, was the thinking of the Puritans. But then also Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, they were like older women who were poor, lived on the fringes of society, and that is who you accused of being a witch, typically. So at first, this witch panic kind of followed the standard, which accusations that had been spread around New England before. But what made it different is that it just started to pick up steam more and more because more and more girls and people around the colony or around the village I'm sorry, started to suffer bewitchment and started accusing one another of bewitching them. Yeah. If you were a person, for sure, a woman, but a man or a woman who, like you said, was about middle aged and you were over there kind of doing your own thing a little bit and maybe just kept to yourself, maybe you didn't like hanging out in the village as much as the rest of the villagers did. You march to the beat of your own drum. You had a target on your back, basically. Right? Yeah. And also, apparently one of the things that they were well known for, these people who are accused of, which is would be like, they needed things from their neighbors, so they would extract them by threatening to curse them. So they would actually use witchy threats. They were probably also into folk magic. So it wasn't just completely baseless, other than the fact that witches in that kind of Puritanical conception don't exist, but it wasn't just totally out of the blue. If you, a modern person, saw the person that they were originally, that they traditionally accused of being witches, you'd be like, oh, my gosh, a real life witch. There's one right there. It would fit the bill for you. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, for sure. So these accusations start flying around. They start mounting, the jails start filling up. The conditions in the jail were not good. It got so crazy early on. And this is where the first part this is before the trials and hangings and everything. This is when you were just, like, jailed and shackled and then charged for your shackles, I guess, like a rental fee. But they arrested a four year old named Dorothy Goode, and she was eventually released. But a four year old it's crazy, me, as a father, having gone through life with a four year old, that you could accuse a four year old of being anything other than a four year old. Right, exactly. But she wasn't. She was held for months. I think she was arrested in March and released in May. And this wasn't like a pleasant December. Oh, my goodness. Okay, so she was there for almost a year, just under a year for the intents and purposes of exaggerating, just how bad this was. She was in there for basically a year. Okay. Yeah. Sarah Oscar died in jail. Right. She died in jail, yeah. This is the thing, like, these jails were like dirt floors. You were chained, like you're saying, it was a place where life could just be lost way too easily. So to keep a four year old in there for almost a year is just horrible. There was a woman who gave birth in jail, and they just left her infant daughter in there with her. So the infant didn't survive. She died in jail just from being born in jail. Somebody who was accused of being witches. And this was before the trials had even started, Chuck. This was just the initial phase of the panic, which was accusation, accusation, accusation. And then suddenly the jails were overflowing with more than 100 people who were accused of being witches. And the court was totally backed up with increased mather. And the new governor that he was coming back with, william Phipps, who he'd gotten appointed, showed back up in Salem and were like, what is going on here? And they had a choice. Chuck. They could have been like, have you all lost your mind? What are you doing? Stop this right now. Let all these people out. They didn't go that route. They went the exact opposite route. At that moment, when they decided which way to go, they chose incorrectly, basically. Yeah. And it was also a pretty bad time. It was kind of what's the word? Conflagration. Man, you nailed it. And it sounded so confident. Confident. It was a conflagration of a bunch of things happening politically and legally. It was a very bad time because by the time the trials rolled around, they eventually got this new charter. But previous to that, the charter of the colony was temporarily suspended. Right. And a new charter did arrive in May 1692, in the hands of the elder mother, but it was brand new. And the court didn't create laws. They didn't have time to create any new laws, that is. So they basically said, all right, we got all these people in jail. We need to quickly establish a special court for this. And we'll call it the Court of Lawyer and Terminal to hear and determine, and we're going to get these people out of jail or kill them. So they're no longer in jail, but they're getting out one way or another. Right. So it helps us out with this. We should say we failed to mention so far, but he points out that William Phipps, the new governor, possibly went along with the idea of creating a new court to get rid of this backlog of witchcraft accusations, to get these people out of jail, to get this over and done with. And that may have happened, actually, but he was very much focused on dealing with the constant threat that the colonists lived under, of being attacked by Native Americans. King Phillips war king Phillip being the guy that punk Tawny Phil was named after, that I got way wrong. In our groundhog episode that had just ended, there was another war that included the French and the Native Americans to the north, sweeping down all the way into Massachusetts and staging rates. So they've lived under constant threat of death, which definitely didn't help their mindset during the witchcraft panic. But that's what Phipps was worried about. That's what he was working on. So he threw the the job of seeing this court through to his lieutenant governor, a guy named what was his name? William what? William Stoughton. William Stoughton. I mentioned, like, some of the lesser known people who are actually villains. This guy was a bad man, and he made a decision that changed the course of everything. I think Phipps initial idea that this would have just moved the backlogs out and freed everybody from jail would have come true had it not been for Stoughton and Stoughton's radical decision to include what's called spectral evidence that changed everything, and that is what led to people being executed. Yeah. So before we get into spectral evidence, I just wanted to point out that William Stoughton was such a bad guy, they named a town after him, and they named a college dorm at Harvard after him, I believe. Well, increased matter was the Harvard president for a while, too. Yeah, Stowton went to Harvard, but I think one of the dorms is still Stoughton, and I think Stoughton Mass is most well known now for having an Ikea. Yeah. Spectral evidence. Let's talk about this, because this changed everything. There were different kinds of evidence that would be accepted in these courts. One was the spectral, which we'll talk about. One was confession, two eyewitness testimonies. And then we won't get really into all the tests, but there are all kinds of different tests, including does she float? Can she swim? From Monty Python. The Holy Grail. I think they were still doing some of that. There was the witches teeth, which was basically, if they found a mole on a woman, they would call it a witch's teat, which was supposedly a third nipple used to feed her animal familiar. That's what my dad always told me my moles were when I was growing up, which is deep. Yes, he was dead serious, too. So there were certain tests and all, but spectral evidence was the big one, because this was basically you could kind of make up anything, and you could be in court and say as an accuser and say, this person has been possessed, or their possessor is in the courtroom right now. Your Honor, this spectrum is sitting on your lap right now. You just can't see it. And it would freak people out. There was nothing you could really say to defend it, because it was made up to begin with. Right. And supposedly cotton mather said it should be used more sparingly. Like, at the end of the day, he was like, it's enough to indict, but not to convict. Oh, really? Was that cotton or increase? That was cotton, supposedly. Okay. And then in the end, I think they verified that nobody was convicted solely on the basis of spectral evidence. Okay, well, then my hypothesis is kind of out the window that none of these people would have been executed without it. Well, you need two out of three things, and that's one of them. Then you're right. One of the more practical problems that spectral evidence presented for somebody accused of witchcraft is that it destroyed any alibi you had. Like, your neighbor could be like, no, he couldn't have been bewitching this person. He was out working with me in the fields all day. They could say, no, it was a spirit. He sent a spirit to which this poor person who's accusing him, and then, boop, there goes your alibi. So it was like you said, you just can't defend yourself against that kind of thing. And that was, like, the level of stuff that was how they were accusing people. There was one guy I read about, Philip English, who will come up again later. He was accused of witchcraft by somebody who said that they got a nosebleed while they were discussing a lawsuit they had against Philip English with somebody else. So that it must be that Philip English had bewitched them. This is the kind of accusations that they were making against one another, and they were holding up in court. That is something that you cannot look past. It's so easy to look back 300 years and be like, yeah, this whole collective group lost their mind. Now, there were plenty of people who did lose their mind, but the people who were supposed to be in charge, the people who were in a position to put a stop to this, actually allowed it, in some cases, fan the flames of it even further. That was the true breakdown at the Salem witchcraft trial. The grown ups did not step in and halt it before it got out of hand. Yeah, another thing that someone might do. If you had a pet that you really liked, not good. They could say, well, no, they have an animal familiar. It could be anything like, take Black Philip from the witch. I mean, that's taken straight from this time period. Sure. But if you had a pet that you enjoyed hanging out with, they could accuse you of having a familiar. If they found a folk magic or folktale book in your library, that could be evident. And that was pretty common too. Sure. Didn't have local hospitals to go to to heal themselves or anything. That like you said, with the nosebleed or whatever, anything bad that happened to you if your crop failed or if one of your cows died, you could say it. Was my neighbor, and they're a witch, and they put a hex on me. Right. So they established, okay, we can use spectral evidence, and we're going to use spectral evidence. And this court of lawyer and terminal it was established. I think they held their first trial on June 2, and they were profoundly efficient at convicting and killing people. Bridget Bishop was the first person hanged, and she was hanged on June 10, just over a week after the first trials began. And that kicked off, like, this new phase where this idea to clear the jails of the accused is actually now diverting them to the gallows for being witches. We can't forget that either. Like, for being witches, even though witches in this conception don't exist. Yeah. And I think that efficiency and the speed that all this happened was a big part of it, because the train was moving so fast that once the more level headed people of the town realized what was going on, like, wait a minute, we're actually hanging people for this. Certain people started to come forward and say, no, no, I'm recanting my confession, or let me stand up for someone's good character. But it happened so quickly that before you know it, there's a couple of dozen people have died. Yes. And people got wrapped up in it, too. Like there's the case of Giles Corey, I believe. Oh, man. He testified against his wife, and then later he recanted it. And after he recanted it, the purgens apparently viewed perjury so suspiciously that that was enough to get him accused of witchcraft, and he ended up paying for his life, which we'll talk about a little more later. But he testified against his wife, and to this day, historians are like, we have no idea why Giles Corey testified against his wife. He didn't seem to have a grudge. They seem to have a fine marriage, whatever. It just doesn't make sense. The only way that you can explain that, at least from my perspective, is that it was, like you said, just this thing that people got whipped up in, and it just happened so fast that it was just easy to lose yourself into that degree. I mean, the whole thing happened over the course of, what, four to six months? Yeah, I think the first things were in January, but yeah, the first trials were June 2, and they ultimately, I think, stopped the following winter. It was not a very long, prolonged thing, but it was just like this weird orgy of mind loss and death. Man it sounds like some kind of album. Fiona after Albany, the other weird thing about this was that the social order was completely knocked out of whack. The puritans. If there's one thing they didn't like, it was hearing from children about anything. Kids were just they were meant to work and to shut up, basically, and do what they were told and kind of like full stop. And you had a situation here where children, young girls, were accusing these middle aged men and women of witchery. And it works. Like, people listen to them and people were hanged because these kids were speaking up at a time when kids were barely allowed to even have any agency or speak. Yeah, which is another thing that perplexes historians, because they're like, something happened. Like there was something that witch panic fulfilled. Maybe it was to let off steam from being constantly afraid of being murdered by a Native American attack. Maybe it was living too close proximity, too far away from where you called home. Like, who knows? But there was something about it that was worth turning the social order on its head. And that was just one example. There are other examples of how the social order just totally broke down. And that wasn't who some of the people who were accused and executed were, because it wasn't just the marginal women who were your prototypical witches living on the outskirts of society who were accused. That was just at first, it started to become extended to really surprising people. Like, Rebecca Nurse was maybe one of the most upstanding Puritan women that town, the colony, had to offer. And she was accused, tried and executed as a witch. And that, I think, really kind of opened a lot of people's eyes in two ways. One, it was like, what is going on here? This could not be the case. And then the other people, it was like, if Rebecca Nurse could be a witch, then anybody could be a witch. And I think that was kind of the thread that the witch trial followed. But it also is, like a really good explainer about how just completely the society broke down for this handful of months, that anybody was at risk of being murdered by their fellow townspeople for being a witch, no matter what kind of background you had. I'm picturing a Puritan, like the only Puritan that actually went on vacation that summer. And they come back, they leave in early June, they come back in late September, and they're like, so it's been going on everybody, right? And then they get the sight of what's going on, they drop their Mickey Mouse ears to the ground. Oh, boy. All right, well, let's take another break and we'll come back and talk about sort of the finality of this, how it ended, and a little bit more about Giles Cory's crazy, crazy story right after this. All right? So in the end, I don't think they have the final, final number. I've seen 22, I've seen 20. 519 people were hanged. Giles Corey, who are going to talk about in a minute, was pressed to death via torture. Five people died in prison. I think the numbers sort of depend on what you count as, like, a fallout death and not a direct death, right? Like the one lady who couldn't repay. I think she just couldn't pay her debt to get out of jail. So she died in jail. That's such a sad story. Yeah. Lydia Dustin, she outlived the witch trials, like, they had ended a few months before, and she had actually been personally exonerated, and yet she couldn't pay her shackle fees, so they just kept her in jail, and she ended up dying there in March of 1693, even though she accounts yeah, for sure. Because she otherwise would not have been killed or died had it not been being placed in jail after being accused of a witch. For sure. But they did this in mass hangings. It wasn't just like, one at a time. There was a hanging on July 19, August 19, and September 27 after they died, they were stripped and put in a big mass grave. Supposedly, there are stories that families would come and get them out of the mass grave at night, buried them in unknown, probably on parts of their land, and they tried for many years to find out exactly where these hanging took place. And they ended up at a place called Proctor's Ledge. There's a memorial there, and people go there, and basically they treat that as though that is definitely the place. But I don't think they have hard, hard evidence other than just trying to take eyewitness accounts and place where they were. Right. Yeah. Supposedly, there was a study in 2016 that where they took those eyewitness accounts, took into account what the people said they could or couldn't see in the background or whatever, and then plotted them. Right. And then figured out that most of these points were standing in around the same place around that ledge where they think that, yes, this happened. Yeah. But they never found, like and then underneath the ground they dug, and they found the gallows pole. Right. Now, they never found any physical evidence, so whatever. So the story of Giles Corey, if you know the Crucible, you know it well. If you've seen the movie, you know it. He is the man that was pressed to death. He was crushed. Basically, pressing is when they would lay you down, they would put boards on top of you and then just start adding weight over the course of time, more and more weight until you eventually die. I had heard this story before because supposedly Giles Corey said more weight because he was standing mute. And he refused to say whether he was guilty or innocent. The one thing I did know is that Giles Cory was 81 years old. Yeah. He was an old guy. He was like the old guy from that Metallica video. That's what I always imagined Giles Cory to have looked like. Man, what a story, though. One thing standing mute would do would allow your estate to be passed on to your heirs rather than being convicted where that wouldn't happen. But I saw that this wasn't the reasoning behind him standing mute because most of his stuff had already been taken, and that he even wrote down that he was standing mute to protest the sham proceedings. Yeah. And it sounds like just the way he's been kind of lionized by history, that that was his motivation, for sure. Yeah. But you said something about how most of his stuff had been taken. There's another villain in all this. Beyond Stoughton and the mothers, there was a guy named George Corwin, and he was the sheriff of Essex County, which is where which panic took place. And he was basically taking advantage of the fact that a lot of people were suddenly way more vulnerable than they had been the year before, few months before. And so when he would arrest them and take them, he would also take possession of their property, officially their stuff, their land, all that, and he and his deputies would divvy it up. So he had every incentive to arrest as many people as possible and throw them in jail. And he did that, and he took a lot of people's land. And I guess he took Giles Corey's land as well. And Giles Corey cursed the town and the sheriff as he died. And supposedly George Cory actually, I shouldn't say supposedly George Corwin definitely did die less than three years later at age 30 of a heart attack. And there's a local legend that every Essex County sheriff from Corwin onward either died or resigned while in office because of a heart condition. I didn't have time to go look through the records of Essex County Sheriff, but I thought that was a pretty interesting local legend. This dude was in his 20th when he was doing this. Yeah, he was in his mid to late twenty s, and he was one of the worst of the worst. And so there's one more story about when he died. That guy, Philip English, that I mentioned before, who was accused because of the guy getting the nosebleed, he was a very wealthy merchant in Salem town. And Corwin took his stuff, like his land, a lot of his ships, just took a lot of his stuff while English was on the run, evading capture. And when English came back after the Salem witch trials were over and found what Corwin had done, he tried to get his money back from Cory. Tried to get his money, his land, his ships, all that stuff, and Coron wouldn't give it to him. Well, Corwin dies of a heart attack and Philip English placed a lien, basically, on this guy's body and said, you're not burying him until I get paid back. Jeez. The family was like, we're not listening to you. We're going to go bury him. So Philip English hired a bunch of guys and they went out and stopped the funeral procession, took possession of the body and held at hostage until Corwin's family paid Philip English back. For what Corwin had taken from and then Philip English gave them the body to bury. Wow, that nuts. Not a nice guy. Who? Philip English? No, Corey. Okay, yeah, I was going to say I totally side with Philip English on that one. All right, so Corey dies and the long and short of his death was that it was sort of a final straw. And this is when Phipps comes back in and says, you know what? Things are getting really out of hand. Increased matter says, yeah, this petrol evidence thing is gotten way out of hand and it's probably not real. And people started to sort of stand up more and more. And it was clear that Governor Phil had to kind of halt things. He said he did it under the context of this is a contravention of English law. We can't do this. I'm dissolving the court of Oyer and Terminal and I'm going to create a new court where we can't use spectral evidence. And what do you know? In January and February of 1693, there were dozens of people released. Grand juries weren't indicting people. They were found not guilty. He pardoned some. And by the end of May that next year, the jails had no more witches. Right. Because they found when you take away the spectral evidence, what you have for the most part, is personal grudges, land disputes, land grabs, people just trying to take advantage of the situation to get back at somebody they don't like and haven't liked for a really long time. And that was a weird, weird, scary time. It was very scary. And I can't imagine, like, living during that time, actually. It's not true. I can't imagine it. But it was just basically another example of, like, a time when a group of people became fascist together and people died as a result. Yeah. And the term witch hunt is still used. The Crucible was written because of McCarthyism. It's been thrown around a lot in recent years, maybe not as accurately, but it's still a term for that reason. Yeah. I've got one little nice button to put on the end of this. Chuck there was at least one guy who was a judge in the court of lawyer interpreter named Samuel Sul. And within a year or two after the witch trials, he was standing in front of the Boston Congregation of Puritans having a petition read by the local reverend there asking for their forgiveness and admitting that this is a huge mistake and he regretted participating in it and would they forgive him? And I believe they did. So the whole thing ended well. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Man if you want to go down a rabbit hole, start researching the Salem Witchcraft trials. You could do a lot worse than going to the historic present, the New England Historical Society and the Historyofmastachusetts.org. Or just hit Ed grabanowski up, he'll tell you all about it go to Salem. Yeah, you could do that, too. Walk around. They're trying to take your money in all kinds of ways. Yeah. Essex County, Mass. Is one of the most beautiful places on earth, if you ask me. Sure. Okay. Well, since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this cool kid. I like to read the emails from the cool kids. Hey, guys. My dad introduced me to your show when I was barely a teenager, and I've been listening ever since. In that time, my family has gone through a lot of changes, and my dad and I haven't always been on the best terms. I wanted to reach out and let you know that Stuff you should know is the only thing that we have consistently been able to talk about when we reconnect after being apart. We can go months without seeing each other. And I can just ask if you listen to your latest episode to have something to talk about. That's cool. It help keeps things lighthearted, and it's something we feel like it's just for the two of us. Hope we can see you live in Austin soon. Furthermore, this is mostly for Chuck. You are so much like my dad, it's actually freaky sometimes. We always make jokes that you two would be best friends if you met in real life. Your voices even sound a little bit the same. I'll be honest, sometimes it's comforting to listen to you all when I miss my dad. I've been meaning to send this email for a while just to tell you guys how much you mean to me and my family. Thanks for being there for us. Also, I don't know if my dad listens to the end of the episodes or just the factual content. We'll find out. But if he's listening this far in, tell him I said hi. Warm regards, CJ Kerbo. And it says if we come to Austin, they treat us to dinner at their favorite fried catfish seafood restaurant. Nice. Very nice. That was very nice. CJ. What a great email, and thank you very much for the invite. We probably will be in Austin again sometime. It was and CJ, you should know that we cut it out, but I accidentally said fried cat food. It was hilarious. And Josh got a good laugh out of it. Yeah, so thanks for that, too. Yeah, you're welcome. If you want to be like CJ and write a very nice email, we want to hear it. You can and send it to us 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."
a6418704-5462-11e8-b449-735d21eb9bf1	The Dyatlov Pass Mystery	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-dyatlov-pass-mystery	The incident at Dyatlov Pass is one of the more enduring wilderness mysteries of all time. Russian hikers found in various states of undress, frozen. What happened to them? Why were there weird internal injuries and no outward signs of distress?	The incident at Dyatlov Pass is one of the more enduring wilderness mysteries of all time. Russian hikers found in various states of undress, frozen. What happened to them? Why were there weird internal injuries and no outward signs of distress?	Thu, 26 Jul 2018 15:22:41 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=15, tm_min=22, tm_sec=41, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=207, tm_isdst=0)	38031018	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. Edition how do you pronounce this? Diatlov? Dietlov. Dietlove? Yeah, that's how I've always pronounced it. That's what we're going with. Okay. Yeah. For some reason. That's a good one. I like that one. Instead of a Russian jetlove. Twang. Anyway, Jetlove is the name of a very famous pass in the Yurl Mountains, and it was named after, it turns out, a 23 year old mountaineer expert outdoors person named Igor Dietlove. I always wanted to call him Yuri because there was, like, five Yuri's in his group, but he was the only Igor. Yeah. And I did not know that this pass was named for him. And when I first started researching this, I was like, that's coincidence. Yeah. Shall we tell the story? Yeah, let's. You'd heard of this before, right? Yeah. And I believe we may have touched on this in the top ten once, maybe, or a video that we did. But whatever it was, it was a little tiny, short thing. I mean, we mentioned the Gary Matthias disappearance was called the American Diet love event. Or disappearance. This is totally different in a lot of ways. In most ways, but you can kind of find some similarities here there, but yeah, let's tell the story, man. All right, so we're talking about a group of students in 1959, early February, from Ural U-R-A-L State Technical University. Yeah. Go. What? Goroskis. The Hammers and Sickles. That sounds good. Okay. The Hammers and Sickles. They were all very well acquainted with camping and backcountry hiking and skiing, cross country skiing. So they weren't a bunch of rookies out there? No. And that's really important. Like, these people were very well experienced with this kind of stuff. Yeah. They knew what they were doing. And there was a group of how many were there? Seven. There were ten total. Oh, ten total. Nine of whom actually went into the woods. The only person to make it out of this trip alive was the one person who stayed back because he wasn't feeling well, stayed behind. It the village that was another Yuri. Yuri? Yuinn. Why? Why? Yeah. Got a little sick and was bummed, and little did he know that would have been almost certainly a life saving moment for him. Yeah. He had a rheumatism. He came down with a bout of rheumatism and actually stayed back in this little tiny village where they set off from. And to say that they were, like, in the middle of nowhere is an understatement. Like they were in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. Not a lot going on there. I think, like a two plus week trip. And they were trying to get to Mount Ordetan, right? Yeah. Or T-O-T-E-N ordetan Ortan, suretoten. Or Tottenham they were trying to make it to this mountain, which is part of the Euro Mountains. And to get there, they basically cross country skied. They climb mountains. To get to this mountain, they had to camp out in negative 30 degree weather. Just crazy, nuts, middle of nowhere. And they were having the time of their lives, these students were. Yeah. There is footage by way of photographs because they took a lot of pictures. If you go through and look at the early parts of this trip, they did look like they were having a lot of fun. They were good pals. They did a very adorable thing on the way. They started making their own little newspaper about the trip, the evening or the ten Yea, where they were just essentially a little fun diary, like group diary. They did. But they put it in the form of a daily newspaper of their journey. Which is very cute and sad. Yes. And one of the ways I saw their group described was that there were two girls in this group and the rest were guys, but that there wasn't any real sexual tension or rivalries going on. But there was, like, kind of crushes here there and humorous flirtation, that kind of thing. Keeping everything real light. Yeah, but it wasn't like Yuri betrayed me. Right. Nothing like that. She wasn't named Yuri. Hooked up with Zena. What's, one of them? Zena. Yeah, there was Zena and then ludmilla. Ludmia is laughing. You try it, Jerry. I can't even talk. You know she minored in Russian studies? I had no idea. Did I ever tell you by the time you May and I went to visit friends in London and we were on our way to go to Moscow for the first time. Were these the guys that I met in London? Yes. And now live in La. My friend Adam. Oh, they're wonderful. They live in La now. Welcome to America, dude. But we went to visit them in London and found out that because Adam, I think, majored in Russian Studies or Russian literature, I think he's like, you have your visa. And we're like, what do you mean? He's like, you have to have a visa to go to Russia. And we're like, I don't think so. No one said anything to us about that. And he's like, no, you definitely do. We called the airline. They're like, yeah, you don't have a visa. And we're like, how did you not you mean like a Visa card? Right. That's what we thought you meant. And we didn't go to Russia. I think I remember we ended up going to Majorca instead, last minute. What a journey. We're like, this could have been way worse than it turned out. I think I remember you having plans to go to Russia and I never heard anything. That's why we didn't. I think I remember at some point in my life being like, that's weird. Josh never talked about Russia, but you heard me talk about Majorca. Yes. It all adds up now. That was all that trip. Interesting. Yeah. So that's my Russian story. That's as close as I've come. That's funny, because you guys are pretty buttoned up. I know. We're both really surprised at ourselves out of you guys. Yeah. All right. Thanks for that, Chuck. I appreciate that. About you being buttoned up. Yeah. That sounds like something I would do. I don't know. That's pretty basic level stuff. I think most people would catch that. All right, so where are they? They're on the Mountain of the Dead, which I don't believe we mentioned was the translation that the local indigenous tribe, the Monte tribe, called this mountain colossal, the Mountain of the Dead. And the Monsie tribe will pop up later in theory. So just we're putting pins and things. Do you remember in our magic mushroom episode where we talked about reindeer herder who would feed their reindeer mushrooms and then drink the pea to trip themselves? I think I do remember that. That's the Moncy. Oh, they're like Siberian. Nomads, I believe. Wow. They know how to party. Yeah. And like the magic mushrooms that their shamans eat and probably their regular people eat, too, they're very toxic. And one way to get rid of the toxins is to feed them the reindeer. And the reindeers filter the toxin. You drink the reindeer pee and the psychoactive stuff is still present in their pee. Wow. Yeah. And they think that possibly I'm saving this for the Christmas episode. Okay. So go ahead. I'm sorry. That's the Monte people. Yeah, that's the Monte people. So what they end up doing is they decide on the night of February 2 to camp in a decidedly sort of odd place. It wasn't so weird, but they were only about a mile from the tree line where they would have had much better cover and it would have been slightly warmer. And it makes more sense to camp in the forest than out on this open ridge. Right. But nevertheless, for some reason, they decided to camp there. They think possibly because they didn't want to backtrack because they would have had to backtrack something to get back to the tree line. Yes. They would have had to go a mile back down the slope, which means that they would have had to go cover that mile up again. And that's what Yuri what's the guy who was his last name? Yuri Yden. Yeah. That's what he later said in an interview, that he thought it was either that Dietlove didn't want to backtrack because the outlook is the leader, remember? Or he wanted to practice camping on an exposed mountain slope, which, from what I've heard about this guy, it sounds like something he might do. He might be like, hey, gang, I've got a great idea. Yeah. We've never done this. Right? Let's try it. And they would have been able to quite easily. They pitched the camp. But in between pitching camp this is February 2, 1959. In between pitching camp and making dinner, something happened. They never got to make dinner, and whatever happened to them happened in between that time on February 2, 59. We'll be back right after this. All right. That was quite a teaser, my friend. Thank you. You can talk regular now. Okay. So the search party didn't go out right away because Diet Loft had said before, hey, we're going to be back around February 12, or maybe a bit longer if we are so inspired to stay out there a bit longer, which is if it's going slower than we thought, right. Which is not the nowadays, people be a little more buttoned up like you guys, a little more specific maybe, when you're hiking in a place like this, but nevertheless, or have, like, a satellite phone with you or something. But again, so these kids are in the middle of nowhere, totally cut off from contact. We're going in January. You'll hear from us probably around February 12 or so. Yeah, but because he put a wishy washy timeline on it, it wasn't until the 20th that anyone had any suspicions that anything was wrong. And then not until the 26th that volunteer searchers finally found this camp. So it was much later. So they found the camp and right out of the gate, they're like, this is a little weird. Yeah. The tents seem to have been cut from the inside out. That's a very weird thing. Not only that, their boots are here, their clothes are here, their gears here, their skis, like everything they would need, it was all just abandoned at this camp. It looked like they left in a hurry. And then, even stranger, from the official report, and we'll see that this has gone on for so long and been open to so much interpretation that there's a lot of taint to this legend. A lot of taint. But the official report said that there were maybe eight or nine tracks, the tracks of eight or nine people around these tents. So that would account for everybody in the party without the addition of other people being on scene. Yeah, and the way they left, like you said, it was almost as if they went and got in their tents, zipped them up, and found a dozen pit vipers in each one, because they cut out of the tent and ran away in their underwear, basically. Not all of them in their underwear, but barefoot with very little clothing, like as if something inside the tent had was about to kill them. Okay, that's a big thing. It's a weird way to leave your camp. So these guys are missing, and the search party that found the tent in pretty short order. I'm not exactly sure how long it took, but from what I understand, it was the same search they found the first two bodies, and they found these first two bodies. It was the two Yuri's. Yuri cravania Schenko and Yuri durashenko. Not the third year. Because it stayed back. No, because they were literally three erie's. Right. Yeah. Three out of ten. Right. That's 30% of them. We're Yuri. So Yuri Kravanashenko. I decided again, because I wanted to do better than the first time. And then Yuri Doroshenko, they were found, both of them, wearing their underwear. I think they were both barefoot at the tree line. At the tree line. They call it the big tree. It was a large cypress tree. So they were in their underwear, barefoot, dead a mile down the mountain from the camp. Yeah. Which is where they said that they probably should have camped for more cover. So very interestingly. Supposedly, both of their hands were burned. I saw. Yeah. I saw that they were just beaten up and that there was human flesh found in the bark of the tree. I didn't see that at all. Yeah. Okay. As if they had tried to climb it in desperation. Okay. I did see that there were, like, broken branches that indicated climbing. I didn't see there was flesh in the bark. Flesh in the bark. Okay. So maybe burned hands means, like, they were raw from climbing the tree. I don't know. But there was signs of a fire. Yeah. There was, like, a campfire that they had built, and there were unburnt branches kind of collected by it, too. Right. But they were both dead, and they were the first two discovered. The two Yuries. Very weird, but nothing that couldn't be accounted for by hypothermia. Yeah, it was being out there in your underwear to begin with. It was the weird part again, in, like, negative 30 degree weather. Negative 30. With howling winds. So foreshadowing. Okay. Three more bodies, including our leader, Mr. Diet Loft. They were found between those two points, between the original camp and that tree. And it looked as if they were headed back toward camp. The way they were laid out, like, imagine somebody, like, kind of dying as they're crawling up a slope back toward camp. Right. Makes sense to me. So let's say that they all kind of went to this tree, and then they started to head out back to camp to maybe get their gear because they realized we're in a bad spot. All our gear is up there, and we're down here in our underwear, in barefoot. And why are we? Yes. Again, who knows? Yeah. So they found Igor Diatlov zaneda Colmagorva. Why am I the only one saying their name? I'll tell you the last one. Rustam slobadin. Well, even Jerry could have said that one. So Rustam had about a two and a half inch gash in his head and a fractured skull. That was very weird. It is weird, but the doctor said that's not what this person died from. Again, all five of these people died from hypothermia, even though this guy has been smashed in the head somehow. Yeah. So the investigators are like, okay, so far it's weird, but something happened, and then all these people died of hypothermia. Okay. Yeah. That didn't hold up when they finally found the other three bodies. Yeah. Two months later. Four bodies. Yeah. In May, I think, after some of the snow melt, they found four more bodies in a gully down slope from the tree. So there's the tree where the first two bodies were found. Up slope. There were the next three bodies, like they were crawling toward back toward camp, and then on the other side, down slope of the tree, the last four bodies were found. Yeah. This is where it gets very strange. Very strange. These bodies, they didn't die from hypothermia. They died of some very weird internal injuries. Some of them had their skulls crushed. Two of them had massive chest fractures and broken ribs. One of them was missing her. Which one was it? Ludmia Dubina. She was missing her tongue and part of her mouth and face. Yeah. She was also missing her eyes, as was one of the other people. And this could have been explained away as maybe an animal ate this stuff, but there was no outside trauma. When you looked at these people, it wasn't like you have been clearly hit very hard on the head with a stick or a baseball bat, or you have had your eyeballs pecked out by a vulture. No outward signs. They didn't find out until later on that all these internal injuries had occurred. Yeah. It was really strange. It was very strange. One of the doctors who examined the bodies in the official report said that it was totally out of the capability of any human to inflict these injuries. It was more like the injuries you would see from a car crash. Yeah. And so they would have, like, crushed bones, crushed skulls, but they didn't have any soft tissue damage. Right. It wasn't like somebody hit them with an ax, but they had the injuries sustained like they were hit by an axe, but not the outward external injuries. Like they were crushed by an axe or something. Yeah. Although a lot of them were missing soft tissue, but no outward signs of that. I just can't figure that one out. No. So we'll put a pin in that missing soft tissue stuff. Okay. Okay. So there was something else that was really peculiar that has never been explained, but at least two of the bodies were found to be like the clothing they were wearing was radioactive. Yeah. And we should point out, too, that some of this clothing they were wearing came off of the other people, I believe, some shoes. And one of the women had parts of a wool pants wrapped around her. So they had scavenged some of the clothes from their dead, I guess, or dying compatriots is the only thing people can figure out. And it contained radiation. Yeah, but that was the only thing that contained radiation. Right. The fact that they were, like, taking clothes from one another, that makes sense. And you can even say that. The people who weren't wearing clothes, you can chalk that up to something called paradoxical undressing. Yeah, this is odd. Which is, like, found in, I think, something like a quarter of all hypothermia cases that you'll find the person stripped because something in your hypothalamus goes haywire and you feel like your body temperature is actually rising, like you're getting hot and actually it's going down. It's a weird quirk of hypothermia sometimes. So you can even say, like, maybe these people actually shed their clothes purposefully. And then, of course, people who weren't undergoing paradoxical and dressing were taking the clothes and putting it on themselves. Totally makes sense. Where did the radiation come from? Why just the clothing? That is beyond bizarre and it's never been explained to anyone's satisfaction. Yeah. And one more strange issue. Thing not completely off the charts, but like I said, they found the camera film. That's why we have all these pictures. And the infamous 33rd frame was the last shot on this role, which showed sort of a series of white lights or a big white light against black. Could have been nothing, some weird exposure, who knows? But they had the camera set up on, like a homemade tripod with a lens cap off, facing out, as if it were like, hey, let's have this camera ready to take a picture of something that we're seeing out there. Right. And then I believe in the weeks previous to this, other hikers had reported seeing, like, glowing orbs and glowing lights and things like this. Was it the weeks previous or the weeks after? I thought it was previous. I think it was after. Or that there was another group that says similar sightings at that time. Okay, who knows? There was another group that was between 30 and 50 miles away basically doing the same thing that reported seeing lights around the same time. So who knows? But the fact and like you said, it's not off the charts, but the fact that I think it was Rustam who had the camera but didn't have any of his gear or outerwear, but he grabbed his camera. That is pretty bizarre. Yeah, there was an investigator named Lev Ivanov. He was the lead guy, and he was really into this case, obviously for a while. He brought a Geiger counter along that apparently just kind of spiked when he was ever around. Yeah, he was the one who discovered that there was radioactivity at all, but they officially closed the case, like a month later or something. And they said they listed the cause of death as a compelling natural force that they could not overcome. Yeah, that's a really vague, creepy statement. Yeah. So that was another thing that really raised everyone's suspicions was that the investigators came in within three weeks of, I think, finding the last bodies, who, again, had not died from hypothermia, but had died from really bizarre, massive internal trauma. They closed the case on it, put it under lock and key, filed it away as classified, and kept anyone from the area for the next three years. Just closed off the area for three years. And it wasn't until like, the early 90s that these files were opened again. And so the fact that they had been classified actually in Soviet Russia was not that bizarre. Yeah, they just classified everything. But it was strange that when they declassified these things after the Soviet Union is all, that they were like big chunks of these files just totally missing. So who knows? Maybe they got misplaced over time. But when you add up all this stuff, the official investigation being hurried and then classified and then parts missing later on, that is a little weird. It does suggest to a lot of people that the Soviet government either knew something, found something, or had some sort of role in this that they didn't want everyone to know about. So we take another break. Yeah. All right, we're going to come back and talk about some of the leading theories and debunk some of them right after this. All right? Did we mention that two groups of people reported flying objects or just the one? I only knew about one. Yeah, there were two groups of people. One that were camping nearby about 30 miles away. And then other reports in that month had been reported. Orange balls of fire. And here's one direct quote. Goodness gracious, balls of fire. This is from the written testimony. One person said he saw a shining circular body fly over the village from southwest to northeast. Shining disk was practically the size of a full moon, a blue white light surrounded by a blue halo. Halo brightly flashed like the flashes of distant lightning. And when the body disappeared behind the rise and the sky lit up in that place for a few more minutes. So that's actually not out of the realm of possibility that that person really did see that, because people have suggested that these were missile tests that they were seeing. Yeah. So should we go with that as theory number one? Yeah. The thing is, though, the guy, the lead investigator, Lev Levinov, is that his name? Yeah, Leviwanov. He said, I suspect this is in an interview he gave. I suspected at the time, and I'm almost sure now, these bright flying spheres had a direct connection to the group's death. He didn't go into any more detail about that. And he himself has died of old age now, I believe. Yeah, but there are a lot of people who say these weird sightings in the sky had something to do with it. Either they irradiated the group one of the things. There was a twelve year old boy from their town of Icanarenasburg, which was known at the time as Vedlosk, that he reported that some of them were kind of orange tanned, like weirdly tanned, and that their hair was gray. So a lot of people said irradiated. They were irradiated by UFOs or missile tests or something like that. You can actually kind of explain the weird tanning. And I've seen a picture of one of them at the morgue as they were mummified. It was probably one of the members of the group who wasn't found until May, and they were partially mummified by the exposure to the snow for weeks or months. Yeah, that was probably explained that. Yeah, that makes sense. They were on the pathway, apparently, for what's called the R Seven intercontinental ballistic missile launches, but it just doesn't hold water with the radiation only being in their clothes. Yeah, that's very weird. That's like the one thing that doesn't quite add up. Yet another explanation for them becoming irradiated is that, yes, they were near a nuclear missile testing site and that they drank melted snow. But again, why would just they're closed. Why wouldn't they become irradiated? I don't know. Or any of their gear or the tent or anything. What else? We got another one. And this is the most people who claim to be sensible say this is the explanation, that it was sure that it was an avalanche. That an avalanche came down the slope because they were camping out on a mountain ridge face of a mountain, and then an avalanche came and they knew it was coming, so they cut open their tent and fled into the night and then got caught by hypothermia and died. Makes sense. I mean, that would get most people, especially an experienced group of mountaineers, out of their tents pretty quick. By cutting through it. Cutting through it, maybe. The thing is, it doesn't explain why some of them, but not all of them, had massive trauma. And again, it certainly doesn't explain the radiation at all. Or the missing tongue. Yes, that was another one which was never found, by the way. No. So the missing tongue, I've seen I saw that it was removed while the girl was alive. I'm sorry. Her name was Ludmia. I saw that. But then I also saw that she had been found near a creek and that it's possible that it had just basically melted away from the water, the action of the water. Here's the problem. This is the official report was kept under seals for decades and conjecture was added. You don't know at this point who to believe. There are so many sites out there dedicated to it. Yeah. And there's a twelve year old reporting from the funeral. That's the only documentation we have. What they look like. His name actually is Yuri Kunzevich. Another Yuri? Another Yuri. And he was that twelve year old child. He became kind of obsessed with it, and he set up the Diet Lav Museum and the Dyatlov Foundation and basically just keeps the whole thing alive and is trying to get the government to reopen the case. That kid. Yeah. So he really stuck to it. He's really taking advantage. Yeah. What else you got for theory? Well, that tribe, the Monsieur tribesmen, there is a theory that they attack them, but nothing about that holds water. They didn't have any footsteps in the snow or footprints. There were peaceful people, by all accounts, had never done anything like that. There was no reason to do anything like that. So just go ahead and discount that one. Yeah. It doesn't make any sense. Animals attack kind of the same thing. Yeah. They're finding tracks. The other thing that the other reason the avalanche theory doesn't necessarily hold up is there wasn't necessarily any evidence of an avalanche having covered up the thing. Well, in the tent. Yeah. It would have swept that tent away and all the gear, probably. Right, sure. Or covered it up. Yeah. Well, high winds. There's one theory that maybe one of the members, maybe one of the uris went out to PPE and a wind swept them away and everyone else ran out to look for him. But this article you found, where they kind of debunking some of the stuff, said that it doesn't make much sense that all these experienced people would have behaved this way and just ran out in their underwear. It would have been a little more of an organized, sensible effort if that had happened. Yes. You really can't overstate that. The level of experience and the combined, like, the group that they formed was greater than the sum of its parts. So yeah, it wouldn't have been amateur like that. And this is the kind of the new fringy, semi scientific explanation. I find this fascinating is the infrasound one? Yeah. I mean, we talked about infrasound in one of our episodes. I don't remember which one. I can't remember which one. But it's a phenomenon where wind and in this area, they said that this definitely could have happened, where wind collides with the mountain and the trees and everything and produces this low frequency range sound that has been known to inspire panic and dread, confusion, fear, all the things that would kind of add up in this case. Right. So there's like this really weird it's very tough to figure out whether that's actually real. If you look at the science, the scientific literature behind it, there's some but more often than not, it's just somebody claiming on their website that this is real. Right. The literature is not necessarily there. But that's not to say that it's just totally made up. It's like the studies of this stuff hasn't caught up to some of the claims on the Internet. But supposedly there is from wind vortices. They could have produced it on. This mountain. Right. These little weird tornadoes that would have spun up, could have produced these sounds that is below human hearing, the level of human hearing, like, a full octave below, but can supposedly produce these weird behaviors that make people freak out. That would explain everything. It would. Except the tongue. Right. And I guess the injuries sure. So frustrating. I've seen other ones, too. There was a guy we need to mention him a little more. His name was Zolotrovariov. Man, this has been tough. His name was Simon Zolotariov. He was 38. He wasn't a member of the group. He was an add on. Toward the end, he was out there with another group that he couldn't get coordinated, so he ended up the wife saying, like, hey, can I come with you guys? And at first, apparently, the group was not all that happy about him being there. But from what I understand, he really kind of earned his place in there for a while. People were like, who was this guy? This is a mystery, dude. Maybe the KGB was involved. Maybe he was KGB. He was definitely ex military, and they actually exooked him to find out if the person who was buried in his grave as him was him. And they took a picture of his skull and superimposed it under a known picture of him. Supposedly, it was a perfect match, but then they took the extra step of comparing the DNA of the corpse in the grave with the DNA of a known relative, and it does not match. Okay, I saw that. I didn't know he was a non. He wasn't an original member of the group. Yes. He wasn't in the club. Some people are like, KGB was in on this, or he had something weird to do with it. It was a little weird, for sure. And he was one of the ones who suffered broken ribs, obviously internal. And he also became the editor in chief of their daily paper. Very strange. He's like, if it bleeds, it leads. Print it. You got anything else? Oh, man, we could do this for hours, but no. And if you're obsessed with the Diet Love incident, we want to know what we got right and what we got wrong. Anything you want to specify, we're happy to hear. Yeah, and I think we just officially became the 300th podcast to cover this topic. Yeah, for sure. Hopefully, we did it some justice. If you want to know more about the Jet Love Pass incident, you can type those words into the Internet, and it'll give you all sorts of crazy stuff. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail. All right, so this one is a bit long, but this is a Josh request. Oh, this one's good. It's a mystery. It is a mystery. And this is from Corey and Joycey City. Hey, guys. At the open of your recent episode on tsunamis, you both expressed disbelief that the topic had never been covered. In fact, you guys both said you could have sworn you'd already covered it, and you each went back multiple times to check. Even after checking three times, you both admitted to being, quote, paranoid. That had somehow been done before. And just like you guys, I was surprised to find out it had never been covered and began to wonder why I had fuzzy memories. So I did a little digging, relistening to old episodes on similar topics. It turns out the three of us are not the only ones convinced of this existence. Episode. Of the existence of this episode. Apparently the 2014 episode of Stuff You Should Know. Josh and Chuck also believed in the existence in the Rogue Waves episode, right? Correct. Yes. In the September 2014 show about rogue waves, at about 28 minutes in, Chuck says and I'll do this as Chuck. Okay, one of the last things we should cover, Josh, is the difference between Rogue Waves and tsunamis. But we've already done an episode on tsunamis. Josh, that was a great Chuck. I appreciate that. I've been working on it. And at this point, Josh chimes in to confirm the existence. Do you want to confirm it as Josh? My name is Josh, and I'm confirming the existence of that episode. I think it's what I said roughly, I think so. And you guys go on to cover the topic quickly, seemingly in agreement that an in depth explanation isn't necessary since it already existed. Man, this opens the door to many questions. Guys, did any listeners write in after Rogue Waves to ask where the tsunami episode was? Corey, I don't remember. I don't either. Surely with so many listeners who take pride in having listened to every episode of the show, someone should have noticed. I agree. Why were you guys so convinced of the existence of the tsunami episode in 2014? I don't know, Corey. Wouldn't Jerry notice? No. That's a no. Is it possible that the lost episode on tsunamis was the tipping point for a sequence of events leading to a doomsday scenario, and humans from the future were forced to travel back in time in order to try and expunge it from the historical record? It's possible, Corey. That's where my money is. Yeah, but why? What did we say in there that was so ghastly that it could have brought about the end of humanity? I don't know. There's no way to find out either, because it's been expunged by the future people. So, again, Cory from Jersey City, one of my favorite places. Thanks, Corey. Our buddy John lives there. Oh, no, he lives in Hillboken. Or is it Jersey City who shout out to John Pendel? Either way. Oh, John. Hey, John. He looks at Manhattan out of his window. I know that. That could be anywhere. That's true. Yes. You might be thinking of Brooklyn. No. Thanks a lot, Corey. That was a fantastic email so much, so I just kept pressuring Chuck to read it. And he did, and I think it worked out well, as we can all agree, right? Yes. Thank you for reading it, Chuck. Certainly, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go to stuffyhano.com and find us on all of our social medias there. And then you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housework.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."
a6713ecc-5462-11e8-b449-3b92746cd14b	How Police Lineups Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-police-lineups-work	Police lineups are something most people have never had any firsthand experience with. What you see on TV and in movies isn't so far off though. Learn about how these tropes work for real in today's episode.	Police lineups are something most people have never had any firsthand experience with. What you see on TV and in movies isn't so far off though. Learn about how these tropes work for real in today's episode.	Tue, 04 Sep 2018 13:30:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=13, tm_min=30, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=247, tm_isdst=0)	50209929	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 Jerry out there outside the fishbowl. And also there's guest producer Noel in our pal Benton. Yeah, I'm in the room this time. Yeah, on the mic. Thanks for having us. This is way better than that time you had me on the April Fools episode. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because maybe remember Ben from that I think it was 2013 or 15 something ungodly time ago. It's my replacement. Yeah, it was an April Fool's joke for the 3D printing episode. So this is your second time on the show? Yeah. Did the Internet shred you, ben. Were you like, a target of abuse? I want to thank everybody for the very polite emails. And as we could tell, thankfully, Chuck is fine. Yeah, they took it easy on them. Okay. We have very nice listeners. Awesome. And then no, this might be the first time you're ever speaking on the podcast, even though you've guest produced it like a million times. I think I may have mumbled something in the background. I know. I edited that. Really? Wow. Josh. So we're having you two on let's get out of business because you two have a podcast together right now. You also run Mini Crush. Movie Crush. It's true. Yeah. You're also several worlds colliding right now, right? There's a lot I'm going over them all. You're on stuff they don't want you to know. But you two, Ben and Noel, have come together and made ridiculous history, which is awesome. Oh, yeah, that's right. We're just missing my God, it's starting to sweat. But you guys are on Ridiculous History together. We are. Tell us about that. So history is full of these cartoonish bizarre events often not covered in your typical history class. Sounds familiar, right? Because for one reason or another, people thought, no way, that didn't really happen. The first recorded instance of a mooning did not result in the death of hundreds of people. Surely not. Surely not. But it did. And surely the US government did not have a plan to shoot a nuclear missile at the moon, right? That was just a Mr. Show sketch. Surely not. But he also was but it was kind of parallel thinking. Is the Mr. Show sketch happened before this story became declassified? Is that right? Yeah. I don't remember day one one nine. So our continuing mission with Ridiculous History, not to sound too Star Trekking about it, is to find those moments, the bizarre people, places, and things throughout the span of human civilization that at least cracked the both of us up on a continual basis. And sometimes we do have to stop recording just for a second because we're so tickled. Do you really? Yeah. Wow. That's actually high quality. Mainly because we tickle each other. I got you. Physically, that's cheating. Ben, you're making it sound so serious. It's actually a lot of fun. It is. It's a fun show, right? Yeah. Okay. I'm giving Ben a hard time, but yeah, that's definitely like we touch on from time to time. It will go into a heavier territory. Like, for example, we did an episode about how women in Kansas in the 1920s were imprisoned in labor camps for having STDs. That certainly falls under ridiculous. Not exactly fun or funny, right? Haha. Ridiculous. So it's all of this thing. Some of them are crack you up. Hilarious moments like Napoleon Bonaparte getting attacked by bunnies. True story. Or the aforementioned st labor camps. Or the racist special Olympics that were held here in the States. And we're a complete well, to borrow a phrase we use on the show. A complete ship show. Yes, absolutely. So wait a minute. I think you need to name the state that hosted that. Oh, it was St. Louis. Yeah, st. Louis, Missouri. Missouri. And it's because the World's Fair was happening in St. Louis and they were going to have it in Chicago. But the people hosting the World's Fair said, if you don't do your Olympics as part of the World's Fair, we're going to totally blow you out of the water with how awesome our World's Fair is. And no one's going to come to your Olympics. And scared them in the early days of, like not the earliest days of the Olympics when they brought it back, like in the it was not ancient Rome. It was not a good example of the Olympics either, because the white supremacists who were in charge of the whole shebang, decided that this would be the perfect time to prove their cockamamie ideas. Yeah, I have like eugenics ideas of kind of like white superiority. And they would have indigenous people competing in these Olympic events. But of course they didn't teach them how to do the events, so they didn't just automatically know how to pull vault or throw a javelin or whatever. White supremacist can ruin anything they put their hands on. They really can. Just turns to poop. Yeah. We are doing an episode on Flatulence later, so stay tuned. Before we give everything away, guys, tell everyone where they can find Ridiculous History and when you can find Ridiculous History at our website. Noel. It's ridiculous. History show, I think. So the website. I've got a stack of notes right here. You can find us an Apple podcast. You can find us on Spotify. You can find us wherever you find your favorite shows, like Stuff You Should Know or Stuff They Don't Want You To know. Or should I list the entire pantheon of all the shows we have? It's too many at this point, but yes, you can find us in all of those places. We also have a community page that we're really proud of and really happy with called Ridiculous Historians on Facebook. Taking a total cue from the sisk army. Nice. Well, first of all, thank you for all of the flattery that you've been heaping on us for the last few minutes. It's much appreciated. But also, thank you for coming by. I appreciate it, guys. Thank you guys for having me. Yeah, thanks so much. Let's do this every week. That might be a bit much. Let me check the sketch. I got to tell you, I love those guys, but I'm glad to get out of that new studio box. It's like a FEMA trailer, man. It's formaldehyde, wafting off, slowly poisoning us. It is still off gassing. It feels like yeah, big time. It's in my hair, which is now falling out. We're in bad shape. Well, before I like what you're wearing, by the way. Thank you. I spilled a tremendous amount of coffee on myself, and luckily, I had a bunch of samples of our new T shirt. Yeah. And this is not just a plug, everyone. Josh is literally wearing a Lewis the Child Skeptic T shirt from the Stuff You Should Know store because they sent us every shirt. I'm like, oh, great. To the guy who has 100 T shirts, here's 20 more. Right. But they are pretty cool. I'm pretty happy with this. Yeah, that's cool. The size of it. Look at the size. Perfect size. It's not so big that it wraps around and gets all mangled by my love handles, but it's also not so small that it looks like a caved in chest. You know what I mean? I didn't remember that reference, though. Well, I didn't either. Like, they listened to the Pie Piper episode. Oh, there you go. It sounds like a you thing. Yeah, Josh, but it was just an offhanded comment I made. Now it's a T shirt I'm wearing, which is I love it. Makes a pretty great time to be alive. By the way, I need to give a shout out to Brittany Schiff. Brittany Schiff sent this idea to us. Okay, great. Well, that's not true. We kind of keep a kitty of listener suggestions, but we don't often do one the next week and then shout out the person. Sure. But I thought we had fully exhausted our Crime and Punishment series. Nope. So I was delighted that Brittany Schiff sent us in, and I was like, Why haven't we done Police lineup? I don't know. It's a great question. It's just sitting there waiting. Yes. The only other one that's left is what kind of shoes detectives wear. That's the last one. You know what gum shoes mean? Is this yeah, that's gumshoe or crepe sold, I think. Do you know that? Yeah, but I don't know how it relates to cops. I guess they wore those because they were so comfortable. Cops are always walking around walking. Yeah, but sometimes when they're walking, they're actually out on the street looking for people who resemble a suspect that they have in the jailhouse, and they say, hey, you, come on over here. How'd you like to make $10? And the person says, exactly how copper. And the cop says, by standing in is what we call a filler in a police lineup. Or they do. Like Homer Simpson. And wouldn't there, like a boat raffle that they said he had to come down to the police station? Yes. You want a boat? Yeah. And then they beat him mercilessly for, like, parking, unpaid parking tickets, I think. Also shout out to Beth Schuster, who wrote this article in the NIJ Journal. The National Institute of Justice, I believe. So. Is that right? Yeah. They're pretty much committed to keeping people from being wrongly convicted. So I would guess the J stands for justice. Yes. And this is a good start. And we have some other stuff we added to it. But thank you, Ms. Schuster, for your work. Well, I already led into the episode, and it didn't take. So let me try again. This NIJ article you sent calls out a dude named Jerry Miller who back in 1981 was 22 years old, I believe. And Jerry Miller had a particularly bad day when he was arrested and he was charged with robbing, kidnapping, and raping a woman. And he got convicted. He was convicted because two people, two eyewitnesses saw him in the lineup, picked him out, and then later at trial, the victim said, maybe that's him, maybe it's not, but who cares? There's two eyewitnesses that picked the schmo out of a line up. He's done. He did 24 years in prison. And you may notice from the tone that I'm using here, he was wrongfully convicted. He actually got out of prison and was living life at least on parole, wearing an ankle bracelet monitor constantly as a registered sex offender. Right. And then finally, I think oh, I'm not quite sure 2007. In 2007, as part of the Innocence Project, which we've done an episode on with yeah, that lady what is her name? Pauline? I want to say Jeffrey Norville, but it's definitely not her. No. Paulazon. Paulazon. Thank you. Jerry. Yes. I wanted to say Pauly Shore so bad. I just knew I was wrong. But we did an innocent, innocent. Right. We did an Innocence Project episode. And under the Innocence Project, gerry Miller was exonerated through DNA evidence. He incontrovertibly did not do this and lost 24 years of his life because of flawed eyewitness testimony. Yeah. And so this is all about police lineups and more about I mean, we'll tell you how they work in a general sense, but this is sort of more about how it's such an imperfect system. But sort of the takeaway from all of this that we're about to go over with all the studies and the trying different things is kind of like it's an imperfect system. And we can try and craft it the best way we can, but human memory is imperfect. Identifying people in lineups is imperfect, and it's kind of the best we got right now. Right. Well, a lot of people are like, get rid of eyewitness testimony. Really? Altogether? Yes. All together. Humans suck at eyewitness testimony, and there's a lot of reasons why it's not like people are out there like, I want to NAB me a bad guy, show me a lineup. I'm going to pick one of those guys out. They're not doing that. They're subject to basically the way our brains are wired. We don't walk around videotaping everything that we see. We get constantly bombarded with sensory information. And under normal circumstances, you see a stranger on the street, you just see there's another human. I've identified them as not a threat and keep walking by it. If that person turned out to be accused of a crime or perpetrated a crime, and you were brought in to say, was this the person you saw? Your brain is going to try to reconstruct what little pieces of memory formed of that person. And there's a lot of things, a lot of factors that are involved that can make that really difficult task even harder. Yeah. Like, I am someone who has told myself, chuck, pay attention. Like, if you're ever in a situation like pay attention, try and collect yourself and try and remember a few really good details about the car or the person. So this is on my mind. And I actually had a situation when I lived in La. Happen to me, where I had to go through a police line up, and I failed. Oh, really? Was the suspect there? Well, no, here's the quick version. I was in a hit and run. This lady, these two lady, these two younger girls, they were probably teenagers hit me from behind in my car. I stopped, my car start to get out, and they take off. So it's a hit and run. I chase them, which you should not do. Now, were you shooting into the air to get them to slow down, trying to shoot out their tires on them? No, but I did chase them because I was so mad. And your adrenaline just shoots through the roof when something like that happens? Sure. So immediately you're just not yourself in, like, recording details. So I was trying to catch up to get a license plate. I saw that they went down the street that I knew was a dead end. Like, I got them. Now, it wasn't a cul de sac, but it functioned like a cul de sac. So I stopped where I was, got out of the car. Sure enough, 20 seconds later, they come hauling but back toward me, and the look on their faces was like, oh, snap, there's the guy. Right. And they just sped right past me, and I saw their faces as they sped past me in their car. The cops found the car, found the people, and they were like, we didn't do that? Who are these girls, these teenagers? Well, that's the long and short of it, is all you have to do and something like that is they didn't do it. And if I can't pick you out, then you get away. They showed me pictures of, like these were young teenage Hispanic women. They showed me probably 15 pictures and said, can you identify them? I was like, no. It was a month ago. They sped past me for a second. I couldn't even hazard a guess. And I didn't want to do that. Well, that's very sensible of you, actually. Yeah. I just didn't want to take a stab at it. So I was like, no, I have no idea. And they're basically like, Sorry, they said they didn't do it. Wow. It's like, but you have the car and it's damaged and none of that matters. They're like, no, not if you can't identify. I mean, I could see that. They could be like, oh, yeah, that happened some other times. I know. In some other hit and run. I mean, but yeah. The long story short, though, is I'm someone who has tried to tell myself to react in the right ways and I couldn't tell them much beyond, like, the color of the car and what it looked like. Because you were seeing red because you were in fighter site. Right. Our bodies are not primed to form memories. It's not where our energy goes. It's more like getting away or shooting out the tires of a car that just hit and ran. Right. But what you did with that line up is the other side of the coin. The other problem with lineups or I'm in testimony from line ups is that sometimes people pick out people who are innocent and other times people fail to pick out the people who are actually the perpetrators. Yeah. So it's like you said, it's a flawed system. The problem is the wrong people can go to jail and the people who actually did it can get away with it. So that's an extremely flawed system. And when something that important is on the table, then it needs to be fixed. And there's a lot of people looking into how it can be fixed. But we're not there yet by any stretch. No. And here's a stat. You were talking about the DNA exoneration. 75% of the first 183 exonerations in the US. Were wrongfully convicted because of eyewitness testimony and police lineups. Say it again. 75%. 75% of the first 183. So the Innocence Project is basically like a pilot study to show through DNA exoneration all the ways that we wrongfully convict people. And what is coming to the front is eyewitness testimony. Yeah. And the basis of that is the police lineup. Right. And one other thing that's problematic with the eyewitness testimony is if you want to wow a jury, bring out an eyewitness who seems totally sure what they saw or that they saw the person they're pointing to in the defendant's table. Yeah. Or that dramatic moment. It's like a movie trope. Now is the person in this room. Right. Let the record show that the witness is pointing at the defendant. Right? Yeah. So the problem is, it has a huge impact, but it's also really cruddy evidence. There's this guy quote, he says that eyewitness testimony is a very unusual, complex kind of trace evidence, and it's difficult to recover, easy to contaminate, and very hard to handle. And there's no better description of eyewitness testimony. If I was ever in court and someone identified me from the witness stand, I would do that thing where you look at behind you when they pointed at you, just be like, I think they're talking about that guy behind me. I get on it and they would say no, and they would point again, and I would move a little bit more. I'd be like, this witness is clearly disturbed. And then if that didn't work, you would escalate to I'm rubber and you're glue. Yeah, that usually works. Right. So there's a couple of other things that makes eyewitness testimony problematic, Chuck. In addition to not being, like, human video recorders sure. Human VCRs. Right. There are circumstances, especially surrounding a crime, that can make it really difficult to remember. If you're in a fight or flight situation, you're not forming memories. If there's a weapon, people tend to focus on the weapon. Sure. Yummy was mugged once, and the opposite happened to her. She remember what the person looked like, but she didn't even remember that there was a weapon. And her friends were like, yeah, there was a gun. Interesting. Yeah. And she went to a lineup and picked the guy out. But Yummy is bulletproof, so she is she's like, take your gun and shove it. I'm not even going to recognize it. No, but that makes sense. If someone pulls a gun on you or has a switchblade or some other kind of creepy weapon, the human instinct is to focus your attention on that thing pointed at you. Apparently, people can really describe the weapon. Right. But you're focusing on the weapon. You're not focused on the person who's holding the weapon, typically, which helps a little bit, but not as much as the face. Right. And then another problem is, if you are, say, an Hispanic dude and you're a witness to a crime and it's a white guy who's the perpetrator, you're going to have a tremendous amount of difficulty picking that white guy out, as sad as it is to say, from a lineup of other white guys. Because eyewitness testimony that crosses race or ethnicities is known to be very unreliable because it's just more difficult for somebody of ethnicity or race to separate or identify people of another ethnicity or race. Yeah. And I don't think it's the case where people are like, all white people look the same to me. It's just weird brain science. Right, right. You just have a harder time. From way back when we were basically Tucktook and Tuktuk lived with 15 other people that looked just like him because they had all been inbreeding for generations and generations, and they had to be on the lookout for another group of people who'd been inbreeding for generations and generations that wanted their jackfruit tree that they live by. What's jackfruit? I know that word. Jackfruit. That's the big, huge thing. The big, huge one. It actually makes a killer barbecue vehicle, like shredded pork, vegan standin. Oh, okay. It's really good. Got you. All right, let's take a break and we'll talk about the fundamentals of the run of the mill police lineup right after this. All right, so run of the mill police lineups. I mentioned that before we left. Everyone seen movies and TV shows, and it's not too far off. Actually, there are a couple of ways you can do it. There are lineups where you look at someone in front of your face, right. And then there are lineups like I had in La. Where I look at photographs, the ones it's way more sexy for a TV show or movie to line them up in the traditional way. Right. It's extraordinarily sexy, like a live police line up, like you see on TV. Sure. And then there are the simultaneous or sequential. There's a lot of debate which we'll get into in a minute about which is best. To me, it's pretty obvious that sequential is best. Simultaneous is the one that you see on TV. They line up six or seven dudes or ladies, and you identify them usually. Well, it depends what will get into the fillers or the foils, but usually only one of those people is a suspect in, like, the best ideal version of it. Right. Then there's sequential, and that's when they bring out one person at a time and bring out, like, seven guys just one at a time. And you say, Let me know at the end of this which one you think it was or if it's a photo lineup. They show you one photo at a time. Exactly. Yeah. I agree with you. I think sequential is head and shoulders. The better one of the two. Yeah. And here's the final little piece of how it can vary, is whether or not the administrator, the person that's in charge of administrating the lineup, knows who the perp is or not. Yeah, that's a big one, man. So it's either double blind, which means they don't even know. And to me, it seems obvious that that's always the best way because there are many circumstances where you would actually, even if you don't want to or mean to, lead a witness. And one example they gave here in this article is if they say if they identify a filler or a foil, aka. A person that was paid $10, that's the person the administrator might say, Take your time. Are you sure? You really need to take your time. Which is basically like saying wrong, pretty much. They should have a buzzer. Or conversely, when they're doing it sequentially, when they get to like number four, they're like, Whoa, good load of this guy. Jeez, look at that bad character. He's guilty of something. But they can't like, even just a smile or something like that cough, like a nonverbal cue you don't even mean to do. Right. Or you may mean to do sure because you know that that's the guy and you know it in your bones that that guy did it. Right. And you're leading the witness. Right. It can be some sort of nonverbal gesture. The problem is that most people I can't say most people, but it's been shown that some people, when they're brought in as a witness for a police line up, feel like it's their role, it's their job to pick somebody for the cops, right. So they're more than happy to be led by the cops because then they're fulfilling their role and they did what they were supposed to do. Right. So another technique or way to administer a good line up is to say, here's the line up, whether it's sequential, one at a time, or all at once, simultaneous. Yeah, right. The suspect may or may not be in this lineup. Yeah, that seems like I think they found that reduced mistaken identity rates were lower when they did this. So you would think, just always do that. Right. Because it says to the witness, like, the person may not be in here. It's like a none of the above. The dreaded letter E, none of the above. You're like, oh, God, does that mean that the answer is not here? And so you may say, I don't see them. Where if they don't say that, you're going to presume that the suspect is in that lineup. Right. And it's your job to find that person and you have to pick somebody. Most people aren't going to think like, I can't say so I'm just not going to they're going to be like three. Yeah, well, first of all, it's a crime against you a lot of times when you're picking out this perp. Sure. So you want them to be found or whatever. Yeah, that's a really good point, too. You don't want them to get away with it. And the other thing, too, is I think there's a natural human instinct when given a test, to not want to say, I can't you might feel like you have failed. Right. That's why I admire you saying that, like, with the photo lineup, not just being like these two, right. About these two, yes. But that wouldn't matter to my case because if I would have said these two, and they're like, no, that's not the lady whose car it was. But a lot of people still would have right. And they probably wouldn't say, no, that's wrong. They would have been like, okay, thanks a lot for your time, or whatever, and then you would have left and been like, God, he was so close. Some other research, it's interesting that suggests when there is an offender in the lineup that young children and elderly perform about as well as just regular young adults, but when the lineup does not have the actual offender, then they commit mistakes a lot higher. And to me, that's just because I think kids in elderly might not fully understand think they have to pick somebody. Okay, yeah, I agree. I think that's exactly what it is too. But the research bears that out, it looks like. Right. So there is some like you talked about research. There's a lot of research in this, but it's become ambiguous. Right. If you step back and you listen to all the different things that you can do with a lineup. It becomes very clear that a sequential double blind lineup where either one photo of a suspect is shown to the person at a time or one live suspect is brought out to be looked at one person at a time and is administered by a cop or a worker or somebody who doesn't know who the suspect is. That that's going to reduce the chance of a misidentification or a failure of an identification. And that the person who's being presented with these people is not going to be able to guess. Right. And if they actually do remember who the perpetrator was, they're going to recognize them. It's just obvious that that's the best way to do it. Right. The thing is, there was a study in Illinois that just completely rocked that idea that that's the case because there was a three or five year study in Illinois that looked at different types of lineups and compared them side by side and found that actually, no, that double blind sequential lineup actually produces worse results than a simultaneous non doubleblind one. Right. But then again, not so fast with that because other people since then have questioned the methodology they used in that program and kind of said, I don't even know if we can take this research and take these statistics seriously. Right. Methodologically. It was a screwed up study. Like, they really dropped the ball on the study. Yeah. And I don't think we mentioned the two judgments either. During simultaneous lineups, when everyone's standing there together use what's called relative judgment. In other words, you compare all the dudes standing up there against one another and with the ones where they trot them out one at a time, they use something called absolute judgment, which supposedly means that they're comparing it to only their memory and not to the people that came before or after. Right. That's the hope. That's the ideal. Right, right. But with this research in the study, I kind of didn't even know what. To think because it sort of went against the grain and the findings. But then they said, I don't even know if we can trust these findings because the methodology was no good. Right. So we ended up sort of back at square one with the Illinois Pilot Program, it seems like. Yeah, the reason why the methodology was so terrible, they used the double blind procedure for sequential lineups, but they didn't use it for simultaneous lineups. So if cops were advertised or inadvertently leading people with simultaneous lineups, then of course those are going to produce correct choices with suspects better than the one that's a double blind sequential one. They compare apples to oranges in this study. It's almost like a 6th grader came up with how to actually conduct the study that the Illinois legislature said, illinois State Police, go figure this out. Do a three year study on this. And they came back and said it's terrible. And the problem is, if it is true that a sequential double blind study is the way to go, that it is just smarter and works better, that study set that back by years because now all the cops all over the country heard they did the study and it's actually worse. Not in the design of the study was flawed methodologically, just it doesn't work. Yeah. They even went to the cops at the Illinois Pilot Program, talked to them and they said the majority of the officers said they didn't think that it was superior and said that witnesses who can identify the offender can do so under either procedure. And officers express concerns that using a blind administrator disrupts the relationship an investigator has, tries to build with a witness. So I interpret all that as it's cop saying, can we just keep doing it the way we've always done it? Yeah, because it gets results. Right. But the thing is, they have some pretty good points in that. If you are running a lineup or whatever, you put together like a six pack is what it's called in the US. Where you've got three and three mug shots of people. I think in Canada they usually use twelve, but you put this thing together, then you have to find like a patrol officer or a sergeant or somebody who has no idea what's going on with your kids if you want to do a double blind. Right. And then that person has to go to the house, record what the person did, and then come back and tell you it's just an extra thing. That cops are like, come on, dude, this is just making it way too hard. Yeah, I mean, they said in here that sometimes they even have trouble coming up with the blind administrator. And maybe it probably has everything to do with budgets, but my thought is, like, why isn't there one person that does only this? Oh, that's a great question. It's called the administrator. The line of administrator and goes to the people's houses or runs them in the precinct or whatever, and this is the only thing that they do. Right. I'll do it. Bring in the administrator. Yeah. That's a TV show we're going to have for sure. Yeah. I don't know. It's probably budgetary got to be they also found with a lot of these, when there's multiple perks, it just goes haywire, because sometimes they'll put two of the perks in the same lineup. Right. So super confusing. That actually falls in line with, like, how to build, like, a decent line up the right way, and we'll cover that and where they get people to stand in as suspects right after this. All right, Chuck, so you were just talking about how if you have a lineup and you put two suspects that you've got say there are two guys who robbed some lady, and you have five people in the lineup, but two of them are your suspects, that actually is totally unfair for the suspects. Sure. Because what you've done just then is increase the chance that somebody could guess, just guess randomly at the suspect. Right. Yeah. If you have five people in a line up and one of them is the suspect, then that person has a one in five chance of being chosen by random chance. Right. But if there's two suspects in a five person line up, they have a two out of five chance, which is way more than a one in five chance. Some people might even say double the chance. Right. And so it's just less fair. So one of the standards that you want to fulfill if you're putting together a line up and you're a cop, is that you have one suspect per line up, which is tougher to do than you would think. Yeah. And it seems like a lot of the problem with this is and they even say so in the NIJ articles that lab studies are one thing, but actually implementing this in the field, they get different results, and people are doing lab research on one end. Cops are out in the field. Sometimes they're in people's homes, sometimes they're in the precinct, and it seems like the two heads aren't talking very much. Right. And there are people they did, like, a live web chat at some point to bring together all these experts from around the world, and they kind of all around me were like, this is a big mess, and we need to all combine forces to try and do the right thing. And the feeling I get is that a lot of these police precincts just kind of want to be left alone. Sure. I mean, they know it works and it works, you know? But does it? Well, that's the question. Right. They fingered a collar. Is that right? The gum, shoe, finger to collar? Yes. Then it's all in a good day's work. Right. But if they finger the wrong collar, then it's no good. Still all in it. So one of the reasons somebody cop would put two suspects in a line up it's not just to increase the chances that one of those suspects gets picked by an eyewitness. It's because sometimes it can be hard to come up with people for a lineup. Yeah. This was hard to believe. They can't find people sometimes. Right, well and the reason why is because let's say you have multiple witnesses and each witness gives you a different description of the perpetrator right? Right. Ideally you're going to find a different line up for each witness. Yeah. Like if there's three witnesses you should run three line ups right. Because their descriptions are probably somewhat different. Right. That can be difficult. Sure. And there's a couple of ways to handle a line up. You can do a suspect matched line up where you've got a suspect and to keep your suspect from standing out you make all the other people in the lineup look like your suspect. That's one way to do it. Another is to do the perpetrator description match strategy which is you've got that's when you have no suspect right, just eyewitness account. You can have a suspect but you're creating your lineup based on what the witness has described the perpetrator to look like and then just throw the suspect in there right. Which can be bad for the suspect because if the suspect the person you actually think did it doesn't look anything like the eyewitness said there's going to be four redheads and the one blonde guy who's actually the suspect and he's going to stand out like a sore throat. So there's a lot of different things that have to be massaged here to try to make everybody in the lineup basically look all like the perpetrator that I witnessed described or all like the suspect that you've got because you don't want the suspect to stand out and there's a lot of techniques that they use to try to make everybody look the same. Yeah, like you said, they dress people. It was funny that one article said in the Bronx precinct they usually put them in Yankees hats right. Just lined up a bunch of guys in Yankees right. That means that they have like five Yankees hats hanging outside of that room where they walk them into. Wasn't Kramer in a lineup when he was a suspect? Totally. Serial killer suspect? Yeah. I don't remember it was a serial killer but I remember he was in the line have he kept turning the wrong way. Yeah, I think he was misidentified when they went to La. To pitch the TV show, kramer got caught up in some serial killer thing. I think of that and I think of the great line up scene in the usual suspects. Let's address that real quick when they have to say something well, we can't repeat it here because it's bad words. Right. Now what I was going to say is that that lineup would never happen. Because not only do you have two suspects in there, all five people in the lineup are your suspects and they're not dressed the same. It's a total movie lineup. It would never happen. No. What are you going to say about them saying something? Well, they had to recite a line. I don't know how typical that is though. When she did her line up, she remembered what the guy was saying. Okay, so that's the thing. And she was like, wait a minute, do they have to say whatever I say they said? And the cop was like, yeah. And she's like, really? What I want them to say he's like, no, you have to say what they actually said. Yeah. How did that result? Did she get the guy? Oh, she picked him out immediately. Okay. Yeah, the guy got busted. Nice. Yeah man, you don't mug, you me, I'll tell you that, buddy. You hear that perps? Alright, you start quaking in your boot. The one thing too that caught me sort of off guard that I never thought about is the part about whether or not they're clean shaving. Like there could be details of omission. Like if eyewitness doesn't remember or doesn't mention that they either were clean shaven or not, then I think they default to something that may not be accurate. And so all of a sudden your lineup should have all clean shaven dudes, you should just assume that if they didn't say the guy had a beard, that doesn't mean that the guy had a beard and they just didn't say it. Just assume it means that they're clean shaving. They should all be clean shaven in the line up because if you have five clean shaven guys and one filler or one foil with a big beard like me, I might get picked out just because I look different. Right? Exactly. Or if the one guy's clean shaven and you're like, well, they didn't say that the person had a beard, but they also didn't say they didn't have a beard. So I can put this clean shaven suspect in with four other guys who all have beards and make them stand out. That's the opposite. And apparently there's this New York Times article from years back about a guy named, what was his name, casting agent, basically. Robert Weston. Yeah, Robert Weston. It's a pretty interesting little article, but in the article it says that the Bronx cops that use this guy to help fill lineups, which we'll talk about in a second when they give the perpetrators like the Yankees hats or whatever for the line up, the perpetrator is always the one who pulls it down over his eye, right? And they have to be like, dude, see how everybody else is wearing their hat? Make it exactly like that or else they're going to pick you out. So they actually are trying to help the perpetrator, at least not stand up and be like me. Instead, just keep it on the level, at least as far as the Yankees hat brims go. I still want to be a filler. I'm sure you can do it. You have to hang around long enough until a dude who looks like you commits a crime, which in Atlanta, I'm sure there's a lot of hipsters running around. For sure. I don't look like a hipster. I don't know. I look like the hipster gone bad. Oh, yeah. I'm not neat enough to be a hipster. You look like a hit and run hipster. Hipsters are super well cooked and squared away. Oh, I know what you mean. Yeah. Your jeans aren't pegged. No, I look like a hipster who slept in. So back to Robert Weston, this guy in New York at the time, at least. I can't believe how little money he made. He only got $10 for putting together a complete lineup. Yeah, and they said sometimes he does as many as four in a day, and sometimes not at all. I'm like, so a good day for him is $40. That's what it sounds like, man. Maybe that's the problem, is they need to well, again, it's budgetary, probably. I was going to say pay a little bit more. Get a casting agent in there, get some of those college educated fillers in there, right? I guess. And also, it made it sound like, I don't know, he's kind of pulling people off the street. Sometimes they're homeless people, sometimes they're like drug addicts. Well, yeah, I guess it depends on who the purpose is. Sometimes they get other cops that aren't busy to stand in. Right. I mean, these are people there's a real need. People will go to a police station and stand in a lineup for $10, right. They get paid as much as the guy who organized the party. Right. But if Robert Weston stands in himself, he'll get an extra $20 on top of putting the thing together. I don't know how many times he tries to do that, but he even said if they want white guys, I don't know any white guys. So they go to homeless shelters for that, and that's very much what cops do. Cops will go find people on the street. They will go to homeless shelters, they will have casting agents like Robert Weston on their speed dial. And what they'll say is, I've got a middle aged white guy with a graying beard and he's about 6ft tall. Give me four other people that match that description, right. And ideally, four other people that match the description will show up and not three, and then one other total outlier or something like that. Well, the one cop was complaining about his work. It was kind of funny, right? Complaining about Robert Weston. He was like, he doesn't bring in good people. He always like, fudges the ages and the races and stuff. But the reason why they keep using this guy is because he answers his phone. It doesn't matter what time you call them, he can put a line up together for you. And if you have a very limited amount of time, you can only hold the suspect for so long without charging them. But you want to put them in a line up for what's called an investigatory line up to where you just want to see maybe bring in one witness just to see if you're on the right track. You've got a very limited amount of time and you need people like that, which means that you may have a lower quality one. Fortunately, that would just be for an investigatory one if it were for a confirmatory one. That's the one that you see on TV, where it's like you bring in a witness and you've got your suspect and they're sitting in jail and you bring them out. That is the one where all the T should be crossed and the I should be dotted, because a good court will hear want to know the details of how that lineup went. And if anything sounds hinky, they'll toss that line up right out that eyewitness testimony out. The worst possible version of all of this is something called a show up. And this is something this is also a movie trope that you see, and that's when an officer brings a witness to a place to show the witness the suspect that's been apprehended. So, like, they're in the back of a car or here's what happens in the movie. There's a guy in the back of a police car handcuffed. They'll bring the person who was robbed or whatever there to the scene. They'll yank him out of the back of the car and say, is this the dirtbag who did it? Like, just one guy. And that's clearly the worst possible version of all of this. And the guy's like, I need more pay. Say pay. I'm coming down. Here's the reason why that show up is so terrible. Chuck well, there's no other people that they're comparing them to that's one, but they're also in handcuffs in the back of a cop car, something like that. They're in police custody. And so the eyewitness is going to assume that in addition to their testimony, the cops obviously have something on this person. And so that must mean that the cops know it's that person. And this is just a formality. So I'll be like, yeah, sure. That was that person, right? That's the first problem with it. The second problem is that from that point on, that person that they've just seen now becomes the star of their memory of that crime. Right? It's like they photoshop this person's face into that vague, shadowy face that's holding the gun that they were actually focused on. And from that moment on, they just get more and more certain that that was the person, because that person is now starring in their memories. And it's not just the problem with the show up, but with any misidentification when they see that person, and that person becomes seared in their brains, they're positive from that point on. And they can seem very confident in court, which, again, juries by, even though it's garbage all the time in weeks and months, can go by between the point that you have experienced a crime and when you may be identifying someone or a court for sure is months and months and months later. Right. So, man, part of me does think, like, get rid of all this. A lot of people say that, or at the very least say this is eyewitness testimony. It's actually terrible evidence. Right. But let's do it anyway. Right. And if they did say that, if they basically lowered how much weight eyewitness testimony held in court, then those cases that were built entirely on eyewitness testimony wouldn't have a leg to stand on. They have to go build a bigger case. Yeah, but, like, in Yuumi's case, it worked. It did. That guy might have walked. Right. That's the problem, is that if 25% of the time it's wrong, 75% of the time is right. We think so. It's not like arson investigation, which we're going to do one on one day, where it's just totally made up. Like, it does have some veracity, but there's a lot of flaws with it. Five are at stake, so it's really dicey. They need to figure it out because of that. Yeah. So they need to go do that now. Can you imagine anything worse than being misidentified and serving two decades in prison for something you really didn't do? No, I really can't. I mean, I remember how upset I got when we did the Innocence Project. It's just you hear these stories, and then they get out and they're like, here's $400,000. We feel pretty bad. Right? Go get yourself something nice. Try to forget about all this. Right? Yeah. Do you ever see that movie an Innocent Man with Tom Selic? No. It scared the bejesus out of me. Same thing happened to him when he was framed. Wait. That's high road to China. All right, I got my stuff. No, that's quickly down under. That all right. You got anything else? No. All right, well, that's it for police lineups for now. We'll do an update whenever they get it figured out. We did one on police sketches, right? Yeah. Okay. Is this it? Are we done? No, we still got arson investigation. We got a lot. All right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. If you want to know more about police lineups, then I don't know, go hang around a police station. See if you can stand in one. Learn firsthand. Okay. Give a little sign that says, I will be your foil. $10. Yes. And since I said $10 this time for listener ma'am, I'm going to call this youngest fan. This is a very cute email. Hey, guys, love the podcast. You're doing it right. This email is not episode specific, but I had to tell you about this. My husband and I welcomed our baby boy into the world a couple of months ago when I was pregnant. We joked that the baby would think that one of you was his dad because he heard your voices so often. That's a very funny joke in the family. Yeah, joke about the paternity of your child. Sure. Now that he's here, I've been playing music in the car instead of the podcast, thinking music helps calm him. Well, one day he was crying and crying in the car. I couldn't get him to calm down. She was like, what's wrong with docking? Why isn't docking working? I couldn't get him to calm down with any of the usual tricks. So I decided to heck with it. I'm going to put on the podcast and I kid you not, as soon as you guys started talking, he stopped crying. My husband says it was coincidence. Jealous? I say stuff you should know. Magic. Now we're back to always listening to you guys in the car. There you go. Keep up the great work. And thanks for soothing my baby boy. And that is from Sarah Strange and our youngest, Fan Frank, from beautiful Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. That's awesome. Thank you so much for that email, Frank. Go to sleep. Quiet. Now. They named their baby after our chair. Yeah, wouldn't that be amazing if they actually did? And thank you also to Unnamed Husband for being a good sport. Agreed. If you want to send us a great email about how we're Magic, you can hang out with us on social media. Just go to our website, stuffyousteau.com. And you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep works.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. 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https://podcasts.howstuf…ysk-freegans.mp3	Why's that dude in that dumpster?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whys-that-dude-in-that-dumpster	Freegans prefer scavenging, volunteering and squatting to the more mainstream consumer practices of buying, working and renting a home. But how does this actually work, and why are these people sometimes called 'Dumpster divers?' Tune in to find out.	Freegans prefer scavenging, volunteering and squatting to the more mainstream consumer practices of buying, working and renting a home. But how does this actually work, and why are these people sometimes called 'Dumpster divers?' Tune in to find out.	Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:05:54 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2011, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=14, tm_min=5, tm_sec=54, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=76, tm_isdst=0)	30786540	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. Always is. Charles W. Chuck Bryant. We are the Koch brothers and we own you. How are you doing? Good, sir. Top of the morning. I saw you gave me a tip of the hat and everything. Dossier old cap. Yeah. Wow. We suddenly like Will Ferrell in anchorman? You're a London gentleman. When in Rome. Chuck, I think before we go any further, we should plug our Kiva team. Bigtime, awesomekiva team. That's Kiva. Orgteamtuffynow. Nice. It's where you can find us. Yeah. We founded that team in October 2009. Right. Chuck had the brilliant idea. Yeah. By 2010, last October, we'd already hit the quarter of a million dollars in loans. Mark, right. That's right. We are on track to hit half a million dollars in loans made to entrepreneurs in developing countries. By May, we just hit 400,000. Our team did. And we just wanted to let everybody know who's not a member. The team is open. Just go on and make a loan. $25 is the lowest increment you can make, but it's a loan. This is not just an outright donation because it's repaid. You can relay again, or you can take it and go on your merry way. Yeah, but it's pretty cool. It's a good feeling. Everybody on the Kiva message board is a happy chipper person. And I don't know if they are all the time, but I think when they come to Kiva and hang out there for a little while, they get happy. You feel better about yourself. I know I do. But, yes, half a million. It was nice. It's crazy. Who knew? So, that's Kiva. Also, we're on Facebook. Stuff you should know. And Twitter. The twitter. S-Y-S-K podcast. Yes. All right, let's go to sleep. All right, let's get started. Chuck? Yes? Did you know that Xerox, I think the 21st century, maybe a little before that, took out ads in all sorts of publications. I saw it in some sort of bar association magazine, I can't remember which one, saying, hey, Mr. And Mrs. Consumer, or Mr. And Mrs. Lawyer. Don't use the word Xerox, use the word photocopy instead. Yeah, Xerox. It's like Kleenex or QTIP or Aspirin was once a brand name. Heroin once a brand name. Sure. And the reason that Xerox is so up in arms about this is because if enough people start using your term generically, especially as a verb like Xeroxing or Facebooking, you can lose your trademark status. It can become a part of the vernacular. And it has happened to some other brands before. Heroin. Heroin, evidently. Allen wrench. Like I said, aspirin escalator the jungle gym. Tarmac. Yoyo, zipper. All of these were once brand name, shattering everything, the illusion of everything. I know, but in that weird. And then this is pretty cool. There's a whole list of stuff that becomes in danger. It's in that realm where Xerox is right now, where it's very commonly used, but these people still manage to keep their trademark jaws of life. Yeah. Nila wafers. Yeah. Ping pong is table tennis. Yes. And let's see, skivvies is underwear. Crockpot rolodex is technically supposed to be called a rotary card file. We should just read each one of these with a question mark at the end after everyone for Micah. Gokart. And my voice will go higher and higher until you can't even hear me anymore. So only dog start howling. Jacuzzi. This is one that I knew to Realtor is a real estate agent. That is not any real estate agent. A Realtor is a specific company's. Real estate agent. Century 21. No Realtor. Okay, got you. But you have all of these all these brands. Band Aid, by the way, that's why I said that originally, their tune was, I am Stuck on Band Aid because Bandaid stuck on me. They changed it to I am Stuck on Bandaid brand because Bandaid stuck on Bandaid stuck at the brand because the adhesive, they don't want to genericize their own name. There's one in this list that I didn't see that should be and that, my friend, is Dumpster. Did you know Dumpster is a trademark name? I did. He told me, like, ten minutes ago. Okay, well, the dumpster, the big trash bin, usually on wheels that can be lifted by a garbage truck. That whole process did you know Garbage truck is brand name? This whole process was originally called the Dempster dumpster, and it was invented in 1935 by George Dempster, who was later the mayor of Knoxville, Tennessee. And apparently, up to that point, if you were making something or you had a construction job going on, you just park a dump truck nearby, and everybody would throw their waste in or take piles and move it into the dump truck. It was somebody's job, right? So Dempster was like, why don't we just create this receptacle that we can eventually start by hoisting with the chain and just dump into the back of the dump truck? Or we'll eventually create these hydraulic arms that can go into the slots on the side of this dumpster with a capital D and that can just lift itself up into the back. I bet you he said, I'll call it the dumpster. And his wife said, you're not calling that thing the dumpster. Yeah, I'm not being associated with trash. And he went, how about dumpster? She was like, Genius. Copyrighted, Trademarket. Pour me a martini. And I've always noticed have you ever noticed it seems like a lot of waste management companies, especially locally owned ones, tend to have a person's first and last name, like Jackie Curtis portraitis. Oh, really? Have you ever look around, you'll start to see it's really weird? It's a lot of pride, but chuck. The point is, the whole reason I say this is because we had to fatten up freaks. Now, anytime we use the word dumpster, we're using it with a capital D. I just want to say so we don't have to say TM every time the dumpsters with a capital D every time we use it. And we're going to use it a lot because we are talking about freegans, who are, in other words, dumpster divers. Yes, Josh, the word freegan is a combination of word free and vegan. Doesn't necessarily mean they're vegan. I think they just had a nice ring, probably. I'm sure a lot of them were vegans when they started. Yeah. Of course, there's a lot of overlap. Or maybe the guy was named Frogen who started the movement. That's not true. No, actually, his name is Keith McKenry. Okay, well, freegans, josh, I know you know this are people who are also called post consumerism or reclaimism. They are anti consumerism. They say, we don't like this whole cycle of working and spending and buying and wasting and trashing and then buying it again. And we are going to try and reclaim and scavenge. We're going to try and not buy things. We're going to try and not work. Maybe just volunteer. We don't want to pay rent. We're going to squat when we can. And that's what we are. We're freegans. And a very big distinction between Friggins and tramps hobos the homeless, is that freegans are doing this by choice. If they don't actually have the money to buy food, they usually have the skills or education to go out and make the money needed to buy food. This is all very much a lifestyle choice, and it is also their very presence, their very existence is a thumb in the nose to the consumer economy that America has, which is in many ways very wasteful one. Right. Stattime, I guess. Yeah. The United States of America, Josh, wastes \u00a396 billion of food each year. That if you go by the stat that we waste a quarter of our food, it's between a quarter and a half. I've seen a half. So it's entirely possible that \u00a3196,000,000,000 of food are wasted every year. And we'll get into more specifics on what kind of food is being thrown out. But a lot of times it's not this big box of completely rotted apples. These apples are pretty bruised. This container is mashed. So we're going to throw this stuff out. Exactly. And I guess it's not just food. Food makes a lot of sense. We need food to live, work, play, freganize, do whatever. Everybody needs food. But food has a lot of other inputs wrapped up into it. Right. Like, I think we talked before about virtual water. Like, the movement of crops from a place that has an abundance of water and can grow these crops to a place that doesn't have it is technically the movement of water needed to grow those crops. You're just moving the crops. So there's a loss of water when that's thrown away. There's a loss of energy to produce and transport these things. There's just all of these losses represented by just throwing away a food. And freegans are like, okay, two things. Number one, I'm going to eat that food for free because I'm not grossed out by jumping in your dumpster. And technically it's perfectly fine food. And number two, I'm also going to do it to make you feel like a jerk for throwing it out. Right. Yeah. Critics will fire right back at freegans. Oh, yeah. Well, you're putting gas in your car, and you're using electricity to cook that food. So you're on the grid. So you're a big hypocrite fregan say, oh, yeah, well, every little bit counts. Jerk. Everybody's calling one another jerk. Yeah. Pointing fingers. It just goes downhill from there. Throwing food at each other. Well, I do take issue with that a little bit. It's true. Every little bit counts. And obviously you do need electricity or heat or something to live to freaking another day. The thing that gets me is the idea that you should hitchhike or HopBox cars or whatever, because in that sense, you're just free loading on somebody else who's using that gas, and you're still using it, too. You're just free loading it. That's the one that I do have an issue with, is hitchhiking. Yeah, but I guess they would fire back. Hey, dude, that train is going from here to Topeka anyway. I can totally understand the train. And technically, if you only catch a ride with somebody in a distance to the place that they're going anyway, tracking it for the people out of their way here. Really? Yeah. And plus, where do you give them the person in return? I can understand a train. It's company. And we should point out that freegan, there's not an official organization. There is a website, frigan freegan info that's very robust and up and running. Yeah, that's kind of the central home where you can learn how to forage urban forage. They also forge in the woods. We'll talk about that in a minute. They have classes. They talk about scavenging sites like, hey, dude, the dumpster on the 42nd street is loaded with baked goods this morning. Get over there. And I want to say also, I have nothing against freeganism. Freeloading drives me crazy. But for the most part, freegans don't hippy. Rob. Yes, it is. Is again, but for the most part, freegans don't free load and they squat, but they squat in abandoned buildings. It's not being used anymore. They eat free food, but it's food that other people throw out. But I think the key here that really differentiates Friggins from other people who ate out dumpsters, aside from being able to buy food, is that they actually do work or they do activities. They're just not doing it for money. So, for example, they volunteer, right? Because how much money do you need if you eat out of a dumpster on purpose and you don't have any house payment or anything? So you have all this extra free time aside from foraging. And most of them tend to volunteer or work on activist causes. Like, there's a freaking colony in old growth forests around North America where basically they just built tree houses in these huge old trees and said, no, you can't cut them down. It's called a resistance community, which is pretty cool. It's a cool thing to do with your time. So let's talk for a second about freedoms. The key to their philosophy to me is they think that consumerism is bad because it destroys the environment through things like deforestation, factory farming, labor practices that stink, and it's all profit centered. So they think that's implicit approval. If you're working in what most people consider a normal life, working and buying, you're saying that all this is okay with you because you're taking part in it. We don't want any part of it. So we're going to do our thing. We're going to not upgrade our iPhone. We probably won't get an iPhone. We have an old flip phone, or maybe we don't even have a phone like that. No, we have cans on a string. I'm not going to update my fashion because the sweater is perfectly nice. Just because Bill Cosby might have worn it in 1987. It's still a great sweater. Your mom liked it. And fashion is like, how important is that really is their philosophy. We're going to repair things that we have. We're going to trade. That's another big point with volunteering and donating time and all that. If you can do something like repair somebody's camp stove, that's a valuable activity, right? And in the end, Josh, what they end up with is a lifestyle that is very much not financially dependent on things like some stinky job that you have to do that you hate doing. So that frees them up. They're like, hey, I need a couple of month to live, so I'm going to make that by doing some odd jobs, and then I'm going to volunteer and give back. Right? And also you can get back when you give and you volunteer through things like Time Banks. There's a website called Timebank.org that I found on the Freedom website. And basically it's like, let's say that I know how to repair your bike and you know how to teach people how to play the guitar. Yeah. So I'll go repair your bike and you teach me how to play the guitar, and it's equitable. We don't remember in the bartering podcast. That doesn't always happen. You sometimes have to engage in multilateral barters, all that kind of thing. Sure. Time Banks get around that by saying, like, okay, well, you went and volunteered at the animal shelter for a couple of hours. You earned two time dollars that you can turn around and use for anything that's awesome from a member of this time bank. So that's pretty cool, too. Although, again, it's pretty much impossible to get away from currency in one form or fashion. Yeah. I mean, most freegans have a very limited budget to endorse her lifestyle. They're probably not completely free, although there might be some that don't use money at all, but most of them, like, limited as much as possible. Yeah. So where is this going on, Josh? It's going on all over the world. But if I was a freakin, I would move to New York City. New York City? New York City. Yeah, because New York City has got a lot of rich folks. That means there's going to be a lot of great trash. I know. Woody Allen's trash. Yeah. And trash day in New York. Imagine it's a field day. No, the night before trash night, which is called the stinky or too bad. Yeah, it's pretty bad. The worst in New York is in the summertime and it's hot and it's rainy and it's trash day, and the sidewalks are just full of garbage. We're in the middle of a garbage strike. I mean, hats off to whoever makes that city run. They're doing a good job, I think. Michael Bloomberg. Oh, yeah. That's off to you then, sir. They forage in New York for things like furniture, bags of clothes, electronics. Like they'll camp out behind an office that's moving. All of what you just said is called urban foraging. Right? It all falls under that umbrella, which is just like foraging, except rather than looking for routes to drink water from, you're getting office chairs for your squat. Four bottles of water. Yeah, well, that's another thing. You want to, but the point is, the city is the forest with everything you need and then some if you know where to look and you can hold your nose. Is it legal? It depends. So everyone who has ever wants a bad kid knows that the cops can go through your trash once it comes out to the curb. Yeah. So there is actually a Supreme Court case from 1988, California v. Greenwood, wherein the Supreme Court ruled that cops could once you put your trash out, it was public property. You expected someone else to come along and take it eventually. And that means that anybody who wants you can go through your trash, including cops looking for evidence that your drug dealer, or freegans looking for bananas that still look pretty good. Yeah, freegan thought. Hey, this should apply to us, too, right? Well, that's what they use, and I think they use it to great success. Although there are a lot of laws, like local, state, regional, municipal laws, that are anti scavenging laws, basically, because most people think of people who go dumpster diving as strictly hobos, who you don't necessarily want around. Right. I'm not sure there's plenty of cities out there. Well, a lot of stores, grocery stores and the like, will lock up and cage up their dumpsters to discourage this kind of thing. Some will put sharks in their dumpsters? Yeah, land sharks. Very dangerous. If you come across one of those. The deal is they think that they can get a lawsuit if someone dumpster, dives on your property, get some food and get sick by it. And that's not exactly true, though, is it? Didn't the USDA have a ruling on that? No. The USDA encouraged this. It's called the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan act. And I could just barely find who he was. He was a congressman who encouraged this. Act died before he could get passed. When they passed it, they named it after him. But basically it said, if you are a good person and you are giving away food, you're picking up food. Do you have anything to do in the chain of taking food, rescuing it from the landfill to feed the poor, and you are not purposefully poisoning the poor or doing it for your own benefit and someone gets harmed, you can't be held liable for anything that happens? Yeah, we're going to protect you, but that prevents that. The whole point was to encourage people, like you said, grocery stores and other groups to donate their leftover food rather than just let it go to waste. Yes, and a lot of places do that. We're not saying everyone just trashes their food. A lot of restaurants donate their food. It's great. Yeah. Speaking of food, though, I did mention bruised fruit. A lot of times you're just crushed packaging boxes. Sometimes the sell by date has cruised on by, and that doesn't necessarily mean that it's rotten. No, the feds don't have any kind of mandatory dating law except for baby formula and baby food. The sell by date is all voluntary. The use by date is the one you want to stick to. Right. That's actually kind of rare. The sell by date is just saying it's past its prime, but it's still got tons of life in it. Like, for example, if you can keep eggs at 40 deg Fahrenheit, which is standard for a refrigerator, they'll last for three to five weeks past the sell by date. Did you know that? Yeah. And if you talk to my mom, you can drink milk for up to two months after the date. I don't know about that one. The USDA does say, though, that factory sealed bacon, not fresh bacon, but stuff that was in the factory that can last two weeks beyond its sell by date. And you mentioned New York being the center of freganism. Yeah, well, it stays fairly cold in New York throughout the year. Right. Which prevents bacteria from growing because bacteria throws between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. So I imagine that you're safest in below 40 deg weather. That's good point. You know what I say the nose. Nose. Yes. I don't even look at the dates. I give it a good sniff. That will tell me all I need to know about whether it's going to go in my body. Yes. I usually don't have time to sniff. I'm too hungry. Wolfen it down. Yeah. And then if I'm still standing afterwards, so much the better. So that is urban foraging. We should also point out, too, that sometimes stores actually bag discarded food separately from the other trash. So it's not like you're picking an eclair off of a lot of toilet paper and saying, well, this looks fine. And then there's wild foraging. If you live near the forest and you're free again, you can collect plants. The website freegan info will actually tell you how to do this, tell you what's safe to eat. Sometimes they practice gorilla gardening. They'll go find a little unused plot of land. We've talked about this. Have you noticed that in the last couple of podcasts, we've recorded, like five other podcasts have been touched on? You know what this means? We're growing a body of work. Well, our quest to explain the world, it's all coming together. Oh, it is, isn't it? Yeah, it's all tying. And at some point we're going to say, that's the last one. It will be the time when we use the word is and realize we did a podcast on is. It depends on what your definition of is. Is going to be a long podcast, but we'll do it. A lot of them barter, like we said. They call it free sharing, though. But what it is, is bartering. They'll have a little freaking marketplace that's set up like every Saturday morning in this part of New York. Will all go meet and hey, I see you've got a laptop that you've fixed. I've always wanted a toaster oven. Let's make a deal. Throw in some rotten eggs and we're all good. Just sell by, man. What about health care? That's a big one. I looked all over the fregan info site for this. Basically, they don't have health care licked yet. They've got it close, though. There are healthcare collectives which have been successful here. If you get enough people, you can get it down to about $100 a year per person. And those go to fund free clinics. It relies heavily on volunteers, but the state operates all sorts of free clinics as well. Right. Which I imagine if you just go in and say, I dumpster dive every day, they'll be like, we'll take care of you. So that one is not kind of licked, because you can also make the case that, well, that's free loading again. And that completely undermines everything that freegans are about. Because it's not waste. Healthcare is not wasteful. The hours of a volunteering doctor or RN are not wasted. No, of course not. Somebody would use those. Right? Well, but a lot of times they're avoiding the healthcare because we don't want to support the pharmaceutical industry. That's a big one. We don't want to support these HMOs. Yeah. I have a feeling if it was the doctor down the street from with a white picket fence that gives you a Coke and tells you that everything will be better, they might be a little more apt to support something like the health care system. Right. And I saw that stated somewhere that they were saying, like, if you just cut out the profits, it's much cheaper than we think. Interesting. So, Josh, this food recovery is what they're into as a freaking but that's not a new thing because we have a long history in this country and other places as far back as typical days of gleaning. And that's when you have a crop, especially nowadays with the big mechanized systems, they'll leave behind a lot of waste that they're not going to go back and pick it all up. So they'll allow people and they did this in biblical days, after they've reaped the harvest. If you're poor, you can come into the field after us and pick up what we've left behind. Yes. It's called Gleaming. Not gleaming. The Cube? No, gleaming. Gleaming. There's a group called the Society of St. Andrew. There's a lot of gleaning organizations, but one of the more famous ones is the Society of St. Andrew, where basically they just have a central hub and they say, volunteers go pick up discarded food anywhere you can and bring it here, and then we'll distribute it. Right. Pretty simple model, but it works very well. And if you are a freegan, I would imagine you get some sort of halo for volunteering at the Society of St. Andrew. Yeah, you're the ultimate. The circle is complete. You have a nice spot in freaking heaven if you do that the whole idea, the anti consumer culture idea that forms freakinism apparently finds its roots back in the 1640s in England. And Chuck, there's a guy named Gerard Winstanley who lost his shirt in business, moved to the countryside and founded a colony that he called the Diggers. And the Diggers basically lived without money for as long as they could. Not that long. But when Stanley and the Diggers inspired the 60s counterculture diggers, who created their own kind of utopian colony or movement, and they inspired Keith McHenry, who is basically thought of as the father of Freakinism, which popped up in the early 21st century, as far as I know. And now he lives a lush, rich life, collecting on that word friggin and then food. Not true. He's a fat cat. And then food. Nut Bombs is another good example of the freegan movement incarnate. Right. Which is basically like they're a cleaner society. And then they go feed the homeless, feed the poor, feed Friggins. And one of my friends, Justin, who is living on tour for a while out in California, he told me they used to call him Soup not Food instead of Food not bombs. I was like, that's kind of jerky, don't you think? And he said, yes. And a sister group to food not Bonds is homes, not jails, which is pretty self explanatory. That's it. Well, let me give you a quick example. If you're wondering and thinking these people are really weird, let me tell you about Daniel Zeta. He's an American who moved to Tasmania, which you might think is weird in and of itself, not necessarily about a decade ago. He's 35. And he gradually became a freakin as he became a little more conscious of the world around him, the environment and wanting to help out. The environment. Okay. He had a great job, government job, pretty good money from what I understand. And he eventually quit the job. And now he is a freedom pretty much full time. He doesn't dumpster dive, though. He works for a food market, basically trades his work for food. Whatever they're going to discard, he'll take. He travels around the state. He builds environmentally friendly houses in return for lodging. And then in his off hours, he services the community. So he says he needs about $200 a month to live. And for a while, he lived on a boat that had solar panels. And the whole bed of the boat was a garden, a vegetable garden. And he bought sandals off the Internet that were returned because the dude didn't like him. He got his computer from his friend. He was throwing it out because the hard drive was busted. Replaced the hard drive. He's been using it for, like, five years. And it's just one story. He's not some weirdo. He's not a freeloader. He's not some crazed hippie hobo freak. He's just a guy that was like, you know what? I'm kind of tired of buying into this whole system. So this is my life now. Jumped favorite meter. Freaking assume they think you're a chump. Oh, they do? Chuck. If anybody wants to learn more about freegins, they can check out F-R-E-E-G-A-N in the Handy search bar. Howstepworkscom? And if this piqued your interest, you should check out another podcast of ours on How Much Money Do I Really Need to Live. Remember that one? Yeah, that's good. You can find both of those on how stuff works, right? And I said, handy search bar. So the handy failed search bar. I failed in my attempt to find a replacement. It is handy, though. It's time for listener mail. Okay, Josh, I'm going to call this zebrafish email, of course. From Alex. Dear Chuck and Josh and Jerry, I am a research technician in a neuroscience science lab studying sleep and circadian rhythms with zebrafish. I first discovered your scintillating podcast several months ago, and they had quickly become part of my daily routine. Each morning when I come in to feed the fish, I turn up the speakers. Blasting the show. And there are suddenly over 10,000 fans listening to your podcast in a 15 by 15 foot room, they eagerly swim to the left side of the their tanks, the position of the speakers as soon as the podcast begins. So these ebrafish are reacting to the dulcet tones of us. I consider myself apparent to these fish and that I feed them, clean their tanks, and educate them through your podcast. One of the first errors I made as a parent was to make a false promise to these fish that if they continue to work hard in our experiments, which is administering cocaine to sleep deprived fish. That's what he's studying. Wow. Chuck and Josh would acknowledge their hard work on the podcast. Please help me out. Don't let down my fish for a false promise I made long ago. God speed. Keep your ear to the grindstone, Alex. I wonder if that tiny room that they keep him in is the bathroom. I wonder if Alex is really a scientist. Yeah, right. He's just into getting fish high. We'll see. Well, thank you, Alex. Thank you to our 10,000 Zebrafish fans. Hello, fish. You guys get some sleep, okay? They can't they're dying, too. Or they're just dying. If you are conducting some sort of odd experiments, we want to hear about it. Wrap it up in an email, will you? Spank it on the buttocks and send it to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housedefworks? Check out our blogs on the Housetofworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camp. Emory, it's ready. Are you."
83345306-3b0d-11eb-b411-db9e1548dc94	The Wright Brothers	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-wright-brothers	Orville and Wilbur Wright were not trained professionals, but they were rigorous experimenters who ended up changing the world.	Orville and Wilbur Wright were not trained professionals, but they were rigorous experimenters who ended up changing the world.	Thu, 07 Jan 2021 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=7, tm_isdst=0)	61092328	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 not here again. She's kind of checked out, frankly. And this is Stuff You Should should Know, the Wright Brothers edition, which, frankly I've been using frankly a lot in the last few seconds, frankly, out of our wind tunnel episode. Am I correct in presuming that? I don't know. I don't remember. No, I think this is just on a list. Okay, whatever. Sorry. I will say, though, that this and I know I say this for a lot of episodes, like, why haven't they made a movie? But it is astounding to me that there has not been a big, sweeping, three hour biopic about the Wright Brothers. It's really weird. Are we still saying biopic? That's what I say. That's fine. You say biopic, right? Yeah, it just makes sense to me. I agree wholeheartedly. And one of the things that struck me, I was reading some research on this is that at one point, these guys, like, in a test flight, got up, like, 600ft in the air. And I was thinking, I want to see what that looked like. Yeah, because these are the first people, some of the first people flying, and they're suddenly 600ft up in the air. And this was in a glider. This is before it was powered flight. So they were really at the mercy of the wind right then, and I'll bet it was one of the most terrifying things that's ever happened to them. And I thought that would be really something to see. That's just one of many amazing things that the Wright Brothers did. They were amazing human beings. Yeah. I mean, the story has thrills. It has chills. It has thrills and chills. It's obviously something that changed the course of humanity. There are these very movie like AHA moments that happened along the way. It's two guys that were not trained engineers. They were self taught, brilliant men who figure this out, but they didn't go to school to learn it. So I don't know. It's got all the right elements, I think. I did find a 29 minutes short film from 2012 that featured Tony Hale. Oh, yeah. The great Buster Blue. Yeah. He was also the dude who rocks out to Mr. Roboto in that classic Volkswagen ad from years back. That's right. I forgot about that. But he plays one of them. I can't remember which one. And I saw a little clip from it. It looked like it was okay. It had a decent production value. But it sounds like a Drunk History episode. I know, it totally does. Was he playing it straight, or was it supposed to be tongue in cheek? No, he seemed really drunk, which was weird. Okay. No, it was totally straight. I mean, it's hard to imagine him like the scene that it showed was a very serious scene of him acting. And it was very hard to not laugh a little bit because I think Tony Hale is a brilliant comedic actor. So it was kind of tough. I was like, oh, man, it seems funny to me. Still. Yeah, I'll have to check it out. But, yeah, there needs to be a big, big movie. I want to see this on the big screen. Yeah, because, again, you kind of hit on some stuff. But it's really important to point out that the guys who were the first human beings to create to undertake a powered flight were the same ones who invented that flying machine that allowed for powered flight. And they were a couple of self taught amateur bike shop owners who decided that they wanted to be a part of figuring out how to get humans to fly, which was super duper in the Zeitgeist at the time. It was like the thing, especially if you were an engineer, that you were probably thinking about. There's a lot of technological razzmataz going on with things like the telegraph, which has been around for a while, I guess. But Locomotion was a big one. Trains, figuring out how to move humans beyond just foot power, bicycle power, that was a big deal. And to get people into the air flying, there were a lot of people working on that. On one hand, it was also kind of audacious that the Wright brothers would be like, we'll toss our hat into the ring and see if we can be the ones to figure this out. Just because they were self taught and they were outsiders as far as the scientific community was concerned. Yeah, and Dave Russ helped us put this together. And Dave is very keen to point out that they were outsiders. They weren't trained engineers, but they were far more than guys that just tinkered in a bike shop. They did do that, but they didn't stumble upon this thing. They very much were very data driven, very rigorous in their experimentation. And it's no surprise that they were the first. They may be unlikely, but not surprising, if that makes sense. So even at the time, the idea was that it would probably be the French who were the ones that figured out human flight. And even the Wright brothers apparently thought this, but it was still open enough that they decided that they could give it a shot. And they also saw a lot of parallels. They're very famous, as we said, for owning a bike shop. That was what their trade was in Dayton, Ohio. But they saw a lot of parallels between Bicycling and flight. Like, for example, Bicycling requires a lot of balance, and you have to figure the same thing out when you're flying. You have to build a machine in the most lightweight way possible that can also convey a human being aerodynamics factor into it. So they had a bit of a head start. They weren't coming it's not like there's nothing in the Bicycling world that has anything to do with this, especially if you're an engineer and thinking about things like aerodynamics. As far as Bicycling is concerned, you can translate that to flight. And that's what the Wright brothers did. Yeah. I mean, a plane is just a bike with wings, right? Basically, at least the early ones kind of work. And a bike. My dad's always said that. Junior, if anyone ever asked you what the difference between a bike and a plane is, you tell him nothing. Then he'd pop some ginseng and go along the way. That's right. All right. So the Wright brothers, of course, Wilbur and Orville, they were born to parents Milton and Susan. They were the third and fourth sons. There were seven kids total. Two. A pair of twins. A pair of twins. Just two people. I kept wanting to make it four people. A pair of twins, one single set of twins there you go. Died in infancy. So there were five kids that grew into adulthood. And we are going to pepper in some facts about their sister Catherine here and there throughout the episode, because Catherine, I feel like, does not get much credit. And while she was not inventing the aircraft, she was very key to their operation and management of these guys throughout their life. And she was a schoolteacher, and then later on, a suffragette in Ohio. Yeah, well, I believe their grandfather, and probably their father, too, was big on abolition. And the whole family kind of had this real defined moral compass that they adhered to rigidly. They also were taught as a family to be maybe a little wary and suspicious of outsiders and that you found your strength and your trust and your basis in the family. And that actually kind of helps explain Wilbur and Orville's relationship. Neither one of them ever married, and they planned on spending their lives together. That's what they were going to do, and that's what they did until Wilbur died prematurely at age 45. Up until that point, they did spend their lives together. But what I'm saying is they were going to grow old and die together. And from the outside, it seems really weird, but when you start to read about them and who they were and how they connected, it's awfully sweet, actually. They had a great love in their life, and it just happened to be their brother. Not in any kind of weird sexual way, not in any incestuous way. I think the Greeks had you even got to say that? It it does. Does. But we're in 2020, man. But I think the Greeks had four different kinds of love, and one of them was like a love between two men, bromance. Sure, but this is brother, mance. And there was no mance to it. It was just they were brothers that fit together in a way that you rarely see siblings do and they happened to change the world from that interconnection between them. Yeah, their mom had a college degree, and she was great at fixing things because her father was a mechanic, and so they got some of the tinkering from her. Their dad was a minister and also ran, I think, the church newspaper for what I could gather. Sure. And like you said, the brothers were tight. They were four years apart. But Wilbur wrote this on paper. I don't know if it was it a memoir, or was he just writing, like, a journal? I don't know. I'm guessing journal. I think they kept journals. All right, well, he said this from the time we were little children, my brother Owen and I lived together, played together, worked together, and in fact, fought together. That's thought, not thought, although they did apparently go at it in a spirited, debate kind of way, and we really love doing that. It wasn't all just like wine and roses. We usually owned all of our toys in common, talked over our thoughts and aspirations, so that nearly everything that was done in our lives has been the result of conversation, suggestions, and discussions between us. That was a great Catherine Hepburn. I could do it as Catherine Hepburn if you want. Okay. Yeah. Start over, please. I think there's another quote. I'll do that one later. Okay. So that kind of goes to show you just how connected these guys were just from a very young age, and they were four years apart. Siblings that are four years apart usually don't keep in touch after a certain age, let alone spend their lives together. So it was pretty cool that they had that kind of connection. And the fact that if you put the two of them together, they were greater than the sum of their parts, basically. Apparently, orville once you got to know him, he was a lot of fun to be around. If you had to pick between the two as to who was maybe the more brilliant engineering mind, you probably go with Orville. But that's not to say that Wilbur was any kind of slouch. And of the two, Wilbur was the more outgoing person. Orville was very shy, and Wilbur even experienced a pretty big dip in his outgoingness. He had a year's long depression that derailed his college career. He was going to go to Yale, study to become a minister and do who knows what else. And he was playing hockey one day and I guess took a stick to the face and I think a couple of other things because he had a long standing digestion and heart problem after that. But after his face healed, something changed in him, and he went into a year's long funk. And rather than go to college, he directed his energy toward nursing his ailing mom, who was dying of tuberculosis around that time and spent a few years, rather than going to Yale, staying home and just kind of being pretty down in the dumps about things. And luckily, he had Orville around orville was also an indefatigable optimist who helped the brothers through some really dark times. And this is one of them. Yeah, wilbur didn't even graduate high school because of that, which is remarkable. And also didn't know they had street hockey back then. Right. So that's something I learned, too, but yeah, orville was like, even from when he was a kid, he would go door to door collecting bones and selling them as fertilizer to the local fertilizer place. He built a printing press, and then when he graduated high school, he launched a newspaper, the Westside News. And that's when he got Wilbur sort of out of this depression. He's like, come on, brother, you get on over here. You can be the editor. I'll be the publisher. It was the same year their mother finally did pass away in 1889 of TB. And it seems like that really did kind of save his brother and put them on a renewed shared path together, I think. Yeah. So shortly after that I'm not quite sure what year it was, but the bicycle was a big deal. Me, too. I'm sorry. The bicycle craze was in full swing, and they decided that they would pool their common talents together and open a bike shop in Dayton. And that's what they did. They had a bike shop for a while. For many years, even after they were steadily experimenting with human flight, catherine managed that bike shop, by the way. She was the only one in the entire family, aside from her parents, to graduate from college. She was the only white child. Yeah, I couldn't get a lot. I tried to find out it's kind of one of those things where when there are five kids that live into adulthood and two of them are the Wright brothers, you're like, well, what did the other ones do? And there was a lot of good stuff on Catherine and how she assisted them through the years, but I couldn't really find out anything else about the other ones. The other two were older brothers, and both of them weirdly became bookkeepers. I don't know why I said it odd the first time, but the first one became estranged from the family, moved to Kansas City, the other one moved to Kansas City, got homesick, and came back to Ohio and then became a bookkeeper. That was it. No, they've led rather unremarkable, solid lies. I mean, they didn't reinvent the airplane, but there's no bookkeeper. They didn't. But Catherine, the fact that she was the only right child to graduate from a full four year college with a degree, she also did that while she was taking care of the family after her mother died. Like, the whole family was like, well, you're the only woman here, so you got to take care of the family. And then she also came back from college. I think she went to Oberlin and became a teacher while she was also taking care of the family, too. So she does deserve a lot more credit in Kudos than she gets. For sure. Yes. The C and the K. So let's take a break. Yeah. And let's talk a little bit about what's going on there at that bike shop right after this. All right, so the brothers have a bike shop. Katherine's running the thing. They're tinkering around in there. The world previous to this bike shop opening in 1892, like you said, there were electric trolleys going around, and Carl Benz had built the first real good automobile. And these guys were they like their bike shop. It was doing great. But Wilbur was like, you know what? I see what's going on in France, and I think that we can do this. Brother, who cares that we're not college educated? Who cares that I didn't even finish high school? And who cares that we're just bike shop owners in Dayton? I think we can invent a powered airplane. They didn't even call them airplanes at the time. A powered flyer. And so he wrote to the Smithsonian Institution in D. C. And said, should I read? Yes, please. I believe that simplified is at least possible to man. I am an enthusiast, but not a crank. I wish to avail myself of all that is already known. And then, if possible, add my bit, you old poop. That was a great Truman Capote. It was probably never happened again. I think there's one more quote, but that should be Sammy Davis, Jr. Do the third quote as Truman Capody, then just keep building on it like that. All right, so the long and short of it is the Secretary of the Smithsonian, a man named Samuel Langley, got this letter. He was a man who was receiving a lot of government grants to work on powered flight. Yeah, it was huge. Everybody was working on it at the time. Everyone was. And he was failing at it. He had something called the Aerodome, which by the time the Wright Brothers got cranking up, had already failed. Yes. Luckily, he wasn't one of those egotistical guys who controls the purse springs. He said, all right, well, if you need some information yeah, here's a bunch of information. And he sent them everything that they had. Yeah, he sent them, like, basically a reading list and a bunch of journals that they should subscribe to and start investigating and really kind of help them get along their way. This is also a time when some early flyers were approaching this scientifically and publishing their data, not the least of which was a guy named Otto Lilienthal. We must have talked about him in the wind tunnel episode, too, because he definitely was an inspiration who actually died during one of his test flights. And on his tombstone, it says, sacrifices must be made, which are his purported last words, which, controversially, actually didn't say that, but that's what is on his tombstone. But he left a bunch of tables. So they started studying like, autolilanthals, like flight test data. They were subscribing to journals, reading books, they were reading everything they could about the mechanics of flight and birds and just trying to figure this out. And they basically, through this approach, through just basically absorbing the data and the theories that were already out there, they figured out, okay, we seem to understand how to get this stuff in the air and keep it up in the air. We've got like, lift and drag figured out, we have power sources generally figured out. What seems to be the big challenge is controlling the plane when it's in the air. Because that's what got out of Lilith, all this thing where you start to turn and then all of a sudden the flying craft turns back the original direction and it causes it to stall. So you no longer have any lift and you just fall out of the air like a sack of potatoes. That had to do with controlling the plane. So the Wright brothers identified very quickly and early on that was a good thing to concentrate on. And that's what they started with, was figuring out how to control the plane in the air. Yeah, because as we'll see later on when we get to France, they could fly straight, they could fly in a circle, but they couldn't control straight and circle at the same time and fly where they wanted to fly. Which is a big key in an airplane, is you want to actually go someplace, not just whatever straight ahead of you. Exactly. Well, the big challenge was the fact that and we've talked about this on a few of our different episodes over the year about plane flight, but there are three things you've got to do when you're up there is you got to control your pitch, which is your nose up and your nose down, your roll, which is your wing tips going up or down and turning you. And then what? And then you got that Y'all control. One of the best Simpsons jokes ever. Look at that. Y'all control. And that is nose right or nose left. And it's those three things, those three different XIs controlling them all at the same time stumped everybody. Yes, because the flying contraptions that were being built were basically gliders. They were basically hang gliders that people were building, which was a big first step that we needed to figure out, because with the hang glider, you can figure out the shape, the size, the curvature, the angle of the wing. And when the White brothers came into this field, when they decided to cast their lot and to figure out how to fly, basically people had thought they had already figured out the wing. But that one thing about controlling the wing to moving from one side to the other without stalling out. Like I said, they kind of studied the mechanics of birds and one of them noticed, I guess it was Wilbur noticed that when a bird banks, the actual shape of its wing changes, so that when the wing twists a certain way, it causes air to go above it, to build up above it or below it. Which means that you're going to turn one way or the other depending on which way your wing is curved. And he said, hey, if we could figure out how to make our wings do that, that might really work. But how about how? Chuck? Yeah. So here's the sort of movie, one of the AHA moments and hopefully it happened like this. It's a great story if it wasn't, but he was in his bike shop, he sold a dude an inner tube and was holding the empty box when the guy left. And he said, by Zeus's beard, it looks like two parallel wings of a biplane. And when I twist this thing just right, the right wing tips curve down and the left wing tip curves up on this box. And he was like, I think I've just stumbled upon the way to do this. Except we're going to do it initially with what was basically sort of like a glorified box kite. We're going to do it with wires running through the wings that you can twist and warp these things from the ground, which was a big, big deal. They were doing this in Dayton. People would walk by and they're like, man, that is one crazy kite. I've never seen a kite do this kind of stuff. Oh, I think you should do that in Sammy Davis. That is one crazy kite, baby. Very nice. Yeah. So they were in Dayton still at this point, flying this box kite around and they were starting to get the hang of bending these wings to their will to make it do stuff. Yeah, it has changed not just the podcast, but my life, frankly, for the better. Oh, boy. So, yeah, they start testing out as kite, which is pretty sensible because the goal ultimately is to get a human in there and then to power the whole thing. But you want to make sure that the thing is not going to crash or stall out or whatever. So they would build these gliders and then basically control them like kites before they got in there. Very sensibly, which I think is a pretty smart move. Yeah, they just started building them bigger, basically. Like each one was a little bit bigger than the one before. Right. And then once they would see like, okay, yeah, this principle actually works, then they would start to get into the glider. They would convert the kite to a glider and then try themselves with them in there. Again, the purpose was to get a person aloft. It's supposed to be human flight. But they realized that to get a human in the air, you needed a really big glider or you needed a really good, strong headwind. And they didn't have the money or the resources to build a really big glider of the size that it would have taken to just fly it around Dayton. So they started looking for places that have really high winds. And, I mean, if this is going to be turned into a really good movie, there's going to be, like, letter writing scenes, because I get a lot of letter writing, and it actually moves the story forward quite frequently. It's one of those cases they wrote to the National Weather Service or the US. Weather Bureau, and they said, hey, do you have any wind data around the United States? And they said, By God, sorry, by Zeus's beard, we do. We have reams of that stuff. And they sent them the September and August, I believe, weather date of the United States, all the weather stations across the United States. And they started pouring over the data, looking for reliable, strong winds. And they found several. Yeah, what they wanted, though, was they wanted to kind of work in private. So they said, who has a lot of wind and not many people around. And where they landed, quite literally, was Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. And this is at the Outer Banks of North Carolina, which now is sort of a different place. It's not like Daytona Beach or anything, but back then, there was, like, not much of anything there. It had really good wind. It had sandy dunes that if you did crash this thing, it wouldn't be as bad as crashing, like, in a hard field and like a frosty field in Dayton, Ohio. And so they said, this is the place. Let's go down to Kitty Hawk. They did so in 1900 with a 17 foot wingspan glider. They had that same wire technology to bend these wings like the box kite, and they couldn't get it off the ground with a passenger, so it couldn't be a glider. And they said, we still got to treat this thing as a kite. Basically, yeah. They went back to the drawing board. They couldn't figure out what the problem was, and they realized that there might have been something wrong with the wing. So they started kind of pouring themselves into the wing a little more. They figured out that maybe the curvature of the top of the wing needed to be taller and closer to the front. And they came up with another glider, the one glider which had a 22 foot wing span, and went back to Kitty Hawk. And this time they did manage to get in the air. They took this Collider for a flight, but just like with Auto Lilynthal, it stalled out with Wilbur on it, and it crashed to the ground. He cracked his head open on a strut a wing strut, I believe, and could have died. He was very lucky he didn't die, but he didn't. And they said, okay, well, back to the drawing board. We've got to figure this out. And they figured something out that I think probably pushed them along. What they were doing wasn't wrong. They were following data that was wrong from the guy who died from Auto Lilly. They should have been their first clue. Right. They figured out that his data wasn't particularly reliable or it was just plain old incorrect, and that there was also something called Smeaton's coefficient, which is the value for air density that you would use when you're figuring out things like drag or lift. And they went back to the drawing board and said, we are going to have to conduct our own experiments and create our own tables. And this is when they built their very famous now, thanks to our episode on wind tunnels. Wind tunnel, that's right. Like we said, there were wind tunnels around, but they had one themselves, I think it's about 6ft long. And they built 200 little model wing designs, because we said it before, but it bears in mind repeating that they're working with these wings are stacked. So it's not just like, why is that funny? Forget it. I think I know what you're talking about. It's not just a single wing coming out each side. It's like a biplane or a box kite. So you've got four different well, not four different. It's really two different things you're trying to figure out, but you've got four wings. And they had to carve these things. Like, what if the top wing is a little bit different and the bottom wing is a little bit different? It's a lot of experimentation that went into this. Yeah, they built 200 model wings and tested them in that little wooden wind tunnel. And the real key, though, was that they had equipment that could very accurately measure that lift and drag, and they could really kind of stack everything out head to head and see which one worked the best for which combination. Rather. Yeah, they built what are called balances, which measure the movement of the wing or the movement of the air around the wing. We talked a lot about that in the wind tunnel episode, but I didn't realize that engineers basically consider that the balance is that they created, to be on par, if not exceeding the impressiveness of the fact that they achieved flight. These balances were not so precise and they built them out of old bike spokes and hacksaw blades. But that was one of the things they were well known for, was they could say, oh, yeah, hacksaw blade, what could I use this for? And they would just fit it into different scenarios in their mind and say, oh, I could do this, or I need to build this. What could I use for this? And they would. Come up with hacks all bikes, folks, and then, more impressive than that, these things would actually work. So thanks to their dedication to experimentation and taking down data and then building these balances, that gave them very accurate data. They not only were able to build their own tables to figure out which wing shape and form and size was going to produce the best lift and the best control, they also were able to revise Meaton's coefficient, which had been in use since the 18th century, from zero five to 33. And if you do the math today using modern equipment, it was almost exactly precise. And they figured it out, thanks to their hacksaws and bike spokes. That's right. And Jimmy Smeaton sat up in his grave, burped out a little dust bubble. Right. And then laid back down. No, I don't feel like it today. So they have their own data now. They go back to Kitty Hawk in 19 two, well armed, feeling good. They get their third glider going based on this data, and it worked. It could carry a person. And they had this sliding effect that caused Wilbur to crash in that last flight. So they added a rudder to stabilize things during turns. And they made thousands of test flights with this glider over the course of like 19 two and 19 three. A couple of times they went over 600ft, like you said earlier, in altitude and a glider. And they said, and I think this is a great time for a break, they said, I tell you what's next, we got to power this thing with an engine or we're just gliding around like a bird. So we'll be back right after this to talk about their power source. Okay, Chuck, the shape, the size, the design of the actual flying machine, but unless they power it, it's just gliding, basically. And they knew that gliding wasn't going to cut it. What's more, it's worth pointing out, Chuck, that they had already contributed to aeronautics and our understanding of aerodynamics to an astounding degree, that the data sets that they came up with from their wind tunnel was the greatest, most advanced set of data any scientists on planet Earth had at the time. And again, these are the self taught Wright brothers working in their bicycle shop who are doing this. But they said, this is not enough. We're really close. We think we can figure this out. We are going to invent the airplane, basically. And that's what they said about doing. Yeah. And I still can't imagine dude being 600ft up the poop your pants feeling. That must have been yeah. You know who could do it really well, I see Sam Rockwell. It's either orville or Wilbur, maybe orville both. Yeah. It'd be like Tom Hardy and Legend. Yeah, you just change them up. He wouldn't be twins, but he could play both parts. That'd be kind of cool. Sure. You only got to pay one guy. That's right, but you have to pay them twice. So they go back to Dayton. They decided they were trying to figure out how to power this thing and they said, well, if we're going to power this, we need to figure out the engine and the propeller. And they thought about the Navy there. Like the Navy builds plenty of propellers for their boats. And they were very surprised to learn that in all those years that the Navy never really worked on thrust in the design of a propeller. So they said, thrust is the key here. So we're going to go back here and we're going to carve dozens and hundreds of little tiny propellers by hand from little tiny pieces of wood. I'll bet you love that, don't you? Miniature. God, I love it. I try to carve something every time I go camping and in 35 years I've never carved anything that was worth keeping. Do you have like a go to like, fertility idol or nice. I used to try and carve like, tobacco pipes and then just little people. And I was just never any good at whittling and stuff. But how would you get the hole through the pipe? That was the problem. Sure. So you got the pipe, it was just not functioning well. I would have to then take it home and use a drill or something. But they never made it. They always just ended up in the fire. I got you. Okay, but back to where you came from. Your stupid pipe. So they're carving these little propellers. And Dave points out, too, that they may have been the first engineers ever to come to the realization that the same forces that generate lift in an airplane and a curved wing, which is Bernoulli's principle, was the same force that worked with a propeller and that a propeller was essentially just a wing that's vertical and spins. Yeah, they figured out that there's a direct correlation between lift and thrust and it just has to do with whether the wing is horizontal or vertical. And the idea that they were the first ones to figure this out is just mind boggling to me. But they seem to be. And at the very least, even if they weren't the first ones to figure it out, they were the ones who figured out how to build a propeller blade such that it did produce thrust. So they figured out how to get this thing to be more than a glider by propellers moving and pushing the plane through the air, propelling it, you could say. But they had to figure out how to power the propellers. And that was a big, big problem because at the time, the thing that had held people back for a very long time was steam technology was basically all you had and you were not getting off of the ground with a steam engine. So the Wright brothers apparently wrote a bunch of letters to a bunch of different engine making companies and said, here are our parameters, or design parameters. Can you fulfill these? And they couldn't. Not a single company came back and said, we can do this. Although apparently a couple did. We could do this for Kings ransom. They're like, we can't afford that. So the Wright brothers being the right brothers, they said, we'll just do this ourselves. Yeah, we'll go back to that bike shop. And they had a guy working there named Charlie Taylor who was the machinist. And he was just sounds like another one of these guys that was just really good at figuring stuff out. In the movie, Charlie and Catherine would be romantic interest of one another. It'd be super cute. There's actually a sad story later that involves that. Will it make the story even better for the end? Okay, let's say they just had a brief fling and maybe she inspired him to tinker better. Okay. Does it work that way? Sure it can. Why not? Or maybe she gives them the brilliant idea during some hot coyotes. I guess I was thinking maybe like a rowboat ride on the lake. But sure, I guess you could have coitus in the rowboat on the lake. You should just abandon this. All right. So Charlie builds 6th grade classes, by the way. I know. I take all that out. Okay. So Charlie builds a four cylinder engine out of aluminum. And no one had ever used aluminum before an aircraft construction. So this was yet another thing that the Wright brothers and Charlie Taylor came up with that would ended up revolutionizing aviation. It became the backbone of aviation using this lightweight aluminum, super strong, super light. And they connected this thing to the propeller using bicycle chains. Yeah, and if they weren't showing off before, they were by then because the engine they created, they figured out they needed a minimum of 8. Engine they created was 12 HP. So it had more than enough to power the propellers, which would produce thrust, which would actually create powered flight. And those bike chains were pretty ingenious, too, because there were two sets of gears, one on each side, going toward each propeller. And those bike chains connected the propeller to the engine. But to keep the propellers from shooting the I guess it would be yaw out the YinYang from creating a gyroscope. With the two propellers going the same way, they decided to have the propellers going the opposite direction of one another. To make that happen, they just turned one of the bike chains into a figure eight. How ingenious is that? Yeah, going in opposite ways. Kind of like, oh, I don't know, like you see on airplanes these days. Exactly. So the Wright brothers figured that out too. So now all of a sudden, they put all this stuff together. They put together some controls because, remember, controls were like one of the big that was one of the big challenges. They figured out a whole set of controls that controlled the rudder. That controlled these elevators in the front of the airplane that kept the nose from diving or lifting too much and then they had the little lever that warped the wing one way or another to let you bank so they could control pitch rolling y'all. On a engine powered aircraft with dual propellers and they were ready to go. All right, so here's how this thing is actually flown, which is pretty interesting because like you said before, they were figuring out like the biggest trick was how to figure out how to control this thing so you could make it go where you want it to go. And no one had really done this effectively yet. So it sort of operated, like you said, like a hang glider and that the pilot is laying down on his stomach in the middle of the plane. You've got the engine on the right and then right in front of the pilot was what was known as the elevator, which are two little stacked wings that could be adjusted and then you adjust them with a little wooden lever and the left hand of the pilot to control the pitch and that is nose up or down. Right? And those apparently used to go in the back of the plane and autolilanthal crashed with the elevators in the back. So the Wright brothers were the ones that moved into the front, which helped quite a bit. That was a big one. There was also the hip cradle that side to side. Yeah, it was like using your hips to steer the plane, basically. And so this little hip cradle that you laid in was connected to wires that pulled on the wings, that caused them to warp one way or another. And then it also was connected to the rudder so that would stabilize yaw as well. So you had two different mechanisms that controlled those three different axes. It really is super ingenious. Now all of a sudden you have a plane that's under human control, right. Like they couldn't figure out at this point a joystick that could control all those things at once. So that hip cradle is, I think, pretty smart to take off. This is the one thing I actually never knew. I always wondered how did they like surely they didn't have that engine powerful enough to get them going and take off and that is correct. They actually had to get up in the air for those twelve horses to do their work. And to do that they slid this thing on a dolly, on a 60 foot rail, basically by the hub of a bicycle wheel. So they get it going on this dolly and then it launches and then that's when the engine has enough, I guess, enough of a head start with the thrust to get it going in the air. Yeah. So when the thing kind of launched off of the rail, it was in glider mode a little bit. That helped the engine kick in or take over, get enough power. Yeah. I mean, I imagine they had the engine going, though, don't you think? No, they totally did. But like you were saying, it wasn't enough to just go from a standstill. They needed that glide to get it started. Right. So on December 17, at 10:35 A.m., actually, there was an unsung test flight that doesn't get a lot of praise. But on December 14, they tried their first attempt in this powered flyer and they tossed a coin to see who would go in. Wilbur won, and it went down the track and went off of the track and crashed immediately and broke the elevators. So they took three days to repair the elevators. And on the next try, on December 17, it was Orville's turn. And so he became the first human to fly in a powered flight, orville Wright did. He flew for 12 seconds, just a few feet, I believe. I think it was about 120ft. But it was controlled. He landed it, and it was a genuine powered flight. And from that first flight, I think even from the one that Wilbert tried three days before, they were like, this is going to work. I can tell from the way the controls responded, and this is going to work. We just got to keep trying. So they did. Yeah. So on that same day, they did three more flights, and the longest one, Wilbur. I loved that they were taking turns. I think it's so cool. Wilbur piloted 852ft in about a minute in the air, which is remarkable. Like, this is the moment of the movie where everyone is just going crazy. It's like the high point of the film. And then they go in and just like a movie, they go inside. They're having a cocktail, they're warming up, and they're so happy, and a big gust of wind comes in and lifts this thing off the ground and smashes it and breaks it into pieces. Oh, man. Can you imagine? Yeah, I can't imagine seeing that. You'd just be like, oh, look, the things being lifted in the air. Look at it. Oh, God, no. They're like, it's tied down. And then Sam Rockwell goes to Sam Rockwell. Yeah, but crash. Yeah, that's the problem. So they apparently were not particularly worried about this at this point because they had already shown multiple times that this proof of concept, it would work, that they had undertaken the first flight. They'd done it, basically. So they went back to Dayton. They had a habit of leaving their test flyers at Kitty Hawk because they beat him up so badly that it wasn't worth moving them back. And some of them are preserved. And I believe that first flyer that they created is in one of the Aaron Space museums, maybe in Dayton, I'm not sure it would make sense to see that somewhere. It might be at the one out by Dulles, maybe. Or maybe I've just seen a replica. I feel like I've seen one in an airport and not a museum. So that was definitely a replica. Got you. And it was actually only six inches wide, and a kid was flying it around. It was RC control. Yeah. Come to think of it, I've got this all wrong. So the Wright brothers, they released a press release. They were acutely aware of what they just done. This wasn't something they had fallen backwards into. This wasn't something that just happened. Through sheer luck, they worked their way to powered flight, so they let the world know about it and they got zero response in return. Basically. Yeah. This was pretty disappointing, I think. They sent out this press release, like you said, and got nothing. And I think they were like, hey, everyone, we flew a plane. Like this thing that everyone's trying to do all over the world. We did it high. And it seems to be just a case of, like, Dave says, the boy who cried wolf. Like, these newspaper editors had been burned by writing about other people who said they'd done it. And they're like, yeah, right. And it took this is kind of one of the greatest parts of the story, I think. In September 19 four, a journalist that was writing a beekeeping journal called Gleanings and Bee Culture, mr. IA Root was the first person to actually say, yeah, I'll write about this thing. That sounds like a good story. Gleam is that filter. Who would play him? John C. Reilly, I think. Oh, yeah. Good call, man. Okay, so John C. Reilly shows up. He had read about the rights, and he said, Can I see one of your flights? And they invited him out and he wrote about it. And it didn't get much attention at the time because I don't think Gleanings and B Culture had a really huge readership. It's a glowing story, though. I think you should read this quote. Whatever accent you want to read. No, I'm just going to read it regular. Okay. God, in his great mercy, has permitted me to be at least somewhat instrumental in ushering in and introducing to the great wide world an invention that may outrank the electric cars, the automobiles, and all other methods of travel, and one which may fairly take a place beside the telephone and wireless telegraphy. Am I claiming a good deal? Well, I will tell you my story and you shall be the judge. So that was pretty good. I mean, for no accent whatsoever. Oh, I thought you were talking about the actual article. Yeah, they still didn't get any kind of attention from that. But it is a pretty great little footnote to the whole thing that that was the first article that was written on them. Yeah. Cleanings and beak culture. They even wrote the War Department and said, hey, we invented an airplane. Do you want to buy it? And they said, no. Yeah. One of the reasons why it was because the War Department was like, well, can you send us the specifications? The right parts are like, no, we invented this. Yeah, you give us a contract first, and then we'll give you the specifications. The War Department said no. Even worse than the fact that they weren't getting any kind of credit for their accomplishment and no takers on selling their design. Was that over in France? Remember we said that even the Wright brothers thought that the French would be the first to a powered flight. The French were convinced that they would be the first to the powered flight and that they had cracked it. There was a Brazilian balloon named Alberto Santos Dumont. I think they made a movie about him recently. He's a super colorful character, right? I don't know. I believe they did. He gave a demonstration. Yeah, I feel like they just called it Dumont with an exclamation point, maybe. But he flew a plane in Paris, I believe, of his own design, and it just flew in a straight line, no control. But it was enough at the time because, again, no one was paying attention to the Wright brothers. It was enough for the French to be like, Sakura blue. The flight has been achieved. And the Wright brothers are like, no, what we're doing is so much better than this. 1908, there was a guy, a Frenchman named Henri Farman, who was the first to fly a powered plane in a 1 km closed circle. This is bears mentioning. That the right brothers, who, again, they're total outsiders. No one's listening to them. Three years previous to this, they had stopped the experimental stage. They had reached the point where they had produced a reliable plane. And by 1019, five, three years before this French pilot did that 1 km closed circle flight, they just knocked the socks off of the French. They had done a 24 and a half mile circle in 39 minutes. The Wright brothers had three years before this. And so imagine accomplishing this and then seeing people doing, like, preschooler stuff compared to what you're doing, getting all this praise and attention and press lavished on them, and no one's listening to you. This is the situation that the Wright brothers found themselves in at the time. Okay, so Wilbur has had enough. He goes to France in 19 eight on August 8, and he said, you know what? I'm going to go demonstrate this thing. I'm going to show them that flying straight is stupid, and I'm going to show them that we can actually make this thing turn and do whatever we want. And so he went to a little small racetrack outside of Le Mong and got on the ground and said, gentlemen, I am going to fly and they all spoke French, and they were like, I don't know what he said. He said something. I think he's about to do something big. So he flew. And if the French were like sakura boo at that one flight, they were really knocked out at this one. They all realized that what was going on in front of their eyeballs was something that the French had never accomplished, that no one had ever accomplished before, and that they were basically done. And there was a Frenchman, supposedly that was there that was quoted in the newspapers by saying, nusombatu, we are beaten. Yeah. So, I mean, imagine being, like, French at the time and seeing, like, somebody in a hang glider with a bicycle gear on it and being like, People are flying. People are flying. And then somebody shows up in, like, a Piper Cub, and it's like, watch this. That was kind of the level of knock your socks off that the French saw, and that was it from that point on. The Wright brothers were overnight sensations. They were the first superstars of the 20th century for being the first to fly, and they finally started to get their claim. So, yeah, these guys are superstars. Catherine is actually, if you remember, we haven't talked about her in a bit. She's actually a superstar, too, because she goes with them. She learns French for the express purpose of helping the brothers out while they go on an eventual European tour. She negotiates a deal with because these guys I get the sense that neither one of them are businessmen, and they really sort of had their head in the invention game. And so Catherine was really key for initially managing that bike shop and then helping them out with their journaling and data keeping. And then she's the one that actually negotiated with the army. The army said, hey, we'll give you guys some money. We'll give you guys $25,000 as a grant. But you got to be able to fly a pilot and a passenger and presumably a couple of bombs or something, and a gun, may be sure, would be my guess, at the very least, a guy with a rifle on your side. Yes. Was this before or after the tragic game of hide and seek with Catherine and Charlie Taylor where he hid in the trunk and got locked in and suffocated to death that you referenced earlier? I don't know. I'm not sure. Okay. But it was around that time, from what I understand. Right. I think so. Catherine, she negotiates this money, and Wilbur is in France, and orville at this time goes back to DC. And he eventually in DC. Does a flight that goes for 70 minutes. Yes. When they saw this, the French government is like, Take our money. How much do you want for this plane? And they started to negotiate with France to sell their military planes. That got the attention of the US. War Department finally said, okay, we're on board. We'll start buying planes from you, too. And one of the things that a lot of people don't realize about the rights is that they spent several years around this time training the militaries of the US. And Europe how to fly planes and selling them planes. They were the first flying instructors. Yeah, they really were. So during one of these training, I guess, kind of demonstrations, orville had a passenger named Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, and they went up and were circling a field, and I'm not quite sure what malfunction they had. Do you know what it was? No, I just know that Orbital had to cut the engine, basically, and try and land. He was going to try to glide in, and it didn't go very well. The plane, I guess, lost its lift and just fell out of the sky again, which was a real problem back in those days. And orville broke some ribs. He sprained his back. But Thomas Selfridge died. He fractured his skull. He became the first casualty of a powered airplane crash in the history of humanity, which is kind of a dubious honor, really. Yeah, it was. Oracle recovered, of course. He came to France. And this is when Catherine also came to France, and this is where they did their big sort of a victory tour, where they were demonstrating this thing all over Europe. People loved it. It was huge. And like you said earlier, Wilbur, Norville and Catherine were the first big celebrities of the 20th century. It's pretty astounding. And orville was like, Where's Charlie Taylor? And Kathryn was like, I don't know. I haven't seen him in, like, a year now. He just kind of dropped off the face. So strange. So when the company became established, the right company to design and build planes, when that again got off the ground sorry, everybody. Orville was kind of dedicated to the actual production and invention side, while Wilbur dedicated himself to the business side, meaning he ran around suing anybody he thought was infringing on their patents, and he spent a lot of time doing that. Again, remember, they were kind of raised not to trust outsiders like they trusted their family, which is the opposite of the stuff you should know motto. Right. And on some trip, while he was, I believe, filing one of these patent infringements are investigating it, he died after a trip to Boston. He caught Typhoid. And I looked typhoid Mary was not cooking at the time. She was on hiatus. Not her fault, because I thought, wouldn't that just be amazing if he caught Typhoid from Typhoid Mary? But he did not. Or as far as I could find, he did not. So he went back home to Dayton and he died, and he was only 45, actually. Remember Orville and Wilbur playing to spend the rest of their lives together. So this had a pretty big effect on Orville yeah, I get the sense. And this is where I sort of hinted earlier about Catherine and her romance. She went with him and kind of stayed with Orville. He didn't have much interest in running the right company anymore, so he sold it in, sold all their patents for a million bucks, about $26 million today. So a huge sum of money to retire for the rest of your life. Sure. And that's what he did. He still did stuff. This is a Hawthorne Hill big mansion in Dayton. He built an automatic toaster that sliced the bread. He built a system of chains that let him adjust the furnace from upstairs. He built a circular shower. He was never going to stop building things, but it was all I got, the sense in just sort of retirement hobby sort of way. Yes. But Catherine, the sad ending there is she met a man and fell in love I can't remember his name, and decided to get married and was really nervous about Orville. I think he was so dependent on her being around that she rightfully was scared, and she was correct. And he refused to speak to her ever again after she got engaged and got married. Oh, wow. Which is really kind of cruddy. That's the nicest way to say it. And it made me kind of think ill of him at the end. And she got pneumonia and was dying, basically. He still wouldn't talk to her. And finally one of his friends said, you got to go talk to Catherine, man. This is your sister. And apparently he did arrive at her deathbed, at least, but she had died. Yeah, well, I think you got there first. But she did pass away of pneumonia and just very sad ending to her story after not getting much credit over the years and sort of being at the beck and call of these brothers that were brilliant inventors and being a key part of their team, and then being too scared to tell her brother that she had fallen in love and getting married, it was really sad. That is very sad. So Orville outlived her as well. I didn't realize that. Well, he kept, like you said, tinkering, kind of in retirement as a consummate inventor for the rest of his life, and he actually died. He suffered a heart attack while fixing a doorbell and then died three days later, apparently super alone. I didn't realize that. That was a real bummer ending that hadn't anticipated Chuck. Yeah, it's a double bummer. I thought we were going to end it. Kind of like him being like I invented to the end. And then the sousa band starts playing. I got mad at my sister because she found love and I never did. Yeah. Or he did find love, and it was his brother who died years before. Yes. Perhaps that's it for the Wright Brothers, huh? That's it. Evil Kaneville got a two parter. And the Wright Brothers didn't. Well, he broke more bones. We're never going to live that down. No, I'm never going to let us live that down. You got anything else? Nothing. Did I say that already? Maybe. Okay. Either way, it's time for Listener ma'am. I'm going to call this from a ten year old fan. We love hearing from our young listeners. Yes. Hi, guys. My name is Quinn and I'm ten years old and from Vancouver, BC. I really enjoy listening to your podcast on my way to school. The two most interesting podcasts that I've listened to so far is the one about soap. It's really cool how soap is made. And the second one about porcupines. It's so cool that the old world porcupines have straight quills. Now the new world porcupines have barbed quills and how they're harder to get out of your body. I am very interested in the Titanic and the story behind it, and I was wondering if you guys ever thought of doing a podcast on the Titanic. Totally. Yeah, we totally should. If you have, it's a very interesting topic to listen to, so if you thought about doing that, then maybe you could do it. It would give me something to look forward to on the car ride to school. I really hope you read this email and I'm also hoping that you can write back if you have time. You guys keep up the good work and please keep making podcasts for me to listen to. All caps. Thank you so much. Sincerely, Quinn. That was a great email, Quinn. Thanks a lot for it. It's great. And that cute thing happens to where it's from the parents email, which is always one of my favorite things. So I wrote back to Quinn's. I think dad said to tell Quinn that this is going to be a listener mail. So, yeah, we've been wanting to do a Titanic episode for a while, but there was a period there where everyone had seen Titanic so recently, the movie, that it was like, why would you even bother to do an episode on it right now? Everybody'd be like, that's not what James Cameron says. Now we can do one and it's high time I've wanted to since day one. So listen out for a Titanic episode and know that came from you there, Quinn. Yeah, that'll be a two partner. Probably. We'll see. Only time will tell. If we mention Evil Knievil in it, then yes, it probably will, right? If you want to get in touch with us like Quinn did, we are always on the lookout for emails from you. You can send it to us at stuffpodcast iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should Know is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
3d7606cb-876d-4fca-992b-aea2010dc4f9	Selects: Waterbeds: The Sexiest Bed?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-waterbeds-the-sexiest-bed	Waterbeds came and went pretty quickly in the United States, but despite their marketing as sex beds, they were actually invented to deliver a great night's sleep. Learn all about these super 70's beds in this classic episode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Waterbeds came and went pretty quickly in the United States, but despite their marketing as sex beds, they were actually invented to deliver a great night's sleep. Learn all about these super 70's beds in this classic episode. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Sat, 28 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=5, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=148, tm_isdst=0)	37862174	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hello, everyone. It's Chuck here on a Saturday. And today's select episode is called water Beds colon the Sexiest Bed. Oh, methinks. Yes, indeed. This episode is from October 18, 2018, also the sexiest month. So check it out. Now, waterbeds. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And there's Jerry over there. And we're just here jiggling away flush on our pleasure pit. Man, it's so funny. When I started researching this, I was like, waterbeds. That's very stuff you should know. Yeah. So it sort of fits right in with our historical pop culture phenomena series. Phenomena. Phenomena. And big shout out to the Atlantic, one of our favorite rags. A lot of this was taken from a 2010 article by Rebecca Greenfield and then a bunch of other cool supplementary stuff. New York Times. Who else? Washington Post. Yeah, WaPo. All those fake news outlets. Right. Although I really love the New York Times and the Washington Post ones because they were, like, contemporary articles. Yes. Like, the New York Times one was in 1086, and WaPo was from 1991. And they're writing about the phenomena of waterbeds at the time. I love that, man. I love being able to go back, read an article, and then go back and see how it actually unraveled, like in real time, basically. Yes, sure. The little time capsule, if you will, and you can look back now and say, did they get it right? What's? The fake news. I don't even like saying those two words together. I don't either. So played out. So played. All right, let's talk about the water bed. You ever had one? No, I kind of wanted one. I didn't have one. I kind of wanted one, too. Sure. I think we're just of that age, and they came about, as you'll see. We're going to talk about the seventies and eighties, and the eighties is when they peaked sales wise. Right. I think even, like, young and like us were very intrigued. Oh, yeah, my friend had one. Yeah? Did you sleep on it? No, never slept on that one. I laid down on it once, in it because I was like, I got to know what this feels like at least. Right. And I think it was they may have called it waveless, but I don't even know what the difference was because it was pretty wavy. What decade was this? This would have been mid to late 80s. Yeah. They had waveless ones back then, I think. So they were called waveless. But I don't know how it still sloshed you around. Yeah, I remember very distinctly laying on it, and I remember thinking, I don't know if I could sleep on this. Yeah, it wasn't uncomfortable. Like, it caused me pain, but I move around a lot in my sleep, so it's not a good or at least the old school waterbeds are not a good match for me. Right. Memory foam is a little better, actually. Supposedly, they've come a long way and the new water beds are the bomb. I would be curious to lay on one. Well, go to a dealer in South Florida. I think city furniture in South Florida is bringing back the waterbed. There's other places, too, because the design now we'll get to it, but it's much different. It's not the good old days where you just fill up a big vinyl rubber bladder, right? Hold tripping on some grass and listening to Dark Side of the Moon. You know, the funny thing about my friend Chris'waterbed, though, and his whole house was a time capsule of the 1970s. He had a water bed in front of a wall that the wall was a photograph of a Hawaiian beach sunset. Oh, man. We had two of those in my house. Really? We had one was a straight up forest. So it's like, I'm in the family room. I'll walk into the kitchen, oh, my God, I'm in the forest, basically. Right. And then if you went upstairs and this is my childhood home in Toledo, Ohio. When you went upstairs to my sister's rooms, when you got right up to the top landing, there was like an outdoor cowards beer scene, like in the woods with, like, a stream coming through. Rocky Mountains. Giant murals. That's correct. In my house. Yeah. We never it's weird. Like, when I look back at the house I grew up in, it didn't have any of those cool 70s things. But now that I look back, I think it's probably not cool then because we lived in this huge house in the woods. Right. But now that I look back, I'm like, that was where I would like to live now. So what was the aesthetic of your house? Sort of contempo country. Okay. That's hip, like Jerry Reid or something lived there. Yeah. Looking back, we had shag carpet, orange shag carpet. There were some markings of the day, but then that was replaced with hardwoods at some point in the 80s. Got you. But then when I had not too long ago, I went back to my childhood home and broke in. It was for sale. Really? And empty. Wow. You broke in? Well, not for sale. It was just sort of derelict and empty. Did you break a window to break in? No, I just got in like I used to get in. Emily it's locked. And I was like, what's this? Watch this. I used to sneak out and read Bible passages. So I snuck in through the garage window, and looking back, there was a lot of the same stuff was there, and it was very kind of 70s tile and linoleum and stuff like that, but it just wasn't full on, like, Brady Bunch stuff. That's so cool, man. Or wall murals. And I'm glad I went because sadly, it is no longer there. I'm glad you went too. Then a couple of months later, just torn down and I went back and saw a big emptiness and I cried. Did you? The end. I can see that. Yummy. And I went to Toledo. And then once when we went to Cleveland for our show, I went by myself and walked around kind of hoping that the people who live in the house will be like, what's that weird feeling? And stick their head out and be like, Can I help you? And I'd be like, yeah, actually, can I come in your house? But no one did. But I did get to walk around the neighborhood. Did you try a little. Nice. But I thought I wanted to go back to my elementary school and it's just like a grass field now. Oh, man. How do you tear down an elementary school? Yeah, maybe it got like black mold or something. Well, let's hope. Yeah, but it's bittersweet to go back to. Yeah, go back to your childhood places, everyone. I highly recommend it. So water bed. Yeah, waterbeds. We'll go back to the earliest history, I guess. But the man that we really need to talk about is a man named Charles Hall, the inventor of the modern waterbed as we know it. He's a student at San Francisco State. He's taking a design class. Oh, he was like a design major. Well, yeah, because he submitted this as his master's thesis was the waterbed. How awesome is that? So I saw competing stuff of what he actually created. Like built. Yeah. And the thing that I saw I think it was in that WaPo 1991 article, it said what he created was called the pleasure pit. And it was an eight foot by eight foot, basically water bed, tub of pudding. But it was meant to be a conversation pit for multiple people that kind of hang around in there was like a bar and there was lighting and like shelves and stuff like that. And that was the original his design. Yeah, but was there a water mattress function or was it just a sunken living room? No, that was the thing. That was where everybody sat was on a water mattress in the middle. It sounds awful. It's just weird, but it really caught everybody's imagination. Supposedly within six months it was on the front page of papers across the country. This is in San Francisco. The Miami Herald had something on the front page about this waterbed exhibit in San Francisco that this 24 year old design student created. Capital P. Capital P? Yeah. Pleasure pit. Everything I've seen is capitalized. But that's what I'm saying. I think that's what he called the first thing. Yeah. But it very quickly got turned into a bed. The water bed I used to like. Actually, my same friend Chris had one of those sunken living rooms. Oh, I love those. Very 70s. You remember in the Big Lebowski when you go to see Jackie Child or Jackie whatever? Jackie Treehorn. Yeah, Jackie Treehorn. His whole house is just amazing. Yeah. He had a conversation pit, right? Conversation pit. That's what it was called. Yeah. So here's the deal from Time magazine in Manhattan, the waterbed display of Bloomingdale's department store for a while was a popular singles meeting place. Sears, Roebuck and Holiday Inns are eyeing the beds, and Lake Tahoe's King Castle Hotel has already installed them in luxury suites. And this is, I think it continues. Playboy tycoon Hugh Hefner has one king size, of course, and covered with Tasmania possum. I thought, how gross is that? Because what I know is Opossum is different. I looked up the Tasmanian. It's super soft, I would imagine. So it's not like American Roadkill on your water bed, right? It wasn't even made from it. It just had a bunch of live American possums on his bed. On his water bed. You heifer was really weird. But here's the deal. The water bed that Charles Hall eventually would go on to create, and we'll talk about some of his earlier designs, aside from the pleasure bit. He wanted to revolutionize sleeping. Yeah. He meant it very seriously. He wanted to have a pressure point free mattress that would envelop your body and give you the best night's sleep of your life. He had no intention of it becoming, which it very much did. A metaphor for the sexy sixty s and seventy s. Right? But it definitely did, like you say, it's a really good example of an idea, just basically getting hijacked big time. And at first he was kind of like, I'm just a 24 year old design student. I don't care. Sure, make your own waterbed knock off. Yeah. But then over time, he definitely came to care and spent a couple of decades pursuing infringement suits here and there, patent infringement suits, which we'll talk about later. But at first it was basically like, here's the waterbed world, and the world went nuts. And again yeah, he meant to revolutionize sleep. But the hippies and the people who own head shops, which is where you bought your waterbeds early on, was at the head shop, said, no, this is all about sex. And that's how it was first sold in the late sixty s and early seventy s. I have never had sexual intercourse on a waterbed, but it doesn't sound appealing to me, right? Because I think the Washington Post article quotes a Washington Post article from the 70s saying, like, a waterbed salesman said, it's very much like three people are having sex because the bed itself is like a third warm body participating in the motion, or something like that, in the worst possible way. And I looked up. Yeah. I was like, it's just weird. And I looked up, like sex on a waterbed. Of course she did. On a work computer, right? Oh, yeah. The work computer is super tainted now. It's failed. Like this one I can't remember the website, but it's basically, like, pros and cons, and it sounds like it comes down to your preferences. Are you into your motions being exaggerated? And I guess yeah, chuck's laughing, because I'm, like, kind of making those. If you're into that, great. If you're not, or apparently it really is pronounced, it's not something going on in the background. It's like, part of it. Right. So it just depends on your preferences, I think. But I think a lot of the earliest water beds were bought by guys who were pretty confident. They could be like, I've got a water bed. You want to try it out? Yeah. And that would happen. It became a punchline. I remember. I feel like every other sitcom or movie, at some point, there was a scene where they were like, oh, he's got a waterbed. Or he would just slowly open the door to reveal the waterbed. And that meant only one thing. It did. Master lover. Right. And then the waterbed invariably, they couldn't make it work because one of them would get flopped off or somebody would make it spring a leak, and then the leak would just go everywhere. Whenever waterbeds appeared in TV and movies, it went badly. All right, let's take a break. I'm all hot and bothered. We'll come back and we'll talk about some of Charles Hall's early designs right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts, and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses, because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right. From your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Okay? So, again, that was, like, the first reception to water beds. Hefner had one. He had two, actually. He had one on his jet, too. One of his mother's brothers bought one, I guess help his sex life out guy from Jefferson airplane. And you bought them at head shops, and they were sold by waterbed manufacturers again, none of whom bothered to get a license from Charles hall, the inventor and patent holder. Yeah. They had names like Wet Dream. Somebody named their company Wet Dream and that was okay in the 70s. Let me see here. What else? Aquarius joyaputic Aqua beds. Joypeutic Aquarius products. Like you said, water works. What else? That's all I have. I got you. I think Wet Dream. We should have stopped there. Sure. It's definitely the worst of all of them. So before this came about, charles hall, a couple of his early prototypes. One, it sounds sort of like a bean bag chair, almost. But it was a big bag chair full of \u00a3300 of liquid cornstarch that the idea was you would sit in it and it would envelop you. It sounds like a nightmare. Yeah. He didn't mean for it to envelop you. It was like he hadn't hit upon the waterbed yet. He was trying out different substances. But yeah, you just sink in. Gross. Right. So he moved on to Jello. For real. That didn't work either. That's not a joke. People put Jello in this thing did not have the right temperature or consistency. So eventually he would think to vinyl really becoming a very popular thing and being used for things other than, like, car parts and tires and things and orings vinyl became a hot item. So he filled up this vinyl bladder with water, had a temperature control device on it, and the idea there was not to have some hot bed, but to sync up to your body temperature. Right. So your muscles were relaxed. Yeah. He had the purest of intentions. I really did. And he hit upon it finally, again, in that 1968 masters thesis. Well, 1968 was part of the problem. Summer of love. People are having sex all over the place. Sure. And there's a story named Andrew Kirk who said the basic design in the late 60s was a free form atmosphere people are really getting. And if you've ever like, I love design museums. If you ever go to some of these, it's kind of cool to see what they were doing in the 60s. Yeah. Because it was kind of a crazy time for design. Yeah. Because a lot of people were open to trying new things up to this point. You had a mattress and you were just thankful that it wasn't filled with hay. Right. It had springs and you liked it. That's the way it was. And you liked it. That's right. So the idea of something totally new, it was two things. One, this guy was trying to revolutionize sleep. And it came at a time when people were willing to like, oh, yeah, the bed's boring. Let's try something different. Right. And it just kind of came together really well. But again, it got hijacked by people who own headshots. Yeah. Well, and he was in San Francisco. It all kind of converged to work against him, ironically. But he applied for a pet, and I think in 1968, but it wasn't until 1971 that it was granted because prior to his design being debuted, like, 30 or so years prior, robert Heinlein, the very famous and prolific science fiction writer, he had basically described waterbeds so frequently and in such detail that he was considered the intellectual property holder of waterbed design. The reason heinlein even went to the trouble, he liked to describe stuff in his books. Apparently. I haven't read any of them yet. No. But very detailed descriptions. Yeah. And one of the things that always popped up was these water beds. And apparently in the 30s, he spent a lot of time in hospital beds, so he was just imagining how they could be improved. And he described water beds almost exactly like Charles Hall had described them. Yeah. He said a pump to control water level side supports to permit one to float rather than simply lying on a not very soft water filled mattress. Thermostatic control temperature safety interfaces to avoid all possibility of electric shock, which was a big sort of urban legend at the time. Right. You can be electrocuted if you have vigorous sex. Yeah. Waterproof box to make it leak proof. Which was another probably legitimate con for waterbed, for sure. Sometimes they would leak back then and then some other things. But basically, it all came together to form such a robust, even though it was in a science fiction novel, that he had to go to court, right, and say, I don't know if he was looking for money or who heinlein I'm not sure how it came out that heinlein owned the intellectual property of it, if he came out and said, that's mine, or what. But within three years of Charles Hall coming out with this, he had the patent for it. And even way back in the 1800s, there were doctors who created one guy named Doctor Neil Arno, or not created a hydrostatic bed. What's the name of it? He covered a warm bath with a rubber cloth and sealed it with varnish. And another doctor in 1893. Doctor Portsmouth. And these were basically to prevent bed sores. To relieve bed sores. Right. And even Heinleins, like, you said, he cooked it up because he had been in hospitals a lot, and he's like, I'm getting killed on these hard beds. Yeah. And the reason you would want some sort of water filled bed for a hospital is because people are laying around in bed all the time, and when you have skin covering, like a bony layer, you get bed ulcers and you don't want those. No. So this was to prevent bed sores. That's why the earliest physicians were coming up with them. So finally, by 1971, Charles Hall holds the patent, and again, he wanted to create a serious sleep product, and he founded a company called Inner Space Environment, and they were selling, like, the real deal legit, high end waterbeds. He had named it. Seriously. Right. He opened, like, 32 stores in California in the early seventy s and had a factory like he was doing it right. His did not leak. One of the things that waterbeds were very much known for is that the sheets would pop off. Yeah. Very well. The sheets fit on his. The temperature control was great. They were like really high end waterbed made and designed by the guy who actually designed them. The problem is, he didn't really pursue any patent stuff. And so there were knockoffs out of the gate, and it was the knockoffs that leaked. It was the knockoffs that had terrible temperature control, and it was the knock offs that gave waterbeds a bad name, because they were fully embracing the sexy advertising that was part of it, too. All the knockoff manufacturers, and apparently he pursued some of these, but he would have spent all his time and money pursuing patent infringement if he really tried to go after everyone. And some of these didn't make a lot of money, and it was just sort of useless to even try, so it wasn't worth his time and money. A lot of times he said to a lot of people who sold waterbeds early, like early waterbed dealers, basically, they were just trying to make some fast money so they could go start a pot farm in oregon. Right. That's who was selling waterbeds in the early 70s. It also is one of the creepiest lines ever in the atlantic article that said something about when charles hall initially was selling waterbeds out of the back of his van. Right? Like, man, that's the creepiest thing ever. Yeah. Here, let me open up my van. You can lay on my water bed in the back of my van. You're about a size eight with the stallion painted on the side. Oh, man, speaking of forgot about the murals on the bands. Remember we used to do blog posts and stuff? I made, like, a slide show. I remember that. Vans with art on the side. I see those every now and then. It gets up still. It's good stuff. You want to take a break before we get into the straightening of waterbeds? Yes. Okay. 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 with your I couldn't come up with a better word than straightening. I apologize for that. Let me think. I guess legitimizing, but I'm thinking more like boring suburbanizing of waterbeds. Yeah. Here's the thing. We say that hall very much wanted to revolutionize sleep, and he didn't embrace the sexual component of it, but he sold a lot of waterbeds, and he kind of knew why a lot of these people were buying them, and he wasn't like I don't think he was so pious that he was like, no, I don't want to sell them for that reason. Right. I think he eventually was kind of like, yeah, that's why people bought him. And that was okay. But I don't think he cheapened his own advertising that way. No, he didn't. And he actually his company went under by the mid seventies, and he likens it to basically advertising to the wrong market. Yeah. He made quality, high end waterbeds, and it was advertising to people who could afford a more expensive, quality, actual, legitimate waterbed, when at the time, it was like Randall Pink Floyd and his friends were the actual customers of waterbeds. That's who was buying waterbeds. And they weren't seeing the ads that Charles Hall was putting out there, you know what I'm saying? In, like, the New York or whatever. Yeah. So he missed the heyday. He was sort of in the early heyday, but I think in the 80s is when it became like a $2 billion 20% of the market share industry. Right? Yeah. Like the late seventy s. I think it was about a $13 million a year industry. And by 1987, I believe at its peak, it was like a $2.3 billion industry a year. And then a pretty steep once again, grunge killed waterbeds. Pretty steep fall in the 90s, right? In the early 90s, yeah. But the way that it built up before it fell was it more companies got into it, kind of legitimized it. I believe that there was a trade association that developed, and I think it's called the flotation sleep industry is really the technical term for it. Yeah. They really wanted to get away from the sex appeal. Totally did the name and like the stores you wouldn't buy a waterbed in a headshot anymore. Imagine walking into a head shop and being like, what do you have a water bed here for? You buy water beds out in the suburbs at a place called, like, Waterbed Plaza or something like that. Right. Or did you see that ad I sent you? The YouTube ad? You have the max bedroom. Yeah. Country Boy waterbeds. Everybody go onto YouTube and look for Country Boy waterbed at Max headroom. And it's beautiful. Yeah, it's a Max bedroom ripoff selling water beds. Country Boy water bed. Water bed, yeah. And I think it was from Arkansas. Like a local waterbed dealer in Arkansas. Texarkana, you mean? Is that right? No, I don't know. I was just guessing. But you could get waterbeds everywhere. Well, that's why my friend in suburban Atlanta, for my friend to have one in high school that kind of says it all right. It's not like his parents were like I mean, they were good, God fearing family. And we're like, yeah, we need to get Chris a sex pit. Right. It was more like they were supposedly healthy. They were like a healthy way to sleep. I think that's also how it kind of transitioned the legitimacy and away from just the association with sex. Right? Yeah. So you have an actual bonafide waterbed industry with actual waterbeds. One of the ways that this industry was able to establish itself was they made vast improvements over the early models of waterbeds. It used to be that you had just basically like a big bladder, a vinyl bladder that a big hot water, big wooden box. And when you wanted to get out, you had to kind of, like, work up to it and roll off the side and bang your knee on the way out. They leaked. There was a lot of problems with it, but then they started improving upon it to where the water bill was actually, like, this one article, I think it was a mental floss article that I found, said that in the 80s, if you were a kid, a water bid was as close to a status symbol as you could possibly get. For sure it was aspirational. Yeah. When I say no chance my parents would have bought me one, it wouldn't have even like, I knew better than to even ask. I think the same with me. I don't remember ever asking for one, although I really wanted one. I think it was like a pipe dream, maybe. It's not like, oh, I really want a waterbed. It was so shut down in my mind as a possibility. Like, this is the time where we inherited mattresses from our older siblings. It was so gross. It's on the side road, but look, not even too many stains on it. Kind of wait, kind of, oh, did you actually get a mattress from the side of the road? No, I'm making sure you did not. No, but just short of that. Okay, so waterbeds then and now one of the knocks against them is there. They are very heavy. There's no way around it. If you fill up a mattress with water, even partially, you're going to have a lot of weight. Depending on the size. A couple 300 gallons of water can weigh between 15. Right. And so they always still do need a. Lot of structural support underneath them. Right. A large, very heavy wooden platform. Supposedly. That's why New York was known as the city where the least number of waterbeds were ever sold. Yeah, I can't imagine. Part of it is because in major cities, there were, like, waterbed bands and leases. Like, if you rented an apartment, you weren't allowed to have a water bed. It was just too heavy. People would leave them behind. Like. Here, you take this. Even when you drain the water, the thing that held the waterbed was heavy itself. The frame was super heavy. It was like a bookcase that you didn't really want anymore. You just leave it behind. That's what happened to waterbeds. How do you fill them up? Is it a water hose? Really? That's how people did it. Wow. Yes. And then to get it out, you needed, like, a pump, and you could buy all the stuff at your local waterbed store. But when you buy a better mattress, a regular mattress, you don't have to go buy a pump two years later because you're moving and then pump the water out of the mattress. You just move the mattress. That was a big mark against it and the popular understanding of it, I imagine, in New York, too. Well, the weight is enough, probably, to disqualify it, but just getting a water hose up, a 7th floor walk up. Sure. Yeah. I'm surprised I haven't seen that movie scene where they have a rope tied around a water hose from the street level that they're bringing up through a window. Sounds like Buster Keaton or something. Like super sexy in the 70s. Who would that be? I don't know. Alpagina. Okay. Al Pacino. We should do a podcast on our Crumb. Why have we done that? Any day. Any day, buddy. That was like a dare. I can't remember if I saw them. Was it a movie or a documentary on him? It was a movie that came out in the early 2000s. Well, both. They did the great documentary Crumb. I don't know which one I saw. American Splendor. That's what I saw. He was a character in it, but it was largely about Harvey. Harvey Picar. Yes. The great Harvey PCAR. That was a good movie to watch. All right. So these days, like you said, they've been brought into the modern era. There's a foam collar around the bladder. There's spandex on top. I believe there are air pockets and things in between to sort of stabilize it. Yeah, you can't get seasick on them like you used to be able to. And I move like that. I really want to try one of these out and see what it feels like. I don't want one, I don't think. But I do want to see what the sensation is like. One of my friends back in high school, their parents had what he called a motionless water bed. And now I understand what he's talking about it's, like waveless or whatever, but it just felt like laying on a feather bed. It's the most comfortable feather bed you've ever been on. Well, my friends must not have been way less because it moved. Yes. And this would have been like the 90s or something like that. And I'm sure it was like a $5,000 mattress or something back then, but that seems to be like the kind that they have now. It's like you just lay on it and you're not like, oh, this is a water bed. You're just like, this is super comfortable. Right. I'm floating and weightless. But your mind is not thinking you're laying on water to lay down. Yeah, it couldn't have like, aside from moving a lot, when I sleep, I like to flop on the bed. Like, when I lay down, I don't lay gently on it. I will kind of throw myself into bed. And none of these things are conducive to waterbeds, especially not in the 70s. But apparently now it's fine. You could do that. Well, one of the new salesmen they interviewed for this article said that he won't say the name water bed, he says, because it turns people off. He said even if they try it and they like it, and then they find out it's a waterbed, he said sometimes they won't buy it because of that weird 70s association. Like with porn. Yeah. Or they're worried it's going to leak or they're going to have to fill it with water. Apparently. I couldn't find any verification of this, but there was an urban legend, at least that you could find aquatic worms floating in your water bed. And they were like, oh, well, we need to add chemicals to the water. Well, then that makes it even grosser. Right. Just over time, people associated a lot of negative things with waterbeds. And then the thing that really killed the waterbed was that in the 90s, by the 90s, it was clear that America was like, sure, we'll try other things besides the inner spring mattress. What he got? And so, like, Temperamedic came around or Sleep number all these guys who made technically alternative mattresses. Right. Our beloved Casper. Sure, same thing. It follows in that tradition that the waterbed established. Charles hall created that market and showed that it was a real thing. And so by the time the 90s rolled around, I think Temper Pedic was the first one. It was like all the benefits of a waterbed without the hassle of the water, why would you want a water bed? And that was it for water beds. Yeah. And minus the creeps. Yeah. Whereas just a few years before, almost between one in four and one in five, between a quarter and 20% of all mattresses were waterbeds. Wow. Sold in America. That's crazy. It's a lot. Down to nothing. Down to just gone, man. I imagine the landfills of America are filled with vinyl bladders just rotting. Well, rotting 1000 years from now, probably. Yeah, that's true. They're probably still in pretty good shape. So one more thing about Charles Hall. Well, two more things. One, he went on to invent the solar shower, the camping shed. No way. Yes, those are great. And then two, he has kind of a bad name, or he did, at least back in 1991, I think, in that WaPo article where the waterbed industry, the industry association that formed, they didn't like him very much because a couple of years before his patent ran out, he'd been gone, and then came back and said, all, you all owe me money for patent infringement. And they were like, what? Dude, we've built this industry. We thought you were cool. Kind of. He was like, no, I'm not. Give me some money. And he started like they apparently wanted to settle and it wasn't enough. But one really noteworthy thing about one of his lawsuits against, I think, a Taiwanese manufacturer that he sold shares in the outcome. So you could buy shares of a lawsuit. Of a lawsuit. Crazy. And there's a common law against it. It's called Champtery, which I had never heard of before. It's where somebody basically pays for legal fees in order to get a piece of the action to cut. Yeah, Champtery. And in California at the time, Champtony was not illegal. Is it now? I don't know if it is. Wow. But in 1991, it was not. And he sold shares for 10,000 a pop for this. Wow. This lawsuit. That's amazing. Water beds. They're amazing. Chuck Jeez, that's what the episode should be titled. It's up to you. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about water beds, well, get in a time machine, get in the way back machine and go try one out yourself. Well, we have one in the wayback machine, so that's right. It's your lucky day. Covered in American pasta. Oh, boy. Since I said that, it's time for listening now. I'm going to call this one of the many replies for colorblindness, too. We got a lot of responses for color blindness. What do you mean, too? Well, I called the Lord. All right. Hey, guys. I was listening to the show about colorblindness with an O-U-R so I assume that he's Canadian. Say British. It's like British light. Yeah. He's still under the thumb, though. I worked in the electrical field for ten years, and in that time I've worked with two red green color blinds. Electricians. Remember we talked about that? The first one I worked with for a few years, and he said it wasn't that difficult to tell the difference between red and green conductors. They just looked like very obvious different shades of the same color and only took a couple of mistakes before he was able to tell the difference. In electrical, red is a current carrying conductor, while green is used for grounding and bonding. Like a rat and a science experiment. He explained it only took a couple of shocks of what he thought was a bonding wire to really notice a difference. So dangerous. I know, man. The other I worked with for only a short while because he died, but he had been an electrician for 20 plus years. It wasn't until he asked a co worker why they thought the ground wire and a current carrying conductor were the same color that he even realized he was colorblind. Wow. How about that? Little slow on the uptake, perhaps? So even though it caused some issues early on in their careers, they're both great electricians. I guess the human brain always finds a way. And that is James from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. That's cool, man. Great area, eastern Canada. Great area. Western Canada. Fantastic. Central Canada. Beautiful. We love it all. Yeah, we do. If you're Canadian, you want to say hi, we'll get in touch with us. Go to Stuff You Should Know and click on our social media links or send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.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 a pet mom when you plan your vacation around your pet. At Halo. We get it because we're pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet foods that's rooted in science. It's the world's best food for the world's best kids. Learn more@halopets.com."
415b7a94-53a3-11e8-bdec-7fc879ea5375	How Dyslexia Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-dyslexia-works	For a learning disability that everyone seems to know about, dyslexia is maybe the most commonly misunderstood and controversial cognitive difficulty there is. Some people think it’s a gift, some people think it doesn’t even exist.	For a learning disability that everyone seems to know about, dyslexia is maybe the most commonly misunderstood and controversial cognitive difficulty there is. Some people think it’s a gift, some people think it doesn’t even exist.	Thu, 07 Mar 2019 14:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=7, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=66, tm_isdst=0)	41267269	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck, Bryan over there. And there's Jerry. And this is stuff you should know about. Dyslexia. How are you doing? Good, how are you? I'm doing pretty good, man. Just hanging out over here. Yeah, ready to wrap. I thought this is pretty cool. I'm surprised that we had not discussed this yet because it's right up our alley. Totally. Very stuff you should know type show yeah. And I think it's an interesting I guess it's labeled a learning disorder. Most definitely. It's a specific learning disorder according to the US. Government. Yeah. I always just have a hard time knowing whether or not to, like, almost at Affliction. Then I'm like, Is that an affliction? I don't even know. I think anybody with dyslexia and any expert in the field would say it's a learning disability. It's a specific learning disability that we're not entirely certain what causes it, but most people would tell you that typically it's considered a neurobiological condition. They think that there's a basis to the brain that leads to this situation where otherwise bright and capable yes. And intelligent students have what they call unexpected difficulty learning to read in that it afflicts them their entire life. Yeah, but there's a lot of questions that surround the definition, and one of the problems with dyslexia research is that it's not the official definition. There are about as many definitions as there are studies of dyslexia. Yeah. This one from Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity made sense to me, though, as far as just sort of a simple way to say it, and unexpected difficulty in reading in an individual who has the intelligence to be a much better reader. So, in other words, this isn't adding up. All the tools are there, and you should be a better reader than you are. Right. But you're not. So why? What gives? Yeah, so there's a lot to that, though, right? Like, there's this idea that if we know enough about the brain and we have things like MRIs and stuff like that, so you would think that by now, since maybe the whatever, we would have positively identified what it is. But there's a confounding problem that they've run into in dyslexic, dyslexia research, and we'll get into it more later, but they haven't figured out if what they're looking at is the changes that would come from not reading as much or if the brain structure they're seeing is actually dyslexia. Right. So they're having trouble with it. I'll explain it better later. No, but I know what you mean. Well, good as long as you do. But it also counts as, like, the million or so people listening to this also do. Hey, everybody. Dyslexia is very studying it and understanding it and learning how to teach children with dyslexia is very important because up until semi recently I'm just going to go, say recently, if you had Dyslexia and you are a student, you might have been called stupid or dumb teacher. Yeah. You might have been put at a separate table and said, well, you go over here because you can't keep up this one guy, man, this one really hit home or not hit home. Hit you in the bread basket. In the bread basket, which is like, home. Sure. Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Schultz was diagnosed later in life, and he said, growing up in the 1950s, he said basically he was placed in what he called the dummy class. Three children in his class were separated, put at a table in the corner. The teacher didn't talk to them much, and essentially one day the principal was coming around and she said, here are these books. Pretend to read them. Right. The principle is coming. Yeah. Man, that is just tough. But there's something really significant about that. That was a column written by a guy named Philip Schultz who was a Pulitzer Prize winner. So that really kind of reveals the fact that what they figured out through decades and decades of research is that people with Dyslexia aren't stupid. They specifically have trouble learning to read and spell and write. And more and more research has kind of gotten to the root of the problems with Dyslexia. But we have found that with patience and practice, people with Dyslexia can learn to read. You have Dyslexia your entire life. There's no cure for it. Right. But you can learn to read, and you can learn to navigate and cope with Dyslexia as a child and into adulthood. Yeah. I certainly don't want to sound like I'm bagging on teachers, because both of my parents were teachers, and even back in the day when let me just say this. Teachers back then didn't have the same tools that they have today, and they didn't have an understanding of Dyslexia. So if they had students that weren't keeping up and would force the class to maybe lag behind, they may not have made the best decisions, but they didn't have all the tools at their disposal to make better decisions. Right. The presence of a kid with this in a class creates a conundrum. Do you slow the class down to that kid's speed and as far as reading and spelling and writing lessons go, potentially risking, like, slowing down the rest of the class who are learning at a normal clip? Or do you take this guy with Dyslexia, this girl with Dyslexia, and put them in a special needs class that may address their reading and writing, but they're going to get so far behind their classmates and every other subject that they're normally proficient at. Right. It's a problem. And they had no idea how to grapple with it for almost all of the 20th century, and multiple generations of kids with Dyslexia suffered as a result. Yeah, it's really sad. There are a lot of symptoms for Dyslexia, key symptoms. And these are very important because there is no blood test. There are a lot of testing they can do, but there's no standardized specific tests that will really nail it down. Right. So keep that in mind. There's no official definition of Dyslexia and there's no specific test to suss out Dyslexia. Right. Two big problems. Yeah. So you got to look at this collection of symptoms. The first obvious one is slow reading, inaccurate reading, difficulty sounding out words, difficulty pronouncing longer words with multiple syllables, which we'll get to that in a bit. Inability to read or speak made up nonsense words, which I thought was interesting. Poor short term memory for verbal information, whether it's written or spoken. Poor spelling, like really poor spelling to where you sometimes can't even tell what the words they're trying to spell are. Right. Not just like using an F instead of a PH or something like that. Yeah. And we should also point out, too, that it's very much an incorrect notion that if you have Dyslexia, you just transpose letters or spell things backwards. That's what I thought for most of my life. Dyslexia was they spelled things backwards and that was that. And that they also read backwards and that they could train themselves to read things backwards. Right. Totally made up. It's not totally made up, but it's such just one component of Dyslexia that it might as well just be an urban legend. Yeah, totally. And then what this can lead to, it's not just like, oh, I have trouble reading that spills out into all aspects of life, whether it's your self esteem or you might have problem with directions directionally. You might have issue with your budgets or money items, or you might not tell time very well. Frustrated, anger, difficulty planning things. It's not just limited to reading issues. And then in real life, you might read something and have very little recollection of what you just read. You will probably have problems giving presentations, finding the right word, recalling words, that kind of thing. Yeah. When you do read, and when you learn to read, you will be reading slower than anybody else. Even reading at your reading level, you just do it more slowly. Yeah. And then as an adult, a lot of people are like, oh good God, I'm done with school. Let me just go off and find a job that doesn't require any reading or any writing and I will be fine. I will go to restaurants and order the same thing at every restaurant. And if this routine that I've developed to mask my Dyslexia is ever interrupted, I will flip out and try to keep it under control. But I will seem a little awkward socially. During instances like this, there's ways you can carve out a life for yourself, but you don't have to. Because now we understand Dyslexia way more than we did before. And we understand the treatment of it, too. Yeah. And as far as how many people have it, it's tough to get because of all these reasons we're talking about tough to get a good number that's reliable, but anywhere between five and 15% to 17%, it looks like, which is sort of not the biggest range in the world. But they don't really know. No, they have no idea because there's a couple of problems. One, there's a lot of people out there who don't realize they have dyslexia, and then there's a lot of people who do know they have dyslexia and are either ashamed of it or have just set up their life to where they don't have time or room to go be diagnosed and then go learn to overcome it. There's, like, whatever, I have this thing, this issue, or I'm slower at reading than other people. So yeah, it's probably very much underreported and underestimated how many people in the population have it. Yeah. And we're talking mainly, almost exclusively about developmental dyslexia, which is the kind we mostly think about. We're not talking about acquired dyslexia, which can happen as a result of an injury. Right. So I just wanted to point that out. Well, let's take a break, and then we'll come back and talk about the history that actually features both of those, okay? Yes, sir. All right. So, Chuck, the first time the word dyslexia was used was in 1872 by an ophthalmologist named Rudolph Berlin, who coined the term dyslexia. But the case that he was describing was a case of acquired dyslexia. Right. Where you can develop the symptoms of dyslexia trouble reading, trouble writing, trouble sounding out words from a head injury or, say, a lesion on your brain, something like that. Yeah. And that told them a lot. Right. Initially, they thought maybe it was just a sign of low intelligence. Maybe it was a problem with vision or something like that. But the fact that you could acquire dyslexia told neurologists and ophthalmologists working in the 19th century. No, there's a neurobiological basis to that. Yes. And they called it early on in the 19th century, and I guess even in the early 20th century, actually, they called it that up until the 60s. Yeah, the 60s. Word blindness. And there was a German who coined that term, and they called it vart blind height. Can you say that? That's good. Okay. You would do it way better than me. Well, I would put on some dumb voice, but that's perfect pronunciation. Okay. You said that it's a W, right? Yes. And you said it is a V. Yeah. Perfect. Okay. You can click my heels together. It checks out. Dorothy. So they called it, like you said, up until the 60s, congenital word blindness. There were a lot of people in the late 1800. A lot, but a handful of people studying the stuff. Yeah. Henshawood and Morgan were the two big ones. Yeah. And they were ophthalmologist and a doctor. Henshawood was the ophthalmologist. And then there were also neurologists, a man named Samuel Horton. It's interesting to look back because they were sort of on the right track with what they thought was wrong. Yeah. Word blindness, also, as a term, is not that far off. I mean, it really does a good job of describing the thing because they're saying, like, there's some condition that these people have specifically because they are otherwise totally intelligent. They have a problem with words, with seeing words and recognizing them like everybody else can. Yeah. And it was obviously since the dawn of time, people have had this condition. But obviously, if you think about it, there are a lot of things that came along that really brought it into the forefront. Like printing widespread literacy. Yeah. Newspapers and books and street signs. Exactly. Menus, like you're saying in a restaurant, and, like, everywhere there's the printed word. And all of this, as all of this started to emerge in, like, the second half of the 19th century, at least in the United States and in the west, in Europe, all of a sudden, people who had dyslexia suddenly became apparent. Whereas before this, it wouldn't have been apparent because there was no way for dyslexia to manifest itself. Right. People didn't walk around reading. You weren't expected to learn to read and write as a kid. You had to be, like, basically a monk to learn to read and write or part of, like, the aristocracy. Now it became democratized and public schooling became widespread. And so as a result, dyslexia became a thing for the very first time. It's actually a relatively new condition that was born out of the modern era. Yes. Or if you were a kid back then and they were trying to teach you a read and you couldn't, they were like, all right, I guess he's not a reader. Right. So get out to the factory of the field. Right. And don't worry about it. But that was what Morgan, like, W Pringle Morgan and James Henchwood were doing, was they were the first ones to say, wait, get that kid out of the field, because he seems otherwise bright to me. He just is having trouble reading. This might just be a thing. So they were the first ones to say, no, this is its own thing. This isn't just being generally slow. This is a specific learning disability. Right. Samuel Orton, the neurologist I mentioned, he created the Orton Society in 1949. They were researchers and teachers trying to figure out, like, all right, we know this is a problem now. How do we go about teaching kids like this? And that eventually led to the International Dyslexia Association, but it really took until the 19s. There was a book written by McDonald Critchley called The Dyslexic Child. And that's when things really started to come to the forefront more. Yeah. They started to realize, oh, wait, you can teach kids with Dyslexia how to read, so maybe we should start doing that. Right. And here are the symptoms and the signs of Dyslexia. And let's take it seriously in the general education system. Yeah. And one of the interesting things that they learned, they have learned over the years is part of the problem, at least in the case of English, is that it's a really tough language to learn. Extraordinarily tough. And it matters if you have Dyslexia when compared to Italian. It says English has over 1000 ways to spell it's. Basic set of 40 phonological sounds. Italian has 25 speech speech sounds and only 33 ways to spell them. So incidences of Dyslexia, while they may be the same technically in Italy, kids don't have as much of a problem in Italy. Yeah, like, think about this. So the short E sound, you can spell it. A, I as in said, e, L as in leopard, B as in bury, I E as in friend. Okay. English is so tough. It is tough. But what you're doing is when you're spelling those things, you're encoding a sound. A phoneme is what it's called. Right. And like you said in English, we have 40 phonemes. And when you spell, when you read your encoding and decoding a phoneme, and we have attached phonemes onto specific things out in real life. Leopard. Right. If you can spell leopard, you can write down that word and you can create a leopard in somebody else's mind's eye by reading it. Right. Okay, this is all spectacular that we can do this, but it's a totally human construct. If you have Dyslexia, the ground problem that is the basis of your condition is you have trouble sorting through phonemes. You have trouble with what's called phonological awareness, where you hear in part as two separate distinct sounds that you can learn to spell and learn to write. You can't sort them. Sometimes they run together. It's a problem on the very basis of reading, writing, spelling, phonology. Your brain has trouble processing it and sorting it. That's the basis of dyslexia. So if you are a kid with Dyslexia, in learning English with as difficult as it is where there's all these different rules for the same phoneme, it's going to be way harder than it is in something like Italian, like you were saying. Yeah. And as a result, as you would imagine, learning a second language if you have Dyslexia, is really tough. But they have found that Italian can almost be like a therapy, a training, like training camp for learning. Really interesting. Yeah. Because you learn, oh, there's rules for certain things, but these are really basic rules and they make sense. So maybe now I can learn English a little more easily with the expectation that the rules are structurally the same, but they're just different for English than they are for Italian in nuance. But ultimately they're getting across the same stuff. Yeah. The whole concept of language and symbols, e letters and words, it's just fascinating to me. Endlessly fascinating. Yeah. Because again, humans like creating this and saying that thing over there, if you draw these symbols in this order, that's what that is. See that leopard and then the word leopard. Yeah. It's just all fascinating. It is, because you're encapsulating knowledge that can be shared later on. It can be unlocked later on by anyone who understands how to decode it in the same way. Yeah. What's the science? What was it called when you study that linguistics? Is it just linguistics? I'm pretty sure I could have been a linguist oh, yeah. If I had only known what it was called. Yeah, I just realized halfway through that would have dumbed. Dumb. I thought it was what's that thing called? Yeah, I could have been good at that. Yeah. It was on the tip of my tongue. So I guess we can talk about the fMRI and the MRI. Obviously, the wonder machine figures in pretty big when it comes to this kind of thing. And in the mid ninety S is about when the fMRI came on the scene with Dyslexia and studies with Dyslexia, one of the problems was little kids. They're like, oh, we can't throw them in there, I think it will explode their brain. And then they're like, oh, no, the fMRI machine is fine for kids. We tested it out on some bad kids. They were fine. And so they started putting children in there because you could obviously do this at any age, but it's important for school age children to figure out what's going on in their brains. Well, that's one of the reasons why that's the sample population is because it takes years for dyslexia to be prominent. Right. Every kid has problems learning, reading and writing at first, sure, but then as other kids progress and this one kid doesn't, but they're otherwise bright same socioeconomic opportunities and all that stuff, that's when it becomes possible that they have Dyslexia. But by that time, a couple more years have gone by. Right. So you're not testing for Dyslexia on babies. Right. You have to wait until it basically manifests itself. Yeah. And of course, with the fMRI, I think there was some hope that it could, like you mentioned earlier, just be like, well, there it is. Yeah. But it wasn't it wasn't as different regions of the brain would light up or not light up, but they didn't get any hard, like, pinpointing conclusions. No, they have kind of focused in on a few spots, like different studies have said this is what we found, and it actually correlates with other studies, too. There's left hemisphere areas, the ventral occcipito, temporal region, the temporal parietal region, and the inferior frontal cortices, which have to do with language processing, but also visual processing of language, too. Yeah. So again, they think that the basis of all of this is that when you are hearing sounds, when somebody's holding up a piece of bread that has been dried through heat and says toast, you're hearing toast. Yeah. And you can learn to write to a little confounding. Sure. And then st over time, maybe the first few times you write T-O-E-S-T it doesn't matter. You're going to learn to write toast and you can write it down and then someone else can read it and they think of toast. Right. With Dyslexia, you're not hearing toast and you certainly can't extrapolate something that you're not hearing correctly into words and letters. Yeah, okay. It's a good way to put it. The best analogy. There you go. There is a genetic component. You are likely, if you have Dyslexia, to also have other family members who have it and they have isolated some genes associated with it. But again, they haven't been like, here's the cause, let's just figure out how to switch this gene off or on. Right. And I think it's just correlated. It's not necessarily the cause, it's people who have been shown to have Dyslexia have these set of genes that are doing this. Yeah, but like I said earlier, what's interesting is those early doctors weren't super far off. It does have to do with visual processing of this linguistic information and they were on the right track even way back then. So not bad. And then even still, though, with this new understanding of like, okay, this brain region looks like this, this brain region looks like that. This is the sign of a Dyslexic brain. There's still the question, is this the result of going years and years without reading? Right. Or is that the structure of a brain with Dyslexia? Right? Because we know that your brain changes when you read, when you learn to read. They've done studies in the MRI with illiterate adults who have learned to read. So they do a scan of them while they cannot read and then they scan them again while they can read and then look for differences in the brain. And there are structural differences that take place in the brain. Right. Which makes sense because it makes you think. So an illiterate adult is that the normal structure of the brain and an adult that can read, is that an abnormal structure? Because think about it, we've only been doing that for 150 years. That's a new construct. So it makes sense that the brain would be neuroplastic like that in that respect because that's a new thing we've all started to try to do to alter our brains. Yeah. And that's where the practice part comes in which we'll get to more. But it's interesting that and it sounds simple, but if you have Dyslexia, the better you get at reading and writing, the better you will get at reading and writing. Exactly. You're strengthening you're creating new neural connections and strengthening those pathways and the fact that it all comes down to, apparently, patience and practice, and that it's saying, like, these kids with Dyslexia are going through the same thing that every kid does with learning to read and write and spell. It just takes them way longer. The fact that generations of kids with Dyslexia were just abandoned by the school system because of a lack of patience is really what it comes down to, is beyond sad thing. Patience and resources. I think that's part of it, sure. Yeah. I just don't want to sound like we're saying, like, teachers just were impatient about it. All right. It was complex and still very sad. Yes. That teachers have to buy their own school supply still gets to me every year. The fact that we're living with this as a country like that's just become normal to us. Right. It's embarrassing. It's just a mark of shame on our country, if you ask me. All right, let's take a break. No, I'm going to give you your cat of nine tails so we can flog each other. I realize I sound really forceful in this episode. I feel like I'm sounding forceful. Do I sound forceful? No, I think you're great. Do I? Well, that did okay. All right, we'll be right back, everyone. All right, so like you said earlier, there is no cure for Dyslexia. There is treatment, and they even put that in quotes. But you shouldn't think of it as a disease cure type of thing. No, it's practice and patience. You have it for life. Yeah. And those are the two strategies. We will say it one more time for the 10th time. Patience and practice. You have to have that patience there. As a parent, as a teacher, as someone with Dyslexia, I know it's frustrating, but the more patient you are, give yourself time. And there are programs now where students can get extra time to take tests and things like that. And I think even officially, like, with the Sat and stuff like that oh, yeah. There are programs where you are not to put it to disadvantage the individuals with disabilities. Education Improvement Act of 2004. The idea, act or idea? It specifies Dyslexia as a specific learning disorder. And when you have a diagnosis of Dyslexia, the whole world opens up to you. You all of a sudden have your own personal teacher's assistant working with you. You have all sorts of resources that just weren't available to you before that are being funneled directly toward helping you learn to read faster. Yeah. I wonder if that's across the board. Yeah, I think that schools probably have specific funding for Idea stuff. I mean, like, when Congress comes up with an act like that, they fund it, and then they fund it out of it. Like those huge omnibus budgets have funding for that, and that goes to the school, and the school is supposedly not allowed to spend it on anything but that stuff got you. So yeah, probably if you get a diagnosis of Dyslexia, it's pretty sweet and a huge relief. Right. Because all of a sudden, it's just like a brand new world. You're taken away from the dumb kids table. Like Howard Schultz was right. And all of a sudden you have your own one on one reading and spelling lessons that you just didn't have before. Yeah. The other, like we said, is practice, and over time, you can learn to read, and you make those new neural pathways. It's heartening to know that if you have the patience and you put in the time, it is something that can be overcome if everyone works together. Right. And if you can learn to read, even as an adult, you're not going to learn to read necessarily proficiently. I think you can if you really practice, if you put your mind to it, it's going to be very slow, but it's not like you'll never read a book or something like that. But I saw one woman describing her condition as an adult, and she said she was very proud to be at a 7th grade reading level as an adult, which is like, you can navigate through life with a 7th grade reading level. Pretty easy. Right. The problem comes when you've never gotten any help and you're basically an illiterate adult because of Dyslexia. Yeah. They have technology now can help out. There are what they call assistive listening devices, because sometimes if you have someone in your ear reading something out loud while you're reading along, sort of like a teacher and an app like that, one on one experience, that can really help seeing a transcription sometimes of what someone's saying. Like a real time transcription. Yeah. So all these apps and devices are really helping things along the way. It's like a brand new world for kids with Dyslexia compared to, like, last century or even a few decades ago. Yeah. The one thing I didn't quite get was this thing that you sent from Sir Jim Rose. I didn't fully get what this guy was saying. He was part of it. So he's not saying this. He's definitely all into Dyslexia. But there is a thread of experts in childhood education, psychology, childhood cognition, who suspect that there's no such thing as Dyslexia, really, that those earliest neurologists and ophthalmologists and doctors who named it and made it a thing were wrong. And that really an inability to read transcends any level of intelligence. It's disconnected from intelligence that no matter whether you are of high intelligence or low intelligence, you can suffer from an inability to learn to read. Right. And so if you have Dyslexia and you are of high intelligence, the kid next to you who has low intelligence and can't read also has Dyslexia, or else no one has Dyslexia, and it's just an inability to learn to read. Most experts say Dyslexia is a thing which. Means, then the debate is, okay, does it have anything to do with intelligence? Right. And if it doesn't have anything to do with intelligence, then all of these resources that are being diverted to these kids who are of high intelligence but are having trouble learning to read is really doing a disservice to the kids of low intelligence. And I'm making air quotes here. Everybody who are having trouble learning to read got you. Why differentiate? They're both having trouble learning to read. Start attacking the problem with both of them. There is this one Australian expert who basically said, like, yes, dyslexia is a thing. It is his own thing. It has a neurobiological basis, it's not made up, it's not a myth. But let's treat first and then diagnose later. If you see an inability to learn to read, go after that. Don't say. Well, is it dyslexia? Let's test the kids intelligence doesn't matter. Try and help focus on learning and teaching them how to read. Interesting and apparently interventions. There's this guy named Julian, professor Julian what's his name? Chuck Linen. Sands. Yes. Julian Sands in boxing. Helena. He has a big solid squeeze about whether or not Dyslexia is a myth. I can't remember the guy's last name, but I get the impression that parents of children with Dyslexia are not a big fan of this guy. Right. But he's basically said, we're diverting a lot of funding away from kids who don't know how to read just because they supposedly don't have a high IQ. Right. Let's treat all the kids. So that's the idea of whether it's a myth, not that Dyslexia doesn't exist, although I think some people suspect that it didn't for a while. Right now people believe it does, but not necessarily that. It's just intelligent, upper middle class kids who have Dyslexia. Right. It's just an inability to read for the same reason. Interesting. That's the basis of it. It's still up in the air, and it's a really touchy subject. Very touchy subject, for sure, and rightfully so. I can imagine you feel lost in the woods if there's no official diagnosis, there's no official test of it, there's no official definition of it. But your kid has it, and you know your kid has it. I can't imagine what it must feel like to have some expert going like, there's no such thing as Dyslexia. Right? Yeah. Thanks a lot. It is very touchy and rightfully. Well, finally, there's this whole notion that if you have Dyslexia, then you may excel in other areas, you may be more creative, or you may be more prone to be like an entrepreneur, perhaps. Yeah, because you think outside the box. Yeah. I mean, there's a long list of people, like famous creative types that have Dyslexia. Agatha Christie, did you know that one? I didn't, but I didn't either. I didn't just make it up. I learned it's a long list. But just recently, part of this bugs me, though. I don't know. I just hate it when they're like, well, look what celebrities have this thing. I mean, I get it. Maybe that it might I don't know. I just don't see the value in that. Well, it's saying, like, look at this guy, this lady, maybe. I guess. So she's not a street sweeper. You don't have to look forward to a life of shoveling horse manure because you have Dyslexia. You can't achieve just stick to it, kid. No, I get all that. And that's valid you're questioning the cult of celebrity? Yeah, that just sort of bugs me. But now there are benefits, I'm sure, if some kids are like, Tom Cruise has Dyslexia. Right? And look at him. I have had some questions about Xanax and its value myself. Oh, goodness. There have been some studies, though, over the years that may or may not support this. Like, supposedly, if you have Dyslexia, you may be quicker to find something in your peripheral vision. Maybe you can, like, MC Escher style drawings or the impossible images, hidden images. You might see those quicker or more easily find patterns in noise. Sure. Like, you could be a great data analyst, perhaps. And they think, like, this makes total sense. But the problem is it's anecdotal at this point. Right, but it makes total sense that yes. The same senses that you are using to read and write, if you don't know how to read and write, your brain's going to compensate with other things. It's going to possibly excel at other stuff. Right. Just because it's structured different. If your brain is structured differently, which we know that's the case, if you do not read or write, you would expect that it would manifest itself in real world behaviors and traits. Oh, yeah. And the first thing I thought was, like, yeah, totally. If you're vision impaired, you hear things better. Well, supposedly it's a myth. Well, I looked it up. There are studies where if you are vision impaired, you are better at pinpointing, like location of sound and certain sounds. But it's not you can't hear something 2 miles away. Yeah, it's not as cut and dry. It's just better because your ears develop better. Remember that guy who can echolocate? He's visually impaired, and he's like he uses clicks or something like that, like a bat. He basically taught himself to echolocate. Really amazing. The first thing I thought about was the guy with the ear in his arm. What was his name? Stellar. What's? Great. Oh, man, I love that you and I go back and forth on remembering the guy's name. Last time we bought them, I didn't remember his name. And you rattled it right at Stellar. Between us, Stellarc is going to live forever. Like the transhumanist to you. But then that last thing about being entrepreneurial or maybe a corporate executive, they did do a study in 2009 that found there was anecdotal evidence of over representation in those fields. But then that's the thing too, where they're like, maybe they were just better at overcoming adversity and that stayed on through their whole life to where it wasn't just Dyslexia, but nothing would keep them down. So they excelled. Right. They learned how to try harder than their peers. Yeah. So yeah, even if that is the case, great. Sure. But the point is it's still anecdotal. So you have to be careful with saying like, oh yeah, people dislike you are way better at this. Right. Or they're more likely to be entrepreneurs. It hasn't been settled yet. But I think the overall point of this episode is if you do have Dyslexia, there is plenty of hope. Do not give up hope. Whether that your kid has Dyslexia or you have Dyslexia, you can learn to read and write and spell and you can become a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist. Or Agatha Christie. Yes. Or John Irving. I saw his Dyslexia. John Ivan. Yes. Richard Branson. That was really good. Ozzy. Osbourne, for God's sake. Look at that guy bumbling around the house. He's successful despite himself. If you want to know more about Dyslexia, you can learn all about it on the internet. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this Sid and Marty Croft email. This guy wrote in to email us about a personal connection he had to the Schoolhouse Rock episode. I'm not going to read that half of the letter because I don't want to further embarrass the family, but his relation to the person that we kind of called out as the guy who ruined Schoolhouse Rock. Okay. Wasn't he an execut? Yes, but the second half of this says speaking of unbelievable stories, guys, I thought you'd be jealous to know that I grew up hanging out on the sets of all the Sid and Marty craft shows because my mom was on a bunch of them used to have lunch with the sleeve stacks and throw around big foam boulders from Land of the Lost. She was Nashville on the Captain Cool and the Kong show which wrapped around the Saturday morning cartoons. I remember that. That also led to the music group, the Bay City Rollers showing up to my birthday party. What? When I was, like, five. It caused such a big mob scene, the police had to come. That's the Shertay. You know how they got their name? They threw a dart at a map and it landed on Bay City, Michigan. Because they are like Scottish, aren't they? I think so. I think they are. I remember my sister, we had a babysitter and then my sister and the babysitter. I don't know why. My sister wasn't just my babysitter. She was six years older. There was another girl who babysat was eight years old and they would sit around this is my big memory of the Bay City Rollers. There was one of their albums that had each of their pictures sort of in a dartboard like fashion in a circle. And they would spin the record around and close their eyes and stop it with their finger. And like they didn't make out with that picture. Yeah, they had to kiss that picture or whatever. I hope your sister doesn't listen to this. It's great. The 70s, man. So innocent. I love the 70s. So Base City Rollers came to his birthday party. They called the cops. My mom went on to do a ton of cool stuff that I'm sure you guys would know. Bunch of episodes of Plastic Man. Wow. All the women's voices on Celebrity Death Match. Cool. Hosting a game show called Rodeo Drive playing Joan Rivers on Family Guy. Wow. Being in the Catskills on Broadway. Nice. For two years. Too much more to mention, guys. Except also she went on the road with Tim Conway and Harvey Corman for a number of years. Hosing is Carol Burnett. My little brother ended up engaged to Harvey Corman's daughter. Wow. But it didn't work out. Wow. Anyway, I love the show, guys. If I can ever be a resource, let me know. That is from Keith or Elle. Keith, that was amazing. You remember Celebrity Death Match? Yeah, man. So great. Big shout out to your mom, too. Yes to your mom, Keith. Yeah. Well, if you want to brag on your mom because she's done some awesome stuff, we love hearing about that. Moms always have great welcomeness here at Stuff. You should know that's, right? That's going to end up being a crummy t shirt. If you want to get in touch with us, you can hang out on Stuffysheanow.com and check out our social links there. I have a website called the Joshclarkway.com. You can get in touch with me there. And you can get in touch with me, Chuck and Jerry and everybody else here at Stuff you should know by sending an email to stuffpodcast@housetofworks.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 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."
https://podcasts.howstuf…k-amputation.mp3	How Amputation Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-amputation-works	Amputation is one of the oldest surgeries and an even older punishment for crime, but it wasn't until the American Civil War and its 50,000 amputations that the procedure began to hit its stride. Learn about amputation and who it attracts in this episode.	Amputation is one of the oldest surgeries and an even older punishment for crime, but it wasn't until the American Civil War and its 50,000 amputations that the procedure began to hit its stride. Learn about amputation and who it attracts in this episode.	Thu, 20 Feb 2014 14:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=20, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=51, tm_isdst=0)	52638687	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And the dynamic duo, Chuck Bryant. Two men. Yep. With eight limbs. Yeah, that's us. Yeah, I guess so. I hadn't really thought about it. Yeah, we're fully intact. Yeah. And I think missing a limb or a finger or a toe or anything like that, I guess it's not something you think about until after it happens, and then it probably becomes one of the central foci of your life. Do you know anyone missing a one? No, as a matter of fact, I don't. Do you? Yeah, I worked with a guy at my last job who had an accident, a biking accident with a truck. Not true. Go ahead. I just had to remind myself of what? My brother in law's father has a partial finger amputation. Oh, yeah. The whole arm? Yeah. What happened? Biking on the side of the road and oncoming truck, the side view mirror basically clipped him at the armpit. Did it take it clean off? I don't know. I'm not sure. Well, I guess if it would have taken it clean off, they probably would have done a replantation. Yeah. Maybe. Which we talked about. Yeah. So this is, I guess, a follow up in a mini suite. I like to think of it as part of a larger suite. We've done broken bones. We've done the replantation. I think it's called your limbs torn off. Now what? Right. And then this one how amputation works. Yeah, it's a good, nice, sweet. Yes, it is. What else could we possibly add to that? I don't know. Because we're going to cover sexual fetishes around limb loss and phantom limb pain, and so I think that's all encompassing, sir. I think this will finish it off. Yeah. Mitch Headbird term all encompassingly. Really? Yeah. That was one of his bits. Chuck. Yes. Surely. I know that you've heard of Aaron Ralston. Yeah, I saw the movie and everything. There's 127 Hours, right? Yeah, I think that's right. The name of the movie. Yeah. I'm doubting it. All of a sudden the number of hours seems right, though. Yeah. Good movie. Did you see it? Oh, yeah, it was great. Yeah. James Franco was just like, oh, I'm doing so great in the middle of the movie. Didn't he look at the camera? He's like, aren't I just doing awesome? I like that guy. Yeah, I do, too. But he likes himself as well. Yeah. And, hey, Danny Boyle, he makes a great movie. Is that who directed that? Yes. He's all over the map, like, genre wise, and I really have an appreciation for people that don't make the same movie over and over. But heads off for that. Have you seen her? Yeah, I just saw it. That is a good movie. Yeah, very good movie. I was surprised at how good it was. I thought I loved it. Yeah. Okay, back to 127 hours. That movie by Danny Boyle is about a real life incident that happened to a guy named Erin Ralston in 2003. In May of 2003. I take it. He still is a real outdoorsy, go getter, can't keep me down kind of guy. Very independent spirit. So much so that he went canyoning by himself in May of 2003. And while canyoning, there was a shift with one of the boulders that he was leaning on or next to or something, and it picked he slipped down into a crevasse. Is that what it was? And a boulder landed on top, wedging his arm in there. Okay. I haven't seen the movie in a little while. Yeah. Plus, I wasn't there when it happened. And so he's trapped, like, alone. No cell service, if I remember correctly. Yeah. He was just totally screwed. As much as a person could be screwed. The one saving grace that Aaron Ralston had the two saving graces that Aaron Ralston had was a pocket knife. Yeah. And nerves of steel. Yes. I'm glad you said that, because I was like, if he doesn't say intestinal fortitude or something like that, then I have to add a third thing. Yeah. Because I don't think that that many human beings can pull that off. So we should say for those of you who haven't seen the movie, you should see it anyway. But he cuts his own hand off. He cut a portion of his arm off. He did what's called a lower extremity amputation. Oh, I thought that'd be an upper. Upper. Yeah, that's what I meant. I was thinking lower on the arm is stupid, but yeah. Without any sedation whatsoever, after having gone about five days without water. A few days without water. He was trapped there for five days with no hope that he was going to be helped us out in the middle of nowhere, he broke his arm. And then after he broke his arm, he cut through the skin and the tendons and the muscles and all the sinew around through the break in the bones and then cut his lower arm off. Yeah. And remember, he had dulled his knife from trying to chip away at the stone for days. I forgot about that. Yeah. So if he had done it initially, it would have been easier. So he had this dull blade. Yeah. Man. It's a tough scene to watch, for sure, but I think they handled it well, and it's a great story. Yeah. And he is like, oh, I should say also, we should finish it. He hiked out yeah. 6 miles before he finally found somebody to drive him to the hospital. Yeah. And I think he even stopped and did a little, like, spelunking along the way or something like that. Now he went straight to the hospital. Well, he was probably doing all sorts of outdoorsy activities right afterwards. Like I said, one of those people you can't keep down, but in this article. It's a pretty good article about amputation. Agreed. The author makes the point that Aaron Ralston is a great example of amputation in that it's a blast resort. Like, you don't just go, let's try amputation, and then we'll go from there. Exactly. It's like if we don't amputate, you're going to die, usually. Yeah. So he also provides the point that your life doesn't end when you undergo an amputation. That's right. There's all sorts of things that kind of get you back on track, and it's a lot of work, and it's a suck thing to happen, I imagine. But when you do have limbs amputated, your life isn't over, basically. And we'll talk about that, too, but you want to get into amputation. You want to talk about the history of this stuff? Yeah, man. History is like all old medical history involving surgery. It's pretty grizzly. It dates all the way back to ancient times. They found archaeological proof that they performed the procedure many years ago. About 7000 years ago, they found a grave about who had his lower arm amputated and had healed. Yes. What they found the difference is, though, back then, they were moving dead tissue, tissue that was already dead, because they didn't know how to stop bleeding at the time. So they obviously couldn't cut any healthy blood flow, any arteries or blood vessels. Right. So they had to cut off tissue that was just, like you said, already dead. There wasn't any blood flowing to it. No blood? No. And then, of course, in Rome and Greece, they were smart and they advanced the process and actually were the first to tie off these blood vessels. Is that called ligating? Yeah. Okay. Like ligature marks. Yeah. And that would stop the blood flow, and they did a good job with that. But it seems that people forgot about that and they didn't do that for another few hundred years afterward. No. And not only did they forget about that, the Romans and the Greeks both used wine and vinegar as antiseptics during surgery, too. And we just lost that, too. I wonder if that worked. I think probably is better than nothing. Better than nothing. Yeah. So, like I said, they forgot for a couple of hundred years or a few hundred, and then started cauterizing wounds instead, which, as we all know, is burning a blood vessel shut, dipping it in boiling oil. That's one way. Yeah. Or just the old hot poker treatment. Yeah. Just awful. Say goodbye to your leg and then say hello to this hot boiling oil. Wow. I wonder how well it worked, though. I mean, at least as far as keeping the person alive and staving off infection. I don't know about the infection part, but back then, I think they just wanted to keep someone alive. Do you remember Rainbow Three when he gets shot in the side and he cauterized his wound by pouring some gasoline in and lighting it on fire. I don't remember that. Oh, man. He did that? Yeah. Wow. This blue flame, like, shoots through his abdomen, and he goes, the best acting Stalin's ever done. Wow. I don't know that I agree with that, but it's impressive. You should watch it, see what you think. Okay. I put first blood on my I saw that on my list, but I haven't heard any chiding yet on your list of 100 greatest movies of all time. That's right. But Rainbow Three was not on there. It was still pretty good. Okay, I'll check it out. Remember, he was fighting with the Taliban, the mujahideen. These are the freedom fighters that he was helping fight the Russians. I actually don't know if I saw Rambo Three, now that I think about it. All right. So amputation advanced, of course, over the years after the Cauterization debacle and wartime, or after wartime, with no surprise, is when they made a lot of these advances, especially in France, with a surgeon name, a military surgeon name, ambrose Paret. I don't know if he's related to Michael or not. Of course, with gunpowder and bullets and cannonballs and things, we saw, like, injuries like we've never seen before. Yeah. We can thank those things for advancement of amputation. Totally successful amputation. Right. So that was one of the big reasons that Pere was effective. And he was basically the first guy to bring back the ligating. That sounds weird. He rediscovered it. Yeah. In 1529, which is sad that it took that long from ancient Rome to 1529. Yeah. For somebody to be like, what if we just tied these things shut? Now burn it. Really? Got the hot oil ready already. It's too late for your advancement. And that is how Fondue was born. Like, we got the hot oil ready. He said, we don't need it. Put some meat on a stick. Got you. And have at it. Oh, no. You thought it was talking about, like, body parts. Yeah. No, I'm not a monster then. I thought it was funnier when you were a monster. Then the tourniquet was invented in 1674, which kind of surprises me because that seems more rudimentary than any of this stuff. Another bonehead invention. Yeah. You come up with this stuff before you cut people's limbs off. That'd be nice. And then anesthetic, of course, in the 1840s with anesthetic gas went a long way toward performing these surgeries without a lot of pain. Yeah. And here in the Western world, the American Civil War was a huge dude springboard to understanding amputation techniques. They might as well call it the amputation war. Right. Just from sheer volume of amputations. A lot of doctors who got their nickname saw bones from amputating, sawing through bones and all that yeah. Just the number of amputations that they perform form this body of knowledge that carried on after the war. Yeah. More than 50,000 amputations in the Civil War. And this is also hard to believe, but I guess it's hard to go back in time and realize if they just didn't know something, they didn't know it yet. It seems like a no brainer now that keeping a surgical environment clean should just be innate and a surgeon but back then, they didn't know that. They didn't understand bacteria like they do now. They didn't know germs. Yeah. And so it was like a stamp of experience to have a bloody surgical gown. So surgeons would, like, purposely not change their clothes and things because they were like, hey, look at my bloody gown. I did eight amputations today. Right. Beat that. Yeah, exactly. Pepper john. They would douse them with a chloroform soaked rag, put on the tourniquet and slice through everything. And then, like you said, get out the old saw bonesaw and take care of business, basically. And then we just tossed the limb onto a pile, which grew pretty quickly. Yeah. And there's plenty of old photographs of limb piles from the Civil War. Yeah. One out of four patients died in those days after an amputation, and that doubled if it didn't happen in the first 24 hours. Right. But a lot of people's lives were saved for battlefield amputation. Yeah. And most of those, I think, were probably bacterial due to infection and not necessarily like just bleeding out or a mistake or something. Right. Which we should say at this point. The whole reason to amputate is because you often have a wound or a diseased part of your body that's creating dead tissue. And that site of dead tissue is a really great place for bacterial infections to take root and take hold. The problem with the bacterial infection is that it tends to spread toward the rest of your body. Sure. So the point of amputation almost across the board is to prevent the spread of infection in the rashest way possible, which is why amputations typically are just the last resort. You're trying to stop this infection from spreading, and if you literally separate it from the rest of the healthy body right. That should do the trick. And it frequently does. Yeah. And I think the final advancement well, not the final advancement, of course, it's still advancing, but the last big advancement was with the infections, and a British surgeon named Joseph Lister was known as kind of the father of antiseptic surgery. Yeah, listerine. Oh, yeah. Is that where it came from? No way. Of course it is. Yeah. I never put those two together. Boom. Did he make any money off that? Like, was it actually his company or did they just? I don't know. Interesting. So he was the first guy he used something called carbolic acid, which is listerine probably is. They used it back then to prevent woodrot and to treat sewage. So I guess they just knew it was good for stopping bacteria. I'll bet that cauterizes wounds, too. Yeah. And he would spray it on surgical tools and incisions and dressings and even people in the surgery room, he would spray them with it, stand still. And then he was the first to stress hand washing and clean gloves and things like that. So hats off to you, Mr. Lister. Lister. Well, he was one of those people who made up a handful of human beings who have saved billions of people's lives just from their innovations and their insights. True. So amputation, it's been around for a while, and that's just surgical amputation. There's evidence of amputation for religious self sacrifice as far back as, like, 30,000, 40,000 years ago. For a long time, it was a punishment. The word amputation for well, it's punishment. It's synonymous with punishment. And it meant like you had your hands chopped off. Yeah. Like if you steal something, symbolically, they would cut off your hand. Yeah. And then amputation was even inscribed as a punishment in the first written law, the Code of Hamurabi. If you were a doctor and you lost a patient, well, you should lose one of your hands. That was the code. That just makes this so counter to trying to make doctors better. We want you to be a better doctor, so we're going to remove one of your hands. Right. You're worried about tort law. Think about how good you have it now. Yeah. So, like you said, there are a couple of reasons you would get an amputation. One is disease, and the other is injury. Like, my friend with the truck, like some kind of catastrophic injury damages it doesn't necessarily always rip your arm off, but it damages it to the point where there's no blood flowing there and the tissue is dying beyond the point where it can be rescued. Right. Essentially. And it might be a truck, it might be a bullet wound, it could be well, basically, any traumatic injury, a fire, a burn, a severe burn is considered a traumatic injury. Yeah. Blood flow is big. If it's not flowing, the problems happen. You're going to have a stroke if it stops flowing. You're going to lose an arm if it stops slowing. Sure. So if your blood flow is cut off for too long, then you're in big trouble. Right. And it's not just a traumatic injury disease. There are plenty of diseases that see a lessening of blood flow, like arteriosclerosis. There's plaque build up and blood vessels. When it builds up enough and enough, those blood vessels harden and the amount of blood flow through those vessels diminishes so much that the tissue that those blood vessels feed dies. There's something called peripheral artery disease, which is the result of a lack of blood flow leading to dead tissue diabetics. Yeah. You join that with diabetes, which has the tendency to also kill nerve endings, neuropathy, and then all of a sudden, you can't feel. So when you cut yourself, say you cut your foot or something like that. You don't feel it, so you're more prone to cuts, and it takes longer to heal because of the lack of circulation. And all of a sudden you have an infection that possibly turns gangrenous and threatens your entire life. Yeah. And in the US. 90% of amputations are as a result of this disease scenario. Whereas if you're under 50, traumatic injury is the leading cause of amputation. Yeah. So, like, you're out riding your bike on a mountain road, or you're Aaron Ralston and you're Mountaineering in Utah. Yeah. I would call that a traumatic injury. Getting your hand pinned under a boulder, for sure. Man, can you imagine? And they did a good job of the movie, but as it sets in, like, what the deal is, because at first he was like, oh, man, yeah, let me get out of this mess, or trying to move the boulder. It's like nothing. And then all of a sudden, you think, I might die of starvation. Yeah. And then your eye just goes over to the knife like, man, I wish I hadn't had it. So then there's cancer, which we haven't mentioned. There are a couple of ways that it could lead to amputation, obviously, just damage to your body tissue. But also, like you said, to keep a malignant tumor from spreading around, sometimes they will just lop it off. Yeah. And apparently those amputations from cancer have diminished tremendously over the last decade or two, but unfortunately, those from disease have increased. Yeah. 50%. Dropped by 50% over the past 20 years. Amputations overall? No, just from cancer. Traumatic injury and cancer. I got you. So I don't know if people are being safer in their recreation, if that's something to do with it or not, or if they're getting better. Yeah. We might have better trauma. Yes. Or better reattaching, too. Yes, but yes, you are right. It has increased because of at least in the United States, largely due to obesity. So much so that this article was from maybe 2006, something like that. And it says that one out of every 200 Americans is an amputee. That's not right anymore. No, it's actually even more from what I could find, 176 Americans. So it's 1.7 million people. It seems like a lot of people. Yeah, but that counts digits and things that you don't think about. Like someone lost a thumb. Right. Because I hear that and I'm like, why don't I see that more on a daily basis? You don't work in the industrial arts. Yeah, that's true. I don't work in a factory with lots of saws and chains and pulleys. That's a good point. You go to Alaska. I bet every third person has a limb that's missing. You don't see it a lot in the podcast field. Yeah. So we're going to prepare you for surgery, Dr. Clark. Right. For this message break, I'm doing the surgery. Right. Okay. So preparing for amputation surgery is like every surgery, initially, you're going to have a lot of meetings, always with the meeting. I know. Because they want you to be prepared and you're going to have everything explained very well and what you can expect before, during and after, just like with all surgeries, what kind of anesthesia they're going to use. Yes. It's not always general anesthesia. I knew this would stand out to you, too. Yeah. I would not want to be awake. No. Knock me out, cut my toe off, I don't care. Yeah, I'd better be out. Well, actually, I'll take that back. If it was like just a digit, I could stomach that. Not me. I don't know. If I'd watch it, at the very least, it would be boring. I think it'd be fascinating. Well, I mean, you couldn't see anything. You'd just be sitting there like, these guys are cutting my finger off right now. I think it arranged a mirror or something. Yeah. I used to get that at the dentist. I used to request a mirror so I could look at what they were doing. I think just because it fascinated me and to keep an eye on them. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, they sometimes use just local anesthetic to carry out an amputation. That's nutty if it's a limb. I don't think they would do that. No, that's got to be generally yeah. Because I think if you weren't under, your blood pressure would rise to dangerous levels. If you're going to get a prosthetic device, you might meet beforehand with your prosthetics to measure you out and kind of talk about what you're looking for post surgery. Then it's go time. I guess it is kind of go time. Well, the surgeon is going to want to figure out exactly where to cut ahead of time. It's not like how about here? They actually measure blood flow to the area to see what tissue is still receiving a healthy amount of circulation. Yeah. They don't want to leave any bad tissue behind. No, but they want to get as much of the bad tissue as they can, which is what you just said. But they also want to leave and tack as much healthy tissue as possible, which is why they measure and they try to find that line of demarcation where they should cut. Yeah. They said especially around the joints, they want to preserve all the healthy stuff they can, because if your joint is working, then that's going to help you out with your prosthetic limb. Oh, yeah. If they can do anything to save a joint, they're going to leave it intact. Yeah. So they figure out where to cut. They try to leave a joint as intact as possible. Yes. This is all the non emergency variety. Exactly. Yeah. Like all of this planning and everything, it goes out the window when you come in with a shotgun blast your lower leg. Exactly. They're going to be like, we need to amputate. We have to do this quick. And they do. And you don't have to meet with anybody. That's the plus side. No meetings. Some of the techniques they use or actually, let's just go ahead and walk you through the process. All right, so everyone, please I love that operating system. The article points out that the first thing they cut through is the skin. Right. They cut through the imaginary barrier and the air above the skin first. Technically, of course, you're going to cut through the skin and you want it to heal quick. And they said leave an appropriate scar, which doesn't mean for cosmetics. Don't leave your initials as a scar or something. What they mean is they don't want to leave a scar where it might rub up against your prosthetic or something and cause problems. Yeah, that can't be good. So they cut through the skin, and pretty soon after that, they meet muscle. Muscle. And this makes up the bulk of what they're cutting through. And I only like, within the last year or so realize that muscle is what steak is. Did it tell you this? Yeah, you told me this. It's just crazy to me. I used to be like, okay, so you got muscle, you have the skin, you have the bone, what's the beef? What's the steak? And then I realized, like, oh, muscle is the steak. Yeah. I was like, I'd make a good steak. Now you'd be sinewy. I'd make a good steak. So with the muscles, they have to cut through it, but they want to save a little bit of length of it as much as possible. Yeah. That's your padding, basically, yeah. Because they're going to fit it around the bone at the bottom. It is. It's the padding on the bottom, the exposed part of the residual limb, which is what the stump is called. You shouldn't call people's residual limb stumps. Is that true? Yeah. Well, then why do they use it 50 times in this article? They finally get to the point where they're like, which, by the way, residual limb, which is the preferred term, I think my friend called his stump. Yeah. I mean, if you have an amputated lamb, you can call it whatever you want. Right. It's like, you can't pick on my brother. Well, only I can pick on my brother. Sure, okay. It's along the same lines. Got you. So we've cut through the skin, the muscle. Now what you've got? Your nerves. Oh, man. I know. It just sends a chill up my spine thinking about it. You have to cut through the nerves, obviously. And then what they want to do, you're going to have where you cut the nerve is going to be a nerve stump. No, that's okay to call it a stump. Exactly. And they still carry signals of pain, sometimes even. And so they do their best to minimize what we're going to talk about next, which is phantom limb pain. Right. By sewing nerve endings and into the tissue around it and even cutting it off, cutting the nerves off higher up than the amputation site to try and prevent that. But thanks to you in that article you sent me, we learned that phantom limb pain actually occurs in the majority of patients who lose their limbs. I didn't know that. It sounded like a rarity to me. No, I think it's like it's not a given, necessarily, but I think that it's very common. Should we go and cover it now and then finish up with the surgery? Yeah. So, like you said, when you cut them up, we'll be back. Right. When you cut a nerve fiber sure. Even though there's a stump and it's not connected to anything anymore down there, it can still transmit information to the brain, and it still does. And your brain has been developed, this certain kind of arrangement of neurons that have to do with your lower leg. Your lower left leg is in this one region of your brain. And the thing is, when you amputate your lower left leg, your brain doesn't really get the news that it's not there anymore, or at least at the very least, it confuses it. It does. And it makes the brain think that you have a lower left leg still, but you're just not using it. Well, your brain has this technique for telling you when it's like you need to use your limbs or get up or move around or do something. And that's by sending a painful sensation from the leg to the brain to you to experience it. Yeah. When that leg is not there and your brain thinks it still is and you're not using it, then what you have is something called phantom pain. Yeah. And that can be it's not just like, oh, it hurts a little bit. It hurts a lot. Apparently, burning, aching sensations, as if the hand is being crushed in the vice. So say some. And here's the bad news, is that it is chronic, and once it happens and persists, it's there. Like it's tough to get rid of. Yeah. In fact, I think this article, they said these other post surgeries to limit that are only effective for a few months, and it usually returns. And so they usually don't even do those surgeries unless you're terminal. Yeah. And apparently, Chuck, drugs don't necessarily do a lot like pain drugs. Yeah. It can help. I think you get used to it, and it's still not really helping very much. So they have some pretty interesting radical treatments that apparently work, and one of the best ones is a mirror box. Yeah. This is so cool. So, you have a box that you put your hand into and then your residual limb in the same box, and the mirrors inside basically make it look like you have two limbs, both intact, facing the correct way, and. Then you move the intact one, and it looks like your residual limb is now moving and you basically your eye sends a signal to the brain. Exactly. And you trick your brain into thinking like, okay, I'm moving my limb. You can stop sending me the pain signals now. And it works for a lot of people. Yeah. And even more amazing is they don't even know if they need a mirror box. They think simply imagining using that limb could work like golfing. Yeah. So just imagine you're swinging a golf club with your phantom, with your limb that's not there anymore. Right. And they think they can actually work. Yeah. They're also trying to figure out how to replace the size, the brain, so that it can rearrange itself to basically be aware that there's no limb there any longer. And it says it can ignore sensory signals from that area. What they're doing is they're working on the brain now instead of the site of the amputation, like the physical site. Right. It makes a lot of sense. They thought it was a psychosis for a little while, that it was basically just like people had such a deep lamentation of the loss of their limb that they were suffering this form of psychosomatic experience, but now they're like, no, this is real. We have seen it. There's also stimulation of the nerves around the area which kind of confused the pain signals so they don't make it to the brain. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. But it's a real thing and apparently it's awful. Yeah. It's way more common than I thought. That was my biggest surprise in all this. I thought it was like, oh, that's super rare, but apparently it's kind of rare if you don't experience phantom limb pain. Yeah. So back to the operating room. We should probably get back in there. He looks fine. You have any Junior Mints on me? No, that's okay. Very nice. So now you've cut through the skin, you've cut through the muscle, you've cut through the nerves and done all your work to try and make sure that the nerves are not going to cause phantom pain. As much as you can. Much as you can. Now you have to cut the blood vessels. Yeah. Right. And you want to ligate them or cauterize. Right. Probably ligate them if you don't want to. Although I'm sure there's cauterization, too, as well. I think if you're trapped in the woods or something, there might be. No, but I think they even have little tools to cauterize blood vessels. Like a wood burning set, kind of. Yeah. But either way, you're going to stop the flow of blood out the open end of these blood vessels now, because that's not good when you tie those off. And you want to avoid as many blood vessels as you possibly can that don't need to be amputated because they still bring blood to the healthy tissue. Sure. And blood is chock full of nutrients, which is how these things just tissue keeps alive. That's right. And then there's only one thing left, my friend. Oh, man. That's the old bone. So they get out the old bone saw, and when you cut the bone, like you said, you're going to wrap the muscle around it. So you want a nice smooth surface. You don't want any kind of jagged edges. So they're going to smooth it out. I don't know what they use. Probably some kind of sander. Sure, they sand it down. Remember, start low with your sandpaper number and work your way up. Oh, is there more grit in the lower numbers? More grit? Yeah, like 80 sandpaper super rough and like a 200 is super fine. I think that's right. Sure. If I got this wrong, I think you're right. Okay. It makes sense. Yeah. But yeah, you really want to smooth out that bone because it's going to keep the amputation site from healing. If it's jagged, just rubbing up against muscle and nerves and blood vessels and all that's, not good. So you have it nice and sanded. You arrange the muscles around it and then you tie the skin off. You close the skin. And frequently if they think that there's a high risk of infection, they'll just kind of temporarily close the skin, leaving a tube to drain the almost inevitable liquids that build up. Sure. And then if they watch it and no infection comes along, then they'll permanently throw it up. Yes. And of course for the next several weeks, you're going to be closely monitored for infection. They're not going to leave you alone. They're going to bother you every single day. Probably checking on your what was the word? Not stump. Residual limb. Residual limb. Your resid. Occasionally they will take off the wrong limb. Should we go and talk about this? Yeah. Just in October of 2013 in Brazil, the guy got the wrong leg removed and the daughter said, hey, you removed the wrong leg. So they said, you're right, and they removed this other leg and now you own this hospital. And now he has no legs. That's crazy. And it said the family plans to sue. I'm sure. My dad got a knee replaced and I went and visited him before the operation. And he had no written on the kneecap that he is supposed to remain intact. No, I think one of the nurses did for him or something. I think it's kind of typical. Well, it's one of the things they do. I read this article from 2010, and this is in Colorado alone. This is not nationwide or anything. Okay. Over six and a half years in Colorado alone, they operated on the wrong patient at least 25 times and on the wrong body part 107 times. Wow. And that's a six and a half year period. And they studied close to 300 medical records and all the mistakes, of course, are traced back to miscommunication. It's never apparently anything but that, right. It's never the doctor was super drunk. No. And a lot of times it's not even the surgeon, we should point out. It's the support staff or other doctors that make this mistake. Oh, you throw them under the bus. So there's a thing. Now, the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons is an initiative called Sign Your Site, which is exactly what you're talking about. Well, sort of. The surgeon actually initials the surgical site for you to see and say, yes, this is the bad leg. Yeah. And you can be like, you're the one who told me that I have to lose my leg. Is it? And then the Joint Commission is a nonprofit group, and they have a protocol now called a timeout, a presurgery time out. Literally, everyone just pauses and goes, okay, this is what we're doing. Right. This is correct. Right. That's smart. Yeah. I'm surprised it wasn't the protocol anyway, but I'm glad it is now. Well, you know, doctors, they're all go with their jargon and their white coats and all that, and I got to hit the golf course. Yeah. Get drunk. Listen to us. So it does happen. And so you can ride it on your own leg, or you can ask for the time out or whatever. Sure. I think they should give you the time out. Either way, it's not as rare as you think. Right. So let's say that they successfully amputated the correct leg. There's a recovery period, as well. Sure. You know the little white bandage that's like a cap, like an inverted cap. No. Well, it's called a compression bandage. Oh, yeah, sure. It's like athletes wear them now. Like a compression sleeve. Right. This one doesn't have a hole on one side. Sure. You know what I mean? Yeah. And the compression, it increases the blood pressure around the site, which helps prevent infection. Yeah. It reduces swelling, of course. Yeah. Which is a big deal. Yeah. And then also you will be moved about quite a bit while you're in the hospital recovering, because they want to keep your leg circulating, your blood circulating, and not necessarily your leg. I just always think of a leg amputation. Really? Yeah. I always think of Arm, probably because of my friend. Oh, yeah. So once you get home, you're going to start meeting with the therapist, because physical therapy is a big deal, and it's not just maintaining motion in your residual limb, but also bulking up the other parts of your body. They're going to have to kind of step in a little bit to make up for that shortfall. Yeah. And apparently, aside from just strength training, they do real world training, like you got to get out of bed and dress yourself without your left leg. So let's see you do it. Do it. And I don't think we mentioned either you might meet with a brain therapist before and after as well. A psychiatrist. Yeah. To help you along, because it's a weird thing to not have a limb anymore. Yeah. I'm sure there's almost mandatory counseling for something like that. Yeah, probably so. Because I'm sure also, even if you go into it like, all right, I can do this, I'm good with this. I think very few people come out of it with the kind of a plum and just go get them spirit of people like Aaron Ralston or the girl from Georgia who had necrotizing fasciitis, who just managed to keep her spirits up. I think it's probably very easy to sink into a post surgery depression and that would need to have an eye kept on it. Sure. If you go through all this physical therapy and you go through your psychiatry therapy and you're doing great, actually. A brain therapist. Yeah. Brain therapist. I like that better. You may have to work with your prosthetics if you want a prosthetic limb. And these days they're not one size fits all like the old days. Yeah. Like, here's this wood leg. Longer than you might want, but that's okay. Timbertoe. Exactly. These days they're going to fit it very much for you. A little longer than you might want it. They're going to fit it for you. It's very much tailor made. The advancements in prosthetics is just unbelievable. We might could do a show on that alone. Oh, that'd make this sweet. Beautiful. There was also another treatment for phantom pain that had to do with prosthetics. And there's prosthetics that basically jack into your nerves. And so you still use the same nerves that used to make your lower leg move, but now it makes your prosthetic move. And apparently your brain's fine with that. Yeah. We covered some of this in human augmentation. Oh, yeah. Remember a while ago, like, these prosthetic limbs now that are hardwired. Did we do that? I don't remember that episode. No, not the podcast when you did it. Oh, yeah, our live speaking thing on there. Sure. With these prosthetic limbs that are hardwired in your brain so that you can think, pick up apple and it picks up an apple, right? That's right. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. So when your lower leg is moving, your brain apparently doesn't care whether it's flush and blood leg or prosthetic leg, as long as it's moving, then that can help treat phantom pain as well. Wow. Yeah. So, Chuck, imagine you're a single guy, and you lose a Lamb. Okay. I'm just saying. A mansion yard. Okay. And you lose a limb every day. That's terrible. I know. You have a wonderful wife. I know. I'm just kidding. And you lose your left leg. You think that your chances of ever getting a date probably just go up in smoke, right. Some people might think that will cut that down. It's not necessarily true. Yeah. There's a lot of people out there that like that. Yeah. You may become a lot more attractive to certain people, specifically people who have do you want to say this one? Which one is it APO or Acro? Acro. acrotomophilia. Yeah. That's an actual there is Apotemophilia, which is we've talked about this before with Body Integrity Identity Disorder, when you want to remove a limb from your own body. Yeah. That is apopymnophilia. Right. Like, I just feel, like, incomplete with all my four limbs, and I want a limb removed. And there are doctors that will do that. Yeah. And there's a lot of controversy lumping that into a paraphilia, because if someone is attracted to the idea of living without a limb, it's very rarely sexually. Most of the time, it's a form of hero worship or they want to be challenged more in life, or they have, like you just said, a real identity disorder where they've always envisioned themselves paralyzed, where they've always envisioned themselves as a double amputee. And they feel less than whole by being whole. Yeah. It's not any different than a transsexual saying they were born in the wrong body. Yeah. They bear a striking resemblance. Yeah. So the bi ID and what was the epotenophilia? Yes, our one and the same. But it really shouldn't be a paraphilia. Now, the other feliacrotomophilia, that should be a paraphilia, because that is a sexual attraction to people who are amputees or who are paralyzed. Yeah. If you haven't seen the David Cronenberg movie Crash yeah, I have not. Oh, you haven't seen it? No. That's what it's about. Boxing haliena. Oh, yeah. Boy, that was awful. I haven't seen it. It was bad. I just know about it. It's, like, notoriously bad. I've got to see it, then. Yeah. So, I mean, there is some reference to this in popular culture, but it was only, I think, when the first case of that was put forth. So it's relatively new and then going to great links to amputate your own limb is even newer than that. There was a Scottish doctor in 2000 who very famously amputated the healthy legs of two men. Yeah. And he caused a huge controversy. Yeah. He stood by it, though. He did. He said he thought about it for 18 months, and when he finally did it, he had decided that it was by far the most humane thing he could possibly do in this situation. Because these men were suffering by having their intact legs. Yeah. And they say, I don't know if it's true, but some of them contend that no amount of mental brain therapy can help. Right. It's like they've got to get rid of that limb. Right. Or paralyze themselves. And a lot of people do take it on themselves. There was a man who went down to Mexico in the think he was 73 to have an amputation surgery in a hotel and died of gangrene as a result. Another guy successfully amputated his own leg with a log splitter wow. People will go to great lengths and do what we would consider self harm, whereas they're really like fulfilling their identity. So it raises that question, like in that specific situation, is medicine harming people by carrying out these amputations cleanly and professionally? Or are you just giving into somebody's solutions and really making things worse? Yeah, supposedly the evidence is after surgery these people feel good, they feel great, they feel the way that they're supposed to feel, supposedly. So it's hard to argue that you're doing them harm by carrying out the surgery. Yeah. And again, those are two very different things. Wanting to remove your own limb, to feel like a complete person is not the same as the sexualization and attraction to like in Penthouse magazine. Remember in this article what article was this, by the way? It was an Atlantic article from 2000 yeah. Called The True Self. It's really good. I thought it was something else, but yeah, no, maybe that was a subheading, but it was a great article and it's nothing new. The sexual side of things, going back to this dude, Richard Von Kraft ebbing. He was a researcher of sexual pathology and he started categorizing and cataloging in 1886. I don't know if it was a book or just a medical journal called Psychopathia Sexualis. And of course everything from bestiality and necrophilia is in there, but to Strabosmith. Apparently Descartes had a thing for women with cross eyes. Yeah. I didn't know that. I didn't know that either. But there are sexual things all the way back then this 128 year old engineer was excited by the sight of a woman's disfigured feet and another guy pretended to be crippled, or lame is what they called it back then. Yeah. And apparently that's still a thing. Like if you go onto the web and start looking up acrotomophilia, you're going to find there are pretenders people who use wheelchairs and leg braces and crutches even though they don't need them. And those are frequently people who are also deemed wannabes, who are, I guess, prevent amputees. They're still intact, but they don't want to be. And then there's devotees for tomophiliac. Yeah. Those are the sexual the ones who want to be with amputees because sexually roused by them. Exactly. Yeah. And it's big on the Internet, this article points out, and there's probably been more medical research on it since then, but he points out that in legit medical circles there's not a lot of information, but if you get on the Internet, there are all kinds of chat rooms and places where you can find amputee porn. Yeah. If that's what your thing is. Hey, that's what your thing is. I can't really see anything wrong with it. I was surprised, though, by the one how the people that it's not sexual, but they just want to be challenged more. Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. I wonder if that kind of falls into the category of munchausens where they want the sympathy or added attention or something like that. That comes with being paralyzed or being an amputee, I think. Pretenders for sure. Yeah. Like if you're walking around on crutches and you're just fine, you're looking for attention. But yeah, like you said, there are some people out there who report wanting to lose a body part because they want to be more physically challenged. Yeah. All right. We should do one on paraphilia sometime. I've always wanted to. Yeah. Is that just any kind of sexual fetish? Yeah, everything. That's everything. And there's a lot of them out there? Yes. Basically any weird thing you can come up with, there's a peer failure for it. Yeah, I bet you're right. Yeah. Never mind. I think it's a good way to end this one. Yeah. If you want to learn more about amputations, you can type that word into the search bar. Howtofworks.com? And let's see, since I said search bar, that means it's time for listener mail. Yeah. This is kind of long, but it's appropriate. I'm going to call it one testicle down. Was there an amputation? Not so much. It was from Rich. This came off the Castration podcast. And he says, guys, when I was about twelve years old, I got kicked in the grapes by a particularly violent classmate. My parents took me to the hospital and after a bunch of tests, determined I had testicular torsion. When a male's testicles twist around inside the scrotum, essentially twisting the wires that connected to your inner workings, and it cuts off the blood supply, like we said, it's not any good. You don't want to cut off the blood supply where tissue dies. That's right. It was too late to save his injured testicle, so they set a date for surgery to remove it. But it wasn't until the end of August, apparently, because there was no rush, because it didn't make anything worse. There would be a rush if it happened to me, I'd be like, let's just get this over with. I know. So he said he was stuck in bed for an entire summer, and his family didn't have working air conditioning yet either. And his scrotum was the size of a grapefruit. Walking, moving, laughing, or even breathing heavily caused some of the worst pain of experience. So he had the surgery and it said had two purposes. One, to remove the injured and now useless testicle, and two, to fix the remaining healthy testicle to the inside of the scrotum to prevent the possibility of future torture. So he felt a lot better physically after the surgery. But it was very hard to cope mentally and socially. I think I only told my closest friends what had happened. I told the rest of my school that I had knee surgery or something. I felt incredibly embarrassed. And remember, I was at the most awkward, puberty ridden age for something like this to happen to my private parts. Poor kid. I know. Then two things happened. The first thing was acceptance. I don't remember if anything in particular brought it on, but I distinctly remember the day where I finally thought to myself, you know what? Who cares? And at that moment, his testicle grew back twice the size of before. Then I did something that still surprises me, now that I think about it. I opened an AOL Instant Messenger this is back in the day, of course, sir. And picked out one of my high school friends at random and told them before I could chicken out. As soon as I told this random person, I felt a huge weight lift off my chest. Nice. And then the second thing was surgical. I opted for elective surgery to put in a fake ball. A human nutrition. Sure. Or a prosthesis made of silicone. It was mainly for cosmetic purposes, and I was happy that I did it. Even now, you can't really tell a difference unless you touch them. And once somebody is in that situation where they could feel the difference, it really doesn't make a difference anyway. Wink. Yeah. So he says now he is very proud to have R1 testicle and one fake one. And he went on and to write about how to tell the kids out there, hey, if something like that happens to you, then it's not the biggest deal and you're still a complete person. And he wonders if he would have even gotten the nutrition if he would have been older and not been at that awkward age. Yeah, he says he probably didn't think like he would have. No, he doesn't regret it, right? He doesn't regret it. No, he says, I'm really proud of it. And I wonder how many of your listeners only have one testicle? Let's put a little crown on it every once in a while. That is birthday. And Rich, thank you for your courage in trying to tell people, especially kids. Yeah. Way to go, Rich. It's not the end of the world. I mean, that is a rough thing to go through. Heck yeah, man. Well, hats off to you, Rich. Crowns off. If you want to be brave like Rich, you can tell us about something that you overcame in your life. We love hearing about stuff like that. You can tweet to us at sisk podcast. If it's a very short story, you can join us on Facebook.com stuffyoushennow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com and you can join us at our home on the web stuffyoustenew.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. With over 1000 titles to choose from, Audible.com is a leading provider of downloadable digital audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. Go to audiblepodcast. Comnostuff knowstuff to get a free audiobook download of your choice when you sign up today. 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. 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https://podcasts.howstuf…ornado-myths.mp3	Myths and Truths About Tornadoes	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/myths-and-truths-about-tornadoes	Tornadoes can make mincemeat out of houses, people, cars, you name it. So do you know what to do - and what not to do - when there's one headed your way?	Tornadoes can make mincemeat out of houses, people, cars, you name it. So do you know what to do - and what not to do - when there's one headed your way?	Mon, 25 Apr 2016 19:08:03 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2016, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=19, tm_min=8, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=0, tm_yday=116, tm_isdst=0)	41946885	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 this episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Start building your website today@squarespace.com. Enter code stuff at checkout and you will get 10% off Squarespace. Set your website apart. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetopworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, reporting from the eye of the tornado, which is why it's quiet and calm. Oh, wait, that's a hurricane. And there's Charles WTOK. Bryant and Jerry's over there. And this is something you should know. Howdy, sir. How are you? I'm good. I should say right off the bat that my wife Emily is kind of obsessed with tornadoes oh, yeah. From her childhood growing up in Ohio. Yes, same here. Which we'll talk about tornado Alley. But some people put parts of Ohio in Tornado Alley. Yeah, some people don't. My family did. Yeah, sure. Was it like a thing growing up at the end of Tornado Alley? Right? I mean, you'd see them, so the tornado might come knock, and then here's what we'll do. Right, son? Well, yeah, and we did it plenty of times. Go down in the basement for practice or tornadoes. All right. Yeah, sure. No, Ohio is definitely at the end of Tornado Alley. I know. If you look at the map, it doesn't look like most of it is. Well, it depends on what map. Yeah, if you look at the Clark family map and apparently the Santa Bogen family map, it's on Tornado Alley. Yeah. So she's still obsessed with tornadoes. And the movie Twister, every time it's on, she'll watch whatever part of it is on. It's a good one. But I think also you could make the argument that Twister kind of cinematizes tornadoes a little. Although there are some parts where it's like you should not be telling people to do this. Like outrunning a tornado. Yeah. That's a good thing to not do, as a matter of fact. Well, there was some video going around the other day of a lady who survived a tornado that went through. I think she was a FedEx driver at a convenience store. And it's just like this camera footage, and she kind of ducks behind a soda machine, and you just see it go through and just wreck everything. And then she walks out. And I told Emily, I was like, this is your worst nightmare. And she said, yes. I said, but it's also your deepest desire. Oh, it's like that for her husband? I think so. She said, If I know I could survive it, I think it might be my deepest desire to get through a tornado going right over me. Yeah. So that's her obsession runs deep. So you've seen that footage of those people under an overpass where the video, like, the tornado appears to go right over the overpass. The underpass. What's the difference? I think if you're going over the road below, you're on the overpass. If you're underneath the overpass, you're on the underpass. Okay. I'm sure some highway pedants will be civil engineer. Yeah, they'll write it. So, Chuck, there are plenty of things that Emily should do and shouldn't do if she's going to survive that tornado that she secretly really wants to experience. Yeah, right. And there's a lot of myths associated with tornadoes. You didn't grow up with tornadoes. Well, I mean, Georgia has tornadoes here and there. Here or there? Yeah. It seems like I've seen them in the North Georgia mountains before. Like, I remember one time when I went to go drive to go camping, there had been a recent tornado and there were some houses that were just toothpicks. Oh, yeah. Yes. As a matter of fact, I think there was a bad one in Ringgold, you remember, which is a little north of here. And you and I were driving through and you could see where it crossed the highway because there was a swath of pine trees, like you said, that just being crushed like toothpicks on one side and then on the other side, but then not further up and not further south. It was pretty neat, but it was also like, oh, yeah, a bunch of people died here a month ago. It is definitely weird when you see, like, a house will be splintered and the next door neighbors is fine. Yes. It's just so, like, creepy. It is very random. Yeah, it's pretty creepy. Were you and you and me on your way to Dollywood, by any chance? It's entirely possible. I just figured anytime you get in a car and head north, you're probably going to die with it. Right. Pointer north, give me. Okay, so we're talking tornadoes, and there's tons of myths and legends associated with them. Some of them even discussed and put out there by scientists, as we'll see. But one of the big ones, it's a pretty sad one, is the idea that tornadoes seek out mobile home parks. Trailer parks? Yeah, that's sort of the old joke. It is. And it's pretty grim joke. Sure. But the weird thing is, it appears to be true that trailer parks are likelier to be hit by tornadoes than immobile homes. Homes on foundations, neighborhood subdivisions, that kind of thing. Well, I think it's probably correct to say it might appear that way for several reasons. Go ahead. Yeah, well, one reason is that there's clearly a media bias when it comes to showing tornado footage because they tend to show the most damage on the 600 news. That is absolutely true. So a mobile home is way more likely to be completely destroyed right. Than like, a concrete house, let's say. And the reasons why, they're pretty obvious, but they're worth mentioning. A mobile home is made out of much more lightweight material than immobile home. Is that what you would call it? I would say I don't want to call it a permanent foundation. Okay, nice. And that leads us to number two. Number two is that a mobile home is, by definition, usually not anchored to the ground through a foundation, like a permanent structure, like a home. All right. And so you put those two things together. When a tornado comes through, it creates horrible devastation, not just to the mobile homes, but to the people inside. And you're much more likely to die in a tornado if you live in a mobile home than in a permanent structure. Yeah. It says here that a larger building could possibly withstand up to 100 miles an hour for wind. Right. Whereas 55 miles an hour could be really devastating in a mobile home. Yeah. And so people in mobile homes in the United States are ten to 20 times likelier to be killed in a tornado than someone who lives in a permanent foundation home. Yeah. And I said concrete house earlier. I didn't mean brick house. I meant concrete house. Yeah. Because I have one in my neighborhood. Sure. Like a cinder block house. Yeah, it's a concrete house, sure. But a brick house, too. That counts. Those concrete houses are built like a brick house. The other thing that we found out is Purdue University at one point did a little research and found out that tornadoes you're more than likely going to find a tornado, what they call a transition zone, where you may be transitioned from a more dense city area to a more rural area right. Where the land changes. Yeah. And they produce studied tornadoes in Indiana, specifically from 1950 to 2012, and found that they are much likelier to touch down in these transition zones. Right. Yeah. But that doesn't explain why they just were able to say, yes, this happens more frequently. And it just so happens that these are places where mobile home parks and trailer parks are likelier to be. Yeah. They're usually not, like, in the middle of the city. So they were saying that it is actually likelier for a mobile home to be hit more by a tornado, possibly because it's right there in the spot where they would hit. But again, we don't know why. I have a pet theory here. Oh, boy. I love these. I think that we don't well, it's clear we don't understand tornadoes yet very well enough, and not just us, scientists, too. And I think one of the things that we're going to learn about tornadoes as we understand them more and more is that they're guided or attracted to static electricity. Mobile homes tend to be made out of more metal than brick or wood homes or concrete homes. And so we generate more static electricity and could possibly serve as kind of almost a beacon to a tornado. Wow. That would attract it. That's my guess. And then do you also remember back in I don't remember when it was, and I couldn't find it on the Web, but either in Vienna or Cairo, which, if you live outside of Georgia, vienna or Cairo yeah. There was a mobile home factory that got hit by a tornado, I think. I do remember that. You remember it made pretty big news because everybody's like under. Irony. The old joke. Right. So that's my pet theory. Static electricity off of mobile homes attracts tornadoes. Did you come up with that all in your lonesome? Yeah, he's my noggin. Pretty good. Thanks, man. Should we move on to the underpass overpass quandary? Yeah, you probably have heard, because the rationale used to be, hey, if you're out on the highway, get out of your car and run under that overpass or underpass and huddle. Makes total sense. Or drive your car under there and sit there. Yeah. Drive your car under and then run up to the part where the overpass meets the underpass and just wedge yourself in as much as you can. Safest place ever. Where skateboarders spray paint. Exactly. Yeah. And smoke marijuana for the first time. It makes total sense. These are extraordinarily sturdy concrete structures, and anybody who knows anything about tornadoes knows that you want to be in a concrete structure. The caveat is that you want that thing to be an enclosed concrete structure, either in some sort of concrete walls with a concrete roof or underground or something like that. And an overpass or underpass is actually a tornado frenzy whipping machine. It actually will do the opposite. It's one of the worst places you can go. Yeah. It creates what they call a wind tunnel effect, so that the wind and the underpass is stronger than the wind on the ground or above it. Yeah, it funnels the wind through and increases velocity. So the wind is actually faster than the underpass. And with that wind, as you know, comes all kinds of debris that will impale your body. Right. Without even feeling bad about it. Yeah. It gets whipped up by that wind tunnel, and then when the tornado passes, that debris that's in the air is going to suddenly shift and come back for a second glancing blow. If you're lucky. Yeah. I was just thinking when you said to hide all the way up at the very tip top that if the tornado was going parallel and literally was as if it was going down the highway above you, that maybe there is something to that. But tornadoes are so wide, it's not like it's as wide as that street. Well, yeah. And this article also makes the point that just the part of the funnel that touches the ground is not the only place where there's winds. There's high winds all around a tornado as well. You just don't necessarily see them. And that video that we talked about the very famous video of the people taking shelter underneath an overpass and filming it as the tornado goes by overhead. Apparently they were being subjected to something called an inflow jet, a surface inflow jet, which was wind whipping off the ground toward the tornado. So they weren't actually in the path of the tornado? No. The tornado was pretty close, like 30, 40ft. Got you over. And to them they were like, it was the tornado, but it actually wasn't. Had it been the tornado, they may not have survived. And they were actually very lucky to have survived anyway. But a lot of people point to that and they're like, yeah, that's exactly what you should do. See, and that's a total anomaly that those people survived. Right. You can't take one video and say this is the standard. Exactly. These people lived, even though it's amazing. Yeah. Although they did say that the FedEx driver was super smart for wedging herself between two soda machines. Oh, yeah. Although she could have been squashed by those two, I guess. So it worked out for her. Yeah. Let's just say that. There's one other problem with taking shelter under an overpass, too. When you park your car around there. It's going to get kicked up by the tornado and possibly land on its side in the middle of the road so that when the tornado passes and the paramedics need to get through there to get to rescue people. They're going to have a hard time with your car on its side in the middle of the road because you left it right in the path of the tornado. Yeah. Plus, there's a problem with people. Well, we'll get to trying to outrun a tornado here in a minute. All right. Should we take a break? Let's take a break. All right, Josh. There's another old thing that you've probably heard growing up in Toledo, which is if you see a tornado or, you know a tornado is coming, open up your windows so we can just pass on through. Makes total sense. Yeah. Not necessarily pass through, but like, was it depressurized the home, maybe? Yeah. So tornado is driven by low pressure winds, right. Yeah. Or a low pressure front. And the idea was that if the pressure was higher in your house than the tornado outside your house would explode. Right. And it was actually this is what scientists told people to do for many years, said, Go open your windows. I remember that. I don't remember us ever opening our windows, but I remember it was like a should you, shouldn't you kind of thing. Yeah. And the problem is that waste like, a tremendous amount of time sure. Run around the house trying to open windows right. When you need to be taking shelter somewhere. And then secondly, it does absolutely nothing. As a matter of fact, it can have even different effects than if you let the window close. Yes. I wonder if that started because they didn't know much about it. And they would say, well, that house looks like it exploded. Yes, because they do look like they exploded, but they didn't. Have you ever seen one up close? What, the wreckage? Yeah. Well, just driving by. No, like a house? Yeah, like on the road, and then the house was beside the road. Got you. But I didn't walk through it. You were telling me once about when she was a kid down south that there was a neighborhood that just got leveled, and she was actually talking about how just insane it is when you're seeing a house that's standing, but everything around it's, like, totally destroyed. But she was like it was unnerving. Just the destruction. Like seeing houses like that because they're supposed to be solid and safe. They're not supposed to look like they exploded or anything like that. Although if you've ever done house construction and stuff like that, I remember. I don't know. I had this idea in my head that I don't think I knew how houses were built. Right. And then once I sort of did a little bit of I was like, man, this is just a bunch of wood. Exactly. And drywall. Yeah, it makes sense. But it is very distressing to see that turned into toothpicks. Right. So if you did go to the trouble of opening all of the windows in your house right. And the tornado came through and it didn't actually level your house, because that's the other thing with opening the windows. The tornado could care less about the lower high pressure, which is going to level your house if it wants to. If it gets in the way, sure. But if it did just pass by enough that it didn't level your house and the windows were open, it could conceivably blow the roof off the sucker. Yeah. Because those windows are open. Right. Apparently, the tornado actually raises the pressure in the house upward somehow, and then gusts can lift the roof right off. And they figured this out by doing tests, and I looked everywhere to find out who conducted this test and how they did it. Couldn't find anything. Is it bunk, that thing? Yeah, maybe. I was always just wondering, though, and they were like, we perform tests. Right. Trust me. How do you blow the roof off of a house? In a test? Yes. Or simulate a tornado. Right. You could on a smaller scale, but does it graduate upward? Nokia to me. I'm off today. No, you're not. I feel off. Oh, you're right on. I gave blood for the first time on Sunday. Oh, I thought you were about to say, like, an hour ago you saw it. That's the first time you've ever given blood in your life. Yeah. Really? Yes. And you're like, Man, I waited way too long. You're going to start giving blood too much, probably. You're going to be like, Take my platelets. I'll be like Peggy Hill. What happened to her? Oh, she got into a blood donating contest with her next door neighbor men to basically see who was the most generous. That's pretty funny. And she really went overboard. Did you eat some Nutter Butters and have some juice? Nutter Butters and little Welch's gummies. Yeah. See, I used to not give blood as much because I was severely needlephobic, but needles have gotten so much smaller now. A and if you get someone who does how to do it properly, it's really not that bad. Oh, no, it wasn't bad at all. I really am ashamed that I waited this long in my life. For years, honestly, years. I was under the impression that you couldn't give blood if you had a tattoo. Yeah, that old thing. Yeah. And then I met Yummy, and she's like, why don't you donate blood? Yeah. She's like, what's your problem? Right. And I told her, she's like, no, that's not true at all. Right. Five years later. Six years later, I was like, all right, let's do it. Well, you can make up for it now. And hey, people out there, you might have some Josh Clark blood pumping through your body soon. How about that? Pretty neat. Pretty neat. I can't remember your blood type. You and Jerry were the same, a positive. So am I. Yeah, we have the same type, so A positive. I love that Jerry speaks especially quietly. Can you make sure you edit yourself out okay? Yeah, because you were both A positive. I remember that because you made the joke. I had the same that you're A positive person or something like that. Yeah, it's a good way to remember it. Jerry would have known that we have the same blood type. If she came to our live show, Jerry could get some Josh blood. Do you know how upsetting that would be for you? What if one of you had to rely on the other to live? Yeah, if, like, Jerry cut herself and got some blood and it turned out to be mine. Yeah, if she cut herself. Should we move to the bathtub, sir? Let's. I'm going to call it an old wives tale. Go get in the bathtub. Because that's a really safe place in your home to withstand a tornado, because bathtubs are strong and thick. They're not, though. You were talking about houses being made of, like, wood and drywall. A bathtub is just like a fiberglass shell around a two x four frame. That's your bathtub. It depends what kind of bathtub you got. If you have, like, an old claw footed iron tub, that's what I got. I could withstand anything in that thing. Okay. So most people don't have that. And you think, like, you're getting in a bathtub, you're like, oh, this thing's pretty sturdy. But really, if you could pick it up, it's just fire glass. Round two. By four. Yeah. You're like, I've kicked a hole in five bathtubs. It's easy. I'm on at least five. So the logic is that it's heavy and sturdy, and I think a lot of this logic came out from the day when bathtubs were sturdier than they are now. I agree with you, but either way, it's only a good idea if that bats up happens to be in a safe part of your home. Precisely. Right. So in a safe part of your home is a room with no exterior facing walls, no exterior facing windows, obviously. And if your bathtub is in a bathroom with an exterior facing wall or an exterior facing window, is that superfluous? Do I need to say that? No, it doesn't matter. Just do not get in your bathtub. Yeah. Because that wall in that room is very likely to be ripped apart by a tornado, even if the rest of the house isn't. So you want to go as much into the center of your house as possible into as windowless a room as possible, say, like a closet inside your house, surrounded by as many rooms as possible. Yeah. So if you have a bathtub and a kill dungeon, go to the kill dungeon, then you're set. Yeah, I don't have a bathtub in there. If you have a closet tub in the kill dungeon, then you're golden. Yeah. You could just go ahead and take a bath. So, Chuck, another legend about tornadoes seems to be that they avoid cities. Sure seems that way. Yeah. But it's kind of like the same thing as the mobile home thing, if my theory is incorrect right. Where it just seems that way. The reason why is because there's way more rural area in the United States than there is city. Yeah. Even though most people live in cities, they're packed in there, which is why we're all stressed out. That's right. 80% of the population in the US. Lives in urban centers, but it happens. Oklahoma City in what year was this? 2013. They had one in 1999 and one in 2013. They were huge. Right. An EF five. And that is based on the Fujita tornado scale. Look at this one. We did a show on tornadoes. I specifically remember saying that tornadoes form because there's a horizontal column of swirling air that eventually moves down and becomes vertical. And that's your tornado. Well, we did very in the early days of the five minute episodes, we did one about being in the eye of the tornado. Maybe that was not it. You know what? It might have been? Can it really rain frogs? Oh, maybe. Or did we talk about water spots separately? Or was that the same episode? No, that was the one where you predicted sharknado. Yeah, which I got nothing for. Nothing. So Oklahoma City in was an EF five, which is the strongest possible tornado on the tornado scale. I was looking into the Fujita scale so apparently Theodore Fujita made up the scale, like, out of whole cloth, basically. Really? Without doing real investigation into it. He just said I'm Teddy Fujita. Yeah. What I say goes with tornadoes. But he said, we'll say an F five is like this, but he didn't actually go out and compare the wind speeds to the level of destruction. He didn't do that leg work. Who is he and why did we listen to him? Apparently, everybody liked the name of his scale because they went out and adjusted it. So it's been since adjusted to where it now actually reflects reality a lot better. Interesting. But an F five is, like you said, it's as bad as it gets, and it can just keep getting worse and worse. There's no F Six or F seven or anything like that. Like an F five plus. No. Even the minimum F five, though, is mind boggling and it's destruction. So that went through Oklahoma City in 1999, which is clearly a biggest city, did a billion dollars worth of damage and killed 36 people. So that's pretty devastating for a city. Yeah. And then 2013, like you said, another one hit. 25 people were killed. And that was both in the city and in the suburbs outside the city. But we had one in Atlanta in 2008. Yeah, I remember where I was because it was the day before my birthday. Oh, yeah. It was March. Yeah, or the day before the eyes of March. I was in Kirkwood having pizza with Emily and Justin and Emily's sister Sarah. And it was like a bad storm, clearly. But Emily said, oh, my God, it's raining sideways. And we looked out the window and the rain was blowing sideways. The wind was blowing so hard, we were just like, man, that's crazy. Let's get another beer. Yeah, I guess if we were in Kirkwood, cabbage Town is less than like 3 miles away. That's where it hit. With Cabbage Town? Well, yeah, one of the places it hit in the Cotton Mill off. So, like, less than a few miles away, tornadoes were wrecking the city and we were just in there drinking and eating pizza. Yeah. And we didn't know till the next day how many miles away. I mean, it had to be, what, a couple of miles? Yeah, it might have even been less than that from there to there. Yeah. And by 09:30 P.m., I did a little research because you kept drinking and don't remember. That's right. It was a super cell moved in the heart of downtown Atlanta. And this was during the SEC basketball tournament. And it blew the windows out on the westin. Yeah. The Peach Tree Plaza Hotel. And they put plywood up over the windows and left it there for like a year and a half. It was longer than that because I remember driving and saying and I remember reading why it took so long was because they were specialty windows when it was built back in the 70s or whatever. Right. I remember thinking, like, how hard could it be to construct new glass? I totally forgot about that two years later. For those of you who don't live in Atlanta aren't familiar, this building is basically like the icon of the Atlanta skyline. Yeah. Sort of the center. Tall building. Yeah, very tall. Cylindrical building with, like, a revolving restaurant on the top. Very impossible to miss. And it was dotted with plywood for two years. It was crazy. Totally forgot about that. So the SEC basketball tournament was going on, the Georgia Dome, and there was an NBA game being played, and I think stuff like happened in the Georgia Dome. They had to stop the game for a minute. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. 130 miles per an hour in F two. Not too bad, not too Chevy. That's respectable for a city tornado, right? Yeah. And thankfully, only one person lost their life in that one, which, if you think about it, is pretty remarkable considering how a lot of people in that area. So you've got Oklahoma City has been hit twice. Terribly. Atlanta, Salt Lake City seen plenty of tornadoes. Same with Dallas in Miami. Did not know about the Miami hurricane. I didn't either, although it makes sense because that's the name no, not the hurricane, the tornado. Yeah, that's what I my brain just got zapped. Well, what are you going to say about the hurricanes? Oh, the University of Miami. Yeah. Right. But it wasn't a hurricane. It was a tornado. No. I can believe a hurricane in Miami. A tornado. That's the one I have trouble. Isn't their name the University of Miami severe weather system? I think we should definitely take a break. Okay. And we'll be back with more unbelievable facts right after this. Chuck, I remember specifically believing that tornadoes were totally indigenous to North America. Right. They only happened here. It seems like you only hear about them here. Yeah. But apparently they do happen elsewhere. The reason why most people think they only happen here is because in North America, we have something like, I should say in the United States. Not even just North America, but in the United States, we get about 1400 reported tornadoes a year. That's a lot of tornadoes. Yeah. By comparison, Europe sees about 300. And that's all of Europe. Apparently, tornadoes do happen on every continent except Antarctica. But the reason that it seems like they happened here only is because they happen so much more frequently here than elsewhere. Yeah. Apparently South America has favorable conditions for tornadoes. And then between Argentina and Brazil especially, they have the right kind of storms to produce tornadoes. But again, it doesn't happen as much right. As the United States. No. And so the other aspect of it we go back to that same thing with the news covering trailer parks. A very small proportion of tornadoes are actually considered. Dangerous. Something like 2% or violent, I think is what they're called. Right. 75% or weak. 22% are strong. Oh, so 3% are violent. 3% are violent. So if you have 300 tornadoes a year right? Yeah. And only 3% are violent, it's not going to make news quite as often as if you have 1400 tornadoes per year and 3% are violent, it's going to seem like there's tornadoes that are just wrecking America all the time. And then apparently also the United States specifically, and parts of Canada. But the US. Is in a very unique position for tornado formation, right? Yes. And we have that thing called Tornado Alley. And Tornado Alley just so happens to fit very nicely over what's also known as the Great Plains. That's right. Specifically, we are talking where is it here? Central Texas. Head northward. Northward? Northward. The w is not silent. I like northward, I have to say huge in northern Iowa and from central Kansas and Nebraska east to western Ohio. That's what you're talking about. Yes. And that is Tornado Alley. That doesn't count. Florida, apparently Florida is a little bit of its own tornado Alley. Yeah. Apparently in Miami, too. Yeah, but like we said, Georgia, we'll have them here and there. Yeah. Because there's a Tornado Alley where they okay, so if you look at the Great Plains, right, it's relatively flat. So it allows cool air to come down from Canada, and it hits warm air coming up from the Gulf, and they meet and they form this front, this wedge that creates Tornado Alley itself. Because where those two things meet, that's where the type of storms that can produce tornadoes are formed. Right. And so it forms basically east west or southwest northeast line. And that, essentially, is Tornado Alley. Yeah. And as far as weather conditions, we mentioned some of these other countries that do have those conditions, but the difference is, in a place like the Bay of Bengal, it's just a much narrower window of time that these conditions exist. Whereas the United States windows tornado season, it's a much wider several months, isn't it? Yeah. It's throughout the summer, starting in late spring, depending on where you are. And then I think in Florida, what they call Dixie Alley Dixie Alley, is that what they call it? That's what it said. That doesn't even make sense. I don't associate Florida with Dixie. Well, of course. Not his own thing. It is very much its own thing. Dixie Alley. Yeah. They experienced tornadoes more in the fall, late fall. Yeah. Because they're not in the heart of Tornado Alley. They're their own thing. They're their own thing. So then, Chuck, I feel like we've really dispelled a lot of myths here. Busted them, if you will. Probably save some lives. Sure. We should say, rather than just like yeah, you're ten to 20 times likelier to die in a mobile home and just leave it at that. If you do live in a mobile home community. After listening to this episode, I want you to get on your laptop or your tablet or your PC or go to the mobile home community office and say, where is the nearest tornado shelter? Because the thing that you should do if you live in a mobile home community is leave that mobile home community when a tornado warning has been issued. Yes. Tornado watch. Yes. No warning. Yes. Warning means that it's been seen. Watches. The weather is likely to produce them. Yeah. And I think they should just come up with better terms for that. Look out, it's a tornado. Should replace warning. Yeah. Or just like, well, yeah, that's pretty good. I'll go with that. Thanks, man. What about getting in your car? Because if the average tornado goes 30 miles an hour right, and the fastest ever tornado on record is only 73 miles an hour, man, I'll bet that is crazy. You would think, man, just get in your car because I can go 80 in my pickup truck. Sure. I can outrun 74. I can outrun the fast. I'd go up to $80. I could outrun the fastest tornado ever in history, easily. I do that every day on the highway. Well, you could conceivably in your truck, be okay, but what about those people who have, like, AMC Gremlin? They probably can't go 80 in that thing and they're toast. No, that is not the point, my friend. The point is you shouldn't try to outrun a tornado, even if you can drive faster than one, because tornadoes, while sort of predictable and that they usually follow a straight line, you never know what they're going to do. That's why you'll see one house spared while the other is destroyed. And they're very wide, so they'll veer off course. And before you know it, you are in the path of the tornado, not out running the tornado. Yeah, they can veer. They can stop touching the ground and then make contact again. Right, like you said, right in front of you or right around you, and they will backtrack. There are certain conditions that tornado will double back over its path and then go forward again. And that just happens, like, out of nowhere. They're extremely unpredictable. So, yeah, you don't know that you're driving in the right direction, even if initially you are. And then secondly, apparently, is it Noah or the National Weather Service that says, I think in all caps, do not get in your car and try to outrun a tornado. It's a CDC. For some weird reason that's not a disease. Is it like the center for Disease Control and Injury Prevention now, though? Because maybe the injury prevention would account for that. But they do say that the least desirable place to be during a tornado is in your vehicle. It should be the Centers for Disease Control and Injury Prevention. But don't ask us about gun violence in Oklahoma. The El Reno Tornado in 2013. Yeah. That was the one that hit Oklahoma City. Was it? Yeah. This is talked about unpredictability this thing within 60 seconds. Went from being a mile wide to 2.6 miles wide. That's insane. And it's the widest one ever recorded in tornado United States. Well, probably all tornado history, man. Nothing makes me think of humans as just, like, fleas on the face of the planet than tornadoes or crazy. Whether they come out of nowhere and picks up everything where we do and work for and strive for and just kicks it into nothingness, that's all natural disasters. To me, it's just like a big reminder, like, hey, humans, when you're long gone, brushed you off my shoulder. There will still be earthquakes and tsunamis. Yeah, it's a feature of the planet. 13% of people killed in tornadoes are in their vehicles at the time, which doesn't necessarily mean they're trying to outrun it. Right, but 13%? No small beans. No. And apparently the one in Oklahoma, there were a couple of notable storm chasers that even had really great safe track records that were killed. And people thought because these people were killed, that might be a real signal. They can't outrun tornadoes. Nor should you try. Yeah. Is Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt ruined it for things. Did you like that movie? Yeah, I liked it. It was a cute movie. Kind of holds up, actually. Does it really? The special effects remarkably hold up. That's very surprising, cause that was like mid nineties, right? Yeah. And there was another tornado movie that I did not see just a couple of years ago into the storm. I think it looked really bad. Did it? Although it had the great Matt Walsh. What about nice paycheck for you, Mr. Walsh? Did he star in it? No, but was he the friends to meet up relief? Sure. Nice. But yeah, I'm sure he did just fine on that one. Did you see San Andreas? I saw about 40% of it. And the other 60%, I fast forwarded through. Really? I fast forwarded through everything except for all the devastation. That's, like, the only part I cared about. Sure. So it was 60% non devastation. That ratio is off. Agreed. That's disappointing because I kind of wanted to see it. It looked like it would be kind of interesting. It's Hollywood direct. Well, not that many disaster flicks are good. Although Towering Inferno, that was a great movie. Straight up great movie. Same with the Poseidon Adventure. Yeah. My God. I was about to call it the Boat That Flipped Upside down. But the original. Yeah, definitely not the remake. Yeah. Why did they even bother? No, actually, now I'm thinking about it, disaster flicks were good movies in the 70s. Airport great. Was it just Airport? And then Airport 77 was the sequel. I think so. I think they made, like, three or four after that, too. They don't make them like that anymore, my friend. No. Well, if you want to know more about tornadoes, we got a mess of articles on how stuff works about them. You can type the word tornado or add an E before you pluralize it in the search bar@housetofworks.com, and it will bring up great stuff. Since I said search bar is time for listener mail, I'm going to call this Josh's pick for listener mail. Since you picked this. Yes. Is this Japan centric? Well, favorite places, right? Yeah, I'll explain. All right. Hey, guys. I just listened to the show on nostalgia. Although I'm a big Hodgeman fan, japan is perhaps not the place for him. I find it fascinating that I'm living in Japan, where the feeling of nostalgia is one of the most treasured emotional experiences. The Japanese word for it is you want to say it? I have to see it in writing, but I can pronounce it. Natsukashi. Natsukushi. And that was actually why I picked this, because I was telling you me that we did one on nostalgia. She's like, you talk about natsukashi, right? Well, here we are. Natsukashi. Is it sheee. It's so close that it almost sounds like an extended eye. Okay. But you don't want to make it like it's like just a little extra something on the eye. I love it. That place connotes the feeling of pleasant sorrow and sometimes of beauty. An interesting example is cherry blossom season. The season just commenced here, and I'm told that one of the reasons Japanese love the season so much is that it's so short lived, lasting only about two weeks each year. The shortlived beauty cultivates the pleasant, sadness feeling even when the trees are in full blown. My friends indulge in pre nostalgia, knowing that will all end soon, and this adds to their enjoyment and depth of the experience. That's really lovely, isn't it? If this sounds a bit overboard, I should mention that cherry blossom viewing feel somewhat like a spectator sport here and droves the people turn out for picnics under the trees with their high end cameras ready to capture the perfect photo. I also found it interesting that one of the positive outcomes with nostalgia you mentioned is that it reminds us that life is worth living in light of the extremely long work hours and brutal commutes on rush hour trains. No wonder Japanese really fostered nostalgia to remind them of life's simple joys. I think she's onto something here. Yeah. By the way, I moved to Tokyo last September and discovered your podcast last fall. Living here involves lots of walking and train time, and your podcast are perfect entertainment as I'm moving about the city. That is from Rebecca Texan living in Tokyo. Thanks a lot. That was a great email, Rebecca. I appreciate it. So you've experienced that feeling? A sukashi? Yeah. Nostalgia. Do you toast and say that out loud? No, you go comply when you toast. Okay. You're just quietly shedding in tear thinking about something very lovely from when you were talking. I was just dealing with big dummies in Japan. Yeah, he's toasting. Something is sad. No, it's not like that. I'm not an expert on natsukashi, but I think it's not quite nostalgia. It's very close to it. There's just something more it's more of like an investigation of nostalgia. More of a relishing kind of thing. Interesting. Yeah. I love Japan. I hope to go one day. You will love it. I mean, you'll absolutely love it. An amazing place. You got to get Emily on board for that flight. It's a pain. And when you come back, depending on what direction you're traveling, where you're flying from, you are nuts from jet lag for, like, two weeks. Yeah. It always seems like you're just ways up for a little while. For, like, two weeks. When is this going to end? In the first five days. Just go by in this haze that you're not even aware of. Crazy. Yeah. Japan. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at s by skodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshono. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web. Luckychnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com."
https://podcasts.howstuf…al-disasters.mp3	Can NASA predict natural disasters?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-nasa-predict-natural-disasters	The US has developed some great equipment for peering into deep space that can also be used to great effect when trained on Earth. Now NASA is using satellites to track natural processes around the globe in an effort to better predict natural disasters li	The US has developed some great equipment for peering into deep space that can also be used to great effect when trained on Earth. Now NASA is using satellites to track natural processes around the globe in an effort to better predict natural disasters li	Thu, 03 Oct 2013 13:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=276, tm_isdst=0)	26314797	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 there's Charles Bryant. Chuckery, as you might know. I'm asking sure. There's a W in there somewhere. Sure. For Wayne. Yes. Wayne Coin. Right. No, we talked about that before. Yeah. John Wayne. How are you doing? I'm great, man. I am all over this NASA activity. Oh, yeah? Good, because it seems like all we hear about NASA these days is how they're having to shut down space programs. Right. They do other stuff, which is cool. Well, the impression I have is that they're kind of taking their field of vision out into outer space and turning a planet word toward Earth. Why not? That's where all the people are that are buying Big Macs. Right. Well, if space exploration is going private, you got the Elon Musk. Sure. And the Richard Bransons of the world saying, we got this NASA. You go do something else with all of your high tech remote sensing equipment. Right. Then it makes sense that NASA would say, okay, we'll become the watchdog guardian of the planet, and that's what they've become. Plus, also, if you're the United States, using NASA's remote sensory equipment on Earth is a dynamite cover for intelligence gathering. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, you have all sorts of satellites carrying out different functions, but really all of them are taking pictures of the Earth. 24/7 highly detailed ones, too. You want to know about Russian troop formation s NASA? Yeah. You guys are sniffing out a volcano. Sure. You want to know what kind of sandwich Julian Assange had today? Ask NASA. Well, that's NASA. Everyone knows that. Tuna fish. Is that what his thing is? Sure. Every day. That's how he keeps his white mane white? Him and Michio Kaku. Yeah, the white mullet. Actually, it's not so mullett. It's just more of a mane mane. For sure. Both of them have a main a big helmet of hair. So, Chuck, I guess the question we've posed today I feel like we need to answer is, can NASA predict natural disasters? I think we can go ahead and answer and say, not yet. Right. But now that again, they've kind of mothballed space exploration to an extent. I mean, we're still hitting Mars. Yeah, they're not mothballing it, but they've reached the point where they're like, okay, we've got all this really good equipment. Let's start monitoring Earth a little more, because there's a lot of questions we have now. They've reached this point where, since the beginning of the 21st century, they started conducting missions. They have planned ones that are just being started now, some that are coming in the next couple of years. And from all this data, they'll be able to analyze it and start to be able to predict natural disasters. Right. So they have this whole tool box. I guess if you wanted to go into corporate buzzspeak of programs and missions that they're carrying out that will help them predict natural disasters pretty soon. That's right. Not the low hanging fruit. Right. They're just trying to reach out and play together with the Earth in the same space. Yeah, in the same space. Maybe javasttorm boy. It's a corporate talk. Yeah, we shunned that all costs here. All right, so let's talk about this. We talked about remote sensing that is basically detecting energy reflecting from something when it's pointed out in space. Like when you're looking for new planets, it's pointed out in space. When you point it on Earth, it's a heck of a lot closer. Right. You can get more detail and they're using different kinds of detectors, they're detecting different kinds of energy, I should say, like microwave radiation, X rays. It's not just like using your peepers. Right. That information can be translated into something we use our peepers to look at. But they can use this equipment to sense all sorts of different stuff. Yeah. And like you said, it's like mounted on aircraft or it's part of a satellite, or is a satellite and yeah, it's all up there looking back at you right now. Yes. Wave. Yes. Or it's looking at the Earth. We're just the insignificant tiny specks crawling around on the Earth. This is kind of a big deal. It makes sense, it's sensible what they're doing. It's a smart thing to do with NASA's equipment. But it also really is we're at the threshold of like a really big change in our understanding of our planet. I think there's kind of a lot of assumptions that people make about our understanding of the planet that are just totally incorrect. Like for example, I would have guessed that meteorologists and climatologists knew how tropical storms form. They do not. And from using things like well, there's actually a project that was carried out in the summer of 2010 that was dedicated to studying this is called Grip Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes. That's right. And for a couple of months, some NASA scientists flew around on a Gulf Stream jet and took really precise measurements of what they believed were the beginnings of tropical storms to see how they form. Exactly. Yeah. And the goal with pretty much everything that we're going to talk about today is early detection because you can't stop a hurricane, you can't stop a volcano or an earthquake, like the old saying. Yes. Right. But if you know what's coming, then you can get people out of the way. You can thwart some of them to some degree. Yeah. Like anybody can point to a hurricane, be like, oh, there's a hurricane by then it's a little too late. If you can point to the very beginnings, the cradle of the hurricane, the formation of a tropical storm. Now you're talking about time that you have to warn people like, you guys need to get out of here. Yeah. And there is one really cool program they've had going since 2002 called Grace. There's going to be a lot of acronyms today, by the way. Love those, love them. The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. This is my favorite one. It's really cool, basically what they're doing. Well, let's step back a minute. Let's talk about Newton. Okay. Gravity depends on the mass of an object. In the case of polar ice caps, the mass is changing. So if the mass is changing, the gravity is changing. Right. So when the polar ice caps melt and turn the water and then flow toward the equator, they are often so big that they left it in depression on the Earth's surface. Once they're gone, that depression can be filled in, the mantle can fill back in in that area, changing the mass in that particular part of Earth and hence changing the gravity. Right. Yeah. One estimate has between 2010 and 2011, the Greenland Ice Shield lost 224 gigatons of mass. So not only is that going to change the land formation in the mass, it's going to make the sea level rise at a rate of about zero 7 year. That's going to change the makeup of the Earth. And so they have a couple of buddies, Tom and Jerry, that are in orbit satellites, twin satellites about 136 miles apart from each other. Do you know why they're called Tom and Jerry? Because they're chasing each other. They're on the same orbit. Yeah, exactly. A polar orbit. Yeah. It's very cute. So they're constantly going from the North Pole to South Pole as the Earth spins below them. Right? That's right. And they're taking measurements, two different types of measurements, but they're precisely separated from one another. And there I'm precisely the same orbit. Yeah. So they can really what they produce every 30 days is a full map of the gravitational field of Earth. Yeah. And NASA, they always work with other people, it seems like, which is a good thing to work with people around the world. But they worked with a company in Germany to develop an ultra precise distance measuring system that basically can measure within the precision what they say is one 10th of the width of a hair. That's pretty precise. Yeah. So basically these things are flying and between the two they're measuring the distances and discrepancies between these two identical twin satellites. And that information is being relayed back and analyzed. Yeah. Because the upside of this is, number one, the Earth is not a perfect sphere. We know that. I can't remember what we talked about that in maps. Yeah. Potato yeah. And the gravitational field is not perfectly round either. It's lower in some places, higher in other places. The force of gravity. So yeah. It's formed in 1995, was coined the Pot Stam gravity. Potato and if you look it up now, there's some pretty cool artist rendering of what the Earth's magnetic field looks like as a three dimensional model. Yeah, it's very cool. So check that out. And that's been updated dramatically in the last couple of years thanks to this Grace project. Yeah. The ultimate goal, basically is to measure this gravitational field over time, see how it's changing with the kind of accuracy we've never had before, which will in turn inform us on climate related junk. Right. Is it just a correlation between ice caps melting and a change in a gravitational field, or does the ice cap melting trigger that change in the gravitational field, which in turn has some other effects? So there's a lot of, I think, understanding we can gain from knowing what the gravitational field is changing, how it's changing. Yeah. Do you like using your GPS to get somewhere? Well, then this kind of information can go on to help GPS, because basically it's just going to improve the trajectories of these satellites. And everything is just more specific. It's like 100 times more detailed than they've ever had before. So that's going to help everything out from detecting climate change or temperature and potential hurricanes and stuff to getting you to McDonald's. Right. Which is pretty important, by the way. Chuck, the tropical storms, do you know how they think they form now? No. Well, I'm going to tell you. So the speed of waves on an ocean, if it matches the speed of the movement of some air above it, and an umbilical cord of warm, humid air can get into this little pillow sandwich, it forms this protective pouch, and from there a convection current can start and form into a tropical storm, which can then form into a hurricane. That's what they learned from the Grip program. And it seems like they would have known this stuff before then. You'd think so, but we're talking like, 2010, when they're I don't even think it's been proven. I think that's what they think, based on the data from the 2010 experiment. Yeah. Aren't they still analyzing that stuff? All right. I imagine, like, that's got to be a pretty good field to get into now and in the next five to ten years analyzing NASA data. Yeah. And just anything to do with the climate, probably. Sure. Don't you think? Yeah. Things changing. It's going to be gangbusters. There's a lot of money in the weather. All right. So that's tropical storms and hurricanes. We didn't talk about the GPM project. Oh, that's true. Yeah. NASA is working with Japan and their NASA, which is called the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, or Jackson, and that is a global precipitation measurement. And they are using satellites to observe all kinds of precipitation patterns all over the world. And basically before, we could only place these things in certain spots that were easier to get to. And you can't place them out over the ocean, and you can't place them in the Andes because it's too rocky. This allows us to study the entire globe for the first time. So they're following they're basically tracking the movement of water around the planet on a daily, seasonal, yearly basis. And what they hope to be able to gain from this is to predict when floods happen, because apparently a major flood happens every day around the Earth. Oh, really? Yeah. And a lot of times those floods lead to landslides. We saw firsthand in Guatemala what happens when a landslide comes down. Remember? Yeah. We were standing there and they said, this is literally 12ft higher than it was. Yeah. We were standing on the remains of a village that got caught in the middle of the night, and there were people down there still. Yeah, you could still see the swaths that have been cut through the jungle on the mountainside. Right. So they're hoping, okay, well, if we can figure out when a flood is coming, we can predict landslides in turn. So by tracking global precipitation, that's what they're hoping to be able to do with that. Yeah. They're also using LiDAR, the LiDAR surface topography system. This is my second favorite one, the List one. Yeah. And they're hopefully going to be able to track things like volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides, and erosion. But not wildfires. No, not wildfires. It's crazy talk. That is crazy talk. But it's the same thing as with tracking precipitation. As of two years ago, we had to physically put some sensor somewhere, and there are places we just couldn't get to. And now that we have satellites, we can track that stuff. Same goes with this. Like, we used to have to be able to find a fault line, put sensors there, and then monitor that with the List program with Leader, they're using lasers to monitor fault lines and find new ones that we didn't know were there before, track their movement, and use those to predict earthquakes and then similarly predict volcanoes. So listen to this. Okay. The resolution now they have is a five meter horizontal resolution with a precision of four inches. Previously, the best data we could get was 30 meters resolution with a 32 foot precision. So it went from 32ft to four inches. Right. That's pretty good. They'd be like, give or take 32ft. Now it's give or take four inches. Yeah. With thanks to lasers. Yeah. So they could possibly detect volcanic activity before it happens. Right. And the way that they're doing that, you would think while they're using thermal cameras, you'd be wrong. What they're doing is looking for land deformation. Apparently, before a volcano goes off, the land around it literally deforms. It swells due to pressure. And since we are tracking topography now using this program, we can say, oh, well, that crater wasn't three times larger than it is now, like a week ago. Maybe a volcano is about to go off. That's right. And it's not just volcanoes and natural disasters. They can also monitor erosion and topsoil loss, basically, anything on the Earth that's interesting. They can really accurately, closely monitor now. And this said 2016. Is it already underway? No, it's 2013, Chuck. No, it says it was going to launch in 2016, but is it already going? No. Okay. I think it's launching in 2016 still. Okay, so this is just the plan. You're right. Yeah. They have a lot of like, this just started. Okay. I think it might have been the Grace program started in 2002, and it's been going on. It is the Grace program, the one with Tom and Jerry, right? Yeah. That was 2002. Right. And had its 10th anniversary in 2012. I think that might have been the first project like this. Right. And now NASA is throwing everything into this stuff, and we're just at the forefront at the very beginning of this kind of thing. This is a very timely episode, frankly. It is, actually. In fact, I think these new probes are even newer than the List program right. That NASA is proposing to launch. The one we're just talking about with the volcano deformation. Yeah. This is a pair of satellites that monitor little bitty changes in the surface. And I guess it's a funding thing, because I don't think these two are even. I think they're still just, like in the proposition phase. So I guess we should say that they will be doing this. This is coming. Yeah. Like this particular project. Yeah. And the precipitation one is launches in February of next year. So it sounds as though these things are already happening, but I think it's just like, this is how it's going to work. It sounds as though they're already happening because of us. The tents we're using that's right. We're using Present. We should be using future. Perfect. One of the problems with the satellites, though, and with lasers is clouds. Right. Because clouds get in the way. It's got to be a clear day to use most of this stuff. Hold on. I know you love talking about clouds. I do, too. But before we go any further, what do you think about a message break? That's great. Okay, so back to clouds. Right. They caused trouble with lasers and with satellites. Yeah. So you got to count on clear days. So it's not like these things are humming 24 7365 now. Weren't you surprised finding out that clouds are still an impediment to lasers? No, I would have thought, like, I mean, the projects were talking about, gee whiz, that can't you shoot through a cloud? I thought that it just seemed kind of like, well, what are you guys going to do about that? Because that's a pretty big obstacle. Yeah, I guess you're right. Maybe they could have an anti seating program to disperse clouds. Nice. So, Chuck, NASA doesn't need to turn it back fully on space. Like we said, it's still carrying out the Mars mission. What was after that? Are they going to Saturn? I don't know. Saturn, Uranus, maybe. Yeah. They're exploring some moon. I can't remember. They haven't turned their back on space. And they don't need to because there's a huge threat from space bearing down on us constantly. That's right. Near Earth objects. Right. Which I feel like we should do a podcast just on near Earth objects. How do you know? What do you want to get here then? Some medium? Sure, go watch the movie Armageddon. All right. Done. Yeah. Although that is deep impact in Armageddon. We're both, while fanciful, not too far off, and that there are objects that come near the Earth and we think if we can detect them soon enough, that there is existing technology now that can throw these things. Of course. Right. And Earth is constantly being bombarded every day. About 100 tons of material. That's a lot like rain down on the Earth. We're talking little particles, things that break up in the atmosphere. Yes. Mostly like comet dust and stuff. Right, right. But there are NASA estimates about 1000 objects that could collide with Earth that are kilometers or more in diameter. It's zero 62 miles in diameter. And that if any one of these impacted Earth, which they do about every 10,000 years, it would be what's called a global catastrophe. Actually. Good news, buddy. What? That is every several hundred thousand years. Oh, man. Okay, so what comes down every 10,000 years? About every 10,000 years, asteroids larger than about 100 meters could hit the Earth and that would just be like a local disaster. So it would be like one the size of a football field. Yeah. That's not great if you're near it, but it's not like what they would call a global disaster. Like the end of the world pipe scenario. And that's one that's like a kilometer in diameter. Yeah. And it says every several hundred thousand years or so, I feel like. Yeah. What are the chances that that's going to happen in the next 40 years? I don't know. When was the last one? It was about a quarter of a million years ago, wasn't it? I don't know. Was it the one that formed the Chichi Club crater? I don't think I've pronounced that correctly. But you know what I'm talking about people who are familiar with that. I do, or they do. But the point is we need a lead time on the stuff. Chickie club. The Chickie club. There's an X in there, but it's in mesoamerica. So the X is like a hawk. Oh, it's pronounced Katulu. No, it's close. Okay. Wahaca. It's like that. But there's a Chi and I believe a club afterwards. So I'm just going to say chi Club Crater. Okay. But I think that was longer ago than 100,000 years ago. The extinction event. So you're saying we're due? Yes. Okay. Well, the good news is if we have a little bit of lead time, like a few years, supposedly there are things that we can do to knock these asteroids off course. Like why? Well, one is using nuclear fission weapons. You set it off, and the trick is you don't want to blow this thing up. No. Because then you might have a lot of problems. Yeah, that's even worse. But it would just set it off course. And even if you set something off course by a few millimeters over the course of years, that could be enough. Sure. So it's not like they're looking to knock it miles away or anything. Right. Although in the movies, that's how they do it. Yes, in the movies, that's how they did do it, I think. Of course, we may mine them, which we talked about. Yeah. Asteroid mining. Sure. And tracking these things has actually become something of a crowdsourced thing. NASA has this all sky fireball network. That sounds so not real. Yeah, but it is. It's a real program. They have where they have cameras that are connected to the Internet that are constantly filming the night sky. Most of them are along the eastern seaboard. We got one here in Georgia. Yeah. And Alabama has them. Tennessee. They're grouped in clusters. And actually, if you want to propose your location as a place to host one of these cameras, typically they're, like, on schools or things like that. Oh, really? Yeah, you can submit an application, and if there's really just, like, four criteria, there can't be a lot of light pollution or light nearby. That rules me out. Yeah. Have to be able to be connected to the Internet. Yeah. That pulls me out, like, a couple of other things. But you can get a camera set up and be part of the all sky fireball network. That's pretty cool. I think the plan is to eventually have 15 of these in place, and I guess tracking fireballs. Yeah. Which are good things to keep tabs on, for sure. You got anything else? No, that's all the news about NASA. I wish NASA would sponsor us. Man, that'd be awesome. Yeah. Talk about someone we could stump for. NASA. Yeah. Sure. Let's do it. NASA, what's your problem? You guys have deep pockets? Yeah. Let's see. If you want to know more about NASA, you can type that word into the handy search bar@howstepworks.com. It'll bring up a bunch of articles. We love NASA here at How Stuff works and stuff you should know. And since I said handy search bar, Chuck, it's time for listener mail. Straight to listener mail. Yeah. Oh, do you hear that chime? Yeah, it's like 2009. All right. Dear guys and Jerry, I just got home from another eight hour car trip with my hubby, during which we binge listening to Stuff You Should Know. Yeah, this has been our car trip ritual for about a year now. We actually moved to Atlanta Kenneth last August, and we make pretty frequent trips to our hometown of St. Louis. That's a long car trip, I would say, yeah, it sure is. I wonder if they know that you can fly there really quickly. He introduced me to the podcast on our first trip down here, and I have to admit, I didn't have much hope. I'm a ballet teacher who loves arts and fiction and long hours with Netflix, and he is a self taught programmer who loves biographies and doing math for fun in his free time. So when he told me what the show was, I was thinking, great, I'm going to feel dumb and bored. But we gave it a try anyway. I also have to admit, and this one is kind of funny after listening to one or two episodes, I told him I didn't like it. He not understanding how that was possible, asked me why not, and I said, dude, it's so condescending to the way they ask each other questions and converse as if they don't already know what the other person's going to say, as if he sniffed me off the case right away. She says she's a true fan. Yeah, by saying, I don't think that's fake. I think they really don't write out a full script ahead of time. Believe it or not. He's right. Believe it or not, that changed everything. Which might seem silly, but I bet you listened to a past episode and imagine it was totally scripted and rehearsed. You'd see what I mean? Now? I recommend it to everyone. I can't even conceive of how we would be able to generate the level of clumsiness that we rise to every episode. You couldn't write that? Yeah. So thanks, guys, for putting out a very entertaining program for people of all ages to enjoy and for being less sad than this American life, which we also love, but sometimes we just don't have enough tissue and emotional resolve to listen to it. That is from Amber and Ben. Stute Baker. Thanks to you guys. Thanks, Amber and Ben. Hey, there. If you're on one of your road trips, drive safe and drive safe to everybody out there who is listening on a road trip or on a long haul or on an airplane, whatever, you're listening to us right now and you're traveling. I hope it's a nice time. Agreed. If you want to tell us about those travels, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffyshow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com, and you can join us at our home on the web stuffyshehno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Brought to you by the all new 2014 Toyota Corolla. 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 Kilgarref and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you'll 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."
https://podcasts.howstuf…ign-language.mp3	How Sign Language Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-sign-language-works	It wasn't until the was developed and despite its co-existence alongside English, a user would be hard-pressed to sign with a British person. Find out about the independent evolution of sign language in the U.S. and how intuitively sensible it is.	It wasn't until the was developed and despite its co-existence alongside English, a user would be hard-pressed to sign with a British person. Find out about the independent evolution of sign language in the U.S. and how intuitively sensible it is.	Thu, 06 Feb 2014 21:59:16 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=21, tm_min=59, tm_sec=16, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=37, tm_isdst=0)	42552081	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. Hey, everybody, if you want a great website, you want to do it yourself. With no must, no fuss. Turn to Squarespace. They have everything to sell anything. They have the tools that you need to get your business off the ground, including ecommerce templates, inventory management, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer codessysk to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me, as always, is Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry. And the three of us together are stuff you should know. Hey, buddy. Hey. How's it going? It's going pretty good. I have to say. This was one of the better articles I've read in recent memory wow. By Mr. Jonathan Strickland, our nemesis at Techstop. Yeah. He wrote a great article in sign Language archnemesis. Who knew? Yeah, I had no idea that he knew anything. It's like there's nothing about the future of sign language, and here it's just sign language. Yes. And this is one of those where I knew really not much about it and it was just a delight to learn. Yeah. And he basically just did American Sign Language. I have the impression that if he tried to expand it, it would have really gotten unwieldy quick. So it's a good editorial decision, good writing. Well, that's one of the things I didn't know. I didn't even know that there are hundreds of sign languages. I kind of thought it was all the same. But he makes a point even that you may be better able to communicate with someone speaking French Sign Language because that was the basis of American Sign Language than to speak sign language. If you're American with someone speaking British sign Language yeah. Because it's different. Sharing a common spoken language with another country does not mean there's nothing to do with that. They share common sign language. Yes. And that's a really good point, because it reveals that the deaf community has, over time, just basically said, we're going to do this ourselves. Yeah. And it even gets to the point where regional dialects just like a regular spoken language. It basically just is a regular language. The more I read it, the more I was like, this is just like speaking English or speaking Southern English or Midwestern English. Sure, yeah. Depending on your community, the community you're raised in, the type of house you're raised in, that's what will necessitate what kind of sign language you learn or develop or whatever. Pretty cool. Yeah, it is. And let's talk about the history of this a little bit first. Okay. So, Chuck, humans have a long and storied history of mistreating groups that are different from everybody else. It's what makes America great. Not just America. It goes back even further than humanity. The deaf community, up until shamefully recently, we're kind of one of those groups that were just kind of mistreated. Yeah. The Torah, for example, forbids deaf people from fully participating in some of the rituals in the temple. The ancient Greeks wouldn't allow deaf people to be educated. St. Augustine, he's a saint, for goodness sake. Yeah. He taught that deaf people were evidence that God was angry at their parents. Wow. Yeah. It wasn't until about the Renaissance that anybody finally took a stab at educating deaf people, and they found pretty quickly that, oh, they just can't hear. Right. That's the thing. They can learn very quickly, and just like you and me. So that kind of became the springboard once people figured out that you can educate deaf people to them being included more into a normal society. But for a long time, they were mistreated. And as a result well, I'm speculating here, but I think they kind of said, we're going to handle this ourselves, like I said. Right. Like, we're going to develop our own language, take matters into our own hands, literally. Yeah. Yeah. And that's where sign languages started to come from. Just necessities the mother of invention. Sure. You need to be able to communicate with people around you. And so sign language developed in communities where there are deaf people who were accepted and not just kind of put to the side. Yes. Before they were getting official with it, people were using sign language. Right. Because they were like, well, I don't care if you're going to make some official language or not. We need to talk to each other. Exactly. We're going to figure it out. And not only do they need to talk to each other, they need to talk to the community at large as well. Sure. And there's actually a really cool story on Martha's Vineyard. There was up to a quarter of the population when they moved over here from England. They were an isolated population, so they suffered what was called the founder's effect, where the population just kind of bottlenecked and these families intermarried, but they didn't marry outside of their group. So hereditary deafness was a trait that was passed along the group. So up to a quarter, one in four people in his community were deaf. Really? Right. As a result of this community on Martha's Vineyard in the early 18th century, having up to a quarter of its population deaf, a specific type of sign language called Martha's Vineyard Sign Language developed, and not only were the deaf in the community proficient in it, everybody in the community was proficient in it. Wow. And up until 1952, when the last deaf Martha's Vineyard resident martha's Vineyardborn resident died, that's when it became extinct. So they were purchasing it from about 1700 to 1000, 952. And apparently Oliver Sacks went and interviewed some of these people for part of a book. Man, he's always on it. He is? Yeah. And he reported that some of these elders, these Martha's Vineyard elders, reverted to sign language while they were talking. So they were coming in and out of speech and sign language and apparently weren't even aware that they were doing it. That's awesome. And they were not deaf. That might be the fact of the show. Martha's Vineyard Sign Language. Yeah, it could be one of them. I think there's a bunch in here. Yeah, agreed. So if we're talking about history, we have to go back to the early eighteen hundred s to a dude named Thomas Hopkins Galaxy, and he was a minister to the deaf. And he went to Europe because, like we said in France is where it sort of originated officially, and he wanted to learn some techniques on how to teach this stuff. Met a guy named Rose Ambrose Cucuron Cicade, who is in Abe abbe CICAD it's so the title. He's like a clergyman. Right. He was the director of the School of the Deaf in Paris, and he learned some stuff from him and then plucked one of his students, Lauren Clerk, and said, hey, there's big money in this. Let's go start a school in the United States. That probably wasn't his motivation. I hope not. Although you never know. Nothing wrong with making a little money by starting a school. Sure. So they established the American School for the Deaf in 17 in Hotfood, Connecticut, and went on like they incorporated what they learned in France with what was already going on in the United States. Right. Which is why, like you said, if you are an American Sign Language speaker and you go to France and you're speaking with a French Sign Language speaker, you'll probably be successful because American Sign Language is partially rooted in French Sign Language. Yeah. More so than, like, going to England. It's so weird to think about. And they ended up finding as well, galdet University in DC. Go Bisons. Is that right? Yeah, they got a football team. I played for the Beverley Bisons in elementary school. Really? I'm a Bison. It's pretty cool, though. They got a football team all deaf or hard of hearing, and it's cool to watch the video like the coach is given, like, the motivational speech, and he's signing at the same time and things. Kind of neat. That is cool. And I thought about this, too. Probably not affected by homefield advantage or not, or the noise. Yeah. I wonder, though, like, the trembling of that much, the sound waves, the physical waves hitting you. Well, yeah, true. But it's not the same as NFL teams. When they go to visit, like, Seattle, they work out all these sign language for each other. Oh, I see what you mean. I'm saying I thought you meant getting psyched out by the crowd noise. No, I mean, like not being able to hear when you are changing a play at the line of scrimmage these signs. And these guys are like, Dude. Yeah, there's an ASL or something. So, anyway, go Bisons. And that is a school of more than 1500 students today. Although they're not all deaf. About 5% may consist of hearing students, which I thought was interesting because I guess it's a good school. Yeah. And it says here in the article that there was a controversy among the students and some of the faculty. I looked it up, and apparently there was an incoming president in the mid 2000s who was born deaf but had been raised to speak rather than sign. And apparently most of the students were not very happy about that because they didn't think she was planning on emphasizing sign language. And they wanted to make sure that sign language was, like, the main method of communication. Yeah. Interesting. So, like we said, we're going to be talking about ASL mainly, which has its own grammar and syntax and phonology, which, if you're talking about speaking, it's a study of sounds. If you talk about signing, it is the hand movements and signals and motions phonology? Yeah. Yeah. In the 60s, some researcher discovered that sign language isn't made up of a distinct sign for everything, but there's a discrete set of hand gestures, movements that you can change and alter to make different words or concepts. Yeah. And that would be phonology. Right. Yeah. I don't think we pointed out sign language. American Sign Language is not literally trying to translate each word someone speaks. It's about the concept of getting the point across of what someone is saying. Right. And we'll get into that. It'll make more sense in a minute. But that's phonology. And phonology, as far as speech goes, would be syllables. Yeah. The study sounds this is like hand, like a gesture or whatever. Yes. Okay. In morphology, which, if you're speaking, that is how words are formed from basic sounds. And in sign language, that's the way your hand and motions represent the concepts. Right. Okay. Does that make sense? Yeah. And you were saying that American Sign Language does not follow English necessarily. It doesn't follow English. Yeah. In fact, they try to avoid sounding like English. Yeah. Like they abandon English syntax there's no use of the word am or b. It's pretty simple and straightforward. And some of the stuff also, some of the signs are conceptual. There are some that are symbolic, but some are like a concept or an icon, I guess is a better way to put it. Yeah. Like, if you are doing deer, if you're saying the word deer, signing the word deer. Deer, yes. The animal. You stick your fingers up and put them close to your head. Like antlers, right? Yeah. So I was curious, like, how you would sign the word moose. Yeah. And I looked. What is it? It's the same thing, but rather than having them up against your head, they're out off to the side a little bit, because the booth has, like, antlers that are bigger than a deer. Well, and that illustrates a very important point with ASL. It's not just the things, the signs you make with your hands. It's body language expressions. And the space, how you use the space around you, like, to take the antlers away from your head represents something. And as we'll learn later, where you hold your hands represent different things, like further away from your body or closer to your body. And we'll get to all that, but basic nuts and bolts. You can call them speakers, even though they're signing, but generally you call the person receiving the sign at the time the receiver. The person being spoken to. Yeah. And the receiver, if you're a receiver, you don't just stare at the hands. In fact, you don't focus on the hands at all. You focus on their face and sort of keep the hands in the periphery. That's how did you hear about the guy who was signing at Mandela's memorial? I thought that was going to be your intro. Actually, I went with the Mistreating people intro. No, I like that this guy was a fraudulent sign translator. Now, was he really? Did they get because I thought he was like, no, I'm not fraudulent. He's fraud. Okay. What's unclear is he suffers from schizophrenia, and he was hired on officially to do this. And they think that the way he was hired was because his rate was about half of what a normal sign translator would have been. So they basically just went with the cheaper option and didn't do their due diligence and figure him out, because he'd actually done this before, where he doesn't know sign language, and apparently it's no malicious intent or anything like that. I don't know if he just needed money or if he thinks he knows sign language or if he wants to know sign language or he feels like he can get it across. But during Mandela's funeral, he was doing all the sign language, and it was total nonsense. So none of it was real at all? No, it was utter gibberish. And one of the ways that the deaf community, who were understandably upset at all this. I bet some of them got a good laugh. Sure. But overall, they said if you're doing fine, you don't just sit there with, like, a stone face, which this guy was doing. He was all hand gestures and hand gestures didn't mean anything. But then also, you express most of sign language with expressions, with facial expressions, with movement. You don't just stand there because it doesn't do anything. You're not getting your point across. So this guy, one of the ways he was found out, he was like, stone face. Yeah. Wow. And if you go and look at it, he's not moving his face at all. Like, he's completely solemn. He was found out pretty quick, too. Yeah. Because I'm sure there are people watching it. What's going on? This guy's talking gibberish. So weird. Yeah. If you were signing actions a lot of times, but not always, you just mimic the action. Like Strickland points out. If you want to sign eat, you hold your finger and thumb like you're holding, like, a little piece of chocolate, and you go to put it in your mouth. That means eat. Pretty straightforward. And there's also something, I think it's kind of neat and efficient about sign language. Is that same sign for eat? Yeah. It doubles for other signs, too, depending on what you do with it. Yeah, it can get confusing. It can, but I don't know, it makes the whole thing more elegant to me that one sign, when delivered in a certain way, changes the meaning, and you really have to pay attention. Yeah. For instance, if you want to sign food, it is the same a lot of times. You will double assign to indicate something else, to indicate a noun. Well, it depends. That's why it can get confusing. So the sign for food is the same as doubling the sign for eat. But if you want to sign eating, which is a verb, you would also repeat the eat sign. So that's where if you're receiving sign language, you understand it. It's all about your context. You want to be like, what are you talking about? Yeah. What do you mean? You guys went out and you were food. Yeah, exactly. I should teach you something. That'd be fun, but I need to learn it first. But apparently also, the verbs or action words or signs are bigger, whereas nouns are smaller. Right. Like, the gestures are bigger or smaller, depending on whether it's a noun or a verb, too. That's true. That's another way. So, again, you can't just sit there with your hands directly in front of you, moving within a very small box. Yeah. You wouldn't be speaking at least as far as American Sign Language goes. You wouldn't be speaking correctly. That's true. There is an alphabet, too, as every 13 year old girl knows. Why don't you remember that? It seems like in the 7th grade, every girl I knew went through a phase where they learned to sign alphabet and would like spell out things with their friends that no one else knew what they were talking about. What, you never saw that? No. Oh man, I remember the big bubbly cursive writing with the bands with the different yeah, I just seem to remember a lot of young girls learning the sign language alphabet and they would sit around and spell things about people had not run into that, not untilita maybe it was a Georgia thing. Maybe. Anyway, there is an alphabet which actually it's called finger spelling, but it's only used to illustrate a really specific concept or to indicate like a person spell a name. Yeah, like if you're going to be telling a story about Josh, all you got to do is spell out Josh at the beginning and then you don't have to keep doing it over and over. Right. One way to do that too, especially if I'm not present, is to indicate an empty space by you spell out my name, point to that empty space and then from that point on, anytime you point at the empty space you're seeing Josh. Yeah. If you're there it's called index and use your finger, you just point to Josh. But yeah, if you're not there you just make an imaginary Josh. Right. And you keep pointing to that space to refer to Josh. It's pretty cool. Another reason that you would use finger spelling would be to ask somebody what a sign was for something you couldn't remember. So if you're saying something and you couldn't think of moose, you might spell out in finger spelling what's the sign for moose? Yeah. And then they would say, hey, fingers up, away from the head. Yeah. I read an article from the Washington Post earlier about Washington, DC. They call them Terps interpreters. Oh, I hadn't heard that. Are you sure they weren't talking about University of Maryland? No, they were talking about Terps. But it's a big deal in DC. On any given day there's like 1500 people in DC signing for clients. I can see that. Yeah, of course it makes sense because it's law. First of all, federal law requires reasonable accommodation for a deaf person. Yeah, but this one guy that they interviewed, what's his name? Painter. He said that spelling is your back door. And it's tough in DC because he basically tried signing a speech by Bernanke when they're saying like very DC specific political jargon that may not have a concept you can represent like fiscal cliff or it's not your first rodeo or kick it down the road a little bit. And so they basically have invented political jargon for people to do that. And he said, or if you get stuck you can always just spell it. And that appears to be a hallmark of sign language. New signs are created all the time, just like new words are created all the time. And just like with speech there are prescriptivists and there are descriptiveist, like people who say, no, American Sign Language is sacrosanct. It is what it is. It's not to be added to. If you add to it, it dilutes the language. Go come up with your own language if you want to add fiscal cliff to it. And then there's other people who are descriptivists, who say no. Language is a living, breathing, evolving thing, and we need to get the concept of fiscal cliff along across. So here it is. It looks like Moose kind of I would just do a little guy walking and then falling off a cliff. Sure. And then making a dollar sign. If you have seen people do sign language and you see them looking upset or puffing their cheeks out or raising their eyebrows, they're indicating an inflection. This is called a non manual marker. Like if you wanted to ask someone and that's also true with punctuation, you could do the little question mark sign, but more likely you would just say the sentence and then raise your eyebrows. Right. Give them an example. Like movies. Do you like the movies? Right. You would say you like movies and then raise your eyebrows. Like, huh. You're basically like a Russian Yakov smiro. You like movies. That's basically what's going on there. Any yakov smearoff reference is hilarious. It doesn't matter what it is. Do you ever see that King of the Hill that he costarred on? No way. They go to Branson and I think Bobby ends up hanging out with him. It's pretty awesome. Another way you can modify a sign, there's basically a couple of ways you can modify action is by directionalizing. So if you had a nice leisurely meal, you would do the symbols for the signs for eating very slowly. If you want to tell someone, I had to wolf it down real quick because it was late for a meeting, you would just do the signs for eating very fast. It's pretty easy. Yes. Or if you wanted to say, I'm going to give a gift to you, you would just do the signs for give gift and then indicate that I'm giving it to you. Right. Or to someone else. The direction of it is going from I to you. So it's implied right there. Give gift is going from I to you. I give you a gift. It really cuts through all the jibber jabber. I kind of like it. Yeah, it really does. And there's also rules with syntax are just totally out the window. In relation to English, too, there's something called the topic of the sentence, and that's frequently a pronoun. Like I right. And it genuinely doesn't matter where that goes. You can go at the beginning of the sentence, the end of the sentence, or both. And I haven't figured out where both comes from, why you would say the pronoun twice. So, for example, like, I am an employee here, right? You would just say I employee or employee i, or I employee i, and I can't figure out hopefully somebody out there can let us know why you would want to say what the purpose is for saying it twice, but it's allowable structure wise. Interesting. Yeah. So within that structure, I think you said it was topic comment structure. Generally, the comment is the predicate, and this took me, like, down memory lane. Yeah. I was like, what's the predicate again? It says something about the topic or the object if you were talking about English. And then there's the tents. Of course, if you want to talk about when something happened, you can do it in a variety of ways, but generally, you would announce the tents at the beginning, and then you wouldn't have to keep saying it over and over that you're like, speaking in the past tense. Right. Until you change tents. So you would start by saying yesterday, and then you would start talking about how you went to the store and you saw this TransAm, and you're like, hey, that's a great TransAm to the guy, and he said, thanks a lot. But then today, you'd sign today. I saw the transmit again, and it had gotten an offender better. Right. And it was sad. Right. So in the middle, you signed today, and it changed tense. Yeah. This is something you have to pay attention to, like sign language. American Sign Language relies on you to be a smart, non lazy person. Sure. Because you have to pay attention. You have to keep up with what you're saying, so you can't just drift off or just start staring into the middle focus. You have to be paying attention, and it's not just because you're watching the signs or anything like that. It can change and switch very suddenly, going from yesterday to today, and then everything after that stays the same, and you have to look for a change in ten so you don't miss it and get confused. Yeah. And they're quick, too. And it relies on you to understand context as well. So, for example, if you were saying, I had lunch today yes, I went out for lunch today. You can't even speak it in English. I went out for lunch this afternoon. Okay. Okay. Yeah. You would say, Today I go to lunch, is what you would say in sign language. And depending on when you were saying it, the receiver would know what you were talking about. If you were talking about in the morning, they would know, oh, you're going out to lunch this afternoon. Or if you were talking to them that night, they would know, oh, well, you're saying you went to lunch already this afternoon. Yeah. Now you're going to you already went. Right. It's all context as well. Yeah. Like you said earlier, you won't get confused if you're understanding what they're saying. Yeah, I guess that makes total sense, doesn't it? It really does. It's smart. Yeah, we talked about using the space. If you sign close to the body, it might have been something that happened recently, or might happen soon if you signed further out. Maybe it was something that happened a long time ago, or might happen way far in the future. Yeah, again, super interesting and smart. And that kind of runs into the calendar. That some sinister report around them all the time. I thought of that same thing. Didn't it make you think of that? Totally. I wonder if Strickland did that on purpose. He is an evil genius. All right, so I think maybe we should take a message break and then get to the Etiquette of Sign Language. 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 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@city.com Adventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but we're pretty excited about Summer. I mean, what's not to like? School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's right. And that's where True crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. Yeah, and with so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. Prepare to go deep and become your own detective in the world of serial crimes and unsolved mysteries. Get lost hearing spooky stories with a combination of detailed research and lighthearted analysis. Whether you're a lifetime fan of true crime or you just feel like being entertained while doing the dishes at night, there's a podcast out there for you. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. All right, check. Where you're going? To talk about Mr. Manors etiquette. Yes, there is etiquette. Like with regular speaking language, you need to. Wait for the speaker to finish signing and then they'll look at you and say, it's your turn to speak. If they look away, they're still talking or signing. You know what I'm saying? I know what you're saying. So don't take that as your cue to jump in there. In fact, that can be rude. They will actually give you the signal that it's time for you to respond. Right. But if you watch two people who are signing with one another kind of frantically arguing yes, that's one as a tactic in an argument using sign language, you don't wait until the person stops and points to you. You could just cut in. What you're doing is interrupting them. Interesting. Yeah. Another thing that might happen if you are a receiver of sign language is the person signing might suddenly turn and start signing to somebody who isn't there. Right. So you're not supposed to take a couple of steps over. They know where you're standing. What they're saying is that they're basically saying, like and then I was talking to Todd. Right. And this is Todd all of a sudden, this is what I was saying to Todd. Right. So they're addressing you still, but they're talking about what they said to Todd. Yeah. Or what Todd said. If Todd said that he has a sore back, you would look at the imaginary Todd and say, I don't know what you would say. Probably back sore. Sure. Or sore back. But the proper etiquette there is to just keep watching their facial expressions and gestures just like they are talking to you. Yeah. You don't just wander off. Right. If you have nothing to do with any of this and you just see two people signing on the street, they say, according to Dr. Bill Vickers, who owns a company I'm sorry, he's president of a company that creates sign language programs, he said it's not rude to walk between them. If you just kind of just walk quickly between them and like, it's no big deal. So there's that, right. But you don't want to be like, yeah, sorry everybody, you see me, I'm about to walk here. So you just go through. Yes. Or I would say just go around if you can. That's Chuck's recommendation. Go around. I wouldn't walk between two people having a conversation either. Speaking conversation. Yes, I absolutely had I thought that was a little rude, too, but apparently people are cool with it. All right, so good to know. So, Chuck, we talked about American Sign Language, and obviously that's far from the only sign language in the world. There are hundreds. But in the States, American Sign language is the dominant sign language. But there are other types of sign languages that are also practiced enough to warrant mentioning. Here one is signed Exact English. Man, that sounds tough. It is, because it's slow. One of the advantages of American Sign Language is that it gets rid of a lot of the crud. Yeah. So, like, you just say give gift, and by the direction you're moving, you get the point across that I give you a gift. Yeah. All of these other things that you can do with the gesture. You're cutting out two, three, four words in a sentence. This whole thing. I feel like I've wasted a lot of words. We do, especially in English. English is a very strange, technically difficult language. Yeah. And American Sign Language gets rid of a lot of that stuff. Or I should say it doesn't get rid of it. It evolved without that stuff. Yeah. That's a better way to it. And signedict English is like trying to literally get English across and all of its weird syntax and order and M and B and is using sign language. So it can be very slow. Yeah. Like in ASL, if you wanted to sign beautiful, that could mean pretty, beautiful, lovely to look at. But they get specific with signed exactly. English. If you want to say someone was pretty and not beautiful, you might sign the letter P and then the sign the ASL sign for beautiful. Right. Which I guess is if you're being set up on a date, you might want to get specific. She was beautiful. Now, I said she was lovely, man. What's the sign for good personality? Strickland points out that hearing teachers who interact with deaf children prefer signed, exact English to ASL, because I guess just when you're at that stage in life to match up with the English spoken language, they think that has some benefit. Well, yeah. There's I guess one way of looking at educating deaf children is this whole immersed education where it's like you learn which lip reading, you learn sign language, you learn to speak finger spelling. Right. You learn reading. Because that's another thing, too. If you just are raised on American Sign Language, you're going to have trouble reading English. Yeah. Because you're going to say, what is B? What is is what are all these extra words? What's with the syntax? Is that going to make sense? So there is definitely a school of thought among educators that if you have a deaf kid, they should learn everything, including sign language, but also all the other stuff, so they can effectively communicate with non sign language. Non signers. Right. And that's as opposed to someone who loses their hearing later in life. No, I think that's opposed to people who think, like, well, we're a deaf community, and sign language is enough for us. We don't have to know how to speak. Why don't hearing kids learn sign language? Why is it on us that we have to learn all this extra stuff? Why is there not a balance? Right. So I think those are two camps. I don't know if it's the whole thing, but I think some people think you should learn everything where other people are like, my sign language is good enough, right? Interesting. Well, there's one more we'll get to in a second called Pigeon Signed English, right after this message break. 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 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. 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, 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. All right, so Pigeon signed English, which is what we were talking about, is the other common form of sign language in the United States, and I don't fully understand this one. Do you? It seems to be the middle ground between exact English and American Sign Language, so they try to follow English syntax, but they don't have, like, b. Okay, so they give you a gift. Right? It might just be like, I give you gift. Okay, yeah, that makes more sense. They do not require in Pigeon sign English prefixes and suffixes like they do in Se. And they say it can be easier to learn than either one of the other two versions because it does match up with English syntax. Yeah, and if you're one of those educators who thinks that kids should learn everything, you would be teaching C, or I imagine at least pigeon sign. Yeah. And they say you can speak out loud and sign at the same time easier, because you're not going to get ahead or fall behind because it'll match up more. Makes sense. And then there was a push, because, like we said, if you're deaf and speaker of American Sign Language and you go to Great Britain, you're going to have trouble communicating, just like an English speaker would have in France. Yeah. What's, a garage on a lift? So there was this push in the mid 20th century to create an international sign language. Yeah, that's what I thought everything was. Yeah, I kind of did, too. Yeah. I was very naive about all this. Yeah, same here. The American or International Sign Language. It came out of the World Congress of the World Federation of the Death from 1951. They said, let's do this. And then 22 years later, they got around to doing it and they created something called justino, you should say. It just uno. Yeah. And it's an Italian word that means unified Sign Language, appropriately enough. And I think Strickland says it's very much like the spoken language esperanto. Yeah. It exists. Some people know it, but it is very far from an international language. Yeah, I looked a little more into it. I think they use it at international meetings because they kind of probably have to. And they say it can be useful for world travelers to pick up, I guess, just like you would visit another country to pick up some phrases and things got you to help you out. Yeah. But yeah, it sounds like it's far from codified. Right. Do you say codified or codified? Codified. You do. Cod. All right. And then there's babies speaking sign language. And I want to say, if you want to see a creepy picture of a baby, check out this article on how stuff works.com, how sign language works. I missed that on the last page. The baby Sign language page is a picture of a baby signing, and it's staring right at the camera. It looks way too young to be thinking of things. It's obviously thinking murderous thoughts. He looks like he's doing karate to me. But look at his face, though. It's like sinister. It's a scary kid. Sinister. It's a great word. So that is baby sign language. Well, yeah, there's a school of thought that if you start your baby out before they can speak English words or whatever words, that you are going to get them ahead in life by signing things that they need, like teach them to sign for hungry or peepee or daddy or mommy. Right. And they say in about six months, kids can start picking the stuff up and learn, like, dozens of words. Yes, they can learn it at six months, but it might take a couple of months before they start signing in return. But they're still absorbing it. Yeah. And like you said, they learn obvious words that have meaning to them in their life. Right. But apparently a lot of parents report that their kids, once they figure out what they're doing, that they're communicating, they want to learn more and more and more, which is pretty cool. There was a little bit of concern when this was first introduced that kids who are learning sign language would become deficient in speech. Right. And they did a study and they found no, actually, the exact opposite is true. Like kids who are learning sign languages, babies have better speech abilities and language abilities than their peers who didn't learn. It interesting that's at least one study found, but the same researchers recommend that if you're teaching your kids sign language, which I didn't know it was a thing, but you mean I went to go visit a friend of hers, you didn't know it was the thing. And they started signing to their baby, and I was like, what is going on? Your kid deaf? Yeah, kind of. And apparently it's the thing. I didn't realize that I had seen it before. But they're saying if you teach your kid, you're hearing child sign language, we speak the word as well. So the kid comes to understand that speaking and signing, they're saying the same thing. Okay. So there's not a reliance on just one or the other, I guess. Yeah. I'm glad to know that it does lead to better speech. Maybe later on, because when I first saw people doing that, it was kind of like I was one of those doubters, come on, what are you doing? Really? Yeah, but now I get it. Yeah, it makes sense. Plus, it's kind of cool, like, if you can get your seven month old kid to sign things to you. Yeah. It's almost like the same thing, but on the opposite end of the timeline of getting messages from the grave. Like babies can't talk for a reason. They know stuff that they're not supposed to know. So if your baby does sign for Area 51, you're in trouble. Right. I got one more little fun thing I was talking about. The guy in DC, painter is his last name, he said that a lot of times they'll get hired because they have to get hired under federal law, but there won't be anyone there that's hard of hearing. Right. But they still have to stand up there and sign. And he calls that and the Turks apparently call that air guitar. That's awesome. Pretty good. Cool. So sign language. Yes. If you have a friend who is deaf or hard of hearing and is sign language person signer, I guess, and you want to ask them how we did. If you go on to stuffyshadow.com and go to the page for this episode, it will have a full transcript for it, too, so everybody can check it out. And if you want to know more about this article, see the scary, scary baby. You can type in sign language on how stefworks.com and it will bring up Strickland's article. That's right. So there's two websites for you to go to steffishineo.com and howstep works.com. Boom. And since I said two websites, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this HIV. Hey, guys. I recently went to visit family in Louisiana for Christmas break from San Francisco, and during a conversation with a quote, friend from high school, I mentioned the fact that I had recently started my medication for HIV AIDS. And this quote friend became visibly uncomfortable and clearly was looking for an excuse to leave. I received a text later where I was accused of endangering his life by not immediately disclosing my status with him, giving examples of risky behavior, like, what if I had drank after you or some microscopic speck of your spit had gotten on my face? 20 13 14 now this is what's going on. Still. Have you seen Dallas Barry's club yet? No. Can't wait. It was a stark reminder, guy, of just how little people know still about how HIV works. Not only are neither of those things a possible vector of transmission, but modern medication can so effectively eradicate HIV from your blood and semen that you're practically not even contagious anymore, reducing the risk by as much as 99.9%. I had end age AIDS in May, and by August, my viral load was undetectable and my T cell count was normal. But there were complications with medication side effects, such as liver damage. There's so much information out there about HIV that people who don't have it are unaware of. When it comes to HIV, ignorance can cause positive people some serious pain when the uninformed make us feel like a biohazard. Yeah, I imagine. And it would be awesome if you guys could do an episode how HIV works. And that is Jesse in San Francisco and he works with the LGBT yeah. Community out there. Right. I can't remember where he works, but he was like, yeah, man, read this and do a podcast on HIV. And I think that's a great idea. I do, too. And we should get that together. Forthcoming. That's right. Thanks, Jessie. To your friend boy, 2014, was it? Dave? I remember hearing something. I remember being a kid. Yeah. We were like the generation that was just scared to death of AIDS and HIV because we're the ones who are, like, on the schoolyard when this thing was becoming a thing. Yeah. And I remember being afraid of that kind of thing and then learning as I got a little older, like, you'd have to drink something like a gallon or two gallons of an HIV patient saliva to possibly contract HIV through saliva or something like that. And you're like, I just drank a court, so I'm good. I'm good to go. And the whole toilet seat thing, remember that? Yeah, I remember that. It's just ridiculous. But I have one for you that's surprising. We'll do a podcast on it, okay? Oh, man, that's suspenseful. Okay, so look for an HIV podcast too. Agreed. If you want to get in touch with Chuck or me, you can get in touch with us via Twitter. That's right, at Syskpodcast. You can join us on facebookcom STUFFYou know? Send us an email to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. And as always, go check out our home on the web, STUFFYou Knows.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. This episode of Stuff You Should Know is brought to you by Lindacom. Linda.com offers thousands of engaging, easy to follow video tutorials taught by industry experts to help you learn software, creative and business skills. Membership starts at $25 a month and provides unlimited 24/7 access. Try Linda.com free for seven days by visiting linda. Comsysk hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime 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. 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86fa2712-3b0e-11eb-9699-6f785c29ad55	Venus Flytraps: Plant or Monster?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/venus-flytraps-plant-or-monster	After looking into the Venus Flytrap, we quickly moved it to the top of our favorite plant list. Part plant, part monster? What's not to love? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	After looking into the Venus Flytrap, we quickly moved it to the top of our favorite plant list. Part plant, part monster? What's not to love? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Tue, 12 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=285, tm_isdst=0)	39297861	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. 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 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. All these and more streaming this month on Disney Plus. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. And the three of us are easy, breezy, beautiful cover girls. And this is stuff you should know. How are you doing? I'm great. Good. I'm doing always wanted to be a cover girl. Well, you are now. I decree. Fantastic. I'm excited about this one, Chuck. I'm really excited because it's like a combination of one of our plant episodes with one of our animal episodes. Yeah, it is, isn't it? It's really hard to not look at a Venus flytrap in action on a video and not think it's an animal. Yeah, I guess so. For me, sure. It's just so like all you can think of or all I can think of is that thing is like thinking with a brain. Let me close my mouth and eat this thing. Yeah, that's what an animal, you know what I mean? That's what it looks like, for sure. Yeah, but the thing is, Chuck, is there's a whole thread of botany now. There's like a big dispute in the botanical world about just how much plants think and not necessarily in ways that we would recognize is thinking, but still having intelligence, memory. And one of the things that seems to be kind of emerging as far as studying Venus flytraps goes is that plants just like us use what are called action potentials, which is electrical transmissions that cause cells to do different things when they're stimulated. And that is thinking. Like, that's how we think. That's how neurons fire. So the idea that plants use the same kind of general principle to do things or to react to things or respond to things or to change the behavior. Buddy, that's thinking in a lot of ways. What's a vegan to do? I know it does. They're going to all end up breathtarians, right? Oxygen. Vegetarians. Yeah. No, that's the thing. Did you know that? Breathtarians? I feel like I've heard of that. It's exactly what it sounds like, the deal. So they don't eat anything? No. They just breathe and drink water? Or is that off the line? I don't even know if they drink water. Probably water. Are they all dead? Eventually, I'm sure. Okay. But yeah, we'll have to do an episode on that because I don't know enough about it to speak on it intelligently. But it is pretty interesting because I know some people at least try it. Well, it sounds like a movement that would probably not gain much steam. Right. Because they're too tired to proselytize about it. Sounds like a short stuff. Okay. There you go. Got you. I think it's a great idea, but we're here to talk about the Venus flytrap, not the WKRP in Cincinnati. DJ. What a great character. He had a lot of facets. Played by what was his name? Tim something, right? Tim Reed. Wow, nice. I saw a lot of WKRP when I was growing up. I did, too. Man. I love that show. It's funny, I remember I'm already going on a tangent before you even get started, but I remember watching that show when I was little and seeing Johnny Fever, where the Grateful Dead T shirts, which was my first exposure. And they had like the skeleton and stuff, and I thought they were some kind of like a metal thing. I did, too. I actually had a couple of other posters. I was like, this band must be the coolest band of all time. And I finally heard them and I was like, this doesn't match at all. Like the best name ever, the best imagery. And then it didn't add up. Music, was it? But we're talking about the Venus flytrap, the plant, which, if you think, sure, I've heard of those things. That's like the one carnivorous plant. No, there are hundreds and hundreds of plants that actually eat other things by attracting things and capturing and killing them. But the Venus flytrap gets all the press because it just looks like it looks and it's so cool. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the other plants, like, eat and digest insects or even like some rodents. There's a kind of picture plant that I saw the size of a toilet. And if you're a mouse and you fall in, that's it for you. Mouse. But they don't do anything. They just kind of sit there and hope that something falls in. The thing that makes the Venus Flytrap so fascinating is that it's one of only two plants in the world that actually closes, that actually traps, and it traps its prey and you just don't see that. The other one is the European water wheel, and it looks like a fern with the very tips of each fern frond. Kind of like Venus fly trappy. The very small version of it. The Venus flytrap is just big enough to be like, wow, that's really neat. Right? Like they would never write a character named Audrey after those ferns and put them in Broadway musicals. No. And Audrey, Too, technically. Audrey Too, yeah. Audrey was the guy was Seymour's love interest, the girl that he liked. So he named the plant Audrey, too. Can I confess something? Yeah. I know nothing about little shopping forest. I mean, I haven't seen in a really long time either, but I went and looked up some stuff on it. Okay, so you're confessing too? Yeah. I saw on a YouTube video this guy from the Carolinas talking about the Venus flytrap, and he said a more appropriate name for them would probably be did you see this guy? Yeah. The Carolina spider trap. Yeah. Because of two things. They are basically only found in about a 700 miles area as far as growing wild along the coast of northern South Carolina. And then he said they really only eat about 5% of their diet as spiders. I'm sorry? As flies. He said they mostly eat spiders and ants. And you can also throw in crickets and slugs and some other caterpillary things in there. Yeah. Very frequently, whatever just kind of happens to wander onto the plant itself. But it'll take what it can get. But I guess winged insects can maybe get away faster or more easily. Yeah, I get the idea that the flies can get out of there easier, so they're fine to eat flies. It's harder. Yeah. I don't know if it was in that same video or not that there's only an estimated 150,000 of these plants in the wild in the entire 700 miles. Just tiny strip along the coast of South Carolina. And they live in bogs, like marshy bogs, sometimes salt marshes, sometimes peat bogs, but like a wetland that's always wet. That's where they grow. And they like the sun and they like it humid. But they can also weather the cold, as we'll see, because it can get pretty cold in the winter in North Carolina. So there's really no way around explaining the origins of the name without it being a little well, it's just a little dicey because it was named at a time where things were different back then and they named it because the plant resembled, perhaps a woman's anatomy. Helped me out here. Now I'm really enjoying watching you tap dance. Well, I mean, we may have mentioned it in the folklore episode, the idea of the vagina dentata, which in many different cultures and nations around the world, there are these folkloric legends of these women who had teeth and their vagina act as a trap. Keep going, Chuck. And that is where this name comes from. It's named after Venus, the pagan goddess of love, because of that plant's resemblance and because of that folklore. Yeah. Jeez, good job, man. I think you really presented that well. All right. I wouldn't name it that today, can I say that? No, they definitely wouldn't. People are a lot less uptight when it comes to sex, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. It'd be the Carolina spider trap. Yeehaw, that's right. I also saw that when it was imported to England for study around the mid 18th century that it was popularly called tippity witches. That's what they called Venus in England. I thought it was fun, too. And Charles Darwin said that it was one of the most wonderful plants in the world, which, I mean, that's a pretty good endorsement coming from him. Oh, I bet he loves the penis fly trap. Yes, he really did. And I don't think because he had any kind of sexual proclivities toward it, like some of his other fellow botanists who actually named it that. No, I think because it's a wonder of natural selection and evolution, I would say that's why, too. That's his kink. One of the other things he's like oh, natural selection. Yes. So one of the other things about the Venus flytrap, it has another name, too. It's a Texanomic name is Diane Muscapula. I think that's right. And that actually is named after Diana, a different goddess, the Roman goddess of the hunt. And Muscapula apparently means mouse trap. So the other name thing you could call it besides Venus flytrap is Diana Mousetrap. It's not bad. It's got a lot of really great names. I mean, tippity witch alone is worth celebrating. I think Diana Mousetrap might be my new hotel check in name. Oh, that's a good one. I like that. Yeah. But at any rate, they eat insects, and not because they just love the taste of spiders or flies. They're regular plants, too. They love photosynthesis, and they do their thing during photosynthesis, like all plants do, and take that energy of the sun and convert it to sugar and oxygen and use that stuff as energy. But they also need other stuff, just like all plants need, but they can't get it because of where they live in that PD marshy bog. They need all these amino acids and vitamins that their land doesn't provide, and they get that from these insects. Yeah, because most other plants are able to get things like nitrogen from the soil and phosphorus, magnesium, sulfur, calcium, potassium, like, yes, they need ATP energy, and they store it in the form of carbohydrates, like all plants do. But there's other nutrients that they need to build cell walls to produce DNA, to transport water throughout that kind of stuff. You definitely need a lot more than ATP. And since they can't get it from the soil, they have evolved to get it by eating other bugs or eating bugs, or even, in some cases, like those giant pitcher plants, like mice. Because animals are really great mobile stores of stuff like calcium and sulfur and phosphorus and magnesium. That's right. And in that wet, PD acidic soil, they must seek purchase elsewhere. And luckily, those little spiders are happy to just crawl in there. And maybe we should take a little break, and we'll tell you all about how this trap happens right after this. 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Squarespace. Okay, Chuck, before we go any further, I just want to restate one of the coolest things I've ever heard, that the Venus Fly trap and other carnivorous plants couldn't get nutrients from the soil they grew in, so they learned to eat bugs to get those nutrients. It's astounding, and it also makes them so similar to the animal world because that's why animals eat other stuff, like other animals or even plants, because we need to get our energy elsewhere. We don't get it from the soil, so it makes them, in some weird way, akin to us as well. Do you feel a kinship? It a little bit, and I'm a little attracted to it, too. Like some of those early botanists. Oh, not in a Darwinian way. No. Or both. You swing both ways. Sure. Okay. I don't judge. Who knew this podcast would go in this direction? I did. Right. When I saw that first thing about it being dicey? Yes. About the name being I knew exactly where it's going to go. So they are not the only plant, also, that attracts things via their smells or these delicious syrupy SAPS. If you go out in your garden on any day and see butterflies and bees and other insects flying around, they're all going to these plants. And these plants are using these insects in one way or the other. They're just not quite using them up like this flytrap does. Yeah. They're using them to help pollinate. That's why they do that. Yeah. Because they want the bee to fly away. Right. The Venus flytrap does not want anything to fly away. No. It says, Come here, let me eat you. So here's what happens. If you look at a Venus flytrap, when it's unfolded and beautiful and has all these little beads of sweet nectar on it. An insect will land on that. And on each side of what are they called? Petals. I saw lobes. Okay. And then I like that. The thing that connects them in the middle is called the mid rib. The mid rib, not the mid rib. Good eating. You only get it at certain times of the year. On each lobe, you've got three little trigger hairs arranged in a little triangular pattern. And these are part motion detectors and part sort of timers, almost. Because when a little fly or spider or any kind of insect that's small enough lands in there, and we should say by small enough, we mean, ideally, about a third of the size of those two lobes. Can't go much bigger than that. No. And they're not big. It's not a big plant. I saw that they grow to be about five inches tall. Yeah, they're small. Yeah, they're fairly small. And then each plant will have between five and ten, I think, fly traps on it. Yeah. If you get your information from little shopify, you're being the flag. Right. So you've got these little trigger hairs, and once one of those is flicked by a fly leg or an ant leg or a spider, it's sort of a timer kind of starts and they've got about 20 or 30 seconds to dance around that thing without hitting either that one again or one of those other trigger hairs. And once it hits the second one or hits that first one the second time within that little timer, that is when the trap closes in a fraction of a second. Yeah. Like the blink of an eye. Oh, yeah. It's super quick. And I think one of the things that makes it seem animal like is it's really hard to find a nature documentary about the Venus flytrap without some sort of foreboding orchestral music playing in the background? Oh, for sure. So it really kind of juices it up a little bit. But here's the deal. They don't know exactly why or exactly how the mechanism works, since it doesn't have a brain. They know they trigger that trigger hair and then it claps shut. But all they've got is a pretty good hypothesis. Yeah. So what they think happens is that the lobes stay opened to a mouth. So the mouth is wide open on the Venus flytrap by the cells around that, the lobe, I guess around the mid rib and the lobe, where they connect, are basically being crumpled. And then something about the trigger hairs being stepped on starts to decomple that it starts to release a little bit of pressure. And then when that second hair is triggered, the pressure is fully released. And they think what happens is, through the use of burning ATP for energy, that the water pressure changes in those cells so that they go from being crumpled to being plump. And so they're no longer holding the flower open or the mouth open. So it just shuts. And all of that is again carried out by those action potentials, which starts with the trigger hair being stimulated, which somehow creates an electrochemical transmission that goes through the plant cells to tell it, get ready, get ready, because it might happen again. And when it happens again, it says, okay, release the water. And then the thing snapshot, which is pretty neat. But even after that second stimulation and the mouth closes, that's not the end of the whole process. There's still another third one, and it has to do with those amazing trigger hairs as well. Yeah, like this. To me, it's already pretty remarkable that this plant can do this. I kind of knew all that stuff, but this is when it really floors me, because even before I got to this part, I started thinking, like, yeah, but how long does this take? And to reset the trap, what if something kind of floats through there that's not an insect and it just happens to trigger two of those hairs? Does it just open right back up? Does it spit it out like, oh, I don't want this thing in there. What if some dumb little kid sticks his finger in there? Yeah, it's going to close, of course, because it's triggering the trigger hairs. Yeah, and you should not do that, by the way. No, you should totally not do that. But that's why I said dumb little kids. Sure. So what it counts on is a living thing squirming around in there once it's sort of not sealed tight. Exactly. At the very beginning, it's like shut. Ideally, they're not getting out, but maybe a fly can slip out if it's quick enough. Or maybe it can work its way out, but all that's doing is triggering those little trigger hairs again. And that's the signal, basically. That like, no, you've got a living thing in here. It's not something that fell off a tree or whatever that you don't want. So now is the time where you really closed down and locked down tight. Yeah. Once the thing's been inside scoring, because, like you're saying, it's like it's got a live one here. One of the other things that just I found absolutely astounding, Chuck, is when the Venus flytrap seals shut, when it's like, okay, I've got a bug in here and I want to go ahead and start eating it. The little things that look like teeth, the cilia, they lace together and form an airtight seal. And there's a couple of reasons for this. One, it keeps the bug from escaping, which couldn't really get out after the second hair was tripped. Like it forms a cage, but then after it scores around inside that cage, then it seals tight, air tight, and that's it for the bug, by the way. And it keeps the bug inside. It also keeps bacteria from entering, because this is not a fast process, what's about to happen. It takes the course of days before it's completed, and in that time, bacteria can enter through any hole in that seal. And so the seal prevents bacteria from getting in and rotting the bug and in turn rotting the Venus flytrap, causing the poor little fly trap to turn black and fall off. So I saw it takes about an hour or two to fully seal it takes about you remember I said earlier, like, what if something just happens to go? How long does it take to reset the trap? Right. That takes about 12 hours if there's like a twig or something, some debris. Yeah, but I was looking for kind of a fun word for that's. Not sexual. How about like a false alarm? But my mind just keeps going to dirty places. Like what? I have no idea. False alarm. Let's just call it. No. What were you going to think? That was dirty. What were you thinking? I was dirty. I can't I'll tell you later. I guess I can't say it out loud. I got to figure this out. I know what you mean. Let's just say it's a false alarm, about 12 hours, and then the entire digestive process can take a week or more. Yeah. Like if there is an actual bug in there, it takes about a week to digest it. It doesn't sound like a pleasant way to go for a bug to be trapped in a Venus flytrap because after that seal is completely sealed. Would you say it takes about a couple of hours, an hour or two for that seal to be airtight? Yes. The whole time that bug is still alive, Chuck, and it's still just sitting there flipping and flopping against those trigger hairs. And this is the other service that the trigger hairs provide that I referred to earlier, that when they're stimulated again after this thing is sealed, what they're doing is telling the Venus flytrap, okay, this thing's about this size. It's not a big thing, it's about medium size. So I only need to release a little bit of digestive enzymes. And this is a really great adaptation because it's really energy intent to produce digestive enzymes. So the fact that it just kind of doles out just enough to dissolve whatever is in there, whatever size insect is in there, it's pretty astounding. And it judges this somehow, some way, in a mindless sort of way, by how much those trigger hairs are tripped while the thing is squirming around in the ceiling. Flytrap. It's just awesome that it can do that. Yeah, this jumps to the end a little bit, but the reason it does that is because it can only do that so much. They do recycle what they can from those juices at the end of the process. But I get the feeling, like, with each opening and digestion and manufacturing of those enzymes and recycling of what they can of those enzymes, it just gets a little bit less and a little bit less until eventually the lobes can't do their job anymore. And then they just stay open and say, all right, I'll just be a regular plant and soak up the sun. I'm just going to photosynthesize, brother. I showed my daughter that this morning before she left for school. I was watching these videos. It's like, oh, man, she's going to love this. And she watched it and got really sad about the fly. Oh, that's sweet. And it's because of the way they shoot these. They do that dramatic music. And she's conditioned. She's been dignified. So it's like it's Bambi's mom in there. Yeah, it's Bambi's fly mother. Or it's Dory. Sure, dory the fly version. Just show her a fly close up or have her listen to our flies episode. And she'd be like, I don't care. I know. The other thing they do that really kind of is really easy to overlook, but definitely perhaps overly dramatizes. A Venus fly trap shutting on a fly. They'll very often dub in like a panthers roar right when it shuts. And you can't pick it out unless you're looking for it, but when you are, it just sticks out like a sore thumb. I think they get about ten to twelve, either partial or complete closures per lobe set. So that's how long they can hang in there before they coast into retirement. Not a bad run. And when you consider that they're only eating an insect every week or two, maybe in the wild, about three times a month. Yeah. So multiply that times ten to twelve and that's your lifespan, basically. Although I did see that they can live 20 years in the wild. Well, because they'll regenerate new lobes. Sure. Right. Yes. So yeah, they grow from a rhizome and those things pop up. But the plant itself, that's a fairly long live plant. Yeah. Okay. So inside one thing I feel is worth, like explicitly mentioning here with the Venus flytrap, you've got this open mouth, and then when it closes, it converts into a stomach. It's kind of like one of those washers. It's also a dryer once the wash cycles over. Right. I always wanted one of those. Yeah. I think it'd be pretty cool when all that I've never heard if they actually like work or not, but maybe we'll just go in touch on one together. Okay. And see, we'll just trade it off month to month. Well, I don't have room for it. Neither do you. Okay. We'll rent a storage space. Yes. And we'll just buy a little single unit. We'll hire an electrician and a plumber to come out and outfit it for a washer dryer combo. Right. And our bunk beds from the old days will be moved in there just for nostalgia. Yeah. But this time we'll be able to wash our sheets. What was like a plan. So in this, which went from the mouth, now the stomach, the digestive juices, just enough to melt, basically the bug that's in there, based on its size and its scormons, they flood this thing. And again, over the course of like five to twelve days, it's going to basically break down all the soft tissue inside that bug, inside it's exoskeleton and basically liquefy into goo until it just kind of mixes in with the digestive juices. Right. And then in this mouth that's now become a stomach, the nutrients that that fly or that spider, that ant carried around with it that became liquefied are broken down into like really tiny basic particles, like amino acids and stuff. Not even like proteins, like even more basic than that. And then the plant absorbs it, just like you do in your gut. Right. And it uses those nutrients to do things like build cell walls or repair its DNA, or to transport water throughout its body. Just not so stuff. Right. And then there's one other trigger. There's one other signal that happens where when the digestive enzyme is basically all that's in there, all the nutrients have been sucked out. Somehow it is able to analyze the ratio of digestive juice to nutrients. And when there's basically nothing but digestive juices left, it reabsorbs the digestive juice, and that acts as a trigger for those cells to compress again and the mouth to come back open. And then, ideally, gentle breeze will blow away what's left. There's a little exoskeleton in there. Yeah. And then Audrey is ready again and again about a week to twelve days. It depends on how big it's a little ant. It's going to be quicker. Sure. We mentioned that the juices get weaker, so if it's. An older trap or set of lobes, it's going to take a little longer, and then the temperature can actually speed it up a little bit. If it's warmer and there's more heat, then there's going to be a faster breakdown. So that'll also speed it along. Yeah. Just amazing, man. I mean, I knew it was going to be an amazing topic, but I was even astounded by how amazing these things are. But we're not done. We're going to take a break and we're going to come back and tell you all about if you want to grow one of these monsters in your house. What you can do right after this. What if you were a global bank who wanted to supercharge your audit system? 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Comsysk squarespace. All right, if you're a fan of Broadway or evolution or Charles Darwin or ancient folklore or just freaking out your neighbors kids or your own kids or grandkids and you want to be in a Slide trap in your house, you can do that. You don't have to live in the Carolinas. You just have to set up an environment that is like you're in the Carolinas, in your home somewhere. Yes. You have to become a Tar Heels fan or outside your home. Yeah, because I'm sure in the Atlanta Piedmont, in probably parts of Alabama, in North Florida, you could probably grow these things in a pot outside, probably so. But if you live in a much colder area above the Mason Dixon line, probably, or in a much drier area like the Southwest, you're going to have to unnaturalize it a little bit. For example, if you live in a low humidity area, you would want to probably put this thing in a terrarium. Yeah, and I've always wanted a terrarium. I think they're fun. Sure. So get a terrarium, make it wet in there. You're going to have, I think, about a four inch pot is a decent starter pot. And you may not need anything else, actually, because they're really not that big, like you said. And you got to keep checking that soil. You don't want it swimming in water, but you definitely don't want it to dry out at any point. Yeah, and you also don't want to water it from above. I didn't see why, but I suspect that it might, like a raindrop, could conceivably cause it to close accidentally. If you've got enough water splattering on it and triggering those trigger hairs. I wonder if they grow in the wild under more densely covered areas to prevent that. It's possible. So what you do is you water them from the bottom up. You place them in a pan or a little tray of standing water about a third of an inch or a centimeter deep. Oh boy, here we go. What? Watering chips with chives. Well, listen, there's something else that you want to keep in mind. I think most people wouldn't realize it's like you can't water these guys with tap water. Oh, I just got what reference you are making. What standing water do we need like a million feet worth of water? You basically want to make sure that your house is completely flooded with water to make these things live. No, you bring a good point, though. Like tap water is no good, and probably most of the filter water using is probably no good either. No. Because the salts and nutrients will build up in the soil and these things have evolved not to use that stuff, and it will actually harm them. For the same reason you don't want to use fertilizer either. They don't need fertilizer, they need bugs, basically. Yeah. They said and I thought, this is really cool, just collect some rainwater. That's your best bet. If you can't collect enough. If you live in Phoenix and you want to grow a Venus flytrap, you're already kind of rowing upstream, but you may not be able to collect that rainwater either. So at least get some deionised water, maybe some distilled water, or if you've got a reverse osmosis system, which you might in Phoenix, then you can use that stuff too. You can use that stuff. And if you don't have a reverse osmosis system, you can buy it. Usually at any aquarium store, they sell that. Okay, so the water is very important. What kind of water you use? Again, don't use fertilizer. And apparently because they grow in areas that get cold in the winter, if you are growing one in a terrarium from November to February, you want to take it out of a terrarium and put it in a window in your garage or something like that. Let it actually get cold, and you're going to get freaked out because the plant will actually die back to the rhizome and it'll look like you lost it or something like that. But then come March, you're going to be pleasantly surprised when it comes bouncing right back. Yeah. And you can treat it like any plant that you overwinter that kind of goes storm it. You can clip off the dead detritus and it'll grow back. How many of those are we going to get per plant? Like four or five? I think it's a five to ten somewhere. Oh, five to ten even. Okay, that's what I saw, but I could be making that up. There's a lot of numbers flying around in this one. But what about the feeding? If you have this thing in your house or in a terrarium, you're not just going to count on a random fly that got in or luku Karacha to walk into its midst. So just like if you have a constrictor and you got to go to the pet store to pick up some mice, sure you have to feed this thing. Yeah. Apparently you can feed it live bugs, but there's problems with live bugs. Apparently live mealworms can actually burrow their way out of the plant, which is not pleasant for the plan, I'm sure. Crickets can easily get too big or can stick a leg out, which will keep that seal from getting airtight. So they can decompose from bacteria that gets slipped in that can actually make the plant decompose too. So your best bet is to get some freeze dried mealworm bloodworms or crickets, put a little water on there, stir them up, and then you put it drop it on the plant in its mouth, basically. And so you might get a closure response from just dropping it in there because it might hit a couple of cilia. But don't forget, like, it's not going to start releasing those digestive enzymes until it's silly and the little trigger hairs are stimulated once it's closed. So you actually have to have like a little toothpick or something like that. And just very lightly, very gently, kind of rub the cilia so that it'll close fully and release those digestive enzymes. Right. And like you said earlier, don't invite your neighbor's kids over to trigger this thing for fun because it only gets ten or twelve of those closures, and you're literally shortening the lifespan of that lobe if you're doing so for fun. Right? So you got to drop in insect. You probably won't be able to catch any flies. Even if you're good with those chopsticks, man, very few can accomplish that feed. Sure, you have to be friends with Pat Morita, and they got to be small. Remember, about a third the size. I told you I worked with Pat Morita once, right? No. Music video. Which one? No, I don't think you have. I want to say it was one Emily produced. And I worked for I think it was Alien Ant Farm. And they did a Karate Kid send up, and Pat Merida starred, and I was Pat Marita's guy that day to get him what he needed in his trailer. And he was as nice as he could be, rip, God rest his soul. And I don't think it's a big deal to say that Pat Marita loved sipping on Chardonnay during the day on a shoot. Oh, yeah. He didn't get plastered or anything, but he wanted a bottle of wine and a nice bottle of white Chardonnay, and he was just a lovely guy. How positively cultured. I heard Mr. T likes to drink huge cups of I don't know what it was he was drinking, but he'd like to drink on set as well, during the day. Oh, really? Interesting. I did a White Cliff video one time, and he and his crew, they really drank. Oh, yeah. But I mean, sometimes those music videos, that was just sort of a party atmosphere. Like, they would use that as an excuse to be like, all right, all my friends are coming. We're here for 24 hours, and we're just going to get down. And I also had one of the coolest experiences of my music video life on that Wacklift Job, and that I was standing kind of right next to a and I'm just so square. I don't know what it's called when they're improv wrapping and dissing each other, like the competition style. I don't know what that's called. It's called Eight mile. Yeah, it's called an eight Mile face off. Okay. That's what I said. I went, hey, guys, nice eight mile. Face off. But I got to kind of witness one of those in person, and I was like, oh, my God. It's like the talent is just off the chart. So it was good because sometimes those things are really not good. No, I mean, these were pros. Oh, good, man. I bet that was cool to see. It was fun, but they were fun, too. Wow. Did we say everything there is to say about Venus fly traps? I also had to put a joint in Busta Rhymes lips. I think I've told that story. Buster Rhymes didn't smoke pot. He smokes marijuana, believe it or not, because he was in the video for Jimmy Samo. He was fake tied to the train tracks in one scene so he couldn't move the ground. And he would always ask me, I would stand by and hold the burning blunt and I would put it in his lips every probably 8 seconds. Good Lord. It was great. Those are the fun things you can do as a PA sometimes. I highly recommend it. Those are some cool stories, Chuck. Yeah, you can really get in the mix. Yeah. Has nothing to do with Venus flytraps, though. But it does now. Well, if you want to know more about Venus fly traps, go buy one. You can buy one online. Although supposedly you should probably go to a nursery that specializes in carnivorous plants because they actually know what they're talking about. So start there. Okay. Can you grow them from seed? You can. You can grow them from seed. You can also divide them, like as they get to be adult size right before they come out of their winter dormancy is a good time to divide them so they make great gifts. I love it. And since Chuck said he loves it, of course. Everybody, it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this Clark me a listener mail. Okay, did you see this one? It sounds familiar from a few weeks ago. Hey, guys. Just wanted to tell you that I've been subtly weaving Clark as a verb in the conversations with my family for the last three weeks. This is Leslie. This is mom that's doing this. Okay. At first I did it just to be funny and see what they would say. None of them had heard that particular episode and don't even know about Clarking. But no one questioned it. I asked my husband to Clark me a $10 bill. I told my son I would Clark him a notebook for school. I told one of my daughters that someone could Clark her a phone charger. That's awesome. Everyone just proceeded as if I said nothing out of the ordinary and it was totally surreal. Anyway, I just had to share that with you guys because I feel like I have a hilarious inside joke with no one to laugh about it with. If you do, read this on the air. And how could we not? Will you please shout out my husband Clint and my kids, jackson looks like Emma and Grace maybe. Emma, thanks for what you do. I'm a longtime listener. Love your show so much. It's perfect for those like me who have a love of learning and laughing. And that is from Leslie and her family. Just sound wonderful. And it says something about how much they're listening to you, Leslie. I hate to break it, too. Yeah, that's pretty great. Or they're just like, mom's gone off a rocker. I guess we'll just go with it. Mark, what a great email. I'm going to guess the middle kids name is Emmy. Okay, so we've got M E and M-O-I don't think we can miss Chuck, unless it's just the artist formerly known as well, thanks again, Leslie. That was a great email. One of the all time greats, if you ask me. And if you want to throw in your two cent and see if you can compete with Leslie's email, we would love to hear it. You can send it to us 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 the Neogen device developed by Rst Syndnexis, 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 Neogenrelievespane.com now for provider benefits. About the Neogen system? Come chat with us. That's neogenrelievespane.com. 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41e09d32-53a3-11e8-bdec-133d92d7a0ec	Planned Obsolescence: Engine of the Consumer Economy	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/planned-obsolescence-engine-of-the-consumer-econom	If you’ve ever heard an old timer gripe that things aren’t built like they used to be, that old timer was right! Learn about the nefarious, possibly mythical, mechanism that’s responsible for the cruddy products and waste our consumer society is based on.	If you’ve ever heard an old timer gripe that things aren’t built like they used to be, that old timer was right! Learn about the nefarious, possibly mythical, mechanism that’s responsible for the cruddy products and waste our consumer society is based on.	Tue, 25 Jun 2019 15:50:53 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=25, tm_hour=15, tm_min=50, tm_sec=53, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=176, tm_isdst=0)	54700930	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everybody, we're coming to see you soon. Yeah. Especially, first of all, Toronto and Chicago. And Toronto. Hats off to you guys. Tickets are selling like gangbusters. Chicago, I don't know what's going on with you. I know. Chicago, what became of you? Chicago? I thought you loved us. Yeah. Really? With your cool hot dogs and your thick pizzas. Yes. That's really all you need to mention about Chicago. So we're going to be at the Harris Theater on July 24. That is very soon. We are going to be the next day in Toronto at the lovely Danforth Music Hall on July 25. And then that's not all, is it? No, that's not all, Chuck. We're also going to be going to Boston in August, followed by Portland, Maine, which is on purpose, by the way. That's right. Wilbur Theater in Boston. The State Theater in Portland, Maine. We're headed to Florida for the first time, everyone. Central Florida at the Plaza live in Orlando on October 9. And then the next night, october 10 at the civic theater in new Orleans. And then we're going to wrap it all up in spanking on the bottom with our annual trio of shows at the Bellhouse in Brooklyn, New York, october 20, 324 and 25. And the 25th is almost sold out. Yeah. So you can get tickets to all of these shows by going to Syssklive.com, our home on the web for touring. And that will send you out to all the great little sites that have links to the tickets and info and everything you need. So we will see you very soon, starting this July. 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 brian over there, and there's Jerry over there. This is stuff you should know. Built a break edition. Okay, I didn't I was not paying attention when you said which one we were doing. And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to pick up on the clues. Wow. Right out of the gate. When did you have it? When I said there's, Charles, that we took Bryant plan to break okay, got you. That was pretty sharp, Chuck. Hey, man, after eleven ish years, right? It's as easy as that. You can read my mind. So let's talk about the Civil Air Patrol. You just threw me off. Luckily it wasn't enough for me to stop and correct you, though. I'm excited about this one because planned obsolescence is one of those things that I think just annoying to people like us. Were you raised with the idea of planned obsolescence? Were you aware of it when you were younger? No, because when I was a kid, things seemed to last longer. I had the same refrigerator my entire life as a child. Same metallic p refrigerator. We even got it like refaced like that's how long you could have an appliance like that. It's like the styles have changed, so just get a new front for it. That's astounding. Man, I didn't even know that you could do that. Yeah, I mean, I doubt if you still can. No, but you definitely can't. Yes. Back then, they were like, yeah, this is a 50 year fridge, so every 25 years, get a new thing on the front. Yeah. Well, if you're sitting there going, agua. When Chuck said 50 year fridge, that's okay. That's the world we live in now. The point is, it didn't used to be that way. Things used to last forever and ever. Right. So what changed? That's a big question that's on people's mind. And what a lot of people point to is something called planned obsolescence, which is pretty straightforward if you think about it. It's basically companies deliberately making their products so that they last a shorter amount of time in order to make you, the consumer, have to go back and buy another one much sooner than you normally would have if the things were built to last longer. Yeah. And there are a lot of ways that this can go down. It's not always just like, hey, build it cheaper, build it out of cruddy materials. But that is certainly one way to do it. Obviously with smartphones and the technology sector of the world, that's where you really hear a lot about this, because I know a lot of people have been frustrated with smartphones and the fact that maybe I want to go five years with a smartphone and not have a new update, make it slow, or not have my battery not work after three years and stuff like that. Right. And I mean, it shouldn't have to be like an identity statement to keep the phone for five years, like you're swimming against the current or sticking it to the man. Right. You should just be able to keep your phone for as long as you like and it's still not only continue to work, but also to be compatible with the rest of the world going on around it. That's not the case. That's just not how things are made, especially in the technology sector, like you were saying. Right. And here's the thing. This is something that a company is not going to admit to. It's not against the law. Some people say it's a myth and it's just like tinfoil hat territory. Other people say, no, it clearly totally happens. And then other people even say, yeah, it happens. But this is great for the economy to keep people making stuff all the time. Right. So there's this idea of, you know, is planned obsolescence a real thing? And if it is real, because I think you kind of touched on it with that third group. Some people are like, yeah, it is real, but it's not like deliberate and out of a sense of avarice or exploitation. It's just kind of part of the world we live in these days, I think a lot of people, they're like, no, it is real and it is deliberate and it is out of avarice, and it stinks. It does stink. We'll find that there's a lot wrong with it. Right? Yeah. So this early light bulb story is pretty interesting. Way back when, Thomas Edison invented a light bulb in the late one thousand s that people could use in their homes, he used carbon filaments, which were eight times thicker than the tungsten filaments. That came later, like three decades later. So these things lasted a long time, and they were built to last. And I can't believe I'm 48 years old and I never had heard of the Centennial Light, which is a light bulb from 19, one that is still working. In California. Yeah, in a fire station in California. And it's on almost all the time. It's not like they turn it off for 35 years at a stretch. Now, you probably wouldn't want to turn it off at this point. I would say probably not. That's probably the only reason it's working is because it doesn't know it doesn't have to. Right. They've got, like, the Scotch tape over the light switch with Do Not Turn off written on it. It's dim now, though. I saw that. It's down to about a night light, four watts or so. Well, it's been burning for 118 years. Give it a break. Hey, man, I'm not knocking the Centennial Light. He's my favorite little old light buddy. Not my presence, at least. But yeah, I mean, that thing. Point is, they were built to last. And initially, this is because electric companies installed and maintained all these systems, including, like, hey, you needed a new bulb, we'll come and take care of it for you. Yeah. And then that got shifted to the consumer, and they were like, hey. And they literally were like, hey. Because there was a concerted effort that wasn't just like, some abstract thought. There was something called the Phoebus Cartel in the 1920s when all these electric companies from around the world and bulb manufacturers got together and literally colluded and said, hey, let's make light bulbs not last as long because we can sell more. Yeah. Collusion. Can you believe that? I can actually believe it very much. It's not like they got together like they sent some letters or smoke some cigars or happened to have a conversation at a club or something like that. They met in Geneva, Switzerland, to hold a secret meeting to form a light bulb cartel to make light bulbs last a shorter amount of time so they could sell more. It's just it happened. Yeah. I mean, that's very much proof, if you're, like, planned obsolescence isn't really a thing. Like, there's proof that at one point it was definitely a thing. It was a thing in one of the earliest industries around in the post industrial age. Yeah. The light bulb cartel. It's not like that just kicked off everything where everybody was like, oh, yeah, that's what we're going to do from now on. It's almost like the impression I got is that this is an independent idea that was just kind of cropped up throughout the course of the 20th century. But the next people to hit upon it. I think it's entirely possible that these guys were all sharing info. The light bulb guys were like, hey, you car makers are being idiots. Here's what you need to do the same places in the Catskills every summer. That's what I would guess, seeing that young, upcoming comedian Henny Young men do a bit. Yeah. So the automakers were the first to hit on it next, and specifically a guy named Alfred Peace Loan, who was a groundbreaking early president of General Motors, who said, I've got an idea. We could sell way more cars if we just make little updates here and there every year to the same car, but just change it out enough so that you want the newer car. It's newer, it's flashy, it's better than the car you own. So maybe after a couple of years, somebody will take their car that still works just fine and trade it in for a new one. And he's the guy who came up with that. Yeah. That's called dynamic obsolescence. Now, we take it for granted because that's all you hear about is the new model year. But previous to that, I'd love to do a show on the early auto industry. I guess they just made cars, and they were called the whatever. And when did they make new ones? Every five or six, seven years when they had a real innovation. Well, he had this idea in, like, the so they wouldn't have been cars for that many years very long before then. But I think it was just like the Model T or the Model A or the box with wheels, which all of those were, right? Yeah. The actual term, though, planned Obsolescence, was in a pamphlet for the first time in 1932, written by a real estate broker named Bernard London. And this pamphlet was called it's 1932. If it's like the big pamphlet writing days, right? You don't get enough of those anymore. You really don't see too many pamphlets outside of, like, a government office or something, right. Or if you're in Vegas and it's just got, you know, those kind of pamphlets. Right. But this was called ending the depression through planned obsolescence. So right there, it's in the title. First time it had ever been used. And this was a plan for products to include an artificial expiration date. So the idea was if you're a consumer and you continue to use that product beyond that date, sort of like taking an old pill or drinking old milk, except you would be charged a tax, like, hey, you're still using that fridge? It's two years past this date. So you got to pay a tax on that now. Right. And it did not take hold, surprisingly. Or not surprisingly. Right. Supposedly, from what I saw, there's 15 copies of that pamphlet known to exist still, and they're all in libraries. And there were 20 originally. Right, exactly. But that Bernard London. He had kind of an idea, but it was misplaced. It was in the wrong place. Nobody wants to tax the consumer for using an item they paid for fair in square. That's not going to be a very popular idea. So he was kind of on the right path, but he found a tree and he started barking up it, and it was the wrong one. You know what I mean? Yeah. But in fact, that same year, there were two other guys, roy Sheldon, and this is a great name, egmont erin, and they wrote a book that wasn't too far off that pamphlet called consumer Engineering or lease of a colon in the title, a New Technique for Prosperity. And they called it creative waste and just basically flat out said we should make things that are less durable because people are going to buy more stuff. Right? Yeah. Which, I mean, lays the foundation for the consumer economy that we live in today. That's it right there. These guys came up with the basis of it. Yeah. It got me thinking about, like, there are places that make really awesome things that are like their selling point is this is really built to last, whether it's a wallet or a piece of clothing or something. No, there are these high end wallet makers now that are saying, like, this is the wallet that you can have for 60 years. Like your father. I didn't know about that. But they often say things like use military grade fabrics or this or that. And I think that's just like back then, they used to use the highest grade and calling a military grade sounds all fancy, but what that really means is we use stuff like they used to because it just last, and now only the military does that kind of thing. Yeah, no, I think you're absolutely right. That's what Bernard London and Roy Sheldon and ignore arrange the foundation of their ideas, even though they were separate ideas, was that things were made too well back then. And Bernard London's idea was, well, you can just keep making them really well, but you have to say that you can't use it beyond this date, which wouldn't work. But Roy Sheldon in Egmont aaron said, well, we could go the opposite way and just make stuff less durable and sell more of it. That's the whole point, to stimulate the economy. Because, remember, both of these were written during the depression, and the idea was to stimulate the economy by artificially creating repeat customers that otherwise wouldn't exist because the stuff that you would go by is too durable, like if you go buy a hose and that hose is going to last you for the rest of your life. And you're not in a business where you need multiple hoses. You're just a homeowner. You're not in the hose business. You're a hose maker. Well, I'm actually referring specifically to a hose that my dad bought from Sears in the 60s. He still got it. He still had it until the sprung a leak. And Sears used to guarantee everything that they sold for a lifetime. My dad took it back to his Sears and they gave him another hose in the nineties. Right. But the idea of a hose lasting 30 something years, let alone being replaced for free when it breaks, that was the problem. Stuff was just made too well. And you can actually go on to etsy and ebay and sites like that today. Chuck and there's like a whole subculture, I guess, of people who buy vintage appliances that still work. They work like they did the day you bought them. Like, I saw a sunbeam mixer from 1930, and it says, works perfectly well. It has a few scuffs on it that's it from 1930. That's coming up on 100 years ago. Yeah. It also weighs \u00a3275, and it catches your house on fire. So you'll have to pay a lot of money to have it shipped. But, yeah, I mean, it's crazy because this early planned obsolescence was in the when we think of that's, when they were making great stuff, and, like, now it's progressed to the point where it's just like, let's just make pure garbage. Right, but it won't last a year. The point originally was that it would stimulate the economy if you could sell the same person stuff multiple times over their life rather than making something that lasts a generation so that they only have to buy the one hose for their lifetime. Right. Well, your dad has two nicknames now, the herbal Elvis and one hose clark all right, boy. Shall we take a break? I think so. All right, let's take a break. And we're going to come back and talk about a man named Brooks Stevens right after this. All right? So this idea is out there. Planned obsolescence. It's been written down. It's a term really kind of became more common in the 1950s, even though it was first written about in the early 1930s. And this is where a man named Brooke Stevens enters. He was a Milwaukee industrial designer, and he did a lot of stuff. He worked in the automobile industry. He worked in the appliance industry. And basically his whole jam was, no, no, we need to make things obsolete and not last very long because this is good for industry. Right. Let's go get that bread. Yeah, go get that bread. And keep people working. Keep people making stuff. At a advertising conference, he gave a speech where he said, quote, instilling in the buyer the desire to own something a little newer, a little better, a little sooner than is necessary, end quote. Yeah, it's right there. Just make it a little crappier, a little cruddier, and you'll sell more of them over a long period of time. Like, you take the long view of it. And if you are looking at it strictly from an economic sense, like an academic sense this just makes total sense. It's perfectly normal and rational and kind of a good idea. But when you put it into practice, we've found there's a lot of problems that start to emerge pretty quickly. Yeah. And emerge so quickly that Brooks Stevens gave that very famous speech. Well, famous among industrial designers, but he made that speech in 1954. By six years later, there was a popular book by a guy named Vance Packard called The Waste Bankers. And it was basically about all the problems that come from that kind of mentality that planned obsolescence creates all the waste associated with it. All the unnecessary consumerism, all the keeping up with the joneses that emerges, like, just six years after that speech. So really quickly, people started to see the problems with planned obsolescence. Like, right out of the gate. Yeah. This Vance Packard, I think maybe we could try and do a short stuff on. Yeah, easily. Just kind of reading up on him. He was sort of a pre Ralph Nader social critic. And I guess Nader was a little more toward public safety. But Vance Packard, he wrote a bunch of cool books and essays. One called The Hidden Persuaders that tackled the advertising industry and subliminal advertising and stuff like that. Who's. Like the arch enemy of Edward Bernays, I imagine. Yeah. Those one called an essay called The Naked Society which had to do in the 1960s, I think, about consumer privacy technology ahead of his time. Yeah. And then the last thing he wrote in 1989 was called The Ultra Rich Colon. How much is too much? How much is too much? Yeah. So he died a few years later. Like, up until the very end was kind of fighting the good fight for saying what a wasteful, invasive, gross society that we're building here in the United States. Yeah, it was an interesting dude. Definitely the kind of author that guys like Gladwell and Friedman and all of them sort of followed in the footsteps of. But he kind of laid the groundwork for that kind of reporting on kind of the ugliness of the society that sold to us. I think we should definitely do a short stuff on them. Yeah. Okay. So pinky square. Pinky square. Okay. Your pinky is cold. Soothing to me. Or frightening? It should be a little frightening. I'm frightened by it because it feels sweaty. Guys, I think Josh is dead. My nose just falls off onto the table. Oh, God. Let me put that back. No problem. The funny thing is, as long as you could keep podcasting on Private Mike. That's fine. Yes. I like Corpse Josh. You buy me like a steel rod to go in my spine for Christmas. Yeah. But I'd have to buy one every couple of years because they don't last like they do. It's true. They don't last like they used to. That's another thing. I really want to say this, Chuck, because I'm sure too, especially some of our younger listeners, we sound like a couple of bogeys who they don't make it like they used to know. It's proven they don't make things like they used to. It's not just people like pining for the good old days or anything like that. There is a definite progression of increasing cruddiness among the stuff you buy and the shortening of the lifespan and durability of the things we buy. It's just happening. Yeah. It's funny when I see stuff on social media about people complaining about their fridge that doesn't work or this or that, I'm like, what about the lemon law? I'm always just like, oh, that's cute. I'm sure you're going to get real far with a lemon law. Yeah. Although we should look into that for a short stuff, too, because there is such a thing. I just don't know how we talked about it before. Maybe we even did a show years ago, extended Warranties. Oh, man, I hearken back to that show pretty frequently. Whenever I'm offered an extended warranty, I'm like, wow, that sounds like a really good deal. What did we say in the extended warranty episode? Oh, yes. Don't do it. Extended warranty. It's never worth it, if I remember correctly. All right, so shall we chat a little bit about some of some of the worst offenders these days? Yeah. First up on the Tball t is Apple. Yeah. Apple is in the news a lot and is very much at the center of the talk among the skeptics and on the skeptics websites about their evil plan to keep you on their machines every couple of years through updates that slow down your phone, which was proven true. Yeah. Well, there's a class action lawsuit against him for it. Yeah. So here's what happened. If you live under a rock, Apple got they sent out an update. This is a few years ago, and the update was shown, and they admitted that it did slow the phones down, but their whole response was, hey, this is because the battery stinks. They're like, we're trying to make your battery last longer, so we're slowing some things down in order to give you a better battery life. And then here's what we'll do. Everyone, we're so sorry. You can buy a new battery for $50 cheaper for $29 instead of $79. So they replaced 11 million batteries in 2018. Did they really? I didn't know that. Yeah, up from about replaced for $29 a piece. Sure. Up from one to 2 million in an average year. Because I don't know if you've ever seen an iPhone, buddy, but it doesn't have a little switch on the back that you just pop a little thing and put a new battery in. No, that's another big part of planned obsolescence that we'll talk about is there is a strict control over the product even after it's purchased. Oh, yeah. They want to control it through repair, through everything. So I was looking up on this lawsuit because I didn't know where it landed, and I think it's still going on. And the latest article I read was from February that said, basically, Apple is squirreling away money because they're going to lose this thing. Oh, yeah. They're literally setting aside money to pay for this lawsuit. That's so cute for a rainy day. Yeah. They opened up a new account. They went down to the bank. Just call it lawsuit account. Right. But here's the thing with Apple. It's not just the update thing. Like anyone who has bought a laptop from them, like me lately, or one of the newer phones, and you're like, oh, wait a minute, I can't plug, like have done since I had my Walkman. I can't plug my headphones into this thing anymore without buying a little dongle. Or I can't plug in a USB port, because there is none unless I get some little adapter that they also sell. Right. So that's a classic hallmark of planned obsolescence, is creating a newer model that is incompatible with older models. So if you want to keep using the older model, you're going to have to shell out some money one way or another. Or even if you buy the newer model, which is kind of an even bigger slap in the face, you have to shell out even more money for additional peripherals like chargers or headphones or something like that to make them compatible. Just making stuff incompatible with older versions. It's a big part of planned obsolescence. Yeah. Do you know, I wonder how much money they made on the little headphone adapter. Oh, man, it's $10. It's like $9.99. I've got one and I'm like, I could really use another one of those. Because the worst thing that could possibly happen to a human being is they have two sets of headphones. One for the flight on Delta and then one for your phone, because they have two different ends on them. To have to keep up with two sets of headphones is basically as horrible as it gets. So I'm probably just going to cave and get another adapter. Yeah. Or just quit ingesting culture. Yeah. Flip phone and stop watching movies and TV altogether. Yes. Sticking it to the man. One other big offender that really gets my goat. And I know we are old guys complaining here, that's fine. But the old and young alike, I think, can all agree that printer cartridges are one of the biggest, most frustrating, wasteful and environmentally damaging scams on the planet. Yes. Which I didn't know about this. I'm just going to go ahead and buzz them because I'm pretty proud of what we got. In an episode printer at home and it has like, reservoirs that you fill with ink and hold a ton of ink. That's great. From like a refill bottle and there's no cartridges involved or anything like that. The bottles that you refill it from are fully recyclable. This is good. Before we had cartridges, but it didn't have this particular component, which is a smart chip. Right? What I'm trying to say is I had no idea this existed until I researched this, but some printers, inkjet, laser printers, home printers, the cartridges have a little chip on them, which is I guess what you pull the tape off of when you load it into the printer, like a new cartridge. And it actually talks to the printer and says, here's how much ink I have left. What are you going to do this friday? Oh, yeah, I got another job coming in. Excuse me. And then eventually the ink level gets down to a certain amount where the smart chip tells the printer no more printing. They've reached the preset amount, not the amount where they've actually run out of ink, but the amount that the company has determined is enough. You can go buy another cartridge now. And these cartridges also the smart chips prevent you from using other companies cheaper knockoff cartridges because the chips won't communicate with the printer. So it's like the printer doesn't know the cartridges there and you can't refill them. They're designed not to be refilled, so they have to be thrown away and you have to go buy another cartridge. Yeah, and I've had that happen before in the past where I get down to if I'm printing something out, just like simple black text and it starts to come out a little brown and then it just stops. I'm like, I'm okay if it's a little brown. Right. I decide what's illegible printer I know. At the very least, I can tell you epsom makes a printer out there that has reservoirs that you can refill with bottles and no smart chips. Okay, give me some money episode. The auto industry is still kind of doing the same thing that they started so many years ago, which is discontinuing parts that could keep cars running for a longer time, making those minor cosmetic changes for that new model year, retiring models of cars that are really popular just because they want to bring out something new and make it harder to fix your old car. So repairs. Chuck like, we kind of teased earlier that's a huge part of planned obsolescence. Like if you're the company that controls the market on your parts and who can repair your products with those parts, you're basically saying like, I can see this product though, after I sell it to the customer to ensure that it experiences just that artificially. Short lifetime. Yeah. And the thing that's so maddening about this is you can just hear it in the meeting rooms. And here's the best thing, guys. We control the parts. We control the repair. The only thing we don't control is the shipping. And maybe we can make some deal with FedEx on that to get a little kickback. Exactly. I don't know if that really happens. I'm just making it up. It probably does. Now. I've got my tinfoil hat on, but you can just hear it in the meeting rooms. And that's what's so frustrating, is it's just this steady ooze of greed with no regard for the consumer at all. Right? And just to lay it out, basically in explicit terms, if you're a company and you make a product, you can control that product after you sell it by saying, if this product breaks and you take it anywhere but where, we say, you can say, like, to the Apple Store or an authorized repair shop, you voided the warranty. So there's no warranty after that. You just voided it. And by doing that, they can say they control what parts are used, which means that they can be the only people who manufacture the parts that are used. Yeah. And then you say, can I get the fixed under warranty through you? Then they're like, we don't cover that under warranty. They're like warranty, you moron. With the repair parts controlled, they can raise the price or lower the price. They can adjust it however they want to make it so that it's actually as expensive to repair as it is to just buy another one or close to it, to just basically nudge you toward, well, just throw this one away and get the newer model. Or they can also this is a really big one, especially also in the auto industry, they can stop making those parts, which are the only parts that you can use to repair. So it ultimately, eventually becomes impossible to repair that thing because all the parts, the finite amount of parts that were ever produced to repair them are all used up. There's no more parts available. Go buy the newer model. Did you see that used Hugo? The new used Hugo? No, someone put a Hugo on ebay that had 480 miles else on it and had been garaged since 1988 or whatever. How much do they want for it? Nine grand is what it sold for. Wow. Which it's nine grand plus. You got to get that thing going again. It's been sitting there for that many years. It's clearly not road ready, but it was cherry. And I think it's kind of funny that some no doubt tech bro with a little too much money wanted the most ironic car in San Francisco. That is as ironic as it gets, for sure. Every time I hear about you guys, Chuck, I'm reminded of remember that Saturday Night Live commercial for the Adobe no it was like the first car under $1,000 made out of clay. So when you got in the fender bender, you just pour water on it and mold it back into shape. If only. Yeah, that was like the Phil Hartman era. That's the opposite of planned obsolescence. It is. Clothing is sort of the same deal. And again, there are some clothing companies, and I think more than ever now in recent years well, not more than ever, but more than in the last 20 years. There are companies that are making really well made clothes. Yeah, but they're not cheap. There are many more companies, huge stores and big brands that are just pumping out cheap clothes because they're like, first of all, the styles change. So why do you want something? You don't want anything that's going to last more than a year, too, anyway. Right, but my beef and we're calling that a lot of brands might as well just keep it going. But when I was younger, you could buy a pair of Levi's and have those for a long, long time. Yeah. And a Russian would trade you a Hugo for them. Yeah, exactly. And now I had a pair of Levi's for probably five months before I got a big rip really? In them. That is sad. It's sad. Levi Strauss rolled over in his grave on that day. I know, man, because that was the thing. It's just like these things are tough as leather. Sure. It lasts you so long. Like, there's nothing better than inheriting Dad's old Levi's. Really? And it's just like or five months. Yeah. That's pretty sad to hear. Is there a middle ground? Can I get five years? Yeah, five years would be pretty good for some jeans. I'd take it. I always put although I do less than I did before. But my jeans would always wear out. Or my two thighs, my big fat thighs rubbed together. That's what we go first. But then you can hide that for a little while until one day you can't. Right. You just hope that that day comes and you're not in public. I can attach these because they're still comfortable. But you shouldn't have to, Chuck. You shouldn't have to. It's committee talk. I'm going to patch these. You want to know another racket? Yes. Or should we take a break and talk about it? We can take a break if you want. Or we can wait. Do you want to wait? Yeah, we'll finish the rackets. This is fun, by the way. I'm having fun, like, complaining about how stuff doesn't last like it used to. How about the college textbook bracket? Okay. Hey, this is a new addition from the previous year. Oh, what's different? The page numbers. Right. So buy the new one, not the used one. Yeah. Which is I mean, like, if you're trying to follow along in class, it's kind of maddening because the information is usually not that much but it's enough to just throw everything off. Right, right. Whereas if they just put these things as, like, a supplement or an appendix or something in back, then you could just or even to sell the additional stuff separately. It would be a lot better. Yes. So the little pamphlet for 899 and probably make money. Yeah. 15 copies. How about the toy industry? So the toy industry is frequently guilty, and this isn't the case across the board, but it kind of is of a specific subcategory of planned obsolescence called contrived durability. And they're not garbage product. Basically, the toy industry isn't the only one that does it, but they're the ones that come to mind when you talk about this. And this is purposely using inferior parts that just aren't going to last for very long at all, especially the functioning parts, the stuff that moves or where the most stress is. Anybody who's ever gotten a switchblade comb and spend a half an hour just opening it, closing and opening it and closing it, and then it breaks on the 15th time, that comb was most likely made through a process of contrived durability. Right. And it's a big problem. Part of the problem is that's another really good example of a type of item that is just are you going to take a switchblade comb into the switchblade comb repair shop? And if you did, how much would they charge you? Would it be any more than you paid for the three ping pong balls that you managed to get into, like a goldfish bowl where you won the switchblade come from? I don't think so. Right. And actually, we'll talk a little bit about some of the problems after this break here in a SEC. But just an early shout to the death of the repair person. Yeah, there are still some of those things, but try and find a TV repair shop near you. Well, yeah, try to find one that's open, too, is the other thing. You can still find them in any given large city, but it's not like it used to be where it was just like, oh, in any downtown, there's a locksmith, there's a tailor, there's a TV repaired person. Right. Or any kind of repair shop. Yeah. They are very few and far between, but that may be changing as we'll see. All right, let's take that break. Okay. Thank goodness. I had a lot of anxiety building up because I knew that break was looming. All right, Chuck, so I feel like we've kind of hit upon the idea that planned ops license can be problematic, but let's talk specifically about the problems it does produce. Right, yeah. Well, first of all, let's throw out some stats just so people know we're not just being angry. Okay. There was a study about four years ago in 2015 by a company in Germany, the Uko Institute. No e on the end of Institute, which is so german looking really it's institute otherwise, they found obsolescence was on the rise. Percentage of electrical and electronic products sold that were replaced because they broke within five years rose from 3.5% in 2004 to 8.3% in 2012. And then household appliances, which is one of the big gripes for people because those are high dollar items that you want to last, you know, 15 years. Large household appliances that had to be replaced within five years grew from 7% to 13%, like, doubled between 2004 and 2013. This is a really rare study. Most of the evidence about this stuff is anecdotal, right? Like, if you ever get your hands on an appliance repair guy who comes out, they will talk ad nauseam about how they literally don't make things like they used to and that the lifespan is like two to three years, five years if you're lucky. But prices are still really high like it used to be like, okay, I'm going to shell out some money for a really good fridge. And you could tell basically by the price of the fridge how long it was going to last. That ended a decade or two ago. But you can still pay a significant amount of money for a fridge that has a one year warranty and it's going to last three to five years even though you spent a significant amount of money. It's crazy. Yeah. Sometimes those appliance repair people get specific to I don't know if you've ever had this happen where they don't just say, like, oh, these things are junk now. They'll say, like, oh, you know what? They started doing this four years ago. They started making this part out of plastic. And I'd see the same repair over and over now. Right. It costs X amount for them to even come out and diagnose the problem, right. X amount to put in the new part. And then you also have to pay for the part. And depending on the appliance, I mean, like, if it's a 1500 or $2,000 refrigerator, $500 might be worth it rather than replacing it. But your one $500 refrigerator just became a $2,000 refrigerator, like 18 months later, right? Yeah. So that's part of the problem is the cost of repair when it is available can be a problem. But if your refrigerator does manage the last five years and they stop making replacement parts for it after four years, you're out of luck after five years because you can't repair it anymore. Like we talked about. Yeah, we had a dishwasher that broke a lot from the first year that we had it. And it got to that point where I kept paying to repair it and getting angrier. And Emily was eventually like, neither one of us are like, oh, just get the new one. She was like, Dude, we're spending more. Like, we could have bought the new one for what we're spending on repairs. Because you're being stubborn about saying this thing should last longer. But you get in that sort of conundrum where you're you like, don't know what the right thing to do is. Yeah. And eventually just about anybody is going to be like, fine, I've spent more money than it would have cost to replace. Yeah. Everybody's going to cry uncle eventually. I think it's just some people do it faster than others. Yeah. One of the other things with planned obsolescence is a company can. It's very rare that a company is just that company. Usually they're owned by some huge uber company that owns many of the companies that brand's rivals. Yeah. So if something gets a bad rep, you can just retire that brand and slap a new name on it. And it's the kind of the same thing. So you don't know anymore if it's a good or a bad brand. Right. And if you just have a couple of mega brands and they're all doing the same thing with their multiple brands that they all own, which is they're just all kind of making crud that lasts maybe three to five years, then that means that there's actually technically no bad brand. They're all bad brands because there's also no good brand either. And they just trade on these brand names that you were raised to hear from your parents or from repairman or whatever. That's a good brand, but this brand is not any good. And then you have, like, a bad experience with that brand, so you switch to another brand. But there's a pretty good chance that those two brands are still owned by the same company to whom it's all the same. You're still giving them the money. Ultimately, yeah. I'm sorry, this is filled with so many anecdotal stories, but I was TV shopping recently, and there was a TV that seemed like a really good deal, and it got good ratings on all the places. But then you start reading the customer experience, and a lot of people were saying, this has a banding issue where you can see lines on the screen when the screen is darker and stuff like that. Yeah. It was, like, ubiquitous. It was all over the place in these reviews, and every single one of them, the manufacturer would reply and say, boy, we're so sorry you had this experience. We've never heard of this. And it's certainly an outlier. So to get in touch with us and it's just so madding. It's like, no, man, it's like, 30% of these reviews say this and I say that. Sometimes when I have to call about something like that, I'm like, man, I know I'm not the only person this is happening to. It's all over the Internet. And they're like, well, we're not allowed to share stuff like that, sir. I have to say, in my experience, Chuck, one thing that has gotten better over the last couple of decades is customer service. Do you think? Yeah, I think for the average person. The companies want to please customers enough that they make the experience of dealing with them better than it was before. I think, boy, I'm going to have to think about that. Okay, think about it. Maybe some companies I've had the experience with, some that are so big that you get the feeling that they think it costs more to give a hoot, right? Yeah, I think that's definitely true out there. But there's so many like, I think smaller companies and tech startups come from this place of, like, we treat the customer really well. That's just what we do. It just seems to be more than there was before. Whereas before it seems like it was all big companies that you had to deal with, and they all had terrible customer service. I think the 90s were, like, the zenith of bad customer service, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe so. So there's a really important point that we're kind of dancing around here, right? Like, 13% of large appliances breaking within five years and having to be replaced. 8.3% of smaller electronics. They're all electronics. Those things being thrown out. It doesn't sound like that much, but when you actually translate into numbers, you're talking about millions of things of items, of products that are being thrown away because they broke. And the vast majority of those things are just like I said, thrown away. They're not recycled. I think in the United States, 6% of small appliances are recycled, which is a poultry amount. That means the rest just go into landfill. Yeah. And it's especially egregious, because not only is all this stuff getting tossed, but ewaste are some of the biggest offenders as far as environmental damage. So you've got 350,000,000 ink cartridges in the United States tossed in landfills every year, 348,000,000 of which aren't even empty, right? Because of the smart chips, you got refrigerators being thrown out. We did get a new refrigerator a couple of years ago, even though our old one that we bought used was still working. It was kind of a workhorse, but we sold it, and I was like, sold it really cheap. I was like, I bought this thing used. It lasted us ten years without problems. So someone's getting a good old workhorse here for a couple of $100. Nice. So we try and recycle our stuff or sell it or donate it these days, or at least set it on fire so it's not somebody else's problem. The good news is, though, I don't want this to all be poopoo is there are places in the world that are working on this and trying to change things. Not here in the United States, of course, but in Europe. They are working on creating some standards. There's a program called Ecodesign Directive, which would basically open up regulation of industry based on what they're trying to do is set new standards for durability and repairability and make it the law. Right. Yeah, the resource efficiency is what they're calling. Like, you have energy efficiency, like, how much water does that disproportionately use? This is how long does this thing last? Like, put it on the label, right? Exactly. Kind of like that Bernard London's idea. But rather than it being an expiration date to where you start to get charged for using it beyond that date, this is oh, well, this one's going to last five years. This one says it lasts seven. I'm going to go with the seven year one. Right. And because of the resources these things use, the seven year one is more efficient by definition than the five year one. At least you can make an informed choice as a consumer. Right here in the States, like I said, the Federal Government isn't doing anything. But when it comes to the States, there are some groups there's one movement called Right to Repair, started in the UK and is now catching hold. I think in 2018, there were 18 states that introduced Right to Repair bills, some of which should take hold, some of which haven't. But it basically requires companies to make it possible to repair their devices on their own or take it to a repair mom and pop repair shop and not have the warranty voided. Yeah, these laws are kind of different, but they have in common the idea that, OK, if you guys are going to build junk, at least make it easier for them to be repaired, like design them so a customer can repair them themselves or take them to an unauthorized repair shop. And those repair shops should be able to get their hands on parts that are as universal as possible. And you guys, the manufacturers should be supplying repair shops with repair manuals for them to reference, like, stop doing the opposite of everything we just said in order to make it hard to repair your stuff. Put out junk if you want, but let us repair it. That's kind of what the gist of those bills are. Yeah. And like we mentioned before, there is a segment of people that firmly believe that this is all great for industry, it's all great for the economy. It keeps an army of employees working at these cell phone companies and smartphone companies and designers and engineers because of that cycle. So that's one way to look at it. If you turn over goods really quickly, then that's a lot more stuff that needs to be manufactured and a lot more trucks driving things. And it might be an environmental nightmare, but those trucks are moving. Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, though, I do agree with the idea of saying, okay, we want to replace we want people to buy a new phone every three years. We have to give them a reason to buy a new phone every three years. One of the outcomes of that is that technological innovation that is happening as a result of that, there's multiple phone companies all scrambling for market share. So they're trying to out innovate one another and justify customers going and replacing their phones, but barely. Well, yeah, because there are other routes they can take. They can take the fast fashion clothing route and just do cosmetic updates to it. Or like the Easy Bake oven. It does the same thing, virtually the same thing. From the beginning of its invention till today, it was just mainly cosmetic changes that were made to it over time to keep up with the times. Just like fashion. If you do that with a phone or technology, then yeah, you're a slab, you're not doing your job. But ideally, if you release a new version of a phone every few years and it is just way better than the phone before that's. Okay. Yes, there's still the manufacturing problem in the waste associated with it that can be dealt with, but at least technology is being pushed forward. At least it's not just a total scam, you know what I mean? Yeah. There's also the idea of value engineering, like kind of walking that line as a manufacturer to not make junk, but also to make something affordable for a consumer. And if we built a card for the last 75 years, no one would be able to afford it because it would all be military grade. Right materials. Or the same thing with a phone. Like if this technological progress is happening so that a phone does actually become obsolete, whether planned or otherwise, in a couple of years, it makes more sense to build phones with cheaper parts that aren't going to last forever because then you have to replace a $500 phone every few years rather than a $5,000 phone every few years too. Right. The final point kind of is that the consumer does have a little bit of responsibility. It's a little bit all of our faults because you might want the new phone in that color when your other one works great. Yeah. There was a study by the same Uko institute that said a third of all replacement purchases for things like fridges and washing machines were motivated by just having a newer, better unit, even though their old one is still fine. Right. So like, you know, it's kind of on the consumer hit them with that. Last 2012, more than 60% of TVs that were replaced were still functioning mike Drop TVs. That's certainly a big one. Yeah. But I mean, the question is, did this, like, ravenous consumer society develop as a result of planned obsolescence or the planned obsolescence develop to keep up with this ravenous consumer society? That's the question we'll leave you with. That is a big question. Yeah. Love to answer that. We don't have the answer. Well, we try to figure it out. How about instead, let's listen to some listener mail from Chuck. Yeah. This is a very sweet email from a gentleman named Tom about his daughter. Hey, guys. Thanks for being a positive influence on my daughter Grace. She recently graduated from high school, will be attending the University of Minnesota Twin Cities College of Biological Sciences, majoring in cellular and organismal. I don't even know that word. Tom just made up a new word. Physiology. Is that a word? I guess I've never seen organizing more even. Oh, here. He says she's even making up new words. There you go. Because of your show's unique insight to learning, you fan the flames of desire for knowledge. You routinely reinforce how awesome and cool knowledge and education can be. I started listening later than she did to try and listen to an episode each way, and then tried to listen to an episode each way from work every day. I've heard you read listener mail from other parents that compliment how you always give us something to talk about with our kids. That is also true in our home. Recently, on a vacation to go skiing in Colorado, we stopped at a Pony express station in Nebraska. That's awesome. Your influence is beyond academics, too. She's involved in her community and articulates educated opinions for her passions. She will turn 18 this fall and is looking forward to voting. Many of the examples you give in your podcast have empowered her to take positions on social issues. I hope you know the importance and influence of your show, guys. We look forward to your show in Chicago. Nice. Yeah. So Tom and the family are coming from Rockford, Illinois, to Chicago. Thanks, Tom. And what was Tom's daughter's name again? Grace. Grace. Grace, thank you very much for making us look so good. Yeah. And good luck in school. Congrats. Good luck with that fake major. Yeah. We'll see you guys in Chicago. I guess that's it. If you want to get in touch with us, like Grace and Tom did, you can chuck on to Stuff You Should Know. Come and check out our social links. Sure. And then you could also just send us an email. And if you want to do that, send it to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is production of iheartradios how Stuff Works. For more podcasts podcast my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
https://podcasts.howstuf…nement-final.mp3	Solitary Confinement: Cruel and Unusual	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/solitary-confinement-cruel-and-unusual	In our continuing exploration of crime and punishment, we take a look at the practice of solitary confinement. To be sure, it has its place in prisons, sometimes for protection of the inmates themselves. However, leaving people in solitary for weeks, mont	In our continuing exploration of crime and punishment, we take a look at the practice of solitary confinement. To be sure, it has its place in prisons, sometimes for protection of the inmates themselves. However, leaving people in solitary for weeks, mont	Tue, 21 Mar 2017 07:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=21, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=80, tm_isdst=0)	45225364	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 podcasts. Just to share the sheer joy of podcast listening. That's right. It's tr why pod side still in nascent industry. A lot of people don't know what podcasts are, and it helps everybody out if you would go out and just say, hey, family member who I see it 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 housetopworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry. This is stuff you should know. Crime and Punishment Part 28 yeah. A lot of stuff on this, and I thought we got more coming. I keep saying we're done, but we're not done. No, because while we touched on solitary confinement in our prisons episode, which was a great one. Was it? Have you gone back and listened recently, or you just making assumptions? No, I just remember it being a good one. Okay. It stands out as one of our good ones. This is a little more robust look at solitary confinement and the ins and outs. Mostly outs, don't you think? Yes. And not just me. There's, like, a whole growing body of people who are kind of screaming their heads off, I guess. Yeah. Saying, like, hey, put a person in a tiny room with no interaction or stimulation for 23 hours a day. Not good for you as a human. Right. And a lot of people are going so far as to say this constitutes cruel and inhuman punishment. Yeah. It's kind of like Zukosis for humans. Right. We talked about that in our Zoos episode. Yeah. Where the animal goes insane. Yeah. What it's not is Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, throwing the baseball against the wall. They probably do that for, like, a half hour. No, they wouldn't give you a baseball. No, that's true. There's nothing funny or cute about it. Right. All right, shall we? Yeah, let's. So, solitary, it is a huge, controversial thing right now because a lot of proponents say it's extremely necessary and that this is just the way that you're supposed to punish people or that it's just needed even without punishment or other people say, no, this is cruel and inhuman, like we said. Regardless of how you slice it, it's actually an American product. It's an American export. It's being used all over the world right now. Yeah. And depending on where you are and what prison you're in, they might call it something else. In this article, the house of Works article. They call it, like, lockdown, restrictive housing, segregation, isolation. But I saw a lot more creative names that prisons used to try to shine it up a bit as something other than what it is. Right. And what it is, no matter what you call it, is confining a prisoner to a relatively small cell. I saw usually eight x ten or less, and I also saw that frequently compared to a horse stable, in which comparison, the prison cell actually comes out smaller of the two, and you can find that person. This is the key. You can find that person to that small selfer between 23 and 24 hours a day, every day. Yeah. Well, I think 22 to 20, like some people never leave. It depends on the day. Okay, I got it. So in some cases, you'll be confined like that for 23 hours a day, and then 1 hour a day, you get out to exercise and shower. Shower, yeah. But maybe that's just on weekdays. Right. So weekends you would be in there for 48 straight hours. Right. Or maybe longer. If the guard doesn't like you or is in a bad mood, they might just not let you out that day. Right. And we don't want to paint corrections officers, as the movies do a good enough job of demonizing them. Yeah. And if you look into some of the people who are being held in solitary, some of the people who started solitary or have stayed in their longest, you kind of understand why someone would want to keep them as far away from people as possible. So it's a complex issue. It's not cut and dry. There's not an obvious villain in this story and an obvious victim in this story. Yeah. So, like I was saying, we don't want to demonize them because it's happened enough in media and certainly films. Tom Hanks aside, I guess in the Green Mile he can't help but be delightful. Well, he was actually kind of I was about to say road to prediction. He was a good guy. He was an antihero, though. Yeah, a bit of an antihero. But anyway, we're not going to do that. But that does still happen. That's why prison reform is still a thing, because there still is a lot of abuse that happens in certain prisons and among certain prison guards and correctional officers. So it's certainly not something that's been solved. I just like to see away a little bit, because I know that we have prison guards that listen to our show. Sure. And Chuck, we should say the whole point of solitary is to limit human contact as much as possible. Yes. So even though you are maybe interacting with a guard here or there, it's when they slide your meal in three times a day. Sure. And that's it. You don't see people. You exercise alone. Everything you're doing is alone. That's the point. That's why they call it solitary confinement. It is. So there's a couple of types of segregation that can happen. One's called disciplinary segregation that is pretty obvious. You have done something that has run afoul of the prison rules, which can range from legitimate things like you start a fight or you attack another inmate what, caught with an extra honey bun? Maybe so. Or you sold something to a little more petty things. And that's where solitary gets real, Hanky. Like, maybe you talk back to a guard, and they didn't like hearing that, so they're like, all right, you go to the hole for 30 days, right. Or maybe somebody snitched on you and you were framed. Clear and simple. Right. So that's disciplinary segregation. There's also administrative segregation. And this is you might be put in there if, let's say, you're a sex offender who notoriously have a rough time in prison, or you're a gang member who has started some trouble, and basically they're trying to protect the prisoner from harm by isolating them from the population. Yeah. But whether they want to stay in the regular population or not, that decision is made for them. Right. And that's just one type of administrative you can also be put in if the regular cells are full and they're just full up. So sorry, you got to go to solitary. Yeah. With overcrowding, that's obviously a big deal. Pretrial, you can go in if you're not even convicted of a crime yet. This might be put in solitary. There should be a constitutional amendment that prevents that. Yeah, I read the story. Actually, I heard it on NPR this weekend, which is what made me think of this thing. There's a documentary on Spike TV called The Caliph Browser Story. Is that the kid who stole the backpack? Yes. Did you hear that? No, I just knew about it while it was going on. Yeah. This guy, Khalif Browder, when he was I think he was 16 at the time, stole a backpack from a party. He and his buddy get I don't know if they're in a car, got pulled over, but they get arrested. They let the one guy go. But Khalif Browder had a prior charge, so they kept him for more than three years in the Rikers Island jail complex. And a lot of that was in solitary confinement confinement. And this is before, like, ultimately the charges were dropped. He wasn't even convicted of a crime. Right. And he was in solitary for three years. He finally gets out. He committed suicide less than a year after. And it's just one of the more egregious and sad examples of just how broken the system can be here in the United States. Right. Another way that it's being used, that's just as egregious as pretrial, in my opinion, is to house the mentally ill. After the 80s, when Reagan closed down the massive institutions that had become, like, huge places of abuse of the mentally ill, in favor of more community servicing of mental health, but then didn't fund the communities so that the mentally ill just ended up on the street. Right. Prison became the new institutions for housing mentally ill people. Well, apparently a favorite place to actually house the mentally ill in prison is in solitary confinement. And as we'll see, ostensibly, just being put in solitary confinement, if you have a completely healthy mind, is really bad for your mental state. If you're already mentally ill or predisposed of mental illness, it can be a death sentence for you. Yeah. And in the United States, they don't have exact numbers because it's just states vary in what they consider confinement. Solitary confinement. Not a lot of prisons want to participate in studies. There's no reporting, not very much. But I have the impression, Chuck, that you could be like a congressperson saying, like, I want to tour your solitary wing, and you would get turned down maybe there's, like, that level of self administration by the Bureau of Corrections inside prisons. Yeah. So the numbers vary, but basically, most people say up to 100,000 inmates in the United States. And again, not all of these are in prison. Some of them are in jail. Some of them are in temporary immigrant housing, are kept in isolation, and you don't go before a court to get put in the hole. A prison official will dictate this. There is no recourse for a prisoner. They call the shots. There's no oversight. Can be indefinite. You can't call your attorney and say, hey, I'm in solitary and I didn't do anything. All I did is talk back. I've been in here for six months because the guard has a problem with me. There's nothing that can be done, basically. No. So that makes it an extra judicial punishment with no oversight from judges or juries, which that's not good. And it's really widespread, not just in the United States, but around the world now. Yeah. Well, let's take a break, and we'll come back and talk a little bit about how this all got started right after this. So, Chuck, I said earlier that this is an American invention, right? Yeah, it's actually an American Quaker invention. The Society of Friends came up with the idea of solitary confinement first, and I feel like we talked about this in the prison episode, too. The whole idea was that at the time, you might be put to labor or work or just left to hang around your fellow inmates in jail. And the idea behind solitary originally that the Quakers came up with was that you should be given time to reflect on your punishment and quiet solitude. And the hope was that eventually you would become penitent and be redeemed. And that's where the word penitentiary came from to describe prisons. That's right. This is the late 18th century when they came up with the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, which sounds lovely. It does. Sound kind of like a nice place to be. I bet it wasn't. Flash forward a bit to the kind of early third of the 18 1829 eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. They said. You know what? We're going to try experimenting with how we deal with prisoners. We're going to try this thing called lockdown. They found that it didn't work very well. These inmates were socially dysfunctional. A lot of them killed themselves. And so in 1829, they abandoned it and said, this is not a good idea. Yes. Within the first 40 years of it being invented, they're like, no, we shouldn't be doing this to people. That's right. And they went in favor of the Auburn State Prison in upstate New York's. Method of putting people the hard labor. That became what you did when you got sent to prison rather than put into solitary. Right. And they kept solitary around. Like it didn't go away entirely. Basically, every prison had a hole. You get thrown in the hole, but you get thrown in the hole for days or weeks or something like that to punish you for something you did in the prison. Yeah. And they still say, like, experts still say it can be a useful tool in prison if you do put someone in there for three to five days. Right. Or I think the UN says no more than two weeks, 15 days, I think is what they came up with. Yeah. So the point is not to say, like, I'm sure there are tons of people that say you shouldn't do it at all. Right. But experts say that it can be a deterrent for poor behavior or whatever in prison. But people being in there for months and years is the issue at hand. Right. So it was used sparingly, but it was still around. Throughout the most of the 20th century, alcatraz famously had D block, which was like a solitary block. But then on October 22, three, everything changed. And the current incarnation of the use of solitary confinement was born on that day at Marion Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois. So there were two different incidents where prison guards were killed that day? Yes. Not two separate things. Right. Yeah. And the warden put the prison on lockdown and just kept it there. And what the warden basically invented in retaliation for these two murders on the state was what's now known as a supermax prison. Yes. It's where all of the prisoners are kept ultimately in isolation for 23 to 24 hours a day throughout the prison. And it's like a prison within a prison. Each inmate is in their own individual prison within the larger prison. That's called super max prison. Yeah. And we talked about those a lot in the prisons episode. These became not the new standard because not all prisons are supermarkets. But they became more widespread, for sure, through the 90s, partially because of Bill Clinton. In 1094, he signed the very famous crime bill, which, among other things, I know, was famously known as the Three Strikes Bill. Well, yeah. That's what created the exploding prison population in large part. Yeah. And Clinton, he still defends this as going a long way to alleviate crime. Even, like during this most recent election, he was being called out for it and saying, like, this was a good thing, and the detractors still say, no. This is what started, in a big way, incarceration as a business model in this country. Yeah. And apparently the US. Now has 25% of the global prison population, but only 5% of the global population as a whole. Yeah. That's really disproportionate. And apparently we're second, at least on paper, to Seychelles for the percentage of people in prison. Every 716 of every 100,000 people in the US. Is imprisoned, and in the Seychelles, it's 799 of every 100,000. But Seychelles has a population of 92,000. So that kind of skews it. They think that the largest prison state really is North Korea, that it has a larger proportion of its population in prison, the US. So technically, the US. Would be number three, but we would just be trailing North Korea. It's not something you want to trail. It's not a country that you want to be super close to as far as, like, prison population percentages. No. So, like we said before, there are even experts that say that solitary confinement can have a place in prison as a deterrent for bad behavior. And as I mentioned earlier, two separate things here. Bad behavior is one, but mentally ill, we just don't have enough space. All these other reasons, truly abhorrent ones. But like I said, deterrent is a big one. There is a lot of legitimacy to protecting prisoners from fellow prisoners if they're at high risk for being injured or killed. That's legit, obviously, if they're a danger, have attacked guards or other inmates, then a need for separation. Like, you can make a case there for sure. If they're prone to escape. Yeah. Maybe they need their own little room. I mean, that's one of the big ones for proponents of supermax prisons, that it's a prison within a prison. They have to get out of that first prison, and then they're still in the other prison. Just makes it much more difficult to get out. Yeah. I mean, you escape and you go on and commit more crimes. Murder someone while you're on the lamb. You can definitely make an argument that keeping people like that, these repeat offenders or repeat escapee offenders in solitary. So those are some of the arguments for yeah. And then I don't know if you said it already, but having that extra way to punish someone who's already in prison is another reason proponents say you need to have this as a tool to kind of maintain order. Like if you legitimately run afoul of rules. Right, exactly. Because if you kill another inmate, ostensibly, you're going to go through trial again, but you could be executed for that. And that would be different than just being in prison. But if you weren't, then it's basically like, oh, you're in prison for life already, or we're going to add another life sentence on to that. Right. There's only so much you can do to someone who's imprisoned short of executing them. Right. And the solitary confinement proponents say, provides that extra layer. Right. That deterrent. Right. And the reason it provides that extra deterrent, though, is because of the impact it has been shown to have on the mind of inmates. Yes. And there's a few problems with this. Before we get into it, we should say there are very little studies. And one of the reasons why there are so few studies is because there is so little access to prisoners in solitary confinement by researchers. It's just not allowed. They're just kept out. Yes, I saw a lot of these studies were longitudinal studies about isolation of the elderly and like, the effect it can have on them. Well, there's a big worry. I've seen that's, like, the next health crisis is going to be loneliness and disconnectedness. Wow. But yeah, that's where they've gotten a lot of the data. Because the prisoners are unavailable for study, they're in solitary. In that same vein, possibly disingenuously. The ones that have been able to be interviewed say they've gotten out of prison and now they're available to be interviewed. Right. The proponents of solitary confinement say that the prisoners are just telling researchers what they think they want to hear. Right. Or they're really playing up their story or whatever. But what they found is that there seems to be a basis for the idea that there are demonstrably negative impacts on mental health that are possibly permanent and irreversible. That comes from staying in solitary confinement for prolonged time. Yeah. I mean, there have been some studies. There was one on the Pelican Bay prison in California, and it said people in solitary for long periods suffer from depression, anxiety, apathy, hallucinations, panic attacks, paranoia this is a big one. Hypersensitivity to external stimuli, basically sound and light. Right. Sometimes they're kept in the dark, sometimes the light never goes off. So they have no sense of no circadian rhythm of day or night. Which makes sleep extraordinarily difficult too. Apparently, prisoners who are in solitary will basically stay in bed all day and then they don't sleep much at night. Right. But they're not really getting good sleep during the day either. So it's not like the circadian rhythm has flip flopped. It's been spread out over the day rather than which prevents them from getting actually real rest. Yeah, because they're constantly at rest. What else? Difficulties thinking, concentration, memory. They become angry and violent. They could suffer from dizziness, heart palpitations, perspiration. Basically, like we were saying, Zukosis, like you're trapped in this little box. And it's not like well, you can just read all day and educate yourself or something or paint. Well, in cases where they are, yes. Because a lot of times they're not given those things. Right. Most times you're not allowed any form of stimulation or entertainment. So in plenty of cases, you are, like, you're still allowed, say, books or something like that. But apparently one of the things you run into very quickly in solitary is you lose your taste for reading, even though that's all you have to do because you can't remember what you read a few pages previously. Right. So you're having so many problems with your memory that you're not able to retain enough of what you're reading to make a book worthwhile. Right. So you just stop reading after a while. Wow. So work could this lead in a physical sense? They have done studies, and they show that if you're in solitary for extended periods, you have a higher rate of self mutilation and suicide. They did one five year study from 99 to 2004 in California, I think, in their whole prison system. And almost 50% of all inmate suicides were committed by those in isolation. And see, that's a tough thing for someone who doesn't believe that isolation is a real problem. That's a tough one for them to just get rid of. Right. Because the other stuff, you can say, well, that's all self reporting by a prisoner in solitary. So maybe they're just kind of making it up or playing it up. If they're mutilating themselves, one guy mutilated his own genitalia, another person blinded himself, and then you have all of these completed or attempted suicides. Those are like, hard numbers that you just can't ignore that you would think people otherwise wouldn't do that if they weren't in solitary, or else the solitary population wouldn't represent such a high proportion of suicides and attempted suicides in the prison. Yeah. They've also done studies for post prison. In 2007, at University of Washington, they said prisoners released directly from supermax into the community committed crime sooner than prisoners who had been transferred, even if only for a few months before release to a general prison population. Yes, I saw that, too. And I think the basis of that is that you don't have social support or social stimulation from other people. Right? Yeah. Even if it's something you don't really like. If you're interacting with them, you're getting something from interacting with them. Right. Yeah. And one of the problems that you run into in solitary, apparently, is you start to focus on stuff. Very small things can become the basis of, like, raging anger and psychosis and because there's nobody there to tell you, like, this is not that big of a deal. Right. Or, man, just let it go. There's no one there to give you that social support to just let you talk you off the ledge. Yes, exactly. So the smallest thing can become something of immense importance. And if it clicks on something like your rage, you're going to spend the indefinite time you're in solitary thinking about that one thing in stewing. Like, think about when you stew over something. Right? Yeah. And just how it gets harder and harder to let go the more you stew. You're just making that neural pathway stronger and stronger. Thinking about it. Imagine having nothing but that to think about for years. Apparently, it's a really bad side effect of solitary, and that comes from not having that social interaction with people to say, you're being weird. Well, this is just me talking, but I imagine it doesn't increase your sense of empathy because you gain empathy by interacting with people. So if you're released directly into the public at large after being in Supermax, you just don't have that normal day to day interaction with people. So you may be more likely to commit a crime. Yeah. Because you don't care about other people. It's a pretty reasonable explanation to me. And then we'll take a break here in a second. But another big impact is simply the financial burden that taxpayers pay. And I went through this one paper, academic paper, on the cost, and it really varies all over the place, but I'll just say 100% of the time, it costs a lot more money to house someone in solitary or supermax than a regular prison population. Yeah, I mean, I've seen it kind of all over the map. Our article says $58,000 a year for regular and 78 grand per year. It's kind of all over the place. But those are pretty in line. It's always a lot more money. Right, but I mean, how would you even keep track of that if different prisons have different definitions for solitary confinement? At the very least, we need to get this stuff standardized. It's step one. Yeah. All right, let's take our final break and we'll come back and talk a little bit more about the rest of the world. And shall we touch on the Angola Three case? Yeah. All right. So you said this is an American export. It does happen all over the world, but there are countries, specifically England and some other European countries, that have kind of seen the light in a way of reform. They rarely use it in England anymore. In the 1980s, they started kind of thinking about it and saying, you know what? Maybe the thing to do is incentivize our most dangerous prisoners, give them a little bit more control, and give them incentives for good behavior rather than just the threat of punishment for bad behavior. And they found that it worked. There was much less violence when they were housed in units of ten people, rather than being in those individual cells where they could earn privileges, like more contact with other people, more phone calls, more visits. Right. They said the results have been impressive. The use of long term isolation in england is now negligible. So they found good results. And then it just seems like more and more states are enacting things like juveniles should never be in isolation. Yeah. I think New York yeah. New York did. I think just in the last couple of years. Even I think Obama banned it in those two in federal prison as well. The mentally ill and the juveniles can't be people under 21 can't be kept in solitary because apparently if it is having these pronounced effects on the brain. It would have even larger effects on the developing brain of a juvenile. Absolutely. So that would be really bad. Yes, that was the case I was talking about before with the NPR story. Right? That kid, I think he was 16 at the time, 17 when it started the incarceration, and he was still developing. He said at the end, he said he was 21. He felt like he was 40. And then, like I said, he killed himself within a year after he got out. Really sad. And again, this is not some hardened criminal. He was never convicted of a crime. Right. He was in pretrial holding. Right. Is that clear? Who else? This Juan Mendez. He's a UN. I've never heard of this title. UN special Rapport Tour. Yeah. Have you heard of that? Fancy. Yeah. What is that? It's like a special investigator. They're like, we want to know about this, so we're going to ask you to go out and find out everything you can and give us a report. Okay. I think it's reporter in French so UN. He presented a report in 2016, just last year to the General Assembly that basically said there's a trend towards reform all over the world when it comes to solitary, and the writing is kind of on the wall that it's just making things worse. Yeah. The thing is, though, is there's a lot of people who still say, especially inside Bureaus of Corrections that say, no, you're all being played for fools. This is not a problem, and it's very useful. And there was actually a study by the Colorado Bureau of Corrections, department of Corrections, one of the two, they funded it. One of the researchers carried it out, and it found that the mental health of inmates can actually improve in solitary confinement. And everyone was like, isn't it strange that this is the only study that has ever found anything like that? It was funded by the Bureau of Prisons in Colorado, and the methodology has been attacked. It's a very controversial study. But what gets me is that critics of the study have used the same criticism that critics of the studies that show solitary confinement is problematic used, which is they said that the prisoners were just telling the researchers what they think they wanted to hear, which is like, yeah, I'm doing great. I've actually thought about how bad my crime was, so you could probably let me out. Now. Right. That study, I didn't read the study, but from what I understand, there's flaws to it and it's the only one that came up with that. You'd think that if the Bureau of Corrections had come up with something substantial, every state prison system would be running the same tests to find out and to back up their case. Right. You know who's really big on this is David Simon, the guy who created The Wire. You know what we should finish? I don't know if it will be the last one, but we should totally do one on private prisons. Yeah, we touched on that a little bit in prisons, but that deserves its own show. I agreed. That's sort of one of his big things. He's, I guess what you call it, a passion project now he's super smart guy. Like hearing an interview with him is really interesting, but yeah, kind of one of the things he's dedicating his work to now is exposing these for profit prisons and incarceration as an industry in the United States. He just testified in front of Congress recently, right? Oh really? I think so. It wouldn't surprise me. Should we talk about the Angola Three case a little bit? Yes, please. So our House of Works article starts with an intro about a man named Albert Wood Fox and he was one of the infamous Angola Three from Angola Louisiana State Prison, which is known as the Bloodiest Prison in the south. And originally, these three men albert Wood, Fox, Herman Wallace, and Robert King were sent to prison for armed robbery. And once they got in there, they started a Black Panther chapter within prison and tried to expose some of the atrocities going on in prison, how they were treated, what was going on with the guards. And that was not a popular move to say the least. Right. So they did things like hunger strikes, work strikes, started to get a lot of attention in the calling for investigations. Angola said, you guys are going in solitary forever. Yeah, apparently that's something that is commonly used for, as well as to squash dissent or criticism of the prison system or the prison rules. Yeah, it's pretty awful. It is. So Albert Woodfox, who was kind of the focus of this article that I read, he was in prison in solitary for 45 years. And they're not positive, but they think that he is the person who was in solitary confinement the longest in the United States. Right. 45 years, dude. I know. The fact that he's out and walking talking is pretty insane. There's another one of his buddies, or at least fellow inmates, is still in lockdown in Angola and has been since, I think the 80s. Right. Yeah. This wasn't one of the Angola Three, but it was a guy named George Gibson and he is in Angola. He's been in lockdown since 1982. Yeah, not like eight x ten is big. Right. These were six by nine foot cells. And here's the thing. If you look at the evidence, there's a lot of documentaries. In very famous cases, they were essentially put in lockdown to squash this descent. But what they were officially put in for was for killing a prison guard. But according to most people, that did not happen. It was not them. There were so many inconsistencies. There were obfuscations, there were missteps. There was a bloody print at the murder scene that didn't match any of these guys. They never compared that bloody handprint to or was it a handprint or a footprint? It's a print. It's just a handprint. Then they never compare that to any of the other prisoners and that had access to potentially kill this guard. And there were very few people that even could have done this. It's not like it was the whole prison population. There was DNA evidence that could have freed them that was conveniently lost by prison officials. They had plenty of alibi witnesses that had nothing to gain, like, they didn't get in exchange for anything like good behavior to get more free time. Right. They said these guys weren't anywhere near the murder scene at the time. These other prisoners and their main witness, Hezekiah Brown, basically, in retrospect, everyone says this guy lied under oath so he could get more privileges. He was a serial rapist serving life, and he agreed to testify in exchange for more cigarettes, birthday cakes, TV time. I know the birthday cake was kind of an interesting perk. And the warden, later on, when he was reminiscing in this documentary, the warden of the prison said hezekiah was one of these guys where you could put words in his mouth. And so there were essentially enough doubt to where the family members of the guard that was killed said, we don't think these guys did it, and we want to find out who did it. And eventually, they were all freed for different reasons. One of them, Herman, was freed because despite all this misconduct in the investigation in the trial and constitutional violations and racism, he was eventually freed because they excluded women from one of his trials, which is a violation of the 14th Amendment, which was interesting. And he died three days after he got out. Cancer. I know. That's awful. Very tragic. Albert was finally released. I'm sorry. Albert was not released because of continued practicing of Black Pantherism, they called it. That's not even a real thing. You can't make that up. You can't keep somebody in there for the what? Yeah. And then finally, in 2016, after 43 years and ten months, I think we said 45 years, albert was released from isolation and from prison. I'm sure there's a movie in the works about these guys. But again, there was no transition process. Right? He was just in solitary confinement one day, and then the next day, he's out of prison. Not just out of solitary out of prison. And from the research I've run across, if you are in solitary, you are more likely to commit a crime. You are less able to identify with other people. And if the point of prison is to rehabilitate people, or at the very least, to not release them until they're ready to be rejoined society yeah. Then solitary confinement is the antithesis of that. Right. You're stripping someone of their humanity and their ability to relate to humanity on a physiological, neurological level. So it runs contrary to our ideas of prisons. Yeah. And if you're thinking, what about the 8th Amendment cruel and unusual punishment? It seems like in many cases, like an open and shut kind of thing. But there's never been a ruling on that. No, the court said, not today. I'm not in the mood today. Maybe some other day. Because after all, who cares about the inmates, right? They're inmates. They're criminals. Right. If you want to know more about inmates and criminals in solitary confinement, you can type those words in the search bar@housetofworks.com. Since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. All right, a quick correction first. It's called World Geography with Josh part Two. I get it wrong a lot. I need to just sit there and check out maps. Well, I'm the worst at world geography. You love maps. I do love maps, which is weird, I think. I don't talk about it because I know I'm not good at it. I got you. So in our family episode, I think you said, what were the two countries? Botswana and Ethiopia. Yeah, we're neighbors. They're not a few thousand miles apart. There's a couple thousand, not a few thousand. All right, so we like the correct things we get wrong. And another thing we got wrong in Jess was when we did our listener mail from Australia with the Ozzy lingo. Yeah. Surely the Australians got that we were joking, right? I don't think so. Wow. We got a lot of response saying, guys, you got it so wrong. Yes. They kind of exasperated, like, how did you get it this wrong? We were just kidding around. Yeah, we knew we were wrong on that stuff. Where's that famous Australian sense of humor? But I'm going to read this one from Matt just because it's the first one that came up on my phone. I didn't have one prepared. Oh, you're like the assassin. And no country for old men. It's all about fake. What a great movie. Yeah. So officially, matt says Maca is McDonald's. Didn't know that. That's not true. He said it rhymes with packers. Green Bay Packers. So Mackers. I guess bottle o is where you buy alcohol. It's wrong. Servo chuck, you got it right. It was a petrol station. Okay, maybe that one. Derries or cigarettes rental curries. Also called darts or cancer sticks. Wrong. Pistons. Drunk. We know that. I don't know what you said in jest I thought your bit was really funny. It wasn't that funny. I wasn't very happy with myself. It could have been way funnier. I thought it was good. Although he says pissed is drunk enough to not drive. I don't know what that means in Australia. I know where that line is. Could you beer off the road? You're just in the outback. As long as you have some water in your trunk, you're fine. A stubby is a beer. It's specifically a 375 milliliter bottle of beer. 375? It's a pint. Okay, why didn't you just call it a pint? He said it's also a style of tradesmen work shorts with a pocket big enough to hold a bottle of beer. We call those cargo shorts or beer shorts. A slab is a case of beer, which is 24 VB plus Stubbies means from Victoria. Like me. Victoria bitter beer is VB. Fosters also is probably Victorian from the Carlton United Breweries. Carlton as is Melbourne Brewery. Fact the first ever artificial ice created was to make beer cold in Australia. What interesting, and he says, by the way, there's a lot of Aussie slang that is not relevant in travel books. I read them myself and laugh as nobody in Australia talks that way. It's a big fat joke that every Aussie convinces foreigners. Danger is gert. G-U-R-T. You're clear of gert, drop bears, hoop, snakes and yowies. I didn't even know what's going on. Now I think a hoop snake. That's another name for hookworm. Okay, what's the drop bear? The drop bear is your fecal material containing hookworm, eggs and yowies. That's what you say when you drop a hoop there for getting a famous poop slang fight, right? Boy, I could see how this could be an endless cycle of emails forever and ever. Let's keep it going. Kind of like a hookworm lifecycle. The above written is true today, as your contributor wrote. No trademarks involved. As far as I know, stubby work shorts origin might be contested. And that is from Matt. Thanks, Matt. What does Matt mean? In Australia, that's how you wipe your feet before you enter a dwelling. Okay, thanks, Matt. If you want to get in touch with us, like Matt did, you can tweet to us at SYSK podcast. I'm also at Josh Clark check me out. You can hang out with Chuck on Facebook or Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And at Stuff you should know, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@househopworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer school's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime four days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. 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 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."
440786a2-53a3-11e8-bdec-8b20eb472530	The Disturbing Disappearance of Tara Calico	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/the-disturbing-disappearance-of-tara-calico	When Tara Calico mysteriously vanished in 1988, suspected to be the victim of foul play, her case may have gotten lost with the countless other missing person cases in the US, were it not for the discovery of an alarming Polaroid photo in a parking lot 1500 miles away.	When Tara Calico mysteriously vanished in 1988, suspected to be the victim of foul play, her case may have gotten lost with the countless other missing person cases in the US, were it not for the discovery of an alarming Polaroid photo in a parking lot 1500 miles away.	Thu, 03 Sep 2020 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=3, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=247, tm_isdst=0)	39010733	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. So I was in the at and T store for an upgrade. I left with at and T's best deal on a smartphone and a choice of plan. But on my way out, here comes this new guy, a non carrier phone and a plan that raised eyebrows. I felt for him when I tell you we left the store grinning from ear to ear with the same deal. I love watching people prosper. You feel me? That's when I learned that whether you joined today or have been with at and T for years, they'll have the same best deals for everyone on every smartphone. Eligible plan required. Offers vary by device. Restrictions may apply. See att. Comdealsfordetails hey, everybody. I don't know if you've heard, but we have a book coming out 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 Nels Parker, who's amazing and is illustrated amazingly by our illustrator Carly Monardo. And it's just an all around 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 pre order 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. There's charles W. Scoop Bryant. And this is stuff you should know. One of our infrequent true crime editions, So if you don't like true crime, probably shouldn't listen to this one because it's about true crime that goes along with it and big time trigger warnings on this one. If you have family members who have been sexually assaulted or kidnapped or if you have children that you care about at all and they're even safe in your home, this might be pretty upsetting for you, as it was for me. Yeah, it's a very sad case just in and of itself. We're talking about the disappearance of a girl who was 19 at the time. Her name was Tara Calico, and she disappeared in New Mexico from the area where she lived. And just the fact that she's never been found, like, she basically vanished almost without a trace, that's just sad enough. And the more you dig into the story, it's very sad. But it also has some, like, this extra couple of layers that your average true crime, missing person, probably murdered person story goes, that make this case, like, one of the most fascinating recent true crime cases that I can think of. Yes, I know. You didn't like this one at all? No, it was pretty upsetting. So you feel like you can make it through this one? I think so. It should be a laugh riot, right? As usual. So, Chuck, let's just kind of give some background on this case for everybody who's not familiar. Okay? Yeah. Here's the deal. Ed helped us put this together, and he takes great pains to point out quite a few times that we don't know exactly all the facts, but we know what we know from accounts from Tara's mom and a little bit from some other family members and a little bit from the case files, although I don't think all of those are available still. But I don't know. I saw otherwise that's the problem with true crime is, like, especially in the age of the Internet, stuff just gets piled on with different weird facts that may or may not be true and down to, like, are the case files still intact? That kind of thing. But, yeah, I think your larger point is we don't exactly know all of the details. Right? Yeah. What we do know is that in 1988 and September 20, she went for a bike ride. She was athletic and took these very long bike rides, anywhere from 15 to 30 something miles on a regular basis. She was 19 years old, a smart young woman, and a student at University of New Mexico, and was living in a place called, I guess, belen, New Mexico. B-E-L-E-N-I think it's Belen. Belen? I think so. Yeah. I think I heard somebody say it like that. Okay. And she left at 930 for this bike ride and was last seen at 1145 on highway 47, which is kind of the standard route that she usually took, apparently. Yes. And there are just a couple of other details about Taro. You said she was an intelligent person. I believe she was a sophomore in college, and she was studying psychology or psychiatry, one or two. I don't think she decided yet. But she was in the field of psychology, and she was a bank teller, too. And when she headed out that day, it's very widely reported that she had told her mom, if I'm not back by noon, come looking for me. I saw that mostly reported that she had said it kind of playfully, jokingly, ingest, that kind of thing. Not that she had set out that day knowing that she was going to meet her grim fate, but that she had a walkman with her, too, and that she was playing Boston. And I can only assume because she was out for a bike ride that she was listening to Boston's self titled debut album, which has don't look back in it, which would be excellent for riding your bike to you in 1988. Maybe so. Or it could have been the new one. It could have been. There's several that they released afterward. But boston. She's listening to Boston. Just remember that. That's right. And she was on her mom's bike, her Huffy bike, and she had a white Tshirt, first National Bank of Belen, and white shorts, green stripes, white socks, tennis shoes, a butterfly ring with a diamond insert, amethyst stone ring, and then earrings, a half inch, half inch loop earrings. Yup. And she was last seen chuck, from what I understand, on her way back from her bike ride along highway 47, I think like 11:45 A.m. Or something like that. And then that was it. Like she was just riding along, listening to her headphones last time she was seen. The only other detail that adds, like, a very cryptic twist to that last sighting is that she was reported being followed, it looks like, by an old tiny truck, like one from, like, the fifties, I think, a Ford truck, like some weird color, like a dirty gray or something like that. Yeah. And the cops and there'll be a few different people working on this case, as is usually the case when it's missing persons, different agencies get involved. But in this case, Valencia County Sheriff Romero his name is Lawrence Romero he said that they found some bicycle tracks about 4 miles south of where she lived, and it looked like to them that the bicycle had been dragged off the side of the road and then back, and they immediately thought that was pretty suspicious. And then when you put it together with the details of this pickup truck, then it was all of a sudden a pretty serious case to them. Right. Yeah. I mean, because if you can't find a girl, she doesn't show up at home when she says she's going to, and she makes that joking, cryptic thing, of course it's going to terrify her mom. And it did terrify her mom. Her mom's name was Patty Dole, and Patty was married to John Dole. And through John, Tara had two stepsiblings, Chris, her brother, and her sister step sister Michelle. And just immediately, Patty was very worried when Tara didn't show up at home. And then once the evidence started coming and she got increasingly worried, and probably the most tragic figure in this entire story is Patty, because from the moment, like, she started to get worried till the day she died in 2006, she was worried. She was overweight by this. Like, it just took her over and consumed her. But one of the things to her credit, for sure is we'll see is that she didn't just, like, collapse and buckle and give in, which she would have it would have been very understandable had she done that. She instead channeled a lot of that fright and worry and concern into action and spent most of the rest of her life working tirelessly, trying to figure out what happened to her daughter, find some evidence, bring her home. I don't think she ever gave up the idea that Tara might still be out there or at the very least, bring her killers to justice. Yeah, I'm going to go with Tara for the most tragic figure in the story, but it was very sad what happened with her mom. She died in 2006, never getting any answers. Her biological father died in 2002. Her stepfather, like anyone, still holds out hope, although he readily admits this is from 1988, and the chances are almost zero that anything is ever going to come to fruition about this. But she did have family that was looking out for her basically the rest of their lives. Yeah, for sure. And her sister Michelle is still carrying that on. Like, after Patty died in 2006, michelle kind of took over Patty's role of just trying to figure out what happened, trying to keep the story and the case in the press. And actually, while she was alive, patty and her husband John managed to get deputized by the Valencia County Sheriffs. So they were actually allowed to carry guns. They were allowed to contact other law enforcement agencies on behalf of the Valencia County Sheriff's Department to investigate the case. That's the kind of, like, the level of dedication that they went to, which is pretty cool. That's how they channeled that. Yeah. The sweet late 80s when you needed to be deputized to carry a gun. Right? Exactly. Because when I read that, I was like, it really took that back then. Yeah, I think so. New Mexico mean they have it locked down out there. So as far as clues go, they're pretty scant. That's one of the most frustrating things about this case. There are reports that they did find a Boston cassette tape a few miles from where she lived on that highway, and then a piece of a walkman at a campground 19 miles away. That seems like a bit of a stretch to me. It was a long way from highway 47, but you never know. But there wasn't any, like, they didn't prove necessarily that was her tape or part of her walkman or anything like that? No, they didn't. But I saw in a couple of places this is one of those examples of the facts getting convoluted. I saw that the Boston tape was found with the front of her walkman at the same location. And then also I saw that it was found elsewhere. So who knows? But that is like, one of like, even that one tangible fact is still questionable, and you can't even necessarily link it directly to her, like you were saying, and that was it. But that's all that was found. They didn't find either of her rings. They didn't find her shoes. They never found her bike. They never found anything except for those bike tire marks, which seemed to be like a bike being dragged rather than ridden. And then that Boston tape and maybe or not a piece of the walkman. And again, who knows if that was her stuff or not? And they searched they searched the area pretty thoroughly, from what I understand. Yes. I mean, anytime there's a missing person like this, you have to be a line of people marching through the woods. It's one of the saddest things that you can see in a movie or TV show, and I've never seen one in real life, never want to see one in real life. But it's one of the saddest things you can witness is people literally combing a field or the forest for the body of somebody, for sure. Well, should we take a break? Yeah, I think it's break time. All right. Let's take a break here. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the things that happened after the disappearance 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 in the multiverse of Madness. New episodes of Marvel Studios Ms. Marvel. And the wonderful summer of Mickey Mouse. And there's so much more coming to Disney Plus throughout the month with season three of Disney's High School Musical, the Musical, The Series and Zombies. Three plus. Don't miss national Geographics. America the beautiful. From the award winning producers of Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and the Disney nature films, america the Beautiful takes viewers on a tour of the most spectacular and visually arresting regions of our great nation, highlighting the breathtaking landscapes and wildlife that make America one of a kind. All these and more are streaming this month on Disney Plus. The world doesn't need just another chardonnay. What it needs is Martha Shard, the Martha Stewart chardonnay that's the newest addition to the 19 Crimes family of wines. Martha Shard is a contemporary lens on 19 Crimes. It's the wine that disrupts the chardonnay category. Brought to you by Martha Stewart. The original influencer, martha Shard is light and drinkable with a medium straw color, satisfying the palette with bright notes of citrus and round stone fruit with a crisp, clean finish framed by a distinctly sweet oak character. Martha stard is exactly what the world needed. And what you need is to make this refreshing crowdpleaser the star of your next party or gathering, because Martha Shard just might be the perfect summer wine. So come on. Let's work hard, play hard, and drink. Martha's Shard, available at a wine aisle near you. And on 19 Crimes.com, that's one nine Crimes.com. Please drink responsibly. All right, so we mentioned this truck, this pickup truck, that's vehicle number one in this case, that you need to sort of take note of. Vehicle number two is a white van with no windows, which those are always a little bit scary. This was in June 15. So less than a year after her disappearance in Port St. Joe, Florida. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Chuck. How would a white van in Port St. Joe, Florida, a year later have anything to do with the disappearance of Tara Calico a year earlier in New Mexico? Well, it may or may not, but there was a little piece of evidence potentially that was left behind. This woman comes out of the convenience store. The van drives away, and then she looks down and notices a Polaroid on the ground that looked like it was inside of a white van. I think they later determined it was, in fact, from inside a van. And on the inside of the van, it was taken sort of from outside looking into the side door. Probably were a couple of kids on some blankets and pillows, a young boy around ten and a young woman that looked like she was probably mid to late teenager. And they look to be bound. Their hands were behind their back, although you couldn't see rope necessarily, but I don't see why you would assume anything else. They had duct tape over their mouth, and they were kind of well tanned, and it's pretty disturbing. Messed up picture. It's an extremely disturbing picture. It's alarming, actually, when you see this, and it sinks into what you're looking at. It's a deeply alarming picture, especially when you realize that this is real. This was really found in a junior food store parking lot in 1989 in Port St. Joe, Florida. Like, some poor lady came across this picture and was, I'm sure, just terrified. And the picture is significant enough that the moment they found it and it was reported to authorities, they started setting up roadblocks around the county, gulf County, Florida, to try to find this white van that the woman who found the picture had seen parked in that parking spot when she went in and was gone when she came out and found the picture. So it's a very alarming picture. And a lot of people said, I think that's Tara Calico. And the reason that Tara, her family found out about it is because a family friend had seen it on A Current Affair. This photo was so alarming and so sinister and also so inexplicable, too. It was not immediately traced to anybody. It was not no one came out immediately. Oh, no, that was a hoax. We were just kidding. That kind of thing. That it ended up on TV. And very quickly, I guess, Tara Kalico's mom had seen the Current Affair episode and said, that's Tara. And so from that moment on, in 1989 until today, that photos forever been linked to the Tara Callico case, whether that's Tara or not. Yeah, and there were a couple of other points about this picture. Clearly visible next to the young woman was the VC andrews book, my Suite Audrena VC. Andrews wrote Flowers in the attic. And those kind of disturbing horror, I guess. I don't know if they're horror, but most of those books were about bad things that happened to kids. Yeah, for sure. I would say horror is apt. Yeah. Horror books. And the other thing is that the young boy in the picture, a family immediately kind of came forward and said, hey, we think that that is our son, Michael Henley. He disappeared on a camping trip in New Mexico in 1988 as well. And I am just as the mom talking said, basically, I'm just sure that's him. That was later kind of found out to not be true, because about a year after that, they found his body death to exposure. So it became pretty clear that he got lost in the woods and died out there. Yeah, because his body was found not very far from the camping site that he disappeared from. So the chances that he had been abducted from that camping site, kept in a van, taken to Port St. Joe, Florida, and then taken back to New Mexico, or even just abducted and kept in New Mexico, the chances are pretty slim. Chances are far higher that he wandered off and died of exposure. And that's what the coroner finally came up with, too. Ruled as Michael Henley's death. But the fact that Michael Henley disappeared in New Mexico and that Tara Kalico disappeared in New Mexico, and that the two people, the young woman and the boy in this picture resembled those two, like I said, it's inextricably linked that photo to this case. And Tara's mom apparently said forever that she was sure that that was her daughter. There's a discoloration on the girl in the photo's leg that Tara's mom said matched her daughter's scar from a car accident that she had gotten in. And I believe her sister said also, she said, if you had to ask me if I had to say yes or no, if that's Tara in the photo, I would say yes. But I also realized that makes zero sense. It just doesn't make sense for this case. But that photo, chuck, I feel like a lot of people link that photo to this case, but that photo is not even guaranteed to be real. There's a lot of points that people have raised over the years that said, I don't know if this is actually a photo of what it seems to be depicting. Yeah, I'm not sure I agree with any of those points either, to be honest. Well, one of the big ones is that it's never been matched to any missing person ever. Right. No one has ever come forward, on the one hand, and said, this is just a hoax. We were just kidding. You can call off your search. But on the other hand, no one's ever said, this is that boy, and this is that girl. That's missing. So it seems unlikely that a family would be unaware of that picture. A family that had taken that picture as a hoax would be unaware of it and not come forward. But it's doubly unlikely that two different families with two different kids that have been abducted would not be familiar with that picture and be like, that's our son, or that's our daughter. Right. That's a big one to me. Yeah. There was another one where someone said that her legs appeared to be shaved, and I think some people might surmise that that would be unusual for an abduction victim. Yeah, I don't buy that, but that's what some people think, evidently. Okay. If you look closely, the people in the photos shoulders aren't distressed. Right. They're not in a stress position. They're actually kind of relaxed. And if they were bound because remember, the bindings aren't visible in the photo, if they were bound, their shoulders would be pinned back a lot further than they are in that photo. So it suggests that they might not actually be bound. Right. That's possible, I guess. And then the last one that I saw was the tape. It should be much redder around the tape on their faces than it is if they've been wearing that tape for any significant amount of time. Yeah, I don't get that one. I don't know why that it's assumed that they had to be wearing the tape for a significant amount of time because they were wearing it in the picture. Well, I don't know that it's saying, like, oh, well, that proves that they weren't actually abducted or being held hostage. I think what they're saying is that suggests that it had just recently been put on. Yeah. Which I believe if someone was going to open the door to the van to take a picture of two bound children that they had snatched, they would probably put tape over their mouth before they open the door would be my guess. The thing to me. The one point of all that just strongly suggests to me that that picture is not actually real is that it is never. Since being discovered in 1989. Since being broadcast on A Current Affair. Oprah. America's Most Wanted. Being all over the Internet. That no one has managed to link it to either the boy or the young woman in that picture to a missing person. Yeah. No one besides the Tara Kalico's family, besides her family has come forward and been like, no, that's our daughter. That, to me, says that I don't know. I think it might be a hoax, I guess. I hate that word these days, but I think that's what it is. Yeah. And we also didn't point out that Tara's mom said that that book in the picture was her favorite book, so who knows? It was definitely an interesting piece of evidence. If that was her favorite book, do you think that that was Tara Calico in the picture, or do you think you just think that the picture was real, that wasn't necessarily her. I didn't study it, and I don't want to go on record for having an opinion on whether or not that was her. Okay, fair enough. One thing we do know, though, is that this picture, like we said, it's alarming enough that the FBI got involved. It was broadcast on national television in polaroid. It was a polaroid, one of those the ones that you wave in the air to develop in just a few minutes. It was that kind of polaroid. Polaroid analyzed it and said this film that this was taken on, this film stock wasn't available until May of 1989. So that picture couldn't have been taken before may of 1989. So that's the picture, and it's not necessarily connected to the Tara Callico case. Although as far as the world is concerned, especially the world of online sleuths, it is in some way or another, always going to be connected to the Tara Callico case from now on. Yeah. And there were some other pictures over the years that have come out that are also not connected yet somehow connected because of the Internet. And there was one that was a couple of people joking around on a train. It looks like a young woman and a guy a little bit older, and to me, it just looks like two people goofing around on a train for sure. I'm not sure why it's so sinister. The other one is another young woman with tape over her mouth, and there's a similarity to the striped pillow as that polaroid, and it was found in California at a construction site, but you can't really identify much about her at all. And I think the only reason it's connected is because, hey, it's another picture of a young woman with tape on her mouth. Yeah, it looks vaguely like her, and that's not it. Like, if you go on to reddit or websluth or any of these online forums about this case, there's at least several other photos that have been associated over time that seemed to just be like, here's an amateur BDSM photo that somebody took and I found somewhere. And I think that's Tara calico and this is evidence rather than this is just somebody's picture from a wild Saturday night or something like that, right? For sure. The Internet definitely has that effect. For sure. So, Chuck, before I guess this is a pretty good place to put an ad break on, then maybe we'll come back and talk about conspiracies. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We'll be right back, everybody. 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Many years later, in 2008, the sheriff of Valencia County at the time, Renee Rivera, said that he had some information about what happened and he was just waiting to release this information. He wanted to build an airtight case, get all the evidence in, perhaps even locate her body. And here was the quote the information I have is that the truck accidentally ended up hitting her. I believe the truck bumped her bike, at which time she fell to the side of the road. From there, the individuals took her. Yeah. Remember the truck that he's referencing is that truck that was supposedly following her when she was last seen at 11:45 A.m.. That's right. And that she was killed later on, maybe because she threatened to call the cops or something and that there could be a couple of extra people involved in this case. Right. So he said, but I'm not going to be arresting anybody because we don't have a body yet, and I want to have a body, so I'm just going to sit here and hold press conferences instead. And John Dole, Tara's stepfather, came out publicly and was like, that was the dumbest thing I've heard in a very long time. Like, okay, if you want, like, an airtight case and you need to find Tara's body to do that, fine. But don't publicize everything else, you know, because to John Dole, that seemed like a bit of a warning to the suspects. That were out there. At the very least, it just seemed foolish to him or a waste of time. And the thing is that Sheriff Rivera, who I believe is still the Valencia County Sheriff, hasn't made any arrests since that press conference. Admittedly, Tara's body has not been found, but that just doesn't seem like a weird thing to do. So that was kind of like one of the first things that kind of reinvigorated this case that had managed to be kept alive over the 90s but really started to kind of come back in. The multiple lights have been shown on it, but even beyond somebody doing a story on it or a follow up or an interview with her sister or brother or something, the police investigations into it had kind of like peaks or increased interest in the 2000s as well. Yeah. So now a character enters, name Melinda Escibelle and she is a blogger and a podcaster and I guess one of these solutes and had done a lot of work on this case. And apparently at one point, and this was in about 2010 at least, said she was working on a documentary film about Tara and that she had information on the body and that she was being followed and that threats were being made. So in 2010, state police officer in New Mexico, author Ortiz, he was brought in for a meeting about this case, mainly because of what was going on with Escabelle and her research and what she said. Yeah, she said she was getting death threats, right? Yes. So that actually kind of reinvigorated this case. Well, it almost did. Ortiz started to kind of look into it a little more, but was eventually told, like, hey, that's the Valencia County Sheriff's case and just leave it to them, so we are going to reassign you. And that was that. Apparently the death threats, I guess it was death threats that Melinda Escobell said she was getting were enough to make her move to La. And then later on she came back and started investigating the case again with Michelle Dole, Tara's stepsister. And they released a podcast called Vanished the Tara Calico Story about this investigation that was, I believe, revealed some new facts and definitely pieced a lot of stuff together. Yeah. So back in 2010 when Ortiz got this information, he met with Sheriff Rivera. And Rivera for his part, said, you know what, there was a thorough investigation. We identified three possible suspects. One of them is dead now. And I also got some information about where this body might be and basically who is Captain Dongas? I'll go with that. This sounds fun and I guess worked alongside river. Is that what it was? It was kind of hard to tell. That was what I got as well. I mean, it's a quote from Ortiz and he's just kind of presuming. Everybody who's reading this quote understands who Captain dongus is. Maybe it's sheriff River's imaginary friend or something. Captain Dong? It does sound like that. Neither would be one joke in here. So Donghus advised him that there was a dig, basically at this location where they thought the body was and that they didn't find anything, but they did dig for the body at this place. Right. And then, like I said, otis basically gets moved off of the case because he's state police, and this is Valencia County turf. That was 2010, and that was some new fresh blood investigation injected into the case. And then in 2013, the state police interviewed a guy named Frank Matthola, who is a former deputy with the Valencia County Sheriff's Department. He's not any longer. He apparently was kind of drummed out of the sheriff's office, possibly for stuff that was unrelated to that. I saw he was arrested while he was still a sheriff's deputy because he had failed to appear in court for causing a crash in a neighborhood during a high speed chase. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So it's possible that something like that led to his dismissal. But regardless, he came forward after he was no longer a deputy and said, hey, while I was a deputy, I interviewed this guy named Henry Brown. And Henry Brown said he was dying and he needed to get something off of his chest. And he gave an official statement. And the statement, from what I understand, definitely exists and has been verified. This isn't just like hearsay, but that Henry Brown said, I was friends with this guy, and his name was Lawrence Romero Jr. Lawrence Romero Jr. He's not a good guy, necessarily, from what I understand, but he was the sheriff's son, lawrence Romero Jr. At the time that all this happened, that Tara Calico went missing, he was the sheriff of Valencia County. And Henry Brown said. I was friends with Junior. And one day. I was hanging out at Junior's house. And the subject of Tara Calico came up. And before I knew it. Lawrence Romero Jr. And another guy were admitting that they had killed her and that her body had been right there where we were sitting not too long before. Which they had moved her body after they started searching for and then they took her and moved her to a pond later on. And that's where she remains. But that he definitely killed her. And the reason why nothing ever came of it, because he was the sheriff's son. And that apparently was given. That statement was given and written down and taken into the record by the Valencia County Sheriff's Department. Yeah. And apparently some of these guys were involved with dealing drugs, and that may have had something to do with it. There was also a report in that statement that it was sort of a conspiracy and that Deputy Rivera had their backs, was the direct quote. So maybe because the sun was in deep trouble, the deputy got involved, and made sure that that sort of stayed buried. But again, I think to call this hearsay is pretty accurate, but it's also a pretty juicy deathbed story, which is always play well in these kind of cases, for sure. I also saw that there was another guy who gave a third hand confession or second hand confession like that, said that Lawrence Romero, Jr. Confessed to him as well. And Lawrence Romero, Jr. Died in 1991 from a self inflicted gunshot wound. And it's not clear whether he died by suicide or other people say that he was playing Russian roulette very foolishly, and it did not go so well. But either way, he died in 1991 within a couple of years of Tara Kalico's disappearance. So at the time, again, his father was sheriff of Valencia County, and this Deputy Rivera, who supposedly had the Romero's backs, became sheriff later and is now still sheriff of Valencia County, from what we understand. What's weird, though, is a lot of that statement jibes with Rivera's weirdo press conference that he held in 2008, that these kids, she was being followed in a trunk, she was bumped by a truck, she was bumped from behind, she was killed. The people's family helped them cover up the crime. He just stopped short of saying who it was. And it's just very odd if he was the one that was helping cover things up. To have that press conference is a very odd thing to do if you're in on it. Yeah, and the one thing we didn't mentioned earlier, that's pretty important too, if you think back to that Polaroid, if you're asking yourself like, surely they analyze this thing for real, and it's not just up to Internet people to compare photos. There were a few different organizations that looked into it, and they very frustratingly. One said, yes, we think that's her. One said, no, that's not, and one said, well, we can't be sure. So that just leads to the frustration to literally have three groups looking into this, and each of them have a different take on it. Kind of leads you back to nowhere, for sure. And if it's frustrating for us or for the web sleuths or whoever's listening, think of what it's like for the family to hear you'd just rather hear everybody say yes or everybody say no. To have it just inconclusive like that or contradictory, just got to make it so much harder. Yeah, for sure. But ultimately, when you put all the pieces on the table, which one makes more sense? That she was killed locally and it was covered up by some local families who had the ability to cover it up, or that she was abducted and ended up somehow in a Polaroid in Port St. Joe, Florida, a year later? And I think that's what her sister was saying. If I look at this photograph, I know that it's Tara, but I also realize that that explanation makes the least sense of all of the explanations that are out there. Right, so the case is still ongoing. In 2019, the FBI apparently out of nowhere, released a $20,000 reward for information on the Tara Callico case. No one apparently has any idea what prompted them to do that or why they did it, but it's out there. So if you know anything about Tara Calico's disappearance and you want to make a cool 20 grand, get in touch with the FBI, or don't even do it for the money. Do it for the humanity. How about that? Yeah. And that's it? You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, then I guess that's it for the Tara Calico case. Hopefully for now. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this math. Math. I was hoping you're going to either ignore this or you hadn't seen it at all. Well, I don't even know if this person is right. This could be one of those great ones where then someone corrects the correction. That would be great, but we'll respond to somebody. Hey, guys. Listening to 1800 podcast and responding to Chuck's anticipation for correction of Josh's math. Josh, your confidence and certainty in your math are charming and inspiring, and I appreciate it when people say something with conviction. Now onto the sour part. Josh, you almost had the math right, but for some reason, you stated that the last seven digits range from technically 1 million to 9,999,999. This were true, then you would be correct in your calculations. But according to what I can find, that does not seem to be the case. The SCC website and toll free number spells out prefixes which are available, but it does not provide a restricted range available for the last seven digits. If you enter zero as the last seven digits to check that if a number is available, there is no information about that being an invalid option. I'm not quite sure I follow. For example, I checked 1833 all zeros, and it said that it was available. So then that brings us the range from all zeros to all nines, which provides us with 10 million, not 9 million. Sorry, Josh. So when you multiply that by seven prefixes, you get 70 million combos seven times 9 million to 63 million, not 54 million. The only reason that I'm sending this email is not to draw attention to a well, actually, you did the math wrong. Liar. But rather because Chuck drew attention to it. So blame him, Josh. Okay. All right, I'll go with that. Can I blame you both? Sure. I think that's most appropriate. And that's from Noah in Philadelphia. We saw you guys at the Bellhouse. My sister and I saw you for her 25th birthday. Please give a shout out to Becca if this ends up on the show. Hello, Becca. Happy very belated birthday, Becca. Well, she's had another one since then. Happy birthdays. I guess we do the bellhouse in October. So it's coming up? Yeah in 2020, who knows? Well, thanks a lot, Noah. And thanks to you and Becca for coming to see us live. Eventually, we will be out there live again. Can't wait. Yes, it will be nice. So keep an ear out. I don't know when, but we will eventually. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us, you can do it by email. 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 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. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2018-02-10-sysk-narco-states.mp3	SYSK Selects: How Narco States Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-how-narco-states-work	In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck discuss Narco States, places where illegal drugs are traded openly with government support -- or without government interference.	In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck discuss Narco States, places where illegal drugs are traded openly with government support -- or without government interference.	Sat, 10 Feb 2018 12:00:03 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=10, tm_hour=12, tm_min=0, tm_sec=3, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=41, tm_isdst=0)	31258836	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 Advantageplatinum Select Card. Learn more at Citi comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. 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 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. Hey everybody, this is Chuck. Welcome to stuff you should know selects Hope you had your morning cartoons and now you're ready to listen to Narco States how Narcotics Works from December 15, 2009. I have no idea why we saw fit to release this so close to Christmas way back in 2009, but it's kind of funny that we did. But I just remember this is a really good episode. Narco State is a very dense topic and it's the kind of thing where if you kind of throw some of this information around at a dinner party, everyone is going to think you are super cool. So please do enjoy how Narco States work. 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. Zonkers. Bryant. Zonkers. Yeah. I just sit here wondering what you're going to call me. How's it going? Great, sir. You pretty good. You look good. You're as good as you were ten minutes ago when you recorded that other podcast. Chuck, have you ever been to Mexico? I have been to Mexico. Have you been to TJ? I've been to TJ. Have you been to Juarez? No, just TJ in, like, the Baja area. Okay, well, had you gone a little further east along the border to Juarez okay. You would have been in a narco state. Yes. And you know what? I'm ashamed to say, Josh, that I did not know what an arco state was. Really? I've heard of it, but I didn't really know what it was. I can't remember if I pitched this one or if Chanel did, but it's a good one. Well done. Sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah. Chuck and I are talking about narco state, as you probably were tipped off by the title of this podcast. Sure. And for those of you who don't know what in narco state it is, josh, I'm just going to give my own definition, okay. Which is a country where they sort of allow drug trafficking and in some cases even participate in the drug trafficking. Yeah. And it's very rarely an entire country. Okay. Most of the time it's like a region of a country, a very small area city. Although there are cases where there have been narco states, like fully functioning countries that are run by drugs, like their gross domestic product is almost fully funded by drugs. The government's in on it, military is in on it. And right now, as far as I could tell, there's only one functioning narco state in the world. Afghanistan. No. It's close, though. Guinea Bisouth. Oh, yeah, sure. In Africa. Yeah. West Africa. I can't wait to tell that story. It's a good one. Yeah. Okay, so Narco State, as Chuck said, is basically any area where the government is either directly involved or turning a blind eye to drug trafficking. Yes. Central Mexico, Central America. South America always known as being rife with this kind of thing. Because chances are, if you're doing drugs in the US. Chances are it did not come from inside the United States. No. Unless it was meth. Sure. Or pot. Yeah. And even then, chances are it probably didn't. Although there's a lot of domestic meth labs and pot farms and stuff like that. Yeah. But the chances are it came through Mexico, if not from Mexico. Mexico didn't used to be nearly as violent. Juarez, which we were talking about, had, I think, 300 murders in 2007, and then all of a sudden there was a drug war started. It's still going on now. Right. And in 2008, they had 1500 murders. Yeah. That's a heck of a stat. Yeah. Detroit had less than 300 murders in 2007. So Detroit is safer than someplace is safer than Wairez, believe it or not. Well, thank God for that. Yes. I didn't get the stats on Tempe, though, so I can't say. Right. Yeah. So one of the reasons why and we'll see that American intervention one way or another, usually has an impact on the formation of anarchist stated, one of the reasons why Juarez and some of the other border towns along Mexico have turned into narco states is because the Coast Guard and the DEA effectively shut down the Caribbean in the 90s. Right. That was the main route from South America to the US. For coke. And Americans love coke. A lot of the world does. And one thing that I learned from reading this article, and just by living as a human in the world, is that drugs will find a way to get into the country. They definitely will. Like, for example, when the Caribbean was shut down, they started moving it through Central America and up through Mexico. Came another way. One way or another. And the reason why is, like I said, Americans love cocaine. We consume 40% of the global supply of it every year. Yeah, europe does a lot of cocaine. Europe loves the junk, too. Oh, no. Europe is the heroine. Yes. They have 11% of the global population in Europe. Right. But they have one third of the world's heroin addict. Big deal. Yeah. It's weird how it's localized like that. It is. But think about it. Think about how much closer Europe is to the heroin producing countries of South Asia. And think about how close we are to the cocaine producing countries of South America. Yeah. Which affects the price, of course. It definitely does. You want to give them that stat, Josh? A kilogram of uncut cocaine, as you hear on the cop shows, it goes for $22,000. That same kilo fetches about $120,000 in Moscow. That's a big markup. It's a huge markup. Is that street value, as they call it? I'm sure those are way off. I'm sure you could get a kilo for a lot less or pay whatever, but one of the things the Feds like to do is pump up their numbers so that they can get more funding. You can definitely get a kilo of cocaine in America a lot cheaper than you can in Russia. Yeah. So, Chuck, all of those kilos add up pretty quickly. And the drug trade, the global drug trade makes an estimated $300 billion a year. Yeah. That's nuts. That is a lot of cash. You could bail out two AIG for that. So, Chuck, we talked about the Narco state being an area where governments either looking the other way or selling drugs directly. Right. Or helping them out, maybe just aiding them. There's a big problem with this. I would say so, but you just think about it. You're like, oh, the government's not supposed to do that. Right. To stop and think, why the government's not supposed to do that? Yeah. Well, because they're supposed to protect their citizens. Yeah. There's something that Thomas Hobbes called the social contract, and basically it said, in exchange for certain freedoms, we can't just do anything we want to that we give to the government. We're going to give that power to the government. One of those things is the state monopoly on violence, right. Where, like, the government can put you in jail, the government can kill you, execute you. But the government is supposed to be the only one who does it. So if somebody shoots your kid, you don't go shoot them in the head. You get the government to go after this guy and incarcerate or kill him. Right. Yeah. And in the civilized world, the social contract is kind of how we develop as nations of the world, and it works pretty well for the most part. That's a whole other podcast right there. But in narco state, it's a little different because that's a little bit of a sham. They kind of have that contract as long as it doesn't interfere with the drug trade. Right. The government has given its power to drug traffickers at the expense of the people they're supposed to be protecting and representing. So that's number one. Yeah, right, sure. So how does this happen? Right? Well, one reason why that might happen there's a bunch of different ways that could happen, but one reason is if, let's say you're in Columbia and all of a sudden you've heard the term Colombian necktie. I have, yeah. All of a sudden, your judges and your council people and your politicians are getting knifed and executed in back alleys by the dozens. All of a sudden, the government might say, wait a minute, we might want to not go after these drug traffickers. Right. Because if the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence any longer, if paramilitary groups affiliated with drug traffickers do. Yeah. Apparently in Colombia, they came at the justice building with tanks. This wasn't the military. This was a rebel faction. Yeah. I think it was Fart that did it. Right. Josh fark? That is FARC. That stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Translated into English Right. And they're actually a communist guerrilla group. They're an army. They are. And they actually got into drug trafficking in the think. Indeed. Okay, so you have a huge guerrilla army attacking your Justice Department in the country's capital. That's a good way to get a narco state started, right? Yes. Sometimes you're bribed into it. That's another one, too. All of a sudden, if your coffers are being filled, a lot of politicians are willing to look the other way. And also, if your intelligence services become compromised by drug traffickers, you're in big trouble. Yes. Those are corrupted. You're finished. Yeah. Because the intelligence services are usually toward the top of the military hierarchy, and if they're corrupted, they can turn the entire military against the government, which there is a division. And after that happens again, you're in big trouble in a narco state can form. Yeah. Plus, they know a lot about smuggling, the intelligence community. And if all of a sudden they're on your side, then all of a sudden you know a lot about smuggling. Right? Yeah. You have to know how to get people or arms or something in and out of countries without being detected. So you know where all the airfields are. You have access to planes and boats and stuff. You just start throwing kilos of coke in there and all of a sudden you're a drug smuggler. Boom. Done. Yeah. And it's kind of tough for us to think about this in the United States because we've had a pretty stable government for the last couple of hundred years. Yeah. But in areas in countries where there's been high government turnover and lots of internal conflict. Let's say infrastructure like roads, bridges, water, electricity, these things have been cut throughout these civil wars and the government's too poor to fix them. All of a sudden, the government is delegitimized, and another, like a rebel faction can step in and say, hey, we're taking over. And by the way, we love drug traffic. Right. Hey, everybody. 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And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace. Comsysk. Squarespace. Capital One offers commercial solutions you can bank on. Now more than ever. Your business faces specific challenges and unique opportunities. That's why Capital One offers a comprehensive suite of financial services custom tailored to your short and longterm goals, backed by the expertise, strategy and resources of a top ten commercial bank. A dedicated team works with you to support your success and help you achieve your goals. Explore the possibilities at Capital one. comCOMMERCIAL. I got a couple of stats for you along those lines. Guatemala endured a 36 year long civil war. El Salvador and a twelve year long civil war in Nicaragua had one that lasted 19 years. Yeah. So what this means is it's a very unstable region, easily swayed by whoever has the power, drug traffickers or the government. And it also means there's a lot of guns. Yeah. And a lot of former veterans that are out of work but know how to use those guns sure. And can serve as a guerrilla army. Yes. And a lot of times these are poor countries, too. In fact, I would say almost every time it's a poor country. Right. And you don't have to be a genius to figure out you got guns, you got these former military guys, you got really poor people, and you have loads of drugs. It's worth a lot of money. It's really not too hard to devolve into a narco state. No, it's not. And of course, the root of all narco states is money, either, like Chuck said, bribes, that kind of thing, or the GDP, afghanistan, apparently their GDP is like 6 billion annually, which, with the United States, I think has 14 trillion GDP. Yeah, something like that. So it's kind of like, holy cow, how do you live like that? They've been doing pretty good, but half of that has been through heroin. Right, puppies? So, cars, I'm going to make air quotes. Elected president of Afghanistan twice and made air quotes again. You just reelected, right? Yeah, reelected. He is well known for turning a blind eye while saying, we need to get rid of these poppies. And the US is like, okay, well, let us spray. And he's like, no, we have to do it all by hand. Right. And apparently the American forces over there have to well, the DEA is over there as well, but the American commanders of the armed forces in Afghanistan don't let the DEA in at all. And they're frustrated pulling their hair out because they're not getting any support whatsoever. And it's kind of one of those things. Like, everybody knows that Afghanistan produces poppies. As a matter of fact, in 2006, they produced the highest poppy harvest in recorded human history. Yeah. Just a couple of years ago. It was double what it had been the year before. So clearly they're not pulling enough by hand. No, because cars, I won't let them spray overhead. Yeah. Which is I should explain that's a common method to like, you crop dust fields to put chemicals on them. You do the same thing if you want to eradicate and kill them. Right. And it is very effective. It's worked in Colombia. Colombia finally has a president, I shouldn't say finally, but Columbia as a president, it's very sympathetic and friendly to the US. And he has the DEA in there, and they have eradicated a lot of cocoa fields using that method. So it does work, but Carte is like, no. And apparently there's been more and more and more reports of the people who are involved in the central government are all drug lords, and most of them are drug lords, too. So Afghanistan is teetering right on the edge of being a narco state, if it's not already. Right. So contributing to half of your GDP, that's another reason for narco state to develop. Yeah. Well, since we're on money, another thing that money brings is bribes and corruption. Like we were talking about. And I have to mention this because you uncovered this great fact from Guatemala, the federal judge. That's just hard to believe. The federal judge was accused of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes to dismiss a drug trafficking case, and at the end of the seat, dismissed the case. At the end of this trial, this judge was seen driving the defendant from court. Yeah. So it goes pretty deep. Yeah. In Guatemala is a de facto narco state right now. Yeah, big time. And in Central America itself, like we said, since the Caribbean has been shut down, central America started to play a really key role as a supply line between South America and North America. Yeah. And actually, because of all those conflicts that you mentioned earlier, there's now a ratio of five to one illegal, unregistered guns to guns held by legitimate police and armed forces. Not good. No. Let's keep an eye on Central America. That means trouble is coming. Okay, so Central America again, we talked about how it's been destabilized by conflict. There's tons of guns, there's terrible infrastructure. There's plenty of drugs and narco state. And you know what else, dude? In Guatemala, they have corrupt government officials there, have drafted legislation that prevents extradition. And as we know, extradition is a really valuable tool for us when we're trying to prosecute these drug lords. Right. And they said, you can't do it. So that kind of says right there, let us make our money. US. Stay out of her hair. Yeah. Once you have the Congress and the judiciary in your pocket, that's even more valuable in the military. Although the military is a really good first step. Yeah, that's true. All right. So, Chuck, one of the reasons why you might notice that Central and South America keep popping up, one of the reasons why is because Central America specifically was a Cold War battleground where the US and the USSR fought one another in proxy wars throughout the Cold War. Basically, both countries just completely used nations in Central and South America to fight one another, try to bleed one another out. You know what that means? That means that these people that live there are being trained by either Russian or American military. They're being supplied with guns and ammunition and all the things that you need once you stop and say, CoV worse over. All those guns and trained dudes are still there. Right. And they're like, well, what should we do with all this stuff? Yeah. And not only that, we are not getting funding from the Soviets or the Americans anymore. Exactly. But the war didn't end for them. The conflict didn't end for them. The power struggle didn't end for them. Just because the Americans and the Soviets suddenly lost interest. Right. It's still going on. And they are funding it through drugs. Right. Yeah. And also the US backed right wing paramilitary groups or right wing dictatorships. And the Soviets, of course, backed left wing groups like FARC. Right. And FARC has a reputation for being extremely brutal. They use child soldiers, they engage in kidnappings, bombings, kill their own people. Sure. At one point, they offered $1,000 to anybody who killed a government official. So they were outsourcing their terrorism. And they're Communists, and they were supported by the Soviets. So of course they're horrible. The US supported equally brutal regimes and groups like Lock of Frieda. You know about them? They're Guatemala. Yes. They were very much supported by the US. And they helped kill as many as 200,000 of their own people during that civil war. Yeah. Josh Lockerfrida wasn't the only one. Right. Remember the 1980s when President Reagan launched the war on drugs? You know what was going on at the same time we were providing funding and weapons for the same anti communist paramilitary groups that were producing and distributing this cocaine. Yeah. Right. At the same time we were fighting a war on drugs. Yeah. It doesn't add up, does it? Not only that, you remember Manuel Noriega. We went down to Panama in 1989. Delta Force was there, Special Forces was there, and we captured him and then put him in prison in Miami for a couple of decades. He was a CIA asset for eight years. Yeah, he was operating in Narco state under our supervision, you could say. Yes. And then once news leaked out to the general public that he was a drug dealer, we went down and removed him from power. Right. And Gabe, I believe he's still in prison, right? No, he just got out. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. Like a year ago or something like that. Good for him. And again, this is the same thing that's going on right now in Afghanistan. We're well aware that Carsii is totally cool with the heroin production in that nation. Right. Which, by the way, is far and away the largest producer of heroin or opium poppies in the world. So it's still going on. Yeah. Although we donated a lot. Or donated, I guess it's not the right word, but we gave them close to $800 million for counter narcotics operations and measures. I'm sure every penny went to that. Sure. So it's still going on. But the reason why it's really disturbing that this is still going on is because we haven't learned a very clear lesson from this, and that's when we support groups that engage in drug trafficking, it invariably comes back to bite us in the ass. Yeah. Like I mentioned, Lako Frida in Guatemala, the two guys who are running that show, running Guatemala as an arco state, we're both trained by the United States at the School of the Americas, fort Benning, I think. Yeah. Right here in Georgia. Yeah. It's where they train foreign people. No, specifically Latin America. Latin Americans specifically to train them. Yeah. Pretty controversial. Yeah, because they trained them in assassination, in assembling guerrilla armies and destabilizing central governments, that kind of stuff. So we're training these guys to go fight the Soviets. But then again, after the Cold wars over, these guys are still around. Yeah. The Mexican golf cartel, which has become hugely violent and kind of big, is run by a couple of guys who were also trained at the School of the Americas. So, basically, the world's biggest drug dealers were trained by the United States in the art of smuggling and all sorts of other stuff. They were trained in their craft. Yeah. And I think the Russians used Escobar, right? Yeah. To help guard their poppy fields. Is that right? Or the cocoa. Yes. Fark actually started out guarding Escobar coco fields in Colombia for the Medellin cartel. Right? Yeah, Medellin. And then apparently they're like, wow, this guy is making a bunch of money, we're going to go out on our own. And they became rivals. And then again, Delta Force goes down there and oversees the assassination of Escobar, which, I don't mean to sound paranoid, I really researched this article and all this is fact. Yeah. Everything that isn't fact, I've made like verbal air quotes with this is documented stuff. So much money and legitimate publication. It's all about the greenbacks. Yes. So much money at stake. So let's talk about Africa, man, that's the place to be these days. Well, if you're in the narco state. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Africa has really risen since the mid eighty s. That was the first sign of a drug presence in Africa, in Zambia. Although it was marijuana in Zambia at the time. That's how it started out at least, right? The gateway drug. Even when you're talking narco state. Sure. Yeah, funny. So Zambia exposes the Narco State. Apparently the government wasn't aware of this one, but a group of prominent citizens were operating like a sub state. Sub Narco state. Just under the noses of the functioning government and again, very poor people. Which is key. Yes. If people don't have any money and all of a sudden people come and give them gobs of money, they'll say, oh, okay, you want to be a drug mule? We'll give you this much money, no problem. 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 in 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, squarespace 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.com SUSK and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer code s YSK and you'll get off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's Squarespace.com SYSK. Squarespace. 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 CapitalOne. comCOMMERCIAL so Zambia was the first to start it in Africa, and then the reason why it picked up speed in the 90s is because it was the end of colonialism. It just ended within the last decade or so. And this European influence and influx of money and exploitation left a vacuum, economically, financially, and oftentimes with central governments. There's just a vacuum and nobody's doing anything. There's no way to make any money or anything. So narcotics are setting up. Senegal was another one. Yes. In the believe, heroin and cocaine really were on the rise. And here's a stat that you dug up. It was pretty good. In 2008, the Telegraph newspaper in England reported that the cost of a bribe to look the other way at the airport when you're flying in into car with drugs. Nine grand per kilo of cocaine. Right. And Chuck just mentioned a little funny little word, and it was cocaine. You don't associate Africa with cocaine normally. Well, yeah, that's true. You do now, though. Yeah, big time. And one of the reasons why it's popped up in Africa is because West Africa is a perfect stop for cocaine en route to Europe. Right. We talked about Europe having a huge problem with heroin. One of the reasons they didn't have a big problem with cocaine is because the Colombians and other South Americans haven't figured out how to get it to them. Now, all of a sudden, West Africa is evolving into narco state because they finally figured out we need a port. And West Africa, is it? Right. Specifically, guinea basal. This is, like we said earlier, the one true functioning narco state right now. Yeah. $150,000,000 worth of cocaine passes through the borders of guinea basal each month, and that was in 2007. And what is $150,000,000 times two to them? Their gross domestic product. It's half of their gross domestic product. So the entire nation, all of the goods and services produced in guinea Basau above the boards equals $300 million a year. Right. And they have half of that coming through their country in cocaine. Cocaine a month. Yeah. Tell the story of how this started there. So interesting it is. What year was it, Chuck? 2005. There are a group of guinea basao and fishermen who were out in their boats, and there was a big old package floating, or maybe several smaller packages is floating there. So they haul them in with their nets and they took them back to land. They opened them up, and there was this white powder inside they had never seen before. Right. They didn't know what to do with it, so they actually used it as fertilizer on their crops, which killed their crops. Did. They really? Yeah. I didn't know that. And then finally, one day, while they're still puzzling over the stuff, god knows what else they do with it. Yeah. South American man shows up and says, hey, I believe you have something that belongs to us. Yeah. And that's cocaine. That's our cocaine. I'll give you a million dollars for it, which is 1300 of the entire gross domestic product, remember, of guinea basal. And so they say, okay, and by the way, can we do this again? Yeah. And that was the birth of the guinea Vasau and narcos. Yeah. It completely happened by accident. It did. Can you imagine that? And Guinea Bissau is a perfect narco state. The cops literally in the capital, Basau, it's the capital city of the country. The cops have five cop cars, and they almost never have gasoline to fuel them. And they have $150,000,000 worth of cocaine going through the borders with five cop cars. Right. It was a former Portuguese colony. The Portuguese left, and there's not an airplane associated with that country, but they have airfields out on, like, barrier islands that are just totally unused, unpatrolled. Right. And what's more, the military is completely in the pockets of the I think they're mostly Colombians that took the place over built stucco mansions. They have direct TV antennas on their roofs in this incredibly poverty stricken country. They stick out like sore thumbs. They don't care. One of the reasons why is, like I said, the military is on their side. How do we know that? Chuck? Josh, in September of 2006, cops, they're arrested to Colombian guys in a house with 700 kilos of cocaine. And the soldiers came, they showed up at the police station, surrounded it, and said, give me the cocaine and the men. And they did so, and they got in their cars, loaded up the coke and drove away. The cops watched the military load up the coke and just leave with the guys. Thank you for your time. Yeah. And that was it. That was the beginning of the end. The military engaged in an all out war with the government and ended up assassinating the president after laying siege to his mansion for several hours. Yeah, just this year. Right. March. He was assassinated in March. So there's no central government in guinea Basau the Colombians are there selling drugs, using it as actually, they're not selling it in GuineasA, as far as I know. They're using guinea basin as mules. Right. They're even more perfect because it was a Portuguese colony. They don't have to have visas to get into Europe. I mean, it's like Pablo Escobar went, god. Right. I need you to do me a favor. I got some friends back there on earth, and they need a place in West Africa. They give us a perfect narco state and god's like gimme bison. Sure. And I think you said the average annual income there is like $500 a year for a civil servant's job. Yeah. So it's clear that if you start waving just small amounts of money under their nose, that they're going to be at your Beckon call. Yeah. So getting the Sal wants to watch. I mean, it's just insane right there. Sure it's not a safe place to be? No. So that's Narco State. I have a headache just from talking about it. How about you, Chuck? I do. Kind of dense, isn't it? It is. It's a really good article, though. Thanks, man. If you want to read the article that I wrote and pour my blood, sweat and tears into, you can type narcostates. That's two words in the handy search bar@howstepworks.com. And that means it's time for listener mail. Yeah. You know, it's funny, this morning Emily asked me when we're getting ready for a day, what we're going to podcast on. I said, Narco State. She said. What's narco state? And I don't know, in here, like 8 hours later, my mind is busy. There is to know about Narco state. Or at least enough to talk about it for 25 minutes. Yeah, because it only been 25 minutes. 35 minutes. Jerry is 35. Josh, I'm going to call this DNA database london email. Hello, Josh and Chuck. Love your show. Thought you may be interested in a little story in regards to the podcast about crime databases. I am from Yakima, Washington, but I've lived in the UK for the last decade. I'm a train driver engineer. Lisa is 30. She's an American train engineer living in England. Isn't that interesting? So a friend of mine who is also a conductor had a recent experience with the British Transport Police in regards to this. He was spat on by a member of the public who was abusive while carrying out ticket duties. So the police were called on the day and for weeks after, my friend was pretty much harassed by the police because they wanted a DNA sample from him for, quote, exclusion purposes. He steadfastly declined each request to the point where he put it in writing to the police. He would get a solicitor involved to ensure he never had to submit a sample. The outcome is basically that the offender went unpunished because the police won't follow it up anymore because the guy who was attacked in spite of the on won't surrender his DNA for exclusion purposes. So, just thought you may want to know, here in England, even victims of crime are being coerced into giving samples. Keep up the great work. From Lisa. XXX from Lisa. Wow. Not an XO, buddyx. That's from Lisa and Stoke Hammond Buckingham shire. And I guess that's a place. Yeah. You know, I've been spit on before and spit back. Did you get spit on by a cab driver and niece? Really? Jerk. He tried to charge me $20 for, like, an eight block cab ride. I was like, I'm not giving you that much. And he was like, yes, you will. And I just blinked and put my hand in my face. And sure enough, there's a spit and I just spit right back in his face. This is France. I thought he was going to explode. Not even in a narco state. It was in NISS. Did you pay him? I paid him some. I didn't pay him $20. What a jerk. Spit on Josh. No doubt. Yeah, he's got a meeting with me scheduled. Thanks, buddy. I'm going to go find this guy. Yeah. Let's go to Nissan. All right. Well, if you have any stories about spitting on or being split upon, you can send it an email. To stoppodcast@housetofworks.com for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Want more housetaff work? Check out our blog on the Househop works.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. 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."
https://podcasts.howstuf…sk-socialism.mp3	How Socialism Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-socialism-works	In America it's virtually a dirty word, but after being dragged through the mud for a century, socialism is still a part of the U.S.'s national character. Learn about this foil and complement to capitalism and why it might not be so bad.	In America it's virtually a dirty word, but after being dragged through the mud for a century, socialism is still a part of the U.S.'s national character. Learn about this foil and complement to capitalism and why it might not be so bad.	Tue, 16 Sep 2014 14:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=14, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=259, tm_isdst=0)	47803810	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 hold your applause. Jerry socialist and me. Socialist. It's so funny. That's a dirty word. Yeah. People love calling politicians socialists these days. They're just a socialist. Yeah, it's weird. That the fact that that is a dirty word, because we stand in a moment in history where it's been drugged through the mud for 100 years. Sure. But the tenants of it, the basis of it is the same. It's virtually unchanged and still it's kind of sensible in some ways. Well, I mean, I looked at there's been various we're going to talk about these, but various social experiments throughout the years, and some worked pretty well for a little while. But it kind of dawned on me at one point. You can't account for laziness. Yeah. That's a huge thing. And that's when it all comes crumbling down. If everyone had that same work ethic, it could thrive. But as soon as that one dude is like, I don't feel like working and I'm a sucker because if I do, because I get the same junk that you do, then it's the beginning of the end. Yeah. If everybody had the work ethic of the people depicted in WPA murals and post offices right. We'd be fine. Which do look uncannily similar to Soviet era depictions of workers, too. Yeah. Because they're related. Yes. So we're talking socialism today, which is a huge, enormous, sweeping topic, but we're going to try to explain it in as best of terms as we possibly can. That's right. And it's really tough to talk about socialism without talking about capitalism, too, because they're antithetical. Pretty much. Sure. But they're both based on the same idea that from your economy springs forth everything else. Like Karl Marx, Joseph Engels, the guys who got together and wrote the Communist Manifesto, they basically said, It's the economy, stupid. Yeah. What was that from? That was James carville. Was that cargo? I thought that was some no, I was thinking of someone else. You're thinking of I'm with stupid. No, I know what you're thinking. Lose weight. Now ask me how what? I can do this all day. Where's the beef? Yes. What else? Can I get any other ad ever? I don't want to grow up. No, there was one stupid that was oil or gas commercial. It's the economy. Bunch of old guys sitting on the porch. Oh, yeah, that sounds like a fracking commercial, but I don't think they're saying, like, It's the economy, stupid. They're saying, Just sit there and shut up, stupid. Yeah, probably that's more the case. Let's just go back to James. Carl. So he said, It's the economy, stupid. It was one of the three main talking points for Clinton's 1992 campaign. Yeah. So Karl Marx didn't say that. But the idea was that you have this economy and depending on what you do with it. You can either have a really literally utopian society where everyone is equal, nobody wants everyone's taken care of, and there is no class stratification. Or you can go the opposite way and let this economy run on its own devices and step out of the way. And what you have is capitalism. And in Marks and Angles opinion, that was basically the most inherently evil thing a state or government institution could do, is just let an economy run rampant. Right. Because you have something called classes. Sure. You have stratification, you have wealth gap. Yes. And basically the exploitation of the very people who are producing the goods in a society. The workers. Yeah. The workers stay poor and the rich get richer. The poorer get poorer. Right. And like you said, it was based on this word, utopia. A British writer named Thomas More in 1515 coined that term. He wrote a book called Utopia about a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. And there was no private property. There were no locks on the doors. Houses. You rotated houses every ten years. So even if your free house, you thought your neighbors was better, ten years, you're going to get that same house, so don't worry about it. I just hope your neighbor doesn't trash it in the meantime. Exactly. They all wear the same clothes. There were no fancy clothes. Six hour work days, free health care, state endorsed euthanasia, which in 1515 was pretty radical. Yes. There's a lot of killing back then. Divorce was okay. So this was his version of utopia. And one thing we'll talk about is utopian. Socialism. That word utopian was tagged to it later on. It's like a majority of kind of like there is no utopia. Naive nanny. So your socialism, your utopian socialism is not possible. Oh, I see. Very clever. Sure. It's funny what people can do with words to just completely tarnish the concept, because you can't account for laziness. So you've got Thomas Moore writing in 1515, and he coined the term utopia, and it's not in and of itself socialism, but it has a lot of the hallmarks of socialism. Right, sure. It's a classless society. House swapping. Yeah. And it's a society that's operated and owned by the people, the very people who are producing goods. Yeah. And we should have said up front, there are dozens of types of socialism. So this could be like a twelve part series. And it will be. Oh, my God. No. Well, no, this one I was thinking this fits into what's become our socioeconomic suite. You know, we have a death suite. Sure. We've done so much economic stuff and socioeconomic stuff, brain bleeds, that I feel like we've got a suite coming up that I'm going to put together. Sweet. Yeah. So Thomas More comes up with utopia, but he's not the first person to ever write about the concepts, the basic foundation or principles of socialism that award goes to Plato, who described a place in his Republic that basically had two classes, the governed and those who governed. And the governed were completely subservient to those who governed. But those who governed were just basically inherently perfect in every way, shape or form. And aside from that, it was classless. Right. Everybody else was very much equal and the government were this hierarchy of a blunted pyramid, but they decided who was going to make what and in what amounts. So you have this hallmark, this other hallmark of socialism, which is complete and utter government control of an economy, which constitutes a planned economy. Yeah. And we're talking about utopian works between 1718 $50. These were very popular because these themes were because there was a lot of oppression going on in that 150 years still is around the world, of course, but it became a popular theme in books and novels to write about these utopian societies. Like man. It could be so much better. No oppression, no slavery, all boats are rising. And then a French revolutionary named Francois Noel Babuf is considered the first socialist because he is the first one who said, you know what? No more private property. We should all be equal. And I'm the first socialist. Yes. No. And he had his head cut off by the French Revolution at age 37 for his views. See where that got him? Technically, today he's referred to as a revolutionary communist. Yeah, you should go ahead and cover that. Yeah. Because socialism, the word was around when he was around and he was called socialist, but his views were so militant that he's now considered a revolutionary communist. And that sort of communism is basically like socialism with guns. Yeah. If you're a communist, socialism is a transitional state between a capitalist society and the communist society. So it's a temporary point in the glorious transition from capitalism to communism, because communists know from experience now that you can't just go from capitalism to communism overnight. You're going to completely cripple your economy. People are going to starve to death. You just have huge problems. So you have to go to socialism. So the difference between socialism and communism is that in a socialist country, everybody's producing for the general good, but what you receive is based on your merit, whereas with communism, everyone's producing for the general good and what you receive is based on your need. Yeah. And communism is a militant takeover. And utopian socialism, the main difference there is the idea is that everyone is on board and just gives us stuff up there's no overthrow of the upper class, because the upper class is like, no, I'm on board. Right. That's a utopian socialism. With communism, though, I think it's kind of gotten the idea. I think in practice, it's been at the barrel of a gun, basically like mouse head power springs from the barrel of a gun. So the idea that communism and militancy are associated has become kind of a thing. But I think theoretically, they're not necessarily related. Right. And then a few others, you have market socialism, which Yugoslavia and Hungary had a version of in the that is, most people see that as sort of the bridge between socialism and capitalism, where the government does own the resources, a lot of them at least. But market forces determine production and demand, and there is incentive. In true socialism, there's no incentive to work harder. See, I don't know that's necessarily true. I think it's communism. In socialism, you're still allowed to give incentives for harder work. Well, which kind of socialism, though? Yeah. Remember our Blimp episode? I do. Remember the helium supply that the US. Government controls. Yeah. That's an example of market socialism. Yeah, that's a good point. I think we're demonstrating just how hard it is to define it because there are so many times yeah. You can talk about it in pure terms. Let's do that. And then I think if you understand just the pure definition of socialism, you can start to understand you can recognize it in the real world. Right, right. So with socialism, you have no classes. Everybody is told what to do, to what to make, where to go to work. And the production output is determined by a central planning committee, in most cases, the government. And then that same committee takes all these production and distributes it according to who needs what. And the economy is completely controlled and planned, and this plan is put into effect by the workers, and everybody's equal. And there's no private property. Yeah, that's a tricky one, too, because if you went to Soviet Russia in the go into somebody's house and they had a TV set and that was that family's TV set. Yeah. So the distinction that I came across for private property is in socialism, people can own TVs, but nobody owns the factory that makes the TVs. So by the government controlling the factory that makes TVs, theoretically, you can make even more TVs, and more people can enjoy the fruits of the TV factory's production. Yeah. Does that make sense? Sure. Okay. I think if you want to explain something, do it by explaining it in terms of TV and TV. Jerry, she went to Cuba this year, remember? Yeah. And had an experience with communism that was really interesting. We should do a podcast on Cuba as a whole. I agree. And have Jerry sit in and not speak. Right. She'll just write things down and we can relay the message. And like I said, to understand socialism, you have to also understand capitalism. And capitalism is basically like the supply and demand runs everything. And if somebody needs something, they're willing to pay a higher price for it. Which means the sector over here will start to ramp up because they want to make more money. That's right. There's no planned economy. It just changes based on the needs of the individual. Yeah. And there's competition. It's encouraged in capitalism. Right. Not so much in socialism. Not at all in socialism, because competition is one of the great evils of capitalism in that socialist. Right. If you make a bunch of money and we're in the same industry, I'm not making a bunch of money and I can go bankrupt and my family could starve. But you're really rich. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Imagine if the shoe were on the other foot. I want us to all be rich. What's that called? Socialism. Okay. All right. So I was talking about Francois Babuf, and he was credited with being one of the first socialists. But the idea, the concept wasn't really popularized on a broad scale until the 1700, thanks to something called the Industrial Revolution, which is when, as everyone knows, robert Barons kind of started opening factories and controlling the wealth and putting people out of work or making people work for or offering people work, I should say, for very little money. And there was a big wealth gap. It was the first big wealth gap. The rich got richer, in that case, and the poorer got poorer, and people got a lot of unrest because of the slave labor. And the idea of socialism kind of became more popular all of a sudden. Right. It seems like anytime that business and industry has overstepped its exploitation of the working class, socialism has kind of been there to step up as a solution to that, and people have been more prone to adopt it. Yeah. In tough times, obviously, because that's one of the byproducts of socialism, of the government controlling industry. That means that the government also protects the workers from being screwed over by industry because you're working for the government and the government is not seeking to screw you over. Right. Does that make sense? Yeah. I feel like I'm not explaining this correctly. It's driving me a little bonkers, frankly. No, you're doing great. Because of the Industrial Revolution, though, there were these communes that started to pop up and all over the place that they were kind of socialist experiments. One was called Brook Farm in the 1840s, just outside of Boston and West Roxbury, and it was founded by a Unitarian minister and his wife, Georgia, and Sophia Ripley. And they said, you know what? You can choose your job. You can do whatever you want to do. Everyone's going to get equal pay. We're going to base our little society on a guy named a Frenchman named Charles Furrier who just died a few years ago. But he was super smart, we think, and he actually coined the term feminism. So ladies are going to be equal. Yeah, that was a big one. That's a huge thing, because this was 1840s, that was way ahead of its time, and they had visions to build this big structure called a Fallon story, and that was their undoing. It seems like there's always this one thing that ruins these experiments, and that was theirs. Fire destroyed it and basically bankrupted them by 1847. So that was the end of Brook Farm. And that's just one example. Yeah, one of many, because, like you said, there are a lot of communes that sprung up within larger capitalist systems, but that practice their own brand of socialism. There were Christian socialist communes, like the Shakers were a socialist community. Yeah. I was wondering about the Amish and I looked up, like, our Amish socialists, and I think they have a hierarchy. Yeah. And I don't think they're thought of as true socialists, but they have a lot of the same values, I think we all work together, we all work hard for the good of all of us. And values are what drove all of these socialist experiments, including the Christian socialist experiments, because basically they were saying, hey, you know what? We don't think capitalism really jibes with Christian teachings. We think socialism does a little more. So we're going to go off and try this and don't even try to persecute us, because religious freedom. Religious freedom. Yes. You've seen the bumper stickers, Jesus was a socialist. I haven't. They're out there. Last one I saw said, Easy does it. So check. Like you were saying, Brook Farm didn't exist in a vacuum. There were a lot of these socialist experiments going on. Everybody there seemed to be two types. There was one that just wanted to just get away from the world, just leave us alone. We're doing our own thing. If you want to come join us, awesome. But we're not trying to change the world, we're just trying to change the world. Our world. Yeah. There were other ones that sought to basically perform this experiment that demonstrated that socialism worked in the hopes that it would spread out to the rest of the country or the rest of the continent or whatever. Yeah. And one of them was in Scotland, formed by a guy named Robert Owen, and he was a Welshman who was a wealthy, wealthy capitalist who decided that capitalism was evil and that he was going to use his wealth to try socialist experiments. And the first one was in Scotland, in New Lanterns. Yeah. In 1786. He basically moved out there. Like he said, he had a lot of money, he's a big philanthropist, and he bought a mill and said, you know what? This cotton mill, I'm going to base this cooperative society around this mill. It's going to be our foundation to how we're going to make our money and we're going to divide up property among everyone and everyone's going to work the same and get paid the same. And it didn't work out, of course, but he was huge in the early progression of child care, basically. Yeah. He was really big on protecting children. He raised the minimum age to ten, the minimum working age. Yeah. The working age to ten. No, not minimum age. Like you have to have a child that's ten years old. Right. If you're born under the age of ten, you go to jail. But he instituted infant childcare for the first time in Great Britain. First preschool. Yeah, first preschool. First public library. First public school, too, I think. Like free public school. Yeah. So he let a lot of reform, but it didn't work out in England. So he said, I'm sorry. Scotland. Well, I think New Land Arc itself worked out, but it didn't catch on. And so he said, Nuts to you guys. I'm going over to America where they're way more open minded. That's right. So he went over and there was some land in Indiana in a place called Harmony. It was actually a commune of sorts there that lasted eleven years, from 1814 to 1825. Yes. But they were a non socialist religious commune, right? No, they were totally socialist. They were separatists from the German Lutheran Church, and they formed their own little socialist society there in Harmony and succeeded for eleven years, thanks to their German work ethic. And then they decided they wanted to go back to Pennsylvania. Yeah. They just left. And then Owens comes in and says, hey, this land, I'd like to buy it from you. I'll name it New Harmony, and I'll start my little experiment over here in the United States and see how it works. Basically did the same thing. Yeah. They said, thanks, Jump. But that lasted just two years. Yeah. This was not Owen's fault here. Well, I mean, from what I gathered, the main reason that it didn't work out is that people liked it so much. It was a bit chaotic, though, and they started splintering off, forming their own. Right. And all these other communes started popping up and they just couldn't survive anymore. Okay, well, also his business partner for the commune took all the money and left. Yes. I didn't see that. That was the main reason, though. I think they were dead in the water by that point. That might be the nail in the coffin. Right. So you pull the Mr. Burns. Yeah, exactly. So that's three that's just three communities. He went back to Belle and he was like, all right, yeah, I guess I'm out of here. And he started but he really, I guess, got a lot of press and raised awareness for the concept of labor reform and really helped set the stage for the labor struggles that would take place in Europe and the United States throughout the 19th century. And again, this is the result of a couple of things, but mostly the Industrial Revolution. Yeah. Because in the Industrial Revolution, business owners where the income inequality gap was growing by leaps and bounds because business owners could buy a machine that could do the work of ten people for a 10th of the price. And so as a result of this, you have experiments in socialism. You also have another thing grow up called Ludditeism. The Luddites. They're supposedly afraid of technology. Yeah, I've been called that. That's really a misinterpretation. Yeah, the Luddites like to smash technology that took their jobs. They weren't afraid of the future or anything like that. They just wanted to keep their jobs. So Luddite sprang up at about the same time, too. So you have Luddites socialism. And in 1848, there is what's called a revolutionary wave, similar to the Arab Spring of what, 2012, 2013, where almost all of the monarchies in Europe faced challenges from socialist revolutions. And most of the revolutions were crushed, but some of them had lasting effects. Like, you know how Sweden is considered a partially socialist state? Same with Denmark and all these other countries, France. All of them had to do with the socialist uprising in 1848. They made an imprint, an impact, and when the revolutions themselves were crushed, they started to move over here in the US. And that's when you saw a lot of these socialist experiments pop up. Yeah. And every country still has a lot of socialist programs that you could label as socialist. For sure. So we'll talk more about socialism in the United States right after this. So, Chuck, we're talking about socialism in the US. Which people are like, what are you talking about? The US. Is a capitalist society. Well, there's actually been a lot of socialism throughout the history of the US. Sure. There's been the Socialist Party. Milwaukee had some socialist mayors. If you live in Vermont, one of your senators is a socialist, Bernie Sanders. And there's this kind of long story history springing out of workers rights movements, labor movements in the United States that were supported by socialists and actually gave rise to the Socialist Party here in the US. Yeah. In 1876, the Working Men's Party was formed and then a year later changed their name to the Socialist Labor Party, of which Jack London, writer, was an early member, good writer. They were called the Workies. And they had someone on the presidential ticket every election from 1892 to 17 little newspapers. Wow. They had a newspaper called The People that was finally folded in 2008. And they even had an office in 2008, although as of 2007, they only had 77 members. And apparently the official meetings in San Francisco were only attended by three to six people. That's a far cry from the peak. Yeah, sure. When Eugene Debs, who was the socialist candidate for the fifth time, I think, when he was in jail and still managed to get a million votes in the general election for president as a socialist. Not bad. Then they're down to three to six members in San Francisco. Well, that was in 2007 and eight. Maybe they're booming again. Who knows? But part of it is because the term socialism, since socialism is basically in a lot of ways antithetical to capitalism has been, like I said, dragged through the mud over the centuries. And it was about this time, actually, it was in 1917 that it really started in earnest. Yeah. The government here in the US enacted the Espionage Act and kind of tied everything to not everything socialism, at least to Communism, and made a lot of things illegal to publicly endorse things like communism or socialism or criticized the involvement in World War I. Yes. Which is why Eugene Debs was in jail by the time 1950s rolled around through McCarthyism, which we have a great episode of McCarthyism. The Socialist Labor Party was waning because you did not want to be tapped a Communist. No. Unless you were a communist. I mean, you could basically lose your career by being blacklisted by the McCarthy trials. And that's in the US. Elsewhere in the world, long before the 1950s, there was a dictator in the Soviet Union named VI Lennon, you might have heard of, and he was the first world leader to really implement socialism on a big, broad government scale. Yeah. Up until that point, it was all theoretical except for little experiments or a little Communist. Lenin was the one who said, let's see if this can work. Yeah. And he was a Communist, but he implemented socialist initiatives after taking over in 1917, nationalized industry to a large degree in agriculture. But things were not profitable. So he kind of had to backtrack a little bit to a mixed economy a little bit. And one of the reasons why things weren't profitable, Chuck, was what you were talking about was you can't account for the lazy yeah. Incentive. People didn't have incentive. And Lennon, he hadn't figured out that to truly incentivize people in the absence of money, you needed violence. Yeah. And so Stalin came in and recognized this immediate you won't die. Pretty much. Yeah. And tens and tens of millions of people died under Stalin's rule, as he basically forced Communism to work by stripping people of any kind of private ownership of land or farms or anything like that, instituting collectivism and really taking Communism in this communist experiment and making it function by forcing the gears together. And a lot of blood came out of that interaction, but it worked for a little while. Like in, the Soviet economy was growing at a rate of about twice that of the United States per year. And this is all considering that the government is deciding exactly how the economy is going to go. Yeah. And then post World War One, there was a lot of activity in Europe. Socialist parties springing up in Germany. Sweden. Netherlands. Belgium. Great Britain. Africa. Latin America. Asia. People were dabbling in it, basically. Governments were dabbling in it. There's a wave of it in Africa in the seventies, too. And in part that was because, well, there's proxy wars being fought between the United States and the USSR. But also, it's because the USSR appeared successful. Can we talk about the USSR for a second and how it worked? Sure. So basically every year, the Government Planning Committee created the Gas Plan, which is like the plan for the Soviet economy. They would say, okay, so we need this and this and this. 25 million different things. And each of these 25 million different things cost this. Government sets the price, right? Right. So they would say, how can we make this happen? And they would send it down the chain and everybody would take a look at it and figure out their plan. Like, this main plan would be split into thousands of tiny sub plans and components. And the people who are actually carrying out the work would look at it and say, okay, we can do this and this and this, and I can get you this many tons of cotton, and we can do this many tons of potatoes, and this is how we're going to do it. And they would send it back up the chain and for the year the economy would be planned. And it actually did work for a little while. But the problem is, like you say, you can't account for laziness and you can also not account for an action. There is a huge criticism of this plan by capitalist economists who are saying this can never work. And the reason it can't work is because in a capitalist society, you rely on the markets for information. You guys don't have a market. You have government control of the market. So there's no real information being gleaned. So you can't possibly know who needs what where. And this very famous communist economist came back with, actually, that's not true. All we have to do is look at stocks. If we have a lot of surplus of something, then we know that we need to lower prices. If there's a scarcity of something, then we need to raise prices. Hence, communism works. And for a little while it looked like it worked until the whole thing broke down. And the whole thing broke down is because you have people whose job it is to set prices who are scared to death of screwing up. So they would just remain inactive. And ultimately, by the time they did respond to something, it was too late and people would starve or the whole system would be totally thrown off. Because if you have a plan, managed economy, if one little bit is thrown off, the whole thing can break down. So that ultimately is why the Soviet experiment failed. It was just too tightly controlled. That's a good one. All right. Back to the United States. Despite McCarthyism and the threats of the McCarthy era, there were some prominent socialists in the US. And there still are. Actually, Albert Einstein was famous for a paper called Why Socialism in 1949, where he had a plan to and it was all education based. Which is good, but he advocated for planned economies and wanted every citizen to have their livelihood insured. Some other notable American socialist ed asner Saul Bellow, Patch Adams, famous clown doctor comedian Lewis Black, singer Harry Belafonte, all identify socialists to this day. And I guess we can't talk about socialism without talking about Britain. Post World War II, the winds of change were brewing because Winston Churchill was defeated in his reelection bid by Clement Atlee, who was the head of the Labor Party. And that's with the U, because it's England and it was a Democratic Socialist Party and established in 1900, and Churchill was the head of the Tory Party, the Conservatives. And after World War II, the citizens were fed up. They said, Our health care stinks, there's labor problems all over the place and I don't think Churchill has got the goods to write the ship, so we're going to elect this at Lee fella and he had some pretty lasting changes. There were a lot of improvements under some of the nationalization policies, under adley like coal miners were given paid vacations, they were taking care of safety wise, they were given sick leave. But of course, when you nationalize industry like that, it became unprofitable because you can't account for laziness and there was no competition and workers weren't motivated. But his big legacy was the NHS, the National Health Service, which was established in 1948, which provided free medical care, and it is still in use today because it was super popular, even though financially it didn't work out for quite a while. Yeah. So Scotland is talking about going independent right now. There's a referendum coming up. Oh, really? And one of the main talking points is, if Scotland can go independent, the Scottish NHS can stay socialist rather than get sold off the private industry. Right. Like they think is going on in England. Is that what's going on right now? That's what the pro Scottish independence people are accusing the English of. I did not know that. Yeah. Interesting. Well, they love their free health care, but a lot of it in the 70s, there was an incredible inflation going on over there, 24%, 75%. And the winter of discontent of 1970, 819, 79 was a dark time over there because there are a lot of major labor strikes going on and the country was headed in the wrong direction until Margaret Thatcher came along. And despite what you think about her, she did write the ship economically in a lot of ways, like Stalling. One thing she did was she reduced spending in education and health care. Inflation went down, unemployment rose still, though, and she started to denationalize a lot of the major industries, like the telecom industry and selling it off to the private sector. And things started making a profit again. Right. Which was seen as a big victory. Yes. So Great Britain is a good example of the response, people being screwed over socialism stacking in. Socialism getting out of control and then capitalism coming in, and then capitalism runs rampant. People start to get screwed over again. Socialism starts to step in. There seems to be, like an ebb and flow between those two, and mostly just those two. Especially if you consider communism socialism. It's strange. Is there like a third one out there that we're missing, or is it really just capitalism and socialism? I don't know. Well, we'll talk more about socialism as it stands today in just a second. Let's just take this message break first. Chuck if there's anything the web has done, it's democratized humanity. Yeah. And one of the ways it's done that is now, thanks to Square Space, anyone who wants a website can have one. Yeah, anyone who wants a great looking and performing website and some little credit ones that you just designed yourself. Right, exactly. It's also very intuitive doing this. You don't have to be a genius, which democratizes the web even further. You can just drag and drop to create a really great looking website. And if you find yourself in any trouble, squarespace has world class customer service. Yeah. It's super intuitive. You're not going to learn how to code or anything like that, but what you will get is a beautiful, clean design. Your content is going to be the focus. You're going to be creating your logo. You're going to be able to sell stuff. You're going to be able to show off your art or your films or your music. It's really all there for the grabbing. Yes. Like you said, all plans have commerce options. So from hosting an entire store to accepting donations for your personal blog, squarespace has you covered. And you can even find out for yourself. Risk free. Go to squarespace. comStuff to start a 14 day free trial with no credit card necessary. Man and if you like that, which you will, it's only going to cost as low as $8 a month. After that, it's going to include a free domain name if you sign up for a year. All you have to do, once again, is use our offer code stuff. Stuff@www.squarespace. comStuff. You're going to get that 10% off your first purchase and you're going to be glad you did it. Okay. So, Chuck, you mentioned the NHS. It's still around today? Yes, it's an example of a socialist government system. Canada has something similar. It's often very criticized as being very expensive, very inefficient, very slow. But there's a lot of people who get healthcare that otherwise wouldn't. Yes, I think about 22% of every dollar in Canada goes to the healthcare system. Is that right? Yes, that's what it says in here. Yeah, that's a lot. And every Canadian I know says, still better than what you guys got. I mean, it's definitely cheaper than what the Americans spend on health care, for sure. Yeah. We may have to wait for an MRI, but at least we're not going broke because we get sick. But that's a good example of socialism versus capitalism. If you go to Canada, if you're a Canadian and you go to the hospital, I should say your MRI is going to cost the same no matter what hospital you go to, which I guess is $0. But if there is a charge to the government, it's going to be the same price. Right. Or roughly the same price. If you go to the United States, you can go to two different medical clinics in the same town, and you could have a discrepancy of maybe $10,000 for a single MRI procedure. Wow. And that's because in Canada, the government controls the cost of health care. It says this is how much an MRI costs. In the United States, there's a free market for people who have MRI that they want to contract out to use, and they can charge whatever they want. So there's a big discrepancy. Yeah. And they give one example in this article in Canada of a woman who had identical quadruplets that they could not be delivered in Canada because they didn't have the resources, so she had to go to Montana to have her babies born. So that's just one example of maybe some of the downfalls of socialized medicine. Yeah. So here in the United States, like you said, socialism gets tossed about. It's a derogatory term. Yeah. And a little willynilly, if you ask me. It is. It's also very glib. Yes. Especially if you're saying socialism doesn't work. Right. Or socialism exists in an evil direction. Because what you're talking about then is pure socialism in pure socialist theory, depending on how you look at it. Yes. Maybe it does strike you as evil, especially if you think of communism as being militant. The thing is, you can make the same arguments about pure capitalism where it's just a completely unfettered free market with no regulation whatsoever. The income inequality tends to develop and progress, and people tend to get trampled. So the idea of saying, like a politician, a socialist or something like that, if they're a United States politician, yes. They probably do have some sort of socialist tendencies in that they are voting to continue funding Medicare, Medicaid or welfare, Social Security, welfare of any kind, any kind of government regulation in the United States. The very fact that there is a rule for a particular industry that says, no, you can't dump toxic chemicals into a river sorry, that's socialism. That's government control over an industry. In part, it's not nationalization, which is a hallmark of socialism, where the government says, hey, your board of directors is gone, and these government employees now run this company. Right. But it's still the same. It's still a version of socialism. So what you have today in most Western developed nations is what's called the third way, which is a mixed economy where you have a free market and supply and demand runs that market, but you still have government protections. You probably have welfare programs, and that is public libraries. Yeah. That is rather than this ebb and tide and spasms between socialism and capitalism, this pendulum swinging back and forth, it feels like the two are starting to or have merged together into a hybrid that could conceivably smooth out over time. Conceivably smooth out over time. Yeah. That'd be great. It's possible that's what we're seeing right now. So in the future, all economies will be mixed economies. That's my prediction. All over the world. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, cool. I did read one article that I thought was interesting about the United States military being the ultimate socialist experiment. Oh, yeah? Do tell. Well, I think it had a lot of holes in it, but just the idea that the military, like, you dress alike, you all live, you have different ranks, of course, but you're essentially equal all working together for the greater good. It was an interesting perspective, but like I said, it had holes. It's like Swiss cheese. Yes. It's a good idea, though, right? It was interesting. So what that sounds like it's talking about is what people, I think, are ultimately saying when they're saying, like, communist, capitalist, pig, that kind of thing, and they're throwing, like, slander back and forth, what you're really saying is collectivist or individualist. Right. If you take the economy part away from it, what you're saying is are you the kind of person who subscribes to everyone working together for the greater good, or are you the kind of person who subscribes to the idea of individual liberty where people should be allowed to express themselves and move freely and not be fettered by any kind of constraints? Right. That's what it all boils down to. That's a bumper sticker. That's a long bumper sticker. Just truncate it. That's it. I got nothing else. So if you want to learn more about socialism, you should type that word into the search bar@housesteporkworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener me. Yeah. Hey, before I read this, I want to say thanks to our friends Josh and Joel over at Pod on Pod. Yes. They're a podcast review podcast. And they gave us we didn't know they were doing this. We just saw it and they gave us the best review. It was really nice. Yeah, they gave us a very well thought out review. We love these guys. It's a great podcast. They explained what they liked about it. Well, that's what they do on their show. I listen to some other ones and they really if you're looking to get into other podcasts, I would start with Pod on Pod and listen to some of their reviews because the review like the sound quality and the production. Right, exactly. That's what I mean. Just professionalism and well thought out. Yeah, it's very well thought out. And they did a great job. Thanks, dude. Yes. Go check out Pod. On Pod, they gave Jerry, like, huge, glowing review. Big ups. I think they called us the new standard in sound quality. That's awesome. Yeah. How about that? Over Mark Marony when they said they gave me tingles. All right, I'm going to call this email. Be careful. Becks she was listening to our Elevator podcast and I mentioned something about hearing that you're less likely to get injured in an accident if you're drunk. And she said she related her story because it happened to her. She was at a house party across the road from a friend of hers, made the mistake of drinking beer and wine. So she was really drunk. She and her friend decided to go into town, got to the main street and bumped into two guys who said, hey, come over and come have a drink with us at this pub. It was in West London. And she says now, when she thinks back at 35, how stupid she was to just, like, attempt across the street and join these two random strangers while she was drunk. She's very wary of that now, but she says she went across I looked first left, which was my biggest mistake here in London, because we drive on the left, so you should always look right. Any ever been over there? They say that on the street for us dumb Americans. Like at the airport. Yes. I say, look right on the sidewalk. She says she only looked left and decided to take her for my drunken brain that she would just step out into the street. I remember my friend screaming, becks now, she got hit by a car on her right. She landed on the bonnet and the driver hit his brakes. That's the hood. And I hit the tarmac. That's the street. Oh, my God. He was going 40 miles an hour and he was only about 3ft away when I stepped out. Had no chance of stopping. He got out of the car, got a pen and paper and wrote my name on it and then wrote, I accept full responsibility for this accident, and made me sign it as I lay there on the pavement. And then he drove off. Wow. The guys that offered us to come over and join them for a drink carried me across the road and into the pub and called an ambulance. They stayed with me until it arrived, made sure I was all right. I'm very grateful to them. Still, my injuries were this one grazed little finger. That is it. Wow. No head injury, no broken bones, no nothing. And I attribute to two things. One, I didn't see it coming, so I wasn't tensed up. And two, I was properly drunk, so I didn't tense up. I did end up in the hospital later that night when the shock set in, I got a headache and my family was worried that I was concussed, which I was not. As an aside, I did not escape the incident mentally enscaped, I suffered a period of real sadness and remorse for weeks afterward because I felt guilty that I had come out of it unharmed. When so many little kids get hit by cars through no fault of their own and die. Survivor guilt. Is that what that is? I think so. That's what Jeff Bridges called it. What was that called? Survivor. No big lebowski something less. I think it was called Survivor. He survives a plane wreck and learns to live. Now yeah, but it wasn't called Survivor. It was a good movie. Are you sure it wasn't called Survivor? Yeah, it was called I Can't Die or something like that. You're thinking of unbreakable that's Bruce Willis. No, I watched that the other night again, though. Good movie. It holds up, huh? It does. That's funny, because that was the one that was the toughest to watch the first time. I mean, aside from signs and all that claptrap. But, I mean, the $0.06 goes down easy. Sure. Unbreakable it doesn't go down quite as easy, but I would suspect that means that it still resonates more later. Yeah. Fearless. Fearless. I knew it was something less. I think the working title was Survived Driver. So that is from Becks Bloomfield, and she is a graphic designer at Little Red Robot Design, which you can find at Little Redrobot co n z. She lives in New Zealand now. Wow. And she is the one who sent in a picture of her awesome dog Stanley with holding a sign in his mouth saying, I heart S-Y-S-K. That's so cool. Stanley and Bex. But everyone is okay. Yes. Maybe take that as a gift. Yeah, it's a mulligan. She's over the guilt by now, I think. Okay. Well, if you have an amazing story that you want to share, we love hearing those. You can tweet it to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook. Comstuffyshow. You should send us an email stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com and join us at our home on the web stuffyoushouldnow.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 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 the Gap. And listen today."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1237407996247hsw-sysk-anger-good.mp3	Can anger be a good thing?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/can-anger-be-a-good-thing	Anger gets a bad rap, but this unpopular emotion can actually be beneficial to us. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to get Josh and Chuck's entertaining take on why we lose our cool.	Anger gets a bad rap, but this unpopular emotion can actually be beneficial to us. Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to get Josh and Chuck's entertaining take on why we lose our cool.	Thu, 19 Mar 2009 12:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=12, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=78, tm_isdst=0)	18344724	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom. And be sure to check out the new Stuff You Should Know blog now on the HowStuffWorks home page. Hey, and welcome to the podcaster. Hi, Chuck. How are you doing? This is stuff you should know. I should say that's Chuck Bryant. I'm Josh Clark, as usual. I think by now people know, right? If not, they just stumbled upon us. They're like, exactly, we just lost them right there. Everybody else, it's us. Chef. Do you remember watching The Incredible Hulk? Well, I was going to say as a kid, it ran from 1978 to 82. So you're what, like 25, maybe 30? No, man, that was right in my wheelhouse. Yeah, I just came in on the tail end, but I had a significant impact. I love that show. So, yeah, that was what, Bill Bixbylooferigno sharing the title role duties, right. Well, actually, Bill Bixby played Bruce Banner and Lou Fregno was the Hulk. Right. And he was kind of a big guy, but not Hulk like. I think they had to use certain camera angles and shots to make them appear even bigger. Right. And of course, since I'm 90 years old, I remember Bill Bixby from The Courtship of Eddie's Father, which was before that. Wow. Sorry. Go ahead. Okay, so, well, Chuck, you remember oftentimes I don't think it was every episode but Bruce Banner, when somebody was pushing him around or something. I remember one, I think in the intro, he would be hitchhiking or something. He was picked up by somebody who mistreated him. Maybe I could be making I make up memories a lot. Right. Healthy. Good. But yeah, in most episodes, he would say something like, please don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. And then inevitably, some jerk made him angry and then get ripped and turn green and just beat the tar out of them. Right, right. My favorite part, actually, he would always turn away as if he's trying to contain himself and then whip his head back around and he'd have those green eyes. Yes. He never bit his knuckles, though. I've always found that that helps to kind of keep things locked in. He should have tried that. It would have been a totally different show had he actually tried that, I think. Right. Well, actually, I bring up The Incredible Hulk, not because I just wanted to reminisce, although that was pleasant. Chuck. It was. I wanted to use it as a segue. And what I was going to segue into is that it is entirely possible that The Incredible Hulk, Bruce Banner, was a self actualized human being, except for throwing cars and stuff. He was in touch with his anger. He tried to keep it down, but eventually it came out and ultimately he would go back to normal. Right. And the point is of this, asinine intro is that anger can be beneficial. Absolutely. We tend to think that anger is just a bad thing. Not just that there's only negative repercussions, that it's harmful. And as a matter of fact, there was, I think, some survey that I read that found 28% of people, when asked about their own anger, they said that they thought it was a bad thing because it was useless and harmful. That's not necessarily true. Right. They said inappropriate, too, which I thought was inappropriate. Yes, I saw anger inappropriate. I think it's completely appropriate many times. Well, I think part of the problem is, and this is just me positing here we live in a society that has lots of expectations on gentility. Right. We're supposed to get along and go along and all that. So anger doesn't really have much of a place in a society like that. So I think a lot of us, including myself, have lost our ability to express ourselves through anger. Right. You know what Aristotle said? I'd love this quote. Let's hear it. Aristotle said this. The famous philosopher? Of course not. Aristotle Jones. Who Aristotle? How do you know Aristotle Jones? We'll talk about that later. The famous Aristotle said this the man who is angry at the right things and with the right people. And further, as he ought when he ought, and as long as he ought is praised. So basically he's saying that you can be angry, but if you're angry at the right time and you handle it in the right way, then you are to be patted on the back, essentially. Right. And he was right on the money, if you ask me. So I did a little research and found we have a great article on the site called How Anger Works. And I'm starting to notice a pattern here. Like all the great articles on the site, the byline says, Molly Edmondson. Have you noticed that? I thought you were going to say yourself, no, I wouldn't do that even if I thought it. Yes. Molly, who is a great writer and a dear friend and has her own podcast yeah. Stuff mom never told you with Kristen Kondra. Another great writer here. And we should probably stop all the plug in and get to the anger. Right. You're angry at Molly because she's a better writer than you. That is not true. Chuck, stop this, please. Okay, so there's basically three reasons why people get angry, all right? Right. And one of them is to correct someone else's bad behavior. When you get angry, you're all of a sudden kind of bursting forth with energy. You're kind of pushing energy from yourself onto somebody else, or at the very least, creating a start oversponse. And that's a pretty good way of teaching somebody. They don't need to do that to you again. Sure. I find that kind of distasteful behavior using untoward yes. My favorite word right now, that's one reason people get angry. Or one way people use anger, another is to demonstrate power, which is really, again, off putting, not a big fan of two of these three reasons, like getting whoever can shout the loudest or get the most irked and irritated winds. And actually that's the case sometimes, especially again in our genteel society. Right. The third reason anger exists, I think, is to address interpersonal conflict. Right. Like you're upset at something you've done. No. You're upset with something someone else did. Okay. And rather than just let it pass by, which will give you the opportunity to stew on it indefinitely and arguably in the relationship, you're using anger. And you shouldn't confuse this aspect of anger with coming into somebody's office, slamming the door and letting them have it. I guess it's kind of a form of unproductive form. This would more be like recognizing your angry and saying, I got to do something about this or else I'm not going to be friends with this person. So actually that use of anger is actually a kind gesture because you're saying, I'm willing to confront you even though it's going to be uncomfortable for me, including you. Right. Because I value our relationship. Okay, so those are reasons why you might demonstrate anger. Yes. Well, I found an interesting study. It's a little dated. It's from 1993, but I bet it's a great winton era. I bet it's still valid. Someone did a women's anger study. Okay. And interestingly, they found that out of the 535 women they surveyed, the three most common roots to a woman's anger, which ties in nicely with yours, is powerlessness, injustice, and the irresponsibility of others. So that kind of makes sense from what you just said. Well, I also read that women tend to become angered. There's actually something called anger triggers. Right. And they're actually age, gender, and culture specific. Oftentimes they're stimuli that trigger our anger. And women this is not the case across the board, but women tend to have find anger triggers in affronts by people that they're close to, family, friends, that kind of thing. Sure. Basically, you can't make a woman angry on average if you're a stranger. The exact opposite is the case with men. Men have a lot more patience with maybe their family and friends, but like, a stranger will just send them off the rails. That's me, man. BG traffic. Oh yeah. I hate strangers. Yeah, who likes them? That's not true. Nobody. But yeah, I find that that's actually the case with me. I would get extremely angry at someone I don't know because I'm a big injustice guy. Injustices really make me angry. People that don't think the rules apply to them. Like, let's say I'm sitting in traffic and we have the commuter lanes here in Atlanta, the carpool lane. And I'll see people, single riders whizzing by me in the carpool lane, and it fury. Do you chase them? Try to knock them off the road? No, because I'd have to get in the carpool lane. Oh, and you wouldn't do that? Well, no, because I'd get caught. Plus, also you would have no right to be angry at somebody else. True. You know what that is? That's reason. So basically, when our anger is triggered by whatever it is, we have two things going on. Two regions of our brain start wrestling and like, dirty, like Greco Roman wrestling. Right. Winner take all age match. Pretty much. Possibly with Shanks. Okay, I haven't determined that yet. But the frontal lobe, which is responsible for reason right. Starts getting into it with the amygdala, which is responsible for emotion. And all of this wrestling match usually lasts about 2 seconds. Quick ones. It is. And most of the time the frontal lobe wins. Did you know that? I didn't, but I get that. Yeah, because think about it, we'd all be walking around like half cocked powdered cakes, right. If the amygdala one. Have you ever known anyone that was like that, that was really angry and would fight people and just made you nervous being around them? I would say his name. 6th grade. I still to this day hate this kid's guts. And I would love to say his name so that somebody can hear it and go punch him in the stomach. But I know Jerry will bleep it out. His name is Beep. Beep. Exactly. That's what his name is. Yeah. But yeah, this kid, he was short and he was really mad that he was short. He bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson. What was that? Captain Caveman and Son cartoon. He bore resemblance to the sun. Really? Just kind of very Caveman esque. Right, yeah. And he was just such a little manipulative bully. He was machiavellian, actually. And he used to have us get into fights and he would turn the whole class against you. He was an angry little kid. And you know what? He was all amygdala. Really? Apparently, yes. I know a guy like that. When I lived in Arizona, that was just I was uncomfortable being around him because he would go to a bar or someplace and just invite trouble. It was written all over his face. It was his energy. And he scared me. I didn't like being around the guy. Do you want to stay away from people? No. I'm a pacifist man. I'm a lover. I don't need that. I know you are, Chuck. Not very angry. No. Well, I have some issues here and there with anger, but like Aristotle says, I want to channel it in the right direction. Exactly. And at the right time. Right. Right. There was actually a guy who's a perfect case study in how the brain processes anger. And his name is Phoenix Gage and he was this affable railroad man. He was a railroad worker. And in 1848, he took a rod through, I think, his right eye owl, and it went into his brain and actually I don't know if they ever got it out all the way, but they managed to keep him alive and he survived and continued to live. Okay. But he had frontal lobe damage. The reason part, his amygdala was perfectly fine. Right. So we went from this affable, friendly guy to a jerk for the rest of his life. Really? Yes. Wow. Finnish cage. I've got some more gender related anger things if you want to talk about that. Okay, sure. It's interesting, men and women it's amazing we ever get together, how different we are. I know. I'm often odd at that. I agree. They found when they studied women in anger and men, that men scored higher on physical aggression. Go figure. Passive aggression and experiences of impulsively dealing with their anger. And men usually more often had a revenge motive and scored higher in coercing people. And women, they found, were found to be angry longer, more resentful, and less likely to express their anger. But they also found interestingly that women used indirect aggression. They were more likely to write someone off that they knew. And I'm never going to speak to her again. Yeah, women do that, according to the study. And it kind of makes sense. I've known some women that have written off people in their life, but I don't know many men that have ever said I'm never going to speak to him again. I have really? I was about to say I think I'm very feminine in that way because it's not the only way, buddy. That's not well, I guess we should probably get to the last part of this clunker. What's that? The UC Santa Barbara study. Oh yeah. That's all you. Okay. So these two psychiatrists, psychologists, shrinks, put a bunch of college students together in a room and I think they said, you are to remain neutral and this other group we're going to make angry. Right. So they had them write about, I think extensively some past experience they had that made them angry. And then they took both groups and had them analyze a series of essays about whether or not college students are any good at saving or were good with finances. And some were good essays, some were terrible. Right. And basically the distinction was the good essays, the arguments that had basis where they cited old studies or facts or they backed up their argument, whereas the bad studies didn't. Right. But they were well written and they found that the kids who were angry had better analytical skills. Really? They scored consistently higher and picking out the good arguments from the bad. Right. Were they sifting through the muck and focusing on just the parts that they needed to? Is that what was going on there? I jumped from A to C. Okay, well, tell me about B. Well, I was trying to tell you about B anyway. Yes, that's exactly right. I think let's just strangle this horse. It's almost dead. What they concluded it wasn't proven, but they concluded that when you're angry, you're very focused, and so you're cutting away the fat, as it were. And if you're neutral, you're more likely to be taken in by flowery language or something like that. And you're angry, you're focused. The other theory that they had was when you're angry, you want to punish somebody. Oh, yeah. So you're probably going to punish somebody who's not doing as good a job or somebody who's not quite up to snuff. And in this case, it would have been a poorly argued essay. Right. There you go. Well, I think the secret is to channel your anger into positivity. There's nothing wrong with being angry, but I know that there are studies that show that if you suppress anger, you're more likely to die than if you don't hold on to those feelings. So suppressing your anger is not a good move. Now, anyone who's ever seen the angry dad episode of The Simpsons can tell you it is life threatening. True. But blowing up at someone and going off on someone and being physically aggressive is also not good. So it's all about doing it in the right way. Sure. Good advice, Chuck. I hope it didn't rain on your parade there with no, you totally didn't get great, buddy. I would want you to be angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. You would rain blows upon me. I love that phrase. Well, let's just get to listener mail time. But first, I know Chuck wants to tell everybody about something we like to call our web log or blog. Right. We, like 90% of people around the world now have a blog. We joined the blogosphere, and the blog is through the website houseupworks.com, and you can find it via the home page. It's called stuff you should know. Yes, and it's my buddy Josh and I just kind of hang out some interesting topics to talk about and trying to engage the Stuff you Should Know community. Yeah. And it's updated at least twice a day. Chuck posts once, I post once. So go check it out. And like Chuck said, you can access that through the homepage of housesports.com. And Chuck, please. Is it time for listener mail? Yes. Today, Josh, I have just a single listener mail. This is from this must be significant. Yes. This is from Adam Asher. And I don't know where Adam is from, but he says Cheers. So he may be from the UK. He may be one of those guys that says Cheers. He's an Anglophile. Yeah, perhaps. He says this. This is about the CIA LSD episode. Quick recap. Yeah. The CIA used to dose heroin addicts John's, and black inmates at prisons with LSD to find out if they could use it as a truth serum or something like that. Perfect. And the name of the program was MKUltra. Yes. That was the umbrella project. Right. So I found this very interesting. He says, I just had a comment on that episode. A few years back, maybe ten or twelve years ago, there was a video game made called MKUltra. In it, you were a weird costume demand with a gun for an arm, and you went through and violently killed everything in your midst. The world you were in was very interesting. Different colors, the walls moved, weird sound. There was a talking dog at your sidekick, and he said that when we talk about the MKUltra. Program, he made him think his video game the thing is, he can't remember it and doesn't have any further details. So I'm really interested to know if that was the name of the game and if there was a video game that literally poked fun at the CIA for doing this kind of thing or if that guy was on LSD true. So if anyone out there knows of this game and has any more details, I'd love to hear about it and get a copy of it. I want to play this game. Yeah. Well, that's thank you, Adam. Asher. Sure. If you want to share any of your acid flashbacks with us or just say hi, you can shoot us an email. If you can see the keys and they're not speaking to you at stuff@howstepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com. Brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you."
https://podcasts.howstuf…ban-planning.mp3	How Urban Planning Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-urban-planning-works	In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the origins, philosophies and practices of urban planning.	In this episode, Josh and Chuck discuss the origins, philosophies and practices of urban planning.	Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:06:08 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=23, tm_hour=19, tm_min=6, tm_sec=8, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=82, tm_isdst=0)	28404316	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 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. 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. That would make this Stuff You Should Know, as if you didn't know. Should I speak? Yeah, please do speak. Bail me out. Yeah. This is show number two in the temporary office. I hate this place so much. I know. It's weird. Get used to it, buddy. Okay. We'll be here for the next six weeks, all right? And then it'll be like, whoa. I know. Look at this new studio. It'll be like the kitchen of the future, but from the 50s. Right? So, Chuck yes, Josh? Do you know what May 23, 2007 was? It was a big day. My wedding anniversary. No, that was not my wedding anniversary. Go ahead. This is a weird thing to say if it wasn't true. Well, that was close. Okay. Chuck? Yes. May 23, 2007 represented the day that more humans in modern times lived in cities than did rural areas. I believe it didn't blow your mind? No, I believe it. So a couple of researchers, one from NC State and another from our Deer University of Georgia, did some demographic numbers crunched and came up with 3,303,992,253 people in cities. And on that day, there were 3,303,866,404 rural people. Do you know what percentage that breaks down to? Is it like 50 point something? It was 50 point something. Okay. Because they were projected that since you brought it up past stats in 1800, only slightly more than 2 million. I'm sorry. 2% of the world's population lived in the cities. By 1900, that was 45%. And they predicted by 2010, it would be like 51%. You know why the shift? Why? Industrial Revolution. Boom. Yeah. We went from an agrarian society to one where you could make the cheese in the city. And so everybody moved to the city. Right. I thought it was Thai food. I think that was a happy benefit, a byproduct of it. Yeah. And so people started moving to cities more and more. By 1910, there were scores of cities around the United States that boasted a million or more people. Right. Yeah. They were kind of crappy, though. They were. And one of the reasons why is because they were just kind of thrown together. Right. Somebody wanted to open a business where you bought the land and built the business and probably lived upstairs from it. Right. Yeah. There was sprawl, cramp conditions, tenement housing. Sure. Poor water quality. Can I read the quote? Yeah. From Henry Blake Fuller's novel with a procession in the 1900s, they were describing Chicago, and the protagonist, Trusdale Marshall, said, Chicago is a hideous monster. So pitifully, grotesque, gruesome, appalling. Yeah. Not a pretty picture now. And anybody who's familiar with Chicago now would be like, what? Chicago? Chicago is the bomb. That's exactly what someone would say. Right. The reason why somebody would say that today is because there was a guy named Daniel Hudson Burnham. Right. I love this dude. He was a Chicago architect, and Monsieur Burnham came up with this thing called the City Beautiful program. Right? Yeah. And I agree with it 100%. Build. The form and function will follow. Right. So Mr. Burnham's vision was to create municipal art, like fountains, statuary, green space, parks, sidewalks. And if you beautify the city crime, other social ills would kind of fall off, at the very least, because of the new found civic pride. Right. People want to keep it clean. You see some kids spray painting a beautiful fountain, you're probably going to open a skull with your walking cane. Right. Yeah. And he unveiled this at the 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposition. That was one of the best ever yeah. In Chicago. And he started applying those principles between DC. Cleveland, Ohio, manila Odley in San Francisco. Well, hey, the Filipinos need some help, too. That's true. And the whole thing really kind of came together for him since he was a Chicago architect in 19 six, when he and another guy named Edward Bennett created the plan of Chicago, the kitchen of the future. Yeah. And that's basically the first example of well, not true, because urban planning goes all the way back to Rome, but the first example of a comprehensive plan for an American city. Growth plan for an American city. Right. And actually, the Romans didn't necessarily have a comprehensive plan. They had really good architects. Yeah. Who burn them. Bases ideas on. Right. They had a lot of municipal art, a lot of great municipal gathering spaces. They had the aqueducts, sewers, cherry water. They had sewers, public houses that were placed in areas where everybody could enjoy them. Right. And that is one of the tenants of urban planning that we'll get to is not to exclude any peoples because of geographic location or socioeconomic conditions. Right. So Burnham basically throws down the gauntlet and says, I have created urban planning. Right. Good for him. Yeah, good for all of us. And it kind of took off. In addition to the Romans, which he borrowed heavily from, he also leaned a lot on the Parisians. You ever been to Paris? I have. It's a gorgeous city. Awesome city. Apparently back during the 17th century, during the reign of Louis the 14th, there was a lot of really good planning going on, or at least public architecture being raised in areas that weren't really settled. But these court architects had the foresight to be like, well, people are kind of spreading out over here. They're probably going to need this land eventually, so we're going to put some parks over here and just attract them. And sure enough, that's where people started to settle. So that concept and then the concept of equality for citizens, as far as the urban planner is concerned, they kind of form the foundation of Burnham's principles. Right? Yes. Should we just simply state the goal of urban planning? Let's do it. I'm actually going to read it because it's just so succinctly put here it is. To guide the development of a city or town so that it furthers the welfare of its current and future residents by creating convenient, equitable, health, efficient, and attractive environments. Right. That says it all. But you'd be a pretty shoddy urban planner if you built a fountain somewhere and what, it's the park of the future? It's a lot more than that. Right, sure. So there are basically three main things that an urban planner takes into account when creating a plan for an existing city. There's also planned communities, also called new towns or new cities. Did you know Columbia, Maryland, was one of those? I'm not till I read this. Built from the ground up, and it was one of the United States first plain communities, which is different than a suburb. Right. This is a town. And they said, we want a city, build it for us. And they did, too. Yeah. And it's grown since then. Same with rest in Virginia. And the government often gets into the act. Los Alamos, Oakridge, both of those are planned towns for a very important reason. Yes. The Manhattan Project. Yeah. I am the bringer of death, destroy of worlds. I am become death. I think. Whatever. Good old Phillip oppenheimer and wait for the event. Yes, it is. Robert so the three things that they take into account, urban planners take into account is the physical environment. Right? Yeah. That means, obviously, where it is, what the climate is like. If you're building in Seattle, you got to take into account the misty rain that falls. Sure. And also, especially if you're planning a town from the ground up, and especially if it was the early 20th century, you were likely to take advantage of a river. Sure. Specifically, a fall line where the river runs out of the mountains and into the sediment in the delta toward the ocean coastal plains. Of course. Very popular. Yeah. And also, Chuck, speaking of rivers and water, people love to settle by water for trade, for drinking water. It's really important. As water scarcity continues, by, I think, 2025, an estimated quarter of the world's population are going to be without access to clean drinking water. I predict that a lot more people are going to show up in areas where there is water, whether it's already established or they're going to find new areas toward the headwaters or the fall lines. Makes sense. Right. And our migration patterns are going to shift radically within the next 1520 years. Yeah, I would use for it, buddy. That means other areas will be deserted too. Yeah, that's going to be weird. It is going to be weird. And it's going to be a big challenge for urban planners who also take into account the social environment right. That is, groups that the city's residents belong to neighborhoods, workplaces, and policies. You've seen Slumdog Millionaire, right? I have. Great movie. So in Mumbai, I think 50% of the residents live in the slums. These are pretty serious slums too. Right. And in Africa, you mentioned the same deal with water. In Nairobi and Lagos, more than 60% of households aren't connected to water. Right. So that's not very good urban planning. So if Lagos, Nigeria said, hey, we want an urban plan, we want a master plan for our city, probably one of the first things that this urban planner would come up with was a way to get water equitably throughout the town. Right? Yes. And then there's also the economic environment. Really important. Yeah. Basically, you want to take into account existing businesses, but also figure out a way to attract new businesses and let the economic engine thrive. Right? Yeah. The future part of it is one of the key components of urban planning, and one of the reasons it's criticized is some critics will say that they take too much, the future into account too much, and they don't concentrate enough on what we need right now. Right. But we'll get to a little more of that later. We will. Let's keep on with the master plan, shall we? Okay, well, what's the master plan, Josh? Well, it's not as ominous or sinister as it sounds. Basically, it is exactly what it sounds like. Take away the ominous, sinister part. It's the master plan for this community, how the transportation sector figures in, or will figure out how land use will be factored in in the future. Airports, water, sewage parks, neighborhoods, housing. Again, economic development. Basically, you have to take all these components people living in the city, people working in the city, how they're getting from home to work, what they're seeing along the route, and then how they're sustaining themselves food, water, that kind of thing, and creating a plan for the future. Right. And the urban planning doesn't stop though at this pie in the sky. We should just do this. This would be great. It has to be feasible. It has to be workable. They got to show how much it costs and how it's going to be carried out too. They can't just present some nebulous awesome goal that could never be reached. Have you ever seen a master plan? No, have you? They are ridiculously detailed. Really? Yeah. It'll look kind of like a big blueprint schematic, like hundreds of pages. Right, right. But the way that I've seen it done is each page is like a transparency, but they're huge. And then, so you'll have the physical geography of the area. Right. Then the next is the infrastructure, the next page that overlays it until you have this thick, literally building. You look over it and you can see the whole master plan. But it's sector by sector, bit by bit. That's really interesting. It's like a flipbook. Right. You also need public support for this. Yeah. That's one of the keys. You have to get the public on your side or you're dead in the water. Because as everyone knows, if the public is against you, the politicians are going to start listening. And they're not going to go against the public too much either. They will sum. But if the public is really, really against something, then the politicians have to put the brakes on you. Back when I was a cub reporter for a weekly down in Henry County, there's this group called Neighbors Opposed to Parker Road Development. And out of that they called the acronym nope. And they were just like this grassroots group of neighbors that became like this political powerhouse that were fighting this development that was going to take over a really beautiful field in their area. And for years and years and years they fought. They showed up to city council meetings, county zoning meetings, everything they could show up to. They'd show up in these yellow shirts and they created this really loud voice. It was really admirable. And ultimately there was a compromise struck. So it wasn't like this terrible track housing that the county had plenty of already. It was nicer housing with fewer lots per acre. Right. And then I think like 60% of this land was dedicated in perpetuity to green space. Like a park. Yes. So they really did a lot. Yeah. We got the Belt line here in Atlanta, which is a project which has a lot of green space that's tied to a light rail line all over the city, which is awesome. And I love this idea until I heard that I was going to be like 85 years old by the time it was finished. Yeah, it's going to take a while. Yeah. And that's actually since I brought it there. That's another one of the criticisms is that it's very time intensive to do many of these plans, and the fact that these processes take too long. Current residents are like, what I want to give up my tax money for? Something is going to be around in 40 years. Right. That's part of it. And also, if you're in a kind of a new urban area, this thing's going to evolve and change and go well beyond the plan before it can be implemented. So time is definitely of the essence, right? Absolutely. And you said that politicians often will not go along. That's not necessarily true in my experience. Well, politicians go along with the developers dollars, and they actually do have legal authority to flex their muscles here. There's this thing called eminent domain. Yeah, I think we talked about that in the Squatting episode. Okay, I thought you meant we already talked about it in this podcast. No, of course. I was zoning out or something. But speaking of zoning oh, yeah, nice. Zoning laws have a lot to do with it, too, and that's where the planners have to be aware of all these zoning laws, which is whether or not an area is zoned for, like, business or for mixed use or for family only housing. But that's where the politician can flex their muscles as well, get zoning laws changed, and they can get the cops out there and be like, Tear down or we'll club you. Yeah, that's true. So, Chuck, not everybody is all hip on the urban planning thing, right? Right. Especially the early 20th century version. Burnham's original vision. Right. There was a lady by the name of Jane Jacobs who wrote a book in 1961 called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She's awesome. Yeah. I researched her a little bit. She passed away not too long ago, and the Rockefeller Foundation actually created something called the Jane Jacobs Medal, and that recognizes individuals who have made a significant contribution to thinking about urban design. She was radical at the time, dude. Early 60s. You can tell. Yeah, big time. And what she came up with, Chuck, was basically five main points. Right. And the first of the city is an ecosystem. And like you said, this is radical. Nobody looked at a city like this before. They're all drunk, right? They're smoking and drinking at work all day. They didn't think about that. Right. So Jane Jacobs was the one who was sober and stopped and paid attention. Right. Okay. So if a city is an ecosystem, that means it's constantly evolving and moving and thriving. And if you look at it and each aspect of it as a system that's interconnected with the rest of the system to make up this organism or ecosystem, what a great idea. You have a concept of what the city actually looks like, not what you want it to look like. Right. You also have to take into account the community. Right. Well, yes. She was a big critic of a lot of urban planners that many times weren't even from that city, would be hired and brought in and not put their feet to the pavement and talk to the local residents. And she thought that was obviously a big key, was called bottom up planning. And that was radical at the time, too, as was mixed use development. That was she was kind of the first champion of mixed use development. Right. Which we're really starting to see today. Even now, it's not really taken off, at least I can't say for other towns necessarily, but in Atlanta. Oh, yeah, man. Everywhere. Yeah. Live workplace. Right. But nobody's necessarily subscribing to it. A lot of them are sitting empty at this point. They definitely are. But I do think that in the future, that's pretty much what we're going to have to have. Yeah. And her mixed use wasn't only the modern thing that we see where there's an apartment upstairs from a chapo shop. She thought buildings should vary in age and condition as well. So don't just go in and bulldoze everything and build everything up new. She wanted different ages, conditions, and rental properties. Ownership properties. Nice. That's what she means. She also thought all of it should be packed together, which is definitely counterintuitive, especially for the time everybody thought the closer you put people together, the more crime and other social ills are going to break out. Right. Her point was, no, you put people together in this mixed use area and you're going to have city life 24/7. Right. It's not just when 05:00 comes, the place is deserted. There's always going to be people around. Things are always going to be open. And she called for higher density. Lastly, she also said that a lot of emphasis should be placed on local economy. Yeah. This is what I'm the big fan of. She was definitely not in favor of going and tearing down the old mom and pop shops to put in a large corporation because it's, quote, unquote, more stable. She thought the stability of the small business and small entrepreneurs was the way to go. You could do that by revitalizing downtown or having certain districts be very niche, like the Hammock district in the Max Scorpio episode of The Simpsons. Or the garment district. The garment district held kitchen. The meat packing district. Right. Exactly. New York has a lot of districts. And what she was saying is you have a district over here in Manhattan that specializes in garments, and then you have a district over here in Brooklyn that specializes in meat. Somebody in the garment district is going to go, I need some meat, and goes over to Brooklyn and vice versa. Sure. Right. And it all works. Yeah. So it's cross pollination of towns or different parts of town indeed. To get people out and about. Yeah. Rather than over to the old Navy targetbedbath and beyond. That's so ubiquitous here in Atlanta. Have you seen that postcard? No. It says Atlanta like no place else. But then Atlanta, the font is kind of big and then the background within each letter is like a target. An Old Navy. A Bed, Bath and beyond. It is very ironic and SmartMY. Yeah. The light just changed in here because the sun that is really weird. We're not used to windows. I'm dripping. So her ideas were revolutionary and they, in the early sixties, built on kind of the modern foundation of what urban planners many times do today. Although she was criticized for fostering gentrification. Yeah, I could see that. There's a real problem with it, especially in areas that have extensive suburbs. White people come out of the suburbs into the old town, buy cheap property and do it enough in droves that they drive out the lower classes who have to go out to the slightly outer suburbs or the inner suburbs. And then they push white people already there further out and it becomes a vicious cycle where white flight takes place exactly. Through gentrification. That's good. She countered that, though. Gosh, I wish I had the quote with me. I can't remember what it was. Something about shut up. Yeah, shut it. Yeah, that was it. I think now something about mixed communities and mixed races and everyone kind of living together. So she wasn't for driving out the poor people or anything like that? Oh, no. I mean, who is jerks rich people. Sure, I guess. So, Chuck, we finally arrived at my favorite part. The future. Right? Yeah. About 14 years after Jane Jacobs wrote her book nestle got a few people together they did in 1975 to plan the city in the sky. We've been planning space development, urban planning. I guess that would be would that be urban? Lunar urban, yeah. Lunar planning for a long, long time. Yeah. What they came up with was a city that's a wheel. Right. It's journey says the wheel in the sky keeps on turning. And this wheel would actually spin. It would rotate on an axis. It would turn. Yes. All right. The wheel in the sky would keep on turning on to do that. Thank you. And through this it would actually create gravity and allow for movement of air. Right. So people could do anything that they wanted to on Earth as long as there was an Old Navy in this wheel city. And they could also breathe and not float. Right. And I think also everybody was issued an orange bell, bottom jumpsuit, too, as far as the 1000 975 guys came up with. How long you been working on that one? Just now. Yeah. That's good. And Mars, too. They're talking about colonizing Mars, obviously. Yeah. We're talking about terraceeding, remember? Yeah. So maybe one day we will live on the moon and on Mars. And that's where some serious urban planning has got to go on. Chuck, I wanted to talk to you about something real quick. What's up? One of the trends that we're seeing, especially with mixed use development, is a focus on the city center going upward rather than outward. Right. You and I live in one of the most sprawling cities in the country and I would say one of the least well planned cities. Yeah. Our transportation is awful. You know what they're proposing right now? We have traffic problems. So they're proposing on making each side northbound and southbound at 75, 80, 511 lanes apiece. Well, that's how they did studies. It said that if you just build more lanes, it'll just be more cars. They're doing it anyway. That's just stupid. Right. We have a plus sign rapid transit system that has like eleven stops on it. Right. It's terrible. And we have terrible, terrible sprawl. So commutes are awful. People throttle one another during traffic. Well, Atlanta grew really fast and we weren't prepared. I mean, I grew up here. I remember the Atlanta was, I don't know, Acquaint southern city. And then the population boom so fast and there was zero foresight. And Atlanta city government is notoriously rotten and corrupt. So this is what we've got now. It was a big mess. Do you know how big metro Atlanta is? It like close to 5 million people or something. No, not population like size. Oh no. 6000 sq mi. I don't even know what that means. Technically speaking, metro Atlanta encompasses 6000 sq miles and 110 smaller municipalities. Jeez, isn't that nuts? That's a sprawl. That is a sprawl. 6000 sq mi. Yeah. I don't understand that. That's nothing compared to La. Though. No, that's pretty sprawling as well. Out of Phoenix, I think is the most sprawling city in the country. Yes. All those desert, they can just go as far as they want, right? I remember leaving town in La was so frustrating because you would get in your car to go out of town for the weekend and you would drive dude for like an hour and a half without a break and everything. It was still just stuff and people everywhere. And then eventually you would get to the point where there would be like land space and exits that didn't have much going on, but it just seems like it was all connected as a big huge mess they call the Southland. Well, again, I predict larger population densities or higher population densities in cities that have access to clean water. Yeah. New York had it right. They were forced to grow up instead of out, obviously. Well, they did both. Well, that's true. Connecticut. New Jersey. You're just part of New York. Right. Although people are going to write in and say, no we're not. My friend Robert, actually he's a fan of the show. He's an urban planner, or was in La. And when I saw him in La and said, hey man, what are you doing out here? He said, oh, I'm an urban planner. Nice work, screw up. He's in Boston. I don't think he still does that. Got you. Hello, Robert. Hey, Robert. And hello, eau Claire, Wisconsin. Why not? So that's it for urban planning, right? Do you have anything else? Jerry? You got anything, Jerry's? Good. If you want to learn more about urban planning, including all the bullet points chuck and I have faithfully read in this podcast, you can type that into the handy search bar@howstaffords.com, which means it's time for listener mail. Yeah. Josh I'm going to call this from Andrew in Cleveland, and it's about his brother. And I like brother stuff because I have a brother. I want to thank the two of you for letting me spend a few hours with my brother recently. My older brother lives in New Orleans with his wife and a younger sister, and I have a younger sister who lives with our father in New York. I live in Cleveland, about an hour from our mother. You got that? Yeah. Okay. A few months ago, my brother serves in the army. Got a call that he was being brought for a tour of Iraq, so he was leaving. It had been several years since we had visited him, so my sister and I cooked up a plan to drive across the country to pay him a surprise visit. The plan was for my sister to fly into Cleveland. He would get into my truck and we would drive the whole way to New Orleans with about a day to spend with my brother before he left. Disaster struck with the weather. My sister's plane was delayed because of snow in the east, and it was delayed 12 hours and really limited our options. When it came down to was I would have to pick up my sister from the airport at three and drive the entire 14 hours by myself because my sister's too young to drive and hopefully get to my brother's house before he leaves at 08:00. A.m. So driving through the night is no fun. Josh no. He's concerned about getting their period. But then, a miracle. My sister's ipod had, I believe every episode of Stuff You Should Know on it. And I've never even heard of you guys before this. Curious. I turned on the podcast and my brain was immediately filled with interest and laughter. The science, humor and discussions drove the fatigue from me, and I listened to you guys nonstopped while my sister slept. I think he has this confused for Radio Lab. I think so, too. I was actually surprised when I arrived in New Orleans because it felt like time just flew by. Upon arriving, we surprised my brother we're able to spend just a couple of hours with him over breakfast with he and his wife. It was a joyous but cheerful day, and my brother told me he could not have wished for a happier thing to happen. That's awesome. Very. Cool. So thank you guys very much for the podcast. It gave me 2 hours with my brother that I otherwise would have missed, and I am now an avid fan of your show. I listen every week and I'm reminded of breakfast with my brother and it makes me smile. Sweet. From Andrew in Cleveland. That's really awesome. Yeah, well, we've already gotten road trip stories from the Cannonball Run episode, right? Yeah. Okay, so if you have a tear jerking story about your sibling or family member and remember, family is what you make it. Sure. Send it in an email to Stuffpodcast at HowStuffWorks go. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetofworks.com. Want more housetofworks? 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. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my Favorite Murder, and Smalltown Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. 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https://podcasts.howstuf…4-sysk-crack.mp3	How Crack Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-crack-works	Back in the mid-1980s a new and extremely potent drug hit the scene: crack cocaine. In short order, America was in the grip of both a sweeping addiction and a state of hysteria over use of the drug and the social consequences of crack, like crack babies.	Back in the mid-1980s a new and extremely potent drug hit the scene: crack cocaine. In short order, America was in the grip of both a sweeping addiction and a state of hysteria over use of the drug and the social consequences of crack, like crack babies.	Tue, 24 Sep 2013 20:56:13 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2013, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=24, tm_hour=20, tm_min=56, tm_sec=13, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=267, tm_isdst=0)	45146346	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know from housetepworkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Jerry's over there. And this is if you should know, kerry just waves like she's waving. It the audience that isn't here. She's waving to the world. A little weird. She may be on something. Josh, you know what's wack? Zack attack from Save by the Bell. I don't even know what that is. You don't know what? Saved by the Bell is wrong. No, I know what that show is, but I never heard of the Zack Attack. It's just Zack being Zack. Got you. That is whack. Yeah. Well, never mind. I thought crack was whack, but the Zac Attack is truly whack. No, I disagree. I was going to say, no, it's not. Right, because that's actually a pretty good show, but okay, yes, crack is whack. We're, like, eminent up in here. We're what? We're like Eminem up in here. Yeah, I guess so. Refer to our hiphop episode now. No, I'm just saying, people, if they're confused about why we sounds so stilted in square, just go listen to hip hop. And that explains everything. People like that one. Surprisingly. Yeah. It's a good one, man. We got a good email from a Facebook post from a graffiti artist. Oh, yeah? Yeah. Good stuff. Nice. I can't remember his tag, but it was, like, really nice. But he was complimenting us. Or he was just saying, hey. He's like, hey, I'm a graffiti artist and here's my work. Nice. And I was very impressed. And he is not on crack. No, because he's not whack. Right, exactly. So, Chuck, I have a little intro. Great. Just if you'll bear with me. The year was 1985. One year. PBG. Yeah. Very early on, cocaine, which is a drug that had been sweeping the nation for about ten years by then yeah. Was up to $150 a gram. That's thanks to the demand and the available income of its well heeled yuppie. Users who are willing to spend that kind of money on it. Sure. Very much an expensive, white, upwardly mobile person's drug cocaine. Sure. Wall street. Yeah. And there were, at the time, articles that kind of said, cocaine is probably not that addictive. We shouldn't worry that much about cocaine. It's not a very big deal. It was mostly, like I said, a white drug. That same year, 1985, a new drug hit the scene. It was cheap, five to $10 a pop. It gave you a very quick, very intense high, short lived, and it swept through lower income African American areas of the United States. And all of a sudden, we had a problem. An epidemic. Yes. Because it was cocaine in a different form. Yeah. The country went crazy for it. And not only was it cocaine in a different form, it was cocaine being used by a different demographic that, as we'll see, America, has always been threatened by and always made legislation to dampen drug use among yeah, it's pretty interesting when you dig into this stuff. And so in 1985, when people started to get worried, nancy Reagan became concerned. And when Nancy Reagan became concerned, as usual, she started to lie. And we will get into what allegedly might have happened and why crack might have been introduced in this country, because some people think it was the US government straight up CIA. Yeah, that's a really good point. So what you're referring to is Gary Webb's dark alliance article, right? Yeah, series of articles and now book from 1996, I believe. Gary Webb was an investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News, and they had a front page story where he basically figured out the connection between the CIA and the cracker epidemic that started in, I think, 1984 in Los Angeles. Yeah, south Central. There was a dude named Freeway Ricky Ross who's still around, I think. Oh, really? Yeah, and he was the largest cocaine distributor, african American cocaine distributor in La. He was big time. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he had a new product called crack. And it became very popular very quickly. And Gary Webb in 1996 traced the origin of this epidemic back to through Ricky Ross, back to some Nicaraguan freedom fighting gorillas that were backed and trained and possibly commanded by the CIA. We're getting into this. So we just go ahead and dive in. Let's just dive in. Do you want to? Yeah, why not? Okay. All right, here's the deal. In Nicaragua Central American country in the 1930s, a man named Nastasio Samosa took power. And then about 40 years later, in 1979, the people revolted overthrew him, and they were called the Sandinistas. Yes. So the whole Contra Sandinista war, nicaragua, that raged in the that's what we're talking about. Yes. And the Sandinistas were Communists, and that didn't fly so well with the US, who had long cherished Nicaragua for their farmland and like to have a tow in their pond, so to speak. Oh, yeah. And so Communism there didn't fly. And so they said, you know what? I think maybe we should fund the Contras, maybe give them a little bit of financial assistance. Yeah. And the contrast weren't just one group. That was like, an umbrella term for any democratic or anticommunist group that was trying to paramilitarily overthrow the socialist leadership in Nicaragua. That's right. So we decided to help fund their civil war. And the problem was that there wasn't a lot of dough that we could say, like, hey, let's use this money to do this. Yeah. Because it was a secret war. There was no congressional approval. It was a proxy war with the Soviet Union at the time. So some allege that this is when the Reagan administration and the CIA got together to literally introduce cocaine dealers and cocaine to South Central and crack cocaine to spread throughout the ghettos to raise money and use that money to fund the contrast. So here's the thing that was never proven, and Gary Webb never, ever said he did not. He didn't say that the government directly introduced it on purpose or with the aim of creating an epidemic in the ghetto. He found connections between the CIA and drug lords right. Specifically Ricky Ross on one end. And then the CIA backed and possibly commanded nicaraguan Democratic force. Yes. This contra force, their business, their group was funded entirely from cocaine sales and trafficking. And that all went to this guy, Ricky Ross. And there's no way that the CIA didn't know about this. Yeah, well, we'll get back to Web in a second. But in the 80s, when the whole Iran Contra thing broke out, there was the carry committee who did some investigating. The carry committee report from John Kerry obviously found that, quote, the Contra drug links included payments to drug traffickers by the US state Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras. And then later on, there was an internal CIA investigation in the 90s where they found that there is no evidence that the CIA actually brought drugs into the United States. These are all quotes however, during the contra era, the CIA worked with a variety of people to support the contra program. And let me be frank, there are instances where the CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who are alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity. Right. So basically the internal investigation said, well, there might have been some people we were dealing with that were doing this, and as it turns out, we didn't really do much about it. Right. So as far as you can go without hyperbole and it's still pretty shocking. Sure. The CIA backed, trained, and possibly commanded at least one guerrilla group, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force and the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, the FDN sold cocaine to freeway Ricky Ross. Freeway Ricky Ross is where the crack epidemic originated. Yes. And so just to finish up with Web, though, after he wrote this Dark Alliance series, he was shunned by mainstream press in the United States. Sadly, all three of the major newspapers, the La times, New York Times, and I guess was the Washington Post came out. Well, not only Sean, they like, tried to discredit him. Oh, yeah. They wrote articles. They put 17 reporters and 20,000 words to a three day rebuttal of Dark Alliance. That was the La Times. Yeah. Rather than pick up the story, they tried to demolish it. And Webb New York Times suggested he was a reckless reporter prone to getting his facts wrong. He already had one to pull a surprise at this point, I think, for something else. And the Mercury News defended it for a little while and then backed off and apologized. He ended up quitting and committed a very weird suicide in which he shot himself in the head twice. Yeah. Who knows? Obviously, if you get on the Internet, there are tons of outlets that say, well, obviously it's not a suicide, it was a murder. Who knows about that? Other people have said, no, it does look kinky, but the first shot wasn't fatal and he was able to do it twice. Who knows? Draw your own conclusion. There's some raw nerve right there. But he claimed that there were people like, he saw what he thought were CIA people, like climbing up his fire escape and stuff the previous days. And who knows? All I'm saying is they're making a movie about it with Jeremy Renner this summer. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Great. Yes. Good. I'm glad I ran across him when I wrote an article on America's Army. Jeremy Renner? No, Jeremy Webb. Yeah, he wrote an expose. America's army. It's a video game, and it's basically like a training game for the army where you can play this free game, but you sign up to be contacted if you're any good at it. The army contacts you, and it's like a recruiting tool through video games. But the army categorically denied that's what it was, but that's obviously what it was. And Gary Webb one of his last exposes on that. And we should mention that today all three of those major news outlets all say, boy, we kind of got that one wrong. Yeah, we shouldn't have done that to Gary Web. Maybe we shouldn't have driven Gary Webb to his possible suicide. Yeah. So Gary Webb did all this investigation, did all this legwork, and he connected the dots pretty well. But there's still this maddening question, tantalizing question. Who invented crack? It came out of nowhere. And so to kind of answer that, which we can't, we have to look at how crack is made. And to look at how crack is made, you have to go back a lot further than the 1980s. You have to go back to the 1880s and actually a little further before then, when cocaine first was introduced to the United States after it was isolated, the alkaloid was isolated from the coca plant in the mid 19th century. Yeah. And that's when it was isolated. For centuries, people in South America were wise to the fact that if you chew on this plant, it will give you some go juice and work more. Yeah. And people still chew the heck out of it. Yeah. So it was no secret to the South Americans. But like you said, it was the mid 1880s when it was actually isolated and became an abused narcotic drug. Right. But first you could buy it all over the place. You could order it through catalogs. Doctors could prescribe it. Sigmund Freud was an ardent prescriber of it. And it was a very popular drug found in tonic. Coca Cola. Sure. For real. That's not a myth. And cocaine was everybody loved it for a while. Yeah, well, not until they still loved it and still do today, I imagine. Circles. But in 1914, it was made illegal with the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. Right. Do you remember I said earlier that everything like this crack has a real history of it, shows the history of racism in regards to drug laws. So the Harrison Narcotic Act outlawed opiates and cocaine for the first time in the United States, and it was based on concerns like Chinamen were luring white women, there were to their dens of iniquity in Chinatown through opium, and Southern blacks were sniffing cocaine, and it gave them superhuman strength, and they were raping white women as a result. So those two things were passed, and we have federal legislation from 1914 as a result of those kind of fears. And if you keep that in the back of your mind and then pay attention to the drug policy, that comes out later on from correct. It's been going on since then, and it continues to today. Are you saying a pattern emerges? A pattern emerges. So cocaine is cocaine powder. You have to actually manufacture it. You don't find a cocoa plant and shake it. Shake it and all the white powder falls out. It makes a good a tinkling sound on all we do. It is made by dissolving the paste, the cocoa paste in a mixture of hydrochloric acid and water. And you add some potassium salt, separate out the bad junk, maybe add a little ammonia, and then the powder is separated out and you've got cocaine powder cocaine. And from there, you can sniff it, you can add a little water to it and inject it. Or you can make something called free bass. Yeah, I never quite understood what freebase was. I thought free basing was a thing. It is. Yeah, but free bass is also a noun and a verb. Right. Okay. Free basis. Free bass. You see, I've been doing it wrong. You verb the noun. Okay, so you've been doing it. This stuff doesn't work. I don't know what everybody's so excited about. So with freebase, you take cocaine and you add something highly flammable, say, ether. And after you dissolve the cocaine in ammonia, you add ether to it and then you smoke it. But you're smoking something that has a highly flammable solution involved. Yeah, tell that to Richard Pryor. Yes. In 1980, when he was filming Bust and Loose, he caught himself on fire because he was smoking free base. He was smoking free base and drinking 151 proof rum one night. And I think he was doing it in his garage, too. So it was unventilated. He caught fire. Yeah, but you know what? There's also reports that he set himself on fire on purpose. Oh, really? That he poured the stuff all over his head and let a match oh, you want a little cuckoo self emulation I think that may be the right story. Now, I just saw a documentary on him, and I think that's what they say. I'm so glad you just corrected me mid podcast. Do you know how many emails you prevented from? I mean, that was the long story that he free based, and I think he even came out later and said, yeah, I was freebing, but I also purposely set myself on fire in the ravages of a free basing binge. Got you. Okay, so free basing. It was a thing at least as early as 1980, but it was difficult to do multi step process. And you needed something like ether. Ether is not the easiest thing to get your hands on. Sure. And dangerous, obviously. Sure. But there was a way to smoke cocaine, and freebase was the way to do it, but that never really got a big foothold in any demographic in the country. It was just kind of a thing that some people like Richard Pryor did. Right. Looking for more intense high, I guess. Then all of a sudden, mysteriously, out of nowhere, there is crack cocaine. Yeah. Crack is also manufactured, but it doesn't require something like ether or anything flammable. No. You dissolve it in a mixture of water and either baking soda, sodium bicarbonate, or ammonia, and you boil it up, separate it out into the solid, cool it down, and then break it up. And you've got your little whiteish or tan crack rocks. Right. And if you buy it on the street, supposedly they range in size from zero one to zero 5 grams. Yeah. And they contain, the DEA says, between 75 and 90% pure cocaine. So it's quite a rush for you. Sure. And because it's so easy to make crack from cocaine, like, nobody imports crack across the border into the US. It's all coke that comes into the US. Right. And then Wesley Snipes converts it into crack in a factory operated and run by naked people because he doesn't trust them. What was that? New Jack City, man? I was, like, played all about New Jack City. That was great for me. It was. And they call it crack because it makes a crackling sound. That's the baking soda when you put the fire on it. And speaking of put the fire on it, that's how you do it. There's different kinds of pipes, but the most often cracked pipe you will see is the little straight shooter. A little glass tube. Yeah. I find them on my dog walks in my neighborhood. Do you really? Still today? Yeah, crack is still around. It's not like it went anywhere. Okay. You thought, oh, they got that problem all under control. So you have to crack in one end and then a filter of some kind, like a steel wool or something in the other. Heat it up with your lighter yeah. On the outside of the glass tube. Or you can hit it with the flame, but I think if you light it under the glass tube, that's generally the way to do it. Yeah. It vaporizes it. That's right. And you smoke it, and pretty much immediately you're going to feel the effects. It's an immediate rush that lasts only about ten or 15 minutes. And that's something that I didn't used to know. I learned it a few years ago, but I had no idea. I thought a crack high was, like, a couple of hours or something. No, I think it's one of the shortest highs on the market, which is, I guess, why it's so addictive and dangerous and rampant. Because you come down and you're like, I'd like to do that again. Exactly. Because every 15 minutes it's a short high, but it's also an extremely intense high, too. So it's addictiveness, or potential for addictiveness is really high. Yeah. And so I know this article summarized very nicely for you exactly how it reacts with the brain. And so let's go ahead and just lay it on people. All right. It has to do with dopamine as we know. Yeah. Dopamine. It's like your pleasure center. It's the basis of the reward system that we have, which is how we learn to eat and how we learn to have sex, to reproduce. We feel good when we do certain things, we want to do it again. And the basis of that is dopamine. Right. So in the brain, the way it functions normally is neuron will release dopamine, and it will travel to a neighboring neuron, causing it to fire and release a pleasurable sensation. And then that dopamine molecule travels back to the original neuron via a transporter and is reabsorbed. So it's a little thing and then goes back home, and it's good. Right. There's a certain finite amount of pleasure humans are designed to experience naturally. Yeah. Because when we say reabsorbed, we said that a lot. I don't think people understand that means basically, it turns that off again. Right. It does its thing and it's done. Yeah. It doesn't do its thing and do its thing and do its thing and do its thing. It does its thing once and goes back to the original neuron. Exactly. Sit down on the couch and this little neuron waits to be released again. Let me know when you have sex again. Or eat something. Break some pizza. Yeah. So with crack or other drugs that target the dopamine system, they interrupt the process. Crack specifically interrupts the process of reuptake, or reabsorption. So you're smoking the crack. Right. And it triggers this dopamine release blood. Yes. But crack attaches to the transporter, which keeps the dopamine from being reabsorbed, which means it's just floating around in the synapse, the area between two neurons, like hitting that one neuron again and again and again. And it does it all throughout the brain or all throughout the ventral TEG mental area. And you have this long well, not long, but you have this very intense, pleasurable sensation. Right. So basically the re uptake, they just shut that down. So you're out there on your own and the dopamine is floating around. Yes. Your brain is a big pleasure center. And then after, I guess, five to 15 minutes, like, the crackers off and the dopamine is taken up once more. That's right. And the high is over and you are left going, I want to do that again. Exactly. I guess we should talk about some of the effects of crack use. Obviously, just like with cocaine, any kind of stimulant like that, or amphetamine, you're going to be at risk for heart attack, sometimes on the spot. And because you smoke it too, it has real potential for problems with your respiratory system and your cardiopulmonary system in general. Yeah. Stroke is also a risk. It's going to make you very energized at first, although your senses may be heightened temporarily. Your heart rate is going to shoot through the roof, your pupils are going to dilate, your temperature is going to rise. You're going to be pretty anxious or irritable as you start to come down. And then you could be really aggressive and you could be more prone to start a fight with a cop. Yeah. Like you have superhuman strength or some crazy stuff to a passerby on the sidewalk because you have a bunch of gunk on the corners of your mouth. That's true. If you have it with alcohol, that's not a good combination because that produces a chemical called cocaethylene. Yeah. Lived up. This is the thing. It's like toxic is all. Get out. Well, the crack or cocaine and alcohol produce a third drug, basically a hybrid drug that's more than the sum of its parts, and it creates a longer lasting, intense or high from crack. But it's also really toxic to the liver. Really bad for you. Yeah. As if alcohol itself wasn't. Yeah. And it's not like you have to do anything to it or to get this thing. Like you just drink and smoke crack. Right. And your body does the rest. Your metabolism breaks this stuff down and creates this cocaethylene. It's like alcohol and cocaine. Right. So as we said, it's super addictive. And of course, all this stuff, whenever you hear about drugs being addictive, it's all dependent on the person. Of course, one person might smoke crack and never want to do it again. One person might be hooked immediately. Yeah. It all depends on your susceptibility to addiction, which varies greatly. For sure. I remember learning when I was a kid that you smoked crack once and you're addicted for life. Yeah, I heard about heroin, too. Yeah. But there is a very high potential for abuse with crack because it's short term. Short high, but an intense high. Yeah. And we don't want to say, like, crack, it's not addictive, but we don't want to spread the misinformation hook it once you're hooked for that. Yeah. Which was really big in the Nancy Reagan war on drug era. Like, a lot of misinformation was put out there just to scare people. Yeah. So we're talking about it being addictive. It's addictive because of the effect that it has on dopamine. Yeah. But it's also delicious to your health because of the effect that it has on your dopamine reward system. Well, yeah. And I know we've covered this in other drugs. If you do enough drugs like this, it rewires your brain to the point where it just isn't working the same any longer. You need it. Your brain has some sort of sensor in there that's like, okay, there's way too much dopamine going on. This person should not be feeling this much pleasure. So I'm going to just stop producing as much dopamine naturally. It doesn't need it. I'm going to destroy the dopamine that's floating around in the synapses. I'm going to reduce the level so that now, when you stop smoking crack, the let down is way worse because you don't have as much natural dopamine as you did before you started smoking crack. And so your craving, your desire for crack to get back up is much more intense, much higher. Yeah. And here's the thing with crack, which is a little weird. Many times you need to smoke more and more of it because of what you were just talking about, because you need to get that high. But sometimes it'll actually make you more sensitive to it, and you will get super high off crack, even as an addict, super quick. And you could super die instantly, which I'm not sure if they've reconciled how it can do both of those things depending on who you are. Well, I think it's the same thing. It's like some people get addicted to it immediately, and other people take longer. Yeah, but I'm just talking about how it affects you. But I guess it's the same with alcohol because some hardcore alcoholics take a long time to get drunk, and some get drunk, like, really quickly. Right. Yeah. So I guess it's the same deal. I guess it probably have to do with metabolism. Metabolism, right. I guess so. Once you are fully addicted, if you stop smoking crack, which, by the way, I think I speak for Chuck, too, and I say we highly recommend it if you smoke crack. To stop smoking crack. Yeah. And if you haven't started yet, then just keep that up. Yes. Do not start smoking crack. No reason to. If you listen to this podcast after you became addicted to crack, if you withdraw from crack, you're going to experience a pretty big come down in general. Yeah. Severe depression, anxiety, cravings. You're going to be not fun to be around. You're going to be really irritable and anxious and exhausted, yet agitated all at the same time. Yeah. The good news is that your brain will eventually restructure itself to return its dopamine levels back to normal or somewhere near normal, so you won't be depressed or withdrawn or anxious or irritable for the rest of your life. It's just while you're undergoing withdrawals. That's what it's going to be like, and it won't be pretty. There's no medication designed to specifically treat crack, and most therapies are pretty standard rehab therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, which teaches you how to basically go through life resisting the temptation of smoking crack. Right. How to disassociate may be triggers, like places you go. Yeah. Just from that lifestyle. Yeah. Just to decouple your mentality from being addicted. Just standard rehab treatment? Pretty much. And we covered that extensively in addiction. There's another type of treatment that I hadn't heard of called contingency management. Have you heard of that? No, I hadn't, actually. It's apparently fairly popular for crack treatment. Well, what is it? Well, basically it's rewarded for not smoking crack, which I'm sure goes over really well with Republicans. Where's my reward? Exactly. I haven't smoked crack ever. Well, you haven't been addicted. You have to be addicted. Oh, you're given like a voucher or something. You make it like, 30 days, you get a free movie ticket or something. You're given stuff to incentivize. Yeah, incentivize. Not doing crack. And I'm sure stuff that is healthy good for you, distracts you from thinking about crack, that kind of thing. I hadn't heard of that before this article. Okay, give someone a movie ticket. You did good today by not smoking crack. Here's a movie ticket. Right. I always like the street terms. We should go over those real quick because 90% of street terms, I think, are probably just made up by the media. Yeah. I always feel like they probably just call it crack or rock. Right, or they call it bassa or French fries or real tops. Or Glow. Glow? That's like wasn't it the drug? And strangers with candy. Was it Glow Jerry, like, rubbed on her gums and they call it, like, Glow, probably. That was great. Rock sand. That's my favorite. Yeah. Hot cakes, CDs. Where is that? Candy? Sugar, yam. Jelly beans. I guess that kind of makes sense. Jelly beans and French fries make sense. French fries does? Yeah, because doesn't it look kind of like little pieces of French fries? Yeah, it makes more sense than basa or real tops. Here's one. There's no way that anyone in the history of humanity has ever called crack this electric Kool Aid. Yeah. They got the wrong drug there. Yeah, that would be acid from the famous book. Like, what is that? I don't know. I think those are newspaper writers who've never been on the streets. The kids today are on the Electric Koolaid. So one thing that we talked about, about crack is the weird sentencing laws dating back to and up until 2010 when we passed the Fair Sentencing Act. If you were caught with. 1 gram of crack cocaine, you would get as much time as someone caught with 100 grams of cocaine powder. Yes. And let's go back over this. In 1985, a gram of cocaine, powdered cocaine, cost $100, $150. And it was extraordinarily favored predominantly by white people. Crack comes along, 1985, five to $10. Cheap, intense high, and it becomes favored by African American. Statistically speaking, yes. So some might allege that the US government actually had a hand in introducing crack to the ghettos and then made stiffer sentencing once people were addicted to crack to put. And I'm not saying crack users are like, awesome people and people should do this, but it's a nonviolent crime. And they were being put in prison for the same amount of time as white counterparts who may be raped and murdered people. 100 to one ratio. You may get caught with 100 times the powdered cocaine to get the same sentence as somebody caught with 100th of that amount of crack. That's right. But it's not like that anymore. Well, hold on. There was one other thing, too. There are mandatory minimum sentences that were extraordinarily harsh just getting caught five years with a little bit of crack on you. Any amount of crack, I believe you got five years automatically. Yes. Five years. That was the mandatory minimum for possession. Five years in prison for nothing else. Like, you could just be walking down the street and get caught with crack and never have committed another crime in your entire life. Yeah. And you would get five years in prison for that. And that was from the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which screams Nancy Reagan. And that was a big deal. It was the law of the land until 2010. Yeah. And finally, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act, which reverted the ratio to one to 18 instead of one to 100 by weight, and got rid of that mandatory minimum. And now Attorney General Eric Holder is actually trying to get some retroactivity in these sentences and not trying to they are actually releasing some people from prison. I remember we talked about that in the presidential pardon episode. That was something that a lot of people were calling for. It blanket pardoned, nonviolent crack users who had been busted under this mandatory minimum. Here's an idea. Rehab somebody. But even still, there's still a skew in the ratio between crack and cocaine. Probably arrests. No, not just that. The sentences. I guess it's still an 18 to one ratio. It used to be 100 to one, but it's still 18 to one. And people are like, why not just make it one to one? It's cocaine and it's cocaine. Exactly. What's the problem here? So, yeah, there's been a long history of, I guess, racism, just put, plain and simple. There's really no other way to put it. Racism among drug laws. Yeah. And since they introduced the retroactivity releases, they've reduced 7300 sentences for an average of 29 months per inmate and saved American taxpayers $530,000,000 in the process. Other people will say, you're letting drug offenders out on the streets. Why are we doing this? So there are two sides, obviously, opinion wise, to that story. Right. We'd be remiss if we didn't point out that people are upset about it in some circles. Oh, sure. It sounds like it's a great idea, Categorically. Yeah, there's problems with it, for sure. Can we talk about crack babies? Yeah. That was another thing that came out of the 80s, was the so called crack baby. Like, there was a huge part of this crack epidemic. Wasn't just addiction, it was babies being born addicted to crack. And thanks to a paper from 1985 by a guy named Doctor IRA chasing off the crack baby, fear started sweeping the nation. I mean, huge, man. There's a New York Times video that you can go watch. It's, like ten minutes long. It's called Retro Reports. Is that what it was called? Yeah, it was really good. And it basically kind of brought, and I remember now, back in the 80s, peter Jennings on the nightly news saying that babies are and it's not Peter Jennings, of course. It's whoever wrote the story. It was Peter Jennings, Dan Rather. It was John Brokaw. People, Time, newsweek. It's saying these babies are being born addicted to drugs. It'll ultimately cost crack babies will cost the United States $5 billion. Yeah, they were saying it was going to be a lost generation, a nation of kids who you can't rehab. They're going to be the babies are aloof. They shake, they avoid eye contact. They avoid eye contact with their own mothers, which proves that they're going to be antisocial deviance when they grow up. Yeah. And this is not like we're not rewriting history, man. It was like hardcore stuff that they were saying. Yeah. One quote was, they will not be able to hold a job or form meaningful relationships. Right. So they were expected to completely overwhelm the education system, maybe not even have an IQ of 50, is the other quote. Yeah, and then completely overwhelmed social services. So basically, there's this whole generation of kids that were expected to be totally messed up because their mothers had smoked crack while they were pregnant, and so women were having their kids taken away from them. Some women were arrested. Yeah. And the guy, the doctor who wrote the original paper, dr. Irish Haznoff, started to very quickly back off of his original statement, which he's still today. He admits that he was pretty mouthy and not very savvy, pretty media naive, I guess you could say it for sure. And he said he would give these long winded statements and then the press would just pick out, like, the juiciest part. And this guy single handedly created the crack baby myth because it never panned out in any way, shape or form. And what they were saying was like the twitchy babies that you're seeing on TV when they're talking about the symptoms of being a crack baby, that's premature babies. Like, you take any premature baby who's premature for any reason, and they're going to display these symptoms that are supposedly associated with crack babies. Yeah. The US government sponsored a 25 year study of crack babies. Not a two year study or a five year study, 25 years. They followed these babies up into adulthood is now over. The funding ran out and they found that by age four, the average IQ of cocaine exposed children was 79. The average IQ for the non exposed children was 81. When it came to readiness, at age six, about 25% in each group scored in the abnormal range. Basically, all of the findings said it's the same as these other kids. But here's the deal. They weren't doing the study against crack babies and white suburban kids. They were doing it against a like, model, which was other poor black kids, basically, that were not crack babies. And they said they are all below average. So the deal is it's poverty, right? It's not crack cocaine. They're scoring the same as non crack babies and they're all scoring lower because of poverty and basically bad postnatal care through adulthood. Right. You might not have any problems, physiologically or not, or cognitively from being exposed to crack in the womb, but if your mom's still smoking crack after you're born, you're probably not going to get the best care from your parents as possible. And they did find in that same study that children that were being raised in, like, a supporting, encouraging house, even in poverty stricken conditions, tended to excel. Right. So it was poverty, they found out, and postnatal care, like you said, and being born premature. Yes. But the crack baby thing never happened. It was another example of hysterics. So right about now, I want to say, if it sounds like Chuck and I are being cavalier, have been cavalier with the idea of crack, we're not being cavalier with crack or addiction. That's nothing to take lightly. Right. But I think what's created a bit of a freneticness or passion maybe in this one, is just this idea that we're able to look back now 30 years on and say, wow, like America was genuinely hysterical. And it's something to be amazed by and a little disconcerted with, too. Yeah. Of course you should not take cocaine or smoke crack when you're pregnant. No doctor on earth is going to say that's a good thing. Right. But the crack baby was a myth. And the one Emory professor that was in that New York Times researcher in the New York Times video came out and said, you know what? Alcohol does much more physical damage and is much more widespread as an abused drug during pregnancy than crack or cocaine ever is. But they're not locking ladies up that are pregnant. For drinking. And the reason they were doing it back then is because they were poor black women. Right. We should say, though, the crack epidemic. Also, while the sentences were stiffer, the amount you got caught with was 100 times smaller to get the same wrap as getting caught with powdered cocaine. There was something that came out of this crack epidemic that was a real threat, and that was the rise of the modern inner city gang, at least as far as we know. It like crypts and bloods and folks and all those guys, they came out of this era. They were able to buy the guns that they bought and fight the turf wars that they fought, because they had this incredibly addictive drug that they could sell and control pretty easily in their hands all of a sudden. So where that came from, who knows? But the big problem with the crack epidemic that you can trace directly back to it is the rise of the modern gang drug gang. So, in summary whack. Yeah. Crack babies, myth. Crack sentencing laws. Whack. Gary Webb. Whacked. Whack. Very nice. I got nothing else. Okay, perfect. Well, since I said something perfect, I am going to tell you to go ahead and research crack. More on our website. HowStuffWorks.com one of our websites these days, you can type crack into the search bar, and it'll bring up this article. And since I said search bar, it's time for a message break. Chuckers, how about you take us out with some listener mail? All right. This is from Rebecca, and it is about PTSD and police chases. I've been a fan of you guys since the inception. I've listened to every episode. I always wanted to write in. Until now, I didn't have a reason. Listening to the Police Chase podcast made me want to share my story. Years ago, I was a victim of a police chase. Some teenagers had stolen a car and were pursued by the cops. I'm not sure what caused them to pursue at high speeds, but they did. The chase resulted in the kids t boning my car when I was stopped at a red light. The kids tried to take an incredibly sharp turn, essentially a uturn, onto another road, and they're going way too fast. The chase escalated to an on foot chase, and it actually did end in arrest. I ended up having to be cut out of the car with the jaws of life, only suffered minor head injuries despite my car being totalled. As a result of the incident, I began having anxiety and PTSD symptoms that were triggered by police sirens and intense stress. I had to receive treatment similar to some of what you discussed in the PTSD episode. All is well now. It didn't take too long with therapy to overcome everything. I just wanted to share the downside of police chases. I don't think that incident required a high speed chase, and the result could have been much worse. Wow. I really wish that police would stop to think before they pursued for minor crimes and would get fined even or have some sort of penalty for causing accidents with bystanders. And that is Rebecca. Thanks, Rebecca. I appreciate you sharing that. Sorry that happened to you. Glad you're doing better. Yeah. If you want to share a personal experience from something that we have talked about in this episode or another one, you can tweet to us s yskpodcast facebook. Comstuffyshonow stuffpodcast@discovery.com and then check out our website. It's stuffyoushaneo.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit housetopworks.com. Like a good neighbor. State farm is there. We're with 18,000 agents across the country who are ready to help you. 24 7365. That's getting to a better state."
a6b63d38-5462-11e8-b449-0f97075784dd	What were war masks?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/what-were-war-masks	War masks were made for soldiers in WWI who had horrible accidents that left their faces sometimes unrecognizable. Though it may seem rudimentary today, they went a long way in restoring their dignity. Learn all about them today.	War masks were made for soldiers in WWI who had horrible accidents that left their faces sometimes unrecognizable. Though it may seem rudimentary today, they went a long way in restoring their dignity. Learn all about them today.	Tue, 06 Nov 2018 14:52:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2018, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=6, tm_hour=14, tm_min=52, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=310, tm_isdst=0)	37791105	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"What if you were a major transit system facing cyber attacks? So you partner with IBM to keep your data network and apps protected. Now you can tackle threats without coming to a halt. 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, a simple checkout process, and secure payments. And if you're into analytics, hold on to your hats, because Squarespace has everything that you need. Just head to squarespace. Comsysk and you can get a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code SYSK to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Welcome to stuff you should know from houseofworkscom. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles to be Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know. I don't know what addition this is. It's a good one, though, I predict. Yeah, I didn't know much about this when I found out. I was like, wow, this is right up our alley. Yeah. This is part of what's very frequently called a hidden history of World War One. This is not something that a lot of people have known about for very long, although it seems to be picking up kind of academic interest. But this idea of people who were disfigured in the war suffered facial disfigurements. And I should say, I want to say now, before at the outset, facial differences is the preferred term, right. And there's a whole sea change going on in perception. And just being out there with facial differences, it's like the antithesis of what we're about to talk about. Right. So hats off to that. But this is a time when there was a huge sudden uptick in facial disfigurement is what they call them from being at war. Yeah. I mean, World War I was a brand new war. The Industrial Revolution brought on new, horrific ways to kill people, like the machine gun. The machine gun shells in trench warfare. They point out in both of these articles that I read that the soldiers at the time still didn't have a full understanding of just what machine gun meant. Right. And that you don't have time to go poke your head above the trench and look real quick like those bullets are faster than you. Right. You will get a face full of them. Right. And you're not dodging one bullet. There's a bunch of them coming. Maybe you get out of the way of one, but there's three more headed your way, too. Yes, it sounds weird to think of that now, but there was not that full understanding. And a lot of men in World War I had a lot of bad things happen to their face. Yeah. So not just from machine gun fire, from sticking their head up above the trench, but also from those mortar shells. Artillery. They've been around for a little while, but they just prior to World War I had really been perfected into really destructive instruments. They blew up and they created a totally different type of wound than a bullet hole does because they're jagged pieces of metal, iron, steel. And they could say, tear your lower jaw completely off, take off half of your face. Like, they just did all sorts of really weird, horrible things. And that advancement in weaponry, I guess you'd call it, combined with some advancements in battlefield emergency medicine saving lives. Yeah. So that there were worse wounds than ever before. But the potential of surviving a wound like that was also greater than ever before which culminated in a huge uptick in people whose faces had been disfigured by either bullets or shrapnel more than anyone had ever seen before. As far as numbers went. Yeah. There are a couple of doctors in these articles that have quotes and one of them talked about we didn't see a broken bone. We saw bones that were just shattered. Right at the time, I think another quote talked about the weaponry was outpacing medicine. And like you said, they were maybe able to save lives more. But it was outpacing like, well, now what do we do? We don't have the means to do facial reconstruction like they will in the future. In a very weird, but also really real way, World War I pushed reconstructive surgery to advance by leaps and bounds just by all of a sudden having a bunch of people to practice on and try new techniques on. But also having to do that all of a sudden rather than slowly taking your time. It was like, no, you need to figure this out now. And a lot of surgical techniques advanced but a lot of people point to World War I as kind of the dividing line between anything that came before as far as plastic surgery goes. And modern plastic surgery really started in World War One. But people have been doing stuff as far as plastic surgery goes for more than 1000 years. Before World War I or no, about almost 3000 years, 2503, 503,500 years, at least. That's as far as I'm going. I'm the worst at figuring out time spans over centuries, as you know. That's why I never do it. You always leave it to me. I usually just say the year and you're like, you can figure it out how long ago that was. You got it. But about 1600 BCE is when we have evidence on paper or papyri of actual repairing things on the face like that. And suturing things on the face. I believe there was a Hindu doctor named Sussrada who developed the first rhinoplasty. Yeah. Because in India especially during this time. I think this is about this is 500 BCE. So about 2500 years ago, if you were caught stealing, you would get your nose lopped off. You could also get it lopped off in war. And it happened frequently enough that it was an Indian doctor at that time who created the technique of building a new nose. Your nose could also just fall off if it was the 1700 and you had syphilis. Yes. Can you imagine something like that? No. Syphilis sounds awful. I mean, it would drive you in crazy, attack your spine. Yeah. But there are also these necrotic lesions called gummos or gummas. That's an awful name for something that eats your face away. A gumma. Yes. Oh, I got a new guma today. Look at this thing. But it would eat your nose clear off. It would eat your eye out of its socket. It would eat your mouth away. The prevalence of syphilis actually was something that kind of pushed plastic surgery along as well. Yeah, they started experimenting with skin grafting in the early 1008 hundreds. The term plastic surgery didn't actually come about until the 18 hundreds, but I can't imagine the results were great, but they were leading the way all over the world with some things like skin grafts and plastic surgery. Very rudimentary and crude, but it did pave the way. Yeah, they were figuring out techniques, but again, they didn't have something like World War One to push things forward. They had syphilis, which is something, but they had like, cleft palates was one that was a surgery that had been not perfected or anything like that, but it was a surgery you'd frequently see if you were a surgeon, you might be asked to do. But World War One again just brought on a drove of totally different cases that no one had ever seen before. So they had to get clever. And there were a couple of people who kind of came to the fore just as far as the plastic surgery went. There was a guy from New Zealand named Gillies. What was his first name? Chuck? Mickey. You knew I was going to say that, right? Yeah. Now. His name was Sir Harold Gillies. Yeah. There were a few people we'll talk about, all of them kind of as we go here, but Sir Harold Gillies, there was a gentleman named Francis Derwent Wood and then there was a woman named Anna Coleman Lad. Right. And they all contributed greatly to this new cause of this really sad cause of these men coming home with these really terrible things that have happened to their face. And not only that I'm shunned by society, but my kids can't look at me. My wife wants to leave me and some of these soldiers are like and she rightfully should want to leave me. Like, how can she even look at me? And it was just such an awful thing to have to live with and they all chipped in to, I call them war masks, basically like these wound masks. And they would make and if you see the pictures of these, it's amazing. These before and after photos, they would make masks and we'll get into the nitty gritty, but essentially masks to cover what they call them disfigurements, whether it was a missing eye, a missing nose, the lower half of your jaw, so it wouldn't be something you wore over your entire face, it would just be the part that they needed. Right, so initially it was, okay, we can advance plastic surgery. And that's where Harold Gillies came in. He founded a hospital at Sidcup, which is outside of London from what I understand. And that was where you would go if you were British, to get plastic surgery. And you could go stay there for like two years, basically getting a series of surgery and a series of surgery just one after the other, recovering new surgery. Recovering new surgery. And if they couldn't quite do it, they would send you over to Francis Dentwood, who we'll talk about in a second. But there were limits to plastic surgery. And when plastic surgery reached its limits and I guess the soldier's face was still disfigured to the point where he didn't feel like he could return to society, where society was like, you stay over there. Then Francis Der Winwood and Anna Coleman lad came into play. Yeah, he wrote, Gillis wrote and he pioneered a lot of work that they say is still important to modern plastic surgery. And he ended up writing a book and he was the guy that said before this we were doing things like cleft palates and all of a sudden we were getting 2000 patients a day coming in with the most horrific injuries you could imagine. And he ended up writing a book called A Plastic Surgery of the Face. And if you look at this book and this article rightfully points out, it really demonstrates how far they had come and what they were able to do, but also what they weren't able to do at all at the same time, like their limitations. Even though he was doing for the time really advanced work. Yeah, I mean, stuff where you cut out a piece of skin and sew it to another part of your skin so that there's blood flow and then you cut off where it was originally connected and then sew that part down and basically you just inch worm skin down the face to where you want it. Like they're figuring out things like you have to keep a blood supply going or else it's going to just rot and fall off. Like really advanced stuff. In a lot of cases they were able to restore the soldier's face basically back to or some close similarity to what it was prior to the injury. But again, there were plenty of them where it was just like, we can't do anything for you, man. And that's when they would go. When those cases started to build up, francis Dentwood and Anna Coleman Lad stepped in. Should we take a break? Yeah. All right, we'll take a break right now. 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 nobrainer, and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind at Airbnb comaircoverforhosts. 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. 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.com stuff right now. So one thing I want to mention real quick is I don't think we talked about was outside or in Sid Cup, where Gilly's Head is hospital. There were so many men coming through there in the town. They had certain benches painted where they painted blue. Yeah. And if there was a bench painted blue, I guess, for lack of a better word, a warning to society, like, here's where these patients will be sitting, and you might want to not sit there and look at them. Right. It's like a horrible thing to do. But it was just sort of emblematic of like what these men had to go through, like children terrified in public of these people. They wouldn't put mirrors in these hospitals. Well, yeah. And supposedly it was an enormous shock. Sure. To see yourself. I can't even imagine it. I can't imagine what it would be like to see your face, like, missing major features, because this is a recurring theme that I saw in a lot of the academic coverage of this, is like, on the one hand, what these people were doing was really great and noble, and they were trying to help these people regain their identity. But at the other, it's kind of like, what does it say about society that these people couldn't come back because they were missing, like, an eye or a mouth or something like that? Right. Like, stay in your house. I don't want my kid to see this. That kind of thing. Yeah. There's a complicated thing going on here. It's complex. Not just cut and dry. Like, that was wrong. This guy was missing a face. Got to have a face. They made him a mess to cover up his deformity. There's more to it than that. We're at a place now where we're making great strides in acceptance of stuff like this. But imagine it's still bad. Imagine what it was like back then. Have you seen that movie Wonder? No. What is it so sweet. It's like I thought of a little boy with facial differences and, like, him going from home school to school. Yeah, I've heard about it. It's heartbreakingly sweet. Yeah. Owen Wilson is his dad, of course, doing his own Wilson thing. Julie Roberts plays his mom. She's a great movie. Worth seeing. But yeah, there's a whole movement going on. I follow this account. I think there might be British called Changing Faces, and they're all just, like, out and proud. This is my face. I'm sorry. I can't do anything about it. I'm not going to do anything about it. Let's move from there. And it's neat to see that change. A huge shift from, you go stay over here, out of society. Society doesn't really feel like it can ask that of people any longer. Whereas before, it was like, my wife can't even look at me. She's repulsed by me, and she deserves to be. That's a huge change. And I think that's wonderful. Well, and it was also the same time where Kennedy would get lobotomized and stuffed in an insane asylum forever, never to be talked about again, or people committed family members. It was a dark time for humanity. Yes. And we're just now coming out of it a little bit. Well, we've come a long way since then, obviously. But it's just amazing. I don't know how much of this stuff still goes on. Sad. Should we talk about the masks? Oh, yeah. So if Harold Gillies couldn't do anything for you, you would move on to Francis Derwent Wood, who is an artist if there ever was one. Yes. So he had a shop called the Tin Knows. The shop. He didn't call it that. He didn't. He may have facetiously, but it was the Tommy, the wounded British soldiers who called it that. Yeah. T-I-N as in you don't have a nose here's one made of ten. Right. So. Yeah, they called it the Ten Noses shop. Yeah. But the official name was the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department. Yes. And it was founded by Francis Dentwood, who, like I said, he was an artist and he enlisted as a private in the medical corps at age 44. Yeah, which is obviously, especially back then, kind of old to do something like that. He found pretty quickly that he didn't get a great duty. He described it as Aaron boy chores. And he had a neck, though. He was an artist, so he had a knack for coming up with some pretty ingenious things. At first, it was splints that were apparently pretty creative and sophisticated. And then those chattering teeth that just made everybody laugh, those are his why was that ever a thing? I don't know. Is that supposed to be funny? I guess. Look at those teeth chatter. 70. I guess so. I was in the Pet Rock, which, by the way, I wanted to do a show on that. Is there a show worth of material or is that like a short stuff, you think? I don't know. We'll find out. Yeah, that's a nice tease. Maybe we'll come up with a third podcast called Somewhere In Between Stuff. Exactly. 23 minutes. Exactly. So, yeah, he was doing Aaron Boy stuff. Had a lot of creativity, I guess he caught the eye of the people there. And as an artist, they said, you know what? You could actually be very useful in constructing this kind of new idea, which are these. And again, this is what they call them back then, like disfigurement masks. Right. They had prosthetics before, facial prosthetics, but they were made of rubber. They weren't very good aesthetically. They were utilitarian. They were meant to maybe help you chew again if you're missing your lower jaw. Whatever. They were meant to solve the problem of the missing function. This is the opposite of that. Yeah. This is cosmetic, I guess you would call it. Very much so. Aesthetic cosmetic. Francis Dentwood said, I'm not trying to restore function. That's not the point of what I'm doing. What I'm doing is restoring identity. Somebody put it that he was making portraits out of metal. Yeah. They call them portrait masks. Right, yeah. And then putting them onto the person to basically restore their look back to what it was pre war. Yes. And they were also very intent at Woods Shop of treating these men with dignity and respect to I think one of the nurses even talked about how beautiful a face without a nose was. She was interested. Was she? Yeah, it was Kathleen Scott who was the widow of Robert Falcon Scott, who died in Antarctica on an expedition, but she was a sculptor who helped out. And these are people still, and they're beautiful in their own way. Yeah. Her quote was, Men without noses are very beautiful, like antique marbles. Always have seen antique marbles all the time, so you know exactly what she meant. They also said it would shop to always look a man straight in the face. Remember, he's watching your face to see how you're going to react. So it started when they first would come in there with being treated like a human being, which really is great. So he would establish his unit in March 1916, and by June of the following year, he appeared in The Lancet, the great legendary British medical journal that's still around today. And then eventually, at the end, toward the end of 1917, there was a Boston based sculptor in the United States, obviously previously to being married. She was Anna Coleman Watts and she was very talented as a sculptor and eventually married a man named Maynard Ladd, who was a physician and moved to France with him because he got a gig with the Red Cross. Yes. He was like the injured children's core leader or something like that. Man, what a thing to do. And yes. So they moved to France and she found out what Francis Went Wood was doing back in England, and she's like, I'm going to try that here. So, with the Red Cross, she set up something called the Studio for Portrait Masks in Paris in the Latin Quarter, and she went to work doing the same thing again, this is all pioneering stuff, like, these people were making this up as they went along. There were a couple of trained sculptors who, during the war, turned their talents to restoring facial identity to men whose faces have been disfigured by shrapnel and bullets. Yeah. And by all accounts, the Lad studio was very much the same way of trying to set them up for success as humans and treating them with dignity. Her place in the Latin Quarter was very beautiful. It was described as a large, bright studio, plants and ivy on the walls and flowers everywhere. And she wanted to make it. I think it's significant that these were artists and not from the medical establishment right. Because they wanted to set up these beautiful places for these men to come and feel good about what's going on there. And I think at the time, like, hospitals were grim. Oh, yeah. And any kind of treatment you got was just I mean, we've talked a lot about old medicine. It was not a sunny experience in any way. Then those horrid like wicker wheelchairs that are the creepiest thing anyone's ever seen. Yeah. So Lad tried to set up a really lovely, cheery, welcoming space for her patients to come in, which is just great. And there's news, real footage from that era of Lad working in her studio with one of her patient clients. I don't know what you'd call them, but I think he's missing a substantial part of his lower face, maybe his lower jaw. And she attaches the prosthetic, the mask, and tucks it behind his ears. Like it hangs on behind his ears. Right. Yeah. And it's the neatest thing. Like, he smiles. He goes from not sad, but neutral. But then all of a sudden he smiles. And it's like it was a warm, genuine smile. And it's really moving because you can read about it. Like, we did all you want, and like, oh, here's this quote from this person. And this person said, this is an amazing thing, too. And there's a letter, somebody seeing that guy smile. When Anna Coleman lab puts the prosthetic on his face, it says it all comes into focus, what everybody in the articles are talking about. Yes. And there are a lot of great before and after photos, and we'll get in a few minutes on how they made these things. But there are a lot of great before and after photos and when you look at these because initially in 2018, you think about, well, these people had a horrific thing happen to their face. And so now they wear a mask, like, attached by either eyeglasses or hooked over their ears to mesh with the rest of their face. And your first thought is, like, how unbelievable did that look? But when you look at these photos, they look really good. And you can only imagine that just that sense of normalcy, for lack of a better word, meant so much to these men. Yeah. Even covering it up, not fixing it, but covering up enough to blend in, I think is what they were looking for. Pretty extraordinary. Yeah. You want to take another break? Yeah, let's do it. We're going to take a break, everybody. We just decided, I don't know if you heard or not, and here we go. Hey, everybody, Chuck here. Did you know there are millions of people around the world hosting on airbnb right now? Yeah. Which means that's a lot of amazing homes that are making people a lot of extra money. And it doesn't have to be an everyday thing. You can host when you want. Like, let's say you're taking a week's vacation. Why not host your home? Because that money could go toward paying for your current vacation or towards your retirement fund or even towards your kids college fund. Yeah. For anything. And listen, if you're worried about your stuff, don't be. Air cover for hosts. Let hosts welcome guests into their home without having to worry. You get $1 million in damage protection anytime you're hosting. Plus pet damage protection and income loss protection, too. And are you ready for this? Air cover for host is completely free every time you host on airbnb. Free with a capital F with air cover for host. It makes hosting a no brainer and the benefits really start adding up. So learn more and host with peace of mind@airbnb.com. Aircoverforhosts. Hey, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify, the allinone commerce platform to start, run and grow your business, isn't it, Chuck? That's right. Shopify gives entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business, so upstart startups and established businesses alike can sell everywhere, synchronize online and in person sales and effortlessly stay informed. Scaling your business is a journey of endless possibility. You can reach customers online and across social networks with an ever growing suite of channel integrations and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest and more. And you can synchronize your online and in person sales, so you gain insights as you grow with detailed reporting of conversion rates, profit margins and beyond. It's more than a store. Shopify grows with you. So just go to shopify. comStuff all lowercase for a free 14 day trial and get full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Grow your business with Shopify today. Go to shopify. comStuff right NOWOW. All right, so let's talk about how these masks were made. Again, they were revolutionary. These people were making it up as they were going along, but they hit upon it pretty well right out of the gate. One of the big differences was that these weren't rubber prosthetics that were meant to restore function, they were metal masks that were meant to restore identity. Yeah. And a little dignity, maybe. So the first thing would happen is Lad or whoever is working on this, because Lad and Wood both had people they worked with on their teams. So the first thing they would do is get a photo, obviously more than one photo, of pre war and what they look like, because the whole thing is I don't want to make you look like you looked before. Not just, well, let me just fashion you a nose. Sure. I want your nose to look like your old nose. Right. And so they would get these photos that the people, the patients and soldiers would have to heal completely in order to undergo this process at all. It's not the kind of thing they could do as their healing. And so they made a plaster cast, and then after that, they would make what's called a squeeze, which is like a clay version of that cast. Right. And then eventually that would end up in a galvanized copper mask about the thickness of, like, a playing card. Right. And the plaster cast that they would make of your face was supposedly just an awful process. Sure. Like they would give you a little straw to put in your mouth and that's how you breathe for as long as they took to make the plaster cast. It's pretty bad. It'd be bad anyway. But after you've suffered that trauma right to your face, I imagine anything near or around your face would be really disconcerting. Yeah. And let's talk about that. What led up to that? First of all, you were shot in the face or hit with shrapnel in the face. Sometimes you would be laying there if you went down in no man's land for hours, days sure. Before somebody came and got you. You were taken to a field hospital and then flown over to England or driven over to England or by boat. Be quiet, everybody. Or taken to Paris, and you underwent possibly two years of surgical reconstruction. And finally, once all your surgeries were healed, you would find yourself in Mrs. Ladd studio, or Francis went Wood studio, getting plaster coated over your disfigured face, holding a little straw in your mouth. So, yeah, it was probably not the greatest thing that they've ever experienced. It was probably tied for first with a couple of those other ones along the way for being terrible. Yes. And like you said, this is after noble but not great result attempts at doing it the plastic surgery way. Right. So these people are desperate if you've gone in there to get a portrait mask, that's your last stop to try and resume your previous life, basically. Sure. As close as you can get to it. It's a big caveat. All right, so if you had facial hair, if you had a mustache, which a lot of men did back then, they would use real hair and add that into the mask. I think it took her about a month to make one of these. Yeah. I don't know if you said or not, but she was credited as, by far being the better artist. Like the results. She was really talented. Much better coming out of the Lad studio than the Wood studio. Yeah. But he was faster and more prolific. Yeah. I think he served a lot more patience in the end, I believe her shop was only up in about a year and with four assistants, created 185 masks, which, again, in the grand scheme of things, it's not very many people, but changed all of those lives. Right. From the plaster cast, you said they made a squeeze. The cast is a negative, the squeeze is a positive. And then they would use the squeeze as the model for making the cast or the mask that they needed, and then they would cast it into copper, 130 second of an inch thick, and then, like you said, it would attach by spectacles or around the ear. And Mrs. Ladd, you said she used hair. Yeah. But Wood used he painted his on. Yeah. So when you go to look up these photos, they'll have the before and after and on the left. Sometimes you can't even tell what this man might have previously looked like. Oh, man. Until you look at the right and then it's a mask. But you're like, you can tell that that's what this guy looks like. It really is true. The loss of identity that must happen, or must have happened, at least back then. And I'm sure now, too, where if you undergo a facial trauma, it's amazing how drastically it can change how you look in your face. It just changes from what it was before, when you see some of the before pictures. So before the injury and after the injury and then after the mask, that before the injury and then after the injury picture, sometimes you're like, I don't see that person in there at all. Yeah, so, yeah, I can imagine. Like we said, they kept mirrors out of the ward because seeing yourself like that, especially if you were in the process of undergoing surgery, I'm sure they were like, you don't need to see this at all, buddy. Just let us keep working on you. Yeah. One of the tougher parts of this process, too, and also most important, was matching the skin tone. Right. So obviously, if you have a mask that doesn't look like your other skin tone on the rest of your face, then it's going to stand out more. And your whole point was to blend in. So she would save that for last and actually fit the mask on the man and paint it while it was on their face so she could match it as exactly as possible. Right. I think used a couple of different oil paints at first. Didn't work out. Yeah, they chipped. Yeah. And then landed on enamel and these things still, we should say. It's not like it would last 20 years. It's a masculine every day, so it would get beat up over the years and wear and tear happened, for sure. One of the other things with the paint, too, is apparently the hue was really difficult because on an overcast day, it might look really lifelike, but then that same hue in sunlight looked like dead, so they had to kind of split the difference between the two. So from what I saw, the paint getting the complexion right was the hardest part for sure. But, yeah, those masks supposedly had a life expectancy of just about a couple of years. But the thing is, after the war, Wood studio closed down and so did Lads. And so these men, that was it, they got their mask. It was almost like this weird little pop up that happened that went away and never came back. So these men clung to their masks for as long as they could, and so much so that there basically aren't any of those masks. No one is like, oh, this is a World War One portrait mask. Right? Those are all buried with their owners because those masks became part of their public identity as well. Yeah. I bet you there's got to be one somewhere, right? Surely. But I think most of them are probably buried with their owners. And like I said, with Lad, only 185 masks, you were very lucky if you were able to get one of these. Yeah. Because I believe they estimated 20,000 what they called facial casualties in World War One alone. Right. So out of that number, to only get 185 from the best artists working, there's not very many people, and they think Francis Dent would created more just because he was open longer and he was more prolific and he's faster. But they don't have a number. But even still, even if he made three times that, it's nothing compared to how many people have become facially disfigured from injuries. Right? Yeah. And lad. She was lauded. She did a lot of interviews when she got back to the United States in 1932. She was made a chevalier. Nice touch. Is that right? Yes. Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. And she just went back to her art when she got back to the United States. Yeah. I want to say this awesome Smithsonian article by Carolyn Alexander, who talks about this. Yes. It's good. It mentions that her bus, like, she was a sculptor right. And before her work in the war and after her work in the war, it's actually really kind of generic portraits of people. It lacks, like, the pizzazz and the humanlike touch that her actual wartime mask efforts had. Yeah. That's really interesting. It's cool. I like her bust. I like her style. Weirdly. Like early 20th century modern. Yeah, totally. They're good looking. And she died in 1939. She died young. She died at 60 in Santa Barbara. Francis Germanwood died also young. 55. Yes. 55 years old. And 1926 in London. And he was remembered, obviously, post war as well, which is great public monuments, war memorials, and the Machine Gun Corps. And Hyde Park Corner in London is apparently where one of the most poignant war memorials for him lays lies lows. Yeah. And like you said, 20,000 of these injuries and only save several hundred of them received masks. And again, this is a time when society didn't really want you back if you were officially disfigured in the war. So sad. There was an idea to basically buy some land for disfigured officers, to have them just basically go live off the land over here and have a nice pension and just stay over here. And those plans didn't come to fruition, and so they were just kind of expected to just go fade away. Just go away. We don't want to see you in Australia. Apparently, they had a lot of facially disfigured soldiers returning home. A lot of them would just go out and live in the bush. Yeah. It would be like living in the woods in England or the US is, okay, I'm going to go live in the woods now because you guys don't want to see my face anymore. And a lot of them committed suicide, too, sad to say, or died of suspicious accidental deaths. Yeah, man. Like the stories where you hear about their kids being frightened of their father and stuff after the war. Just heartbreaking. Yeah, and that was supposedly a pretty recurrent anecdote in newspaper articles about these studios. They're trying to save people because their own kids can't stand to be around them. Yeah, but kids even scared of the mask because it points out that while they did so much to restore it, they were still expressionless faces. Which could creep out a kid for sure. Yes, but we've come a long way and Wonder is proof positive of that. Great. Go see that movie. It's good. I will. If you want to know more about facial differences, go check out I don't know, just search facial differences. Check out changingfacesorg and go see Wonder. Why not? It's a good movie. I'll check it out. That was the second one was directed to everybody. Okay, since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this relative of President Pierce here. Whoa, I'm in trouble. Parentheses, lighthearted. Okay, good. I'm not. Hey, guys, big fan. I had a baby in August, so I've been behind on the episodes. Finally got to these new short stuff where you mentioned that President Franklin Pierce. And I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I heard you're disdain for the fans. My baby's son's middle name is actually Pierce, just like his father and every other male that was born in his family. A tradition that has stemmed since you guessed it, franklin Pierce became president. My husband is a great great nephew of Pierce. The best. His grandmother actually still owns the presidential China. That's kind of cool. Wow. Every time someone finds out my husband a descendant of a president, they get so excited. But my husband and all of his family just roll their eyes and exclaim, oh, he was the worst president. Everyone just remembers Lincoln. Anyway, it makes me laugh every time that his family doesn't think much of this man any more than the rest of the world. So just take comfort knowing that your hate on Pierce and his faults during his time in office aren't past his own family. Man, that's something I'll do my best to make sure my son makes up for. It so sad I missed your shows in Denver. Please come back. And that is sincerely from Sarah, mother of Appears. Thanks. Sarah mother of appears. That's a great email. Yeah, and we'll come back to Denver for sure because we sold out two shows there. Denver loves us. Loves us can't get enough of us The Mile High City. Yes, we'll be back. If you want to get in touch with us, why don't you go ahead and mosey on over to Stuffyheaniew.com? Check out our social links there. I also have a website called the Joshclarkway.com if you want to check that out, too. That's right. And you can always send me, Jerry and Chuck an email all at once at Stuffpodcast the housestepworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseupworks.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 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 are pet moms, too. We make natural, high quality pet food that's rooted in science. 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http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-03-28-sysk-foreign-accent-syndrome-final.mp3	How Foreign Accent Syndrome Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-foreign-accent-syndrome-works	Foreign accent syndrome isn't when your mom talks funny when she goes abroad. It's an actual condition where people wake up one day with an entirely different accent, usually from some kind of head trauma. Learn all about this decidedly rare affliction to	Foreign accent syndrome isn't when your mom talks funny when she goes abroad. It's an actual condition where people wake up one day with an entirely different accent, usually from some kind of head trauma. Learn all about this decidedly rare affliction to	Tue, 28 Mar 2017 07:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=7, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=87, tm_isdst=0)	45610716	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 podcasts. Just to share the sheer joy of podcast listening. That's right. It's tr y pod side still in nascent industry. A lot of people don't know what podcasts are and helps everybody out. If you would go out and just say, hey, family member who I see it 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 houseteporkworkscom. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry's here as always. You should have said that in a British accent. It's stuff you should know. Hey, how's that? It was great. You're a regular rich little Remember the arrest development, little subplot where Charlize Theron was thought to be a British spy? Oh, yeah. For British eyes only. Yeah, but what was the name of her character? Mr. F. Mr. F? That's right. That's right. I knew I had some like they said that every time. Right. It was pretty funny. She's great. Yes, she was pretty lady funny, smart. Yeah. Good actor. What else? That's all I got on her. She can macromay. Oh, really? I don't know. I just assume. Okay, this is off to a great start. It's unusual. Odd even. You could say that you suggested I save the intro in a British accent because we're talking about foreign accents today, Chuck. That's right. It was coy. I see. Now it makes sense. Yes. And we're specifically not talking about there's a thing sometimes that certain people do when they meet someone with an accent different than their own right. Where they accidentally or sometimes purposely adopt it momentarily. Yes. It's called code switching. My mom's done this before. That I remember it happened when I was a kid. My brother and I thought it was so funny. Yeah. And it seems like it's usually a parent of an embarrassed child. Sure. Is there an explanation behind it? Yeah. From what I understand, this is the point. Right. So our accents are extremely personal. They're part of us individually, but they also signal our membership in different groups. Right. So, like, a farmer is going to talk differently from a stockbroker and a farmer from Georgia is going to talk a lot differently than a stockbroker from Portland, Oregon. Right, okay. Because it's the other stock market seat. You thought I was going to say New York. I know. So when we code switch, when we meet other people and taking gone their way of talking, it's called code switching. And I think it's a way of signaling, hey, we have something in common. I don't want you to be distracted by the welcoming thing. Yeah, my overalls with no shirt on are distracting enough. I don't want you to be distracted by my accent, too. So I think it is a way of saying, like, hey, we have something in common. The thing is, accents are such a part of group identity that if you do that in front of some other members of your group, whether it's your family or your friends or whatever, they're going to tease you. They are going to tease you, guaranteed. And one of the reasons why is because what they're doing, consciously or otherwise, is maintaining the borders of their own group's identity. Yeah, they're saying, don't put on heirs. Don't think you're fancy. Don't think you're just like that guy. You're one of us. And making fun of somebody who adopt someone else's accent is a way of doing that. It's a way of maintaining group divisions and borders, really. When you do kind of adopt someone else's accent, I think one of the things that you are doing is trying to make the foreigner, the stranger, feel more comfortable. And having met your mom, I guarantee that's what she was doing. Well, I just remember the only one I remember specifically and you just had these random childhood moments that sort of stick with you was we were in Florida and we were talking with an Irish woman. I believe she may have been from England, but I think she was Irish. And the other thing, too is I don't think my mom had probably talked to a lot of Irish people at that point. She's from West Tennessee. They moved to Georgia. We didn't have Irish people all over the place. She wasn't super well traveled back then, although she is much more now. So it was probably a bit novel to her. And I remember very specifically, the woman said something about going to Disney instead of Disney World. And my mom said she got kind of proper. And she says, we haven't been to Disney yet. And I remember my brother and I just thought that was so funny. Instead of saying Disney World, did you guys make fun of her in front of the woman? No, I don't think so. We may have laughed a little under our breath, but I don't think we even teased her. I'm teasing her now a bit, sure, but I don't think we made fun of her, really. I think we just kind of like my brother and I want to do very quietly looked at each other in that way that brothers do, right. And then talk to each other like the kids and escape. From which mountain were they telepathic? Yeah, but it's funny. I was listening to the great Judge John Hodgman podcast with our pal John and class act Jesse Thorn bailiff Jesse. And they had an actual case a few weeks ago that was very funny, where this mom does this on purpose. She's a trained actor and loves to put on accents when she goes to places. And the daughter, she took her to the Internet court and was just like, stop doing this. You've got to stop doing this. And the mom's whole thing, she was very just fun and whimsical and having a lot of fun with it. So it was really hard to rule against her. But I think Hodgman ultimately did rule against her. He's tough but fair. Well, I think his whole thing was, like I think he ruled partially in her favor. Like, you got to let them know where you're from. And you can't do it to, like, waiters and service people because their job is to take your dumb jokes and have a stiff upper lip about it. And it just kind of makes their job harder if they think maybe you're making fun of them. And you may not realize the unintended consequence of this, is somebody may feel uncomfortable that they have to put up with this. Wow, that took a really serious turn at the end there. Now. It did. I mean, that's what's great about that show, is they're funny cases, but he adjudicates seriously, I think. And then Jesse always shoots his gun off at the end. Yeah. So, anyway, I just thought it was pretty weird that this article came up and then that episode had just aired, but that's different than what we were talking about. Totally. Like, I started saying, this is not that at all. This is a legitimate, super rare this reminded me of alien Hand syndrome, and it's rarity. Yeah. Because I've seen different numbers, but the most I've seen is about 150 described official cases of foreign Accent syndrome. Right. That's super rare. For sure. Yeah. And what makes it different from somebody taking on the affect or dialect or accent of somebody else? Someone taking the piss. Right. This is where you can't stop it's involuntary. Yeah. And it sounds weird. It's epic. And you just want to poke the person who's doing that in the neck and be like, what are you doing there? But if you really start to dig into the actual cases, it's sad in a lot of cases. Oh, yeah. Because, again, your accent, what you sound like, makes up a part of your personality. So if it changes on you involuntarily, it can be quite traumatic for some people that you could have an identity crisis of sorts. Yeah. So I guess we should go ahead and talk about a couple of cases so people know what we're talking about. The first one mentioned in our own article is really interesting for a few reasons, and it's the most recent case that's documented. I'm sorry, it's not the most recent, but it is fairly recent. A woman named Lisa Alamia, she had jaw surgery because of an overbite and then when she came out of surgery, even though she was from Texas and had never been to England, she spoke with a British accent, and she's like, Right, bloody hell. Wait, I need our British listeners to write in and tell me how good my British accent is. Okay, well, I'm known on the show for doing the bad accent, so I'm glad you're taking up. No, yours are good. No, mine are. They verge on decent at times. Well, there's cartoonish and stereotypical, but they're really good cartoonist. Stereotypical versions of accents. So she woke up, had that accent, and her husband and three kids thought it was a joke. She had only been outside the country to go to Mexico, and it was a real thing called Foreign Exit Syndrome. Yes. She'd never been to England, apparently. Probably had seen British people on TV kind of thing. But her case, actually, is the opposite of what I was saying. She was apparently quite shy before, and now she has something to talk about. A conversation opener, I guess she's a little more chatty than before. Interesting. Yeah, it is. It's the opposite of some other people who have really experienced the crisis as a result. She's like, well, I sound British now. I guess I should talk more than before. So she sounds like a drunk, cockney chimney sweep. Pretty much. And she does sound cockney to me. Oh, really? I didn't see this one on YouTube. So, yeah, we should say this is kind of like optical illusions. It's one thing to talk about it. You need to actually go see and hear these people talking. If you just look up Lisa Alamia Alamia. And you will find plenty of interviews with her. She's, like you said, fairly recent. There's one that's quite a famous case, maybe the most famous, because it was the one that put Foreign Accent Syndrome on the map, even though it was before the term was coined. Yeah. This one had a much darker turn because it was during World War II. A Norwegian woman named Astrid suffered injury, and the ironies here are really sad. She suffered a brain injury from shrapnel from a German bomb and a bombing raid. And then when she came to, she had a German accent. Right. Very not fun for her. No. Because the Germans were occupying Norway at the time. Right, yeah. So people she didn't really know were like, oh, hey, German spy. Yeah. You want some milk? No milk for you. Yeah, she was shunned. She couldn't even speak German. But she had that accent and was obviously very distraught by this. And she went to a neurologist named York erman Monrad Crone. Nice job. That's great name. And he coined the first term for this, which is Dysprosty, which is prosody, is, like, the tone and rhythm of your speech. And the prefix disk obviously is, like, abnormal or ill. And that didn't catch on too well. It didn't but as we'll see, he kind of nailed what the problem was because the non grammatical parts of speech, the prospect are what is affected. When you have Foreign Accent Syndrome, you have what appears to be a foreign accent, but usually your vocabulary, your syntax, your grammar remains unchanged. It's all the little nuances that make up your accent or your intonation or the rhythm of your speech that are affected and has changed. So Dysprosty is actually, like, the perfect name for the syndrome. Yeah. But Foreign Accent Syndrome is way more catchy. Oh, it's sexy. In 1982, neurologist named Harry Whitaker came up with that. So Whitaker coined it in the think 1982 was when he coined that official term. Right. And he was a neuro linguist who did some pretty serious research into Foreign Accent Syndrome. He actually came up with a four point criteria for diagnosing it. And the number one is that the accent has to be considered by the patient, the people the patient knows, and the researcher, the doctor to sound like a foreign accent. Right. Yeah. Pretty straightforward from what they are. Yeah. Well, that's number two. It has to be different from the patient's former property. Sure. Noticeably different. Number three, it has to be related to central nervous system damage. And this one has come under fire under the last few years. And then four, it can't be related to a patient's ability to speak a foreign language already. Right. So there's actually a condition it's astounding to me, it's called bilingual aphasia, or there's also polyglot aphasia. And apparently, if you suffer a stroke or brain injury or some other trauma or insult to your central nervous system and you know more than one language, you may completely lose the ability to speak one language and completely retain the ability to speak the other. That's how decentralized our language processes in the brain. Well, yeah, because that's one of the factors in Foreign Accent Syndrome is it's not like in a case where you might have a stroke and lose the ability to speak, you still can speak in perfect dialect, whatever that dialect is, as far as being articulate and coherent. Right, yeah, exactly. You're not slurring your speech. You just sound different, like a foreign person saying the same words would. Right, yes. Oh, got you. Okay, so there's this four point diagnosis criteria that's kind of been deconstructed over the years. The problem with Foreign Accent Syndrome, it's like you said, there's been maybe 150 cases, so it's just totally up in the air as to, like, how to diagnose it, what qualifies as it. And we'll talk a little bit about how scientists have dug into it thus far after this break. So, Chuck, Foreign Accent Syndrome, it's kind of all over the place right now, right? Yes. You've got Lisa Alamia, who woke up from jaw surgery with it. Apparently, people who have strokes can suffer from Foreign Accent Syndrome. And I actually saw one case where your Foreign Accent Syndrome and one patient who suffered a stroke was cured by a second stroke elsewhere in the brain. Wow. So it's very tough to predict what's going to happen when Foreign Accent Syndrome does come about. And there's been people from Japan who developed Korean accents or there have been people from Scotland who developed South African accents. It's kind of everywhere and all over. Yeah. One of the other causes, it can be from the onset of Ms for multiple sclerosis. This one woman that we'll talk about in more detail suffered from chronic migraines but had a migraine attack so severe that it spurred this and we'll get to her. But all of these in a bucket from some sort of trauma or an event are called neurogenic type. And for a long time they used to think that was the only way that you could get for an accident syndrome. Right. Because remember that Harry Whitaker 1982 criteria specifically says it has to be related to central nervous system damage. Yeah. So there's another kind called psychogenic, also non organic or functional or psychosomatic. But one of the leading experts said that they prefer psychogenic, he said, because, Quote, this term has the advantage of stating positively, based on an exploration of its causes, that the disorder is a manifestation of psychological disequilibrium like anxiety, depression, personality disorder or conversion reaction. In quote right. And we're talking about could be bipolar disorder, it could be some other form of mental illness. And, I mean, it's not a huge community studying this, but the people that do are obviously super fascinated by it. And it kind of rocked their world when they found out that someone that had no head injury, no stroke or anything like that could have something like this. Yeah. So they developed first was neurogenic, then they developed psychogenic, and then there's actually a third one. Now it's mixed. So apparently it can actually be from a psychological issue that possibly could arise from, say, a brain lesion. So it's both of them together working to create this Foreign Accent Syndrome. And definitely the psychogenic version of Foreign Accent Syndrome differs tremendously from the neurogenic in a lot of ways. And number one is the psychogenic tends to clear up. It accompanies, say, like a psychotic break or a manic episode or something like that. And as the episode wanes or goes away or clears up, so too does the Foreign Accent Syndrome. That is not the case with neurogenic. With neurogenic, they have no cure whatsoever. And basically the only treatment that they can come up with is through speech therapy, where speech language pathologist basically retrained you to talk the way you did before. Yeah. The neurogenic is also much more common. Out of the cases, I think it's about 86% are from some sort of neurological damage. Right. So what does that leave? 14%. Unless, I guess, you're accounting for the new super odd one that could be both. One of the more famous cases that kind of demonstrated that psychogenic FAS was an actual thing happened here in America. There's a woman in her mid 30s who had a history of schizophrenia in her family and she was brought to the Er after attacking her mom's landlady. Yeah, this one is the most recent case, actually, and she believed the landlady was practicing voodoo on her against her and she attacked the woman. And throughout all this, during this episode, she had taken on a British accent and taking a family history, they found that, number one, she had schizophrenia family. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a result of this incident, but that she had had similar instances before and during these she had spoken with the British accent. Yeah. I didn't see anything in there about her. If she liked it, I mean, is it another personality? Is it multiple personality disorder? I don't believe so. That's not what I took from it. Because that would make sense if you have just a British personality that came out that's violent, maybe, or something. Yeah, well, I mean, remember, I think we've done one on schizophrenia before, haven't we? I don't know. Have we? We definitely did one on dissociative personality disorder, which is just absolutely fascinating. But like you, I kind of noticed, like, hey, what about multiple personalities? It seems like something that would be right up the alley. I'm sure they've looked into that, but apparently that's not part of it. Yeah. Another case that I said we were going to get to those. This one is really weird and super sad. This woman named Sarah Caldwell in England, she is the one that had the migraine that set it off. And this one is super odd because she's an English woman who now has a Chinese accent. I mean, just straight up sounds Chinese and like broken English Chinese. Right. So she sounds like a native. I think Mandarin speaker is probably what we're thinking of, who is speaking English. And if you weren't looking, like, you would expect to see, say, maybe like a middle aged Chinese woman when you looked at the video. And no, it's like, I don't know, late to mid 30s, Caucasian woman, a native born English speaker. And she's who I was thinking of when I was saying for some people is a really big problem. She has presented a big crisis for her identity. She said that she can't look in the mirror while she's speaking any longer. She just doesn't feel like herself anymore. And it's really hit her hard. Yeah, I mean, her case is really sad. It was, I think, 2010 when she was diagnosed after this migraine incident, and in 2015 she couldn't work anymore. And she has a lot more issues going on than just the speech. With these migraines that have come on. She's got a whole range of physical problems that she's had to stop work. She's in a wheelchair. Even though her limbs completely work, her brain basically can't tell her limbs to do what they should do. Good Lord. From migraines. Yeah, from I think these really extreme migraines, I think they even likened it to having a stroke. They were so severe. So she said to sell her house. And I think her husband is afflicted with something, too. It's just a really sad case, but there's all kinds of interviews with her and it's just so strange to hear that accent coming out of this white lady. It is. And from what I gather, she'd be like, yeah, well, imagine how strange it feels coming out of you. Oh, yeah. And I saw videos where they would sit down and play her, and before I looked up further that she was having even more troubled times, it seemed like she was getting a little better throughout the interview through therapy, because they were playing her. One of the things they do is they play old recordings of herself and she would sit down and listen to them and try and mimic it, which kind of brought up one of my question is, can you even mimic an accent? Like, people can fake an accent. Can you even do that? And I didn't get an answer on that. But then you're just mimicking an accent your entire life, too, even if you could. Yeah. So that's problematic on its own. Sure. But it seemed like he was getting a little bit better in that interview, but apparently not. It's really sad. Yeah. It's bad enough you've got migraines and then they have a crisis of identity. Not fair. So one of the other things that's really troubling is you can't just go to a neurologist and get it cleared up. There are a whole range of doctors that you'll probably see along the way, including a neurologist. You talked about a speech language pathologist. You might go to a clinical psychologist to deal with the fallout from everything. Maybe a neuropsychologist, maybe a radiologist. You might see six and eight doctors and still not get anywhere. Right. Because I can't do a lot for you. We don't know how to treat strokes very well, and once damage has occurred in the brain, it can be pretty tough, if not impossible, to reverse that damage right. If it's permanently damaged. So, yeah, the idea that you've now gotten a foreign accent, they're probably like, that's kind of the least of your worries. You just had a massive stroke or a huge head injury or something like that. But what it's revealed to them is not that there's this huge mystery, and we have kind of played into it a little bit by not revealing this from the outset, but you as a patient with Foreign Accent Syndrome, you didn't hit your head and wake up with the foreign accent. It's all in the ear of the beholder. The whole idea that there is a Foreign Accent Syndrome is the way that it stated is false. And we'll talk about that after this break. Okay, Chuck, we're back. Yes. So I thought I heard you drawing a Breath right before we broke. I might have been. Do you have something to say? No. Yes. I think I have a little trouble wrapping my head around this whole idea that it's only in the ear of the person because that lady clearly has a Chinese accent. It's not oh, I'm just hearing it that way. So they've actually been studies where they've played a video clip or an audio clip of a person with Foreign Accent Syndrome to different people and said, where do you think this person is from? And the same person will get tens of different answers out of tens of different people. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, that makes sense in some cases, I think, but I don't see how anyone could hear this woman and say, she sounds British to me. Right? Well, no, she definitely doesn't sound British, but that's the point. She sounds Chinese, but she's not actually speaking in a Chinese accent. She didn't hit her head and wake up with a Chinese accent. What happened was she got these series of migraines, probably had some sort of stroke and a region of her brain that controls the really intricate process of prosody of making your tongue do certain things to intonate and accent certain words in certain ways that make up your accent and your dialect overall, that got damaged. And so now she can't control it in the way she used to before it comes out sounding differently. And to you, somebody who has heard people speak in a Chinese accent before, it sounds like a Chinese accent. That's the difference. Yeah, I still don't get that. What I do get, though, is we take second nature. Just when we open our mouth, we talk. We don't realize the complex series of events that's going on to make your voice come out the way it does. Well, in the brain, they think. And again, the mysteries of the brain, how you create speech is really complex and involves all kinds of areas of the brain, but specifically damaged in the left hemisphere and the cerebral artery. They know a lot of times can cause Foreign Accent Syndrome. Right. But when you're speaking, you're using your tongue, you're using your lips, your jaw, your larynx, and the way all these things combine. And who you are is going to make you have and we should do one on accents, period. But I agree it's going to control how your speech comes out. The one example they use in here is if you have a little too much to drink, you might lose some of that muscle control and you might slow your words or talk funny or differently. Right. So that's a pretty basic way of understanding it. But I know vowels are sort of a big deal when it comes to Foreign Accident Syndrome. Yeah. If you say instead of a or you substitute consonants like R for L, right. What were they singing? Jingle bells on Deck the Halls on A Christmas Story Christmas Story, right. Yeah. So if you were a Caucasian English speaker and you damaged your brain in a way that the part of your brain responsible for forming LS now formed Rs instead, to other English speakers who'd heard native Chinese speakers, you would sound like you had a Chinese accent, because that's what people who speak Chinese do when they're speaking English. Right. So you didn't actually adopt a Chinese accent. You're just creating sounds in the same way that somebody who was a native Chinese speaker would. Yeah, I see what they're getting at with all this. To me, it's a little bit splitting hairs, I think that's what I'm trying to say. I think the difference is this, Chuck, with your native accent, your native dialect is the result of your exposure to your environment, right. Lifelong, all the people around you, all the stuff you've learned, all the things you've heard, it creates your dialect. Right. When you suffer Foreign Accent Syndrome, your dialect, your brain is damaged so that you can't produce that anymore and you just kind of haphazardly producing something else you don't actually follow. So, like, if you took Sarah Caldwell's language and had her read a passage from a book and then you had a native Chinese speaker, typical accented, Mandarin speaker read the same passage, it would not be the exact same thing. There'd be all sorts of derivations and deviations from that normal Mandarin accent, because Sarah Caldwell's brain was damaged in a certain way, that makes it a totally unique accent. Yeah, I get that, but that happens within the Mandarin accent between people, too. You're not letting this one go, are you? Don't get it. All right. One thing I do get is that there's no, like and this is probably what's so frustrated or one of the things so frustrating is it's not like they wake up with a new cultural identity either, right? I mean, this woman still wants to have her tea and biscuits every afternoon, but when she says that, she says it with chuck would call it a Chinese accent. A neurologist would say, well, you're just hearing that. Right. Like you said, people suffer a bit from their own sense of self. Right. Here's what I wonder. Do they hear it in their head as their own regular accent? I don't think so, no. I think it sounds off to them, and I think it's probably distressing because they're like, wait, let me say that again. And they still say it what they perceive is the wrong way, because apparently one of the hallmarks of Foreign Accident Syndrome is the errors or the differences that they make in their pro city is predictable, right. Which makes it like an. Accident. I mean, that's what an accent is. You're going to drop your t's or replace the T-T-H with a D, right. Just about every time I add that R when you say wash. Yeah, exactly. It's a predictable thing. And that's part of foreign accents, it starts to happen in predictable ways, too, so I would guess yeah. It sounds off to them as well. Well, because the reason I say that is because, and I think I've talked about this when my grandfather had a stroke, he still talked, but it just came out as gibberish. But in his head, he was saying the things that he was trying to say, which is one of the most frustrating things, I think, after a stroke victim, is I remember seeing him talk and getting so frustrated. He would just say things out loud and it would come out as gibberish to us. But in his head, he's still saying his English words. Right. They got to make you feel trapped in your body. Yeah. However, FAS is a little all over the map because there have been other weird cases, because we've been saying this whole time there's not a new identity. You're saying the same words and everything. But there have been cases where people do substitute out words. Like you would say lift instead of an elevator. Right. That's like the psychogenic version. I know. It's just so confusing. Well, it almost makes me think, like so before there was nothing but Neurogenic Foreign Accent Syndrome. Right. Everything else was just a just crazy. Now they recognize that there's psychogenic FAS as well. I think what's going to happen with more and more study, they're going to just diverge into two totally different syndromes now. Yeah, that makes sense. I think they're going to be like, that's actually not the same thing. That's something totally different. Neurogenic Foreign Accent Syndrome is its own thing, and psychogenic is something else entirely. Yeah. Let's make up a new name. Yeah. This one other case I thought was interesting about the Dutch woman. Which one? She was Dutch and she developed a French accent, but she spoke Dutch using French syntax and occasionally French words, as if she was a French person learning Dutch. And it turns out that she was a Dutch language teacher who taught French people to speak Dutch. Right. And I don't know, is her psychogenic or Neurogenic? It would have to be psychogenic because Neurogenic has basically that original Harry Whitaker criteria. You never use different words and things well, it has to not be related to the patient's ability to speak a foreign language. Okay. Yeah, right. So she would be technically canceled out from Neurogenic for that one, and it didn't have anything to do with central nervous system damage. Right. Which is, again, that's why I think it's going to end up being its own thing, man. So interesting. It is. What else you got? That's all I've got, man. Isn't that enough? I think so, man. Any language stuff? Anytime we talk about language in the brain, I guess neuro linguistics, I turned to goo. It's so interesting to me. Yeah. That's what happens when something interests me. I turn to goo. If you want to turn to goo and learn more about Foreign Accent Syndrome, you can type those words in the search bar@housetopworks.com. And since I said that, it's time for Chuck administrative detail. How was that? That was great, ma'am. So, Chuck. Yes. We've got some more people to thank for sending us some nice stuff. That's right. I'm going to start off with Nathan Ferlatzo. Well, that's good. He sent us some really lovely hand drawn calendars and BOOKMARKS, and you can find those at wildlife. Mariniforlazzo.com Au. And that's Mariniferlazzo.com Au. And it was really beautiful work. And it's a cool thing because portion of every sale is donated to a nonprofit wildlife organization. Very nice. I think you handled that foreign accent very well. Thank you. Want to say thanks big time to Robert Combs, or Combs from Whitetail Coffee for the amazing coffees especially. Like, seriously, it's a really good coffee. Especially the LaderIs and Lamarella and that's white tail. T-A-L-E coffee. It's just an amazing coffee subscription service that you should check out. Well, I got a couple of more coffees. I'll just knock them both out. You have one sitting actually, you have two of them sitting on your desk right now, my friend. I can't wait to go grab them. True Stone Coffee Roasters from St. Paul, Minnesota. Sinister medium blend. And I can't vouch for the taste yet because it just got here, but it smells good. And then Devon from True Coffee Roasters in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, sent us dark, roasted Sumatra. And in Mexico, alootra. Nice. I'm sorry, Altura. Nice. Thanks a lot. You got coffee coming out of our ears. That's great. That's a good place to be. But we're not going to have diabetes, my friend. No. Doug Fuke sent us a beautiful illustrated card. Thanks for that, Doug. Thanks for saying hi. Meg from Seattle, she sent me a card about Lauren's passing my cat, which I lost last year, which was very sweet. And while I'm on that Buckley, my old boy passed away a couple of weeks ago. And everyone on Facebook was beyond supportive and sweet, and that really helped out. So thanks for that. Yeah. For everybody listening to you, Chuck, we send our condolences. Thank you. It was very dark time. Yeah. Let's see. Preston Pope, he sent us some amazing chocolates. Chuck from Vchocolatesv. Just the letter V. Chocolatescom. Seriously, it's good stuff. I feel bad. I feel like I'm running around on little bit sweets. That's okay. We'll always come back to them. Okay. Our buddy Jeff Barney was kind enough and I still haven't tried it. It's in my fridge. But you said it's the best. He sent us cutie Japanese mayo. Oh, it's so good because of my love for mayonnaise. Chuck, you may never go back to American mayo again. Well, I'm finishing up a gallon of Dukes this afternoon. Yeah, I'm just going to shoot it down and then I'm going to dive into the QP and see what's going on there. Got to see what the difference is. It's subtle, but you'll notice. You'll say, wow, this is actually really good, Manny. All right, well, thanks to Jeff Barney for that. Thanks a lot to Tim and Joe from Primer Stories. I don't know if you remember, but our animal rights double partner tied into an essay I wrote on Primerstories.com and they sent T shirts to say thanks for that. So thanks back for you guys'support. Ian Newton of the Baltimore Whiskey Company sent us some ginger, apple liqueur and gin. Yes. Thanks a lot. Don Kent, who last gave us some Clini the Elder before, which was nice, also sent us a bunch of soylent. And thank you also to soylent itself, the company who heard our soylent episode and said, you guys haven't tried soylent? Here's some soylent, and thank you for that soil. That was very nice. I think they got what they wanted out of this, which is for us to say soylent twelve times. Soylent. This came in today. Thomas Kregel. K-R-E-G-E-L. He sent me a friggin monocle. Oh, that's neat. And he heard me talking about my eyes going and how I just need them to read things close up. And he said, buddy, here's what you need to do because you will one day embarrass your daughter like I embarrass my children. You need to rock a monocle. And it's a monocle. So is he like a trained optometrist who can no. So he just gave you a piece of glass that's going to ruin your eye over time? Yeah, I mean, I tried it and it's kind of like a reader. It works about the same as my prescription, but he uses one. He sent a little picture of himself and I guess I should plug the company. It's near sights. Monocles is what he used? Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I got a monocle now. Nice job, Chuck. I'm going to use it. Your new nickname is Pringles Guy. Okay. I've got someone else. Pringles Guy. Janelle. Samara sent us a copy of her book. Our only hope. Thank you. Congratulations on writing a book. Bridget Massoth. M-A-S-S-O-T-H send us some really cute along with an extra large handwritten note. Sending some really cute Josh and Chuck cutouts. Like kind of paper cut and paste cutouts. Nice. And yours is on your desk. Thank you. You got to get out of this room. And I do go over to your desk. You got a bounty. Francis de la Paz. So there's like a whole group of people out there who believe in writing letters, beautiful letters with fountain pens and all that. And Francis dela Paz is one of them, sent us a beautiful handwritten letter. And you also apparently customarily send what's called the flat gift. And they sent a postcard. The Sad Life of SAG Clown. Which is great. I think sad clowns are great. Well, I got a few letters, actually, I'll just knock those out because Sandra maybe this is because of International Correspondence Writing Month that we got these, because apparently that happened. Okay, but Sandra sent us a nice handwritten letter in honor of that, specifically. And then Austin from Bakersfield sent us a very nice handwritten note. And then Kristen Cook sent us a Valentine's Day card to all of us, including Harry Noel, man. Not Harry Noel's of Ain't It Cool News, but our own knowledge who was just Harry. Right. We got some other ones, too, Chuck. We got a lighthouse postcard from Big Stable Point from Theresa. We got a couple of Christmas cards from the Johnson Alumin family and Tess Sullivan and her family. And I guess in part because the national what is it? National Writing Month or Letter Writing month. International Correspondence Writing Month. Exactly. Noel Varoza. No, sorry. Noel Verizona. It's handwritten. I got it that last time. Noel Verizona wrote us a nice handwritten letter in fountain pen. I've got two more. Megan Moon Waltzman. That's Megan with two GS. Oddly, she sent us a copy of this really cool thing she made. It's a book. It's called Song Book. A book of music for all levels, all ages. And it is eleven songs kind of written out as chords and things and illustrated for different instruments. Like, there'll be a song for guitar, an intro song for banjo, one for cello. And it's got these cool pictures. And then you can download these songs, it says, for all ages. But it seems like it'd be great to give a kid, right? So check that out. It's very worthwhile. I've got two more to finish than two. One. Austin Doyle sent me an amazing oil crayon painting which I assume will inflate in value very rapidly once Austin dies. Hopefully that doesn't happen because Doyle is one of our oldest, and I don't mean by age, but one of our longest time listeners. Yeah, he's a great guy. I mean, like, when he dies of old age, I just plan to outlive them, okay? So I can catch in on the painting he made me. And then Ben and Aaron Gibson sent us the Japanese car magnets that signify an elderly driver or a team driver, which we've talked about before. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Thanks, Steve. I got one more. And this one. Boy, you have no idea what's waiting in there. You just came right into the recording studio for a change. Yes, on your desk right now. Josh. I can't wait. You have a handmade cutting board. Awesome. And it's really nice. This is from Christopher at the Timber dwolf, and it's just gorgeous. He sent a couple of these in, and they're really nice. Nice. So you got to take care of it, though. I left the instructions for you. I got a lot of stuff to carry out of here. Yeah, someone needs to send Josh a wheelbarrow or a Radio Flyer. I got one of those for my kid. It's nice. Oh, yeah, the old red wagon. Like the real one. The Radio Flyer. Yeah, they still make them nice. Well, thank you again to everybody who sent us so much great stuff. We appreciate it big time. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh Clark and S-Y-S Kpodcast Chuck at Charlesw Chuckbryant and stuff you should know on Facebook. You can send us both an email to stuffpodcast@howstephos.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffysheno.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstofworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the 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 Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today."
1219e0bc-361f-11ea-91d6-f75a0b8d0c01	Short Stuff: Habsburg Jaw	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-habsburg-jaw	The Habsburg Jaw is the result of inbreeding. But what is it? Click play and learn!	The Habsburg Jaw is the result of inbreeding. But what is it? Click play and learn!	Wed, 29 Jul 2020 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=29, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=211, tm_isdst=0)	12188984	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. This is Short Stuff. Let's go. Hey, ho. Let's go with the Habs hubs. Oh, God. Take two. Habsburg jaw. Yeah, the Habsburg. Oh, man. I hadn't said it out loud until just now. We're in big trouble. The Habsburg's jaw. I think the tendency is to want to say Habsburg with a P, but it's Habsburg with a B. Although in America, we've added the P and it's just so prevalent now and we're America. That's what it is now. It's Habsburg. Yeah, with a B, as in, Boy, would you look at that jaw. Right. This is not to be confused. The Habsburg jaw is not to be confused with the Hillsburg Jaw, which is what happens when you walk into a Hillsburg Diamond store. Your jaw hits the floor because the prices are so reasonable on really great jewelry. Oh, man. If you don't get a kickback on that, I just see you next time and you've got the big Love Hate diamond rings like Radio Raheem. Do the right thing. I want a love hate diamond grill Sweet. I wonder how that sound. Podcasting probably not great. Well, Hillsborough Diamonds. Let's figure it out. All right, so who we're talking about are the Habsburgs, and they were a big ruling family kind of all over the place in Europe at the peak of their fame, I guess, or the peak of their rule, they had Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Bohemia, Slovakia, Croatia, and a little bit of Italy, Romania, and Poland all under their purview. Yeah, like, not just their purview, under their thumb in their iron grip of this dynastic family that ruled these areas for hundreds of years. Yeah. I mean, up until 1918, it took the First World War to break up the Habsburg dynasty. Yeah, that's a long time. It really is. Because they originally came to power, Chuck, in, I think, the 13th century in Germany when a guy named Rudolph I became the Roman German king. Which is nothing to sneeze at, for sure, but apparently he had arrival in nearby Austria in the form of Autocar ill premise. I'm going with primeasel. Yeah, it feels like there should be another vowel in there, but there's not. That Y is doing, like, double or triple duty right there, but it's working well, anyway, we're going to call them Auto Car. Auto Car said, you know what? I don't really recognize you as the Roman German king, so we're going to be rivals. Which really doesn't matter in this story beyond the fact that it drew Rudolph the first attention to Austria. And so when Autocar was killed, he kind of moved in and set up shop and basically took over Austria. Yeah. And so that's where they got their start. And then for the next century, basically, they really did a lot of conquesting, conquering, and they took over. He didn't want to say something dumb in front of you it's great. It's charming. They took over the Tyrol, which is the place in the Alps that Austria and northern Italy shared in the 13 mid 13 hundreds. Yeah. And also Chuck, where Oopsie lived and died thousands of years earlier. Right. He was a Tyrolean. And by the time the 1500 rolled around is when they were really rolling the Emperor Maximilian or I guess future emperor, married Charles the Bold's daughter Mary and then all of a sudden they have control of Burgundy and also a little cachet. Yeah. From what I understand, that was an enormous move. So they were making all sorts of moves. Right, they were making moves. Gaining and consolidating power through conquering, through marrying. Well, just basically those two things. But it was working for them big time. I bet there was one more thing. Let's see, how would you do that? You would conquer things, you would marry people and then you would send like be known for sending really great thank you notes as follow ups. Sure. That could definitely win you some friends. Yeah. Okay. That's what the third thing was. So here's the deal with this jaw. Because you saw the title of the episode and you've heard us say that a couple of times is they had jaws that would make Jay Leno blush if you looked up some of these folks. Joseph. I Charles, one of Spain. Charles second. Leopold wilhelm. They had this very prominent lower jaw and basically people got together and studied this over the years and we'll get a little bit more into why this happens. And they said, we're just going to go ahead and name this the Habsburg Jaw because it's so prevalent in this family line. Yup. And they did. That's why everybody calls it the Habsburg Jaw. And if you have never seen it before, you probably have and didn't really realize it. But if you haven't either way, just go look up Habsburg Jaw. H-A-B-S-B-U-R-G jaw and it will bring up some old timey Middle Ages Renaissance era oil paintings and you will see quite clearly what people are talking about when they say the Habsburg Jaw. So if you haven't seen it before, it's just a very prominent lower jaw and there's an underbite and it's very distinctive. Yeah. And if you're driving or something right now and you can't look it up, you know, like the cartoonish characters of the Blue Bloods who are like, oh, that's astounding that face that the cartoon makes. They're drawn with the Habsburg Jaw. They're actually making fun of Aristocrats, as we'll see in a minute. And here's the thing. We don't want to make fun of anyone that has something like this but we were just trying to figure out a good way to describe it. It's a prominent lower jaw such that there's even an underbite. Yeah. Well, let's take a break real quick and we'll come back and talk about it a little bit more. Okay. Yes. All right, Chuck. So we're back and we were talking kind of describing the Habsburg jaw. There's actually a medical term for it because the Habsburg aren't the only ones who have this jaw. And you can have it to varying degrees but technically it's called mandibular prognathism. And that is where the lower jaw juts really far forward so that you have what you would colloquially call it an underbite. Right. But with the Habsburg jaw in particular it's to such a degree that the teeth no longer even line up. It's just really sticking out. There this mandibular prognathism. And then what they also figured out is that the Habsburg also had something called mandibular deficiency too. Right? Yeah. And that can affect your ability to eat, your ability to speak. And I don't have anything to disagree. But you remember from breakfast, I've got sort of an even bite and my lower jaw sticks out a little bit. I'm not Habsburg, Ian. No, but I feel their pain. With the Habsburg jaw in particular it's pronounced enough to a degree that the musculoskeletal composition is different. It's just a very prominent look, like you said. So, what they figured out was that because of this and based on some documentary evidence too that some Habsburg, at least I believe Charles II, the ruler of Spain there's a contemporary account of him from the 18th century that basically said his jaw was so out of line his teeth were so out of line because of this jaw, he couldn't chew. He had to swallow his food whole. Can we just read this? It's so crazy. Yeah. This is from Spain under Charles II by Alexander Stanhope. That's Doug Stanhope's grandfather. Wait, who's Doug Stanhope, the stand up comedian. That's right. And he was speaking about Charles II. He has a rabbit in his stomach and swallows all. He eats whole for his nether jaw stands so much out that his two rows of teeth cannot meet to compensate, which he has a prodigious wide throat so that a gizzard or liver of a hen passes down whole. And his weak stomach, not being able to digest it he voids in the same manner. So he's just pooping out whole chicken. That's the old statement. So when people started talking about the Habsburg jaw it's because they figured out over time this is a real thing. And it was very distinct for this family. And it became a thing years ago, centuries ago, people were aware of the Habsburg jaw and just remarked on it. But it wasn't until, I believe that the 21st century that people started doing studies on it as best they could. I guess you could say they're kind of made up studies and that there was no actual genetic testing to figure out what accounted for the Habsburg jaw. But they were doing the best they could base on portraiture of prominent Habsburgs and came up with some pretty interesting stuff. Well, yeah. Do we need a drumroll here to see what's actually going on? If you haven't figured it out by now, then sure, we'll give you a drum roll. Dave, will you put a drum roll in, please? All right. The Habsburgs like to keep it in the family. And when we say keep it in the family, we mean really keep it in the family. This jaw was a result, pretty obviously, of inbreeding. Yes. Which is not to say that anybody who has mandibular prognostism today is the result of inbreeding. Of course not. Yeah. I mean, it's a recessive trait. And when people that aren't in the same family get together, you're going to have those heterozygous genes, and they're going to carry different traits, and that's all how it's supposed to work. But if you are in the same family, that may not be the case. If you have homozygous LLS and get together with a family member and make another family member, they're going to have those same traits. Right. Because the chromosomes are going to be so similar that the chances of both parents having the recessive gene and donating that to the kid really increases the likelihood of that kid having that recessive trait. There's a guy that's quoted in this article. He's a geneticist named this guy's name is Great montgomery Slatkin. That's a great thing. He says that if you are a child of inbreeding, your chances are hundreds of thousands of times greater of receiving these recessive traits than of children of parents who aren't related in any way. That's right. So that was it. The Habsburgs, they wanted to consolidate power, so much so that they just said, you're marrying your sister whether you like it or not. And the son would say, but don. And that's it for short. Stuff, everybody. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works. For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2009/1234891924040hsw-sysk-squatting.mp3	How Squatting Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-squatting-works	The practice of squatting is usually defined as camping on unused land or moving into an abandoned structure -- and it's more common than you might think. Tune in and learn more about squatting in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.	The practice of squatting is usually defined as camping on unused land or moving into an abandoned structure -- and it's more common than you might think. Tune in and learn more about squatting in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.	Tue, 17 Feb 2009 17:45:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2009, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=17, tm_min=45, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=48, tm_isdst=0)	20500626	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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? Is it's Charles W. Bryant? We like to call him Chuck here on Stuff You Should Know, which is what you're listening to. So there you have it. There's the introduction. That's nice. I'm coffeed up now, so I'm firing on all pistons. Yeah, I got the shakes. Chuck, you ready to go? Yeah. That's good. Do you know much about homelessness there, Chuck? Not really. Have you ever heard that homelessness really began to take steam in America in the when states started just shutting down mental institutions? I have heard that, actually, and this part is unsubstantiated, but since I say it's a rumor, I'm going to discontinue it anyway. How about that? Sounds good. Apparently in New York there was a series of shutdowns in the 80s. Ronald Reagan is often blamed for this, although he didn't have any necessarily direct hand in shutting down mental institutions. Right. Not like you're insane, you're out on the street. Right. But it was under his administration that a lot of them went under, basically. And you have all these mentally infirm people right now, they have nowhere to live. So apparently in the state of New York, they gave them a bus ticket, like $50, and sent them to New York City. Really? And the homeless population has just shot through the roof since the 60s. Right. And of course, there was homelessness before the Great Depression was a big time for homelessness. And hobo ism, which is a word I just made up, but it really picked up in the now we have the homeless problem that we have today. And this is not to say that if you're a homeless person, you're mentally unstable. That's not necessarily the case. But the closing down of state institutions, the country really had that effect. Right, right. That's sad. And I do know that a lot of homeless people are suffering from various forms of mental illness. Sure, that kind of makes sense. But they're also expanding the definition of homeless. Homelessness before usually just encompass somebody who had no home or was staying in a shelter. Right. And they expanded it to include people who are living in, like, weekly motels, staying on other people's couches interest. Apparently they just shot the numbers through the roof. Wow. Yeah, sure. So apparently in 2007, the estimated number by the National Alliance and Homelessness for homeless people on the streets was about 671,000 and change. Almost 672,000 people. Right. That doesn't include the college dude crashing on his buddy's couch. No, I don't think the fish tour. No. Okay. And actually, that's pretty funny that you say that, because I used to have a friend named Hippie Rob who was staying at my house for a really long time, and he would not leave. Right. I liked him a lot. He was a good friend, but, man, he really knew how to move. Right. He was staying on my couch. Finally, one day, I took a hippie rob to Kmart and said, here's $20 by a good tent. Right. And he bought a tent, and I put him in the car with his tent and drove him to the woods. It was like, See you later. It was a lot like that scene from AI where the mom drops off young David the robot. Right. And it was less sad, though. Wow. That is an incredible story. That is a true story. He was squatting in your own house. He was. Actually, it's funny that you mentioned squatting, since the title is Podcast. Right. Do you like that? So my homeless segway was really intended to serve as a juxtaposition between the number of people homeless on the streets, which is about $672,000, with the number of vacant housing units in the US that same year. Right. Which was 16.7 million. Interesting. So basically, what we have in this country is a homeless problem with a clear solution. There's vacant houses, and yet people are on the street still. Right. So why don't we just move them in to vacant houses? Right. It would be a little tricky, I guess, but it seems possible. Actually, there are people who are doing it right now. Really? Yeah. There's this group called Take Back the Land Out of Miami, and they have been staging, basically, homeless move in into vacant housing down there. Is this new housing or stuff that's been abandoned? I think it's both. A bank owned foreclosed stuff that's been on the market forever in Miami apparently just got reamed by the subprime mortgage fallout. Oh, really? And there's plenty of houses to go around. So these people are just moving them in there. Same with homes, not jails. Right. Who are basically their mission is to stop the court system from just jailing homeless people. Right. So the San Francisco Tenants Union, there's a lot of people out there who are saying, there's an empty house right there. This person is homeless. Whether it's because they are insane or they are down on their luck, it doesn't matter. Basically, it's the distinction between whether or not housing is a basic human right. Sure. Isn't it under capitalism? No, it's not. If you don't have the money, you're on the street, whether this is vacant or not. Right? Right. Okay. We're talking about squatting. Chuck? Yes. Let's go. Let's give a little background on squatting. Okay. Are you going to give a little background on squatting? Well, sure. Josh, can you define squat? Yes, it's when you actually live in a place or on a parcel of land that's unused or not yours. Yeah. Not yours and not use. Yes. We should make the distinction, because if you move into a house with a family already living there, you've just committed home invasion and you're in big trouble. Right. So it's an empty house. It's not yours or a piece of land, and you've moved in or camped out on it and stayed there. Right. And that means you are squatting. Right. That is squatting, yeah. Right there. Which would probably be the end of the story. Right. Because if you own that land or you own that house and you have a squatter, you would think all you would have to do is go in, pull a gun on them and run them off right. Or more peacefully, ask them to leave. Yeah. I think somebody who leaves, if you ask them to was just crashing at that place. Right. A squatter is one who just says, no, I'm not moving. Well, you would think it'd be that cut and dry, but it's actually not that cut and dry, because squatters can actually are protected in certain ways. Yeah. There's this thing called well, there's property rights, the right of a landowner, a homeowner. Right. Right. There's also tenants rights. Yes. Where if you rent like I do, I can't just be kicked out of my house because the landlord got sick of me. There's a lease, there's a contractual obligation. There are laws that guide that along. The thing is, in I think, every state, these same rights are extended to squatters and a tenant right. Actually kicks in in Georgia after three days. Really? Yeah. So if you have an annoying house guest over for a long weekend, at the end of the three days, if they don't feel like moving, you got a problem on your hands. Yeah. That's why I refuse to have any house guests for longer than two days. Yeah. That's a house. It's a good policy. It's a good rule of thumb. Right. Two days and you're out. All right. We've got property rights, we have tenants rights, and basically, as an extension of the tenants rights, there's also this thing called adverse possession. Right. Which is the ultimate nightmare of somebody who has a squatter. Right. We heard a little bit back from fans about when we did our gorilla gardening podcast about someone beautifying, like a strip of public land, potentially, that could lead to adverse possession. So that's a reason that someone might not want that. Yeah. I think the technical definition of average possession is living openly, continuously and hostile. And hostile isn't like you're chasing little kids around your yard with a stick. You're not moving if they ask you to. Oh, yeah. And it means you don't have permission. Right. You have to live there for a set period. Right. And that's usually state by state. In California, if you can do that for five years, you own the property. In West Virginia, it's ten. In Texas it's 30. But I think every state, again, has a rule of adverse possession. They do. So basically, if you live there, especially if you're keeping the place up, that kind of thing, and people know you're living there. Once that time period comes up, you can go pay the property taxes. And that's yours. Right. That's the key, though. I think it's the property taxes. Right. I think that makes it official. I imagine that that almost never happens, that Everest possession takes place. Right? You think? Well, I mean, in this day and age of this many people crawling on the planet land, it's important, it's expensive. Right? Well, I'm gunning for it. Is it time for my squatting story? Yeah, please. I'm a squatter, Josh. Oh, yeah, that's right. Are you sure you want to talk about this, Chuck? Yeah, because no one knows where I live. My house that I bought has a little strip of land behind it. Very small strip of land, about 100ft by 40ft, I would say. And the previous owner of the home had that sectioned off for some reason, and it's technically separate from my property. We never heard from this guy, and we moved in, and half of that strip of land is most of my backyard. So Emily and I decided that we're just going to put our fence up, put our privacy fence up, plant grass and claim possession of this land if we never hear from this guy. We checked with the county, and there were years of back taxes owed on it. Then he clearly abandoned. I guess he thought he could build something on it, but there's not enough room. You have to have variances, be a certain amount from the curb and all that to build something. So we couldn't build anything on it and basically just kind of dumped it. So we have claimed it as our own. And we've been in the house for, I think, three years now. Have you been living hostile? We haven't been living very hostile. What's the time limit in Georgia? I'm not positive. I believe it's seven years, but we need to look that up for sure. And we've also been in touch with the county about the back taxes still haven't been paid. And when it comes time, we're going to pay the taxes and claim it as our own. Nice. Keep living the dream, Chuck. Keep fighting the good fight. Right? Keep squatting. In addition to living continuously, openly and hostile right. There's actually some steps that a squatter can take to basically lay claim on a place, right? Right. If you're keeping a place up, if you clean it up, maybe plant some shrubs like we did, something like that. Yeah. Planning club. You're laying claim on the place, and you're also showing that it's doing better in your possession whether you really own it or not. Right. Which goes a long way, too. But let's say you move into a place, you throw up some curtains, plant a couple of bushes, maybe you borrow a lawn mower from a friend with a house and you cut the lawn, something like that, right. And you've set up house. Right. One of the first things you can expect is a visit from the cops. Right. Because if you live in a neighborhood and the house has been empty and all of a sudden there's somebody living in it, especially somebody who drives their shirts on a clothesline up front, they're going to take notice and they're going to call the cops on you. True. But there's not a lot of cops can do, though. No, there's not. If you can prove tenant rights that you are staying there whether you're supposed to be or not. Right. One good way to do this is to go to the utility company and ask to have the power turned on and start paying a power bill there, which you can put your name. Yeah. You don't have to prove ownership. I never had to. I haven't either. You just go and set up an account, start paying, and then you have bills that are coming in your name to that address. If the cops show up to your house, you get to show them this and they say, good enough for me. And what you've just done is shifted the burden of proof that you're not supposed to be there from you the squatter to the landlord. Right. And it's a huge headache for a landlord. Right. It becomes a civil matter. It is a civil matter. The cops are immediately taken out of the equation. Indeed. I have to tell you, when I first researched this article, I was very much gung ho, like, squatters rights, let's put the homeless in homes. And I get that. Like I still feel that. Right. But I was kind of brought down to earth a little bit when I interviewed our COO, Mike Cascon, who actually had a long harrowing story with a squatter. Really fascinating. He had like a rental place, right? And he had a tenant that had a lease and the lease came up and the tenant moved out, but the tenant had a friend staying there and the friend didn't move out and she said, I'm not moving. Sorry, bud. And so Cascade says that when you think all the things that you can do to get rid of somebody who's a squatter, you can't do. You can't turn off the power, you can't turn off the water, you basically have to make sure that they're comfortable and safe and actually get your place. Yeah, you can get big time fine. And he also said he spent several thousand dollars in court fees and things like having subpoenas delivered, that kind of stuff and missed work getting this person out of his place. Right. And good luck getting a refund on anything like that or getting the squatter. Right. No, I don't think she had much money while she was squatting. Yeah. So that kind of changed my attitude a little bit. At the very least. Now I see it from both sides because there is a victim in it, even though when you're talking about putting the homeless in housing, it's kind of tough to see it that way. But there definitely is. Yeah. So what do you do? Well, how to get a Swatter out? Tell me. Well, I think there are legal avenues that you need to go through if you're a landlord, right. Which does not include, like we said, turning off the water and power, because you can get in trouble for that. Right. If you're a landlord, basically, you need to call an attorney. If you have a squatter, don't make a move. Just say, I'd like you to get out. They say, no, you say, to be continued, and go get a lawyer. Okay. But the landlord, that's tough. Usually if you're an individual landlord, you don't have vast resources. So the great enemy of the common squatter is gentrification urban renewal, because all of a sudden, you have developers in the equation. Right. And developers tend to have much deeper pockets and possibly fewer scruples than the individual landlord. There's actually a squat, a house that was being squatted in down the street from me really? A couple of years back. Yeah. It was bad, and one day it wasn't there anymore to it down because I just tore it down. Interesting. The developer did. Yeah. Wait until the person was out of the house or just showed up with the I don't know. I've seen a couple of people who were squatting in the house walking around since then, so I guess it gave them a chance to get out, but the house isn't there anymore. Interesting. Which is really kind of cynical, a little sour, I should say, because now it's just an empty piece of land. Yeah. But I guess he really didn't want people staying in his house, so he sent the wrecking ball through. Right. So urban renewal in general, once you have the presence of developers, but not just developers and upwardly mobile people who really don't want squatters hanging around and bringing property values back down. Right, right. So if you're a squatter, you're in trouble once a place gets tapped for gentrification. Right. And I would guess and this is a generalization, but that most people that move in squat into a place that's abandoned probably don't do massive improvements, and it's probably not that kind of situation. No. I can tell you the squat down the street for me, was not the case. Really? Yeah. But I am in an area that's being gentrified as we speak. Right. And apparently Geneva, Switzerland, went through a similar thing in the 90s. There was a group called Rhino, and they were basically political activist squatters. Right. And at its peak, this group held 150 apartment buildings, apartment buildings, not apartment units in the city. And all of a sudden, there's this urban renewal movement that comes through Geneva, and by 2007, they had like, 27, which is still a substantial amount of apartment buildings, but compared to 150. You can see once an area is targeted like this, then there's nothing you can do. Right. They can move out to the sticks. Sure. They've also done this in London and Denmark, just to name a couple. Yeah. Now, squatting can be good to some extent. How's that? Okay, so there's this Peruvian economist. His name is Hernando deserto. Very nice. Thank you. And he created what he called a roadmap to wealth, and it was specifically designed for post Soviet former satellite countries that were making the transition from communism to the free market. And one of the facets of this, one of the major parts of it was that squatters on rural land, the rural poor who were just, like, living on land and Shannon and that kind of thing. Right. The land that they were squatting on should be parceled up and they should go register it. And then by being landowners, they would have credit available to them, which should conceivably get the economy going. Right. Interesting. It's unproven, but it's actually being tried in a country called Princess Trovi, which is an unrecognized nation that used to formerly be part of Moldovia. Interesting. So we'll see if it happens, right? See if they get their seat at the UN. Yeah, well, we'll see. Only time will tell. And if they do, you can bet that it's going to be because of Hernando Deserto. Right. And they'll probably put them on some sort of currency. Yeah, probably. Or statue, at least. So that's squatting. Right, Chuck? Squatting. I will continue to squat, and maybe in a few years, if we're still doing this podcast, and then I'll let everyone know how it went. Yeah, I'm really curious to see how this goes. I hope you didn't just out yourself. I don't think so. You got anything else you want to get something off your chest, maybe? Maybe a little listener mail? All right, let's hear Josh. This comes to us, and I'm not going to read this person's name because it's slightly sensitive. We'll just say that the name starts with the G, and G wrote us about the Delta Force podcast, and here's what G oh, yeah. Remember that one? Yeah. Here's what G had to say. The podcast reminded me of a friend I used to have at work. When Ronald Reagan started doing his war on drugs, my friend, let's call him John, was removed from the military and sent on these black operations. An amount of money would be left in a safe deposit box in the marks area. The mark was someone he had to kill. Yeah. With a photo of the mark and some other information. The mark was usually a drug lord or a higher up deemed too big of a threat. So John and his partner would use the money to buy local guns and supplies, then head out and snipe the person. Yeah, wax them. And this guy would tell these stories in the break room. Evidently. He said it wasn't a one day operation. They had to set up camp the night before and set up landmines around their camp so anyone coming in would get tripped up by the landmine coming in trying to kill them. And he says on countless occasions he would hear an explosion, thinking assassin was coming to kill him, only to find a shredded cow had happened upon the landmine. Yeah, those are always the innocent bystanders. So this is an amazing story and I don't know if it's true, but I don't see no reason why this person went right in and make all this up. So it sounds pretty good to me. Yeah, well, thanks a lot, chief. That story is absolutely nuts. And if you have an amazing or harrowing tale of cows being blown up or people being greased or you just want to say hi, you can send an email to stuffpodcast@howtoffs.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstep works.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."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-12-14-sysk-globe-of-death-final.mp3	How the Globe of Death Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-globe-of-death-works	The Globe of Death – el Globo de la Muerte to our Spanish-speaking friends – is perhaps the greatest of all the circus arts. It requires no smoke, no mirrors, only motorcycles, a giant sphere and fearless riders with the will to bend physics.	The Globe of Death – el Globo de la Muerte to our Spanish-speaking friends – is perhaps the greatest of all the circus arts. It requires no smoke, no mirrors, only motorcycles, a giant sphere and fearless riders with the will to bend physics.	Thu, 14 Dec 2017 15:25:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=15, tm_min=25, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=348, tm_isdst=0)	40945869	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"If you live in San Francisco, you better come and see us at the Castro. Nice. That was horrid, but really nice. I appreciate that. Yeah. So we are going to be be, as this song says, at the Castro Theater on January 14 for San Francisco sketchfest. Chuck that's right. We go there just about every year now. And it's a lot of fun in San Francisco. You always treat us so well. So I recommend a stocking stuffer or two in the way of Stuff You Should Know live tickets. And there's an extra stocking stuff where they can get featuring just Charles W, Chuck Bryant, right? Oh, that's right. I'm doing my very first ever movie crush live at the Punchline. And I am having as my guest Mr. Tony Hale of deep, interested development, mr. Buster Blooth himself. I know, right? And we're going to be talking about the movie Punch Drunk Love, and it is at 01:00 P.m.. So you could double dip that day, see me at one, see Stuff You Should Know at night. And I am even going to be doing a little meet and greet before and after. Fantastic. Chuck, this is why they call you the hardest working man in show business. That's right. And you can get tickets for moviecrushlive at Bit Leemovycrush. Yes. And you can get tickets for our sketchfish show@sysklive.com. And there's still a few tickets left for Seattle the following day on January 15. So s ysklivecom and bit Lee moviecrustchuck correct. That's right. We'll see you guys in January. 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 Jerry. The three of us were just lobotomized, so we're feeling just fine. Globe of Death. That's right. Or because it's huge down in South America. El Global de la Morte, which I think I prefer that one. El global de laue de la morerte. Terry she just said it. I think she did it better than anybody. Well, Jerry actually speaks Spanish. That's right. She's not a faker like us. No, she's not. I'm so mad I didn't learn Spanish. Oh, yeah, you did German. I did French. Just so dumb. How helpful would it be to know Spanish now? It would be pretty helpful. I would love to chat it up with Spanish speaking people I see every day in my life. Yeah, well, it's never too late to learn chuck, I know what they're saying about me. Right, exactly. Yeah. It's too late. It's over. No, it's not. I'm saying it's not too late. No, it's too late. I'm not learning a new language. I think that's it. I'm going to go learn Spanish just to show you. So you can talk about me in Spanish. Yeah, me and Jerry can. So, Chuck yes. We're not talking about learning Spanish or whether it's too late to learn language, because it is. It's not. We are talking about like you said the globe of death, also known as the globe of steel. Yeah, apparently that was a Wringling Brothers marketing department invention, or PR department invention. Because we can't have like, a globe of death at our circus. We don't want anybody to see our elephants and start thinking about death fear. That's a good one, too. What about the 360 deg circle of intimidation? I just came up with that one. It's not that great. No, it was terrible. We should tell people what we're talking about because I can sense the frustration weeks from now brewing with angry listeners. Sure. All right, so the globe of death. What we're talking about is if you've ever been to a circus or a fair affair and by the way, we thought we would never add to the Circus Arts suite, and here it is. There's still more to come. What? County fairs? State fairs. Sometimes if you have a pretty good music festival, they might have something. Oh, okay. Maybe a Jane's Addiction show. Who knows? Yeah. What's? The World's Fair? Remember those? Oh, man. They still have them, but they're just not the same any longer. I think the US pulled out of them a decade or two back. I think the Internet killed it. As a matter of fact, you're absolutely right. That's what I read. Because just the other day I was thinking, like, whatever happened to World's Fair? And it turns out they're still there. They're called like, international expos or something. Now they are just not as interesting. It's not about the future. And they specifically said that it's just the internet now. You can go on the Internet and find all that stuff without leaving your home. Internet's ruins so much. That's one way of looking at so globe of death, what we're talking about? Or we could beat around the bush another ten minutes. No, if you've ever been to the circus of those places, they might have this attraction wherein there is a steel sphere, steel mesh, so you can see through it. Yeah, you can see through it, but you can still see it's there. It's not invisible. Yes, that would be amazingly cool. Yeah. Wherein there are one, but usually more than one, motorcycle riders riding inside of a globe, around and around, horizontally, vertically, doing a loop to loop, like all the way from the top to the bottom and over and over again. And yeah, just one person doing this. This article says it's kind of boring. I wholeheartedly disagree and I would like to see the author try to do it. Right? Well, yeah, sure. But compared to like, when you got four or five people in there, right, and then a lady standing in the middle smoking a cigar, that's another right. Juggling baby. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, get a baby juggler. And I think the record that I saw, somebody was trying to break seven and do eight motorcyclists in a sphere at once. I didn't see anyone had actually done it. There's been a lot of talk about it, but I didn't see anyone had done it. Seven is the most that I've seen, although I've seen with my own eyes on video. Oh, no. I'm sorry. Seven is the most I saw with my own eyes on video. But it is. It's amazing because they'll follow one another in a circle, which is pretty cool, but then one will break off and start doing something perpendicular to the other circle, and they'll just miss each other every time. And it's just an amazing feat of machine and mind coming together in this physics. Yeah. Which we'll get to think, I might have it figured out physics wise. This is kind of a rehash of the sun episode, as hard as it is to understand. Oh, I thought I didn't think this was that bad. Oh, well, then you take it. Oh, no, I'm not taking it. No, you take it. But I just saw, like, a few basic principles and bing, bang, boom. Well, my brain broke trying to figure it out, and I think I got it. But I also may have gone insane and come up with a completely, entirely different interpretation of reality. Well, you're on a podcast, right? Your name is Josh Clark. So I must be nuts. I want to see one of these things. Is a motorcycle with a side car with a small child or a monkey. That'd be even better. Yeah, a cigar smoking. Wouldn't that be fun? Yeah. The monkeys just like, what is going on? Yeah, because that's what monkeys were put on Earth to do. To smoke cigars inside cars while we move them around. Globes of death. All right. Should we go into some history here? Yes, because I was very surprised to learn that the Globe of Death was invented and patented in yeah, I saw it was invented even before then. Oh, well, sure. Probably it was sometime in the 1890s in Europe. Somebody came up with this act crazy. But yeah, it is surprising. You'd think this would be, like, 70s daredevil era kind of stuff, right? Sure. But no. The 19th century is when it was first invented. And here's the gas of the whole thing. The original Globe of Death was ridden on bicycles. Pedal fast, sir. In unicycles. Pedal super fast, sir. Yeah, I don't see how that worked, because, as we will learn later in the post ad break physics section, it's all about speed. It is very much about speed. How did they do this on a bicycle? Well, I don't think they did the loop to loop. I think that came later after motorcycle. Okay. So they just did sort of horizontalish circles. Yeah. Which I'm sure if it was the 1890s, you'd be like, wow, I'm impressed. Yeah, sure. I live in Wisconsin, and I'm preoccupied with death and horribleness, so this is a real relief for me. So Grand Rapids michigan was where the first one was patented by a man bicycle stuntman named Arthur Rosenthal. And he had a stage named Arthur Rose. He had a partner. Mr. Frank Lemon. I know that's a lemon rose. I love that word. Together lemon rose. That sounds very nice. Doesn't it? Doesn't it's? Pleasant. It's no stellar door. No, but it's close. It's in a different direction. It should be like a type of gum. Sugar free gum. Sugar free lemon rose. Yeah. I don't even chew gum. And I drew that. So they would do, like, these little 1015 minutes routines. Here's a quote from one of the state affairs routines of skill and nerve, guaranteed to deliver laughs and roars like that. They were on bikes. Bicycles, yeah. So I guess around the motorcycle started to become a little more ubiquitous, a little more affordable, and the first thing that people did with them was put them in the Globe of Death. Yes. I don't know about the first, but sure. They cast their bikes aside and said, I've got plans for your motorcycle. Where have you been all my life? That's right. So they started riding these things, and it just spread, like, further and further afield. I guess it started in Europe, made its way to America because Arthur Rosenthal was from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Right. Yeah. And it moved down to South America in pretty short order. So I think by 1912, there was a guy named Jose Urias who had built his own Globe of Death back then and was riding in it as well, down in Brazil. And his family is actually still around and still performing the Uriah Brothers Globe of Death act. Yeah. Remember our circus family's podcast? They were in that, huh? I think they were either in it or I was just pointing out, generally, like, you do something like this and your kid is going to probably grow up and do something like this. Right, exactly. It's a family trade. Yeah. Now they're up to the great grandsons are the ones who are performing in the show. And what I read was that Jose Urius 1912 Globe of Death is still in use by them. They have other globes as well, but it's still in usable condition. That's the true Globe of Death. You could actually die. Right, exactly. You may have noticed earlier, I said something about the word patent from Arthur Rosenthal. He did get a patent on May 3, 19. Four. And you also heard us mention things like South America and Germany. Right. And you may be thinking, well, that's great. Art Rosenthal was getting bank from all these Globes of Death everywhere. Sadly, that did not happen. He had a patent. But I guess it was just one of those things where early 1019 hundreds, you're going to have a hard time chasing these people down around the world saying, I own the patent to that. Give me $100. Right. Well, I mean, I think, even though their paths must have crossed, I can't imagine the globe of death community, even around the world, was like a big group. So I'm sure he was keenly aware of it, but I don't know. Maybe he just didn't pursue it because it was international. Who knows? Well, I just think at the time, it's just so hard to successfully do that internationally. Yeah, I think you're right, ma'am. So, at any rate, we got numerous globes of death all around the world. A lot of the writers where did you get this history section? I can't even tell you. I don't remember. All right, well, they mentioned quite a few. Speedy's. Speedy wilson. Speedy. Mcniche. Who? I like speedy Mcniche. Sure. Louie. Speedy babs. And it says Babs in one line, then Babbas in another, so I'm not sure which it is. We're going with babs. I like babs. But he was notable because he was the very first person to do a loop to loop and not just merely ride horizontally. Right. Which is very impressive for what, 1930s to think his set a world record. This guy was a globe of death amazed, balls guy. He set a world record after being the first to do the loop de loop. He said a world record of 1003 loops inside of a globe. They should call these amaze balls. I think it's still it should. It's a great name, amazeballs of death. Amazeballs de la morte. But I think his record is still unbroken of 1003. It's got to just be because somebody's like I don't feel like spinning around that many times. Yeah, people are too busy. Yeah, that would take hours. I have a family, but like you said, there are many families all over the world that have been doing this for many decades, and it seems very much to a state in the family. Biz and one of the ones in our article they talk about a lot. Are they the uriuses? Yeah. So there was a hay day of the globe of death between world War I and world War II. That may have actually been its original golden age, but it also spread around the world around that time. Then, too, there was another one in the were some innovations that we'll talk about, and then it kind of became almost legit in the early 2000s when long established circuses started to pick up the acts like the Uriuses, I believe, were hired by ringling brothers barnum and Bailey. The universal circus picked up the Willie family, and so they kind of went from, I think, like, these kind of scratching out in existence, like, having to hustle to basically like corporate sponsorship. Finally, the big circus has got hipped to this idea in the early 2000s. Should we take a break? Yeah, let's. All right, let's take a break, and we'll come back and we'll talk about the club of death. All right, man. So we're back, and as you said, we're talking about the Globe of Death. That's right. Yeah. So these things here's, the deal with these is they vary in size, generally speaking, unless you're pulling off some pretty amazing tricks with lots of riders are trying to set some big record. You're probably looking at about a 16 footage in diameter sphere, and they need to go. And it's amazing that they were doing this in the when motorcycles were so heavy. Well, the Globe of Death got its name from killing some people, for sure. For real? Oh, yeah. Okay. I figured there have been many injuries, but yes, you're right. Especially early on, it was exceedingly dangerous. Yes. So these motorcycles are a lot more powerful and lighter now. So if you're going to be in the Globe of Death business, now is a good time to do it. You're going around generally 40, 50, maybe 60 miles an hour at the most, three and a half to four and a half GS. And that is gforce on your body. And that's what's generally happening. You're on a trajectory that you have preplanned, but you are not on a track. And it doesn't use magnets. It's literally just physics at work. Yeah. Apparently a lot of people think that there's a trick or an illusion to it, and there actually is not. And again, we're not to the physics yet. We got to hang on. But we're going to talk about it eventually. That's right. So like you said, the gloves themselves have kind of a universal size, although it changes. But there are also other things that the gloves do. So it's amazing enough that there are people, like, riding around these things on motorcycles, but I think one of the first families to use a split globe was the Urias'i. Saw a picture that they credited to the 60s, where the globe hydraulically splits in half and the top part lifts up. And guess which side or which part the riders moving in at the time? The upper. The upper part. So they are actually in the top half of the globe and now there's like, no bottom. The bottom is well below, and there's a big gap between the top half and the bottom half of the Globe of Death and the riders just circling around the top. How big is that gap in the picture? It looks to be a good five to six. 7ft. Oh, I misread this whole move then. Oh, dude. It is not like they can very easily just go flying out if they got too close to the edge. That's their toast. See, here's what I thought happen during a split globe trick, is that they split it by about eight inches and then we just continue to span that split. Well, that would be pretty cool vertically, but no, this is yours, not yours. You didn't invent it, but well, I presented it. Yours is way better. Yeah, no, I agreed and to see it is actually pretty amazing because it just brings home the whole thing before. Yes, they have a bottom, but it's still really scary sphere of death, right? Sure. But now there's nothing there's. Just the top. It's incredible. It's an incredible thing to see. Everyone basically should go to YouTube and check it out right now. Split globe. There is also a family, I believe it's the Torres family, who were the first to introduce a triple split globe. So there's a top, a middle and a bottom. And so I think the one I saw was they were circling the middle part, the middle band. So it's really just this narrow little band of steel that they have to stay on track with or else go a little higher or little lower. Again, your toast. Right. And you think that the dangerous part would be sticking to the globe with that motorcycle. That is not the case because once we explain the physics, which we're still not going to do yet, not yet, not yet. Physics takes care of that. So it's pretty easy. Like, there's a formula that you figure out how fast you need to be going, and it's constant, like you don't have to worry about anything else. It's really those G forces once you get in there. One of these Urius dudes said when they go upside down, he said our heads are at gray out. Like they come close to passing out in this thing from the Gforce. And there's one trick they do with is it one of their wives that they put in there, and she's an aerialist, so she hangs from the center while they ride around her. And they said, there's a certain point in that show where she can't see us and we can't see her. And you just have to trust that it is mapped out and timed and practiced. Yeah, it's pretty awesome. Mapped out and timed before you even practiced, right? Yeah. And it's basically all timing, from what I understand, but they have all that just ticked off in their heads, just from experience. Amazing. One of the other things that really comes into play are the bikes that they use. Right. So for this House of Works article, I think they actually interviewed one of the Urias brothers, and he was saying that all the bikes they use are modified dirt bikes. So they're powerful, but they're also lightweight. But then they modify them and change them from like 125 cubic centimeter engine to about 150 cubic centimeters engine. But it's still on that same light dirt bike. Right. So it's got a lot of power, but there's only a certain amount of speed you're going to get to anyway, because as we'll see in the physics, which we're not getting to yet, if you speed up too quickly, you're going to increase the G force too much and you're going to blackout. And that's a terrible thing to have happen to you while you're in the Globe of Death, right? Yeah. So there's only a certain amount of speed you need. So horsepower, which is the quality in the engine that you want to hit, high top end speeds. The quality. The quality of that engine. Thanks for pointing that out, because I think I would have gotten it past a few people had you not said anything. Hang on, man. I'm here on my fingernails. So horsepower is not important. What is important is torque. Torque is that thing where when you hear, like, oh, this car can go from zero to 60 in 5 seconds or whatever. Sure. That's all torque. That's an expression of torque. And torque is the power that it takes to spin something on its axis. Like a rotational power. Right, yeah. And so, you know, like, you're spinning an axis when you're making a tire move, and the faster you can make that tire move from a dead stop, the quicker you can go in the shorter amount of time that's torque. And that's what really counts on the bikes in the Globe of Death, because you want to be able to just take off and be spinning around, like, from a dead standstill in no time at all. Yeah. Well, they actually rocket back and forth a little bit to get the timing right. Even better. But they still want really high torque, and so that's what they're looking for with these bikes as far as the big modification goes. As much torque as you can possibly have. Can I tell you a torque story? Oh, you have a torque story? I got a torque story. Let's hear it. So vacation this year, Isle of Palms, where I famously lost another tooth on a Cristini on a Christini. This was pretty no, I think this is after I lost a tooth. Okay. Regardless, we went out to dinner one night at Iowa Palms, as opposed to just cooking up tons and tons of seafood at the house, which is what I like to do. Sure. And we got a car ride to the restaurant. Had a great time, had quite a bit to drink. Okay. Big celebratory. I think it was the final night dinner, and then afterwards, we call a car to pick us up, and a dude shows up in a Tesla car like, this is a ride sharing app. Yeah. Wow. So he shows up in a Tesla, and I was like, oh, well, this is great. We're all excited. Little buzz. No one had ever ridden in a Tesla, and he got us in this thing and was, he sort of telling us, a very cool guy, college student, paying for his Tesla and school through driving it for people, and he was just telling us all about it. People get a sense that Tesla owners like to show off their Teslas. Sure. Because they're so neat. Right. And it really was cool. And I'm not a car guy. I'm not knocked out by much in a car, but I was like, this is pretty great. So I'm sitting in the backseat, and my friend Justin's in the front and his girlfriend and Emily and I are all three in the back. And he was talking about the torque and the zero to 60 capabilities, the qualities of that engine. And he was like, yeah, there's no combustion, so there's like, zero lag. Like, you hit the gas and you go even your highest performance combustion sports car engine right there's. A little bit of that lag at first when you punch it while everything is firing, but not so with the Tesla. And so Justin Scorpion list was like, can you do it? Can you show us? He was like, all right. So he makes a couple of turns and goes to this area, this long straight road where it's pretty desolate, and he knows he can do it. And he stopped, and he's like, all right, everyone, hold on. And we kind of laughed, necessarily, hold on. And he punched it, dude. And it was faster than any rollercoaster, like, even the ones that hydraulically launched you. Faster than anything I've ever experienced that quickly in my life. Yeah, I've heard that about Tesla's, actually. It pushed us back into the seat, physically pushed my head back against the headrest, and the only thing we could all do was laugh and smile. And I think Melissa screamed like a scream of delight. We were like four children, and it was one of the coolest things. And of course, I gave him this huge tip, which I think that's how he's paid for that Tesla. Sure. Right. Giving people joyrides. Yeah. He's like, I guess I can. Anyway, it was great. That is not a prolonged ad for Tesla. I wish I could afford one of those things. But it was very sweet. Well, they have, like, I guess, more affordable, comparatively speaking. Is it the model Three? Yeah, but I don't think that's the one that does what this one does. I think all of them do, though, because they don't have that lag. Yeah, but they don't have that huge engine. Yeah, that's true. Surely they don't all go this fast, right? I don't know. Let's find out. We'll go look it up later. And I asked him like a dummy, how did you buy this thing? I went to a Tesla dealership. He was thinking, dad got you. Should we take another break after that Tesla story? We need to recuperate. Yeah. I feel like I derail this. So no, I've got to digest that whole thing. All right, we'll come back and we'll finally talk about physics. All right, we are back, and it's time for the dreaded physics, which Chuck is feeling pretty good about. So, Chuck, why don't you take a crack at it and then I'll take a crack at it? Well, I mean, I'm not going to explain it all and have you re explain it. Okay. Because that's no fun for anybody. Well, you go ahead, but we can tag team this thing. The way I understand it is there are a few forces at work here that make this all possible. One of which is manc. Is it centrifugal or centrifugal? I've seen that if you've are a physicist, there is no such thing as centrifugal. All right? So that's one of the main forces at work. And if you are traveling on just a regular street, it's a pretty easy calculation. If you're talking about the maths of centripetal force, it just gets complicated when you're talking about a globe of death. Because you're not on a flat surface and you're not just traveling horizontally on a round surface. You're going all over the place. So that's when it gets a little more complicated. Right. Keep going. Well, centripetal force is directed toward the center of a path, of a circular path. Yeah. And this is just the overview. We'll get more detailed. There's also the force of gravity, of course, at work when you're in one of these things. Because when you're going upside down, as everyone knows, gravity is always directed straight down. Yeah. Or when you're perpendicular to the ground or parallel to the ground, like riding around in a circle right on the middle of the globe, it's still pushing you downward. Gravity is always pushing you downward. That's right. Okay. And then finally we have the normal force, which everyone's always heard the saying that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you go and press on something that's not moveable, like a 5000 pound rock and that rock doesn't move it is that the normal force is that rock exerting its force back on you. It's equal and opposite amount. Right? That's right. And if it wasn't there and it's not always there, then you would push the rock and it would move. Right? Yeah. Well done. But that's not all. How do these all work together? So here's what's been messing me up, and I think this helped my breakthrough. The force of gravity and G forces are not the same thing. This is what was messing me up. I'm like, if GForces make it feel like you're being pressed up against something, right. Did you ever go on that steel drum carnival machine? Just spin, right. And you get pressed up against the inside and they lower the floor and you're just hanging there, but you're like, of course you're being pressed up against the edge, apparently. And this is why people think physicists are all crazy. But apparently that's an illusion. You're not actually being pressed up against the edge of it. You're being pressed toward the center by the drum. Okay. Okay. That's centripetal force. And there's another way to think about this. Man. I can do this. Chuck if you took a key and you put it on a string and you started. Swinging it over your head in a circle, right? Yeah. So it's being on an axis, and the axis is where the string is being held in the grip of your hand. That's the axis of the circle. What's happening is that key at any given time, it just wants to go straight. That's all it wants, man. Just let me go straight. That's the direction of its velocity is straight at any given point. The problem is it's attached to the string, and the string is exerting the centripetal force pulling the key toward the center. And so rather than being allowed to go straight, it's being forced into a circular path around the center. That is what centripetal force does. Okay, that's all well and good when it's a key on a string, but when you're talking about the Globe of Death, the string is actually the globe. The globe is the thing that exerts the centripetal force against the person on the bike. Right. There's no string pulling them toward the center. They're not being pulled toward the center by the string. They're being pushed toward the center by the external force of the Globe of Death. Okay. And as long as that globe is strong enough to take the GForces, which we'll talk about in a second, the increased weight against it and push it back in an equal amount, then it will just keep directing that person along that circular path around the center, which is in the middle. It's invisible point in the middle of the Globe of Death. Right. If it's not strong enough, then it's going to break, and that person is going to go off in that straight direction that they've been wanting to go in the whole time, but have been directed into a circle instead. Right. So in terms of an equation, in this case, centrifugal force is equal to the force of the gravity on the motorcycle. And the dude or lady, they have ladies that do this now? Yeah, they do. They have a whole female team, which I'll tell you in a second once I find the name. So it's that force, force of gravity plus that normal force that I was talking about on the motorcycle and the rider by the globe pushing back on that. You can figure that out, like I said earlier, with a math equation about how fast you need to go, as long as you know how big everything is, that is the globe. But once you go below that speed and you start to fall, that normal force goes to zero. Right. So it takes a bit of friction to keep the tire gripped to the globe, for sure. As long as you have that friction, that normal force compressed against you much more easily, right? Yes. Okay, so here's the thing. This is the difference between the force of gravity and G forces. G forces are just a measure of how much gravity is pushing down on you. At any given point. Like if you jump up in the air, that's one G with no wind resistance that you normally experience. And we call it weight, right? That's your weight is the force of gravity acting on the mass of your body. But if you speed up really, really quick, especially say like a circular velocity, right, you are actually increasing your own weight, which you feel is GeForce. It's like pressing down on you. You feel heavy and you can't move. And in real physiological terms, like the blood is being pressed away from its normal locations, which is why you can block out, right, because some of the blood is no longer in some parts of your brain and your brain needs the blood to operate. But as far as the physics goes, gravity is always pushing downward on you, remember that. And the Gforce is pushing you and making you feel like you're being pushed outward. When really it's the combination of your circular velocity and the radius, the distance between the edge of the circle and the center of the circle at any given point. And the more you increase your speed, or the less of the radius, the stronger the G force or the higher the G force is against you. So if you have a small little globe of death, or you're traveling really, really fast in a globe of death, you're going to very quickly reach a G force to where like, you not only blackout, but you can die from that as well, right? Sure. Like you said before. The timing is what they have in their heads. But they can sit down and mathematically calculate what speed they need to hit at. The weight that they need to be at and their bike needs to be at. So that they can know as long as I hit the speed. I'm always going to be able to go anywhere I want to on the globe of death. That's right. I think we did a chunk. Yeah. And so as far as Gforce goes, what you can handle as a human is about seven GS is about the tops that you want to go, right. As a person. I don't remember what James Bond which one was that? Was that octopusy? I don't know, I don't think I've seen that one. Yeah, he got in a GeForce machine, which was basically a centrifuge, a big round room with a pod on an arm connected in the center and it would just spun him around. And of course he was like, give me all you got. And then they gave him kind of a little ride and then the bad guy came in to baddie and started cranking it even further and even further. And I just remember being a kid and seeing Roger Moore's face like they must have just had some powerful wind blower on him because his cheeks were rippling. I was like, oh my God, he's really in that thing right. But I'm sure that they did not get the physics right and they probably pushed him to, like, eleven. So that really rings a bell, what you're describing, I guess I have seen you saw those movies, didn't you? I've seen most of them. That's a Roger Moore one, so I would think I have seen it. Yeah, that comes to mind, because I can see Roger Moore's face going like yeah, that only happened once. Right, exactly. R-I-P roger Moore. Yeah, for real. But you remember Colonel John Paul Stapp. The guy who gave us seatbelts and Crash test dummies? Oh, how could I forget? Remember his eyes used to burst blood vessels because of the amount of GS that he was being pushed to. Yes, but I think so. You mentioned the seven GS. That was what, a guy named Guy Martin, who is a motorcyclist who actually set the world record for the fastest anyone hit a wall of death with, which is basically like a globe of death, but without the top and the bottom. It's more like a barrel. Yeah, exactly. And that's just riding horizontally super fast. In his case, I think, what, he hit 78 miles an hour? Yes. And the Guinness people said, we're here, and you got two chances to get to 60. He did like 72, I think, the first time, and then 78 the second time. I could have seen that. It probably looks like Roger Moore. And I think that was Moonraker. I don't think I see moonraker either. Well, Moonraker was the one that was for James Bond. It was very futuristic, had to deal with outer space and stuff like that. Doesn't he do it in zero gravity with the Bond girl? Of course he does. What was the one where he's got that Lotus that turns into a submarine man? I want to say the Spy Who Loved Me. I think he might be right. I don't know. I know that Jeez somewhere. Matt Gorley is spinning in his chair in Los Angeles. I can't remember. I can't either. Yeah, I love my Bond, but I just don't have them all mapped out and memorized. Got you. If you do want to see that Guy Martin break the world record, apparently the Channel Four over in the UK sponsored it, so I'm sure they have it somewhere. Yeah. And lastly, Chuck, I have to give a huge shout out to PBS Digital Studios crash Course Physics for helping break my brain into understanding of the century old forest thing that you didn't go to Nickelodeon Science. They didn't have it. They didn't have what I was looking for. Yeah. We said this at live shows. I don't know if we ever said on the air, but children's science websites are great places to understand complex science. If you don't get it, we go there a lot, and we don't only go there, but a lot of times it's a great starting point for breaking things down in an easy way. So we highly recommend it. Agreed. There's no shame. No, not at all. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about the global death, just go start watching global death videos. They're pretty awesome. And in the meantime, you can check out this article on householdworks.com. Since I said that, it's time for a listing of mail. I'm going to call this flu epidemic. Okay. Hey, guys. I'm a Master's of public health candidate in Atlanta at Emory. Nice. We spent a good amount of time discussing the flu. I remember you mentioned the Spanish flu and wondered if such an epidemic could happen again. Bad news is it can, and it probably will. According to public health scholars, that is. The culprit is our meat industry, which keeps an overabundance of foul and pigs in tight, unsanitary quarters. Because of the way this industry is growing, and some might argue due to its lack of regulation, these unsafe conditions lend to the rapid mutation of the virus. This, coupled with the ever decreasing CDC budget, makes it harder and harder for vaccine scientists to create accurate vaccines. On top of all that, the fluicine is a low threat by most of our society, rendering us ill equipped and underprepared. Most people are scared of Ebola or other difficult to catch viruses. However, influenza is a rapidly mutating and highly aggressive virus that is easily transmittable and is right here on our doorstep. Scientists predict the flu might be the next most deadly epidemic if we're not careful. My recommendation to our Congress people, stop cutting the CDC budget. Prevention is key. I know it'll probably sound like a quack. Not to me, for real. But just wanted to spread a little knowledge and say hi to my favorite podcasters. Thanks for putting on such an amazing show. And that is from Jasmine. Thanks a lot, Jasmine. Hello? Over there at Emery? That's right. I love your rice. What? Jasmine rice. Okay, weird. If you want to get in touch with us, like Jasmine did, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast or Joshuaclark, you can hang out with me on my website, russeriusclark.com, you can hang out with Chuck on Facebook@facebook.com. Charleswchuckbryant, there's also Facebook. Comstofytechnow. You can send us all an email, including Jerryto stuffpodcast@houseworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffthatoe.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstopworks.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 Kilgarra and Georgia Hardstark, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you worry 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."
c60a7afc-5460-11e8-b38c-8bed8bc3875b	Selects: How Moss Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-how-moss-works	Think you have moss figured out? You probably don't. Join Josh and Chuck in this classic episode as they explore some of the surprising aspects of these most ancient and important plants on the planet.	Think you have moss figured out? You probably don't. Join Josh and Chuck in this classic episode as they explore some of the surprising aspects of these most ancient and important plants on the planet.	Sat, 19 Feb 2022 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=50, tm_isdst=0)	32185857	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hello, friends. Charles W. Chuck bryan here on a Saturday. Well, it's really a Tuesday. Actually, it's a Thursday, but in your world it's a Saturday. So let's just pretend it's Saturday. This episode, everybody, is about moss. Is moss born ringing? No, not at all. Moss is actually really cool. And if you listen to this episode from June 5, 2012, you'll learn it for yourself. So check it out, everybody, how moss works. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, who now refuses to do the cheeks, everyone. So I can't vouch for how good the episodes will be from this point on. Cheeks are done. I don't care about them anymore. We'll see. Okay. I mean, if we started nosedive you're doing the cheeks again. No, I will speak to it that you do the cheeks. Can't do it. I will stand on your chest. Ben will grab one cheek, jerry will grab the other, and the cheeks will be done. For people who don't know what we're talking about, this sounds like really gross. Everybody knows what we're talking about. Chuck does a little cheek pull to start off each episode. It's a little good luck charm. And now he's suddenly decided he's not going to do that anymore. I have a new good luck charm. What is it? It's called not doing cheeks. Not the bad luck. So I've got a joke for you to open this one up. Do you really? And I made it up today. It's a made up joke. I don't want to hear. What do you call a reproducing swagnum? What? Randy moss. That's pretty good. Not bad. No, that's into the realm of pretty good. Yeah, I think if I was a tour guide at like a nature, like firm bank science or something, that would be my go to for the kids. That'd be a good one to try and identify with them. I don't think the kids would like it as much as maybe the teacher. Yeah, that's true. The teacher would be like, that's pretty funny. And by the way, those brown knee high socks you're wearing are great. Right, well, I'm going to give an intro in addition to the intro joke. Maybe that should be your new good luck thing. You tell jokes, you make a joke, make up a joke for every that would be welcome back, Cotter. Did they have a joke for everyone? Yeah, he introwed every show by or maybe it was outRoad by telling a joke to his wife. Oh, yeah, I hadn't picked up on that. I only saw like maybe two episodes of that show. Well, then you heard two jokes. Yeah, plus all the other jokes. Was his wife. One and the same with Bailey from WKRP. Didn't they look alike? Were they the same person? I don't know if they were the same person, but they definitely seem the same. Got you. And they both wore glasses. They had the feather sort of long, feathered haired 70s ladies. Yeah. I don't think they were the same, though. But they were both probably in the Love Boat. Yes. Within five years. As, like, a way to revitalize the career. That's right. Chuck, I was going to talk about the ice age, the beginning of the ice age. Of ice ages. Glacial periods. Remember, right now we're in the midst of an interglacial period. Right. I want you to think back way back, 470,000,000 years ago. Okay. There was no such thing as a glacial period. And by proxy, there is no such thing as an interglacial period. All we had was one hot, soupy, barren mess of land and ocean, and that was it. That's right. This is what's called the ordovician period. Ordevician period, depending on where you come from. Okay. And the beginning of this period is characterized by ice ages and Paleo geologists. I guess you could just call them geologists, really? Because nobody's studying, like, present stuff very much. It's mostly Paleo geology. Right, sure. They were like, where did this Ice age come from? When did this start? And they figured out that what triggered this was the arrival of the very first basic land plants. Eg. Mosses. That's right. And they recently figured out that mosses came about about 470,000,000 years ago, and they triggered these ice ages by latching onto rocks. So these were a certain type of moss, as you and I know, called granite mosses, and they would actually leach materials from these rocks to use as nutrients and minerals. Right. These are like weedies for moss, early moths. Well, the moth started releasing stuff. Releasing no, sucking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere enough to reduce the global temperature, mean temperature, by eight degrees centigrade. Wow. Which led to the beginning of ice ages and the ice age periods that we know and love. You can thank moss or thank you moss. You go outside, you find a little bit of moss. You grab a little piece of it gently, and then shake it. Shake it's a little. Say thanks for the ice ages, baby stem. Yeah. Well, we needed ice ages. That remains to be seen. It's all part of the big soup. We've had some might have doubted. We've had some chilly, windy weather lately, and it has been getting to me. Just seeing the trees getting whipped outside makes me feel chilly. And then in turn, I feel socially isolated and mad. Wow. Yeah. It's been really windy. Yeah. Crazy. So we're talking about moss. This is no joke. April is over by now. We're in it right now. But by the time this comes out, this is no April Fool's joke. We're talking about moth and how it works because it's part of our long parade of explaining absolutely everything in the known universe. That's right. Moss is part of that. It's part of that. So let's talk about moss. Well, moss is pretty fun and unique in some ways, if you ask me. Yes. Because unlike most flowering plants and trees or let me go ahead and say it all flowering plants and trees, they don't have roots like traditional root systems. Moss doesn't no, mosses don't. They do not. They don't germinate from seeds. Pretty weird. And they don't gush water around through internal systems, internal vessels. And that's weird. It is. Especially if you're familiar with plants, then you're like, well, moth is strange. Exactly. For somebody an average bystander like me, I'm like, oh, okay, well, moss doesn't do that, and plants do. It doesn't seem particularly weird to me, but I do find it intriguing. It makes me want to know more about moss. Well, you got about 15,000 species. If you want to talk about moss traditionally, you are probably going to think of moss as the true moss. Well, let's back up a little bit. Okay. They're related to liverworth and hornworth. Yeah. I saw other articles on moss, and everybody points that out for some reason. I'm not sure if they're like, I got to put ten things in about moss. I got nine. So let's put that in. They are in the phylum bryofida, and they're in three groups. You got the granite mosses, the pete mosses, and true mosses. True mosses are probably what we're going to think of. When you think of the little green carpet, like padding that you see everywhere, a fallen tree in a forest or something. Yeah, true moss. Tons of true moss, like 14,000 species. Yeah. Granite mosses are blackish, small growing Arctic regions in the mountains. Yes. Grow on rocks. They're the most ancient moss, apparently. That's right. And there are only about 100 species of that. And then the final subgroup is the peat moss. Grows in bogs. Have you ever been in a bog? Then you've probably seen some peat moss or sphagnum moss. Right. And that's the money moss, because you can burn it and convert it to electricity and charge money for it. That's why sphagnum is the money moss. Not oddly, but remarkably, the sphagnum moss do you use as a soil conditioner? We do that in our garden because some of it can hold 20 times its dry weight in water. It's pretty amazing. That's very amazing. That's some strong moths. You're going to find moths all over the place, including places where you won't find any other living plants, like the bottom of an Arctic or Antarctic lake. That is pretty impressive. Like, the only multicellular plant growing down there is moss. Right. And it grows really slow, I think as little as 1 year, this aquatic moss at the bottom of these frozen lakes, and that is the slowest growing and longest living freshwater plant ever recorded, I would guess. So it's kind of like putting somebody on ice. Right. So slowing down the cellular processes. But they're still active so you could by, in theory, extend their lifespan, right? That's right. Same thing with moss. Yeah, it's probably even easier with moss. Yeah. And by that same token, the zombie moss I thought was pretty cool. Yeah. You could dry some mosses out for 19 years without water, and if you add water to it, it'll resuscitate itself. It'll turn into a big dinosaur. It's pretty cool though. They can go dormant for that long. Yeah, it's amazing. And all mosses can go dormant. It's like one of their defense mechanisms. They'll just turn brown and dry out and dormant state. Unfortunately, you can't really tell what the difference is between dead and dormant until you add water and see if it comes back. Right. That's the only way to determine the length of a moss dormancy. So if you add water and it just stays dead, then it's dead. That's sad. So you said there's like 150 species and they kind of range in size and shape and texture, color. Some of the I think the peat mosses grow different colors, like rose. Yeah, very pretty. Some grow black, like the granite moss, you said. Some are silver, which is amazing. And then there's the smallest moss is the Ephemera, which is half a millimeter tall. That's crazy. That's adult size. And then there's the Dysonia, which is up to almost 30 inches, 70 CM in height, which that's a pretty wide variety. Yes. Okay. Some of it's fairly interesting so far. Let's talk about the individual plants, because when you look at moss and you think about moss, you're thinking of a carpet of plants. Yeah, right. Those are actually like a bunch of little plants put together. Correct? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, sure. That's one way to think of it. So when you're talking about moss, when you're talking about the individual parts or the individual plants, they're pretty simple, they're pretty basic. You have something called the gametophyte, which is the stem and the leaves. Right? That's right. The leaves are generally arranged in a spiral pattern and the leaves are usually a lance shaped with like a point. Right, yeah. That's where you're going to find your reproductive parts. Right. At the bottom there's rhizoids instead of roots. Remember, these are not roots. They don't anchor themselves to anything necessarily. Well, the anchor themselves to maybe organic material or something, but it's not into the dirt. Right. And they also don't, they don't suck up water in the same way that roots do, but they do use rhizoids. A lot of it's kind of academic. The difference is really between rhizoids and roots. Yes. In my opinion. Sure. I'm going to get some mail about that. But I think that they're very similar. Yeah, but I mean, the fact that it can grow in a rock kind of instead of soil kind of says it all. Excellent. Okay. So in the gametophyte you're going to have, like I said, your reproductive parts, both male and female. And then we'll mention this because it comes around later on when we talk about the reproduction. Emerging from the top of the female gametophyte is the sporophyte and a thin stalk called aceta and a little brown ball on top of that known as the capsule. Right. And then on top of that is the perculum. And it's like a little hat that the capsule wears. Right. And that comes into play. Well, let's talk about how it gets nutrients. Then we'll talk about the dirty stuff, the randy moss. Yeah, exactly. That was a pretty funny joke. That was silly. Okay, so a moss needs a few things to live, and one of those is water, of course. Possibly one of the most important ingredients because it AIDS in not just photosynthesis. Sure. But also in reproduction, which we'll see. Yeah. I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. We've really built up this sexy monster. Not as interesting as we're making it. Yeah. There's no, like, riding crops involved or anything like that. No, but there are parts. Yeah. All right. Okay. Yeah. And I was surprised by the number of parts. I didn't realize they were that involved. I thought it was like, here's a spore and go forth and reproduce. True. Anyway, with that water that moss needs, because moss need pretty much across the board, one of their great characteristics is a moist environment. Right. Yeah. And they need this water or they get this water, since they lack roots in a number of different ways. Some have very absorbent leaf surfaces where you can pour a drop of water on a leaf and it goes it's just gone. It's pretty amazing thing to watch. Yeah. Spongy. Sure. And then another way is the rhizoids, which, although they aren't roots, still manage to suck up water. And they do this through capillary action in the same way. That like a paper towel. If you put a drop of water on your kitchen counter, ask your mom first before doing this because some moms will freak out on you if you do something like this. Right. Put a drop of water on your kitchen counter and take a single thing of paper towel, set it next to it, just barely touching, and the paper towel go suck it up. It's amazing. That's capillary action. And it's the result of the adhesion in this case, let's say with rhizomes, the adhesion of a water molecule to the rhizome rhyoid. Rhythoid is greater than the cohesion between that water molecule and all the other water molecules as part of yeah. It's a quicker picker upper. So once you've got a little water in there, the water is going to be moved between cells or transported through cells, depending on the moss. And then you're going to get your photosynthesis, which is part of being a plant. You like this analogy? I didn't find it apt, necessarily. I just ignored it. Okay. So at the end of photosynthesis. You're going to have sugar and oxygen as a byproduct. Releases the oxygen like a good little plant. Right. And eats the sugar. Basically. Yeah. And says, Give me more. Yes. So it converts the sugar into energy to break down minerals. Say that it's leaks from rocks or a tree stump or whatever it's attached to, to grow and to reproduce. That's right. I think we're at the sexy moss point. Reproduction occurs, can occur in a couple of ways, and the first way is for the reproduction to begin, we're going to have to get a vase shaped archaegonia. It's getting all like a Georgia O'Keefe painting in here. It is. And that's going to produce the eggs. It develops at the tip of the gametophyte, which we talked about. And then on the male side, you've got the antheridia and that produces the sperm. Right. And the sperm swims through, basically fertilizes the eggs, which is why they need to be moist. Like you said, the sperm swims through nearby water to get to the egg. It's pretty remarkable. Yeah. It's almost like a fish. Yeah. But it's a sperm. That's right. So it's more like a tab pull. Yeah, I see what you mean. And then the eggs for a lie, you're going to get a sporophyte. We already talked about the sporophyte. That's the tall thin stalk with a little aperculum at the top. A perculum is going to open up at a certain point. That's the hat. Yes. The tip of the hat happens, releases the spores, which are basically like seeds. And there you have it. Well, yes. And then the spore goes and germinates like a seed. So I'm saying rhizoid, root, spore, seed. I mean, I know that there's some differences here, but they're not that great. Anyway, this four goes lodges itself into a but it's different than every other plant, every other millions of plants. Okay, I understand. I get it. I know that there are differences. I'm just saying, like, the difference between the two is not like a wow kind of thing for me. I got you. I wish it was. I understand. I'm not fighting it. So the spore germinates into another plant and the whole thing happens again. Hopefully not with any plant that it's related to, though. That's correct. So the other way it can reproduce is asexually, which is pretty cool. And basically if you've got enough moisture and a piece of moss breaks off and floats downstream or gets caught up in the wind and it roots down at a nice and moist place, it'll just start growing again. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. But it doesn't root rhizomes. I think I'm confusing riboflavin with something else to get rhythome. Okay. So we have healthy, sexually active moths everywhere, all over the place. We understand them. We understand them. Now, like that's moss right there, we left out one interesting fact. I thought they're leaves. The tiny little leaves are so small they're very rarely one cell thick. Yeah. That's tiny. Yeah, it's neat. It is neat. Okay, so now that we understand moss, if you have said, I like moss a lot, I've seen moss before, I want to bring more moss into my life. I happen to have a yard, so I'm going to introduce moss to it. We now can say, yes, here's how you do it, because we understand moss and here is how you do it. Yeah. And I like the look of moss. It's nice to go between plants or like in Japanese gardens, moss is like big. Yeah. Crazy big. So if you want to grow some moss, one thing you can do sometimes is just transplant it. Like gently scrape it off that rock and sort of like a big chunk of a carpet square as you can get and just throw it on the ground and water it. Water. And sometimes that will be very important. Yeah. Not always, if you put it in the right kind of place. Mosses require low sunlight. Sure. Basically shade. In fact, if you have low sunlight and you have trouble growing grass, moss is a great alternative. It is, very much so. They want low sunlight or shade, and they also prefer low acidity. Lower acidity than turf grass prefers. Yeah. So yeah, if you have a patchy piece of yard, moss might grow there very well. So in just transplanting it like that could work. Especially if you keep it watered. Yeah. You can also try propagating it using a pretty ingenious little method of taking a clump, a whole bunch of moths, throwing it in a blender with some buttermilk, and then taking that mixture with the paintbrush and painting it wherever you want. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Buttermilk. It just must be the wonder thing for the moths. Yeah. Packed with nutrients. You also want to take care of your moth. Sure. As low maintenance as it seems like, there is some things you have to do, like leaves, twigs, that kind of stuff. Since it's in a shady area, it's usually subject to those things falling on top of it and that actually will burn it like acid. There won't be a lot of growth in that area of your moss. Sure. Because the leaf is preventing it from doing its thing. Yes. You want to clean it off like you would your carpet. Yes. Maybe with a very light broom. Very light. A leaf blower on a low setting, which you hate. Yeah. I just don't like the noise. But in this case, it makes sense. Sure. Unless you have a very light broom. Or you could just pick these things off individually. That's right. If it's got weeds, you don't want to yank the weeds out because that can yank up moss. You don't want to do that. So you just want to snip it with scissors. And it's no wonder this is popular in Japan, because they're always more like tender and caring with their gardens. Anyone who has the patience for bonsai and origami and things like that will snip weeds with scissors. You mean. I were in Kyoto and witnessed a man cutting the grass at a park with scissors? Yeah. My neighbor used to do that in my old house. Man, but his lawn was awesome. I don't have time for that. No crap. No one has time for that. So, yeah, keep it well fed, as in once a year, aside from the water, you're going to want to, in mid spring, get out your buttermilk again. So basically, like right now or like last week? Yeah, true. Get about a quarter of buttermilk, mix it with a couple of gallons of water and spray it. Yes, spray it all over. And misty moss, they love mist. They do. They drink it up. Yeah. Literally. Yeah. Well, they use capillary action to drink it up. That's right. No roots involved. Let's say you want to kill moss. Yeah, I thought that this is very interesting in this article. It's like all Promoth and then all of a sudden it takes a really dark turn. It does. With the subject heading how to kill moss. Well, some people don't want it. They don't want ivy taking over their yard. They don't want moss taking over their yard. That's true. Although they point out in the article it's not going to take over your lawn because it's not going to grow where your lawn would grow. Right. So lighten up, is what I say. But if you're one of those people who are prone to slipping things, you may not want that on your sidewalk. You definitely don't want moss on your roof. There's a sign that you have a big problem if you have moss on your roof. Unless you are doing that on purpose. Like a green roof. Sure. Well, then you're not going to have the kind of roof that you have to worry about. Exactly. If you have a traditional shingled roof and you have moss, you need to do something about it for a couple of reasons. One, the presence of moss traps moisture. Moss is designed to do that if you're into intelligent design theory. And that means that it's going to foster things like fungus that will decay the wood beneath. Meaning you'll have a hole in your roof. Yeah, at some point. The rhizomes. Right. Rhizoids. What is wrong with me? I don't know. The Rhizoids also like to get in between shingles and loosen them. That's right. And what else? Well, you don't want it on your roof. And so one thing you can do to kill it is use pesticides and chemicals. Not pesticide. I guess it would be a herbicide. Yeah. They say pesticide in here. That wouldn't be right, then. No, it's an herbicide. Yeah. Like Roundup. Sure. Which, if you're into spring, that kind of junk on your lawn, feel free. I advise not to, but that's just how I play in my yard. So you don't use scissors, but you don't use pesticides? No. You just kick back and you're, like, grow baby? No, I take care of things, but I just don't like spraying chemicals all over there. What do you use as herbicides and pesticides? White vinegar. Like as a spray. What does that work for? Anything like pesticide and herbicide. I don't know about pesticide, but herbicide, like it'll kill weeds. Really? That's interesting. Yeah. Put it in the Hudson sprayer. Got you. Or just live with it. Yeah, I guess it depends on the weed, for sure. But if you have animals, you don't want to be spraying your yard with chemicals. Yes. Even though they say, like, once it dries, it's fine. I don't buy that. I don't buy that either. Yeah, but if you do want to get rid of it, they say the best way to get rid of it naturally is to make it a not moss friendly environment. So, like, cut back some shade, cover, maybe make it sunnier. That will help get rid of the moss. Yeah, just make it so it wouldn't want to live there even if it could. Yeah, or scrape it off if it's, like, on a sidewalk or something. Yeah, that could lead for so it may come back. Don't be surprised. But yeah, just a flat shovel or a hoe will take care of moss usually, too. That's right. It says here's zinc. Yeah. I didn't know about this. Strip up on your roof and it'll keep mosses away. Up on the heat, that stuff. I'm sorry. And then the last moss fact of the podcast, if you're ever lost in the woods, you need to get your bearings. That's right. Start looking around and see what side of the trees and, well, pretty much an upright growing tree, what side moss is growing on. And you probably have found something like north. Yeah. Because moss is going to grow on the side that gets the least exposure to sunlight, which would be north. So just follow that and you'll end up in Canada every time, even if you start out in Australia. Hey, Australia. All right. Well, that's moth. You got anything else? No, I'm going to grow a little moss garden in my front yard. Are you going to? Yeah. Well, I was going to zero escape it anyway, so they might as well get some moss going. I wrote an article on that. Zero escaping. Yeah, but the problem is this isn't zero escaping because that's dry landscaping. This requires true water, but it'd still be pretty low maintenance. Yeah. And my front yard doesn't get very much sun. Like, I failed miserably at trying to grow grass, so I'm just going to, like, mulch and moss and put plants and stuff. I'd like to see that. Yeah, one day. If you want to know more about moss, including seeing some very pretty pictures, of moss and to get to the bottom of what Chuck and I decided was an in apt analogy between photosynthesis and cookie baking. You can type in moss in the search bar athowtofworks.com and it'll bring this up and you will be very happy. And you should also be happy because I said search bars means it's time for listener mail. Josh, I'm going to call this the nicest Irishman on Earth. Wow, this guy was super nice. Okay, Josh, Chuck and Jerry. My name is John Keating and I'm writing from Dublin, Ireland. I've been a reasonably long time listener. I started listening to the show over a year ago when I started studying for my leaving Cert, the Irish University entry exams. On a number of occasions during my exams, I was able to recall a topic you guys covered during the series, especially in English and history. Due to this, I feel I owe you a great deal of thanks as I was accepted to the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, better known as Trinity College. And it's go Thunderbolts, in case you're curious. During the year in Trinity, it was announced that a fraternity is to be established within the college in Ireland as well as in the UK. Society and clubs take up the role of frats that frats have in the US. However, one exception is normally these clubs societies do not have a particular house associated with them. Okay. Like we do here. Right. This house concept is something I'll have to deal with in the near future, as I shall be staying in the Beta Theta Pi branch of the University of Toronto while I'm in the city in search of work this summer on this side of the Atlantic. The frat concept is mainly centered around their depiction in such movies as Animal House or how the Winklevoss twins were portrayed in The Social Network. Sure. Did you see those guys entering commercial for, like, Pistachios? I did. It's awful. Hey, man, you got to make that dollar some way, huh? Yeah, the multimillion dollar payout wasn't enough, right? Yeah, they were wealthy already. Yeah, exactly. They seem like nice enough guys. Oh, they seem like great guys in such we see them as being an alcohol fuelled rich boys club. Yes. Except for the College of Pharmacy fraternity. What are they like? It's a pill fueled club. I know that both of you weren't associated with the frat when you were in college, so maybe I'm right on the button there. Also, I'm curious as to why the idea hasn't successfully been exported to Ireland and the UK. And further afield. And what exactly is the association with the Greek alphabet and why did they develop in the US in the first place? So he wants us to do a podcast. Oh, I thought he wanted us to answer now as this email has already exceeded the limit, I felt it would. So I shall end it on this note. I just want to further emphasize my gratitude and respect I have for the SYSK team that's so nice. And all the individuals involved in how stuff works. Here's hoping for a successful venture on a TV. Best of luck and slam. Must be an Irish thing. S-L-A-N. Every heard of that. Is it like an acronym for something? No, it just says Best of luck in slang. So we'll probably hear about that. And that is from John Keating. Thank you, John. That is very nice of you. That was a very nice email, wasn't it? Do you want to do Fred's? Yeah, I think we should at some point. Well, I guess we have to explain everything. If we did Moth, we have to do fresh, right? Yeah, sure. Let's see. What should we call for Chuck? I don't believe anybody can possibly have a Moth story, which makes me want to hear one. Well that means people go, oh boy, you didn't think you'd get a moss story? Listen to this. Okay, so we might as well ask for it. I once laid so still for a year I had moss growing on my side. That would be pretty cool. That would be cool. And then there's the tree man who I think some people call the Mothman. I don't think I know him. Oh, you do? There's a video on how Stuff works with this man who has some sort of HPV and like he's growing like bark bark like skin. Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, I think he's called a tree man though. It's not the Mothman, is it? I don't know. It's sad. So we've already heard about that guy. Don't send us any links to that video. Seen it. But if you do have an interesting moss story, we want to hear it. Not only that, if it's interesting enough, we'll promote it on the show via listener mail. You can tweet at least the first 140 characters of your mouth story to us at SYSK podcast. You can post a bunch of it on Facebook at facebook. Comstuffyshow. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstuffworks.com. Stuffyhudo is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
https://podcasts.howstuf…an-star-wars.mp3	Did Reagan's Star Wars program win the Cold War?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/did-reagans-star-wars-program-win-the-cold-war	Putting lasers in space to blast Soviet missiles out of the air was a very real part of Ronald Reagan's defense policy. While his "Star Wars" program was derided at home and abroad, historians are beginning to wonder if it didn't help win the Cold War aft	Putting lasers in space to blast Soviet missiles out of the air was a very real part of Ronald Reagan's defense policy. While his "Star Wars" program was derided at home and abroad, historians are beginning to wonder if it didn't help win the Cold War aft	Thu, 16 Aug 2012 19:20:09 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=16, tm_hour=19, tm_min=20, tm_sec=9, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=229, tm_isdst=0)	33125873	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. 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. Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff you should know from Housetopworks.com. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Shuckers Bryant sitting across from me. Hi. Have you ever seen Donny Darko? I do. It's one of my favorites. You know when he takes that masculine and, like, that thing comes out of his chest and he starts following it? Yes. He doesn't take mescaline, but yeah. Sometimes I feel when we're sitting across from one another, we're connected by one of us. Yeah. It's like a wormhole of fellowship. Yeah. Like from the abyss. That's what it sort of looked like. Yeah, it did look a lot like that. I love that movie. Yeah. When Ed Harris takes all that masculine oh, that movie and sees that thing come up out of the water, it was just like that. No masculine, no movies. How's it going in which people take masculine? There's plenty of us. Sure. This is what people have been complaining about lately. Who's been complaining? Tell me their names. Various people. People have been complaining. Oh, you bring something up. I feel like we should address something. We haven't done this in a really long time. It appears to me that we have a lot of newcomers. Yeah. Welcome. Yes, welcome. And I think anyone who's been following us the whole time kind of gets the stuff. You should know, Jam. Right? Yes. But it seems like there's a lot of people who don't quite understand what we're doing and think that we purport to be infallible experts on everything and that we don't just get things wrong from time to time. We're just a couple of guys who are pretty decent at researching. That doesn't mean that we invented the topic that we're talking about or that we didn't just walk right past a fact or something that we missed in our research. It comes up. It happens from time to time. So I guess if you're just joining us, that's probably something good to keep in mind. We don't claim to be experts, so don't hold us to that standard, because we're not trying to reach that standard. We're just trying to impart some really great information as factually as possible. And we love science and wonder. Great. Are you good? Yeah. All right. How are you doing? I'm awesome. Do you have anything to get off of your chest? No, just welcome. The pimento cheese mini sandwiches are in the corner. Help yourself. So, Chuck yes? If you remember a while back, we've talked about this stuff a lot. Mutual assured destruction. We did a podcast on that specifically, didn't we? We did. We did one on who won the Cold War. Yeah. Did one on how to steal a nuclear bomb. Yeah. It's just this fascinating period of world history. The Cold War. Agreed. Incredibly tense, incredibly scary. And this is our history. It is. In part because you're half Russian. No, but I was alive and well. A youngster war, kids, weren't we? Yeah. We've talked about this before. Sure, little Ruskies. So the central, I guess, the fulcrum of the Cold War, the fact that the reason we're all still here was the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Yes. Which is basically like we had enough nukes to wipe out the entire world. The Soviet Union had enough nukes to wipe out the entire world. So we were just there in a tense, fragile detonte. How about a nice game of chess? Exactly. That's why we're still here. So this was, I guess, this accepted reality for every president and every premiere from well, I guess who for us from Ikea, this mutual assured destruction doctrine was just kind of a part of daily life. But when Ronald Reagan came into office, he came up with a different plan. He did indeed. So instead of a tense standoff, he found that untoward, I guess. I think he found it from my understanding of Reagan, he would have found it untoward because it didn't give America a clear advantage. Well, the article says he found it morally and politically distasteful. I agree with him in that Reagan didn't like mutual assured destruction for one reason or another. Yeah. So he came up with something a game changer, you would call it today if you read books that 80% of an airplane is also reading at the same time. That's right. What is it, Josh? He came up with the Strategic Defense Initiative, which the press like to call the Star Wars program. And I remember this very well because it was largely derided in the press for a bunch of reasons. We're going to talk about. Yeah. I remember very well, too. It was all over Mad magazine. Oh, yeah. It was all over time. There were awesome illustrations of satellites with laser shooting out of them that you could see in the mainstream media a lot. Sure. But yeah. I also remember it kind of just basically being generally disliked by the public. Yeah. As well. Pretty much. It was to be laughed at in many circles. Although it was a very serious thing. It was. And it was laughed at for a lot of reasons. But we're going to go over so Reagan, on March 23, 1983, he held an address to the nation little televised speech, and in it, he challenged the scientific community, who he said had created nuclear weapons to make those very same weapons, quote, impotent and obsolete. And that kind of became the rallying cry. Yeah. Like, let's make nukes impotent and obsolete. And the way you do that is to make it so that we have a missile defense system that can shoot down every single nuclear warhead that Russia has in its arsenal. All at once? If need be, yes. After launch, that is, if they launch their missiles, we can shoot them down in space. And in Reagan's view, which I can see his point at the time, there would not be any more need for it. He thought it would neuter the Cold War in its tracks. Soviet Union thought, that's not too cool. They thought, yeah, right. Because a lot of people felt like it was going to escalate the arms race. The Soviets thought, this just means you have a clear advantage over us. This doesn't neuter. Like it neuters us. It doesn't neuter you right. And Reagan said as many times as the Soviets could stand to hear it, that this was strictly a missile defense system, a net or a shield, if you will, that would only be used in the event that a Soviet nuclear launch was detected. Right. But the Soviets were saying, or you could just shoot all of our missiles down and then launch a strike. Sure. A first strike where we would have no way to retaliate. So, yeah, this is totally unacceptable. And yet the Russians rallied against it. But not just them. Here at home, there were a lot of people who didn't really care for it, including the public who thought it was a pipe dream, or who thought it would escalate a new arms race with the Soviets, or who just thought it was going to be a huge money pit. Yeah. And it was a lot of those things. And when we say Soviets, let's go ahead and call out the premiere that I didn't remember Yuri and drop off I didn't remember him. I don't remember him either. I looked him up. He was only I mean, it seems like there was a lot of premieres there for a while that died there after, I think he was in less than a year and a half. I was like, the KGB had something to do with it in vodka. Oh, yeah. So he was the premier at the time. He wasn't a fan. They launched a big propaganda campaign. It said of their propaganda went toward Poopooing, the Star Wars defense program, even though they didn't think it was going to work. Yeah. Congress apparently right. Apparently the Soviets were like, this is not a feasible program. Well, and they said it violates a couple of important treaties. The ABM, the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty of 72, which the Soviet Union and United States were both a part of, said that at the time, that was two ground based missile defense systems you were allowed. Later on it was one, and I guess this would have been more than two. Not only that, ground based is an operative term in this case because this is going to be the Strategic Defense Initiative was going to be space based, and that violates another treaty. 1967 Outer Space Treaty says that you cannot use weapons of mass destruction in space. And that's pretty much what was going on. Or that was what was planned, right? 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. Josh, my friend, do you know where your passport is right now? 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You can learn more at Citi comAdventure and travel on with Cityadvantage. All right, so that's why they don't like it, right? Congress didn't like it. Congress didn't like it either. Most people in Congress, apparently. The Missile Defense Agency attributes coining the term Star Wars to describe the Strategic Events Initiative, to mock it, really, to Ted Kennedy and interviewing the Washington Post almost right after Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative. And Reagan spent the rest of the time he was in office trying to simultaneously get this pushed through and to get everyone to stop calling it Star Wars. Because with no luck, had it caught the american public's imagination, like, oh, yeah, star wars, let's just go ahead and blow up Russia with star wars. He would have been like, yeah, let's call it star wars. It's awesome. But it was like, reagan star wars, that crazy old kook. He's got Alzheimer's and he wants to put weapons in space and just shoot lasers around and all that. So he spent a lot of time lobbying against people, calling it star wars, but it didn't work. Now he tried to go by the name strategic defense initiative, and you know how the press is. I think you need to get a hold of something. It's all over. He was probably even willing to allow it to be called the SDI. I bet he'd be down there call it SDI. So Europe wasn't all in favor. The allies, they had some concerns about the balance of power and how this would affect it. Obviously. And like you said, congress, not everyone was against it, but they had some major issues, largely a, the cost, and b, is it even possible? Like, are we just pipe dreaming here on these lasers? Right. And they were kind of right? Well, at the time they were. So in reagan's defense, he said from the outset, like, this can take years, decades. Sure. This is not going to be an overnight thing. Yeah. And he also said, we're going to test a lot of different stuff. Right. He was well aware the technology didn't exist, or if it did exist, it was like a glimmer in some national laboratory scientists eyes. Sure. And it was just in the nascent stages. So from the outset, he commissioned some reports, and the one that kind of got picked up was the fletcher report. And the fletcher report basically said, here are eight things you need to build the strategic defense initiative. Everything from sensors that can detect when an intercontinental ballistic missile launch is launched. Yeah. Because they don't phone you up and say, we've launched exactly right. And you need to make sure that they're accurate. And it's not going to be like a war games thing where it's like, whatever. You also need to come up with some incredible guided missile systems. I think they were like eight different aspects that basically either needed to be created or needed to be refined to the point where they might as well be created from scratch. Right. And reagan said, do this. Yeah. He said, press on. And I think a lot of people at the time, in congress at least, were saying, good idea. Let's use this as a bargaining tool in the arms race. Like, we don't really have to do it. Right. They're like, everyone thinks you're serious. Exactly. And he said, this could work as a bargaining chip. And he was like, no, I really want the star wars. I'm sorry. STI right. In effect. So apparently gorbachev got Reagan to meet him for arms limitations talks in Iceland in October of 1986. And Reagan went and they had this great talk and basically Gorbachev was like, let's end mutual assured destruction. Let's basically get rid of our arsenals. And the Soviets were just throwing, like, bone after bone under the table, and Reagan just can't believe his luck. And then all of a sudden gorbachev at the end is like, okay, so we'll go ahead and sign off on this, but all this is contingent that you give up Star wars. Right. And Reagan stood up and left. Really? He left? Yeah, which is kind of like that's a little crazy, maybe, but that's the level of commitment he apparently had to star wars. Well, yeah, not too long after, the Soviet said, well, you know what? We got to do something. We can't build a star wars, and it's actually a pretty good idea. They said we can, or at least they thought they could undertake what they called the polyus skiff, which will invent a network of weapons to destroy your star wars machine, which was, hey, that's pretty good thinking, but they didn't have the funding, and it was not very successful either. No, they didn't. And that leads us to a point, if I may skip around a little chocolate. Sure. But history has kind of vindicated Reagan in one way. Like, his star wars program didn't go anywhere, but it wasn't given very much time. Right. And the reason why is because the follow the Soviet union happened within less than a decade after he announced the star wars initiative, the program, the Soviet Union fell, collapsed entirely. And some people attribute that to the defense spending that he immediately caused them to start expanding because of the star wars program. True. So he did kind of ratchet up this arms race, but the Soviets couldn't keep up. This came on the heels of us bleeding them dry in Afghanistan, secretly funding the mujahideen, which became the Taliban, by the way, but I don't know how much Reagan knew, but the Soviets were hurting financially. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you introduced star wars and they couldn't keep up. Yes. And the follow Soviet Union with that came obviously, at least huge threat of all out nuclear war. Right. Because they were the major players. You didn't have to worry about the smaller countries as far as mad goes. Right. But you have to worry about rogue states and all that, making sure that the Russians could hang on to their arsenal, which they didn't do very well, necessarily, but yes, the mutual assured destruction just went the way the dinosaur and the soviets fell. HW. Bush comes along. Yes. People get annoyed by the way, when we don't say president so and so, who does? Is this on Facebook? No, I've seen people write in before, and I've heard other people say, you should always address them as president so and so. But I hear all the time people say Obama, Clinton Reagan So no disrespect intended, folks. H. W. Bush comes along. Soviet Union has fallen. So he's like, you know what? We need to really cut back on the scope of this SDI. He probably would have just scrapped it all together, but he was pretty loyal to Reagan, of course. And so he refocuses the program, cuts it back, clinton comes along, President Clinton, and refines it even more. And cuts it back even more. And by the time that happened, it wasn't anything like Reagan's initial Star Wars program. No, not at all. But it would become handy, which we'll get to. So let's talk about what Star Wars was. We've kind of given, like, a little bit of a broad overview, but until I started researching this, I hadn't really thought about it, but intercontinental ballistic missiles, once capable of saying, traveling from Moscow to New York, have to leave Earth's atmosphere and in our orbit. And so the idea was we would have something up there that could shoot it down when it entered orbit. That's right. Which meant that we had to weaponize space. Yeah. And I wonder if they ever gave any thought to what nuclear bombs going off in space would mean. I mean, surely there are repercussions there. I know it's space, but you can't just go willynilly setting off nuclear bombs in space. Right. They did in Nevada. Well, that's true, but bikini Atoll? Yeah, and look what happened there. What happened there? Well, I'm just saying it's got to cause some kind of harm to space, even though it's space. Right. Or does it just suck into it? I have no idea. This is something I could not find. I researched. I couldn't find anything. Yes, no, I understand what you're saying, and space is a vacuum, so it should have some effect or no effect whatsoever, but it's got to be some got to do something. There's someone out there really smart that hopefully is going to email me. I guess, though, the idea behind this was fairly utilitarian, where it was like, okay, this possible consequence in space or saving millions of lives here on Earth, and they just said, whatever, that's fine. Of course. So you have something up in space that's capable of shooting down an intercontinental ballistic missile, like an Xray laser. This is like, where we kind of come to some of the there are a lot of proposals that were kind of out there, but they went ahead and spent a lot of money testing these things, like the X ray laser. And that was a physicist, Edward Teller. He created the hydrogen bomb. Yeah, I saw that. It was his proposal, so they obviously listened to him. And it was going to use power generated by a nuclear blast, and it never performed well, and it really became the focus point for the press and for David Letterman and for Johnny Carson. To make fun of because it was an x ray laser. And this is coming off the heels of the Star Wars movies themselves with their xray blasters. Actually, they are blowing up. Yeah. Or the dust star blowing up that planet. Alderon, I think they focused the laser and boom. You just saved me from a lot of iron. Because I was going to say tattooing. I might have got it wrong. I think it was all the Man, I hope you got it. If there's one thing that I ever hope you got right, it was that one. So many Star Trek fans will be riding in. So there's the x ray laser, and it doesn't go over very well, which was very much the focus of the media. And they were being chided for the fact that they send it really far out. Right. But they tested it. It just wouldn't work. The idea behind it was that they were going to have a small, controlled nuclear explosion that would power this laser to create a massive amount of x rays. Concentrated amount of x rays. Yeah. That would be focused on a missile and go kaboom. It was called project X caliber. So it had a cool name, too. But apparently or the people behind it were accused of falsifying the initial test results. Yeah. So it kind of went down in scandal and mockery and everything. So in the little box that said worked or didn't work, they just checked, worked and shuffled away cartoon sweat coming off the air Force. So some of the other ideas that they tried and spent billions of dollars trying, kinetic warheads, apparently they would collide in orbit. It's like shooting a missile at another missile. Yeah. And that one actually was like the big dog on the block for a while. At first. In the early stages of Star Wars. Because they figured out that you could have this thing. Like. Basically a satellite based garage with. Like. Ten missiles in it. And you just have it floating up there. And they shoot at a missile. And one came up and it was a good idea. They're like, we can actually do that. I think we can do this. The problem is, somebody pointed out that all the Russians had to do was shoot a missile at your garage, and for their one missile, they took out ten. Yeah. So people said, okay, let's get back to it. And they started exploring other ones. It's like bringing a knife to a gunfight. It's like bringing a missile to a multi missile fight. No, I don't think that analogy works at all, actually. No, I think it's like a sitting dock. Okay. The other thing they wanted to try, Josh, was this railguns mounted on satellites. Did you see the popular mechanic drawing of it? I did, and it's pretty wicked. Yeah. I got to admit, it looks like an ibeam coming out of the satellite, but it's shooting like a three ounce slug at 200 miles a second. Yes. It's pretty wicked. Yeah. That one didn't go very far because of the energy requirements. Yeah, it was just way too expensive in an energy sense. Right. And then the MIRACL miracle laser. It was another laser, but it was ground based using mirrors. Right. It was a chemical laser. Okay. It wasn't like a nuclear xray laser. Got you. It's like they just started to try to throw cool Sci-Fi terms of the time together like, let's make a laser, but let's make it a nuclear xray laser and we'll shoot missiles out of the sky with you. Tron laser. Tron. I said that. So then this article doesn't really go into it, but after some of these were kind of asked and answered up until and even beyond the fall of Soviet Union, the shining star and all this became these things called Bright Pebbles. Does that ring a bell? It did for me. When I ran across it, I was like, those two words sound very familiar. So Bright Pebbles was the little garage with ten missiles. These were very small ones, like, say 20 to 50 pound mini garages that would shoot slugs or would ram themselves. But I think they would shoot slugs. And rather than having one garage with ten missiles, you would have thousands of these little things all over the country. All over space. Oh, they're in space. Yeah. Got you. So they were hoping for a constellation of up to like 4000 of these things just floating around in space. Wow. The cool thing about them was if you took one out there were still 3999 left, right? Yeah. They were autonomous so they could attack on their own if they wanted to. They could also coordinate and communicate with one another to launch coordinated attacks against missiles. So it'd be very tough to overwhelm these things. And they would have been designed to protect US. Space based assets, like satellites. Sure. And if the Soviets ever launched anything like it, these things were trained to just go right after them and blow them out of the sky too. So basically they were like little sentinels in space. And they were going to be cost effective too. It was going to cost about 11 billion in 1980, $4 I think, which is about 20 billion today. It's a bargain. It was considering that they were looking at like 20 billion, which is about 43 billion in today's dollars just to get some of the other ones off the ground. Right. So to get 1000 off the ground that you could mass produce just $11 billion at the time was quite a bargain. And had the fall of the Soviet Union not coming on, we probably would have Bright Pebbles up in space right now. Oh, really? And as a matter of fact, they were proven, they were tested. The Clementine probe, which mapped the moon in 1994, that was a bright pebble that they basically redesigned instead of as a weapon. They used it to map the moon, and it did so successfully so they would have worked awesome. 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 credits while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience network, and most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast and start taking charge of your future today. 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 Cityadvantage Platinum Select Card is your ticket. You can learn more at City comAdventure and travel on with cityadvantage. And lastly, yes, a computer model of Bright Pebbles found that had they been in operation during the first Gulf War, they would have shot down Saddam Scub missiles with 100% accuracy. Wow. Pretty crazy. Well, cheap. I was going to say expensive. No, they're cheap. They just didn't have time to come along. Well, the problem with the rest of the plans is I saw one quote that said that at the time they were just sort of taking these ideas almost from science fiction, and they felt like they were or some scientists felt like they were a decade away from even. They're saying, we can't even start this for ten years. We need to research for ten years to see if any of this is even feasible. But I think instead of sort of like, trying these things out, reagan was encouraging that, though. I mean, I'm sure. He was like, hurry up. But at the same time, I got the impression he was saying, like, sky's the limit, guys. Use your imagination. Do whatever you can come up with. Sky's the limit beyond the wacky ideas. Right. So did any of these ever work at all? So apparently a couple did. They shot down a stationary object on earth. They shot down a mile mock warhead in the earth's atmosphere, and they shot down another mock warhead in space, and one of those things was going 2100 miles an hour. Some of these technologies, because they had a bunch of different groups testing all these different things, and some of them were successful for the most part now, but it eventually led to a different sort of defense system that we still have today. Right. Or is it that what some people say. Yeah, like the ballistic missile defense system. Yeah, it's the outgrowth of star wars. Like, the idea that we have a missile defense system comes from Star wars, even though we're not using x ray lasers. Right. A lot of people say it had some benefit in the end, after all. Yeah, because we're using sensors, the same sensors. Like a lot of the research that was not like x ray lasers, but still have practical applications we're still doing today. And apparently in pearl harbor last month, a missile shot down another missile. Really? Over the Pacific successfully as a test. Yeah. I was like, somebody's attacking pearl harbor again. They figured the American public doesn't want her, but yes, the Chinese shot a missile at us and we shut it down, so everything's cool. So I guess that's about it. Yeah, that's all I got. Okay. So if you want to learn more about star wars, I think it would bring up a bunch of crazy stuff if you type star wars in the search bar, how stuff works. Like the one man star wars. Star wars one man show. Yeah, that's pretty good. Landau, dr. Pepper, caloriesian. Remember that one? I do. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff. Just type star wars in the search bar. Hustleforks.com and I said that, which means it's time for listener mail. Josh, in lieu of listener mail, we are going to do a little Facebook question, stuff that we like to do from time to time. And this is happening live, which is pretty exciting. That is scary because I didn't have much in my head already, and this is a good thing to do. So let's just look through some of these, and you let me know what you want to read. Okay. Our friend Kuby, don Kuby says, is there a particular side of the recording booth that you each always sit on? The answer to that is yes. I guess if you were facing from here, josh sits on the right, I sit on the left. But you really come in from the other side. So Josh sits on the far side and I sit on the near side. Yeah, that's the best way to say it. That's very well put. Yeah. And I think all the podcasters probably no one ever sits in a different seat. That'd be really weird. Yeah, I'm sure everybody sits in the same seat. Like, if I said over there, they'd be disconcerting. You'd have to be, like, bona fide nihilist to do that. It would just be odd. I've got one from Jerome Hanson. Jerome, right. Yeah. Who is your favorite Marvel superhero? I guess I would say punisher. I know he's not a superhero. He's a straight up hero because he doesn't have any superpowers. But he's definitely the comic I was into the most as a youngster. I'm going to go spiderman. Really? Yeah. I identified with Peter Parker, not Spiderman favorite band of all time. I feel like we've answered that many times. Okay. I'm going with pavement. Still. Pixie still. Okay. I would like to know your opinion of Anne Margaret. That's from Brian Throckmorton. I think Anne Margaret, in her day, was one of the most smoking hot women on the planet. So my only familiarity with Anne Margaret was from The Flintstones when they had that character, Ann Margaret, and she always seemed like she was on Lithium. So I don't have a great opinion of Ann Margaret. Got you. Oh, this is good. William Bayer, if you were speed limit, what would you be and why? You know what I would be? I would be one of those special speed limits in state parks. It's like 5 miles an hour. Do you know that the parking garage here is four and a half? Is it really? Yeah, that's what I would be doing. Four and a half miles an hour. It's like they're showing off because just take your foot off and let the idol take you in. That's where I'm at. What would you be? This is arguably the strangest question I've ever been asked. I would say 75. Okay, that's good. Okay. It's fast, but it's not super dangerous. Not even to read into it. That's what comes to mind. Okay. Got you. You got one. Let's see. Lisa Tashira asks us, what's our least favorite food. Lisa is a regular, too, but I recognize the name. Hey there. What are you going with? Least favorite food? Would have to be? I was just talking to me about this the other day. It's like, one thing I really don't like, and I can't remember it because I generally like everything. What's yours? Let me think about it. Probably mushrooms on anything. I'm just not a fan. Yeah, I know. They say they don't have taste, but then I'm always like, why are you putting it in something? They can virtually ruin? A pizza. Yeah. Oh, I've got it. Cream cheese. Cream cheese with stuff in it. Like a cream cheese spread, a cream cheese ball, cream cheese on just about anything. Like, if you have a plain bagel hot with cream cheese. That's fine. Just a regular man. Once you put, like, garden style cream cheese or something else. Yes. I don't like that stuff either. Okay. Matt Sailor. Boxers or briefs? We've been asked that before. I'm a boxer guy. Katie Hart favorite punchline to a joke. Those aren't pillows. I can't say any ones. I know. You got any more on here? Why don't we do, like, two more? Let's see. Charlotte Jean asks, how do we take our coffee? I take mine black. I do, too. So there you go. That's kind of boring. Got a lot of hair on the old chest from it. And you know Jason Domini from our friends at Penn Bonson, the Amazing Coffee Makers and roasters, which you should not. Coffee makers should support them, by the way. He says he gave me a personal tour of the thing and a Coffee 101. And he says if you drink good coffee and it's roasted properly, you don't want sugar. Oh, yeah. Definitely don't want milk, but you definitely don't want sugar because it's really sweet. He's like, coffee beans are exceptionally sweet, and when you roast it right and he called it CHARBUCKS, which I thought was kind of funny. He said their stuff is just, like, bitter because they chart too much, because they get beans from all over the place. And when they do that, they want to make them all taste the same. And the way to do that is to over roast. Our friend Rob Pointer was telling us that he goes to a coffee place in La. Where they don't even have creamer sugar. Oh, really? Like, they don't even offer it if you want it. Like, they tell you to leave. Awesome. Yeah. When he made his coffee, it was great. All right, so I think that's good enough for now. We'll hit this up on the next one. Oh, we will? Yeah. Okay. We'll be back, people. In the meantime, you can contact us at syscast on Twitter. You can hit us up on Facebook.com whether we have a question out or otherwise@facebook.com. Stuff you should know. And you can send us an email, too. Stuffpodcast@discovery.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. 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."
41d6acd2-53a3-11e8-bdec-bbb740511d4a	How the Hygiene Hypothesis Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-the-hygiene-hypothesis-works	In the early 90s, a new study that found that kids who are exposed to more germs early in life are less likely to develop allergies later. With the West in the grip of a full-blown immunity crisis (still going on today), this was an interesting thought.	In the early 90s, a new study that found that kids who are exposed to more germs early in life are less likely to develop allergies later. With the West in the grip of a full-blown immunity crisis (still going on today), this was an interesting thought.	Tue, 18 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=18, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=169, tm_isdst=0)	43104214	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hello there. It's me, Josh, and I just wanted to let you know, people living in Minneapolis or with access to Minneapolis, I'm going to be in your city doing my solo show, The End of the World or How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Humanity a Gas. And it's pretty interesting, too. So on June 19, I'll be at the Parkway Theater in Minneapolis. And the next night, I'll be at the Miracle Theatre in Washington, D. C. So come see me. Go to themiricaltheater.com or theparkwaytheatre.com for tickets. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Joshua Chuck. There's, Jerry. Stuff you should know. You jerk. Oh, Jerry is back from vacation. Hello, Jerry. Welcome back. Welcome back, Ms. Roland. You don't look any different. You're rolling your eyes at Josh. That means everything is normal. Everything's quite normal. I thought you might be sunkissed. But she's nodding, though. No, she just wrote down help me on the side. I saw that. I'm sure everybody heard the paper. Russell too. I have an announcement real quick, if you don't mind. Please check. The Bryant's are back in the cat game. Got two kittens. Oh, congratulations. Thanks. The cat game? Yeah, the kitty game. Where are the cat's names? Luna and Levon. Oh, that's a good name. And we've been planning this for a while, since we lost our cats, but we had the house renovation. It was like, it makes no sense to get two cats in a rental house and move them. Then we waited, and then we were like, well, we're going out of town on vacation for Memorial Day. Right. Let's wait until after that. And we did. And I woke up on Sunday and looked at the calendar, and I said, it's cat day. It's a cat day. So went to the Humane Society of Atlanta, got two eight month old kittens. Nice siblings. Oh, matching cats. Yeah, boy and a girl. One is luna is a girl, and she's black. And Levon is black and white. Nice. Both short hair, which we are going to try and recreate Lauren and the wizard a little bit. That whole thing for them that you have established. Well, we were going to get a tabby and another man coon got you, because we really love those. But you're in a different direction. I was just like, you know what? These are kittens. They're great. They need a home. Let's take them home. Well, you know what, dude? Congratulations. Thanks. It's been a lot of fun. Best wishes to the best of lifetime with Luna and Levon. Well, you start at my age with cats. I was like, this may be one of the last pairs. And Emily's like, stop. I know. Just don't even go there. Say that. Stop doing math, you mean. I have a friend who's a neighbor, and she was like, how old is your dog? And she's like, oh, she's like three, so we'll probably pass it about the same time. I was like, why would you say that out loud? Well, if these cats live a nice healthy, longish life, they will see me into my mid sixty s and see Ruby through high school. That's cute. That part is cute. So it's good that you're getting these kitties for Ruby, in part for Ruby. I'm sure it's largely for you guys too. Yeah, it's for all of us. But she's going to run around growing up, being exposed to cats. Are they going to be indoor outdoor cats? No, strictly indoor. Strictly indoor. They live longer still. Not judging, but no, that's fine. Keep your cats. They kill fewer birds too. Yes, but the fact that she's going to be exposed to cats is a big leg up for her. Yeah. And the fact that she was being licked in the mouth by dogs from the moment she was born. Yes, that's true too, but dogs, cats, different animals. True. Which means yes, very microbe spit. And we're going to get into why we're saying all this stuff soon enough. Just hold your horses everybody. But what we're talking about is the hygiene hypothesis today. Yes. And this is sort of the Vin diagram of several past episodes, including some really good ones on allergies the immune system. Did we do one on the immune system? Either that or just the microbiome. We definitely did that, but there may have been three. But if not at least those two and the Hook worms episode. Sure, yeah, why not? Southerners, lazy and dumb, right? No, it was Hookworm. Yeah, we did do some good ones. But this is like the stuff you should know way is where we talk about all the stuff that has to do with the larger issue before we ever do a larger issue. Yeah. And if you listen to the show for a long time, you're getting a pretty robust education. Yeah. 11,001 200 episodes worth. And a lot of silliness. Yeah. So let's stop the silliness here in there. So if you didn't realize this already, prepare to have your stocks knocked off. But we in the developed and rapidly developing world, right? I'm just scanning my memory. That's the right term, correct? I think so. Okay. Are suffering what's known as an immunity crisis, like a massive one, the likes of which has probably never been seen before in human history. And it's happening at the snap of a finger, the blink of an eye, the pop of a spit bubble. Right. Like that fast in evolutionary terms. To be fair, Josh just said that because I popped a spit bubble in his mouth while he was talking. That's sort of one of my chores. I got some stats. What's here between 1950 and the year 2000, rates of hay fever, eczema, asthma and type one diabetes. These all have to do with immune dysfunction. Right. Sorted 300% in developed and developing countries? 300% since 1950. Yes. Between 52,000. And children born in the UK and 1970 were twice as likely to get eczema than those born in 1958. There are tons of stats we could keep reading, but all of this flies in the face of what you would think would be happening, which is, as we get more medically advanced, our world gets more sanitized. Sure. Like everything, people should be getting sick less and have more robust immune systems, and the complete opposite is happening. Yeah. And it really has been confounding people, because there's a couple of factors, or there's a couple of things here that this evidence is screaming. Number one, it's happening really fast. Number two, it's happening in a distinct part of the world, the developed world, but it's also happening over time too, in the same places. Yeah. But the first one is happening so fast that rules out genetics, because genetics doesn't operate that fast. No. So it's clearly environmental. That's what everybody settled on. And again, it was confounding everybody for a very long time. And then, in 1989, there are a lot of people who tried to explain this, and in 1989, there was a British epidemiologist named, I think you pronounced his last name as Strahan. Oh, really? Strachan. The Kraken. The Kraken. Or Michael Strahan? One of the two. Or Michael Shannon. Let's throw him in the mix. Oh, man, he's good. So, David Stretchen, I'm just going with that. And some colleagues released a very short paper in the British Medical Journal in 1989 and it said, we think we might actually have this figured out. Yeah. What's going on behind this confounding immunity crisis, why everyone's bodies are turning on themselves, why their immune systems are going haywire and crazy. We think it's because things are too clean, actually. Right. And he didn't actually use the term, but the word hygiene was in the title of the paper. But right after that, people said, I like the way you're thinking. We're going to call what you're talking about the hygiene hypothesis. But first, explain to us what you're talking about. Strachen. Right. Basically, he was saying that if you're a little baby that's born and raised up through your early, very important immunity developing years yes. To about age four. The most important. Yeah. So if you were cleaning everything too much and slathering everything in hand sanitizer and keeping your child inside in a protective, clean, play place, then they are not being exposed to the they're too clean, they're not being exposed to the germs that they need to develop a robust immune system. Right. That was his interpretation of some evidence. The actual study that the paper was based on was a study he carried out of, I think, 17,000 British households. Yeah. Kids in particular. Yeah. And he found that kids born into smaller families had a higher chance of developing allergies as they grew older, compared to kids born into larger families. Yes. Which is supported his theory. Right. Which is that because there's more people in a family, there are more people bringing germs into the home, exposing the little kid to the germs more frequently at an earlier age, and that those germs somehow protect us from developing allergies later on. That was the basis of, we have to say, the original hygiene hypothesis, because a lot of people don't know it, but it's changed dramatically since then. Yeah. And people got on board. It made sense. Still kind of makes sense in some ways, and it made a lot of news. And people really kind of got on this train of let's not have any kids, or just have one. Sure. And let's let them roll around and dog poop. Right. It did get translated really quickly into let's all stop washing our hands. Because initially, the thing that was identified was infections that kids develop infections from infectious pathogens and that being exposed to infections early on actually trains the immune system and makes it basically bulk up. It gives you a beefy immune system later on and more to the point, a smart one. And really, we should probably talk about what the immune system does to really get home with Strachan and all of his colleagues and everybody in the world was thinking was actually going on. Yeah. Should we take a break and talk about do a little allergy recap? Yeah. All right. So you can refer to our allergy episode for the full picture, but here's sort of an assessment, an overview, if you will. And I remember when we said this in the initial episode. An allergy is basically a mistake. It's a case of mistaken identity. Yeah. Like, there's nothing inherently wrong with dust. Right. Or pollen. Those things are great. They're not actually foreign invaders that are going to harm your body. No, there's nothing wrong with dust. People avoid dust because they're allergic to it. But it's not like dust has some inherent property that gets in your nose and makes you sick or allergic. Right? Well, it makes you allergic. It does. But it doesn't make you sick. But it's not the dust's fault, I think is what you're trying to say. It's your stupid immune system's fault. No. Your immune system says this is a harmful invader, even though it's really not. It's pollen or dust or something, and let's mount a defense against this. And that is what triggers this allergic response, which is we'll go over that in detail, but everyone knows what that is. In the case of dust and pollen, it's sneezing and inflammation in the nose. Yeah. Scratchy throat, redness, maybe a rash, depending on what kind of allergen you're talking about. But it's all just a big mistake. You just made me itchy, dude. Really? Okay, so it is a mistake. And this is why mistakes like allergies happen, okay? The immune system you're born with an immune system that says I'm ready to learn. I'm thirsty for knowledge. It's remarkable, right? It actually trains and like we said earlier, that first four years are really important. It's basically when your immune system learns to recognize what's actual for an invader that I need to defend against and mountain immune response against. And what's just a normal, harmless or maybe even friendly microbe in the environment like dust or pollen. It's such a friendly microbe, right. It really has a good personality as far as cat hair goes. Yeah. So what happens is when that immune system meets something harmful, truly harmful, it creates an antibody and it's very customized. Like you said earlier, it's a very smart system. It's not just a one size fits all deal because your body is trying to get very specific with how it's going to deal with these invaders for the rest of your life. Right. So when a foreign micro friendly or harmful or totally neutral comes into your body, you have a multi layered system immune system. It's actually really two layers, to tell you the truth. There's the innate immune system and then you have the adaptive immune system and the innate immune system is basically that's what you're born with. It's the blaster from Master. Blaster, okay. Which was Blaster, I think Blaster was the big crushed skull guy, of course. And then Master was the Master, right, that rode on his shoulders. So Blaster gets his meaty paws on a microbe what seems to be a foreign invader. And it doesn't matter what it is, blaster does the same thing to it. He crushes them up and eats them and digests them and then poops out the parts of that invader, that microbe that make that microbe, that microbe the proteins on the outside of the microbe called antigens. OK? And it says, look at this. And it shows the adaptive immune system, what it's got. Yeah. So that innate immunity. You're born with it. And it's sort of like mom is going to pass on some Cobra coverage almost, right? You get this temporary insurance that mom is kind enough to pass on and that covers you for a little while while your body is sort of learning how to do it on its own with Master. I'm sorry, blaster sort of leading the way at first. So where you left off was it presents it to Master and says, here, do with this what you will start learning, right? What is this that I just chewed up? That's two John Travoltas in one episode. No, that was VIDY Barbarino. And what was the other one? Just regular John Travolta. Okay. Why are you so weird? So when Blaster spits out these antigens and says, what is this? Check it out. Yeah. Master's job. Now, Master is the adaptive immune system. The second part, this is a more nuanced, smarter, selective or supposedly selective part of your immune system where it looks at this stuff and somehow some way. I don't understand exactly how it does it. Maybe we touched upon it in our immunity episode, but the adaptive immune system master says, okay, this is actually not harmful at all. Don't worry about billing in anybody. You can forget about that. And as a matter of fact, don't forget about it. But the next time you see this thing, just let him on through. He's the friendliest cat hair you're ever going to meet. Don't kill them next time. Yeah. Or if it's an actual foreign invader and everything is going smoothly and correctly, then the adaptive immune system is going to say, this is a really dangerous thing you've just presented me with. We're going to study its weaknesses and we're going to build a molecule that is designed to kill this thing with extreme prejudice. Yeah. It turns into Clint Eastwood all of a sudden. Yes. While this is going on in the background, we should mention that Blaster has already set off. He's basically walled things off with an inflammatory response and not like something mean that he said to Master. Not that kind of inflammatory response. Right. Why are you so short? But regular inflammatory response is sort of the big dumb guys way to deal with something. It's like, all right, while you figure this out, just let me puff up and let me cause a rash or give you a fever or there's all sorts of inflammatory responses. Yeah. Blaster is responsible for what you think of when you think of an infection that you're fighting. Like me last week, I had that weird virus. Yeah, it's gone. It's gone. Great. That is weird. It is weird. But Emily and I both had all sorts of things weird. Bumps and lumps and rashes, fevering. Those lately. Yeah. It was not good. So that's the inflammatory response that's going on while Master is working on his plan. Right. Sort of like a first line of defense. Almost. So Julia Layton put this one together. We have to go over the four key components of the inflammation response. Okay. Okay. You've got callor, dolore, rubore, and tumor. Sounds like Game of Thrones or something. It does. It's heat, pain, redness and swelling. Yeah. And when you put them all together, you're like, yeah, of course. It's an allergy. That's an infection. That's what happens when something tries to get my body. Blaster goes and brings this on, right? Yeah. And man, every time we study the immune system, it just blows me away. I love it. It's just amazing that humans can do this. Yeah. We're not even trying. No, we're just sitting around watching. Well, I'm not watching games, but you watch that? No. Did you? I watched the first few seasons and dropped off yes. Apparently you pulled out just in time, according to Reddit. Well, everyone said one through seven was great. Okay, so you never saw seven? No, I saw like one through three. Okay. And then just got confused and went to sleep. It was confusing. Oh, yeah. There's a lot going on. Yeah. You had to keep up with the characters and storylines, and it just got too much. I was just like, I'm going to go back and watch Company again. I can't wait for that. I watched Barry. Have you been watching Barry? No, I watched a few episodes on a plane. That's where I started. Yeah. I need to get Emily on the Berry train. It's very good. It is good. Yeah, that's a good show. And Beep, of course, I need to watch the last season of Veep. I'm not on that. Same here. Same here. Okay. So anyway, slight digression. Keller dolore rubor. And two more. And Blaster, the innate immune system is basically creating this to keep the infection localized while the adaptive system, master is figuring out what to do and building the antibody. So once all this happens, the antibody is released, it goes in and destroys whatever remaining microbes of that foreign invader are still around, and the body is saved. And even better, somehow your immune system remembers this. Yeah. That's the important part. Right. So that the next time Blaster comes along and comes back with that same micro, or the same kind of microbe, master says, I know just the thing for this guy. We've met him before. We're going to get this anybody over here, and it's going to destroy them. And the body will just keep humming along with the immune system, mounting normal, appropriate responses. Right. And all your cells are just screaming, two men enter, one man leave the whole time. It's very disturbing, actually, under a microscope. So we talk about T cells. Yeah. Didn't you say we're quickly going to go over the immune system? No, I mean, we don't have to talk about T cells. No, I'm just saying from being quick. We've talked about them a lot in the past. Yeah, but not to this degree. And they actually are pretty important in this. All right, well, remember that Blaster, the innate immunity dude? Remember, any microbe it gets its hands on, it does the same thing. Yes, it's pretty bad for the microbes. So he's going to present that microbes antigens to these T helper cells, th cells that we've talked about before, and they are part of Masters smarter system. Right. And like earlier when he said he presents it, what he's really doing is presenting to the Theler cells. Right. So there's thelpor cells that are undifferentiated. They're just kind of floating along, waiting to be told what to become. And then Master says, you turn into some Th One cells because this is a bacterial or a viral infection, and Th One cells are specialized to combat that kind of microbe. Or if, say, it's a hookworm infection, they would turn into Th two cells. Or if it's an allergy or an allergic response, it means Th two cells are involved, too. And this is here the key to the original interpretation of the hygiene hypothesis. Yes. And the Th One, they do a lot of things, but Th One generally work on the inside of cells, and Th Two generally work on the outside of cells. Right. They sort of split up, and they sort of balance each other out, too. That's a big key, too. Yeah. Like, if there are more Th One cells, there'll be less Th Two. And the other way around. Right. They kind of regulate one another or more, like, more to the point, T regulator cells regulate throne and Th Two cells. Yeah. The Tregs, which we didn't find out about until, like, the but this is the point here. If there are a lot of Th Two cells, there's not going to be very many Th one cells and vice versa. And so the original interpretation of the hygiene hypothesis was that kids who are not exposed to bacterial or viral infections early on in life do not have a chance for their immune system to learn what's good, what's bad. And since their Th one cells aren't activated because they're not exposed to pathogens, their Th Two cells, the ones that are responsible for allergic reactions get to go into hyperdrive. That's right. And being responsible for allergic reaction, th Two sells kind of like a hammer into a hammer. Everything looks like a nail. Yeah. So to the Th Two sells, everything looks like a foreign invader, and so an allergic response is mounted. So because the kids Th one cells weren't active enough, the Th Two cells were overactive. They weren't exposed to infections. They developed allergies later in life. That's what they thought was the crux of the hygiene hypothesis, and that it was all because we were living in a world that is far too clean for our own good. Yeah. And, you know, there are more studies that they did that really seemed to support this. In the really interesting one, in the Germany in the early 90s, they did a study of allergy rates of east and West German kids pre unification, obviously. And this was a really great idea because what you had was two populations that were genetically identical, basically just living in two drastically different environments. Obviously, East Germany was very polluted. It was generally more poor, much more industrialized. And in the west, it was cleaner, probably, and safer. Water cleaner, but cleaner. Air cleaner, for sure, and kind of all the way around. Right. And so they hypothesized it was a researcher named Etika von Muteus. That's good enough, I think. That's exactly right. Okay. And she basically said, well, clearly the children from the west will be healthier and less allergic. Right. And she found the exact opposite again. So it was just another sort of some more compelling evidence that this hygiene hypothesis kind of carried a lot of weight. Yeah. And the fact that she was expecting the opposite was kind of interesting too, but she was like, whoa, I just accidentally proved this hygiene hypothesis. Right. Because, again, it makes zero sense that the cleaner the environment, the more likely your immune system is to malfunction later in life. Right. Should we take a break? Yeah, we should. All right. We'll take a break and we'll talk about sort of where this is now in the new understanding that hasn't gotten nearly enough press. Right. Okay. So the world really clamped on to the hygiene hypothesis because it makes a lot of sense. It's very appealing. It's like, yeah, just go be dirty. You don't have to worry about all this stuff. And yes, pesticides are terrible for us, so it's antibacterial soap and just everything you can think of. The idea of it was really just kind of appealing to the world, especially in the 90s, because that's when people started caring about, like, herbs and supplements and organic food and stuff like that. So the timing was really good. Sure. And the idea of looking at all these chemicals we are using to sanitize our world is actually harmful rather than beneficial. Appealed to a lot of people, but it also appealed to people in the sense that now we had an explanation for this mysterious massive explosion, allergic reactions and immunomssed up function. Right, sure. Did you know type one diabetes is an immunodeficiency just from this? Yes. Me too. I had no idea. I was like, why did they keep talking about diabetes? And then I realized your body has mistaken the beta cells that produce insulin in your pancreas as a foreign invader and attacks them. That's why you don't have insulin or enough insulin, because your body is turned on it. Yeah. Very interesting thing with, like, Crohn's and any kind of autoimmune disorder. Really. Yeah. Your body is mistaking the cells of your own body as a foreign invader. But again, the incidents of these kinds of disease just exploded over a handful of decades. And by the about 2000s, people had said it was because we're overly clean, we're killing off the pathogens that we actually need to infect our kids so that their bodies can recognize a good invader from a bad invader and they won't develop allergic reactions later on. Right. Well, today we now know that the hygiene hypothesis wasn't quite right. It's not like they threw it all out, but it's been revised, and it's a lot smarter now. And the basic theory now is that what's missing, it's not necessarily a hygiene thing, but it's nature. And they have a name for it, which is very cute. The old friend's theory. Right. And this is introduced by a fellow named Graham Rook and his colleagues in 2003. And this basically theorizes that exposure to these harmless microbes, not the pathogens, are what's going to protect you from allergy sensitization. So kids playing in the dirt and kids getting looked in the face by a dog in the years one through three and four is actually a really good thing. Doesn't mean you shouldn't wash your hands after you poop or just let that chicken pull that raw chicken off the counter and don't sweat it. You should still practice basic hygienes. But kids being inside all the time and not being exposed to nature like they were for hundreds of thousands of years is sort of the problem. Right. And part of the problem, why it was easy before and not now is because they're saying, yes, do wash your hands, but not all the time. Right. So what they've identified is those pathogens that they originally thought we were killing and it was having a detrimental effect on us. The opposite is true. They found that we really should keep washing our hands and killing off things like the stuff you get from chicken juice, raw chicken and poop and infectious disease. We need to keep fighting that like we are. That's actually a huge benefit. We need to keep getting vaccinated. We need to defend against colds and the flu and all this stuff. That is something we want to keep at bay, not expose kids to that. We found the opposite is true, actually. Exposure to things like colds and flus and measles in childhood actually increases the likelihood of developing allergies later in life. That's right. Which is the opposite of the original hygiene hypothesis. But what they found is so we need to keep defending against those infectious pathogens, but we need to up our exposure to those friendly microbes, the old friends that our bodies co evolved with over these hundreds of thousands or millions of years and that we've realized now just beginning to realize make up a symbiotic relationship with us, or at the very least, some sort of relationship. We depend on them. And by not being exposed to as many microbes as we were in decades past, before everybody got obsessed with being clean, our immune systems are not functioning properly, whether they're not being trained early on enough or they're just not being exposed to the right kind of microbes that form colonies, like in our gut or on our bodies somewhere. Yes. And what's really sort of the newest concern is the rise in food allergies. It's really like you grew up in the do you ever remember peanut allergies being a thing? Zero. I knew zero kids who had peanut allergies. Yeah, I mean, we just like, slathered ourselves in peanut butter growing up constantly. Yeah. There's a trend. Yes. It exploded in the west in the continues to rise. They're calling it the second wave of allergy, the second epidemic. Basically, one in ten kids in the developed world have food allergies. That is nuts. And that's just in the developed world. I think in America, it's 20%. One in five has a food allergy in America? Yeah. And like, serious allergy sometimes. I have a friend whose sister's son is this. Kid is allergic to everything you could imagine. And it's not like that's the outlier, like you hear about more and more cases like that. Yeah. One in five kids has a food allergy. And again, in the 80s, there was no such thing as a peanut allergy, basically. I mean, there were, but it was just vanishingly rare. Yes. And it's not like we just didn't know what to call it back then. A kid would eat a peanut and drop dead. We called a balloon face syndrome. That's terrible. But yeah, it's a real thing that's happening. Food allergies are just off the charts now compared to how they used to be. Yeah. So like you said, that's the second wave of this and what they're thinking is going on is kids are less exposed to the microbes that we used to be more exposed to because we're spending more time inside, because we're using way more disinfectants. And it's good we're using the disinfectants because they do kill the pathogens that we do want to keep at bay, but they kill indiscriminately. So they also kill all the friendly microbes that actually perform wonderful benefits for the healthy functioning of our immune system. Yeah. The harmless bacteria that children need to be exposed to. Right. And adults. Right. Although they do think that when you are exposing kids to microbes or when you are being exposed to microbes like you and I, it's probably not doing a lot for us because our immune systems are already developed. Right. It really counts for kids, like, from birth up to about four years of age, because again, that's when your immune system is being trained. And if it's being trained by a bunch of friendly microbes saying that's, okay, blaster, you can kill me, just make sure you don't kill anyone else like me because I'm fine, I'm not going to do anything to you, then that is what's creating the healthier immune system and lowering the risk of allergies later on. Yeah. So they recommend getting your kids out in nature. Let them play in the dirt. If you can breastfeed, then that helps. If you can have a vaginal birth, that helps. Although I saw a study that showed children born from C section were swabbed in vaginal fluid from their mother's birth canal to give them this coating of microbes like they would have gotten from a vaginal birth. So they do that. They did it to four kids in this one study. Got you. And the results were mixed. And then another study found six weeks after birth. This study didn't find any difference in microbial makeup between kids who were born vaginally and kids who were born through C section. So it might not be as big of an issue as we thought. Well, they definitely say to practice target what they call targeted hygiene, which, like you were saying, it's not like you don't clean up after the raw chickens on the counter or wash your hands after you poop, but get rid of the snotty tissues. And wash your hands after you do those things. And blow your nose. Right. Wash your hands after you use the bathroom. Yeah, but start washing your hands again. Everybody is the key. But get out there and play in the dirt, too. And it's like a kid should be in nature, okay? So, yes, play in the dirt. Go out in the woods. Go for a hike. Get your kid a dog or a cat. Yeah. And let them hug and kiss. Take them to a petting zoo. This is the point. You don't have to attack your kid with the antibacterial spray on their hands after they pet a goat at the petting zoo. Right. Actually, what they're finding is that it's healthy for the kid to pet the goat and then eat a sandwich afterward. Seriously? No, I know. It's all making sense now because we have ten goats that live across the street, always had two dogs and two cats in the house. Except for the brief period where we didn't have the cats and we were very lazy parents. And still don't bathe our daughter with much regularity. Right. Every week or three. No, but she's been like, take her to the doctor, sick four times. Yeah. Well, and then hopefully, it will also mean that as she gets older, she's going to be far less likely to have allergies because her immune system trained like Dwayne Wade and Gabriel Union put together. That's a super couple. Yeah. You see their kids, their oldest son that's about to start playing basketball with Bronnie, they're transferring to the same high school. So LeBron son and Dwayne Wadeson are going to play basketball. He looks just like Dwayne Wade. Does he really? He has a sleepy eyes. It's like no mistaking whose kid that is. That's very cool. It's not the milkman. No, it's Dwayne. Wait, unless the milkman had sleepy eyes, who is the basketball player? That was the mailman. Clive Drexler. Carl Malone. No. Carl Malone was the mailman. Clive Drexler was the glide. That's right. Yeah, you're right. He also is on the Just for Men commercials. You're watching the finals? Oh, yeah. Pulling for Toronto pretty hard. He's not. Did you see that map of the US? And who's pulling for Golden State and who's pulling just like, the Bay Area and nowhere else? It was California and Hawaii, and then the rest of the country was pulling for Toronto. Toronto pulling for another country. Yeah, exactly. Wow. So go Raptors. That's what I say. If you want to know more about the hygiene hypothesis, go back and listen to this episode again, because there's real nuance there, and I hope we got it all. Maybe we should rerecord this again. Yeah. Like now. Okay. Okay. Anyway, we'll see what version comes out. And in the meantime, it's time. For what? Chuck administrative detail. So if you don't know what this segment is. If you're new to the show, this is the time every few months, let's say quarterly, where we give thanks where we give thanks to people who have sent us kind gifts over the past few months. And for some reason he named it administrative details I don't even remember any longer. But that's a pretty good assessment of what we're doing right now. Yes, it's a very cold name for a very warm segment. So you want to start, Chuck? Sure. I'll start it off with a gift of wine. Jeremy Nelson sent us. Wine from Baronmore. Very nice. Speaking of wine, big ups to our buddy Addison Rex. Dude, for not just the wine. He once gave me homemade olive oil, too. Yeah. So Addison and Kat live in California and Emily and I went and had a very personal wine tour experience. Yes. A lot about your life, your fears. Yeah, and I said a lot about wine and how it's made. And then not only that, but when we went to the next wineries, they went with us and we ended up hanging out all day. And they're just great. They're awesome. And we have new pals and we're going to see them again. And then he went after a long day of that, drove into town. Drove into town to see you do End of the world live? Yes. And we hung out for a little while after. Didn't go in any winery or anything. But he is now a friend, too. Good. Dude, if you want to find out I didn't meet Cat, but I'm going to take your word for it. Yes, but if you want to find out about the wines we're talking about, his label is Jurassic Wine because his name is Addison Rex. So he sounds like a dinosaur. But Jurassic like the movie. Yes. Minus the park. Plus wine. That's right, jurassic wine. Thanks, guys. You're the best. Can't wait to see again. So Julie Mullins from The Onion. Remember back in the day we had our OG onion pals. We used to be big time at the Onion. We did. They moved to Chicago and we have new onion pals now. That's so great. Julie Mullins sent us the Onion daily calendar. Right. And she is an Mgfx artist at the Onion. Yeah. Thanks a lot. This one is a long time coming. Do you remember our Phoenix show like 50 years ago? I quite enjoyed that. Or October, maybe. One of the two. Yeah, well, at that show or maybe the Salt Lake City show. Okay. I think it was Salt Lake one of those two shows. Our friend Kathy kathy with a k tosh gave us each alaso. Oh, yeah, that's right. Like a real bona fide. Get over here, cow. That was tight last, though. I'm pretty sure. I think it was Salt Lake City. Was it? I can't remember for the life me. Anyway, Cathy, write in and let us know how you're doing and what show it was, but thank you for the last. She also said, yeah, just go on to YouTube and you can learn how to do it. Which I've yet to do. I haven't either, but it's hanging in my closet. It looks very cool there, doesn't it? It does look very cool. Yeah. Thanks, Kathy with the K. So our friend Joe Barrett sent us his book. And it's called Managed Care. I haven't been able to read it yet, but it's on the stack on the desk. So check out Managed Care by Joe Barrett. Speaking of books, there's a guy named Thomas Ramsey. Great last name. Looks wise, but I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it. He wrote a book called Who's Afraid of AI? Which I cannot wait to read. Right up your alley. Yes, it is. You open it up and it just says Joshua. Yeah, it's got just a picture of a robot holding my head, but thanks a lot. Thomas Rams book who's Afraid of AI? Go check it out. Earl pal Dustin Bowen sent us a 3D printing of our stuff you Should Know logo which sits atop my desk right now. Very awesome. Yeah, it's very cool. Huge. Thanks to our old pal Don Kuby for the floral photography canvases cubes. Coobs photography is just out of this world. Yeah, she's really talented. Yeah, like almost nay, exactly as good as Aaron Cooper's Photography. And she sells her stuff on her site. Dawnkubie. Dawnkubie.com. You know, before I did the Wenos parenting live in Brooklyn recently and Emily and I both went for a little quickie New York trip. We went to the Brooklyn Botanical gardens and the frieda kahlo exhibit at the museum. Oh, no. We walked around the botanical gardens. Who wanders up but don Kuby. Oh, really? Yeah, she's like, oh, I just happened to be following. I mean, I just happened to be here as well. No, we had a nice little chat. She was taking photos and she came to the Weno show. That's why she was there. She's great. She's very easy to talk to. Yes. Serendipity. Who else? Sheena and Ben sent us a wedding invitation. Their wedding in Burbank. And we've gotten a few of these lately along with invitations to officiate. But they've all lined up against either live shows butted up against live shows or other travel plans. Right. So I've not been able to do that. No. Plus, we'd have to get ordained. Are you ordained? No. Okay. But I'll do that in five minutes. All right. There you go. Brad TopLift sent us a box of runes. R-O-O-N-S which is short for Mac. Runes, which his wife makes. Runes is his wife's company. And they're amazing. I can attest and you can get them@eatruns.com eatroons.com. All right. Our old pal Steven Brightman sent us poopy pockets for our dogs. This cool little invention. It's a two in one poop bag, dispenser and poop a pocket for the poop. And it's a veteran owned business, so big thanks to Steven Brightman for the poopy pockets. Nice going, Steven. Mark Hicks sent us the Simpsons theme journals. Sure. And drawn Simpson journals. Those are from Mark Hicks. Thank you very much. Mark. Because I think we forgot to thank him last time. And he wrote him like, dude, I was like, I'm sorry. Our old pal Ian Newton from the Baltimore Spirits Company send us their shot tower, barrel, gin and their batlomaro. What does that explain with it? Seshuan Lamaro Laker. Oh, man. So good. Yes. A little heat to it. Everything that they make is really good. Yeah, I can't remember the name of it. He's also sent us, like, mezcal, made from smoked apples. It's just the bomb. What kind of black magic are they doing in Baltimore? They're doing some good stuff up there. All right. Support the Baltimore Spirits Company and eating it and everyone. They're getting creative with their spirits, so we're going to leave it at that and we'll do the rest next episode. How about that? That sounds great. Well, thanks a lot for joining us. If you want to send us something, we're always down with that. You can find us on social. Just go to stuffyouw.com and you'll find all of our links there. And you can also send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuffyteknow is a production of iHeartRadio's. Stuff works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
https://podcasts.howstuf…-attractions.mp3	How Haunted House Attractions Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-haunted-house-attractions-work	Ever since the Egyptians, humans have been evolving toward haunted house attractions. The level of sophistication in the scares and gore effects continues to rise over time, but the purpose remains the same: to scare the pants off you.	Ever since the Egyptians, humans have been evolving toward haunted house attractions. The level of sophistication in the scares and gore effects continues to rise over time, but the purpose remains the same: to scare the pants off you.	Thu, 30 Oct 2014 14:19:42 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2014, tm_mon=10, tm_mday=30, tm_hour=14, tm_min=19, tm_sec=42, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=303, tm_isdst=0)	45321490	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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. What if you were a major transit system facing cyber attacks so you partnered with IBM to keep your data network and apps protected? Now you can tackle threats without coming to a halt. Let's create cybersecurity that keeps your business on track. IBM. Let's create learn more@ibm.com. 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 Jerry. And this is stuff you should know. The prehalloween spooktacular week of dark content. Although this isn't super dark. No, this isn't about attractions. Haunted attractions. Don't want to spoil it, but there are some darkness. Now, is it dark or not? It's dark. Okay. But not all of them. Just the really creepy ones. So it's mid level dark. What a train wreck this is. Yes. So for those of you who tuned in thinking that we're talking about haunted houses, sorry to let you down. Real haunted houses. Yeah. Of which there may or may not be a thing. All the skeptics were like, shoot, I wanted to let you so bad. This is just about attractions. Yeah. These things are proven to exist. They are real because you can probably if you live near any kind of major metropolitan area, you can probably find one somewhere in your town. I think you can find them almost anywhere if you live in a major metropolitan area that may be one of those really big daddy ones. Right. But chances are your small town has some form of haunted attraction. Even if it's the local if it's for charity and they're trying to raise money for the local JCS and it's set up in like a school gymnasium or there's enthusiasts, there's home haunters. Yeah. They basically set up a haunted house in their backyard. Yeah. There's some documentary about two guys that are I don't know if they do haunted houses or just take their Halloween decorating to extremes. Well, I think that's one in the same for a home haunted yeah, I think they're competing guys on the same street that someone did a documentary on because they just keep, like, ramping it up and ramping it up and have become obsessed without doing one another. Right. But I don't know what it's called, so it just came to me right now. Me either. Yeah, but you do make a good point. Haunted houses are everywhere. Apparently, in 2014, they expect they being the American Retail Federation who likes to put out statistics and figures about holidays. They expect 33 million people to go into haunted houses across the United States. Yeah, about 4000 of them. 1200 of which are the pay some money to go in professionally about 300 are in theme parks. Like amusement parks. Right. And then about 3000 of them are the charity ones that I spoke of. Right. Which you'll still pay. But they're not going to the fat cat Koch brothers or whatever the profits are. They're going to your local community organization. Yeah, those are fun. You might get some light scares. It's not like these really super scary ones where you pay good money to leave your body and wet your pants. Just one more little bit of data statistics, if you don't mind some numbers. Talk about role reversal. Remember, you used to be stat guy. I know. I got so bored. It in 2014 again. The National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend $87 per person on Halloween for a total of $7.4 billion. Yeah, that's right behind Christmas. Right behind Christmas. People love getting their scare on. They really do. I don't decorate at all anymore at the house, just because I think I've talked about this before. We don't have trick or treaters in my area of the street, so it just seems kind of pointless. I mean, what is the point at that point? Yeah, there is no point. Emily thinks we could do it for people that drive by during the month of October to see the house, but I don't know, man. Whatever you put up, you got to take down that. And plus, it's like you get no satisfaction from somebody driving by. It's not like they honk at your declarations with little kids coming up and trick or treating. There's some sort of payoff, I guess, to your effort, right? That's right. Scarring him for life. All right, so let's talk the history of this, because it turns out that haunted house attractions are relatively new, but they're probably not as new as trick or treating in the United States. Did you know that? Not as new. So they predate trick or treating by a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. And when we look at the first one, I read some of this history, the ancient history. I was like, come on. This is from Fangoria magazine, by the way. Oh, it was. But then when I started really getting into it, I was like, you know what? They actually did pave the way for what we see today in ancient Egypt to keep people from grave robbing. Basically, they would make little scary things like trapdoors and snakes and creepy insects and things to keep people away from robbing their ancestors grave. Right. They'd put an old lady in a rocking chair who would go, behold the ravages of age. What's that? From the Simpsons. Okay. Greeks and Romans kind of paved the way as well. They had mazes and labyrinths set up with monsters and things. Even more than that, even more directly, they started stage effects. Yeah. Like fake blood and things like that. Yeah. And that's where a lot of this stuff finds its roots. Is in early stage special effects. Yeah. And it's still a theater when you come down to it. It's just like an interactive participatory theater that you walk through, and then the Dark Ages the Medieval Ages, I think the Dark Ages. The Medieval Ages are part of the Dark Ages, but they're not one in the same. But during the Dark Ages, the introduction of well, the syncretism between Christianity and paganism that led to the adoption of Halloween kind of saw a rise to this. Basically a scare show. Yeah. These little plays that would scare people into remaining pious and remaining on the narrow path. Right. Which is still very big today. We made a huge comeback. But these scare shows, if you want to call them that, I'm pretty sure that's not what they call them during the Dark Ages, but they featured plenty of gore and fake blood and violence. The people who went to see them weren't necessarily going for the religious message. They were going to be grossed out right. And get a kick. Yeah. During the Renaissance, Shakespeare was famous for incorporating demons and ghosts and monsters in his plays. He loved us. And in the 1800s, we've talked about this before there was a big rise in spiritualist and conjuring sessions and mediums and fortune telling and communicating with the dead was, like a really popular thing during the Victorian era. So it's debunking it. Yeah, that's true. The Victorian era also gave us the wax museum. Yeah. Which very quickly went from celebrities to include scary stuff, too. So you could walk through a wax museum, and while the stuff didn't move or jump out at you, you would come across like some sort of tableau of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde like kind of a room, and it was scary and lit. Oddly, the intention was to scare you, even though, again, there wasn't an overt scare or startle. Right. It was something that definitely laid the groundwork for haunted houses to come. They were to instill dread in the hearts of all right. John Pepper invented something pretty neat in the 18 hundreds. It was sort of set up where you use mirrors to appear translucent. If you've ever been to Disney's Haunted Mansion, I think Peppers Ghost is what they call it still. Is that right. A trick they use it's like a hologram, sort of smoke and mirrors. Yeah, but using mirrors. Right. It's not like the Tupac hologram. It wouldn't be high tech like that. No. But it still looks pretty awesome. That's right. The 20th century, then, Chuck, is where we really find the progenitors of the modern haunted house the dark rides. There's this really neat article on Collectors Weekly. You ever read any of their stuff? No. They write a lot of really cool, long form articles about stuff that's come and gone, like old ads and things. And one of them was called Jeepers Creepers. Why, dark rides scare the pants off of us. Nice. But it's a collector's weekly article. It's an interview with the guy who collects old dark ride stuff. But dark rides were like if you went to some rinky dink amusement park or whatever. They couldn't afford to have a roller coaster. But they could afford a little dark building with the walls painted black inside and a little train track or maybe a little boat or something that road you through. And all of a sudden a skeleton popped out of the wall or a strobe light went off or something like that. And these were the direct progenitors of the haunted house. Yeah. And between that and the traveling freak shows, really, like you said, everything was in place. And coupled that with the fact that a lot of these houses from the 1800s are starting to crumble, and there was nary a neighborhood that didn't have some creepy old vacant house and to keep their kids out, people would say parents would say, you know that place? You don't want to go in there. It's haunted because you may not come out. That was an interesting point that I definitely wasn't aware of. Yeah. But if you think of the modern conception of when you think of a haunted house, what comes to mind typically is a dilapidated old Victorian mansion with a story around it. Yeah. It's never just like, oh, yeah, that was where Mr. Johnson lived. He was a farmer and kind of a good guy. Yeah. Died quietly asleep. No reports of his ghost at all. Well, what's probably funny is that was the real story, but what you heard was that he killed his family and had their name written on each knife blade. That's what I heard. The first official recorded haunted attraction, according to this person who wrote this article in Vancoua, Becca McKendry, he says that the Orton and Spooner ghost house in the UK and the Eduardian Fair was the first genuine haunted attraction. Yeah, that was the first ghost house. And in France, they had something called the Grand Guinole, and that was sort of similar, I think, and around the same time. So you've got that haunted house. You've got the dark houses that are coming up in places like Coney Island and stuff like that. Sure. And then finally you have the first big time permanent haunted house, as we understand today, which you've already mentioned, the haunted mansion that was first built in 69 at Disneyland, and apparently it was supposed to go up at Disney. Oh, no, it was so Disneyland the one in California and the one in Disney World that came up in the 70s, right? Late 70s, early 80s. I'm not sure, actually. I've been to that one, though. If you want to know more about that stuff, though, I think stuff you missed in history class did like a whole episode on the haunted mansion ride. Oh, Holly, from stuff you Miss in history class. Is an absolute haunted mansion fanatic. Right. I think they have a whole episode on it. She knows more about it than anyone. More than Walt Disney himself knew, I think. But here's a little known fact besides what you just said about Holly, she knows more about us than Walt Disney. Originally, the haunted mansion ride was a walk through ride like today's haunted houses. But instead they found that I guess the people, the ushers couldn't get people on a pace easily enough, and so there'd be traffic jams and backups and everything. So they said, we'll turn it into a dark ride. That's what they did. Yeah. Which we'll get to this later. But that's a big part of running your own haunted house, is the flow throughput. Yeah. Also, the haunted mansion in Disney was based on the Winchester Mystery House. As far as the look, they didn't want to have some credible dilapidated psycho house in the middle of their lovely park. So they said, well, we can make it creepy on the inside, and let's just make it like a really lovely Victorian on the outside. Yeah. And if you haven't listened to that podcast on the Winchester Mystery, I also recommend it's pretty neat. This one are ours. Yeah, man, that was a good one. Not the Disney podcast. Right. So then you mentioned the JCS, Chuck, and I didn't realize this, but the idea of a semi permanent so not located in like an amusement park or something like that, but an annual attraction that just comes up around Halloween and then comes down in November. November 1. Yeah. As far as haunted houses go in the United States was created by the JCS, which is the United States Junior Chamber, which is like a community organization with chapters across the country. And in the JCS hit upon this idea of, why don't you guys create haunted houses in your town as fundraisers? And it just took off like a rocket. And the JCS became synonymous in the with haunted houses. Like, if you went to a haunted house in your town, it was probably put on by the local chapter of the JCS. Yeah, I remember specifically going to some of those as a kid, as well as my church would have their own haunted houses, not held houses. A haunted house. Yeah, just very like kid oriented minor spooks and goblins. We'll get into hellhouses later. But even though I did go to Baptist church, it wasn't anything like that. Surprising. Yeah. I mean, that was before the concept of the Hell house. Yeah, it was just like we'd have like a Halloween carnival. Got you. You bob for apples and did that little fishing game where you get something clipped to your fishing pole behind a curtain. Yeah, those are awesome. It's so funny. Do you remember when you were a kid just being like, god, this Halloween carnival is really well done. And if you go to one as an adult, you're like, this is really junkie. Like, are these kids really falling for all this stuff? And yeah, they are. It's wonderful. Yes. My elementary school had a pretty rocking Halloween carnival every year, too. The Catholic school I went to had a good one. It was one of the highlights of my year. Yeah, you're right. And now the concept of bobbing for apples. There's no way I would put my face in that disgusting water. Anyway, out of the JCS in 1075, there were a couple of guys from a chapter in Bloomington, Illinois, named Jim Gould and Tom Hillagos, and they said, you know what? Let's just create our own haunted housebook. Basically, like, I don't know if it was a book. Yeah, I guess it was a book. And let's teach people how to open this up and sell it. And they distributed about 20,000 copies and they formed the Haunted House Company, and it was the first real group of outfit to kind of just sell the plan and the stuff that you needed. The props. Right? Like details like how to do special effects. Like a starter kit. Exactly. Yeah. And because of the success of the JCS in the private companies finally were like, we can make some cash off of this. Starting in the haunted houses that we think of today, the for profit ones like Netherworld in Atlanta or 13th Story in New Orleans is another big one. They came out of the 90s. Do you go to those? No. No interest? No. Do you? No. Emily and I, we still may go. She has a hankerin this year to go to another world just because we haven't been to I think we went to one in La. That was pretty decent. I'll go, I guess, if she wants to, but it's not my favorite thing. I like scary movies and stuff. I don't avoid that stuff. I am depressed. Chuck, on Twitter the other day, I said, the best scary movie or the best horror movie I haven't seen go. And I have heard of vampire Brooklyn, Eddie Murphy. Every single suggestion. And there are a bunch of suggestions that everybody shot back. So I realized I'm really running low on good horror movies. They aren't around much anymore. Like, the ones that are to me, the ones that are genuinely scary are the ones that get into your head. Yeah. And I'll take a fair amount of jump scares because that's a part of it. If it's got the tension ratcheted up. Right. But the ones these days, man, just the disgusting torture porn thing. I'm just not into that. No, I'm not either. It's just such an easy, cheap yeah, they scare me. Exactly. They just repulse me. Exactly. Which is a totally different sensation. That's fine if you like to be repulsed, whatever, it's great for that. But that's not true fear. It's not being scared, necessarily, at least different. Yeah. I do have a recommendation for you, though. A movie. It's called either The Lady in Black or Woman in Black. And it stars a grown up Harry Potter. So it's fairly new. I think it came out in the last couple of years. The Daniel Reckless guy. Okay. And he does a great job. It's almost exclusively just him in the movie. Is he a lady in black? He does double duty. Oh, nice. And there are some Conjuring esque style, like CGI ghost graphics, but it's not overdone. It's not overblown. And it is a genuinely frightening ghost story. Conjuring was okay. It was okay. I would say this one might be better. That guy. I don't know if it's Ty or T West. Tis his name. He's a director that did the Innkeepers. Oh, yeah. That was a good one, too. Yeah. And then I can't remember, did he do House of the Devil? Those are pretty good because he's a little more old school. He's not just trying to out gore you or shock you. He tries to build genuine suspense and dread. The same guy to both of those movies. Not The Conjuring. No. The innkeepers and house of the devil. I think so, because both of those were good movies. Yeah. They seem totally different, though. Yeah. I may be wrong in that the Inn Keepers there was a slow burn that managed to pay off, but it took a long time to build up. Yeah, it's a little slow. Like, you didn't even try to start the scares until like, 30 minutes in. Yeah. You know the lady that's in that is Kelly McGillis. Did you realize that? Yeah, I didn't know until the end of the movie. It said Kelly McGillis was like, oh, she's got the same name as that lady from Top Gun. Yeah, I think it's really her. Right? She looks so different now. Yes. So that's our Josh and Chuck floor movie coroner we'll get back to the actual podcast right after this message. 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. Twelvecom podcast. That's K twelve.com podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. What if you were a trendy apparel company facing an avalanche of demand to ensure more customers can buy more sherpa line jackets? You call IBM to automate your it infrastructure with AI. Now, your systems monitor themselves. What used to take hours takes minutes, and you have an ecommerce platform designed to handle sudden spikes in overall demand, as in actual overalls. Let's create It systems that rule up their own sleeve. IBM, let's create. Learn more@ibm.com Itaution. Yeah, we should have done it. Maybe next year we'll just do one of those, like a total horror movie talk fest. Sounds good. Those are fun. But back to the more boring subject of haunted house attraction. The industry is huge. Like you said, there's a lot of money to be made and no two haunted houses are going to be alike. Sometimes these folks that open them, buy an old home or something and own it and do this every year. Sometimes they rent out a space. The ones I've been to haven't been in the actual space. Wasn't some cool old house or like a penitentiary. Yeah. Apparently, Eastern State Penitentiary is converted this year. And that is a scary, scary place. Just normal looking at it. Yeah. The only ones I've been to are the ones that it's in a big open, like a shopping center where there used to be like a sales jewelry closed down. Right? Yeah. The ghost of capitalism. And then you have themes. Some of them. I think the better haunted houses have themes because when you talk about scares, you can be all over the map from doing something, like with a movie theme where you have classic horror movies or serial killers or craze scientists or like vampires and monsters and ghouls and goblins. Yes. Those are two very different kinds of themes. Apparently Rob Zombies got his own jam going. It's called his house. Yeah, pretty much. It's called Rob Zombies great American Nightmare, which I think is supposed to be a play on the American dream. But one of the rooms is the John Wayne Gacy room. And it's like a guy dressed up like John Wayne Gacy's. Bubbles the Clown. I think that was the name of his clown, wasn't it? That sounds right. Just kind of hanging out in like a recliner or whatever. And this is Chicago, and that's where John Wayne Gacy killed his victims. And a lot of the victims families are still around, so everybody's up in arms and rob zombies, like, could not care less. Thank you for the free press. Right? Exactly. Yeah. Well, clowns are I posted something on her Facebook page the other day because that new clown in American Horror Story. Have you seen this clown yet? No. Twisty the Clown, the guy that made that show was like, just wait. I know clowns can be scary, but I have got the scariest clown ever. Awesome. And it's pretty scary, dude. Yeah, I'm not bothered by things like that much, but I saw this clown, and I'm not into that show, but I did watch the scenes that that clown was in just to see what it was like. Yeah. It's pretty frightening. I'll have to check them out. Yeah. And there's a broad daylight killing, which are always super scary to me. Oh, yeah. Like they don't care about there's no hiding it or anything. Yeah. Like a beautiful blue sky out in a beautiful field. And those kind of creep me out more. Yeah. Because the whole idea of, like, oh, it's a good day to die to me, that doesn't mean it's beautiful out. It means the world is already ending. Now it's a good day to die. Right. The Earth is opening up and magma is pouring out. That is possibly a good day to die. Then the serial killer can come along. Right? Yeah. So if you're opening one of these haunted houses, you can count on spending, because this is a good idea. You can make some good dough if you've got the funds to get it going. Sure. $15 to $25 per square foot for decorating and special effects is what? Just that alone? Yeah. And that's not counting the renting or buying of the structure itself. Right. So you have 5000 foot square footage. Okay. That's what I was going for. That's good. You can be spending up to 125 grand just in decorations and scares and tricks. Yeah. And you may be able to reuse a lot of that from year to year, but you probably shouldn't put out the same thing every year because if you're in the same space doing the same thing, you're not going to get repeat customers. No. So you want to turn over, like, 30% to 40% of that each year to new stuff. Right. And like you said, themes often change. So just changing the theme alone is going to require that you change your layout, I guess, to an extent. Yeah. Like, if you're doing scary clowns sure. You're probably going to have to get rid of your oar setting or whatever. Unless you do a clown doing surgery, which is kind of scary, but it just seems a little off. Clown doing surgery? That's disgusting. That'd be pretty scary. The Clown Hospital. Yeah. Well, don't they have that? Children's Hospital has a clown character. That's what I'm thinking about. Cordary. Yeah, sure. By the way, this is written by Kristen Conner from Stephan. Never told you. And she actually interviewed a few owners of haunted houses to get some good inside poop. That's where we're getting these numbers. And they say to open one up. I was just making mine up. Oh, you are? Yes. They said to open one up. You not only obviously it's a fun job, but you've got to have a lot of business acumen, too. It's not just like, oh, this will be a hoot. Right. Like, you've got to be super focused and have a good business brain or you're not going to make any money. Plus, also, safety is a big deal, especially after a fateful event in 1984 at Six Flags Great Adventure in New Jersey. They had a 17 trailer, interconnected modular haunted house, dark ride, basically, but a walking dark ride. So it was a haunted house and it was basically a fire trap, and it went up and eight teenagers got trapped inside and died in the fire. There were no fire sprinklers. There were no obvious emergency exit signs or anything like that. That's what happened back then. Yeah, but you'd think, like, by the time the 80s rolled around, people would have figured out, well, if somebody likes a match in here or doesn't put their cigarette out because again, it's the still smoke everywhere, the whole thing is going to go up because it's all plywood and foam and maybe we should put fire sprinklers in. But apparently it took this tragedy to really change the industry. But it did. Yeah. And safety is, like you said, a huge, huge part of it because you're in the dark, you've got things flying out and props swooping down and people jumping out. Anything can happen to go wrong and someone can get injured. Yeah. And actually, did you hear about the girl in 2011? No, but there was an employee at one of the ones outside of St. Louis called Creepy World and she worked there and somehow got caught in a noose and accidentally hung herself. That sounds like a story that you hear. You would think so. It is so well documented that it actually did happen. I'm quite sure. Crazy. But she survived. She suffered some brain damage to an extent, from what I understand. I don't know if it was extensive or not. I'm on a roller coaster of emotion. Right. She did survive, but she accidentally got caught in the news and hung herself. And it's possible some patrons passed her by, thinking that she was like, that's what was supposed to be going on. Yeah, I've heard some story that is not that of someone who hung themselves on Halloween and everyone thought it was just a decoration in the front yard. My friend, you need to go watch the most recent Don't Be Dumb. Oh, really? It comes out this week. Is it about that? Yes. Is that an old wife? Well, don't spoil it, okay? People should go watch it. Go watch. Don't Be dumb about that and tell them. Josh so after you've got your safety system worked out, you've got your fire safety, you got your sprinkler system, you've got flame retardant material, you've got cameras set up everywhere. Everyone assigned a lengthy waiver. Even if they do get hurt, they could probably still try and sue you, but you're trying to avoid that at all costs. What you're going to have is some sort of a maze like structure where you're walking around sort of lost, but really just getting shuffled along a path. Right. And like you said earlier, there's this thing called throughput. So there's a lot. Of thought put into it, because apparently the worst thing you can do in a haunted house, and this makes sense, is to let the group behind catch up to the group ahead. Yeah. That ruins the whole thing. Ruins everything. Because you're in a group. It depends. But I don't know, six or eight people. And you don't want the scare that already happened to be apparent to the group that hasn't gotten there yet. Like, you see the chainsaw guy crawling back into his little truck. Exactly. Right, exactly. So this throughput is basically a calculation of how many people you can push through at what intervals to, say, meet your nightly ticket quota. So the numbers that Congregate gives to get 500 people through in a night, you can put a group of six, you can set them out every 25 to 30 seconds, and they shouldn't bump into one another. Yeah. And then one of the ways that employees make sure that these groups don't bump into one another is the way that they scare people. Yeah. It's called scaring forward, which makes sense. It's kind of an interesting, boring term, but what they're doing is usually jumping behind you as you walk through the group to make you go in a forward. They don't want to jump out in front of you and have you move in the direction you just came from. Right. Backward. Yeah. So they won't scare you forward. And that is a little tip. If you are not into being the lead person, being scared, then you should be in the lead because it's probably going to come from behind you. It's pretty counterintuitive. Yeah. But if I'm going to be in the back and I'll be just fine, you're the one that's going to get grabbed. Because if they jump out at the front of the group again, it's going to push the group backward and the group ahead is going to run into the group behind. And that's very bad. Yeah. And I say get grabbed, you probably won't get touched. Now, there apparently are some haunted house attractions that do light touching, but you're going to be fully informed. That's so creepy. It really does light touching. You're going to be fully informed. Like, you're not going to not know that it's coming, like in line. They're going to be like, sign this, an initial here, an initial here, an initial here, and we're going to give you a heart attack test first just to make sure. Please step on this treadmill, that kind of thing. See, that's how I would really scare people, to say none of the actors are allowed to touch anyone. So if you're getting touched, that means something has gone horribly wrong. Right. And then have people grabbing stuff. Well, we'll get to, in a minute, the new extreme ones, where there's not only touching, it's beyond anything that you could imagine. Right. But we'll get to that soon. And since we mention actors hiding. Those are called scare pockets. Yeah. Where they hide and they jump out from. Yeah. So, like, they're hiding behind that tree, and they may distract you with a back swooping down in the other direction. There's a lot of distraction going on because what they don't want is you to be focused on the clearly placed faux tree trunk that has the smell of a chainsaw. Right, exactly. Yeah. But there won't be any blade on that chainsaw, by the way. No. And a good actor also will scramble back into place very quickly, because the longer they hang out and they're like, the more you're going to be like you're just some teenager who doesn't scare me. Yeah. And if you're looking to save a little money, you might want to double up and have that scare pocket. Have a couple of different ways that can go. Like, I can jump out on these people on the right, who are in this one part of the haunted house. Now, I can scramble back and then hit these people on the left. Not hit them, jump out and scare them. And that way you're saving a little dough with your actors, yet doubling or tripling your people, and then apparently, chuck lastly, a lot of the attractions are run on compressed air that is set off either through motion sensors, which I think everybody expects, but also through touch pads, which makes sense because you can control that. Right. Well, with a motion sensor, every group is going to set off that effect at the same point. Right. And what it does is it opens the valve and all of a sudden, the skeleton sits up in the coffin or comes out from the side or back. Right, exactly. Or some weird air. Exactly right. That was a really good impression. With a touchpad, though, if you say place the square off to the left or something, not every group is going to walk over the touchpad. So not every group is going to get the same set of scares. So it kind of randomizes the thing, which in turn makes the whole experience even more frightening, because if you hear the group ahead at the curve scream and you hear that, you get to that scream. Exactly. When you get to that curve, you're going to be prepared. And if nothing happens, well, then, my friend, you're just even more keyed up for the next one. That's right. Yeah. And you're keyed up to begin with walking in there, because a good haunted house will put a little bit of money into getting you all ramped up in the parking lot in the line. They might have creeps dressed up, roaming around. They may have sound effects and spooky music and, like, an air horn blast, which is really uncool. And that's just got you on edge. By the time you walk in that place, you're ready to be scared. All right, Chuck. Yeah. We've teased it enough. Let's talk about extreme haunted houses, which apparently are so extreme that people who are haunted house enthusiasts, like people who are like in the industry don't even like these things to be called extreme haunted houses because they're so extreme. That's what I gather. Yeah. And to say these are interactive is not really putting a fine point on it. You're basically paying money to be treated like an assault victim for up to 7 hours. Like you might be put in a headlock. Where's the one there's one in San Diego. Yes. Mckaymen is renowned as like the worst of the worst. The video that I saw, it was like you were covered in blood, dude. It was unbelievable. Put into like a coffin and somebody is in their writhing on top of you in the dark and you're trying to get out and they're pulling you back in. Right. And just like it's insane how intense this thing looks. Yeah, they had a cage that locks your head in that they're dropping like fake snakes in, which is not as bad as live snakes, but it's still pretty bad. And apparently the catchphrase of everybody who goes through these things is let me out of here. If they shout or cry, it well, yeah, but apparently, supposedly Mckaymen, it's open year round and they only take four people a day through this thing. But like you said, it's up to 7 hours long in some cases, right? Yeah. So they'll take in, I think, just one at a time you have to go through by yourself. And they only do four people a day. It's only open on the weekends and I don't know if this is true. Supposedly the one rule, like you have to apply fill out an application to go through this thing right. And be super fit and super psychologically fit because you're getting physically abused in some cases, like nothing you can't walk away from, but they're mangling you without hurting you. Yeah, I saw they held one guy's face in front of a toilet and it shot up some obnoxious stuff out of it, like stuff like that. So on one hand it is physically abusive on the other. It's almost laughable that these people really put their minds to it and they came up with shooting stuff out of a toilet in your face. Yeah, but supposedly you can't leave this one at all. Like there is no safe word. I just don't believe that. I don't believe it either, but it's free. The one in San Diego is really yeah, it's free. The one hook is that you're not allowed to leave. What? You sign a document that says I'm going to go through this thing from beginning to end. Whatever. That's what I say. Trust me, I would get out of that place. Sure. I would bust through a wall or something. That's what it took. Chuck Merry but that is McCaine Manor and that was constructed by Russ Mckaimy, who's a terror fanatic. They also have one in New York and La. Called Blackout. One called Gates of Hell in Las Vegas. And the common denominator of all these is you're getting physically like you don't wear clothes you ever want to wear again because you're going to fake blood and vomit thrown in your face. Hopefully fake and be physically assaulted. I mean, they have scenes where there's a rapist after you, right. It's really dark. So disturbing. With haunted house enthusiasts who criticize these kinds of things, it's usually because they say there's no story to it. There's very rarely build up. It's all just pay off, pay off, pay off. Like all of it. There's no ratcheting up of tension. It's like those movies yeah. That we're talking about very much. It's the haunted attraction version of I don't even know what they are. I don't watch any of them. Hostile. Oh, okay. I did see that one, actually. What do you think? Yeah, anytime. If you're going to pull out that rusty tray of medical instruments, you've lost me. Yeah. That is such a trope. By now, you know who did do it? Well, was the first couple of Hail raisers. They used medical instruments, too. Yeah, back in the day. Disheartening degree effect. Yeah. The ones that scare me the most, again, to delve back into movies. Did you ever see Wolf Creek? No. It's set in the Australian Outback. Yeah, it's the kids whose car breaks down and all of a sudden the rest of the movie is them getting chased by this homicidal maniac. Okay. That to me, is what's called a psychological thriller. Yeah. Yes, I understand. It is Horror Friday the 13th. That's like Hallmark horror, but it's a movie different. Yeah, the slasher movie is just different. There's not enough true, genuine horror movies, in my opinion, which amount to basically, supernatural horror, I guess, is how you'd put it. That's what I'm into. You should check out Wolf Creek. I have no problem with it. It's just as far as horror goes, I'm not scared by that. Only 45% of high school students feel they are prepared for college or careers. 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So you partner with IBM Consulting to bring together data and workflows so that every driver and merchandiser can serve up jalapeno, sesame and chocolate cover goodness with real time, data driven precision. Let's create supply chains that have an appetite for performance. IBM let's create. Learn more at IBM. Comconsulting I want to be scared. You might be scared? Okay, I'll check it out. The murderous guy is really, like, kind of a great character, and I think he falls into the pantheon of classic, like, Michael Myers characters. Oh, yeah. One of the good slashers. Which brings us to the Hellhouses, which, like we said, was sort of started back in the dark ages of Christianity. They do this today. The most famous one is in Cedar Hill, Texas, and there's a documentary called Hellhouse on these things, I think from 2002. Parecamp? No, Hellhouse. I guess the idea of these is run by churches, usually, and they are to just, like in the old days, scare you into walking straight and narrow. Right. And actually they were originated by Jerry Falwell back in the that's the first ones, I think. Yeah. And then in the church in Texas you mentioned took over Abundant Life Christian Center, and they took over and they started actually packaging it. They started selling Hell houses for like 299, $299. And it was kind of like do you remember those JCS in the came up with the haunted house package? Yeah. These are the same things, but for Hell houses. And then there's modules that you can buy that cost additional amounts of money so you can add rooms to it. And so, like, a room you might buy is the abortion room. Right. And in the abortion room, you're taught how to use raw meat. That's like a stand in for a fetus that you throw into a glass bowl. You got to make sure it's a glass bowl so everybody can see through into it. The quote literally from the manual that they distribute on how to run these says, quote, purchase a meat product that closely resembles pieces of a baby to be placed in a glass bowl. Right. So that's their suggestion. That's a room from Hellhouse. Yeah. And this is to keep you from having premarital sex. Exactly. Obviously, subtlety is not a hallmark of the Hell house. No. So, for example, there's one from New Destiny Christian Center. It's called the Rave Scene, and basically it's about club drugs and death, teenage death. Like, pretty much everybody dies or takes their own life as a result of sin. Yes, of their sin. Yeah, like the lesbian suicide room where a young lady succumbs to lesbianism and is so mistreated and she's not a lesbian, she's just saving herself and is mistaken for a lesbian. Confusingly. Okay. And then kills herself because her best friend rejects her and calls her a lesbian when she went to go hugger. That was from the Vice article you sent at least. Yeah, that's a great article. It's all repercussions of sins. So there's the lesbian suicide room, there's the AIDS room, the abortion room, the domestic violence room, the DUI room, and they're all just enacting these horrific scenes until you get finally to hell is at the end. At the very end, right. And Hell is where they're displaying what Hell looks like with ghouls and demons and then finally you get to go to heaven. Well, this is what makes a Hell house a Hell house. You send through these different types of sin into Hell and then when you come out, you emerge through Hell. And then the real life preachers there saying, hey, how about you repent? And for those of you who aren't saved, why don't you come on over to our church and we'll save you? Yeah, they call it in the Vice article, they call it a really cool pastor who jumps out and is the good cop to hellhouse's bad cop. And he's like, you can avoid all this scary stuff if you take the Lord Jesus as your savior. And sometimes they'll do that right in the room and have you sign something. Oh, I can imagine. And that's the whole house. And in that Vice article, it's crazy. The author mentions that a little boy goes off and vomits during the Hell house. So apparently they're very effective. Well, the object is to make you sick and vomit. Yeah, I guess so. Vomit from fear for your soul and they're still around. It seems like something that might have gone by the wayside. Oh, no. But yeah, you can still go to hellhouses in a lot of places. I have one more thing for you, Chuck. What you got? Go to buzzfeed.com. You may have heard of that website. Sure. And search for 44 best picks of scaredbrows at haunted house. That's a good one. Yeah, I can't remember where the haunted house is, but it's all the same background but very much like roller coasters. They take a photo of this one spot, right? And it's like the scariest spot. And the people are it's great. They're wonderful hilarious. And it's been around I think they first started publishing them in 2011, so they've been around for years and they're still just as funny as ever. It's great. The scared face is just so pure to me because it's just pure reaction. Like the toughest dude in the world, like trying to climb over his girlfriend or push her toward whatever he's afraid of or something. Whatever's happening in that 2 seconds. Yeah, it's pretty great. Yeah. So that's haunted house attractions, everybody I know, if you want to know more about them, type those words in the search bar athowstopworks.com and since I said that, it's time to listen to mail. I'm going to call this Karate kid email awesome. Which was the scariest movie I've ever seen. If you listen to our Karate episode, we wax philosophical about the Karate kid movie and we get a lot of emails of people feeling great ways of nostalgia and talking about it. So here we go. I'm sure you guys will get dozens of versions of this similar email. I just listened to karate and I have not finished it yet, but I'm writing about the first seven to 8 minutes. Specifically, your ode to the Karate kid was beautiful. I got goosebumps. Along with Chuck. I may have also had a tear in my eye when he described that magical moment in the film where it all comes together and we realize, along with Daniel san, the Mr. Miyagi is truly a genius. By the way, Ralph Macchio's named his son Daniel. Is that right after himself? Yeah, I guess so. After the best version of himself. I recently sent the karate Kid to my six year old nephew to ensure that despite what his friends and media tried to tell him, he will know that Ralph Machio is the original and only Karate kid. Yeah, when I called him and asked what his favorite part was, he actually started singing, you're the best around. Nothing's ever going to get you down. It was the proudest moment of my aunt Hood so far. Now, Chuck, I implore you to watch The Karate Kid, too. After all the other films that attempt to be a part of the franchise or travesty two is incredibly good. It is very good. The Peter Satura song Josh mentioned, glory of Love was my first ever favorite song when I was six. It's a good song because of the film is a classic and I think you are missing out. I'll watch it. I'll check it out. Anyways, thanks for sending me to work this morning. With an extra bounce in my step and a song in my heart that is from Nicole Beale at Jed's Barber shop, Salt Lake City, Utah. Go get her to cut your head. Nice hair. Not your head. She's doing a terrible job. She's cutting your head. Thanks a lot, Nicole. Did you know her friend Van Nostrin did his band the Bangalores do a cover of you're the Best Around? I know he loved that song. I don't know if I knew they actually covered it. It's good. You can go to SoundCloud search Bangalores and you're the best around. It's on there. I'm going to do that right after this too. If you want to let us know that we nailed something, we want to hear about it. You can tweet to us at siskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshando.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. 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c4877c0c-5460-11e8-b38c-4b6d1e476205	SYSK Selects: How The Moonwalk Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-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 in this classic episode.	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 in this classic episode.	Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=8, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=221, tm_isdst=0)	40003379	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hi, everybody. Are you moon walking right now? Well, it's Saturday, so you know, I'm moon walking. And this is my Saturday select pick from July 2016. How the moon walk works. Give it a listen right now. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, chuck Bryant and Jerry just moonwalk right in this joint. Can you moonwalk? No. 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, a senior 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. And not a great moonwalk. 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, teach it as a class for free to children in need. No, he got OK 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. OK. 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 I 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? I will give 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 Headful of Ghosts, which is pretty neat. It's like a psychological thriller. Oh, yeah. I haven't read a fiction booking 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. Yeah. At midnight fame. People are like, wait a minute, I thought he was at the Onion. Now he's 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 Harare. Love that guy. And 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 has that paper has no value. We just all agreed. So it's essentially fiction. 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. 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 non fiction, and I don't know, I just like a good fictional yarn more. I'm quite the opposite. Like I told you, I want to be a Civil War buff and got one of those huge books that's supposed to be great, and I just can't do it. It's 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 Headphone of 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. Like. Easy to read. Dean Coons. No, it was a little more literary than that. Okay, 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 Koontz, man, that guy's imagination is fantastic. I always assume that he was better than Stephen King because he could finish his 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 a good thing about acute 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. The guy's got a great imagination. You should read some of Stephen King's work. Like 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. Excuse me. Sucks just because he's so prolific and because he very famously has trouble finishing a story. Oh, really? Yeah, but he'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. Those you can finish. It's the largest what do you mean not finish? Just amazing build up and then the resolutions like so he finishes you just mean it's okay. Right. It's not left unfinished. It's 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's almost 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 needed a little something though. This is a short one. Well, you were 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 wasn't I mean, I listened to pop music, but I was also influenced by my well, he's now my brotherinlaw, the General. 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 Doobie Brothers. Like heck yeah. But I also listen to the American Top 40 every week. So. I mean, I was an MTV. I was glued to 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 was the same thing. Yeah, I don't see how it's a pop and move. I saw that in the article and I couldn't put it together because popping is so herky jerky. And a good moonwalk is so smooth and buttery. Well, so locking is herky jerky. Right? Well, no, popping is too popping. Is that like yeah, but it's also this is 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 classic popping. Is it? Yeah. And I was like, okay, I'll bet the worms popping wrong. The worms and breaking move, I clearly don't know. But the average person who's doing these dances is probably popping, locking and breaking. Yes. It all kind of worked together at the same time. Yeah. And I know we covered break dancing some in the hip hop episode, but we should do it total breakdance, 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 it'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 popping 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. Well, you want to throw it out there, man. If you believe that, how could you? I'm unconvinced at this point, all right. But seeing my own a yeah, that's a good one. A bunch of people are like, that's what COA means. Yeah, I'm covering my own a, speaking for myself. Anyway, if 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 Calloway 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 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 like, Sammy Davis Jr. Did in this video. I don't think it looks anything like the moonwalk. Not really. I think you're 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. Can 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. Sorry, man. We sound old, you know? Old because we're trashing Justin Bieber. He's just saying it'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. Right. Look at some of the videos. 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 just 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 agent 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 moon walk. Sort of. But the point is, it was 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 on the stage. Yes. 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, 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. Yes. I love tap dancing. I didn't know it. I watched it. Sounds 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. Kelvariznikov White Knight. Well, I did see that movie. Yeah. There was a guy. Savion Glover. Oh, 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, like, legit moonwalked 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, like, Bill Bailey might have seen it from someone else. Being like, that's a hot move. Yeah. He seems like the type of talent that he could have come up with in himself. Yeah, sure. But what's weird, Chuck, is that 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. Oh, 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 mime routine where his feet are floating. It's called air walking. 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 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 was 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, Miming was a big deal. And I would practice that. Okay. A little bit. Not for years, but, yeah, I practice 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 shallow mar 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 Shalomar fame, 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 was dancing in the sheets. Remember that hit? Yes. This great Footloose soundtrack song dancing In The Sheets And that was the 80s 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 Shelmer, who's also a Solid Gold dancer, he had a pretty awesome move called the backslide. And when you watch him backslide, he's moonwalking. Yes. Total moon walk. It totally is. And later on, he was interviewed, like, where did you get this? Where did you come up with the idea? He's 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 the clip of Bailey, right. In the fifties, and he was like, what's that? He's like, I never even seen that. He was surprised to see that someone was legit moon walking, whatever, 50 something years earlier. Yeah. The same move. Yes. 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 1955, and it began and ended with him. And it took me to 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, the heyday of mimes 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, it came down to a few things. They look like clowns. Clowns. We did a whole episode on that cholera phobia. And the silent thing seems to bug people. Yeah. 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 their intruding upon you to do their act. I don't even know if that's the case. You could do your act over there. Oh, it is. Believe me. Yeah. Mine is very intrusive. 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 back sliding around. And so all these dudes were basically kind of laying the foundation for what the moonwalk would come to be. It got really 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 the Solid Gold dancer 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? Yeah. Michael Jackson comes out and brings the house down. And one of the reasons he brought the house down is because he was 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. Yeah, they might have 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 is, 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 those the lean 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. Right. 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 lien. 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 some strong ankles. Right? And there's a guy 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, and he kind of fully explains the illusion and how to do it well. And I looked 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, like, 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 a dance floor. While you're having a conversation with somebody, slowly just start to lead, and they'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. Right. 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 Shalomar 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. Yeah. 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 name, for sure. Obviously someone named it. Yeah. Some AP reporters. Like, I named it was me. For what it's worth, Daniel said, besides shields 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 a 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 Boogaloos. 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're the electric bugaloo 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, it was good friends with Rerun. Yeah. And if you think of Rerun dancing, like those twists and the jumps and the suspender stuff yeah. That's locking. 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 70s. Great show. Very funny. And Re Run was one of the characters played by the great Fred Berry, who was in the lockers. In the Electric Boogaloo Locker. Yeah. And just go watch. Go type rerun dancing. What's happening? 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. What instrument was that? Like a clasma or something? I have no idea. It's weird, 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. Like, we've 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 hiphop music and breakdancing created out of holecloth. 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 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. Well, 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 Kirmudgens, like Rap was going to be a fad. No, rap is a brand new art form. He's here forever and it changes and morphs and is, you know, amazing. It's neat. We did a hip hop episode. You mentioned that. Right? Yeah, it was good. I thought for a couple of shimmers 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? It says 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. Yeah. 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 moonwalk. 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, is it, Steve? Brooke no. God, that would be great. I just think the guy had the wrong shoes on, personally. I'll bet that's what he blamed it on to. 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 know, 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 really hard to create that illusion. Like a good, completely synchronized, simultaneous snap up and down with those 2ft. 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 backwards. 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 really good. Michael Jackson used to move his head up and down and rhythm to his walking or whatever, and it adds to the effect totes shallow mar. I feel like I kind of should try it. Try right now? Well, I'm not going to do it now. You don't have a vodka gimlet? No. Are you got 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. Gimlet is the lime juice? Yes. Roses, lime? Yes. If you want to know more about vodka gimlet, you can type that word in the search bar. Howstepworks.com. And since it's a gambler, 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 was 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. They're not nice people. As it turns out, no one on the Internet is a nice person. No. I was just very surprised if 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 mistaked 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, like, 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. Yeah. So very sorry about that. Civil War buffs. Now, 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 was talking about the bogus studies, how to do good research. Got you especially like 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 talk 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 a tooth. Sorry. 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 without the fear of losing grant money. Amen. Thanks from Trevor. Thanks, Trevor. That was very illuminating and enlightening. Very erudite. Yeah, you say that. Yeah, Rudy. Really? Okay. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com stuffyshonow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast@housestofworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyshow.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."
43375ec8-53a3-11e8-bdec-ffc0ed7f0212	How COVID-19 Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-covid-19-works	We’re in the middle of an odd, tense time and Josh and Chuck are here to explain what’s going on and how to stay safe.	We’re in the middle of an odd, tense time and Josh and Chuck are here to explain what’s going on and how to stay safe.	Thu, 26 Mar 2020 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=86, tm_isdst=0)	63867576	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the Global Nightmare. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. There's Jerry over there. And we are stuff you should know. That's an Alex Cooper song, right? That's. Welcome to my nightmare. I think it is my nightmare, isn't it? Yeah, but he should have thought bigger. Yeah, he really should have. I was kind of excited. Yeah, well put. We saw him in concert once, remember? That's right. Big shout out to Nita Strauss. Yes. Guitarist extraordinaire for Alice Cooper? Among others. Who invite you? Science enthusiast. What? Enthusiast? Science. Oh, yeah, for sure. I think everyone knows right now that we are now set up to record apart from one another. Yes. Chuck. So my first question before we have to get serious is what are you wearing? I knew it. Can I tell you seriously what I'm wearing? Yeah. I'm going to tell you. Okay. I am wearing an apron. And that's it? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. What about you? So your cosplaying is sexy chef. Yeah, that's what I like to think of myself as. It's not really cosplay. It's kind of normal life stuff. Yeah. I am wearing and this is not a plug, but it is what I'm wearing. I'm wearing me and these. I'm wearing my mac weldon I don't know what they call them. Kind of the warm up pants that you can go to the grocery store in. Sure. But do not go to the grocery store, Chuck. I'm not. Okay. And I'm wearing a Max funcon 2012 T shirt and my slippers. So basically I got all this free outfit. Boy, it really is. I paid for the slippers. Okay, but I mean, if you name drop the slippers, maybe you can get a replacement for them. I don't want to do that. Even though they're super comfy. Maybe we can get a Slipper sponsorship. Did you ever stop wearing slippers out of the house? Well, what do you mean? So I think it was a five second rule episode where we talked about the point of slippers is just have these things that are housebound and never leave your house, and then you just wear them in your house instead of outside. So the outdoors germs never come inside on the bottom of your feet. Boy, you're calling out like a nine year old episode. I may go get the mail or something. Okay, all right. Well, before you were going and getting ice cream at the convenience store in those things, if I remember correctly. Well, yeah, and I feel like the fact that you're not doing it anymore, you may have forgotten, but that's my influence, Chuck. Or I may have just gotten gained some self respect. Right. There you go. I like to think both of those were my influence. Okay. Yeah. So at the head of the show, I think we should announce we're doing an episode on covid 19. It is tuesday. I don't even know what date it is. March 24. And this will come out on the 26th. Right. That's what Jerry's promising right now. That remains to be seen, though, so it'll be sort of up to date. But two days, a lot can change, as we all know. Yeah. And the other thing, too, is I think we are going to stay out of sort of the politics and the economics of this because that's almost separate podcast in itself that I have no interest in ever doing. Well, I'm surprised if you say that last part. I was figuring that that would be one we do like years from now, go back and look at the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 because I think so many weird, remarkable, interesting things are going to grow out of this and are already going on. I could totally see us doing that, but I can vibe on what you're saying because after recording this, I'm hoping that we can finish this episode and never talk about Coronavirus again. Like, I get what you're saying. That would be great. Yeah. I'm tired of knowing about it. Yeah. And we debated, quite honestly, whether or not to even do this, but it seems like we had more people asking for just a level headed take on it from us than people saying, I would really rather be distracted. So we'll distract you after today. Yeah. And we're not riding that wave where we're trying to feed your news addiction that you can't get enough breaking information about this global pandemic. Like you said, we're just trying to add just trying to do stuff you should know on Coronavirus, on COVID-19, typically. And we got some big help, a big assist from Dave Rus, who initially pushed back. We had to convince him to do it. Remember? He was like, are you sure people want to hear this? Yeah, we're pretty sure. We'll find out, though. So thanks a lot, Dave. Bruce, you did good. And also a big shout out to the Grabster, too, who's been under the weather, so hang in there, Grabster. Yeah. So let's get going. I learned a lot in the last couple of days, and the first kind of dumb thing that I learned was that COVID-19 stands for Coronavirus Disease 2019, which I didn't even know that until two days ago. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, it's not talked about a lot, and I didn't bother to look it up, so yeah. And I guess it's not intuitive looking at it, if you think about it, but there's other names for it, too. So what you just said, coronavirus disease 2019, kova 19. That's the name of the disease. Right? There's another name for the disease that the who calls 2019 N Cove. Okay. And then the virus itself, if you want to really show off at your next online dinner party, the virus itself is technically named Sarscove two big V two. That's right. And as we'll see, the reason that it is called SARS Cove Two is because it bears a striking genetic resemblance to SARS Cove One, I guess you could call it, or the SARS virus that swept the world not too long ago, too. Yeah, and I can't help. Every time I hear of SARS, the first thing I think of is the Saturday Night Live sketch with Peter Sarsgard when he developed the Sarsgard sarsgard. Yeah. When did we talk about that before? Was it the viruses one or the Spanish flu episode, maybe? I don't think we did one on SARS, did we? No, not as far as I remember. Because I don't know much about coronaviruses. Or I didn't until we really started researching this. But that is what Covet is. It's a coronavirus. And coronaviruses have been around for a while. They're a family of viruses that typically cause upper respiratory infections in humans and chickens. In pigs and cows, coronaviruses usually cause diarrhea or intestinal infections, but in humans, it's usually the upper respiratory tract. Although we have seen now that coronaviruses can cause pig or cowlike infections in humans, too. We've seen that recently. But for the most part, you've probably been exposed to a coronavirus. You've probably been made sick by one. And normally coronaviruses just give us something that we would take as a cold or a common flu. Yeah. And corona means crown in both Spanish and Latin. And these images that you've seen, the illustrations of what it looks like under a microscope, those little spikes protruding from the surface, those are kind of, I guess, how it got its name as corona. Yeah. Dave puts it here like it reminds him of Pinhead from the Hellraiser movies, who, by the way, has a really good backstory. I was reading about him, just by happenstance the other day. Pinhead? Yeah. He's a really interesting guy. The whole reason he got into being a centobite in Hell was he was disillusioned by the chaos of World War I and lost all faith and any meaning to life. So he just ditched this world for Hell instead. Oh, wow. I didn't know there was a backstory. Oh, yeah. There's a bunch of it's kind of been built up over the course of some of Clive Barker's novels. The movies have contributed to it. Some other people have kind of contributed to it. And there's like this robust kind of mythos around that guy. It's really interesting stuff. See, I'm appreciating our sites more than ever today. Yeah, me too. It's kind of like, do we have to talk about this? Yeah, let's talk more about movies. Have you seen the new Candy Man that's coming? Are they remaking? Candy man yeah. Jordan Peele producing it. And I saw a trailer. It looks pretty good. Did you like us? I did. I was not moved entirely by it. I really like it out a lot more than us, but I'm a fan of jordan Peele. I think he's got a great mind and everything, but I don't know if I was expecting more from us or I was expecting something different. I'm not sure. Well, I like to get out more, for sure. US got a little wacky, but then I think I appreciated it more as like a sort of a Twilight Zone, a kind of wacky. Yeah. I guess if I had gone into it expecting that, I think I would have liked it more. Yeah, I dug it. Great acting, too. Oh, yeah, for sure. Across the board. All right. Do we have to talk about this now? Yeah, back to it. All right. So you said that chances are that at some point you might have had a coronavirus. You might have just thought it was a cold, novel corona viruses. You've probably heard that in the news lately. This is different because this is an animal coronavirus that evolves and then infects a human and thus rendering it novel or new to us. Yeah, like those other coronaviruses, the ones that give us colds or whatever, who knows how long they've been around? And it's possible they followed the exact same process that these novel coronaviruses have followed. But this novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, like you said, it's new to us, and we think that it literally just made the jump from animal to human, possibly in a live animal food market in Wuhan, China, as recently as late December 2019. Yeah. So there's kind of a lot to this. I think they pretty much are positive that that's what happened. They think that they have a patient zero, a 55 year old man from the Hubai province, but they're not positive about that. And now there's some debate about the timeline. Officially, it was December 31, but now they're saying it may have been first detected in mid November. The patient zero is not confirmed. They also think they have zeroed on the fact that just like in the movie Contagion, it started with a bat, and then this animal, this very strange animal that I had never heard of before, called a pangolin, has served as the intermediate host because they did genome sequencing of the virus, and it has a 99% identical genome sequence to that when it's in a human. Yeah. It's really interesting to think that if you look at a lot of the research Chuck, that we're hearing about and we're learning and just generally stuff that people walking around know about coronavirus, it has come from China doing an astounding amount of research and work on examining and trying to figure out and trying to defeat this coronavirus. So they've definitely done a lot of work, you could say, to kind of explain to the world what's going on, even though I believe they're pretty roundly criticized for potentially not warning the world in enough time. But I guess it's getting to that political stuff. Yeah. And just to be clear finding a patient zero isn't so they can say, you did it. You did it. You have to pay for this. Yeah. It's helpful in trying to figure this whole thing out. That's why timelines are important. Tracing it back to its roots is important. Since that time, China has closed down about 200 wildlife farms to try and curb, in part to try and curb the Pangolin trade, which is a delicacy to eat in China. But I just read today, apparently in Nigeria, they account for about 55% of the Pangolin trade. And the penalty they already had in place is still the current penalty, which is $2.70 for a first time offender. So there's a lot of pressure on Nigeria right now to shut down their trade as well. Wow. And yeah, penguin. It's a mammal, right. But it is covered in these kind of dragon like scales, and it looks like a small anteater. It looks like a dragon had sex with an anteater. Yeah. And it's tough to look at. Like, it hurts my teeth. Looking at pengolins, for some reason, I can't quite put my finger on why, but it's almost like they just shouldn't be or something. Well, I'm not going to say what I was going to say. All right, cool. So let's talk about the spread of COVID. Okay. So the way that it spread initially or the way that just about well, any zoo, notic virus. I'm not sure if all viruses start like this, but they usually typically start in an animal, and it spreads through close contact between an animal, a sick animal, and human, who then contracts that it's Zoomatic transmission right. From animal to human. Great band name. It is. I'm surprised we haven't hit on it before. Yeah. So that's an animal to person transmission. From that point on, that person is infected, they get sick, and then they transfer it to somebody who comes in close contact with them, which we'll talk more about. But these days, close contact for coronavirus in COVID-19 is considered within 6ft for an extended period of time or present when somebody sneezes or coughs in a small area, and then that person can get sick, that's person to person transmission. And then the last one, this is the one that's the hardest to deal with and the one that we're seeing right now, the stage that we've entered around the world is what's called community spread. Yeah, that one's, the scary one, because that's the final stage where people get sick, who, as far as they know, didn't have any contact with another sick person. Right. And this is when those very first stages of the outbreak, it was all person to person after, obviously, the animal transmission. And then when it developed into community spread, that's when people started to get a little freaked out, I think. Yeah, because they can't say, oh, I was around Timmy, who's sick with this right now. So I got it from him. It's like, I have no idea where I got this. And that makes the whole thing scary. It makes people freaked out. It makes it much more difficult to contain when people don't know where they're getting it from. And it makes you need to take much more draconian measures to prevent the spread of this stuff. It's where it starts to get out of control is when it hits community spread. Yeah. And when you see these graphic maps of how it spread, it's really frightening is the only word that can be used to describe how quickly this thing has taken hold. And this is stuff that everyone knows, unless you've just been under a rock. Or like my friend Clay, about a week before this happened, he went to Nepal for a two month Viking trip. Really? Wow. Yeah. I was like, well, that's your new home, buddy. I hope you like it. Is he there still? Yeah, he's still there. Oh, my gosh. Having a great time. Okay, that's good. He's not sick or anything? He's just hanging out. Yes. I don't think he's seen a lot of people. Oh, I'll bet. I think he's deep into the woods and stuff. Well, man, that's about as good a place as you could possibly be right now. Yeah. And he was planning on being there for two months anyway. Yes, he had a planned a trip. It may not have been two months, but I'm not sure. I mean, I am concerned about it, obviously, but he says everything's cool. Yeah. It sounds like your friend Clay may be one of the luckiest people in the world. Maybe. Wow. Well, keep adding, clay, you're doing social distancing, right? Just go to Nepal and stay in the woods. Should we take a little break here? Yes, we should. All right, let's break, and then we'll talk about some of the symptoms right after this stuff you should know. Okay, Chuck. So we're talking about symptoms here. It turns out there's, like, a classic set of symptoms that they now recognize as if you have these, there's a really good chance right now that you have COVID-19. The cluster of symptoms are a fever. It's usually a high fever. A dry cough is a really dead giveaway, and a dry cough is almost like the back of your throat is tickling, and you can get no relief from it. And you're not, like, coughing up slim. That can help get rid of that sensation of needing to cough. It's like a dry cough. Yeah. Which is really troubling right now because it's pollen season here in the United States, and dry cough for a lot of people is a regular thing every spring, so it's especially worrisome, I think, for a lot of folks with allergies. Yeah, for sure. I don't normally get allergies, but it's pretty bad this year, and, like, I got not a dry cough, but, you know, little tickle here. There my nose, maybe a little runny here there. So I'm like always really paying extra attention to that stuff. It's exhausting, basically. Yeah. And then the third one is so you've got fever, dry cough, and then difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, that kind of thing. And from studies they found, according to the Journal of what does JAMA stand for? I used to know the Journal of the American Medical Association. Yeah. So JAMA found that on average, people start to display that symptom of shortness of breath within five days of the onset of the rest of their symptoms. So if you have a fever, if you have a dry cough, and after a few days you start to develop a shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, you are a really good candidate to get tested for COVID and maybe need to go to the hospital. Yes. And I've seen the chest thing described from people who have coronavirus or Coba 19 as everything from 50 pound weight on your chest to a belt strapped around their chest that just keeps getting tighter and tighter that you can't unloosen. That sounds awful. Yeah, it sounds very specific. If you feel actual severe pain and pressure in your chest, if you have bluish lips or bluish face yeah, that's fair. Or if all of a sudden you're confused and you normally aren't confused mentally, then those are signs that they say you really need to get to the hospital right away. Yeah, for sure. Anytime your skin or lips are blue, that's a bad sign. But that's one of the big signs of Covet, is that difficulty breathing leads to a lack of oxygen, which is why everybody keeps talking about this need for ventilators. Part of this process of a really bad case of Covet we're talking about a bad case here is that you may need a ventilator to help you breathe because you're not getting enough oxygen into your lungs breathing on your own. So that's why ventilators have been kind of like celebrity stars, really sought after in this pandemic right now. Yeah. And why the shortage of ventilators is super scary, because you've got in that situation and we'll talk more about the biggest fear, which is overwhelming the medical system. But then you have potentially mild cases that develop into more serious and even fatal cases, right? Yes. And that typically seems to be seen most in people who are older. I think 65 and over is at graduated increased risk from that age forward. People who have compromised immune systems already, I think people with diabetes are at risk. But for the most part, something like 80% of cases of COVID are relatively mild and are going to appear to you to be just like a seasonal cold running nose, cough, sore throat, just something that you wouldn't even need to do anything more than take some medicine at home. For the vast majority of cases of people who have or going to get covered, 19 are going to experience a mild case. I guess what I'm trying to say is don't be freaked out. It's very rare to get these extreme cases comparison. That's right. Yeah. Statistics are on your side, and that's how it's treated as well. In mild cases, it's treated sort of like the flu. You get rest, you have a lot of fluids, you try to manage your fever, and generally in the side of a couple of weeks, you will recover in mild cases. Right. One of the problems that I saw, though, Chuck, is that when the case becomes more advanced and you have difficulty breathing, it just kind of like wreaks havoc on your lungs and the air sacs in your lungs, avioli start to become damaged. And when they become damaged, they can very easily get infected and fill with fluid. And then you have pneumonia, and that's an entirely different comorbidity that is difficult to manage, that can kill you, but also isn't necessarily going to kill you, but it's another problem that they're finding can arise out of a COVID-19 infection. Yeah. I think Dave has here down, the latest statistic is about 1% to 3% of infections get to the secondary pneumonia, and if that happens, you have what's called Ards, acute Respiratory Distress syndrome. And the scary part about Ards is 30% to 40% of those cases end up proving fatal. Right. Yeah. Even if you have a ventilator. Right. And one of the things that's kind of confounded people studying this pandemic has been like that every once in a while, a young, healthy person will die from this, and it's very puzzling. It doesn't make a lot of sense. And I saw that there was an article in The Lancet from January 24 that talked about a study that found that in cases where people were severely ill. They found what's called a cytokine storm. Which I know we've talked about before. But basically your body throws everything it has at this infection. And it's actually an overblown immune reaction. So much so that your body attacks its own organs and you can die from multiple organ failure. Again, this is in the worst case scenarios, but it does explain why some younger, healthy people have mysteriously died from this. They think that their body just overreacted to the illness. You know, I know that they have to report accurate findings, but I think one of the things that is certainly not helped with the social distancing is the initial news that it's really only a problem if you're elderly or over a certain age. Right. Since then, the messaging has been really ramped up on millennials and younger people. There are stories every day now where younger people are like, hey, I've got it. This is no joke. Please, please don't take this lightly. Yeah, I've seen some people making videos like that, and good for them for doing that. Yeah, we got a lot of things wrong early on in this outbreak in the United States, for sure. Yes, you could say that. One of the other things I want to point out, though, speaking about numbers and statistics and everything, though, is that when we talk about the rates of mortality, which we'll talk about in a second, it's really important to remember that even if the mortality rate is as high as 3%, that means that 97% of people who get it recover. And one thing I've really been heartened to see, Chuck, is that just in the last couple of days, the news agencies have started to report total cases, and then next to that are recoveries, and then after that are deaths. It used to just be total number of cases and deaths. Now there's a big old bar in between those two that's recovered. People who have come down with Kovi 19 and have now recovered and are no longer ill. Yeah, I mean, the fatality rate is I've seen 4% Dave Has here. Some people place it below 1%, some above two. It's somewhere in that range. And if you want to compare it to SARS, SARS had a fatality rate of about 10%, but it was much more contained. So that's sort of the main difference in what we're seeing here with COVID-19. Yeah. The reason why no one can say at this point what the fatality rate actually is, in part is because the testing was so flubbed early on in the United States that so few people were given tests, the results were skewed. Right. So if you took a test for COVID-19, the chances are you had such terrible symptoms that you went to the hospital and they tested you there. Well, that totally leaves out people who had COVID-19 but had those mild cases and didn't go to hospital, and so they didn't get a test. So this vast number of people who came down with Kov 19. And it was just like the flu or the common cold. Their numbers weren't added to this. Which makes the number of people who were tested and then died really disproportionate to the actual numbers of people who die when they have covid 19. At least in the United States and in South Korea. Which is held up as like this model for how to handle a pandemic from this point forward. They had plentiful widespread testing early on and throughout, and they took a lot of really good containment measures. But because they had really good testing, it became clear that the fatality rate, at least in South Korea, was zero 7%, which is still higher than a seasonal flu, which is usually about zero 1%, but it's not nearly as high as, like you said, 4%. So our understanding of the actual fatality rate is not clear yet, but it's probably not anywhere near as high as 4%. Yeah, that's what the thinking is. And the asymptomatic individuals they are, asympt is what I call them. That's another one of the scary parts about it is it's hard to get accurate numbers on even the number of people that have it because there could be there could be far more people that have it. They just don't develop the symptoms and are still spreading it because they think they're great. Right. They're an enormous problem. And that's one of the things I know we've talked about this before, but like a worst case scenario for a virus is one that infects a person but takes a while for symptoms to show up. Because, as you said, they're asympt walking around infecting everybody else because they can spread it even though they don't know they're sick yet. And by the way, Chuck, Asympt, excellent band name. Not bad, is it? And I see them all with matching Manchucci haircuts. Wow. The whole four or five piece band. Interesting. The Asympts Monchi Chi was that sort of like I remember the song ironically, but I can't picture they're little fuzz heads, weren't they? They were. They were kind of kind of like Mop top, like the Beatles with their matching haircuts early on. It was a little like that, I guess. All right. Are you saying the Beetles were asims? Yeah, I think that was the original name with Pete Best in Hamburg. Wow. All right, let's talk about how it spreads. You did mention earlier, but it bears repeating. This six foot rule is because you are most likely to get infected by being sneezed around, being coughed around and getting those airborne droplets from an infected person. Even though they do know now it can live on surfaces. And they're rapidly trying to test how long it lives on various types of surfaces because that's a big, big deal. Yeah. I didn't know this. An infected surface is called a fomite. Did you know that? I don't think so. So grocery store cart handle fomite plastic from a glove. If it's a plastic glove, it's a foamite. Yeah, cardboard. I know that they're testing cardboard a lot right now because a lot of people obviously are getting home deliveries now. And just quick little non doctor recommendation from Doctor Chuck here. When I get a package now, I go outside with my surgical gloves on, I open it on the front porch and I put a firebomb in that cardboard box and push it into the street. Yeah. Very smart, Chuck. I don't bring that outer box inside, though, at all. No, you send it down the street. A flame in a wheelchair. Like Philip Seymour Hoffman, the Dragon man. That was one of the creepier images in movie history. I think it was great. Especially when he hits the wall and jumps backwards. That's great. There was, I think, an NIH study that looked at fomites. It found that in the air when somebody sneezes or coughs into the air, that aerosolized air or aerosolized virus. Sorry. Can survive for 3 hours in the. Air, 4 hours on copper surfaces, 24 hours on cardboard, two to three days on plastic and stainless steel. The thing is, this is really reassuring because I, too, have been super worried about things like boxes or touching grocery carts or anything like that. The CDC says that up to this point, there have been no documented cases of infection from Fomites. Right. That's huge, man. That's huge. Because that means that if you're not around a sick person, at least up until this point, at least documented wise, if you haven't been around somebody who's sick, you haven't gotten it from touching something. And that's a big thing that people have been talking about, is like, don't touch your face is one way to avoid the spread, which we'll talk about. But don't touch your face after not only being around somebody, but don't touch your face after touching a cardboard box or touching a grocery cart or something like that, because it could be a foamy. But the idea that no one has gotten sick yet from a foamite, I found extraordinarily reassuring. Although it's not like we should go get cocky now, and you can just do whatever, but I feel like I can relax a little bit. Even though I'm going to be just as vigilant, I can be a little more relaxed about it. Yeah, you're not going to go start licking grocery cart handles like you usually do, man. Some of the tastes I've discovered, it's like the impossible colors version of tastes, and almost something that HP. Lovecraft would have trouble describing, like unnamed. Well, that's how you discovered the new form of, umami that had previously been undiscovered. Right? Jumanji. And to be clear, too, this whole cardboard box on the porch thing and the surgical gloves, for me, that's an abundance of caution. Just being like, why not just leave it on the porch? Just because. I don't know. And the surgical gloves thing. And keep in mind, I really literally haven't left the house in ten days, I don't think. But previous to that, I was wearing the gloves, like, when I had to run to the store to get our stuff, just so I didn't have to sanitize my steering wheel and my car door handle and everything like that, every single time I did anything. It's just smart. Yeah, it's really hard to do, too, if you think about it. You're like, Wait, but I need my hand to touch my credit card. But then I need my gloved hand to punch in the numbers for my zip code. You really have to be on point to keep up with it, and even then, it's impossible to be perfect. Yeah. Again, we haven't been out much at all, but when we have had to be out, we're sanitizing our credit cards. When we come back, we spray our door handle. And not like Howard Hughes level stuff, but just trying to be smart. Right. Although Howard Hughes level stuff right now is not the worst idea. Like, I have Phoenix boxes on my feet right now. No judgment, of course. So, Chuck, we were talking about how it spreads. What actually happens with this virus is once somebody coughs or sneezes or licks their hand and wipes an elevator button or something with it that is an infected surface, although apparently people haven't gotten sick from it yet. But more often than not, apparently, you're going to get sick if you're around somebody who coughs or sneezes. And you get it from that aerosolized virus. When that virus enters your body through your mouth, your nose or your eyes, it sets up shop, usually around in your throat, which is where that dry cough starts. And the reason that those spiked proteins that form the coronavirus crown are there is because that's how it interacts with the cell. And the way that it interacts with the cell is through an enzyme that's present on the outer membranes of most cells in the human bodies. And this enzyme is called F-U-R-I-N-I think. So furin activates that protein spike, and that's how the virus can pump its genetic information into the cell, which hijacks the cell's functions and says, you're making copies of me now. And then it just kind of spreads from there. And this is why they think that you can get things like diarrhea, like a cow or a pig, or you can suffer multiple organ failure or it can go after other stuff is because most of the organs and systems in your body have cells that contain furin on their outer envelopes. And so the coronavirus can interact with just about any cell that has furan. Yeah. And it makes me really uncomfortable for you to talk about my outer envelopes and diarrhea and cows and pigs in the same sentence. Yeah, it's all pretty bad. It is a little bad. And we've talked about touching your face, which is tough for me, as a nail biter, and just general orally fixated individual. That six foot distance disinfecting light switches and doorknobs and countertops surely doesn't hurt. No. I know everyone has heard this a gazillion times, but we would be negligent if we didn't talk about washing your hands with soap and water, hot water, for at least 20 seconds. Pretend you're a surgeon and you've seen shows about surgeons. Just pretend like you're in the match camp, okay. And just wash like they wash. There was no chance that we were not going to reference match in this episode. I know there's different songs, like the ABC song or I Don't Want No Scrubs. I guess you could sing like a surgeon if you wanted to. Oh, that's a good one. But at least get in there for 20 seconds. We have hand washing parties at my house several times a day, even though we're not going out. We take our temperature every morning as a family. Because I took that trip to Philly, New York and DC. Right as this was launching to see Bonnie Prince Billy, and we went on two trains, two planes, penn Station in New York, for God's sake, which is already the filthiest place on earth. Sure. And I was not freaking out, but I was definitely at a higher risk than the rest of my family. So I've been watching stuff, and tomorrow actually will be my end of my 14 day window. So unless something really happens overnight, then I feel pretty good. Man, I'm glad to hear that. That's great. That's got to be a big relief. It is. You know, I try not to focus on it, but my wife and daughter didn't go to Penn Station right. And didn't eat a Philly cheesesteak at two in the morning. Right, I know. And yet they could have suffered for it. Yeah, totally. So I think a lot of people are counting down days. I know. Yummy is from this past Thursday, which is the last time her dad went out to get supplies from the grocery store. And she's like, nervously counting to 14 from Thursday, just trying to will him not to get sick. And I think that's just kind of like everybody's got these little countdown clocks going on right now of their own. It's just talk about, like an anxious thing to do while you're sitting around in your home, not leaving you waiting for days to pass. Right, exactly. You're counting down the days in the hopes that an illness doesn't pop up in the meantime. What a strange, horrible thing for everybody to be doing right now. Yeah, absolutely. We should mention masks really quickly, too. The CD says there's no need to wear a mask unless you are sick or you're caring for someone who's sick. If you're healthy, if you're not sick, if you're keeping yourself clean, masks aren't necessary. You shouldn't go out and buy hundreds of these things. I'm not going to judge anyone. If they had some and they want to wear them out, more power to you. Some people say that they wear them to keep from touching their face because they're early fixated, so there's something to that. But the rush on buying things like surgical masks has put a dent in the medical supply chain, which is not cool now. And I have to say. Like. I know we're not getting political or whatever. But I read a New York Times article with this guy. It was about masks and the mask shortage. And there was this one manufacturer in Texas who said. Man. Short of setting myself on fire in front of the White House. I've done everything I can to warn the government that we are in a really precarious position. He said, I told the Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the Trump administration that we rely on 95% of our medical masks from overseas, and if a pandemic happens, we're going to be reliant on other countries who are dealing with their own stuff to send us masks. And he said that's even the case with American manufacturers who move their operations overseas for cheaper labor. And in fact, there's a company that makes medical masks. It's an American company that moved their jam to France. And France, under this pandemic, said, oh, by the way, we've taken over your factory, and none of these masks are leaving France. You can't send them anywhere. It's illegal. There are even though you're an American company, this is in France, and we just nationalized everything. So this guy has been warning everybody. I can't imagine what that's like, to have seen this coming so clearly and to just not be listened to, because exactly what he predicted is panned out. Boy all right, well, let's take another break, and we'll talk about containing the spread. Everyone's favorite two words these days, social distancing. Yeah. And a little bit more about Kobe 19 right after this. Stuff you should know. Josh and Shawn. Stuff you should know. So I just want to say, everybody, I think it's laughable anyone, including me, who thought that I wasn't going to get political at all in this episode. Well, you indicted the past three administrations, so that's okay. That seems fair and balanced. Fair and balanced. So until we have a vaccine, we can only contain Cobn 19. It is about twice as contagious as the seasonal flu. Yes. That's a big deal. Yeah, it's very contagious. And like we said, the big fear right now, obviously, is loss of life. But the real big fear is that the medical system becomes overwhelmed and treatable infections can become deadly because we don't have the resources that we need. Right. So in addition to social distancing, if that one isn't the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year yeah. Then flattening the curve has got to be it's one of those they're going to tie for first, probably. And we should probably explain what flattening the curve is for the three people who aren't already familiar with it. Shall we? Yeah, go ahead. All right. So flattening the curve is this idea that we're going to get X number of infections. Because this is a pandemic, a lot of people are going to get infected by coronavirus and become sick from it. Right. But what we can manage is the time scale that that number of infections takes place over. So let's say we know that an area is going to get, just statistically speaking, a thousand infections from this pandemic. It's way different to have those thousand infections all at once over the course of one week than it is to have that same number of infections, 1000, over the course of ten weeks. That's right. Because of the strain that it puts on medical staff and medical equipment. We have a limited amount of medical staff and medical equipment, and if they're all called for at the same time. That's a problem. But we can reuse that medical staff, we can reuse that medical equipment over the span of time. So a ventilator can support two patients who need it for a week each over the course of two weeks, but it can only support one patient of those two if they need it on the same week. So Flattening the Curve is all about making this number of infections that we're surely going to see spread out over time rather than happening all at once. And the main mechanism for Flattening the Curve is social distancing, which is just stay away from one another to cut down on that rate of infection. Yeah. And you know what? We try to remain judgment free on the show and tell people to live their life. But this is one instance where if you are not social distancing, if you are going out to bars and restaurants and having gatherings, then you're doing a very bad thing right now. You're doing something extraordinarily selfish. And I know a lot of people are like, well, I'm young and it's not going to get me. And even if it does get me, I'm young and healthy. I'll be fine. It'll be like a cold. The problem is you're the same person who's going out in public and then touching an elevator button and making that person sick. Or if you're sick and you're out running around, you're coughing, you're sneezing, you're being gross, and you're aerosolizing the air with the virus, which can stay viable for 3 hours. So you're getting other people sick and those other people might not survive that covid 19 case that you've given them because they're not young and they're not healthy. And the idea that you're just flouting that yeah, I think maybe blood boiling is the right term. Yeah, it really has been pretty upsetting to see even in my own super cool neighborhood, where people seem to do the right thing most times and on the neighborhood pages, on the Facebook, people are talking and doing the right thing. But even up until like a few days ago, I was driving through my little neighborhood area where the bars and restaurants are, and some of them are still full of people. And I just like, I want to put a loudspeaker on top my car, like in Slacker in the link ladder film and just drive around saying very bad things to people in public. When I think of loudspeakers in cars, I think of Blues Brothers. Yeah, that too. Sure. And that was probably slacker was probably stolen from that anyway. Got you. Did they use a cop car in Slacker? No, it's at the very beginning of Slacker. There's this guy actually he probably didn't steal it because I think it was a real dude in Austin that would just drive around sort of preaching to the masses from inside of his car. But we need that guy right now to get people in their houses, man, it's like it's a couple of weeks. Just do it. Just do it. It's easy, especially for two guys who can continue to work from home to say that. Absolutely sure. I don't want to give the impression that we don't have any sympathy and our hearts don't go out to people who do work at those bars and restaurants and need that money to survive. And so staying at home, and if everybody else stays at home really deeply affects their potential to hang in there and survive. That's not lost on us. That's not lost on anybody, I don't think. Yeah, and I think the thing that is the most blood boiling are people who are going out and like, not doing anything that has any economic impact. They're just being jerks. They're like playing basketball or they're just going to the beach. That kind of stuff is what drives me the most crazy. Yeah, just knock it off. The heartening thing to see has been how many people are stepping up to contribute to their local favorite restaurants and bars, whether it's a go fund me or supporting their curbside pickups or just venmo your favorite server. Some money that's happening all over the place to try and keep people solvent while this is going on. But the big picture is if we don't do this now, it's just going to be more drawn out and people are going to be more affected economically. So the right thing to do is just to shut it down for a little while. Yeah, I mean, from everything I've seen, what we're doing now, this kind of halfhearted approach to social distancing and quarantining, like, we're getting all of the negative economic effects but little to none of the public health benefits. So we're doing it in the exact possible worst way right now. Yeah. I saw one doctor say that if you could literally just hit a pause button in the United States right now, there would be no covered 19 in two weeks. Yeah. If we could freeze everybody just freeze 6ft apart for 14 days, the virus would stop in its tracks. And we've seen this is the thing. This isn't like conjecture, this isn't philosophy or modeling or anything like that. This is based on what we've seen in other countries like Singapore. Hong Kong. China. Even Japan has done a really good job of quarantining where they've basically figured out the way to contain this is extensive and widespread testing for the disease and then really strict and really well followed and meticulous social distancing and quarantining. People taking it seriously so that you can test the people to see who have it and isolate them. Quarantine them. Treat them to keep them away from everybody else and test other people as time goes on so that you can have people living a normal life because they're not sick. And the people who are sick have been identified and are being warrantied and isolated while they're being treated. Yeah, it's very easy to look at a place like Singapore and look at a country like Italy who did not do it right. And America. Italy was just before us. These are two great examples of the difference that this can make. As of today, Singapore has 558 cases. And despite that, I just saw a new announcement today that they are closing schools and closing entertainment venues just because they're really trying to be super proactive and get out in front of Italy. The infection rate was almost nothing throughout February. Yeah, this is mind boggling. And then in March, it spiked to 25,000 new cases a week, two weeks later. Yeah. These are numbers that should speak for themselves, and you shouldn't have to talk people into social distancing. Yet here we are. It is saddening. I guess the big problem, again, is the idea that if a lot of people become sick, if you have a spike in cases like Italy saw, where it suddenly goes up to 25,000 new cases a week, a lot of those people have to be hospitalized. And it stretches and overtaxes and eventually overwhelms the healthcare structure in the country. And in the United States, every town has a brand new gleaming hospital and lots of doctors. But it turns out, if you look at the statistics, the United States has a paltry number of hospital beds per 1000 people. We have 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people, which even sounds small, but if you put it in context, it's really small. Japan and Korea have the most they have 13.1 and 12.3 hospital beds per thousand people. Next is Russia at 8.1 and Germany at 8.0. And then you go there's a lot of countries in between Germany and the United States, which finally pops up with 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. The problem is that's just hospital beds. That's just a bed to put people in. That's not specialized hospital beds. Like people with a bad case of covenant, 19 frequently need, like, an ICU bed. And so already in the United States, in hard hit areas like New York, we're starting to see ICU rooms that were meant to hold one patient, starting to be tripled and quadrupled up with patients who all have coveted 19 just to try to give them the advanced level of care that they need because we don't have enough beds. And so that's why not social distancing, why just going out and carrying on like nothing's going on is just such a ridiculously, arrogant thing to do at a time like this? Yeah. And I feel like every day it's gotten a little bit better. You really have to be pretty selfish. And what's the word? There's a word that I can't say on the air for when you've got a lot of gumption to do something despite everyone saying you shouldn't. Guts. Not guts, because that involves bravery. Nerve. You got a nervous nerve. There you go. Yeah. Like, as of today, when we're recording this, which is two days before release, if you're still out doing things like that now, then you really have got a special brand of nerve. Yeah. And conversely, too, we should point out to self quarantine is a gift. That's a gift you're giving other people. Nobody is telling you there's no Marshall Law. You're not going to be shot on site or arrested or whatever if you leave your house, if you've been exposed to COVID-19. But the official guidelines from the CDC and the World Health Organization is if you know you've been around somebody who has tested positive for COVID-19, they ask you to self quarantine for 14 days, because 14 days is the longest, as far as we know, that it takes for symptoms to show up. That's why people are counting down 14 days. Right. So if you hang out by yourself, isolated away from everybody else, like you were doing for 14 days, and you don't get sick, you don't have covet and you're not spreading it, you're not a risk factor any longer. But to stop your life and to say, I'm not going outside because I don't want to risk other people getting sick because I'm not sure if I have it or not, that is an enormous gift to give to people. And I mean it's what you did. My friends Mitch and Patrick, dirty Mitch from the Scabies episode, he and his husband Patrick were exposed to somebody with COVID-19. They have no idea if they had it or not, but the first thing they did was self quarantine. And they just committed to giving up 14 days of their life, of going outside, of interacting with other people, of doing whatever just because they didn't know, in part because testing is not widely available in the United States. So this is the alternative. It's on us to make that decision and that choice, and it is a really kind thing to do. So hats off to YouTube, Chuck, for doing that. Well, hats off to everyone doing the right thing. And you're right. Unless you're rich and famous, it can be hard to get a test right now, which is another problem. But we're not going to go down that rabbit hole either. Well, we've been at it for close to an hour, maybe. Let's wrap up with some talk of vaccine. Okay, obviously a vaccine is the ultimate end goal for all this. There are a lot of organizations working all over the world rapidly trying to develop and test vaccines. The National Institute of Health, Walter Reed, Army Institute of Research, and countless others are trying apparently the government is trying to cut a lot of red tape to speed things up, but it still has to go through clinical trials. You can't just rush something to market as much as everyone would like that. And it could take a long time. It could take up to a year to get results of these trials. I saw that the NIH vaccine trials could be in full swing by the fall, and that one has promised the mRNA 1273 because it was being developed for MERS. So they kind of had a head start. Remember, MERS is a type of novel coronavirus. So they're like, this might work for this SARS cove. Two coronavirus, we'll find out. So hopefully by the fall, that one might be just banging. Who knows? That's what we need is a banging, robust vaccine. Right. Lots of chains, gold chains, a nice swagger to it. Just banging. Yeah. And I don't think this is getting too political, although it is a little bit. But I just did a little last minute research and found out there's this drug called what's the name of it? Clerk no rim deserve. So this is not FDA approved for Coba 19. It's still got to go through the clinical trials, but it has been used as an emergency measure to treat a couple of cases seemingly effectively. And they're expecting some results from a trial in April. And I just learned yesterday, I just kind of dug into this drug yesterday. The FDA granted the company who makes a Gilead Sciences orphan drug status. And this is from the Orphan Drug Act, which is meant for rare diseases only. Coronavirus, or Coba 19 is obviously not speeding up to not be a rare disease. But there's a little loophole in that orphan Drug act. If you get exclusivity, which is what happened, they granted them exclusivity to profit exclusively for seven years on this drug. Right. If you get that in and that designation in before it hits that 200,000 person threshold, which means it's not a rare disease anymore, then it sticks. And so yesterday, the FDA granted Gilead Sciences exclusivity for seven years, which obviously the fear there is that it could lead to a block on supplies for generic versions. It could be super expensive. And at the end of this article that I read, I found out that a man named Joe Grogan, who serves on the White House task force for Coronavirus, lobbied for Gilead Sciences from 2017, which is always a little bit concerning. These are the guys who have come up with an antiviral drug that has shown promised to treat Covasin. That's right. And they have now, as of yesterday, been granted that seven year window to profit exclusively and potentially block generic suppliers for making this. And here's the real kicker here's. The cherry on the rotten cherry on top is that they were developing this for Ebola. So it was developed with $79 million of taxpayer money. Oh, boy. And now they have been granted exclusive status for seven years. That's almost as much of a bedtime story as hearing about senators who were briefed about the pandemic and then went and sold all of their sold a bunch of stock before the stock market crashed without telling anybody about it, while also downplaying the pandemic, too. Yeah. Send them to jail. Send them to jail. There was a time in this country, it wasn't very long ago, where people who did that were stripped of any honor. We're basically drummed out of town on a rail by irate citizens. There was a time in this country man, that was Grandpa Clark all the way. That's right. I suddenly just drew patches on my elbows. I think Cardigans about to sprout out of them. Before we wrap up, I would like just to know your biggest fear and all this. What has been your biggest fear? Loved ones dying. That's my biggest fear. I think economics is a huge one. I'm really scared about that and the long lasting effects, people losing their jobs and just the setbacks that comes from that. But ultimately, people I love and care about dying, especially unnecessarily. Like the idea that we could have done some things differently and there would have been abundant medical care. That's my greatest fear. What about yours? Well, I've seen in too many movies about domino effect type things, obviously worried about friends and loved ones. But my biggest fear has been worst case scenarios, which is everything from the US military getting a large outbreak and somebody like, I don't know, another hostile country saying now is a great chance. Oh, jeez, Chuck, I didn't even thought about that. Or medical personnel or police forces. Things getting disrupted so much with our health professionals or our people who keep us safe, that things become really scary on a citizen level. So, like, people are what scare me. Yeah. And it becoming like the Purge or something like that. Right. That's what scares me. That's great. That was a good one to end on, Chuck, because the whole reason we do this episode was to reassure people and then just pull the rug right out from under them at the last minute. But you know what? Having said that, I'm always consistently reminded of the ability and the will of not only Americans, but human beings to do the right thing. And the vast, vast majority of people will come together and not go into attack mode. Yeah, I believe that. I think that people are generally good overall, and there are definitely bad people out there, but I think the good ones outnumber them and when pushed against the wall, the good ones can fight back pretty effectively. Also. That kind of raises another point, too, that I found it's really easy to just kind of let your mind run away and focus on all of the terrible stuff that can happen or all of the terrible stuff that is happening. You have to exercise your mind to not do that. You have to stay on top of it and remind yourself that you can also just as easily think positively, too. And you got to. Try to do that in times like these, for sure. And in times like these, I make it sound like this happens every couple of years or something. This is definitely monumental and historic and once in a lifetime, hopefully. Yeah. One other thing. If you think that you might have coveted 19, I found there's a self triage tool. They say that if you think you have it, you should call your doctor, your hospital, 911, and say, I think I have COVID-19. There's an online tool now, gehrco vidakidolabs.com Garcovidtriage akitolabs.com. And it's just basically a questionnaire that says, hey, this isn't a diagnosis, but this might give you a clear view into whether you're just sitting there freaking yourself out or else this is actually something you might need to call your doctor or your hospital about. Right. Good stuff. And hopefully all of this will be a weird, distant memory not too far from now. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Yeah, you know what? I think instead of listener mail on this one, let's just encourage people to be kind to one another. Be cautious, be smart, help out someone in need, if you can, and just hang in there. I know we have listeners right now that have coveted 19. Statistically, that's just got to be the case. So be well and please take care of one another. Yes. And think positive, everybody. Think positive. If you want to get in touch with us while you're hanging out, socially distancing, being responsible, you can send us an email. You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom, maybe wipe it off with some Lysol wipes or something first and send it to Stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon Music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today."
d94cb53e-361e-11ea-91dc-db411663a86d	Short Stuff: Haint Blue	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-haint-blue	Haint Blue is a kind of robin's egg color that you might commonly find on porches of the low country of the Southeastern United States. But what does it have to do with ghouls and ghosts? Listen and learn!	Haint Blue is a kind of robin's egg color that you might commonly find on porches of the low country of the Southeastern United States. But what does it have to do with ghouls and ghosts? Listen and learn!	Wed, 17 Jun 2020 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=169, tm_isdst=0)	10065749	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Ah, summer school's out. The sun is shining. The daylight is longer. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music that's so good it's Criminal Morbid. Part true crime and part comedy, morbid takes you on a journey from murderous mysteries to major laughs, all in the same week. Hosted by autopsy technician Elena Ercart and hairstylist Ash Kelly, this chart topping series will have you hooked before you know it. Listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. Hey, welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's kind of hanging around us like an unwanted spirit, but we doused her in blue paint as if she were wearing fur in New York in 1985, and she's taken off. Wow. That sounded almost scripted. It was not, man. Of course it's not. It was right off of the cerebral cortex, the executive function, aka the old cuff. Yes. The problem is I just diverted so much brain power to the cerebral cortex that my brain stem made me pee my pants. Have you ever heard of this blue tradition? Sure. Okay. I didn't know how much people knew about this. This is something I was familiar with because, well, for many reasons. But one of my good friends, Mita, is from Charleston and has a hat, blue porch ceiling, and I sort of liked the tradition, and now I know a little bit more about it. Yeah. I mean, Atlanta is not exactly like in the low country, like along the Georgia coast or South Carolina coast, but it's close enough that you could see it kind of trickling in, and I think it does. Agreed. So what you're talking about is a specific kind of paint color that you very frequently see in those areas in the southeastern southeast. Doesn't get much more southeast than that. You end up in the Atlantic if you keep going yes. That you will see on people's ceilings of their porches. Like this. Very pretty. Like light blue. One of my favorite shades of blue. Me too. Not necessarily hain't blue. I'm not like hank blue is my favorite color. Nothing like that. But any kind of, like, light blue, pale blue, robins egg blue. Yeah, all those are very pretty colors. There's a purpose to this, though. Like this pink color on the ceiling, though, right? Yeah. So the word haint, they think it may have come from the word haunt, but a hat in this low country culture, which we'll get into more in a SEC. It was a restless ghost, and it's a ghost. I thought all ghosts were sort of like this, that has not moved on to whatever world lies beyond and is still here to haunt the living. Yeah. And haints are specific to a culture of slaves imported from western Central Africa whose ancestors has kind of formed this community along the low country and who still have this very robust culture that believes in haints. The difference to me is between ghosts, as we understand them in haint is hate seem to be much more like all up in your business kind of thing. And they like to mess with you a lot more than like a ghost who's tied to a house and is replaying their murder over and over every night at midnight. Yeah, I've spent a little bit of time this one weekend with some gullah geechy folks, and they are really awesome and rich with tradition and have this really cool accent. Dude, I'll bet their food is amazing, too. I know, the food was terrible. I'm kidding. I was genuinely surprised. It's like some of the best food I've ever had in my life. I would guess so. I mean, low country boil. You just had me right there. Yeah. So hoodoo, there's a specific type of voodoo that goes on the low country called hoodoo or root work or conjure. And that's a practice where they use a lot of herbs, in this case haint blue, to protect people from these evil hints coming into I mean, sometimes it's a little lighter. Sometimes it gets pretty heavy and scary. Yeah. So there's a boohag, which is one of the best names for a haint ever. They seem to be like, what is that sleep paralysis tradition from Ireland or Scotland or somewhere over there. I can't remember. There's like a tradition of an old witchy woman standing on your chest while you're sleeping with babadook. I don't think so. But related, maybe the wife of the babadook, but we talked about in the sleep paralysis episode, that's probably where that came from, was having sleep paralysis. And this sounds very familiar because the Boohag will stand on your chest while you're sleeping, too, and try to suffocate you. Yeah. And also steal your skin and wear your skin during the day so they can blend in. And why there hasn't been a modern horror movie called the Boohag yet is beyond me. I don't know either right. Or even just hate. Yeah, so that's one kind of hate. And there's things you can do, like using hoodoo or root work or whatever. People wander around, like, carrying little bags of roots and talisman to ward off hates. But if you actually have a hat that you're having to deal with in your everyday life that you've attracted somehow, one of the things you would do specifically with the boohack is they have like an obsessive compulsive disorder, according to the golgi chi, and they have to count. So if you do things like throw rice on your bedroom floor or whatever, the Boohag might come to sit on your chest and suffocate you, but instead she's going to end up sitting there counting rice all night, and then the sun is going to come up and she's going to be toast. Where have we talked about this before because I have a very distinct memory about something being distracted because they had to count whatever you threw. It was the Eastern and Central European vampires that had that same was it? I believe so, yeah. I knew it sounded familiar. Should we take a break? Yeah. Was that sudden? That was like a left hook. All right, go gather yourself and we'll be right back. Okay. Hey, summer is here, my friend, which means school is out, the sun is shining bright, the days are longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. Yeah. Whether you're road tripping or you're relaxing by the pool, you can tune into the podcast here. It's on Amazon Music that's so good, it's criminal. Morbid. That's right. It's part true crime and part comedy. Morbid takes you on a journey through murderous mysteries and major laughs, all in the same week. Yeah. From the paranormal to the pretty spooky and everything in between, host Selena Erkhart and Ash Kelly cover it all. And with two episodes released each week, you'll be hooked on this chart topping series before you know it. You can listen to new episodes of Morbid one week early, only on Amazon Music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. 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 in 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.com SYSK and start your free trial today. And then when you're ready to launch, use our offer codessysk and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace. Comsysk. All right, we're back. Let's talk about more hints. There's another hint called a plate i, which also sounds very scary. They are shapeshifters, and they can be anything it says here in the House of Works article, anything from a beautiful woman to a two headed hog. And the scary thing about a plateau is that there aren't a lot of defenses against the Plat eye save maybe leaving some whiskey out or pouring it on the ground or something. And the platye may stop to lick that up, right? But otherwise you're out of luck with the Platyle. Yes, they say that once the plate is attached itself to, there's not a lot you can do. You can maybe search yourself and see what kind of, as this one expert put it, what kind of grave spiritual offense you've committed. Like, what have I done? I'm trying to make it right. I also saw that you might end up with the plate attached to you if you go looking for buried Confederate treasure, because they say that plateau are frequently ghosts of people who were murdered and improperly buried by a Confederate treasure in order to protect it indefinitely. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So be careful if you're going to go looking for Confederate treasure buried in the low country, take a little whiskey with you and pour some out for the plate. That's right. So that sort of brings us to this haint blue. And I'm sure you're wondering when you guys are going to talk about the title of this podcast, and it's now, and we did a great show on indigo, and so we don't need to go over all of that again. But indigo, just very briefly, was a plant that thrived in the low country, and slaves were used to cultivate the indigo, and it was a big, big cash crop for the south. It's the reason Georgia legalized slavery, remember? Yeah, that's right. So this blue was available to the gulagigi people, even though the color and the spiritual power of this blue is sort of all over the world. But they would have this blue, and it sort of became the color that they would use because it reminded them of the sky and of the ocean. And the idea was that you paint this on your porch or on a door maybe, and it tricks these spirits into thinking that they are in water or they can't cross or they're in the sky or something like that. Yeah. Because there's one thing you can say about Hanks, and that is that they're kind of gullible. It sounds like at the very least, they have a lot of faults and flaws that can be manipulated by people who know what to look for. Yeah. They're dumb. The problem is if you're visiting somebody on their porch and they have a haint blue ceiling on their porch, there might be a hint hanging out in there. So they didn't make it into the house. They could still be on the porch. So FYI, never visit your neighbor. And we should point out that this has got a rich tradition in this low country culture, but it has very much become part of the mainstream and a very kind of it color for front porch ceilings and stuff like that. And there's nothing wrong with that. But I think educate yourself, know where it comes from, know a little bit about the tradition if you're going to do something like that. I think. Yeah, totally. I mean, at the very least, be able to say what that is instead of, like, pretty blue. Who knows where it comes from? Who cares? I had a Volkswagen Beetle that was robin's egg blue. Such a great color, man. It was gorgeous. Tough to beat a good robin's egg blue. Agreed. So way to go. Golgichi, people. That's pretty awesome as far as traditions go. And keep up the good work, battling Haints. You got anything else? Nothing else. All right, well, if you want to hear more about this, start this episode over, because short stuff is out. 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."
c3f71a2c-5460-11e8-b38c-cf272273e7b0	SYSK Selects: How Maglev Trains Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-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 what's taking so long for us to get aboard in this classic episode.	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 what's taking so long for us to get aboard in this classic episode.	Sat, 01 Feb 2020 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=1, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=32, tm_isdst=0)	29551892	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hello, friends. It's me, Josh. And for this week's SYSK Selects, I've chosen a super cool episode that has it all engineering, strange physics, Elon Musk. What else do you want? What more could you ask for? Also, by the way, I'm pretty sure that the contest we talk about in the listener mail is no longer around, since it's many years old. At any rate, enjoy this episode about the future of transportation. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and this is Charles W. Chuck. Chuckers Bryan. Is that what you're going with? Sure. Yeah. I might bust right into CC rider Elvis style. I already gone with the Muppet show. Oh, yeah. Last time we put on makeup. Yeah. What was that? Somebody's giant stomach sounded like what was that? That's weird. Did you guys hear that? Actually, yeah. That was crazy. That could have been Jerry's stomach. There's no way. All right, what's your intro? Stalling. Chuck. Yes. Well, you remember our Magnet podcast? Yes. I personally thought it was a great episode because we explained how magnets work. Yeah, it's 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. Yeah, I remember doing the quantum levitation. Was that it? No, 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, Maggie? The basic principle in 1 minute behind magnetic levitation. Well, it's pretty much what we're going to do here. Yeah. Except slightly longer. Yeah. So that was my intro, but not an 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. Yes. 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 DuckDuck Go, 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 heard of that. So basically, Elon Musk, who is like our good friend yeah, he's 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 or whatever that beats twelve people or something comfortably, and you suck all the air out of it. 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 Magilev is we're talking here, but Magaliv, the great advantage it has is that it supposedly goes faster than the normal steel wheel train oh, yeah. 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. Yes, 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 a 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 exactly how fast are going, because I looked and I was like, well, it 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's 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 tax? 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 was saying there's at least seven different kinds of technology here that everyone's calling maglev 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 systems. 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, and 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 actually company is called Trans Rapid International. There's also a Transrapid 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. 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. 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 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. 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 so. 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 and immediately under. 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. It 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 a 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 maglev. 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 cool superconductor, right? Yes. And 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, hold bunch of magnets, say, on a train, the magnet will float, it will levitate. That's right. And that's the electrodynamics 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 the big that's 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, like, 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? That's Back to 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 the land speed record for Maglev trains. Right. It's the Jr Toky. That's the railway company. The Jr token 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 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. This is 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. Yeah. Because that magnetic field will wreak havoc and you probably won't live. It will shut you down. And then there's the induct 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 as we get as you go out to the store and getting two magnets and putting their, like, 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, south, east, 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. So you have your extra strong magnetic field that can produce this misery 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. It'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. 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 magleft 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. I thought it might have been maglev, 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. Yeah. And there's one proposed between DC and Baltimore. La. And Las Vegas. Yeah, La in Vegas, and I think one from Pittsburgh to some places, but I'm not sure exactly where. I saw that one, too. I don't remember where it might have been. DC. To Pittsburgh. Philly. Well, hold on. We're getting ahead of ourselves, man. Oh, 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. 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. They've 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, so it's like everything should have been 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 was another one in Shanghai on that line. That is an operation. Yes. 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's not pony any money for it. I think we'll see it in our lifetime. They think 10 billion between DC. And Baltimore. Yes. Although they don't have a firm cause 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 psyched, I guess, because 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 it had a 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, 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, I was just talking about what they asked me to talk about. Yes. I was at McDonald's one day when I said that I was waiting in line at McDonald's. Yes. 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 us to go 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 13, 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? Yeah. 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 in 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 syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com Stuffyoushouldnow, or you can send us an email 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. 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."
c37fa852-5460-11e8-b38c-1b01c9010bdc	SYSK Selects: Are We in a Cyberwar?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/sysk-selects-are-we-in-a-cyberwar	There's a secret war going on around us, and it's happening on a daily basis. The Air Force has a unit specifically designed to carry out and defend against cyberwar. Go deep into this alarming type of war in this classic episode.	There's a secret war going on around us, and it's happening on a daily basis. The Air Force has a unit specifically designed to carry out and defend against cyberwar. Go deep into this alarming type of war in this classic episode.	Sat, 17 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=17, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=229, tm_isdst=0)	28321419	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey there, everyone. It's me, Josh. And for this week S-Y-S-K selects, I've chosen a classic episode on cyber war. It's almost certainly hopelessly out of date by now, but it is an interesting intro to cyber warfare. And we learned that Chuck hates the word stuck's net. So listen out for that, kick back and enjoy this classic episode of Stuff You Should Know. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me, as always, in Charles debut. Bryant we call him an authority on cybersecurity, the Internet, everything about it. Yeah. An expert. You would say that's, right. Hey, should we say hello to our latest celebrity fan who we just learned today that Miss Kristen Bell did lovely and enchanting and nerdy. Kristen Bell. Is she nerdy? Very nerdy. Like, pride herself on I mean, it doesn't surprise me that she listens to the show. Yeah. Because she's on record as being a big nerd. That's cool. Which is one reason I like her a lot. And she's curating a Newsweek page, right? Yeah. Like, things she likes or kind of one of those deals that they do in magazines now. Yeah. And she listed us. That's pretty awesome. How about that? Thank you very much for that. I'm a huge fan of a Party down what she was in and other stuff that she's been in. Forgetting Sarah Marshall as a good yeah. And you got to see her sloth video online that she did on The Ellen Show. It's pretty funny. Okay. Highly recommended. Okay, so that's all I got. That's all the sucking up I'm going to do. Should we say hi to another fan, slightly less famous but pretty cool? Yes. Sam, do you want to give a little backstory? Are you giving some backstory here? Sure. We had a live trivia event here in Atlanta a couple of years ago, and at the event was a little teenage fan named Sam. Teenage? You mean like just post tween? Yeah, like 13. And his mom brought him, and he's a big fan. He's just like, really sweet kid. Mom is very sweet as well. Yeah. Very nice family. Flash forward a couple of years. We got a south by southwest. They're Sam again. Apparently, mom drove him to Austin to come see our live podcast. Yeah, they weren't there to see. I spoke to mom afterwards and was like, so what else are you guys going to see? She's like, Nothing. We're going back crazy. I was like, what else did you see? She's like, Nothing. They came to see us. So then we were like, all right, we got to think of something for Sam to do because he proved his medal, and Sam wrote in and sent his resume and, like, all the reasons we should put them to work. And it's just like, dude, the future is secure. If kids are like, Sam, for sure. I'm not worried about a thing anymore. Yeah. So we racked our brains, and we found out there's, like, a surprising amount of adult only tasks that we do, like, at any given time. Sure. And we're like, all right, we have to figure out something that is age appropriate for Sam. That's right. So, long story short, I was getting kind of thin on Podcast Topics. I put Sam on the case, and he sent me, like, a stellar, stellar list with reasons why we should do this. And this is the first one. This is one. And he had a lot of overlap on ones we had already recorded that aren't out yet. So that just goes to show you that Sam is, like, he gets the show. Right. So as Sam's picking these out, we're going to let you know if this is a Sam one. But this is going on in the summer. We're going to call this the Summer of Sam. That's right. Sam's choice. All right, so that's the longest intro ever. That wasn't even the intro, man. Well, let's get to cyber wars then, bossy. Chuck, have you ever been to Bellingham, Washington? Okay. I have not. Have you been to Washington? Been Seattle? Isn't that where Van Nostrin lives? Or is it Oregon? No, he's Washington. Okay. So in Bellingham, Washington, on June 10, 1999, at the Olympic Pipeline Company, a systems control and data acquisition system. There are systems twice in there. Okay. But a SCADA system, which is basically like a computer program that can make a valve turn or turn something off this is mechanical, right. From digital binary instructions. Right? Sure. This Olympic pipeline company system was operating on this type of program, and something went wrong, and one of their pipes started leaking a lot, like millions of gallons of gasoline, and part of it erupted into a fireball and killed three people, injured many others. And they went back and looked at it. I think it was just a system malfunction. Right. But the fact that this came along, this happened because of this system control, and it happened in 1099 as the.com bubble was starting to grow and, like, the Internet was really becoming a huge thing. People who are into cybersecurity now point to this as evidence of exactly what somebody could do during a cyber attack. Wow. Even though they think this was just an accident. Right. Irrelevant. Okay. But they weren't, like, pointing to that as no. Okay. No, they don't think that had anything to do. But they were saying, this is what it would look like if somebody had wanted to attack. Like, this is what a cyber attack would look like. That makes sense because it's not just the Olympic pipeline Company that's using these systems all over the United States. Companies, law enforcement agencies, military banks, public works all of these things are all running on what amounts to windows. Yeah. It's as simple as that. Yeah, Microsoft systems, many of them. And as Jonathan Strickland wrote this from Tech stuff the article yeah. And as Strickland points out, a couple of things. Microsoft has been kind of chastised over the years for their security or lack of security in some of their programs. And the other thing he points out is the Internet grew so fast and everyone got on board so quickly that it kind of outpaced what we could even do security wise. Right. It was all of a sudden government agencies and power grids and emergency services and weapons systems, water and fuel pipelines, all this stuff is running on computers and a lot of it through the Internet. And we don't quite know how to guard against a cyber attack. No. And apparently even as far as the knowledge of how to guard against cyber attacks goes, the United States is lacking compared to China and Russia. So we're kind of in this really weird position right now where we've realized that all of the ponies are hooked to a single basket of eggs and all it's going to take is a couple of black cat firecrackers to scare all the horses off. That's the best analogy I can come up with. Did you just think of that or did you I just thought of that. My imagination is back. I can tell you where I time travel to. You awesome. Where? I can't think of it. All right, let's go back a little bit in time. I don't think we need the Way Back Machine for this because we're just going to we can just walk outside. Yeah, that'd be a waste of time for the Way Back machine. 1997, some pretty smart people caught on early that, hey, we could be vulnerable to something like a cyber attack. So let's look into this. Let's put a red team on it. Red team is our friends that act as enemies to try you know how they hire these people to break into your home? Yes. Those are red teams, basically. Right? Like from Star Wars. Yeah, exactly. So let's get a red team. Let's name this mission something really cool out of a football playbook. Let's name it project eligible Receiver. Do you know how many times I had to look at that before it finally sunk in what words I was looking at? Oh, really? It does look kind of funny. It looks like Eleanor Rigby when you glance at it. At least I think so. Yeah. It doesn't to me. I was thinking more of like a radio receiver or something like that. No, I think it just means about football. No, it's totally diligent. I read this many times before. I was like, oh, okay, so a lot of this is still classified, so we don't know everything. But basically they hired some hackers, which is what you do to test your security. They being the Department of Defense. Yeah, Department of Defense saying, hey, can you nerds hack into the Pentagon system, and afterwards we won't assassinate. Exactly. And the nerds were like, just watch this. And it took three days before the Pentagon even knew that they were being cyber attacked by the Red Team. Pretty successful and very sobering. Yeah. So it was, I guess, kind of an eye opener for the DoD, and I'm sure used it to step up security. Not fast enough, though, because after this Red Team attack, operation Eligible Receiver, an actual attack, which they later came to call what was it? Moonlight Maze. Yes. This is one year after that, the test. A year after it, somebody launched an attack, and it was, I guess, what's probably the most typical kind of cyber attack, where you insert some sort of software to basically spy and get files and gather data and download sensitive materials. Right. Yes. And apparently it took two years before NASA, the Pentagon, and other agencies in the US. Government noticed that. Accidentally noticed that they were being spied on, cyber wise. Yeah. They got data, like strategic maps, troop assignments and positions. Not good. Right. Very scary. And they traced it back to Russia. Doesn't necessarily mean that it came from Russia in its origin, but at least that's where they traced it to. And this is cyber warfare. Like, it's happening. It's been going on since the 90s. Pretty much. Yeah. It's not is a cyber war coming? It's like, how do we prevent a cyber war from bringing us all down? Pretty much. And apparently from looking into this, there's, like, two camps. There's, like, a gloom and doom camp where it's like, yeah, somebody really wants to mess things up. They're going to be able to it's going to be pretty easy. Yeah. And the sunny, optimistic camp is kind of like, now we know what we're looking for. Now, like, sure, they could launch an attack, but we'll be able to stop it in time for before it can do, like, a lot of damage. Yeah. So we'll lay out everything for you. You can decide who is right. That's right. So we've already mentioned that on the defensive side of things, the US. Is sorely lacking, but on the offensive side of things, we've actually done this ourselves more than once during the coast of a war, strickland points out we used computer attacks to compromise Serbian air defenses, basically kind of scrambling their information. So they had bad, I guess, coordinates. Well, on the radar screen. Wasn't apt. Wasn't accurate. Yeah. Okay. Or appropriate. Did you see that one? So we did this. We launched it, and it worked. So that's a good thing, but it's also a bad thing if you're like. Was it Bush the first or Clinton and Bush the second? Bush the Second in 2003 in Iraq and Clinton, well, they were both like, we don't think we should be doing much of this because a couple of reasons. A, it basically opens us up as, hey, they did this so we can do it right back. And B, I think they could have drained some banks of terrorist cells, and they said, we kind of depend on the integrity of the banking system worldwide. We don't want to start messing around with this. So apparently with cyber warfare, it's very much like when you build that virus, it's out there and it can be captured and studied and redeployed against you. So what they were saying with Clinton and Bush who were saying like, no, we're not going to use a virus to drain those bank accounts because it will eventually come back on us. And our banking industry is not secure enough to withstand something that we ourselves make, because apparently the US. Is pretty good at making viruses, I'm sure. Should we talk about some of the different ways that this can go down? Yeah. The Pearl Harbor attack. Yes. I had the feeling Strictly might have named this one himself, but it's not true. He went to a lot of trouble to explain why it's called the Pearl Harbor strategy. I think he could have just left it there. The idea here is that it's pretty much in your face. It's a massive cyber attack where they infiltrate and then they sabotage systems. Much like Pearl Harbor was a big surprise and a big attack. Yeah, it was sneaky, but it wasn't quiet by any means. Right. Or stealthy, I guess the word. The other ones are pretty much stealthy. Yeah. Part of a Pearl Harbor attack, I believe, can be a distributed denial of service attack, which is basically like when you try to get onto a website or whatever, you're sending a request to the server to let you on a ping. Right? Yeah. Now if you assault that one server with millions of pings and it's trying to accommodate everybody as is appropriate and apt, basically they crash is the point. You can crash a server by hitting it with millions of pings all at once. Just slows it down to the point either where it doesn't work or it crashes. Yeah. And that's what Anonymous likes to do with, like, Mastercard during the whole WikiLeaks thing when they made that was a Mastercard or Visa crash. Cannot remember. I remember when that happened, though. It's basically just launching a bunch of server requests at a specific server and server, it's like, no, and this falls over. Is that why people say ping, by the way? Ping them? Yeah. I hate that. It's better than Java Storm. I don't even know what that is. Drinking coffee while you're having a brainstorm. Like, let's go get coffee and brainstorm something. Java Storm. People say that? Yeah. I don't say it. I've never heard of that. That ping and meta are the three things that I will never say. Epic. Maybe the worst to call something epic. I don't mind epic. Oh, man. I hate epic. Well, at least that's a real word. Especially epic fail. Yeah, sure. Okay, back to it. Viruses, code red, slammer nemda. These are viruses that Strickland has mentioned that spread very quickly across the Internet. And there's a couple of ways this can go down. You can do it immediately and release the virus. You can have all these other computers deliver the virus. You can put sort of like a delay timer on your virus for it to go off in two years automatically or manually whenever you want to. It can be waiting for you to hit the button and then launch the virus that way. Or I think for the user of that computer to do, like, say, control, alt delete will trigger it or something. Oh, really? Yeah. That's pretty scary. Yeah. Don't press those three buttons. That did that all the time on my PC. Oh, my God. Chuck, I think we should talk about right about here is, I think, where Stuxnet fits in. Who? Stuxnet. Say it one more time. Stuxnet. I don't know what that is. You know what stuxnet is? Is that in this? Yeah, it's the Iranian. It's the virus that the US. And Israel unleashed on Iran. It's a perfect example of this. It is. You're right. So let's talk about Stuxnet. Stuxnet. It's a great name. It was offensive, a cyber attack offensive in 2010. They're thinking maybe it was the first one ever. The US launched, like, a strictly for sabotage attack. Basically, they wanted to disable Iran's centrifuges so they could not enrich uranium. And they did this through the new 24th Air Force based out of Texas. Right. Texas in Georgia. Yeah. In Warner robbins. Robbins Air Force Base. Yes. Robbins Air Force Base. Yeah. Those two places are where the 24th is stationed. Yeah. And this is the first all cyber unit. Pretty much. Right. Pretty cool. Right? The whole task is to wage cyber warfare and I imagine to be defensive against cyber attacks. But I don't know if they had to do with stock detect, but they probably would have. I think it was being developed before the 24 was ordained in 2009. I think it went back to 2007 when it was started. But basically the CIA got their hands on centrifuges that they knew Iran was using, and they had just as many as Iran did of the same kind, and they studied it and they built this virus based on this configuration of centrifuges running windows and Siemens switches. Right. Yeah. And then they build a virus to go infiltrate it. I thought it was called Operation Olympic Games. It was, but the malware, the virus itself okay. I couldn't figure it out. But you're right. It was called Operation Olympic Games. Yes. And this whole operation was this huge, sweeping, awesome, massive secretive, basically, imagine, like, the CIA. Do you remember Uncommon Valor? Yeah. Okay. Do you remember when they're training at that replica of the camp? Yeah. Okay. The CIA did that with Iran's centrifuges in a nuclear program, and they figured out exactly how it worked, and then they figured out the best way to break it was Gene Hackman bank rolling the whole thing. Oh, yeah. He's there to get his son out. He was just staring at this menu of guns and silhouette that he wanted to order. Do you remember that? Yeah, I thought that was so bad. Yeah, but that was a huge movie for dudes our age. No, I'm saying bad isn't, like, good. Okay. Yeah. Got you. So Stuxnet Olympic Games happened, and like you said, it was the first offensive cyber attack. Most of the other ones have come in the form of sneaking in and lying around and watching and waiting and spying. Well, stuck in it. Had that, too. Oh, is that the initial? There's a companion companion program called Flame. Right. That somehow this is the part that's the biggest mystery, that Iran's nuclear program is not connected to the Internet. So somebody got that in on thumb drive. Okay. Wow. Infected their local system and Flames sat there and basically just studied everything. Told the US how the configuration was set up. Okay. And then they built it. And then they inserted Stuxnet, and basically it made all of their data look like everything was operating normally, but it was telling their centrifuges to spin out of control and basically break themselves. Like Oceans Eleven when they built the Replica vault. Exactly. Showed the replica video. There's nothing going on. So basically, the Pentagon has been watching a lot of movies, but this is a hugely successful attack, if not at the very least, for American cyber warfare, because it supposedly set Iran's nuclear program back by at least a year, if not more, in the hopes that this would let us continue talk. Yeah. And I think it said one of the aims was to make them feel stupid, and they said it worked. Yeah, they did something wrong and that's why these systems were failing. It's pretty scary, man. But the point is now is, okay, that's out there. Stuxnet is out there for anybody who can get their hands on it. Yeah, that's the name of it. It's a great name. All right. Stuxnet with an X, with a nuggety center. But it's out there. And the US is now basically just the computer equivalent of Hiroshima was just launched by the United States. Yeah. And nice little set up there. A lot of people are comparing these days of the early days of cyber warring to the early days of nuclear bombs and that there's not a ton of defense. Not anyone really knows what they're doing. It's sort of a chaotic mess that everyone's trying to get their finger in the pie, though. Yeah. Other countries, like China, I believe, Russia, who are apparently better equipped to defend against a cyber attack than the US. So basically the US. Is so really playing with fire. Well, and that's why Clinton and Bush were declining to use these. It's one of the reasons this opens us up to counter attacks and just may not be the smartest way to like we wouldn't go out and just drop a nuclear bomb on a country. Right. Oh, wait, I did. Oops twice. Yeah. What else you got? Let's see. Yeah, we talked about the system controls and data acquisition systems. Basically, that is the Achilles heel of infrastructure in the United States. One of the reasons why we're not set up to defend against a cyber attack is because we are so connected to the Internet. Yeah, everything is iran, North Korea, not quite as much, because a lot of their stuff is off the grid just by default. Sure. Because they don't have the infrastructure that we have. So just the robustness of our own infrastructure is one of its vulnerabilities as well. Yeah, that's a good point. As far as defense goes, too, I forgot about this stuff. Strickland says the first step is education as far as educating consumers over antivirus software and how they search the Internet and stuff like that. So I give that a medium. But this guy, Richard Clark, he's a security expert. He blames things on companies like Microsoft. He feels like rushes through programs before they are fully security tested because they want a few coins to rub together by selling this stuff. And the consumer doesn't want to wait and the stockholders don't want lots of testing because they want those new products on the market. Right. So it's a bit of a rough position and private companies run most of the net. It's not like this big government thing. So he contends, Clark does, that it's up to these private companies who own the Internet's infrastructure to really make it more robust in a defensive sense. Right. Which is good in one sense because then you have a dollar amount in the form of lost profits attached to a security breach. Right. So a company is going to try to protect it, which is good. Yeah. But at the same time it's like, yeah, if you're putting out products though, and you have competition and your competitors products are safer and you're just rushing stuff to market, then you're going to lose out ultimately by the same economic forces. And Jonathan also points out, too, that a scary way this can be implemented as a onetwo punch with a physical attack. This is the one that wakes me up in the middle of the night, is a cyber attack is launched and the electric power grid is shut down and gas lines and water lines start going haywire. And then all of a sudden, in comes the Red Dawn team parachuting in. Well, that's what we did to Iraq in 2003. We sent a cyber attack that messed with their, I guess their air defense systems and then we invaded. So that's happened before and we've done. It doesn't surprise me. Yeah. Cyber war. We're in the midst of it. We're in the midst of it. Pretty crazy stuff. Get your What Norton antivirus that will dissolve everything. Yeah. Education. That's the only all we can do to prevent cyber war. If you want to learn more about cyber war and read this article by Jonathan Strickland. You can type cyberwar one word in the search bar@howstepworks.com. It'll bring it up. I said Jonathan Strickland, which means it's time for listener mail. It's time for a lot more than that. I'm going to call this beer and fire. Hi, guys. I'm a professor of history and a longtime act of your show. I use a podcast in my college classes to talk about how we use history and entertainment. I'm writing about the Great Chicago Fire podcast, especially as it relates to my research. C. I study the history of alcohol, and I teach a class on the history of beer. Pretty cool. We study the economic, social, and cultural history of beer, and we make beer in class and do weekly beer tasting. Yeah. Anyway, aside from the stuff you mentioned in the show, the Chicago Fire is important because it wiped out about three quarters of Chicago's breweries. Something like 18 breweries were destroyed by the fire. Of course, people still wanted beer. Chicago in the Upper Midwest was populated by a lot of Germans at the time. This gave birth to the beer industry in Milwaukee. Before the Great Fire, Milwaukee was a beer town, but not a major supply center. Schlitz, especially, is a good example of how the Milwaukee beer industry reacted to the fire. Joseph Schlitz, the founder, had first donated thousands of barrels of beer to Chicagoans in the weeks after the fire. Been sensing an opportunity, he then opened a distribution point in the city. After all, there were still hundreds of thousands of thirsty Chicagoans. He opened Schlitz Tied saloons. By the 1880s, he was selling about 50,000 barrels of beer in Chicago alone, which is about 17% of their total. Wow. And the slogan for Schlitz, the beer that made Milwaukee famous, came out of this period, and it's because of the beer sold after the fire. So that's where they got the name by two. Schlitz was the largest brew in the world, a title it would trade back and forth with Budweiser until the 1950s. He goes on to point out that Blats and Papst followed similar trajectories. Stuxnet, Stuck Neck. And the Chicago brewing industry, sadly, never recovered from the fire. Although beer drinking remains steady. And I don't have Professor Beer's name, so we'll just call him Professor Beer. No, I'm sure he'd appreciate that big time. Yeah, I'm sure that's what the students calling. Thanks, Professor Beer. Yeah. And if you want to write in, I'll say your name on a later show. Okay. And if you teach, especially something interesting or use stuff you should know to help you teach. We're always interested in hearing that. We want to know about it. Okay. You can tweet it to us at syskpodcast, put it on Facebook. Comstuffyshow. Or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast the Housetopworks.com. And, as always, join us at our home on the web. Stuffyoushorenow.com stuff you should know is production of iHeartRadio's House. Stuff works. For more podcasts my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio Apple podcast are wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
44a2f0a6-53a3-11e8-bdec-ef2e8692e8f7	How Buffets Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-buffets-work	Buffets are every kid’s dream – until they grow up enough to realize how gross communal spreads of food shared with strangers actually are. Then the dream is dashed, for most of us at least. Learn about the golden age of buffets and more right here!	Buffets are every kid’s dream – until they grow up enough to realize how gross communal spreads of food shared with strangers actually are. Then the dream is dashed, for most of us at least. Learn about the golden age of buffets and more right here!	Tue, 22 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=12, tm_mday=22, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=357, tm_isdst=0)	54826281	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clarke. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant out there. Jerry just left to go get some food for guessing at a buffet, although probably not. I don't think she actually is going to a buffet, chuck I can actually hear Jerry laughing for the first time. I can do I don't know if that's going to make it in the final edit, but it was creepy and otherworldly disembodied. Jerry laugh kind of sinister. It's almost like we're in the same room again. Almost, man. Almost. Someday. Less than a year, I'm thinking. Less than a year. Yeah, let's just call it that. And we're talking about hitting the road again eventually. Yeah, if things go great, maybe next fall. But if they don't, then the next year, we talk about stuff way early. Yeah. I mean, those theaters are going to be jamming. That's the big thought, is that when things truly get better, everyone and their people have never even performed live, are going to book Dangerous to get up on stage. It's going to be a lot of fun. There's going to be a lot of pen up energy to be released right in our direction. Why talk about that? Easy crowd, man? I can't wait for that. So speaking of talking about things, Chuck, great segue, because it turns out we're talking about something today. And specifically, we're talking about Buffets. That's right, jimmy Buffet. I hadn't even thought about that. Good joke. Do you have good memories of buffets from when you were a kid or an adult? We certainly went to Buffets more than a little bit growing up, and it kind of jibed with everything that our household believed in, which was value for the dollar. Sure. I learned from my dad that you should eat until you're physically uncomfortable and then eat a little bit more. Oh, that's good. Didn't have good food examples for my dad, and my mom has been known to stuff a roll or two in her purse. No. Sure, dude. She falls under the section titled Problematic Customers. Yeah. And I think, boy, I hope she didn't hear that. She can be so mad. But it was usually under the guise of it like, well, I don't feel like I came in that hungry, so I didn't eat as much as I'll make you feel a little bit better. My mom, I don't think ever once in her entire life bought candy at a movie theater. She would always bring in those bag of bulk candies in her oversized, giant 1980s purse. Yeah, it was always great. She always had the good candy. But if you wanted, like, snow caps or something, you were so well, I will say this. I haven't been to a buffet. I was really trying to figure out the last time, and I don't know, man. It literally may have been 20 years ago in las Vegas or something, a town that I do not enjoy going to, but I think maybe I can't think of any time. I used to go to this sort of super Asian buffet when my sister and her husband lived in North Carolina with them. And it was one of those weird ones that had, like, this great Chinese food, but then, like, pasta and seafood, but not, like, in the Asian style of seafood. Right? Yeah, that's like that's a typical Chinese buffet. They have lots of Chinese food, but they have everything, and they'll have eight different buffets all in one. Is it like that? Yeah, but actually, now I do remember the last time I went to a buffet. I did go to one of those KFC buffets, but it had to have been more than 15 years ago. Was it the one in Velasa? That's the only one I know about. No. And I remember I literally went because I saw it on the sign said The Buffet, and I was like, I've heard of these. I got to do it. Yeah, well, it's still around. There's one on exit 18 on I 75 in Valdosta, Georgia, there's a bona fide KFC buffet. I can personally attest to its existence. When was the last time you went to a buffet? I hadn't thought about it, and I was thinking about it while you're talking. I was listening to you as well. But do you remember when we did that live catastrophe in Erie, Pennsylvania? Sure. Yeah. They performed at a school in front of, like, 19 people. Yes. And ten of them had to be there for, like, forced credit, I think, the next day. So there's airplanes fly in and out of Erie a couple of times a week, and the flight that I happen to have didn't leave until late the next afternoon. So I went and saw Cure for Wellness, I think was the movie I saw in the theater. And then I went and ate at one of their local buffets in Erie. You stayed on an extra day, huh? An extra two thirds of a day. Very long two thirds of your day. I think I drove and flew out of another town. You did? And I didn't have that foresight, but before that, I have to say one of my favorite buffets that I went to sometimes was Panahar. Do you remember Panahar over on Beaufort Highway? Sure, yeah. Late Panahar. It just shut down, I believe. In the last few months, I don't think I ever went there. Was it Indian buffet? It was Bangladeshi. Okay. The average American would just be like, oh, good, Indian food. But it was just magical. There was something that they put in the food that made everything really good, but they would do a lunch buffet, and it was fantastic. I bet you would pay for that, though. I would pay a lot, especially now that it's gone under. Okay. I see what you mean. You know what I mean? No, they had very good food. It was well made, too. It didn't just taste good, it was well made. Like, they had some 150 year old grandmother back in the kitchen overseeing things. Yes. II don't mean that it would be made bad, but Indian food is the love and bane of my existence. I love it so much, but it scares me up. That bad. Yeah, it doesn't get to me that bad. But that's part and parcel with buffets, though, Chuck. It might not just be Indian food. It could just be the fact that it's a buffet, because buffets make you super duper sick. All right, so should we talk about the smorgasbord? Yeah, because that's where the whole thing originated. Yeah, I did not know the origin of that word. So it's kind of cool. In Scandinavia in the 13th century, they had smorgasbords, but it was smorgasbords and bronze Vince boards. And it sounds a little more like if you were to put out, like, a nice meat and cheese tray with some butter and spreads, maybe a little smoked fish. But the key here is vodka on that brand. Sport. Right. That's what everybody was there for. But they would lay out these spreads for, like, travelers who came to visit, guests who came over long distances, and they'd be like, Here, restore yourself with these lovely the spread of light food. And over time, the Swede said, this is a really great idea. Let's just make this the meal. So from what I can tell, it began as the bronze board and then later became the smorgasbord. And in addition to the fact that it was, like, this awesome spread of great food, that everybody loved the aristocracy, like, the fact that the staff would just be attending to the smorgasbord, that it wouldn't be waiting on the guests. So if you kind of wanted more privacy or whatever at your dinner party, a smorgasbord was the way to go. Yeah, that makes sense. Keep them out of our hair, tend to the food. I think it was a little more of a refined experience than just go, like, stuff your face with everything. Yeah, that's still a big difference between a Swedish smorgasbord and an American buffet. Yeah, like, very well laid out on, like, a round table in a specific order. That's not necessarily just in order to make you fill up on cheap food first, which we'll get to later, but, yeah, it sounds kind of cool. And then in the 1912 Stockholm Olympic Games, I think the rest of the world saw the smorgasbord, and it was like, we need to bring a little piece of that back home to the good old USA. Yeah, they're like, you serve yourself from a table in the same room where you sit down and eat. This is amazing. And there is something amazing about it that I still, despite researching and writing this whole thing. I cannot put my finger on what it is, but there's just something about buffets or smorgasbords. Right. So something did capture the world's attention at the 1912 Olympics, and then in America in particular, the smorgasbord really got a boost at the World's Fair. That's the one where that big globe is over in Flushing, Queens, right? Oh, sure, yeah. So at that one, there was a Swedish pavilion, and they had a restaurant there called the Three Crowns Restaurant, and they put out a real deal shmorgasbord. And the Americans just went bonkers for it. And as a matter of fact, they said, just give us a couple of years. We're going to figure out how to turn this into basically the most American thing anyone's ever invented in the history of food service. Right. So from there we moved to Las Vegas, which is you can't talk about buffets without talking about Vegas, of course. And early on, what would become the Las Vegas Strip before Benny Siegel even was dreaming of the flamingo bugsy Siegel. Right. Yeah. Benice is his real name. Bugsy, I was wondering that the way you said it. I've been correcting you lately and just putting my foot in my mouth every time, so I came at it a little more trepidatiously than before. Definitely more trepidaciously than the saka jawea correction. Did you get the supercut of that from the basically exact same conversation we already had years before? No, I did see people mention it, yeah. So much. When you forward that to me yeah, I'll have to dig it out. It was good stuff. I want to give him his due to okay, so Herb McDonald was this guy's name. He was a publicist, and he was kind of one of the very first people to start working on what would become the Vegas Strip. And he's given credit as the guy that came up with his El Rancho Vegas, or I guess where he worked at the El Rancho, which is the first hotel there on the Strip. What would become the Las Vegas Buffet. Yeah. The legend has it that one night in the late 40s, he was hungry, and he went to the kitchen and came back with a bunch of cold cuts and cheese and kind of laid them out to make himself a sandwich. And some of the gamblers who were there late at night were like, hey, I'm kind of hungry. Can I get some of that? And he thought, this is not a bad idea. If I lay out some food that isn't a sit down meal that the gamblers can serve themselves, they're going to spend more time here gambling. So maybe I will create what's now known as the American buffet in Las Vegas, the cheap, all you can eat 24 hours. Buffet had its origins from that little eureka moment. Yeah. The Midnight Chuck Wagon was the name of the first deal, I guess, at a dollar 25. And they became known for the 24 hours version, which was the Buckaroo buffet. I love that. Which was a Buck. It was a dollar the Buckaroo, of course. Right. And everyone kind of knows the history of Vegas and like cheap food. Cheap or free food and cheaper free drinks and fairly cheaper free rooms. That was sort of the old days. It's not a cheap, cheap town to visit these days. I think they still run a lot of deals and stuff like that because gambling is where they want to make most of their money. But they did wise up at some point and they were like, hey, listen, we're not just going to keep giving away steak dinners and stuff. Well, people started coming for the shows and stuff like that and weren't necessarily gambling. Time was if you went to Vegas you went and emptied your pockets there so they could afford to lose money on like the buffet or whatever. But all you can eat, all night buffet that started in the late forty s and became synonymous with the town, actually kind of lent a bit of cachet to Buffets in general in the United States, as we'll see, they kind of spread from there. It started in Scandinavia, moved to the World's Fair 1939, then to Vegas, and then from Vegas it just kind of spread of apple turnover, all a mode. Okay. Yeah, I thought you were going to say something like a five gallon pan of hollandaise sauce. Oh, that is so much better than what I said. Man. That was amazing. Chuck all right, let's take a break and we're going to dive into the golden age. We love golden ages. The golden age of the buffet right after this. Okay, so there's long been in America restaurants that have been like all you can eat blank for blank amount of money. Yeah, we used to do that some, sure. Did you ever eat at Buffalo's Cafe for wings? Oh, no. Did they have been all you can eat? Yeah, but it was like all you can eat wings for like say eight or nine or $10 or whatever, right? Yeah. We went to a place called Rio Vista on Memorial Drive, which was like all you can eat catfish on Tuesday nights, that kind of thing. Right? Yeah. And that's still very much around. And that apparently is where the whole idea behind Buffets finds its other footing, its other origin in the United States with these kind of deals that were meant to kind of generate new business. Like you would go try out a restaurant. There's this really great site called restauranting Through History. Terrible name, but a great site. And the person who runs the site found this ad for the City Restaurant in Elira, Ohio from 1896 and it was all you can eat oyster stew for twenty five cents. So it had been around for a little while, but when the Depression rolled around, all of a sudden people were like, oh, all you can eat sounds kind of good because I haven't eaten in a week and a half and I've got this whole family who's starving too, so let's go try this. And they did. Yeah, that surprised me. I was surprised to see them turn up in the Depression just because of value and stuff. But food prices were low, so I guess they could afford to charge people 50 or $60 or something. Well, not all they care to eat. That wasn't really a thing yet, but people did love it. And apparently desserts during the Depression era buffets was really where they because I guess that was just a rare treat. So they would really load up on the sweets. Yeah, they definitely would. But it taught people who ran restaurants like, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you order people or if you offer people all they can eat of something, some people do overindulge, but a lot of people just eat like a normal amount, which is weird. And that kind of gave us confidence, I guess, to restaurant tours to kind of start to move into changing their restaurant entirely over to an all you can eat set up. Yeah, so we go down to the where legit chains started opening that were very cheap or let's just say inexpensive buffets. And this is where you start to see mac and cheese and carb heavy meals and fried chicken and salads like the little kind of festive looking jello mold salads that you're not quite sure what's inside. And then Chain said, you know what, this mortgage board word is kind of weird. I don't think they were using the word buffet at all at that point, were they? I started around the same time in the 50s or sixty s. Okay. But they were using Smorgasbord sometimes or Smorgy or other variations like Smorget or smorga. And this is when they kind of started leaning away from these nice round tables of food to the long sort of cattle style grazing. Yeah, I think, like I said, that Vegas buffets kind of gave buffets everywhere else in the United States is kind of cachet. And part of that was presentation. And then as more and more chains kind of grew and took over the whole buffet style food yeah, they did away with the presentation part really quick and just to eat your slop. Sure, it was more about that. They'd shove you into line, that kind of thing. But the idea, like you said, Smorgasbord was kind of taking off. It seems to have been like out west and in the Midwest Morgis and all that. But then elsewhere, buffets started to come to be used. So by about the 50s or the had smorgies and buffets proliferating across the United States like a pan of apple turnover. Olimone. Yeah, and that word buffet comes from the furniture piece the French furniture piece. We call them side board. Sometimes we have a couple in our house from Emily's grandparents, but people call those buffets as well. We call them bed spreads. I call them comforters or afghan. Remember those growing up? Did you have afghans in the house? Yeah, they were always too small. It was like, why did you make this the itchiest way to keep warm of all time, probably besides a wool blanket. Yeah, I'm not big on afghans. I like things to be bigger than that. So softer. I don't know about small afghans. What was going on there? They were always just slightly too small. So like they said, wouldn't cover from chin to foot. No, never has there been an afghan that is covered from chin to foot successfully. Even if you do the little diagonal trick. Yes, I've even tried that. And then it's like too short on the sides, so my love handles will be cold. Oh no. The thing that I remember growing up with is what comes next, which was a lot of these. But the western steakhouse sort of buffet, which was actually one of them, was started by Dan Blocker who played Haas cartridge on bonanza. He started the Ponderosa steakhouse, which I must have known that back then because we went to Ponderosa and bonanza was the big one that we went to ponderosa was the buffet I grew up with too, up in Toledo. Yeah. I love those bonanzas. I mean the same company, right? Yeah, as far as I know. I'm not sure what the difference was. We didn't have a bonanza. Like I said, it's just Toledo. But we did have that ponderosa. It was wonderful. What about sizzler? Sizzler we didn't have. But I was aware when you think of like the steakhouse theme buffet, you were sizzler aware. That comes to mind. Yeah, I was sizzler aware. That seemed like a cut above, if I remember correctly. Yeah, I think it always at the very least positioned itself. If not was actually a cut of Bob. There's also one called Chuck Arama that I've never heard of. And then golden corral. Everybody knows about it's been around since the golden corral is like the last man standing. From what I can tell. It's actually doing rather well, I think. There is still one over by the north of Cab mall, if I'm not mistaken. They are everywhere. They're still building them now. Yeah, they're not everywhere around where I live. I got you. Did you ever go to western Sicily? Because oh really? It was established in Augustus, so I would guess you had been there before. Yeah, I went to western sizzlingland and then the other big ones. And they are in fact next on the list. Or when they went sort of farming homespun. There was an old country buffet near where I lived. And there were also hometown buffets, ryan's Grill and then bakery and buffet. All owned by Ovation Brands, which was just pumping out garbage food to buffets all over the country, right? Yeah. Yummy said that the worst case of food poisoning she ever had was the first time she ever tried a buffet, and it was Orion. Oh, really? She can't even say that word. Like, she can't even be friends with somebody named Ryan now because she'll just get sick at the thought of it. Oh, man. She can't even watch Ryan Gosling or Ryan Reynolds. No, I have to call them Gosling if I call them anything else I like. And was a big fan, and we, as a family as well, of the, I guess, ethnic buffet, we didn't do many Mexican ones, but there was definitely one we went to sometimes on Sunday morning that had I think it was kind of even before they started calling things Brunch, but I can't remember the name of it. But it had a really nice taco station, and they would make you, like, a fajita station, and that stuff was so good. You don't remember the name of it? No, man, I can't remember the name. I don't think it was Ponchos. I don't think it was a chain. I got you. We went to Chichis when I was a kid. I don't remember being a buffet, strangely. I don't know why, but I didn't know it was either. Yeah, that's where I was introduced to the Chimichanga. I love to eat and I'd love to say, but Chichi was like the Olive Garden of Mexican restaurants. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I think so. I didn't really go to those that much, but we did go to Mongolian barbecue in the 80s. There was one another on Memorial Drive near where I live. That's where you pick out all your and I can't imagine the health codes, because they literally had, like, raw meat that you would pick out and then hand to a person to cook. Yeah, with just your bare hands. Cup man, filled with raw meat. It was so good, though. There's a chain called Who Hut. It's a Mongolian grill. It's like make your own stir fry buffet. And they're newcomers. They've been around for about 20 years, and they're actually doing rather well as far as buffets are going. Good for them. There's also a little bit of history that I found on that restaurant thing through History site, jane Whitaker's site. She turned up a couple of gyms that I just thought you have to mention that whole smorgasbord thing when people were trying to figure out how to Americanize it. There was a hilarious collision between ethnicities when an Asian proprietor took over. Like, a smorgasbord opened a smorgasbord where you would have, like, Gong Lee's Morgue or Johnny Hom's chuck Wagon hofbrow and Smorgy. That's great. I just love that. I think that's the cutest thing ever. I'll bet Johnny Hom and Gongly were very happy, welcoming gentlemen. Pizza buffet was something we did a lot as well. There was one called Village in Pizza near us, and I guess it could be akin to like a Shakey, who I think is kind of the king of the pizza buffet. But boy, those pizza buffets, I remember it was like you always had a plan at any buffet, like a game plan. You didn't just like, casually eat. We had a game plan. But those pizza buffets, I remember people sitting around the restaurant with, like, one eye on when they're bringing those pies out, and it was yeah, people would attack it. They would swarm. Swarm. Yeah. Pizza Hut had buffets for a very long time, and they still do, from what I understand. But it's the dessert pizzas that are like the bomb, I think, keep pizza buffets going. And there's always a sad pizza, too, that no one wanted, that just sat. Sat. Right. If you're looking for a pizza buffet, they have CC's now. They're kind of all over the place. I don't know. Pizza buffet. I think we all need a pizza buffet once in a while, Chuck. But there is this site called Mashed, which I hadn't heard of, but they had a lot of good stuff that I ran across for this article. But they were rating buffets and they got to CCS and they said, do you like eating cardboard? No. Then stay away from CCS. That's me. The funny thing is, now as an adult, I go to New York and I'll grab a slice and that is the meal. I would like nine more of these and then a dessert one. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah. But every once in a while I don't know, just going berserk on food. There's something about it. Maybe that's the thing that I couldn't put my finger on. Going berserk on food is the allure of buffets. I liked this in high school. My hack for school lunch was the salad buffet. Well, actually, it wasn't a buffet, but it was a build your own salad that you might as well have you didn't need to go back because I would build these huge salads just stacked with, like, ham and turkey and cheese and bacon bits and very little lettuce was going on in there. Croutons and then drenched with ranch dressing. And that was a really good value at my high school cafeteria. That's awesome. Yeah. Once you drink it with ranch, it's like, goodbye nutritional value. Hello, love. But salad buffets were really big in the yeah, they were people were trying to eat a little better. And so I think in 1978, the two big salad buffet competitors, super Salad and Soup Plantation and Soup Plantation also was known as Sweet Tomatoes for a while. They were both founded in 78, and they had a pretty good run up until the then people were like, I don't think this is actually very healthy. And they said, it's never been. And they started to kind of go away little by little. My favorite name of all time, of those style of restaurants, I don't know if you remember lettuce Surprise You. Yes, they were good. I loved. Lettuce surprise you. Actually too. All of those super salad, super plantation. I like the idea behind them, but they're not actually healthy. No, of course not. Like I said, my salad was probably worse for you or worse for me than whatever was in the regular lunch and Big Mac. And speaking of Big Mac, it turns out, Chuck, I read this really great article on I can't remember maybe Eater, but it was like the history of fast food buffets. And there's like this whole subculture where all they want to do is talk about fast food buffets. That's it. And there's like, legendary ones that may or may not have existed. Like McDonald's supposedly had a buffet for a little while, or Taco Bell. But the impression that I have is that that might have been, like, a local franchisee trying something out. Yeah. Just completely lost their s, and they're like, serving McDonald's or Tago Bell buffet style. Well, I was a Wendy superbar adherent. Yeah, I think I've told the story before. For newspaper staff, you were allowed to check out and go, quote, unquote, sell ads or take pictures or whatever. So all the newspaper staff would always hit the Superbar near the high school and eat pasta and a little Mexican taco salad. And my favorite thing was, you remember they used their hamburger buns as the bread and they would griddle those hamburger buns. Yes. Garlic bread. Yeah, it was so good. It really was. Yeah, because their stuff was legit. Like, even their little salad bar was good, but they had, like, a baked potato bar, and the whole thing was and it was like $3 or something like that. Although the key here is it was not all you can eat. And from what I gathered, that was one of the downfalls of the window, was it not? I don't believe it was. I believe one big fat trip, much as you could fit. That's my memory, though I'm not 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that's what it was. And I also saw somewhere that that was one of the reasons why it went away, is because they just had so much trouble keeping people from going back for seconds or thirds or whatever. That also explains now looking back, why I always had pasta and enchilada sauce and baked potato. Right, exactly. Because you're like, where can I put this? Right there. There you go. You want to take one more break and then come back and talk about how buffets make any money at all? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. We'll be right back. Okay. Chuck so there's this thing, like the fact that if you're a Las Vegas buffet and you're offering things for cheap, you're actually losing money. It kind. Of shows you it points out that buffets have a really narrow profit margin. Apparently, restaurants have one of the narrowest profit margins of any industry, but then the buffets are the narrowest of the narrow, like they really have trouble making money. And so there's actually an entire economic theory called adverse selection that predicts that buffets just shouldn't exist. And yes, they do. In the face of economic theory. Yeah. So this is interesting. Adverse selection basically is if you have a case where a buyer has more information than the seller does, you're going to be in a distinct advantage as the buyer. So the seller is going to set their price at a price point that's low enough to attract the worst customers they can get, high enough to chase away the really good customer, which I guess in this case would be a really heavy eater. So the good customer to the buffet, low capacity. Yeah, the low capacity eater. And it basically means you're not going to be in business very long. Yeah. Because you're going to set your price high enough that the low capacity eater is going to be like. This isn't worth it. I don't eat enough to justify paying this. But it's going to be low enough so that a high capacity eater with a huge empty belly is going to say. Oh. That's a great value. So you're going to attract nothing but high capacity eaters and your business is just going to go away. And yet buffets still manage to persist despite that very logical economic theory predicting that they shouldn't. And it turns out that when you start digging around in the business of buffets, that there's a lot of tricks that they use that you don't find elsewhere in the restaurant industry to kind of protect that very razor thin profit margin any way they possibly can. Yeah. And obviously, if you're looking at a buffet and how they made or make money, the family unit is a really big deal. And I know it's very sort of lazy and reductive to paint it in such a kind of a king of Queensian way, but that's how buffet runners and managers and restauranteurs looked at it was you've got this big hawk of a father that's like, I need to eat at a buffet tonight. And this like, diminutive little wife is just like, well, I don't eat very much and the kids are like, well, I love the dessert. So the only one in that family that's really putting a hurting on the buffet is the dad. Yeah. Kevin James. Kevin James. And again, this is not how we look at things. It is super lazy. But if you're talking about the buffet industry, that's exactly how they looked at it. Yeah, I mean, like all of those cliches about like, oh, gosh, here comes a football team, or something like that, that's actually like, part of the buffet industry. They worry about stuff like that. Totally. Yeah. So some ways that they try to balance out that they find that balance between low capacity and high capacity eaters or to kind of protect their profit margin in the face of more high capacity eaters than low capacity eaters. In one way, they'll just straight up kind of fly in the face of established all you can eat ethos, which is all you can eat, no strings attached. And some restaurants say, you know what? No, we're not going to do that. We're going to basically use nudge psychology to kind of get you to not be wasteful, to be a little more mindful because it's kind of part and parcel with going to a buffet as being like, I don't have to use my brain at all for the next hour that I'm going to this buffet. And so they'll try to do things like they'll say, like, take all you want, eat all you take, is a very common sign, you'll see. And in fact, Chuck, I mentioned this restaurant called Grandpa's down in Coco, Florida. It's in a train, which is just that in and of itself is worth going to. Right. But they have a salad bar, and on their salad bar it has sign that says if you waste food or if the waiter or server determines you have wasted food from your trip to the salad bar and you haven't eaten enough, you'll be charged $2. It's a $2 charge for wasting food from the salad bar. And I can't tell you how many arguments you and I have seen between old couples about whether or not that they're going to get charged at $2 because the husband or the wife didn't eat enough of the salad from the salad bar. You know how that ends? It's like as if buffets weren't gluttonous enough, that end with some old man saying, oh, yeah, watch this. Shoving whatever food is on that plate down his throat right in front of the manager. Yeah. Oh, man. Yeah. Other places do that, too. I've heard of plenty of places when I was a kid that supposedly like the rumor is I don't think I ever saw it happen. But they would charge you for wasted food. Yes. I don't know if they actually do. I think it's a threat. Yeah. It's kind of like a mandatory mask policy. They're not going to put you in jail for not wearing a mask, but the fact that it exists is going to make more people go ahead and do it than otherwise would. Yeah. Another trick they will lay on you is to not clear your plates away because I guess there is real research that says that people are not prone to go up for more food if there's like three sort of half eaten dirty plates and sitting in front of them. I guess the shame accumulation keeps them from going back. Yeah. That's happened to me. I realized I've been a target of that kind of harassment now that I've done this research. Okay. I had no idea, and now I'm a little bitter about it. I mentioned earlier about front loading it with carbs, and that is true. They have done studies that show that, I think Cornell University I don't know why they did this. Well, they have a huge food industry program, like, the national leader in it. All right, I'm glad you said that, because I thought it was a strange thing to study, but 75% of people in a buffet line they found got the first thing in the line, no matter what it was. And so the idea is that you put, like, if it's a Chinese buffet, that's where you would put the fried rice or Old Country buffets. That's where you'd put the mashed potatoes and gravy, maybe, and you want them to fill up on that stuff. And by the time they get to the real high dollar amount, which is like the bagged beef that we're going to talk about in a minute, that you're not as hungry. Yeah. That same study, I believe, found that two thirds of the stuff that is on the plate after you've made your rounds on the buffet were the first things that you encountered. Like, you just go up and you start behaving in this really predictable way. So buffets protect their bottom line by catering to that. If you've ever noticed when you go to a buffet, it's like, 599, but then when you go to check out, it's like 1099, because your Fountain Coke was $5. Yeah, that Fountain Coke costs them next to nothing. So to make $5 on it is a really good way to boost their profits where they're otherwise losing it hemorrhaging money. That's why we drink water. Yeah. So I've read some stuff about people getting kicked out of buffets, which we'll talk about in a second, but some buffets are like, we don't serve tap water. Like, sorry, you have to pay for a drink no matter what it is. They also have to watch their price point with pricing it too low so that people don't think they're eating garbage food. So they've done studies on that and a pizza buffet for $4. I think people who paid the $4 considered the food 11% less good or desirable than people that paid literally twice as much paid $8 even though the food was the same. Yeah. Double digit difference. Yeah. I guess I might as well say it here. I worked on a job as a food stylist, not as the food stylist, but when you're a PA, sometimes they would just say, hey, food styling needs you for this whole job. Just go be one of them. And I did that for a job on an unnamed major chain, sort of one of those bar restaurants, is all I'll say. And literally every single thing on the menu comes bagged, and most of it comes precooked. Yeah. That's why a lot of restaurants will say we're a scratch kitchen, because they're saying, like, we don't use cisco. We actually use ingredients that you would use at home. But, yeah, so many restaurants just use cisco or some other food service where all that stuff is pre cooked by cisco, and it just shows up in bags. And your job as the cook is to put it together and heat it up, and then that's what you do. That's actually one way that buffets save money is by not having to employ actual chefs or cooks, and they also have to employ far fewer wait staff because they're just coming over to make sure your drink is refilled or something like that. They need way fewer people because you're serving yourself, which saves them money. And then there's one other trick that kind of falls in a little bit with the take all you want, eat all you take kind of sign. Apparently, Sizzler led the charge on this. That whole all you can eat idea, if you stop and think about it, it sounds a lot like a challenge. The reptilian part of your brain takes it that way. Watch this. Sizzler said, well, we're going to change that to all you care to eat, which is much more genteel and it's much less hostile or aggressive sounding. And it never took off, obviously, but you can still see that every once in a while. You'll see it on, like, a buffet sign or something like that, and you're like, oh, that's a fancy buffet. Yeah. There's another place here. I can't remember the name of it. I think Jason's Deli. I think they got, like, a salad bar and a dessert bar. But you also order sort of the main portion of your meal, like soup and salad and dessert can come with it, though, right? Yeah, and it's so good. I love Jason Staley. Is it good stuff? It is. I mean, it's a big honking salad bar and soft serve ice cream, chocolate, vanilla, and swirl. They have this really great kind of like, molasses bread. It's really good, Chuck, if you could check it out. And their sandwiches and soups are pretty good too. All right, so problem customers. We've talked about people that would stuff food in there. They would come in with, like, the Ziplocs ready to go inside the purse, or they have, like, special plastic pouches in their coats. In Britain, there were people at this one place buffet called Gobi in Brighton. In Britain, they were banned for life in 2012, and they made the news. They're like, you can't come back here anymore. They did. And I read this Business Insider article where this person was like, oh, man, I wonder how easy it is to get kicked out of a buffet. So they went to a different buffet called Mr. Wuz, and they said they tried so hard to get kicked out, and just eating and eating and eating that they were basically crawling out when they finally left. And they finally asked the manager, like, what do you have to do to get kicked out? And the Mr. Woof manager is like, we would never kick anybody out. It says all you can eat. You eat as much as you like. And they're like, okay. I wish I would have gone to a different place to try to get kicked out because it sounded like they really paid the price for it. I also like the story from the Chuck Arama when in 2004, a couple that was on Atkins were kicked out because they went to the carving station twelve times and they were just loading up on meat, and they were like, you can't do it. That's the most expensive thing here. Get out. Yeah. So the restaurant was like they had to issue a statement because apparently the position was, we're a buffet, but we're not all you can eat. And that's like basically a contradiction in terms. You have no business owning a buffet if it's not all you can eat. Yeah, look it up. And that's actually a pretty fairly routine thing. Like, you can get kicked out of a buffet pretty easily, and if it's particularly egregious, you're banned for life. I'm realizing now that you've had a lot of buffet stories for somebody who doesn't like buffets. But she lived in Japan for a while, and she and her friend Rami, who she met there, he is a big strapping dude, and he actually got, I believe, banned from a Japanese sushi buffet because he would show up if this poor couple who own this restaurant would just be like, please, sir, no, please stop going back to get more food. I could do some damage at a sushi buffet for sure. Yes, I could too. So now the dark side of buffets. I mean, a lot of this has been dark, yet I'm salivating somehow still. Yeah. Our buffet's gross is how you titled this next section. And the one sentence you have is that answer is resounding. Yes, it's true. It's gross. When you're sharing utensils, your food or your body germs are going to be all over that. When those tongs fall in the meat and gravy and the guy behind you just picks him right on up and then maybe wipes them off of the paper napkin who calls someone over and says, sir, the tongs fell in here. That's what you're advised to do if a buffet. That's what you're supposed to do. If there's tongs in the food, that food is toast. It should not be served anymore because Mr. Poop Hands, who just touched the tongs last and threw it into the stir fried beef has now corrupted the entire pan of stirfried beef. But you don't want to wait on the stir fried beef. So you just get it and wipe it off and you use it that's why buffet patrons tend to be more rugged than the average restaurant. Goer. It's also gross because that food is just sitting out there for a long time. Sometimes it's just dangerous. It's dangerous. They try to do what they can with ice and chafing dishes and steamer tables. But let's get real, some of that stuff is well out of the required temperature range. Yeah. So that range is 40 degrees Fahrenheit to 140 degrees Fahrenheit height. And anything in that 100 degree window is fair game for things like E. Coli and chigela and salmonella to grow. And apparently the most prolific bacteria can double in population size in 20 minutes within that temperature range. It's not just gross, it's kind of dangerous. These don't get published very frequently beyond, like, local areas, so you would have to do some research. But if you just look up food poisoning and buffets on Google, you're going to find that it happens a lot because you're going to be able to search a bunch of small town and cities papers all at once. And it seems like it happens quite a bit. And that's why we all owe a debt to Johnny GarneL. He is the restauranteur in Germophobe who in 1959 patented the Sneeze Guard. It was known as the food service table at the time. But those Sneeze Guards, they went from not there at all to there everywhere and required by law now over the course of 2030, 40 years. I remember by the time we were kids, they were pretty much in play, unless you went to maybe one out. If you went to a buffet that was a little more rural area, it might be kind of wide open. But I remember they're usually always being sneeze guards. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely like law. Now, speaking of law, by the way, I forgot to mention with those utensils, that shared utensils that buffet patrons serve themselves with, there's no law regarding how long those can stay out and how often they have to be replaced, by the way. Yeah, it does not surprise me. So. Yeah. God bless Johnny Garno. He was like, this is just gross. But this is the business I'm in, so let me try to improve it however I can. And he came up with the Sneeze Guard. Food waste is obviously a big problem if you are an Ovation Brands, a big, big company with lots of buffets. I think they filed for bankruptcy in 2016, but they have 330 buffets nationwide. They had real computer modeling and data driven insight into exactly what to bring out and when to bring it out and how to really cut down on that food waste, because that's a big cost for them. Not only is it just wasteful and terrible to throw big pans of food away, but like you said, the margins are so thin, they have to do everything they can, including computer modeling, to really see if they can get that down to the very minimum amount. Yeah, and they had it down to a science man they knew to the store, based on that locations data, what food they should put out at what time and in what amounts to try to cut down on food waste as much as possible, which is pretty impressive. But despite that, they still found that between five and 25% of every pan of food, including Apple Pie Alamo, was going to waste and there's just nothing they could do about it. And from what I could tell, that doesn't take into account the waste that was being sloughed off of like the customers plates, who took all they wanted but did not eat all they took it. I'm trying to think of those phone calls about this computer modeling and like restaurant managers arguing with corporate. Right. I'm telling you, Frank, Buffalo doesn't move Salisbury steak after two. They just don't stop putting it out. Just face it. I love it when people say face it. Face it, face it. They can't move Salisbury steak. Frank. So some places are allowed and some communities are allowed to pick up this food for people who need food. But I think that's probably kind of rare. Sadly, we talked about that and that why is that, dude, in that dumpster episode about gleaning. There are communities that definitely allow gleaning, but there are some that expressly prohibited, which is sad because there is a lot of wasted food and food on the plate. The patrons don't eat that's wasted as well. Supposedly two hotel buffets are the champs of food waste for not just buffets, but the entire restaurant industry. They throw out about 50% of all the food they put out on any given day, which is just shameful. But the silver lining of the whole thing is you don't have to worry about this food waste for much longer because buffets probably won't be around that long. Or if they do, it's going to be in very limited small amounts because like you said, that Ovation Brands that was the leader of the industry for a while, they went bankrupt. Right now it's golden corral. But Golden Corral is up against the wall because not just restaurants are in trouble, but phase were specifically singled out by the CDC guidelines saying these should probably shut down until the pandemic is over because they are coveted nightmares as far as restaurants are concerned. I think Colin Crowley will be up against the fence now. I guess so. They'd be up against the barbed wire. Yeah. I mean, people are eating healthier these days. Millennials are certainly not unless I'm sure there's an ironic millennial that loves a good buffet, but generally that's not their bag. Even baby boomers, which was a big part of the buffet generation, are eating healthier as they age. They don't want to die. So everyone's trying to do a little better and it's been narrowed down to sort of the local mom and Pops. You know what, my dad lives up in the mountains and I've gone to the mom and Pop buffet there within the last twelve years now that I remember. That's awesome. Sure, it's great. That stuff is cooked. That's like grandma's fried chicken and the real deal. Yeah, it's not bad food. The salad bar will be around. They'll always be buffets, probably on cruise ships and there'll be some casinos. The best buffet I ever had was in Vegas with Yuumi. It was a breakfast buffet and they had a no joke of donut making station where they made donuts in front of you. It was like I can still imagine myself there right now. Happiest day of my life. Like the little fryer. Yes. It was so good, dude. It was so good. But they also had frosting too. It wasn't just like, here's some cinnamon sugar on it. They were amazing donuts. So there's always going to be like buffets here or there, but the idea of just buffets being everywhere, their heyday is over and they're definitely going the way the dinosaurs face it. Face it. But I mean, I think it's sad because I think the kids are going to miss out on an experience because it's kids who enjoy buffets, you know what I mean? Kids love them. Man, that swirled ice cream that tastes like acid rain will never get old. Yeah. One of the things you can say about buffets that we'll lose is this ability to try new things. You don't risk at all on ordering something that's your entree and then it's terrible and you just wasted an entree. You can go try stuff at a buffet. I tried frog legs when I was a kid at a buffet at a dinner theater that we used to go to. I probably never would have tried frog legs in my entire life had it not been for that buffet. So there's something to be lost with buffets. It's true. I think I might have tried frog legs. And I don't know if you ever went to this place, but my final plug, it's not open anymore, so it's a worthless plug. But Athens, Georgia, had a place called Charlie Williams Pinecrest Lodge. Oh, yes, I remember. The Pinecress Lodge. That was out, I guess somewhere in the east side. It wasn't like close to campus or anything. That was a really kind of quote unquote nice buffet where that's where the parents would always take the kids when they're in town. Right. You wore your jeans without the holes. Yeah, I think they had frog. So that's an on frog legs. Right. You got anything else? No. I feel like I owe it to myself to check out a buffet at some point. Soon or not soon, but like next year. Yeah, after the pandemic passes, for sure. If there's any left. Right? Well, since we talked about the pandemic passing, everybody that means, of course, it's time for listener mail. Let me see. I got a few good ones here. I'm going to call this changed life. Kia aura. Guys, I'm writing because an episode of your podcast helped me discover my life's passion and dream career. Ten years ago, I was a science obsessed twelve year old listening to stuff you should know frequently. And the episode that changed everything was how molecular gastronomy works. Remember that one? Yeah. That's a strange, life changing one. And so on. The concept of breaking down a food to its molecular basis and reconstructing it into something unrecognizable from a sensory level blew my mind. You planted a concept in my head that inspired me ever since. That year, I did a presentation on H-E-R-V-E. What? Is that herveyviches? No, I don't know what that is. I don't either. H-E-V-R-E this. I don't know what that is. It sounds like it's a plan. Curb. This starring Harvey Via Shade. Okay. I had this presentation for my class. I saved up until I could afford a kit of food activities. The following year, as Fortune had it, a school teacher informed me that the more practical version of molecular gastronomy is food technology. Through a science fair, I was linked with a group of mentors with the New Zealand Institute of Food Science Technology through the ages of 14 to 16. My early networking from six years prior helped me secure an amazing first internship at one of New Zealand's largest food manufacturers this summer. I still get giddy with excitement I felt from that episode every day. From studying non Newtonian fluid mechanics to experimenting with new stabilizers, a single episode has led me down a Stem path that I wouldn't have discovered otherwise, yet suits me completely. Man, that's amazing. Yeah. The gift of knowing what I am meant to do early on has pulled me through severe mental and physical illness. I'm not sure I would have continued to pursue a field and Stem had I not known what was waiting for me. I think about how you guys changed my life often. I'm sorry for not letting you know sooner. It's okay. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for pointing me in the direction of food technology. It is an invisible, yet highly important undercoat of modern life that I would have never known without you. And that is from Kissy. Man, kizzy, thank you. That was an amazing email. That, Chuck, is exactly why we take every topic as seriously as the last, isn't it? Yeah, I think so. Because, I mean, you never know what it's going to mean to somebody. And, like, even if we're like, oh, that was kind of interesting, there's somebody like Kizzy out there who's like, well, that episode just changed my life. So congratulations, Kizzy, on figuring out what you want to do in life so early. Best of luck and best wishes, and thank you very much for letting us know that. That was great. You never know. The next great buffeter might be listening to this very episode. Right? Very nice. Well, if you want to get in touch with us, like Kissy did, or you think you're America's next great buffet, or we want to hear from you, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is production of iHeartRadio. For more Podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcasts.howstuffworks.com/hsw/podcasts/sysk/2017-02-14-sysk-tardigrades-final.mp3	Tardigrades: Nature's Cuddly, Indestructible Microanimal	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/tardigrades-natures-cuddly-indestructible-microani	You can burn them, freeze them, shoot them into space – they wouldn’t bat an eyelash, even if they had eyelashes. Go into the microcosmos and learn about the tiny animals that are so astoundingly durable, they can survive conditions not found here on Eart	You can burn them, freeze them, shoot them into space – they wouldn’t bat an eyelash, even if they had eyelashes. Go into the microcosmos and learn about the tiny animals that are so astoundingly durable, they can survive conditions not found here on Eart	Tue, 14 Feb 2017 17:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2017, tm_mon=2, tm_mday=14, tm_hour=17, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=45, tm_isdst=0)	32330086	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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, everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, My Favorite Murder, and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcasts. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today. Welcome to stuff you should know from howstuffworkscom? Hi, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with Charles W, Chuck Bryant and Jerry. This is stuff you should know about hard grades. Never heard of these little guys. Really? And now they have shot into the top five alongside the octopus. What was the other one that I had? Jellyfish. Jellyfish. These little dudes want to hug them? I might be hugging them right now. You could? Well, probably not. Probably not. But I love them. Okay. They're cute. Tell them they're tiny. Hardly anybody knows what they are. I would say 99% of people listening do not know what this is. Really? So I was under the impression that they were kind of a big hit on the Internet within the last couple of years. Well, I'm not hip to that stuff, so maybe okay. It might have been part of a meme. I don't know. What, a political meme? Yeah. I think Tartar Grades had a moment. Okay. But it turns out that they've been around for much longer than the Internet. Yes. Hundreds of millions of years. Yeah. Somewhere around the neighborhood of 600 million years. Yeah. Which would make them Pre Cambrian Explosion, which makes them really old PCE. Yeah. So before we get into that, let's tell you what we're talking about. Yes. Tardigrade, also known as a water bear. Cute name. This is my favorite moth piglet. Yeah. Pygmy. Rhinoceros. Pygmy. Armadillo. I don't like armadillos. Ever since our Leper See episode. Oh, right. They are little, tiny microscopic animals. Animals. Multicellular animals that reproduce sexually in a lot of cases that are well, they're animals. They're not bacteria. They're not viruses. They're not bugs. They're very small. They get to be about a half to 1 mm in size, depending on the species. And they're also super cute, depending on your view of things. Yes. First thing you should do if you're at home or if you're not driving, let's say just pull out your phone or your desktop. Pull out your desktop and look up tardigrade and just look at a little picture of it. So you know what we're talking about, right. If you ask me, people liking it to a panda bear, I don't quite get that. Although, have you seen the picture of the one on its back? No, I don't think I did. Very cute. It looks like he just want to scratch his little belly. Yeah. But it looks to me like if moth caterpillar and a naked mole rat had an unholy union. That was awesome. That was the best analogy I've ever had. That's kind of what it looks like to me. Yeah. They managed to do it somehow. Televill donx. The name Tardigrade is from Latin, and it actually means slow walker, which is cute in and of itself. Yeah. And that supposedly was named by this Italian scientist named Lazaro Spalletzani. Tell him the name of his book. I love his name. His book was oh, boy. Oposcouli Decisia Animalia Steele. Not bad. Not bad. You didn't raise your fingers, though. That's right. But he named this guy well, he didn't discover it, apparently, before him, in 1773, a German pastor named Johann August Ephraim Gautza discovered it. But he is the one spalitzani is the one who named it Il Tarato, which means slow stepper. Yeah. And the reason he called it that is because if you look under a microscope at all the stuff which was all the rage in the late 18th century oh, yeah. Look at all this stuff. What was his name? Anton von Levin Hook. Am I saying that correctly? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure after he started to invent microscopes and their use spread, people started looking at what was in debris and rain gutters. They added water to it, and they found that when you add water to stuff that was just dried up dust in a rain gutter, all of a sudden you saw that there was a bunch of things that came to life, and most of those things move around really fast, just starting about like, oh, it's over here. Let's go over there. I want to go over there. They have very short attention spans, right. Target grades, lumber about. They kind of fall and flip over a lot as they're climbing over, like, pieces of dust and other particles, and they move much more slowly, and I guess deliberately, compared to their other microscopic friends in the rain gutter debris, that's where they got their name. They have eight legs. Yeah. Little short, little stubby legs. Right. And their rear legs are inverted, so they're facing forward instead of backward. No, they face backward. They face backward instead of forward. Yeah. And all their legs have little claws at the end. Right. For climbing. For climbing. And the first three pairs of legs are used for swimming. The back are used for climbing only. And rudderwork. Yeah. The front one is paddled, and they steer with the rear. They make dream hands with it. And what are they climbing over? Well, it depends. You can find them all over the place, but mainly, if they're on dry land, they're living in moss, fallen leaves, stuff that you would find in a gutter. Lichen. Yeah, yeah. Things that typically have moisture in them, because water bears, tardigrades survive when they're surrounded by moisture. Right. When they're amid moisture, fresh water, salt water, dead matter. No, it doesn't. It depends on the kind, of course. Right. So they apparently originated in the sea because the species of tardigrades that are marine based are the least evolved, I guess you'd put it. Yeah. Then yeah. You've got freshwater ones, and then you've got ones that are terrestrial that you can find on land, and those are the ones that live in lichens and mosses and stuff like that. And all of them, again, are part of this branch of the family tree. That's its own phylum. Tardigrade is a phylum. And this article makes the point that if you look at humans, we share a phylum cordata with, like, snakes and every other vertebrate on earth. Right. These guys have their own philosophy. They're in their own club. They really are. Yeah. So this has two things that they're a very ancient line, and that there is a ton of them, a lot of them. And there are there's water bears everywhere. Yeah. And we mentioned that there are animals, and if you look at a picture, it's probably from well, not probably. It's definitely from a microscope. And so you think that, again, it's just some sort of bacteria or something, but it's not. It is an animal. It has a brain, has a nervous system. It has a little stomach and little tiny intestines. It has a little tiny anus, little tiny esophagus. And they don't have heart and lungs or veins. No, because I was going to say open source. They are open hemakoale, as the lady on the internet said. Yeah. Which means that gas exchange and nutrient exchange happens because every cell in the tardigrades body is touching the interior body cavity. So as food and air goes through the mouth and out his tiny Danus right. Those nutrients and those gases get to get passed into the cells that get that it passes by. Yeah. It's like a studio apartment. It's actually extremely efficient. Sure. So there are about 1000 species or more of tardigrades, 600 or so on land, about 300 marine, and about 100 in freshwater. They lay eggs. Some of them have sex, some of them don't. Some of them self fertilize. Yeah, it's pretty interesting stuff. What else? They eat the fluids of plants, or some of them are carnivores. Yeah. The fluids of animals. Right. There's always got to be fluid. Yeah. They have, like a piercing mouth part, I believe, that can pierce cell wall and just suck the fluids and proteins and stuff out of the cell. And depending on the species that sell, maybe plant based, or it may be animal based, including other tardigrades, which is decidedly less cute. Cannibalism? Sure. So if you're sitting there right now and you're thinking, I don't see how this rivals an octopus, these are just tiny, little maybe kind of cute, but tiny little animals. What's the big whoop? Right after this break, we'll tell you what the big whoop 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 let students take charge of their education and their future by combining real world skills training and traditional academics. Students can earn college credit while in high school or get the training needed to land a job right after graduation. Stride Career Prep prepares your team for in demand careers in business, tech, health, science, criminal justice, and more. Students can take courses developed by industry professionals, prepare for certifications, get hands on experience, network, and, most importantly, gain the confidence they need to succeed. Stride Career Prep is backed by over 20 plus years of experience in online learning and education. Take charge at K Twelvecom podcast. That's K Twelvecom podcast. And start taking charge of your future today. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy, which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US. Based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, we're back with the big whoop about tardigrades. Despite the size of these things, how big were they again? If you look at a magazine article, they're about half the size of a period at the end of a sentence. What's a magazine? That's true. You say that, but it's true. I know. So sad. That's a good way to put it, though. Change. They're that tiny, and they are one of the toughest, most resilient creatures on the planet Earth. Period. They're probably the most resilient animal or organism on Earth. Amazing. All right, let's talk about it. Let's talk about temperature. Yeah, they like it. They're like 75 deg and nothing else. Right. Well, what's weird is there's this long standing tradition in biology of trying to kill Tardigrades under. Really? Not so conditions. Yeah. Let's see what these little guys can take. Basically, I'm not quite sure how it started, but somebody figured out fairly early on that they could withstand amazingly cold temperatures. Right. So we're talking down to basically absolute zero, just a couple of degrees above absolute zero. And to understand how crazy that anything could survive at absolute zero, that's where, like, atomic movement ceases as absolute zero. There's no movement of atoms or molecules any longer. Right. Because that's what heat is. Heat energy is the movement of atoms and molecules. So cold, by contrast, is the Cessation, or the lesser movement of atoms. Right. We're talking 272 celsius negative. 459 fahrenheit So Tardy grades have been kept at that temperature for 20 hours. Yes. And then thought out and they said, yeah, that's what you got. You got a Tic TAC? This is great. I think I fell the fly on my shoulder. Yeah. Seemingly unharmed, they put them on ice at negative 200 Celsius. So not absolute zero. But they've iced them down for years in a row, thought them out, they were right back to normal. Right. Amazing. Then, on the other side, they've exposed them to extraordinarily hot temperatures, like 150 deg Celsius. Yeah. And we should say, so the fact that they're surviving, that's like, wow, 150 degrees Celsius. That's hot. Absolute zero. That's cold. The reason why it's so incredibly just mind boggling that tardigrades can survive this and still be animals is that they appear to be the only life that can survive these conditions. The reason why is if you freeze and you're multicellular, your cells are liable to freeze themselves and there's going to be all sorts of cellular damage. When the ice crystals form in your cells, they're going to rupture your cells because ice expands when it freezes. Right. It's also less effective. Yes, we did frostbite. Yeah. Frostbite. So the fact that they can come back to life after being exposed to these really cold temperatures means that they've got something going on that's keeping their cells from rupturing. Science has no idea why. On the other hand, with heat, tremendous heat, when you expose the cell to 150 degrees Celsius, which is above the boiling point of water, right? Yeah. Your proteins are going to unfold and pool and coagulate and be totally useless. So you can't come back to life, because all of the processes and the building blocks of life are useless in your body and you would have to start from scratch, which is tough to catch up to when you're trying to come back alive from being exposed to high temperatures. Tardigrades do it. All right? So they flash freeze them. They freeze them for years. They boil them, they try and smash them to the tune of \u00a35800 per square inch of pressure. And the target grade was like, Bring it. Yeah, no problem. And we're talking about pressures that are six times greater than the greatest pressures found anywhere on Earth and they withstand it. They blasted them, they tried to suffocate them. They wrapped tiny little hands around their throat. They put on tiny black gloves first. So they didn't leave any of it? No, they tried to suffocate them with carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen. They shot them with gamma rays. Xrays. Yeah. There was a French study that found that it took 570,000 rotagens, I think that's how you say it, to kill 50% of the Tardigrades in a sample. Yeah. But 50% still lived. Right. And that's 570,000. It takes 500 to kill a human, but it took 570,000 to kill just half of the Tardigrades in the sample. Yeah, they shot them up into space and I think about half of those lived. Right. So they've literally, like you said, they're trying to come up with newer and more creative ways to kill these things. And the Tardigrades take all comers right. Basically. And they have a couple of mechanisms. Again, science is trying to figure out, one, how their cells keep from freezing in a way that they would rupture, or how their proteins keep from unfolding. But that kind of radiation exposure should do all sorts of horrible things. You should go listen to our radiation sickness up. So that was a good one. Yeah. But it should do all sorts of horrible things, like break up DNA, but apparently they have some sort of mechanism to prevent this from happening. Right. Well, they have a mechanism to stitch it back together, and apparently they also produce a protein called desp that acts as a shield that wraps itself around DNA and basically shields the DNA from radiation exposure to begin with. Right. Amazing. So they have all these natural processes, but they also have passive processes as well that include basically like going into a state of suspended animation, depending on the conditions. Yes. There are two things called an oxybiosis and cryptobiosis. Those are two of the three states where these things live. The other one is just the active state, which is just a regular, living, normal Tardigrade. That's where they're doing all their daily life, basically, which I don't think we mentioned. It's not a lot to that part. No. And apparently researchers are like, we have no idea what role they play in ecosystem. Yeah, that's kind of what I was wondering. Like, they're indestructible. They're going to be the only thing left, maybe after our nuclear annihilation or global warming has wiped us off the face of the Earth. Sure. But why? Nobody knows. Who knows? Maybe they're going to grow up and be big boys one day. Well, no, that's a really great question, though, because if you think about it, you're like, why would these things be able to withstand pressure six times greater than what's present on Earth, or radiation like you would never find on Earth or temperatures like you would never find? Reason doesn't make any sense until you stop and think, like, there doesn't have to be a reason. It could just be that they have strategies that they use to defend themselves against certain conditions on Earth that are just totally unrelatedly, also happen to cover these other conditions that we humans try to launch them into. That tartar grade would never evolve to take on. But they can still withstand it. Yeah, like, you asked the tartar grade, and they're like, we're just trying to survive, dude. Right. Why do you have to lay a purpose on it? What's with your hang up? So, the first one I mentioned, an oxybiosis that's when if you, like, starve them of oxygen, they will puff up in a little ball and stay that way, basically. Yeah, I guess they lose their ability to regulate fluid transmission in and out of their cells, and fluid brushes in and they puff up, and they can stay that way, I think, for a few days, and then after that, they die. But not bad. A few days of being completely saturated with water. Not bad. Yeah. The one that's really amazing, though, is the cryptobiosis. So we said that they do need this water. It doesn't mean they have to live in the water, but they need water. But if this water eventually goes away and you dry them up, they pull in their feet and they pull in their head, and they basically stop metabolizing. They go into this weird state of suspended animation where they say, all right, you think I'm dead. By all accounts, I look like I would be dead, but I'm not. And it's called a tun state. T-U-N? Yes. Or tune. I think it might be tuned because it's short for tuncan form. It's a German word with an oom lad over the o. So wouldn't that be a two? Well, it's like form, tune, chin, form. Yeah, but I'm going to call it a ton state. Okay, so this tune state, that's how I'm going to say it their metabolism slows down to, like, zero 5% of its normal rate. Right? Yeah. And there was a researcher in the 40s in Italy who said that she revived a sample of tardigrades from a sample of drive moss that had been collected, like, 120 years before. Yeah, that one's a little hinky. Well, apparently no one's ever recreated that one, but they have found that tardigrade can survive in this teen state for at least 32 years. Yeah. Some Japanese researchers took moss that was collected from Antarctica in 1983, and in 2015, they opened up the sample and they re hydrated it, and they found that some tardigrades came alive. Yeah. It's almost like it freeze dries itself and just needs to add water. And they're like, all right, what happened over the last 30 years? Right, exactly. As president. The thing is, though, is if something dries out, it loses 97% of its water, its moisture from its body. I think. Okay, okay. If something dries out like that, your DNA needs water, too. Sure. If DNA stays dry, it starts to deteriorate pretty quickly. So again, nothing is supposed to be able to survive 30 years of that state, right? That's right. So this is just got researchers puzzle as well. Like, how are they doing this kind of thing? Apparently they have proteins that help stitch DNA back together. So I guess they start to come out of the tune state, and one of the first things they do is stitch back their DNA to get out the little sewing machine. Yes. Well, there's this one dude, and we'll take a break and talk about his seeming obsession with these little fellows 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 credits 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. These days, you use your personal info to do just about everything, especially when you're online. And guess what? With all that info just floating around out there, it can make the Internet a practical gold mine for identity thieves. And stealing your identity, it turns out, can be dangerously easy. Which is not good. But now it's easy to protect yourself with LifeLock by Norton. Yes, LifeLock monitors your info and alerts you to potential identity threats. And if you are a victim of identity theft, a dedicated US based restoration specialist will work to fix it. Identity thefts have had it easy for far too long. Now, finally, it's your turn. Just remember, no one can prevent all identity theft or monitor all transactions at all businesses. But everyone can save up to 25% off their first year by going to LifeLock. comStuff that's LifeLock.com stuff for 25% off your first year. LifeLock identity theft protection starts here. All right, so if you want to know everything you need to know about a tardigrade, you should sit down and have coffee with UNC. Chapel Hill. Coattail Hills. Is he a professor? He's a prophe. He's a Prof. Thomas Boothby. This dude seems like the go to. Like, every article I read featured him as the main interviewee. Well, he likes to talk tardigrade. He does. He has a button that he wears all the time. It says, Ask me about Tardigree. People are like, what? So, yeah, I'm sure it's not an obsession, but he is sticking with them as I am, and he's trying to figure out how and why they're able to do all these amazing things. Sure. Probably more on the how than the why. With the why, he seems to do a lot of I don't know. He leaves that to the philosophy professors. Yeah, exactly. So Thomas Boothby made his name not in the way that he would necessarily like when he was leading a team, I think in 2014, maybe 2015, that did a genetic scan of a species of water bears and found some really surprising results. They found that something like 17% and change of genes in the water bears were associated with other things like fungi. Bacteria. Viruses. But they had all these DNA stitched up with theirs. And that the assumption was that that was how the Tardigrades were able to do all these amazing things and survive in all these ways. Because they were borrowing talents and traits and characteristics of unicellular life and nonliving life like viruses. And that's how they were able to survive these extreme conditions. Yeah, but it kind of ended up being a watch. Like, he got really excited and thought, oh, my gosh, they've got all this stuff. But it turns out they were just contaminated through poor experimentation. Right. They assumed that there was lateral gene transfer that was going on. Yeah. Turns out that yeah, they had a contaminated sample. And hats off Thomas Boothby, because he's not like, okay, I'm going to go hide for the next decade. He was like, hey, it happens. It's science, man. We've gotten increasingly sophisticated machines, and the increasingly sophisticated machines found that our sample was contaminated. Let's get back to work. So this Japanese researchers did a follow up on a different type of Tardigrade. One of the hardies around resumed tourists. Basically, I was hoping that's what it was, but it was like Ramazadius verio natus. Here it comes. Okay. And that's one of the hardiest of all. It's the Land species. The Land are much more harder. I think we already said that. Right. And well, there's your why, Chuck. That one of the reasons why the Land species have evolved is because they have to. They don't have these stable conditions that the marine and aquatic ones do. Right, yeah. So they tested the Ramazadius are very anonymous species, and they found that they had about 1% of foreign genes involved in them, which is about normal. Right. Because lateral gene transfer can happen at that rate. It's just sort of average. Right. All right, so like you said, he held his head high and said, all right, no big deal. We're going to continue to search for the reasons why these little dudes are so hardy. One of the things that they found that was pretty unique is ice is a big deal. And we talked a little bit a few minutes ago, harkening back to the frostbite, where ice crystals form inside a cell, tearing apart that DNA. And there are some animals that make an antifreeze like protein, like fish. Some fish do that to keep it from freezing. And they thought, well, maybe the Tardigrade is doing that and they don't think it is. They think it can just handle it, basically. Right. Like maybe it's just freezing the outside of the cells and not the inside. Like some weird mechanism they don't understand. Yeah. But it's definitely not producing an antifreeze like some of these fish are. Exactly. It's just like, bring it on, little ice. I can take it. I can take that. No problem. And again, with radiation exposure, they've been found to have proteins that shield DNA and the ability to stitch DNA back together. Right. Yeah. So you got that covered. Yeah. And I think you alluded to it earlier. It may not be the case if the Tardigrade has all these different things to survive these environments, but maybe two or three little tricks that are just you can apply to different ways of survival. Exactly. So it's not like they're evolving to go fly through space right. To colonize new plants. That's a question that a lot of people come up with once they learn about Tardigrades, is like, well, wait a minute. Are these things like aliens? Did they come on an asteroid and basically get spread like seed here on Earth? They could survive space, some of them could conceivably, but they would burn up on reentry, so probably not. So were they on the back of an asteroid? Yeah, they'd burn up because fire apparently can kill a charter grade, I guess. Yeah. In those space experiments, they were inside the satellite, inside the capsule, protected from reentry until they were out in space, and then they were exposed to solar radiation and then they were put back in the capsule and brought back to Earth. Right. Safe and sound. Yeah. So the thing you found in common was with the heat and the cold, the common link there is an ability to repair DNA. And so maybe that's the sort of common denominator here. Right. They're just good at it. Yeah. And they're good at it because they have to be, or else they wouldn't be around. Yeah. They were forced into it. Yeah. It's a pretty nihilistic view. I like it. There is another thing that stood out to me I just love so at the pressures they can withstand yeah. The fatty membranes of their cells should be as solid as cold butter and again, should stop functioning at those pressures or it should kill them. They bounce back. Solid as cold butter. Yeah. I mean, think about it. Like normally fatty membranes that make up cells, they're basically in a liquid state. Cold butter is not good for cellular function. Yeah. It's also not good when they give it to. You at a restaurant I know, to put on the bread. But you know the key to that? Stick it under your arm. Well, I just hold it in my hands. Yeah, and you're going to want to get greedy and try to do two at once. Don't. It slows it down longer than it takes to do two separately. But then you got butter on your hands. No, I mean, you get the little foil wrap kind. Oh, I'm talking about I serve you a dish with cold butter, you leave. Yeah, I'm talking about like a real restaurant that just has butter in a dish. That's what I'm saying. You leave that restaurant that's not a real restaurant. Somebody's not paying attention to details, or even the worst are the little cold butter balls that they've scooped and it's just stuck that in your cheek and warm. It's not spreadable. It's useless. Right? Yeah. It just rolls around when you try to put it in. A nerf gun never hurt. Have you seen those things lately, by the way? I was watching the kids channel the other day, and I try not to get too hysterical about stuff, but the Nerf guns these days, they're like assault weapons. Yeah, I guess I do. So it doesn't count. Yeah, I know, but I don't know, it's clearly made me think, like, well, they're clearly indoctrinating children as young as possible. You like this nerf gun? You're going to love the AR 15. Anyway. Wow, that took a weird turn at the end. Yeah, didn't it? If you want to know more about tardigrades or guns, you can type those words into the search bar@housetofworks.com. And since I said whatever, it's time for listing or mail. I'm going to call this Erin sorkin Rebuttal. It's from Mark Frost. Hey, guys. Had a comment, too, about Chuck's Professed dislike of Erin. Sorkin Was that you? I thought that was me. No, that was me. Did you gang up? Yeah. Okay. My wife and I are definitely fans, but I want to put a different perspective out there for you to consider. I don't think anyone is supposed to consider his writing to be conversational. I would kind of liken it to a musical or the place of Shakespeare, and he says, I'm not equating Shakespeare with sorkin musicals aren't how people talk. Shakespeare was definitely not representing how people talk back then. For Willie the Shake, it was a poetic language filled with metaphors that turns a lot of people off, even today. But like with musicals, it's a stylized way of showing what people are feeling and thinking. Realizing that, yes, people don't talk that way actually makes me enjoy it more. In some ways. It makes things more compact in that it can express feelings, ideas more quickly. We can often do so more entertainingly, as in people are way more quick witted than you would be in real life. But suspending your disbelief makes it enjoyable for me. At least I think that's the problem I have with it. It prevents me from suspending disbelief. Yeah, me too. I definitely like the Steve Jobs movie, which we both liked, right? You liked it, right? I haven't seen it. Okay, I did. I actually liked how clearly artificial the construction of it was. Seemed very much like a play in several acts. I agree with you there, sir. Did not feel like anything that was attempting to show real events or real sequences, but rather to condense a lot of what happened during periods of his life into specific scenes. I agree with all that. Then those scenes packed in drama emotions from the time they had. We also just finished Newsroom and loved that. Anyway, people are always up in their own opinions, and I tend to agree with most of your film thoughts, just not this one. I love both your show and you guys and will continue to do so. That is Mark Frost. Thanks, Mark. That was very well written, well thought out thing. Yeah, I get it. People love Erin, sorkin people love all The West Wing and stuff like that. Have you seen the night manager? No. What is that, man? Where did I hear about that? Everywhere. The John Lacare adaptation with Doctor House and Tom Hiddleston. Actually really good. Is it a movie? It's like a six part miniseries. Oh, yeah, I like those. Very good. Check it out. You will like it a lot. Promise. Right? That's got Josh's guarantee. Yes. You also said it like soylent. I didn't say that, did I? Okay, just kidding. You're making me think I was losing my mind. No. If you want to get in touch with Chuck and me, you can tweet to us syscapodcast or Joshua Clarke, FacebookUS at Charlesw, Chuck Bryant or stuffychnew. Send us an email to stuffpodcast@houseofworks.com. Hit us up at our home, on the web stuffyshnnow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.com. Hey, it's summer, everybody, which means schools out, the sun's shining, the daylights longer, and best of all, there's plenty of time to get lost in a good, thrilling story. So whether you're road tripping or relaxing poolside, tune into the podcast series on Amazon Music, My Favorite Murder. From exactly right. Media. My favorite murder has something for everyone. Hosted by Karen Kilgarif and Georgia Hardstarks, this true crime comedy podcast will share stories that will have you wanting more before you know it. Listen to new episodes of my favorite Murder. One week early on Amazon music. Download the free Amazon Music app and listen today. You know you're the best pet mom. When you growl back during playtime, give epic belly rubs and feed them hate Halo holistic made with responsibly sourced ingredients, plus probiotics for digestive health. Find us at chewy amazonandhalopeets.com."
42f5736e-53a3-11e8-bdec-83fc131115d3	Amazing Animal Stories!	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/amazing-animal-stories	Regular animal stories are wonderful enough, but when animals lead amazing lives the stories become almost unbearably wonderful. You’ve been warned!	Regular animal stories are wonderful enough, but when animals lead amazing lives the stories become almost unbearably wonderful. You’ve been warned!	Tue, 28 Jan 2020 13:48:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=1, tm_mday=28, tm_hour=13, tm_min=48, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=28, tm_isdst=0)	35656590	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 WTO. Brian over there. There's Jerry and amazing animals that's right. That will partially delight you and if you're an animal lover, should partially horrify you at times if you don't like animals. And you're probably going to listen. Yeah, you probably would listen. Amazing animal stories, skip. But who would do that one? Star. Yeah. So we're talking animals today. And like we said, not just animals, amazing animals. Because animals are great to talk about. We've talked about octopi and duckbell platypie and elephant eye. Did we do the platypus? I believe we have. Okay. Almost positive. If not, it's due. So animals are trying to talk about it's even more fun to talk about animals that are accomplished. That's right. Okay. I was at the playground the other day and my daughter was playing with another little girl, which is kind of one of the fun things about kids. They just immediately bond with another kid and the girl turned out to be a bear cup? I wish. No, this girl smashed a ladybug and said, yay. And the parents weren't around. I was there and I was horrified. And my daughter said, that wasn't nice. You shouldn't kill animals. Good for you. That's great. And then this girl stomped an aunt. Hill girl's got issues. Yeah. And you know what? She found another lady bug. And I said, don't touch that ladybug. Yeah. She said, Why not? I said, Because you killed the last one. Yeah, and I felt fine, like admonishing this child. That was not mine. Did you wait until she turned around and clapped by her ear to really startle her to drive it home? No, but she did trip later on, and under my breath I went, Karma. Oh, really? Yeah, she was fine. And then above your breath, you went, ha ha. That's right. Above, by the way, with Mike the Headless Chicken, which we're going to start out with. I couldn't remember how this existed in the annals of Stuff you should know, because I knew it did, and I thought it might have been one of our dumb videos, but it turns out it was one of our great videos. Which one? You did. Don't Be Dumb on this, but surely we've talked about Mike before. I thought we might have, but Don't Be Dumb was the only thing that came up, and it was great. Weird. Well, thank you very much. We've done some cool videos together, though. Remember this day in history where we veered off into, like, conjuring Satan for a little while and we ended up in a different dimension? And I thought those were great. So silly. Anyway, okay, so like you said, we're talking about Mike the Headless Chicken first. That's right. Which september 1945. If you were in Colorado and you happen to live near the Olsens Lloyd and Clara and Fruita. Colorado. Yeah, fruita. Do you know where that is? It's by Grand Junction, which I think is do you know where that is? I feel like I've been west. Colorado. Okay. Like, on the way to all those amazing national parks. Colorado is very varied. You think of Colorado as just being this amazing mountainous state, which it is in parts, but they're also, like, plains and all sorts of stuff. There's an ocean right in the middle of it. Right. That's. Where? Canyon National Park. canyonland Candy Land. That's where the guy cut off his own arm. And 127. James Franco did. Sure. Yeah. So the Olsens were farmers, and they were killing birds. Lloyd would cut the heads off of these chickens, and his wife would clean them up, because, after all, it was 1945. Right. That's kind of how the division of labor went back then. And he would go in and sell these chickens at the market, and he went to gather up all the chickens, and he got to one with no head that was still alive, and he went, what, into our nation? That's right. That's a direct quote. You should be dead. I saw that. For this one in particular, he aimed to preserve the neck as much as possible. So he just took off the head. Yeah. He did a good job, I guess, because I think his mother in law was coming over for dinner, and she liked fried chicken necks, so he was trying to give her a fried chicken neck, just taking the head off. The thing is, this one was still alive, and that's still alive in the way that a chicken will run around with its head cut off, like everybody knows. Yeah. He was just being a chicken. Yeah, so he did that. He ran around like a chicken with his head cut off, but then he stopped and he started, like, pecking at the ground with his stump. He started preening himself. Yeah. Basically acting like he still had a head and he wasn't planning on dying anytime soon. That's right. So Lloyd said, Let me put you in this apple box overnight, and I assume we'll get up in the morning and you'll be dead then. God will take his vengeance on you over the night. I don't want it to do anything more like you consider it a coffin, basically. And he woke up in the morning and this chicken was still alive. A rooster, technically. He said, what's for breakfast? So he took this thing to that meat market just to show everyone, like, you got to see this. This is what anyone would have done, I think. And then the word starts to spread. Everyone was amazed at this headless chicken. Word starts to spread around fruit. Why do I have a bad feeling we're pronouncing that wrong? Is there any other way you could pronounce that? Fruita? Yeah, that could be. I mean, in Georgia, they call Cairo. Cairo. That's true. In Vienna. For Vienna. That's right. Wolf, did you just woof. So he takes this rooster everyone is quite impressed, of course, at this headless chicken, and word spread around about what was going on there. And that eventually attracts the attention, of course, to a sideshow promoter who said, this chicken is dynamite. I don't think you know what you have on your hands here. Yeah, you rube, you hay seed. Yeah. Let's go into business together, is what he said. Totally. So this guy's name was Hope Wade. I kept waiting for him to turn into an underhanded, devious kind of guy because he was a 1040 SciShow promoter. He seemed to have been fine, passed all the great tests, exploiting all the right humans and animals. He was just in it for the love of the game, from what I could tell. Okay, so he gets together Hope Way, the circus sideshow promoter, gets together with Lloyd and Clara, and they start touring the country with Mike the chicken. But first, I don't understand why they did this. Maybe just to make the whole thing even more bona fide. I'm not sure. They went to Salt Lake City. And we should note that Hope Wade traveled from Salt Lake City to Fruita. I think that's what we're going to go with. Okay. Okay. Which is like, 300 miles in the 1940s. That's not an easy distance to travel back then. No, because he heard about a headless chicken. But think about what he was putting on the line with that. Let's say it took him four days to get there. He could have been doing any number of things those four days. The chicken could have died while he was on the way there. Yet it didn't, and he made it there, and he became a business partner with the Olsens. He had a hunch, and he went with his gut, and it paid off. So the first thing he did sorry. Was to take them back to Salt Lake City and introduce them to some scientists there. That's right. So the scientists did a lot of tests. Apparently. We don't know this for sure. I tried to do this surgically to some other chickens just to see if it worked, I guess. And Mike was like, stop. What are you doing? Life magazine showed up and ran a story in 1945 called Beheaded Chicken Lives Normally after Freak decapitation by Axe. That wasn't freak decapitation. It was very purposeful. Yeah, but I think they were saying, like, it was freaking that he survived having his head chopped off. Maybe they just said Freaky decapitation. Sure. But that's what Mike got. Huge. That's right. Of course. Magazine is huge. Yeah, it was huge. I think Time eventually did one on them, and it's really hard to overstate how big of a deal mike the Headless Wonder Chicken, I think is what they ultimately, finally dubbed him, became in the United States, people would come from far and wide to go see him whenever he came to town. I mean, once it hit the Internet, it was like wildfire. Well, that's what Life magazine was basically back then. Yeah, that's true. So they all went to California and Arizona. Then Hope. They had to go back to the farm at some point. Lloyd and Clara did. So hope toward the Southeast, which I bet it was just like gangbusters in the Southeast. Sure. I looked up when he came to Atlantic because Surely came to Atlanta and I couldn't find anything about it. That's because he went to Terminus. Right. It was preatlanta. Yes. They started getting letters. They started getting fan mail and hate mail. Yeah. Some people compared them to Nazis, which I don't get that at all. I think experimentation, maybe. Yeah. Okay. Kind of Mangala esque. Yeah, I can Bindish and esque together. That's a nice trend. Completely messed it up, is another way to put it. I think we should start using that from now on. Ash. Yes. Why not? Okay. I like it. They got a letter from Alaska saying, can you swap out Mike's drumstick and put in a wooden leg and just keep this party going? Only in Alaska. Very funny people there. And they became so unknown, especially around through IDA. I hope that's it, because if so, we're the only outsiders to ever pronounce it correctly. You're welcome. Thank you. No, not so Fluida. They became so well known there that people would write letters to the owners of the Headless Chicken. And that was it. On the outside of the envelope. It would show up at the Olson store in their mailbox. Yeah. The good old days. So everything's going quite swimmingly for them. They made a lot of money off of Mike. He actually lived for 18 months without a head. Yeah. And there's pictures of him standing there, standing up without a head and his little heads down by his feet. Yes. You can see the stuff. Yeah, it's on the Internet. Go check it out. It's on the current Life magazine, the worldwidelife yes, I did some of course, the calculation, the inflation calculation they were pulling in in modern day money, about $64,000 a month. Back then it was $4,500. And they said, can you imagine that mike was valued in modern money at $142,000 or ten grand back then. Yeah. So they upgraded their farm equipment. Yeah. They bought a new pickup truck. That thing is sweet. Did you look up a 46 Chevy pick up? No, but I'm pretty sure I know what it looks like. Oh, man, they're nice. Yeah. And yeah, they made a lot. They went from being poor Colorado farmers to pretty well off Colorado farmers. They've been using, like, a mule and a wagon before to go to town. Now they're driving in their brand new Chevy pickup truck. So it was really good for them that Mike managed to live after they cut his head off. But while he was alive, they managed to study him and figure out exactly what happened. Yeah. So to be fair, it's a little more accurate to say Mike the faceless chicken. Okay. Although when you look at a picture, it looks like the head is completely gone. But what happened was he cut off. This is all by accident, of course. Remember, he's trying to preserve as much of the neck as possible. Yeah. Which he did, because he left the back of the head on there. And apparently these chickens, most of the brain function and the brain itself is a little further back, tucked back into the neck. Yeah. So the brain lived. That's why this chicken was able to walk around and be a chicken. And he definitely took a slice off of the brain. Oh, sure. But I think this one guy in this one BBC article by Chris Stokel Walker, the chicken that lived for 18 months without a head, there's really no wrong headline you can have when you're writing about Mike the headless chicken. He basically says probably about 80% of the brain was left over everything that controlled breathing, heartbeat, digestion, all that stuff. And so all they were left with was figuring out how to keep Mike alive. He still needed food. Even though he didn't have a head or a face anymore, he still needed food. So the Olsons would actually feed him with an eyedropper of milk and water combination. They would give him little grounds of corn. Right into the esophagus. Yes, right into the esophagus. When he got Fleming, or if a little bit of corn got backed up or stuck in there, they would use a syringe to pull it out. And Mike lived this way for 18 months. He actually went from two and a half pounds to \u00a38 without a head. Mike thrived. The big question was, like, which I had the whole time, was, why didn't this thing just bleed out? Because it had his head cut off. Right. And science thinks just a quick blood clot just kind of took care of it. Yeah. Science went. God. Yeah, sure. It was good. So there's kind of a sad ending. Of course, Mike is eventually going to die. You would hope that Mike just died of old age. He did not. But when they were in Arizona, they woke up to the sound of chicken choking. And Clara said, Even jerry, is that you? And her husband was like, It's not me this time, it's Mike. Right. And sadly, Mike had expired because they left the syringe behind. That would clear that esophagus. Yeah. The last side. So they've been at fatal mistake. It was, which is really sad for Mike. He choked to death on a piece of corn. But they also watched their main source of incredible income wealth just choked to death on a piece of corn because they left the syringe back at the fairground. What a crazy story. In this BBC article, Troy Waters, who is the great grandson of Lloyd and Clara Olsen, he said that his great grandfather told him this whole story and for years, basically for decades, would never fess up to Mike dying on him. He said he sold them off to a sideshow promoter and he finally fessed up before his death that Mike had choked on a piece of corn and that was that. What an amazing story. An amazing animal story. Alright, well, we're going to take a break and come back with another right after this. Hey, everyone. When you're running a small business, every second counts and you can't afford to waste a single moment. So why are you still taking time out of your day to go to the post office? And you could be using Stamps.com. Yeah. For more than 20 years, stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses. Because stamps.com gives you access to all the post office and ups shipping services you need right from your computer. That's right. You can streamline your shipping process with stamps.com easy to use software. All you need is your regular computer and printer. No special supplies or equipment necessary, and you can get discounts you can't find anywhere else, like up to 30% off USPS. Rates and 86% off ups. So stop wasting time and start saving money. When you use Stamps.com to mail and ship, sign up with promo code stuff for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a digital scale. No long term commitments or contracts. Just go to stamps.com. Click the microphone at the top of the home page and enter code stuff. Okay, we're back, everybody. Amazing animal story number two. And this one is the one that is pretty horrifying in some ways, but also cute. But also horrifying. I honestly don't know. It's horrifying. All right, well, I'll point it out when we get to it. Oh, I know it's. Okay. This is the story of Voitek the bear. And I believe you got a lot of this stuff from time magazine and atlas obscura. And what else? Another Atlas obscura. Okay. Wow. They doubled up on this one. They did, for good reason, because it's a pretty amazing story and there's two different memorials you can visit. That's true. So Voitec is a Polish name, which is odd for a Syrian brown bear found motherless in Iran. Persia at the time. I don't think it was Iran then. Yeah, world War II changed a lot of geography and boundaries and country names. You're telling me. Right. So a Polish name for Syrian brown bear is a little odd until you know the background behind this whole thing. Before we get to the bear, we have to talk a little bit about why there were Polish soldiers in Persia in the 1940s. Well, because of the war. Okay, so now we talk about the brown bear. Yeah. Specifically, the 22nd Transport Company Artillery Division in the Polish Second Corps. They were fighting in World War II, and on April 8, they found this little cub in the mountains of Iran. Well, there was a boy who had found it, and they traded him for it. What they trade? They traded some coins, some chocolate, a Swiss Army knife, and a can of beef. Hey. Not bad. Yes. It depends on how the beef is prepared. Right? I bet it was some kind of a jerky. Okay. That travels well. Sure. So, by the way, I finally gotten over my beef jerky reticence because, I don't know, years ago, when I lived in Los Angeles, I ate moldy beef jerky one night when I was up late. What's wrong with you? Well, I didn't mean to. I came home from the bar afterwards, and I was just eating in the dark in front of the TV. I was like, this tastes funny. And I turned on the light, and it was just covered in blue mold, and I vomited. And I literally haven't had beef jerky in, like, 15 years. Okay. But I'm back on it. Okay. It's good stuff. And a good snack, as it turns out. It is. I have some right here if you want it. No, I'm good. I know you're a jerky enthusiast. So, April 8, they find this bear, trade it with the boy, and they were Polish prisoners of war who were being moved from Siberia, from a prison there or a Gulag to Egypt, and they got this bear. And basically, we're like, this is our little baby now. Yeah. And just one more thing. So this army, this Polish division of soldiers, had been captured by the Soviets and held as prisoners of war. But after Germany turned on the Soviet Union, the Soviets sided with the Allies. And part of that sighting was to release these Polish soldiers to form a military unit known as Anders Army. Look at you. Okay. All right. And then now they have a brown bear in their position. A little bear cub. That's right. And as you could imagine, these soldiers, who had been away from their families and their own children, adopted this little baby bear as their own. And here's the part that's terrible, as he did certain tricks, like if they offered him a cigarette, he would take a puff on it and then eat it. Right. That's awful. Yeah. Eat a lit cigarette. Yeah. You should not do that to an animal. No. Or let it drink beer from a bottle. Well, that's pretty hilarious, actually. So a bear drinking a beer from a bottle, and this is what one of the people who were there said, that Voidk would drink the beer from the bottle, and when it was empty, he would hold the bottle up and look into the opening to see where the beer went. Right. Because he wanted more. Hysterical. I think it's hilarious. Other things that would happen there is Voidic would drink a lot of water because you're in Egypt, of course, it was very hot. He would chase after these oranges that they used for grenade practice. He would break into the shower so he could drink that water, which was a problem because they were rationing water. Yeah, because they were in Egypt. It's a little scarce outside of the Nile. That's right. So he just basically became the mascot for this artillery unit. Yeah. Just through and through. They love this bear so much, and he loved them right back. There was just a real mascot thing going on. Yeah. And even when it came to battle, there are rules that say you can't have a bear in war, you can't have any pets unstated. And so they said, oh, yeah, well, we're going to enlist this bear and give him an official number and rank. Private Voitec, I guess. And Voiteek, by the way, means joyful warrior. I don't think we said that. No. This was now an official soldier of sorts that allowed them to skirt the rules of war. Yeah, he was a private in the Second Core. I mean, like that's. Okay, well, then you can come along. Yeah. See, I thought this was pretty terrible, too, bringing a bear along to the front lines. Well, so most of the time when he was in the front lines or anywhere with them, his main role, aside from mascotting was they trained him to just kind of sit in the cab of a truck to guard it, to protect it, keep anyone from stealing. I bet that works. Works pretty well, I would guess. Yeah. Well, during this Battle of Monte Casino in Italy, he was there on the front lines guarding trucks, and supposedly started carrying crates and artillery during this battle. There's no photo documentation. There's plenty of pictures of Voitec and the Polish Second Corps hanging out, doing their thing, wrestling, having fun. There's no pictures from this battle, but there are witnesses who say, yeah, this 600 pound, six foot tall brown bear was walking around carrying a crate of artillery shells. Where they spent? Were they new? Were they unused? Who knows? But he was definitely doing that. That's the story about Voipek. Yeah. I say, Get that bear away from the field of battle. Sure. That's just my opinion, but I'm sure everyone loved it. Eventually, though, sadly, the war would end, and everyone was like, well, what are we going to do with this bear? It's like when you get a bear with a significant other and you break up, like, who's going to take the bear? Sure, you fight over the bear. Everyone wanted the bear. Of course, Voitec was beloved, and they said, well, here's what we don't want to do, is send them back to Poland, because the Soviets love their bear insignias, and they'll just scoop him up as a symbol for communism. Yeah. And after the Yalta conference, poland went behind the Iron Curtain. That was that. And so these Polish fighters who had been fighting for Polish freedom got the exact opposite at the end of World War II. And they're like, you're not taking our bear. You're certainly not going to make them a symbol of communism, like you were saying. Yeah. And they were fighting with the Allies and the Brits by this point, so they ended up I think voicec ended up in Scotland because of that. Yeah, with the 22nd Artillery Regiment. They ended up in Scotland, around Edinburgh, and so he was with them when the war ended, and their status was kind of up in the air, too. They all decided to live in exile, and Voitec lived with them. And he eventually went to the Embra Zoo and became one of the most popular attractions at the zoo for years. Yeah, it was just sort of like in the army was a part of the community. Apparently. They would take him around to kids parties. He would go to concerts and dances, and just a beloved bear, he knew how to yell free bird at inappropriate times. Amazing bear at the age of 22. Sadly, Voicetech would die in 1963. I don't know about how old bears are, but that seems like a decent life for a bear. How old? 22. Sure. But they think partially why this bear died was because of damage to his esophagus from that cute little cigarette trick that they would play. Isn't that awful? Yes, it is. So there's a woman named or. Her last name is or. Eileen. Or. Eileen or. She wrote Voitek the bear Polish war hero. There's a colon in there. You can figure out where it goes. And she said that she lives in this farm that Voidke lived in in Scotland right before he was moved to the zoo. And his claw marks are still on some of those trees. Wow. Which that would be quite a sight to see. Amazing. Yes, I thought so too. Is that all you got on Voita? That sure is, Chuck. All right, we're going to take our final break and come back with the tale of another animal adopted by the military 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 to 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. Okay, so, final amazing animal story. Yet another animal adopted by a military unit. This was not a bear in Poland, though. This was a very cute dog, a St. Bernard that was adopted by the Royal Norwegian Navy during World War II. That's right. And he kind of got drafted along with his owner, who is a guy named Lieutenant Aarling Hafto. Great name. And Aerling Hafto was a harbor master in a town called Honingsvogue on the Margarita Island. You're really going for it, huh? I don't think I got that last one right. In Norway. Right on the north coast of Norway. And so Bumps Up would just kind of like hang out with Lieutenant Hafto. It was like the family dog. And very early on he became beloved, at least with the Hafto family, when little Vicktus Hafto, the three year old daughter, fell ill. And apparently BumpsA would not leave her side for this whole twelve days when she was at death's door until she recovered. Yeah. So they thought this dog is good luck. I don't know if they thought it healed her daughter. Probably not for their daughter, but sure. But they thought it was certainly a good omen and at the very least, an exceedingly loyal dog. Yeah. And this was in 38 and 39 World War II breaks out. And so Hosto was called active duty. And this is something if you've seen the movie Dunkirk, they would take civilian ships and basically make them into warships and not necessarily like battleships, but bring them into active duty as well. So they gave him a whaling ship called the Thorod, two DS, and said, you are now a coastal patrol boat and you are a patrol boat captain. Right. So he was part of the Norwegian Army, and as a ship's dog, which Bumps, it was he was the ship's dog already. When he was entered into the log, he became part of the Norwegian Royal Navy himself. That's right. So he was BumpsA sea Dog of the Royal Norwegian Navy. Right. That's right. Where did you find this stuff, by the way? This came from famous dogs in history. Love it. That's probably one of your favorite websites. Yeah. And then Kitten Morgan Benson had something on Find a Grave and then there's some other ones I've seen. So BumpsA and Lieutenant Hafto are just kind of hanging out, doing their thing. Coastal patrolling on the Thor. Odd. And it's not just the two of them, but Lieutenant Halfto is in charge of the Thorod, and there's this whole crew. And they're starting to love bumps, like, more, more and and more. Of course, eventually, the Nazis invade Norway, queue the booing, and the Norwegian king says, everybody, let's get out of here. We're going to go form a government next aisle in the UK. Right. Let's go to Scotland. Specifically Scotland. Everybody regrouped there. And so the Thorod and Captain Lieutenant Hasto were put in charge of mine sweeping around Dundee, Scotland. That was their thing now, keeping the UK safe. Yeah. And just like it's very similar to the void of story in a lot of ways, they both ended up in Scotland. They were like an hour and a half car drive apart from one another at the same time. That's crazy, isn't it? So, just like with the Voitex story, Bamsa becomes beloved by the town, goes on, the pub crawls, would sit at the bar. Apparently there was one story where there was a cat sitting in the seat that was usually occupied by the dog. And of course, bumps that comes in is like, get out of here, cat, that's my seat. And not only did he go to the bar just to hang out, he went to the bar to drink beer with his fellow sailors. Again, boo. Drank beer out of a bowl. It's not good for a dog. But kind of hilarious still. But he was also kind of the DD, because he was well known for going to the bars and the pubs to get his sailors back to the ship before curfew so they wouldn't get in trouble. That's right. He learned how to open doors. He wore a little hat, which is very cute. You can see a picture of this little sailors cap. So once he learned to open doors, he could visit, like, all the businesses all around the harbor. Yeah, people were just like, come on in. After he learned to open doors, he learned to ride the bus. Yeah. They gave him a bus pass that he wear around his neck. Yes. That is super cute. But not only that, Chuck, which makes it even cuter, is bumps that would go to the bus stop and sit there and wait, and the bus drivers would stop and let him on and he would climb up to the top deck and sit there and look out and be like, hey, I'm BumpsA. So great. Good to meet you. So I think you said that he ended up being good luck. Still, to the soldiers, there were more than one instance where BumpsA would either break up a fight or foil some sort of crime. There was one soldier who was getting mugged and Bumps came up and attacked the mugger. One guy went overboard. I think he was kind of drunk at the end of the night and fell in the water and bumps and jumped in and barked and barked and then kept this guy afloat until they could rescue him. Yeah, like saved at least two men's. Life pretty great. He also was extraordinarily brave when the Thora would be out patrolling and take fire from German planes. Yeah. He would sit next to the tail gunner, I guess, on the tail of the boat. That's what they call it. And with a little helmet, little steel helmet on his head. It's just pictures of that. And just sit there and probably point with his paw like, there's one over there. I can't imagine the sounds. I guess it just didn't bother him. Yes. And he would not leave the gunner sight until the attack had been all the Nazis were dead. Yeah. So he'd swim out to the downplains and chew the throats out of the wounded. He was a full service sea dog. So at one point, this dog was transferred I'm sorry, the owner was transferred to another ship. And everybody was like, no, you're not taking bumps with you. Yeah, he was going to and they're like, no, this dog is staying here. He's like, I'm the captain. Yeah. And the dad of the dog. He said, no, he belongs to this ship. Yeah. In that town. And that's what happened. They left him there, which was the right thing. It was temporary, of course. It's not like it was just for a few months. Right. So they were eventually reunited. So Bumps is like this beloved sea dog, not just in this town of Dundee. I think it was actually Montrose, Scotland, but all over the UK. And basically became like the mascot of the entire Norwegian Royal Navy. He was beloved is a really good way to put it. He was known as a peacemaker, a lifesaver. Very brave, very sweet. And so when he died, it was a big deal. He was only something like, I think seven seven years old. Yeah. 1944, St. Bernard's. Bigger dogs have a little shorter lifespan, I think. Yeah, for sure. But a pretty good seven years. And the whole town came out in a big way. Yeah. They canceled school so the schoolchildren could attend his funeral. Amazing. They gave him a funeral with full military honors. His casket was draped in the Norwegian flag. It was a big deal. Soldiers came from all over the place. The town just basically stopped that day to attend Bumps funeral. That's right. Over a thousand sailors and villagers attended this funeral. Pretty great. And I think does this one have two statues or was that Voitec? Voitec has two statues, one in Krakow and one in Edinburgh, and then BumpsA has one in, I believe, in Dundee, Scotland, and then the other one is going to be in Norway. I don't know if they've raised it yet. And then in 2006, too, the story gets even better because Bamsa was awarded posthumously, of course, the people's dispensary for sick animals. Gold medal is the animal version of the George's Cross or the George Cross. Right. And who accepted it on his behalf Vigus, the little girl who was on death's door until she got those sweet, sweet Saint Bernard lakes. Pretty amazing. Amazing. Well, that's it for amazing animals, everybody. If you want to know more about amazing animals, just go start reading about them. It will turn your day around. Walk outside and look around. Yeah, go kiss your closest animal. How about that? Yeah. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. Kudos guys on the MH 370 podcast. That must have been a good one. We got a lot of good response from that one. Yes. As well as other people that were like, aviation is tough and you guys did an okay job. I didn't see any of those. Yes, there were a couple of those technical details, but I think we told a good story in the end. Okay. I live in Kuala Lumpur, Ore, and have even flown on MH 370 before this incident. So creepy. You covered this one really well and handled the cultural issues while to really appreciate that you reached conclusion in a logical, well reasoned and unbiased manner. This includes your reference to other suicide flights like the Silk Air flight. You are spot on. Malaysia is not interested in the truth in this case and are happy to see this as an act of God. Hence the prayer they show on every single flight since. Yes, they put a prayer on the screen before every takeoff asking God to bless the flight as Westerners. We will never understand this fatalistic approach as we can see a real cause for this terrible event that they prefer to pass off as God's will. This rift between how we think about it and how they think about it is real. I don't mean to be bigoted or anything, but I have lived in this culture for 40 years now and understand that people do think differently. My wonderful wife that is from here even agrees with this assessment. So well done, guys. It's one of your best podcasts. Well researched and well presented. Calling it as it is, sadly. Cheers, Pete. Thanks, Pete. That was nice of him. Yeah, that's great. I don't have anything to add. Great. If you want to get in touch with us like Pete did, thanks again, Pete. You can go to stuffyshoodnow.com and look for our social links there. And you can also send us an email. Two 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 or wherever you listen to your favorite show. Hey everybody. I don't know about you, but I am excited that it's summer. School's out, the sun is shining, and best of all, there's downtime for days. That's where true crime podcasts on Amazon music come in. They're the perfect activity for last minute road trips, long walks, or, if you're brave enough, late nights. With so many killer shows like Morbid, my favorite Murder and Small Town Murder, you'll never be bored to death again. So download the free Amazon Music app to start listening to all your favorite true crime podcast. Plus, with Amazon Music, you can access new episodes early. Download the app today."
41d2cb6c-53a3-11e8-bdec-072d3b70ffef	How Area 51 Works	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-area-51-works	The secret military base Area 51 is inextricably linked to every secret, shady project the US government is rumored to be involved in – from reverse-engineering alien technology to coordinating a one-world government. The truth is much more mundane.	The secret military base Area 51 is inextricably linked to every secret, shady project the US government is rumored to be involved in – from reverse-engineering alien technology to coordinating a one-world government. The truth is much more mundane.	Thu, 13 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=13, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=164, tm_isdst=0)	48795549	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hello, Minneapolis in DC. It's me, Josh, and I'm coming to perform the End of the World or how I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Humanity, my solo live show, and I think you're going to like it. Times running out, though, so go to the Parkway Theater. theater.com for Minneapolis tickets and themiracletheatre.com for DC tickets. See you on June 19 and June 20. Welcome to stuff. You should know a production of Iheartradios how stuff works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. And there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. And there's Dylan, the guest producer. Again, this is the podcast about Chuck. Some pretty heavy stuff. Yeah. I could have sworn we did this one. No. What do we do? Roswell. No. UFOs. Yes. We did that at a Comic Con or something, right? Yeah, we did. We did it live. I've never been satisfied with that one. I agree. Maybe we'll redo it one day. No, this is good. This Area 51, I think this kind of covers some ground that I didn't think I was surprised by. This is what I'm saying. Yeah, me too. And I think the thing that I would wager you were surprised about, which I was definitely surprised about, was just how mundane the explanations for what goes on at Area 51 probably is. Yeah. Secret government research. The end. Right. But it probably doesn't have anything to do with reverse engineering, alien technology, and the secret seat of the One World government, the Majestic Twelve, probably isn't located there. No. Probably just bombs and planes. Probably. It makes sense. And if there is a conspiracy going on, the one conspiracy theory I saw for Area 51 that made the most sense to me is that it's actually meant to be a distraction or has developed into a distraction for some other place that no one even knows about. Area 50, maybe. Yeah, maybe. Hopefully they're not quite that on the nose, but it's possible. All right, so let's go back in time, I guess, to World War II. Well, first of all, Area 51, just to geographically level set, it's less than 100 miles from Las Vegas in Nevada. South Nevada. Yeah. It's 600 sq. Mi. And it's basically, if you look at it on Google Earth, it looks like a big airfield with a bunch of buildings. So I think the whole restricted airspace that's part of the test range and the air base and all of that stuff that the Area 51 is located in, I think that 600 sq. Mi. I'm pretty sure Area 51 itself is no more than 60 sq. Mi. Yeah, sure. It's not like there's 600 sq. Mi of buildings. Right, yeah. The installation that people think of as Area 51 is part of a larger, huge chunk of the American desert in Nevada. Right. So next to Area 51 is what you're talking about, the Nevada Test Site. And this is where for about ten or eleven years, the atomic energy commission was setting off nuclear bombs underground, above ground, and really sort of figuring out how to kill a lot of people very easily in sort of the most dangerous way you could imagine. Yeah. And you could see this from Vegas. Like they would have parties when they were doing the test because Vegas is like 80 miles away or something like that. And they would have atomic cocktails and viewing parties and stuff like that. And people would watch them shoot off bombs. Unbelievable. Right. But this is obviously a part of the country that the government would be very interested in keeping people away from, not just for the bombs, but because of the fallout, the radiation, but also the fact that they're testing super sensitive military equipment and weapons. Right. Like atomic bombs. Yeah. Like previous to this, it was just land. There were silver mines, there was cattle and wildlife. But then in 1940, the government said, no, this is ours, and we're going to train bombers here. And there was a big bombing range and they were split into different numbers. And that's where the number Area 51 comes from. Which seems, I don't know about arbitrary, but no one knows if it really matters why it was named Area 51. No. I think if you look at old bombing range maps, the area where Area 51 is located was denoted as area 51. Between 50 and 52 is probably the answer. Yeah, that's basically from what I saw, that was it. Yeah. So there's another part to this story with World War II, and this is Germany. They were a bit ahead of us as far as jets go. Jet airplanes. Yeah. The United States is like, this won't do it all, so we're going to put the gas on our jet development. And in 1943, Lockheed said was tasked with developing a jet fighter plane. You can use a British jet engine. And they tasked engineer Kelly Johnson to get a team together. He got a team together and they delivered the P 80 shooting star, which is one of the coolest looking old jets. All these planes are just amazing looking. Agreed. Very cool. It's a good idea when we talk about a new jet or something, go look it up as we're talking about, because most of them are pretty boss looking. Yeah. I've never been a plane guy, but I'm getting more and more into it. Is that right? Yeah, I want to do a stealth bomber episode one day. Okay. Possibly the coolest plane. Yeah. So Kelly Johnson was just that right there. Delivering America's first jet under time and under budget was huge. And he became a legendary engineer right off the bat. And I think Lockheed said, hey, how would you like to keep this pace up? We'll give you your team of elite engineers, whatever funding you need, whatever resources you need, just ask. You can have it. And you just keep developing stuff really quickly for us, and we will put you at the cutting edge of aviation research. And so Kelly Johnson and his team eventually became known as the Skunkworks, which is legendary in aviation engineering because they developed a whole bunch of really cool stuff. But also, they had a pretty great name, too, that was fairly intriguing. But they were the first ones to kind of basically develop agile project management, from what I understand. Yeah. And this was all out of what was known as Site One, which was in Burbank, California, just sort of a suburb of La. But then in 1954, they said, you know, what we need now is a spy plane. The CIA wants a spy plane. We want something that can fly above radar and photograph Soviet military bases, missile installations. We're going to name it because we name everything project Aquatone. And that's where Johnson and his team developed the U two, the Skunkworks team. But they couldn't do this at Site One anymore because it had to be super secret, obviously, because it was a spy plane. So they needed a different place. And that's where that sort of all converges onto this testing site in Nevada. Yes. Kelly Johnson CIA officer named Richard Bissell and a couple of pilots started scouting locations for where they could develop this in super secret. And they went to look at the old Nevada test range, and specifically, the thing that attracted them was a dry salt lake called Groom Lake. And one of the pilots recounted taking some, like, 16 pound shot footballs and dropping them on the ground to see just how sandy the ground was. And he said it was solid as a tabletop. This lake was the dry lake. They were like, this will probably do. And there's a lot of reasons why it would do. Not just because there was a dry lake bed that was as hard as concrete, but because it was in an area that was already off limits to the public. The airspace was already restricted. It was remote. There are two mountain ranges that shield the test site from view. So this area, what became known as Area 51, was just perfect for developing a super secret spy plane in super secret. And so the CIA and the Skunkworks team said, this'll do. Let's take this place over. Did I ever tell you about one of the most fun things I ever got to do as a PA? What? Wait, didn't weren't you arrested by Eric Estrada? Is that what you're going to say? Oh, no, that stopped in okay. We did a car shoot on a dry lake bed in Death Valley. Nice. And they had, like, a big, huge line of cars in a row, all driving in perfect synchronicity. And the director wasn't happy. And they were like, all the dust is behind them. He went, I want dust in front of them. So the ad ran and grabbed the keys to a Mustang, threw them to me, and he said, get in that Mustang and drive 100ft in front of them as fast as you can. Fishtailing and doing donuts and stuff. Awesome. That was like me. Yeah. Oh, man, it was so much fun because it's a dry lake bed. It's like there's just no fear of hitting anything or flipping. Like you could just do whatever you wanted. It was wonderful. That's cool. It was so much fun. You didn't hit a jack rabbit or anything, did you? Just a couple? No, it was fine. It was a lot of fun. So what was the last thing you said? Super secret? Yeah, the last thing I was talking about how amazingly perfect 51 is for developing a super secret spy plane. Yes. So they called it Paradise Ranch. And the locals around there, they were used to because of all the atomic bomb testing, it kind of worked out because they weren't going to. First of all, it was in the middle of nowhere. But even the nearby communities, the ones that were close enough, it just wasn't on anyone's radar because they had always been doing weird things out there. So it's not like it pricked up anyone's ears. So it was kind of the perfect cover to be there at Paradise Ranch doing these development of the spy planes and stuff. Right. But in addition to that, the cover story initially that the CIA produced was that they were a team of bomb experts who were cleaning up unexploded munitions from the time when it was used as a bombing range. So that was the story they used for why there was a sudden appearance of, like, trucks and people when there hadn't been really much of anything there before. Yeah. There are also natural barriers. There were a couple of mountain ranges that kind of shielded it from view. It was already remote. The airspace was already restricted. And then Eisenhower came along and signed Executive Order 106-3395 Five, which basically extended the airspace over Area 51. And then in 1958, a public land order basically said, this area doesn't exist anymore. Right. It's not on maps. It's not acknowledged. And this is one of the huge reasons why Site Two, the ranch, Area 51, has been so and we'll see later. Things have changed a little bit in recent years. But just for the government to say, like, I don't know what you're talking about, over and over again. It's sort of crazy making. It is. But as we'll see later, they would say in open court, the place where this person claims to work does not exist, like in court. And the judge would just be like, how are we going to get around this? This is a real problem. But from what I read, Chuck, originally, area 51 was CIA installation. And around 1970, it transferred hands to the Air Force. But from what I could tell up until that point, or at least the first several years in the mid to late fifty s and early 60s, no one had any idea that Area 51 existed. They did a really good job of keeping that place a genuine secret. Not an open secret like it became later on, but a real secret. And one of the ways that they did that was from what workers later said in testimony in court cases, is that they would be interrogated at gunpoint to see if they were actually spies. There were all sorts of weird loyalty tests and things like that. And while they were working on the you two spy plane in particular. They kept that secret so serious that if you were out there working and you had nothing to do with the YouTube program. You were just a worker. You were working on a different program. They would move you indoors. Close the doors. Close the blinds on the windows before rolling the U two out or testing it like you were not allowed to be outside or look. Yeah, that was pretty remarkable. Within Area 51, they even had subsecurity protocols in place. I kind of just figured, like, if you were in there, then you had access to the alien room, all the good stuff, right? But think about that, because to even be on the base or in Area 51, you had to have the highest level of security clearance you could possibly have just to work on there. And even if you have that, you still couldn't see the U two spy plane or know that it existed or hear people talk about it. They wouldn't even let Bono in on it. No. So that was a terrible joke. It was really bad. I was really hoping we can get around that one. So the U two spy plane was great until it wasn't. And that was when Francis Gary Powers was shot down in 1960, and the plane was all of a sudden in the hand of the Soviets. And they basically were like, well, that's the end of that. You can't have a secret spy plane anymore once it's in the hand of the Soviets. And it was also a big deal because the American people all of a sudden knew that the US government is definitely doing things in total secret and developing technology that no one knows about. It was a surprise to everybody, not just the Soviets, but also the American public. Like you were saying too, and I looked to see if this was looked upon by historians, is like the point where Americans realize that the government did things in secret that the American public didn't know about. And I didn't see anything like this. I don't know if this is an ed comment or what, but it makes sense. And certainly people didn't know that the YouTube spy plane existed. The CIA did a really good job of keeping it secret, but when it was out. It was pretty humiliating for the US. And it was also a big deal that this spy plane was shot down because Eisenhower had approached Krushchev and said. Hey. Why don't we maintain an open airspace policy to one another so we can keep tabs to make sure that either side is keeping our word with our armament treaties and the stuff we're doing. Like we're enemies. But maybe we should kind of be able to keep tabs on one another. And Cruise Chef said, no, there's not going to be any open airspace policy. And so the United States went and developed this Utah spy plane instead. And when it got shot down, flying over restricted airspace of an enemy, that's an act of war. And it could have gone way differently than it did, but instead, it was a big humiliation for the United States. And instead of just kind of tucking tail and running, the guy who was in charge of it for the CIA, Richard Bissell, went to the government and said, hey, I've got an idea. Let's get even more secret and develop an even more secretive plane under an even more secretive project. And that the government said, hey, let's do it. We're scared of the Russians. We'll double down. We'll triple down if you want, buddy. And that became Project Ox. Cart that's right. And that was a Black project, and it was so secret and so concealed that no one was even allowed to know how much money was being spent. Yeah, this is a big turning point here. It was I mean, this kind of started the era that we still live in today in which the military just dumps money into secret projects where they don't exist, as far as anyone knows, and that there's very little oversight for. Right, exactly. Interesting. Yes. And apparently it was this Richard Bissell's idea. All right, let's take a break. Old Dick Bissell. We'll get back to Dick Bissell and the rest of Oxcart right after this. So one of the problems with I guess it's not a problem if you're comfortable with dumping money into a project, but one of the expenses of a super secret project is that it just costs a lot more. Background checks take time and cost money. Putting something in a super remote location costs money. Having extra security forces, and it all just cost a lot more money. It's a serious multiplier on cost to do something that, quote, unquote, doesn't exist. Right. But in addition to that, chuck, too, is just the fact that the technology that was being developed was so cutting edge, it just, by definition, required even more money on top of the extra money for it being so super secret. Yeah. So Oxcard eventually led to the SR 71 Blackbird, another amazingly cool plane. Probably the coolest of all time, if you ask me. Yeah, I said the stealth barmer earlier, but the SR 71, it was pretty awesome. Although there is another one later on that I'll mention. Well, I'll go ahead and say the Bird of Prey stealth jet. You like that one, huh? It's pretty cool. It looks a little bit like a super cool tongue depressor. You know what I'm talking about? I know what a tongue depressor is. This looks like that like a flying gray tongue depressor. It's like a Popsicle stick, though, right? Yeah, but wider. Okay, but the SR 71 Blackbird definitely not a Popsicle stick. No, it's just cool. Plus, it doesn't hurt the fact that GI. Joe, well, Cobra technically had the SR 71 Blackbird as one of their planes. That's funny. Yeah. So Oxgart, they needed better infrastructure, basically, and they couldn't just pour money into the development of the jet at this point. They had to really update all the facilities, expanding on land, expanding more restricted airspace, even. That happened in 1962. And it just sort of, I think, ingrained the super permanence of Area 51. And also like, the fact that the government said no, okay, this is a humiliating thing to have our YouTube shot down. Rather than maybe we'll just kind of take another tack. They really went further down the path of just completely secret Black projects, and they developed some pretty amazing stuff there. I think you were saying the Bird of Prey, that was from the 90s, right? Yeah, I think it's cool looking. The F 117 Nighthawk, that's the one that's like a single wing stealth bomber, I believe. Yes. And this is also where they take, like, if you capture an enemy plane, you will take that to Area 51 to check out as well. Yeah, there's another program at Wright Patterson Base in Dayton that's set up specifically for that. But I wonder if this is even more highly sensitive. I don't know. I don't know. But yeah, they've captured Migs before, captured radar systems, and they reverse engineered them there, which will come into play later on. And then there was another one called the Tesset blue stealth bomber. So basically, any stealth aircraft, whether it was the Stealth Blackhawks or the Stealth bombers that were developed from the 60s onward, it was probably developed and tested in super secrecy in Area 51. Right. So like I said, this made it just sort of a shop that wouldn't close, essentially. At this point in 1993, there's an area known as Freedom Ridge. Very ironic name because Freedom Ridge was taken by the government and closed off to the public. And this is where tinfoil hats used to gather with their binoculars to try and check out things. And they said, no more. Freedom Ridge is now ours. It's called? Get out of here, Ridge. Yeah. Shot on Site Ridge. That's right. So if you are like, get to the aliens, what are you guys even talking about? Aliens in Area 51 as synonymous as they are now, and they are synonymous. The highway that Area 51 is off of that. The road to Area 51 is off of has been officially renamed by the state of Nevada as the Extraterrestrial Highway. Highway 305, as synonymous as this base is with aliens and UFOs, that's actually relatively recent. It was operating for a good 25, 35 years, I think, before aliens became tied to Area 51. And there's actually a moment in time that you can point to where it happened. And it happened on a broadcast in May of 1989, almost just past 30 years ago on KLAS, the local Las Vegas TV network. I'm not sure what network affiliate they are, but they had, like, their 05:00 news, and on it, they interviewed a guy who was anonymous, went by the pseudonym Dennis, and he basically said, hey, I'm doing a lot of weird stuff out there at Area 51. Let me tell you all about it. Yeah. His real name was Bob Lazar. Have you seen interviews with this guy? Yeah. Did you see the more recent one? No, but the one where he said, I think it was a good idea. That one. No, I'm talking about there was one just from a few years ago. I got to say, I'm not a conspiracy guy at all, right. But when you listen to Bob Lazar talk today, he just doesn't seem like some crackpot or a weirdo or like he would be lying. He hasn't made money off of this. Or like, he's basically like, Listen, man, I kind of wish this wasn't attached to my name because I'm trying to run a business in Michigan, and it doesn't help that people think I'm some UFO. Kook bob Lazar's alien apples. Oh, good. But he was like, everything that I told you was true, though, and that's just the deal, and I don't care if anyone believes me. He's kind of like that, though, too, in the early interviews. At the very least, he's very calm and not at all kooky or anything like that. Specifically the stuff he was talking about that was so compelling. Yeah. So his story is and you can go watch the stuff for yourself and see it all, but he basically explains how he's an engineer, and he was working on reverse engineering, flying saucers, essentially alien spacecraft and alien technology. And at one point he was in a room, and they left him alone with all these files that describe alien technology and alien autopsies and all of this stuff. And it's pretty remarkable to listen to. It didn't make the hugest waves because it was 1989. It was a local news station at first. It didn't yeah. And then it was picked up by Japan, oddly enough. And after it went to Japan, it went worldwide, and before you know it, the whole area just sort of became alien central. And we should point out this also has a lot to do with the fact that in the kind of went UFO nuts. Oh, yeah, man. There are so many great books at the time that were coming out that claimed everything from, like, UFOs were responsible for the mutant triangle, or Atlantis was populated by UFOs, or the NASCAR lines were for UFOs, or the Egyptians built the pyramids with UFOs. All that stuff came out of the yeah. So this all kind of coincided with Lazar having his news interview and it really just kind of changed everything it did. Right. So he kind of like, came out at a time when America was primed to really believe it. But if you think about it, everything you hear about and think about from about Area 51 today did not exist. Pre 1989 pre Bob Lazar. It all started with Bob Lazar and the reason why everybody wasn't just like so he's just some nut who came out and said this stuff. Who cares? How did that become truly cemented with Area 51? Is that weirdly? Some of the stuff he talked about kind of held water. Like he would talk about just mundane day to day stuff that went on at Area 51 that seemed to be able to be correlated from locals. Yeah, it held up. There was a scanner once he said that you would get in and out of rooms by scanning your hands and it would scan the bone structure of your hand. That was how you're identified and could come in and out of rooms. And supposedly somebody found like 30 years later, mention of something like that in some declassified report about Area 51. This is what really kind of legitimized him. He would take people out on Wednesday night, and at the time he would say, I never saw what time it was, but at the time he said it would happen, lights would rise up in the sky and they would do all sorts of Ufoe kind of stuff. And the fact that he knew about these schedules really kind of added legitimacy to his claims. Yes. The new interview that I saw, he was explaining some of the anti gravitational propulsion technology that the aliens had supposedly used that he was supposedly assigned to reverse engineer. Right. And he was sort of walking the person through it that was in the room, and he was like, oh yeah. And he said, we had this thing, it was sort of like half a basketball. And when you went to put your hand on it, he was like bringing two magnets opposite poles that repel. And he said, that's kind of what it felt like. And he said, So we would drop like a golf ball and it would just skirt off to the side without hitting it, as if it had bounced. And the way he was describing it, I was just like, this guy just seems so credible. Right? It was so like, shocking. I didn't know what to expect. I thought he was not going to be credible, I guess. Right. I didn't see the interview with them, but I read about that technology. And by the way, everybody, you can erase your email. It's like poles that repel each other. Chuck not right. The antigravity technology I was talking about was basically saying, like, around the craft or whatever, that they were reverse engineering it would bend gravity so this could just move right through space, basically at light speed. That's the big suspicion among Ufologists who follow this stuff is that they reverse engineering light speed aircraft that was propelled using antigravity technology on engines that were antimatter engines back in 1989. There wasn't an Internet to start with, but even if there was, you couldn't find stuff like descriptions of anti gravity craft at the time. So for this guy to just come out and start talking about this in an authoritative way, he's an enigmatic figure, for sure, but he was also one whose credibility was questioned right out of the gate, too. Right? Yeah. I mean, he said that he went to MIT and the Caltech. There are no records of him being a student. The conspiracy theorists will say, like, you know how easy it is for the government to wipe that clean? I don't know. Is that easy? So that's what they will say. They will also say that they also got in touch with his professors to make sure they never talked and stuff like that. But that's when I get a little bit like you can't have hundreds of people or thousands of people involved in some big, massive cover up, like, someone's going to talk. You're just not thinking big enough. I agree with you. That's when it kind of starts to get hinky for me. But he did disappear. Not disappear, disappeared, disappear. But it's not like he was like, all right, and now I'm going to go make all the money on this. Right, exactly. Like, he moved and tried to start, like a regular business and tried to just not be in the public eye. Yeah, he did. Which I think adds to his credibility even more, you know, a little bit. Let's take our last break and then come back, shall we? Let's do it. But let's promise we're going to come back, okay? All right. Okay. Chuck so Bob Lazar comes along, just starts spouting out at the mouth about all the crazy alien stuff that's going on in Area 51, and then he kind of, like, fades into the background for a while, and everybody else kind of took it from there. If you have anything to do with government conspiracies or believe in UFOs or aliens or whatever, all that stuff started to get saddled little by little onto Area 51. And one of the things that pretty early on got connected to Area 51. But almost across the board, any reasonable source or skeptical source will say, like, the two have nothing to do with one another. Is Roswell and Area 51. Yeah, the Roswell crashed. When something crashed. Gentlemen found pieces of some kind of unidentified object and it became UFO central. Later, it was said to be a weather balloon. But first the army said it was a flying disk. Right. They kind of changed things. You've seen the pictures, right? Sure. I've seen that one famous picture of the guy crouching with what looks like just some balloon material. Yeah. Right. But he was just a stooge for the government and that was just a prop that they came up with. So the Roswell crash happens in 1947. There's no way Area 51 would have been associated with it. The whole mythos around Roswell is that there was a UFO crash that happened. Some aliens survived, or at the very least, their bodies were recovered, depending on who you ask. And the UFO and the aliens, alive or dead, were taken for further study. To where? Area 51. Right. Area 51, back in 1947, when the Roswell crash happened was not even on the CIA's radar. It was basically a defunct airstrip and a nuclear testing range still. So there wouldn't have been any place to take the aliens in the first place. And then secondly, after the Roswell crash happened the idea of an alien crash having taken place there that didn't come about until, like, the 80s too. So really, people started to kind of catch on to this a little late. So probably Area 51 in Roswell have nothing to do with one another. And let's not forget that they're, like 800 miles apart too. Yes. Even though to everyone in America and really the rest of the world outside of the Southwest thinks they're, like, right next to each other. I think so, yeah. So there have been a lot of crazy theories over the years. The very most basic. Like you just said, there's alien corpses, there's alien technology there. And the US. Military has been studying this stuff and trying to perfect everything from time travel to lightspeed travel. Right. That's the basic ground zero approach. Don't forget inter dimensional travel too. Why not another one? I saw there's some pretty low hanging fruit that I love. The moon landing was faked there. Sure. And then afterwards right. But then after that, Kubrick was executed on site and replaced by a clone. Well, that clone did some great work. He did better than Barry Lyndon, right? Oh, I love Barry Lyndon. I've never seen it, so I can't really hate on it. It's amazing. Weather control experiments. That's probably the most believable for me. Sure. Cloud seating. Sure, why not? Why not? And then there's, like, stage two of conspiracy theories. Yes. There are aliens that clock in every day at Area 51 and work side by side with us in harmony. In harmony. In order to build, like, an alien human hybrid race. Maybe all of this sounds familiar. I will bet that you watched a pretty hefty amount of XY. Oh, yes. Because they really tapped into this stuff. They basically just appropriated it for plot lines, which is great. I love the X Files, but it was just I guess Chris Carter used to hang out with, like, Ufologists or something just to get ideas. Did he really? Yeah, he had two of yeah. Or he is one himself. I don't know much about that. Maybe so. Maybe so. And then, of course, if you even ramp that up a little bit more, that this is all part of a giant conspiracy to create a One World Government that is human alien run, right? And that's where that majestic twelve I mentioned at the beginning comes in. They are supposedly a panel of academics, elite scientists there's twelve of them who were impanelled by Eisenhower after the Roswell crash. Or I guess it would have been Truman, I think, still. And they were put together just the cream of the crop to basically go contact the aliens and basically broker a meeting, I guess, between the President and the aliens. And they managed to leverage this to catapult themselves into the status of actual people who run the world. Right. They're the ones who are forming this one world government. And that is where Area 51, or that's where it's located. The seat of this government is located underground in Area 51. Yeah. This next one is a little more recent and very kooky, and it's the notion that Hitler and Stalin got together and hatched a plan to undermine the United States in World War II by distracting us about the threat of an impending alien invasion. And they would do this by building a fake spaceship, filling it with mutant children that Joseph Mingela created, and fill the spaceship with those kids. And then the craft crashed in a storm. And that was the Roswell incident. Right? It was meant to land. And then these mutant children come out speaking German. Right? Supposedly, the mutant children who are the aliens that were found in the Roswell crash, had huge heads and giant eyes. They were basically like the grays of alien legend, right? And that Stalin and Hitler were inspired by the public's reaction in America to the War of the Worlds broadcast. They wanted to incite that kind of panic by actually creating this fake alien invasion with all the drugs Hitler was on. After we know this now, who knows? I'm sure he's like, yeah, that's a great idea. It's a great idea, man. What else you got? What else you got? What else can we do? Stalin's like Mellow. You tried CBD. He's like, no, that's the one thing I haven't tried. You got any? Right. But it'll mix well with everything else. So this is obviously not a thing either. Well, this is from a book by an author named Annie Jacobson, I believe, and this book came out in 2011, and she based this whole thing on an alleged Area 51 insider who was her source, who said that he worked on a project that had to do with this somehow, some way, but this was where all of this alien stuff came from. It was a hoax by the Nazis and the Soviets. Weird thing is, there's another guy out there who supposedly has a different source who tells the same story, but this other source says that it was all fake, that I saw the files myself, but I believe that it was meant to be a test of loyalty right. Or to see how I would react working at Area 51 to files like this and be like, oh, my God, this is real. This is real. I can't believe this is actually real. I guess to see how gullible you were and therefore how trustworthy you were. Right. Which could explain Bob Lazar's situation, too, because he was supposedly in a room full of files that he probably shouldn't have seen either. Right. He probably failed to test. You got three different sources who supposedly worked at Area 51. Technically, I should say, because we'll get email. Bob Lazar worked at S Four, which is an even more secret installation that's attached to Area 51. Yeah. But you got three people who allegedly worked in Area 51 who all tell a story about basically being left in a room with files that contain information about aliens, whether it was a hoax or real or whatever. And maybe that is because that kind of correlates with the idea that they were like gunpoint interrogations to verify your allegiance to the government or the military or whatever. Maybe that is something they tried there. Yeah. It doesn't make the actual aliens real. It just makes the presence of the files real. That's true. Yeah. So Area 51 today as it truly exists, if you're driving down highway 375, there's an unmarked dirt road between mile markers 29 and 30, or I guess 30 and 29, and you turn on that road. It's 12 miles on a dirt road. You'll get to a gate, and there'll be warning signs all along saying Restricted Area. Sort of like Close Encounters type stuff. There will be cameras and sensors everywhere. So don't think you're like getting away with anything. No. There's mics that listen to your conversation. You are under as close surveillance as you've ever been in your life, from what I understand. Yeah. And there are guards, of course, and they will say, I'm sorry, turn around and drive back to the highway. And if you persist a little bit, then you will get arrested. If you're around the perimeter area, kind of walking around with your binoculars, they will probably come and take your binoculars and tell you to leave or drive you back to the highway, or maybe smash your face in and bury you in the desert. Well, there's a sign that says, Use of Deadly force. Force is authorized, I'm sure. But from what I've seen, there's never been an incident where that actually happened, you're much more likely to get handed over to the local cops who will slap you with a several hundred dollars fine. Sure. If you give them any kind of guff and don't leave immediately when they tell you to. So kind of the cool thing about Area 51, obviously there are civilian workers that work there. It's a huge facility that apparently is still growing because you can look at satellite photographs and year by year it seems to be getting bigger and bigger with more buildings. Right. If you work there and they have to have everything from food services to custodial services to plumbing and electricians and stuff like that. And all of those people have the highest possible security clearance an American can have. Oh, sure. So they don't drive down that dirt road and just go to the gate and say, how are you doing, Rick? And they go, come on in, Jane. They go to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas and they all get on a big, basically air taxi. It's a 737 passenger jet that fly. They call them the Janet jets under the coal sign Janet, they're white, the big thick red stripe. You can look it up online. And that's how they get to work every day. They fly everyone in on a 737 and you can see them on the tarmac. They just get in with the regular planes. It's just look for the giant 737 that are white with the red stripe and pretty cool. No logo, no nothing. They don't actually have a name. Like you said, they fly under call sign Janet. People have tried to figure out forever what Janet means. There's an idea that it's just another non existent terminal stands for that her joint air network for employee Transportation. But if you go visit the Nevada Aerospace Hall of Fame, they tell the story that there was a commander of Area 51 named Richard A. Samson from and he chose his wife's name, Janet, to identify the commuter shuttles. That's sweet. And that's the most romantic super secret government story of all. So we kind of teased earlier on that the government is no longer saying like, I don't know what you're talking about. No. This satellite image that we're all looking at of buildings, I don't see anything but dirt. That's all changed a little bit now because of a lawsuit in the mid 1990s. There were a group of workers from Area 51 that sued the government because of the environmental disaster there. Or maybe this changing now, but it had been for many years because of the fact that it's a black project and so unregulated that they were just basically doing everything like dumping hazardous waste and burning it in trenches. And people were there just inhaling these fumes, right, and getting really sick. And a guy named Robert Frost that worked there, an employee, had a lot of really bad health problems. Doctor said you were suffering from some kind of a really bad chemical reaction, and in order to treat it, we need to know what it is. And the government said, Sorry, we can't tell you that. And he died. He died. And some other co workers filed this lawsuit, and one of them ended up dying, too. And they finally got to like a Nevada, I think, or a federal circuit court that said, no, you guys don't have a right to know what you've been exposed to. They weren't looking for money. They just wanted to know what was killing them. And the reason that they had no legal right to know was and this is that trial that I was referring to earlier, where the government representatives were saying, the place that they're talking about doesn't exist. Sorry. Right. So imagine trying to just get past that barrier. You're suing the government to find out what they were burning that made you sick. But the government's in court saying, like, the place that they're talking about doesn't even exist. That's obstacle one. But the whole reason that they were burning this stuff in the first place is because Area 51 operates under what's called the Mosaic Theory. And the Mosaic Theory is that any little piece of information a spy gets his or her hands on could be fit together with other information to provide a larger picture of what's being done at Area 51. And as a result, nothing can come out of Area 51 like the chemical that's killing the people. Right. Or computers that go in and are used. Once they get decommissioned, they get put in this pit in these trenches, and every two weeks, they go out there with jet fuel. And everything that's been put into the trenches over the last two weeks gets doused with jet fuel. It's set on fire with road flares amazing. And whatever is in that smoke, the workers get exposed to because for some reason, they built the trenches upwind of this installation rather than downwind. And so people were exposed to this every two weeks for years and years and years. And things like anti radar paint. The jet fuel that they're using as an accelerant, I'm sure wasn't helping, but just all sorts of exotic materials that was super classified. This is what was killing these people. Aliens were making them sick. Exactly. And the government said, no, this is just too classified. These people can't know. They're just going to have to go off and die untreated, because we're not going to say publicly what they were exposed to. That's where it stood, that case. They did finally, in that case, say, okay, there's an Area 51. I know the whole courtroom went out for beers that day afterwards. So there's a thing there. And that's really all we can say. Sorry, there's a thing there. But that was the very first sort of insight into just that admission that there was something there was the first time that it ever happened, in the mid 1990s. Yeah. And you were saying, like, people would point to satellite images of the place, and you can see that it's growing now. Like, you can see it on Google Maps. That is really new because it wasn't very long ago where all the satellites in space were controlled by the government and the government could control what ended up in satellite images. So they blocked out any image of Area 51. But as private firms started launching their own satellites, it became basically impossible. Just little by little, it's becoming to the point now where they're like, yes, they acknowledge something is there. No, you can't know what's going on there. It's basically the status quo now, pretty much. So that's Area 51. And sorry, we kind of took the government tack here and didn't really go all in on the alien theories, but I just don't think that's what it is. Now, if you want to know more about Area 51, I guess just start reading about it. There's some pretty interesting stuff out there. And since I said that, it's time for listener mail. This is about nicknames. This is from Rob. Oh, yeah. I love this one. Hey, guys. My name is Rob Bob. Rob and Bob combined into a singular form, like Jim Bob, but better. My mom has explained to me that it started when I was about six months old. I was a really chunky kid, like, in the 99th percentile for weight. They felt like no other nickname like Robbie or Bobby Fitz. So they started calling me Rob Bob. Many years later, I meet my wife, which is almost eight years ago now, and quickly found out that her favorite writer is Richard Wright. Since reading his novel, Native Son has wanted to name her kid Richard to honor the impact he had on her life. She had visited his grave in Paris and has every book he ever published. When she met me, I told her about my super nicknames that I had wanted to call my kid because, you see, my father is William Bill for short. But now, since we came up with these weird names, I call my dad Willbill to bug him. This leads me to why I've always wanted to name my child Richard since high school. Then we would, in order, have a Will build a Rob Bob and a Rick Dick. All in three generations of awesomeness. My wife does not approve and thinks we should look elsewhere for name ideas. With great admiration. Rob, Bob and Rachel. Thanks, Rob. Good luck with that, with your quest. Yeah, I don't think Rick Dick is going to fly in your household. I don't think so either. Rachel may have the cooler head here. I think so. Well, if you want to get in touch with us like Rob Bob did, we would love that. You can go on to stuffiestchnow.com, check out our social links there, or you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how stuff works. For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite show."
https://podcasts.howstuf…ysk-tabloids.mp3	How Tabloids Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-tabloids-work	Having started as an egalitarian answer to 19th-century newspapers, tabloids came to peddle shock and sleaze. They've cleaned up a bit, but they remain the world's guilty pleasure. Learn more about the fascinating history of tabloids with Chuck and Josh.	Having started as an egalitarian answer to 19th-century newspapers, tabloids came to peddle shock and sleaze. They've cleaned up a bit, but they remain the world's guilty pleasure. Learn more about the fascinating history of tabloids with Chuck and Josh.	Thu, 05 Jul 2012 19:28:39 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2012, tm_mon=7, tm_mday=5, tm_hour=19, tm_min=28, tm_sec=39, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=187, tm_isdst=0)	47221515	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know from housetoporkscom. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W. Chuckle. Bryant and this is stuff you should know. It's podcast. It's audio only, but coming soon, it will also include smells. Oh, yeah. Smello vision. Not vision. We'll just call it smell aroma. Grumpy people today. I'm not grumpy. You're grumpy. I'm grumpy. Jerry's grumpy. I'm fine. You all were grumpy at each other when I came in here. No, Jerry was mad at me for being mad at her. It doesn't count. It's just everyone's grumpy. Such a grumpy day. I'm not grumpy. I just had legitimate gripes. Grumps gripes. Everyone's gripey. All right. So, Chuck yes. I want to tell you about a great American hero. William Cat. No. Okay. Many years ago, in the wilds of I wish I could remember where he was found Mississippi, a little guy known as Bad Boy was captured. He was caught on a rooftop during a flood in Mississippi, and the authorities seized him and took him into their care. He became a ward of the state. That makes sense because Bat Boys are known to go to higher ground during flooding. Yeah, and he did through to form Bat Boy. At first, he didn't like this captivity, but eventually, he kind of became something of a patriot by volunteering to go search for Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda operatives in the caves of Afghanistan. The reason Bat Boy was so good at it is because he was raised in caves. Half boy son or heroes. Sure. Yeah. He wasn't able to find bin Laden, but he still returned to the US. A hero after long, long flight because he just flew himself. Of course. And we know of batboy's exploits thanks to a little newspaper known as the Weekly World News. Have you heard of this? Two things. I used to subscribe to the Weekly World. Did you really? Yeah, for, like, a year in high school. Me and my buddy Rad did, because it was fun. Radcliffe, Radford and two. I didn't realize that Batboy continued his exploits. I think Batboy sold a lot of papers for the well, I knew he did, but I didn't know they kept it up. That's awesome. Yeah. I'm glad to know that he was fighting the terrorists. Yes, he did. He tried to. I don't know if he was successful. At least he went equipped more than with just a sword, right. But yeah. So Batboy was a prominent character, I guess, in the Weekly World News, which also bills itself as the world's only reliable newspaper. Really? Yeah. I don't remember little Tagline or whatever. Oh, that's great. Yeah, it's not around anymore. In print. Yeah. I think I remember it shutting down and being sort of sad. Is it online? I guess, yeah. In 2008, it moved to and moved online. Yeah. So really? Every aspect of that story, from this outrageous claim that the bat boy was captured and sent to Afghanistan to calling itself Tongue in Cheek, the world's only reliable newspaper, to it shutting down and going online because of massive profit losses after being purchased by this huge conglomerate of tabloid papers. The Weekly World News is a perfect analogy for the course of tabloids over the last, like, 20 years as a whole. Yeah, and we're going to dig into that. I think it's funny because I didn't know the little tagline, but I guess they figured if we're just going to be making up stories because the Weekly World News, for those of you who haven't read it, isn't just a tabloid, it's fan fiction. I mean, it's completely ridiculous. They don't pretend, but that's why it's funny that they said that they're the only reliable thing. Yes. They said, well, we might as well just say that in the thing. Get it? Yes. And apparently one of their editors is quoted as saying, I could only find one source for this quote, so I don't know how true it is. It could be made up, which would be kind of like this apropos metaparity of the whole thing. But he said if our readers are informed, it's usually by accident. Really? So they're well aware. That's great. And it is an extreme example, but there are some aspects of the Weekly World News that do fit the bill of a standard table. Sure. So, I mean, let's talk about it. What is a tabloid? Well, should we start at the beginning or should we just talk about it a little bit? Then do the history. Do you want to do the history first? Man yeah, let's do the history first. Roof positive that we don't practice. So I did see there was one slight error. This is an Ed Grabanowski article, which are always great, but did you see this other etymology for the word tabloid with the pill company? No. In the late 1018 hundreds, apparently, Burrows Welcoming Company was a pharmaceutical company in England. They produced at the time, medicines were all like BC powder and goodies powdered, all powdered. And he, I think, was the first one to make into a pill by compressing the powder. And he called it a tabloid of cocaine. Yeah, it probably was. And that word became to mean anything figuratively. That was a small dose of anything. So the word tabloid actually came before, I believe, about ten years before the shrunken newspaper, the physical newspaper shrinking. Well, it still works. It's like the origin of life on Earth comes from another planet. But really, where did the origin of life begin? Right. It doesn't answer the question. It's the same thing, like, okay, so maybe that's the origin of the word tabloid then. It was associated with newspapers. The tabloid paper is printed on a smaller, more compact version of the normal newspaper newsprint called a broadsheet right. Yeah. So the tabloid is a smaller, more compact version. The broadsheet is longer and wider. Yeah. And then the tabloid were usually printed on the smaller paper, hence the word. Yeah. So at first it was a pill, then it became the size of the paper, and then later on, it just became the style of the paper and size. But really the style the tabloids, as we're explaining them, are basically like they are also commonly referred to as rags, as gutter public gossip rags. Yeah. They're gossip sheets, whatever. Basically, it's a slightly shifty, underhanded newspaper and tabloids. One of the ways that they exist and always have existed, is in comparison to, quote, legitimate newspapers. So, like, originally, newspapers that say, like, the beginning, the early 19th century, they were extremely stuffy. They were extremely expensive. They were like six cents per, which is like half a day's pay for the average labor. Really dry man. If you ever read these old New York Times articles yeah. They just really lay out the facts and then say the end. Exactly. Like the AP used to do until a few years ago. Yeah, AP always did that. It was sort of straight up when, how, where and why the old journalistic pyramid. Exactly. And then maybe a quote in there. And that was it. Out of this, I guess, kind of boredom and need for the working class to be able to get their news, too. Yeah. Because I couldn't afford it. Came the predecessors of tabloids called the penny press, so they were cheaper. And they also did something different. They took stories from just these boring facts, political stories, business stories, that kind of thing, and started working on human interest stories. Yeah. And they changed the style of writing. Sentences were shorter, paragraphs were shorter. They changed a little emotion. Way more emotion. It was designed for that. Like, listen to the triumph of this family over their evil landlord, or whatever. Kind of what we see now in mainstream newspapers. Exactly, yes. A lot of our mainstream media owes quite a bit to the evolution of tabloids. Agreed. And there's actually a point where it kind of spread. Finally, it made a jump. But you can see throughout the history of tabloids and newspapers, this interplay where tablets almost kind of break ground, take a bunch of heat and flack for it, and then newspapers latch onto what they're doing after it becomes co opted and normal behind the guys of we're, the upstanding publication. Exactly. But disgusting. You're right. I'm disgusted by it all yellow journalism came about in the era of William Randolph, first with his New York Journal, later called the New York American. And he was the first person in the United States, at least because I think in England it even started out before us, but not mistaken in England. I think they were kind of like the birth of some of the more tabloid style writing okay. But in America, William Randolph Hearst did with all of a sudden, he started doing some celebrity stuff and some murder and little sensational gore here and there. And he found that it sold really well up until the Depression, when nothing sold really well. Right. Pick up after the Depression, when a very monumental figure in tabloid history named Jeanette Janet Pope, or Jean Pope jean Pope Jr. He bought a Hearst paper called the New York Enquirer for 75 grand, changed it to tabloid size, started printing stuff that he figured people like to stare at a car crash. He was actually inspired, literally, by seeing people like jockeying to see the blood in the gore in a car crash and thought, wow, people really are disgusting and crazy, so I'm going to give them what they want. And he did you remember the crime scene photography episode we talked about? Ouija. He sold a lot of stuff to Gene Pope. Yes. He printed a lot of his gory crime scene photos. What's his name? Weegee. That's right. Lewis Felic, I think. But he went by W-E-E-G-E-E. Interesting. Yeah. So I said it again. Yeah. I was queueing the Executive Orders episode. How many times? Like a bunch. You know why? Because it was super interesting. So he starts selling a lot of papers based on this new style. And then a guy named Rupert Murdock, who you may have heard of or proved that you could actually have pretty wide circulation, and began selling News of the World in England. Millions of copies, sex scandals. And then the Pope said, you know what? If he can sell millions and millions of copies, so can I. Right. Let me change the name to the National Enquirer. Boom. Right? The National Enquirer was born, but the inquirer as we know it still wasn't born yet. They were crazy headlines about interracial sex and lesbianism and horrible acts of violence, posthumous violence. There is this one headline about a teen ripping the head off of a corpse to get at its gold teeth. And always with the gory crime scene photos. It's like the Pope comics we're doing, too. Yeah, very much comics. It was just very tawdry. If the stuff and the inquiry today is Target, this was just like, it's not fathom today. The reason it's not is, again, because of Gene Pope. So he had a lot of competition, not just he, but the whole industry was facing a big problem and that news stands were starting to dry up. Yes, sadly. So Gene Pope came up with an idea. He's like supermarkets. Everybody goes to supermarkets. They need to get in there. Now, I stand in line at the checkout stand. Right. But he knew there was no way that any respectable supermarket was going to sell his tabloid, his rag. Right. The murderous fire. So he cleaned the thing up. Right. He added way more. He took a queue from Rupert Murdoch and his News of the World and added way more celebrity stuff, sex scandals, but nothing taudry like this stuff he was talking about before. It was more like the Senator got caught with somebody or whatever. And there's this guy named James Waltz. He wrote for Vanity Fair, and he wrote this article called US Confidential. It was in the June 2002 issue of Vanity Fair. It was about this and about that transition going from the crime scene photography to astrology overnight so he could get into supermarkets. He said the inquirer staff was aghast. It was like asking an experienced team of grave robbers to take up gardening. So that's pretty much how the Enquirer staff took. We got to clean up our act and start writing about astrology and celebrity sex scandals. And it wasn't even cleaning up that much. It's not like you said we're going to become The New York Times. No, but that's why they're there. That's why when you stand in line at a supermarket checkout line, it's because in the 1960s, Jean Pope was like, we got to get in the supermarkets. I think people either read these or they don't. I don't think anyone dabbles in tabloids. You know what I'm saying? It's kind of like soap operas. No one says, Let me watch a little bit of Days of Our Lives. Like, you're either hooked on this stuff or you're not. I agree with that. But I think a lot of people are guilty of picking up the tablet and thumbing through it and then not buying it in the supermarket check out line. Well, now you know what they do now. And of course we were going to get to this. Might as well bring it up. They look at People magazine and US Weekly, right? Because they have nicked from tabloids as well and become a quote unquote respectable thing to pick up and read. Right. Even though come on. You ever read a People magazine? I have. It's sort of tabloidy at times. It is. And actually, you can thank the Star for that. Star used to be a tabloid sheet tabloid. And it went over to the glossy format at some point, I think maybe the late ninety s, and it married those two things, glossy People magazine format with tabloid. And it was enough of a success that People was like, well, we've already got the glossy magazine part. Let's just start doing the tabloid thing. Yeah, people have legitimate articles still, and they're not like, making stuff up, but they've definitely gone way into the look at the cellulite on the beach in Malibu and look at this person and look at that person and who wore it better? Plastic Disasters. Yeah, exactly. Stuff like that. Who wore it better? I know somebody who's been reading People. Yeah. When they have the two ladies with the same dress, it's so mean, especially when it's like 82 to 18. I know especially when it's like, you know, it's just mean sometimes. Yeah, I'm going to start wearing hockey jerseys and they'll be like, who worked better, kevin Smith or Podcast or Chuck Bryant? People go, I guess Kevin Smith because I never heard of this other guy. This is the same guy. It's the same dude. Anyway. All right, so that's pretty much a quick history of tabloids. Yeah. Here in the States, at least England. We keep mentioning England because they're lousy with it. Well, they're kind of on the leading edge of the decline of tabloids right now. Yeah, I'll get to that. All right. So before we go on to tabloid stories and how they get these stories, we should point out that in 1999, the National Enquirer, the Star of the Globe, the National examiner, and Weekly World News were all purchased by American Media Inc. All those just snapped them all up, basically on the show. Now, every big tabloid in the United States was purchased by this one company. I think that's never a good thing. Or maybe that's just me being it. Well, that's the funny thing. The title of this sidebar is they control everything you read. Unless you don't read any of those things. So AMI. Actually, they're the reason the Weekly World News shut down. They were like, okay, this thing's losing money. Am. I posted $160,000,000 loss in 2006 and was facing like a billion dollars in debt. That's how bad boy had to go. Yeah, bat boy went to the Internet. Yeah, that makes sense. That's where that boy belongs. So, okay, let's talk about this. What makes a tabloid? It's not just subjective. I mean, tabloids like pornography. You know it when you see it, right. It's tough to define true. That's not entirely the case. There are some actual discernible distinctions among tabloids that make a tabloid a tabloid. Agreed. So what are they? Well, Ed points out here something really important. The key to a tabloid story is not that it be true, just that someone has said that it's true. Right. And they latch onto that person, and as long as they say, attribute these quotes to this person, then they can't be held accountable. And that person is frequently cited as an expert sure. And close friend. Sure. It's all the way you present the story. If you're saying if your whole story is all about how this person said something, it's not really about the story. The story is still there, but you're focusing on this person. It's like the rule of the tabloid industry. It's kind of a trick, though, because very much you're tricking people into thinking you're reading about a story about Brangelina when in fact you're reading a story about a former maid that worked for Brangelina right. And what they think is true. Right. Or some crazy person who has nothing to do with Francilina, who just maybe saw one of them in a coffee shop. Right. And noticed they didn't tip or something like that. Bam. There's your story. Also, like we said, they like to add experts. But the experts are in no way, shape or form qualified in a lot of ways. They have no credentials, they're not vetted. It's more, say, like the example Grabanowski uses is like a bigfoot enthusiast, right? If somebody spends a lot of time searching for bigfoot, researching bigfoot, there's no institute out there to qualify them to give them credentials. But you could reasonably make a case that this person is a bigfoot expert. Right. The thing is, the Inquirer or the Star or the Weekly World News is not going to the trouble of explaining that. They just say bigfoot expert so and so says that there's a bunch of these things out and he's seen a bunch and he's an expert. Exactly. My favorite is the leading quote. Like they will get the random person who saw Angelina Jolina coffee shop and they will say they would say maybe something like, yeah, she looked like she looked jittery. And they would say, did she look strung out? And that she had possibly been up for days without eating. Yeah, she started to look like that. And then all of a sudden that's the quote witnesses say she looked strung out and she had not eaten for days. Right. All they have to do is say yes. Exactly. Yes. Or would you say this? And if the person says yes, then you just said that. Another hallmark of tabloids is making a huge deal out of something I guess other newspapers would consider small. Right. Back page stuff. Yeah. And like actually looking through other newspapers, find some quasi interesting story and then blowing it up into possibly a front page feature just by getting into the story and really interviewing a lot of people involved and then maybe throwing an expert or something like that. And just basically making a lot of hay out of something very kind of negligible in this by adding a bunch of quotes and stuff. And what do you think about this? What do you think about that? It takes it from being about the story, right. Like a man saved a goat from a burning building. Awesome. To what these people think about this man and his goat. And you can do anything with that. Exactly. The love affair, you mean? Maybe. Who knows? If somebody said it, then they could conceivably report it. Yeah, if anyone said it. Celebrity news is obviously one of the biggest parts of tabloids these days, at least. And the writers have informant, all kinds of informants. Security people who had worked for them or who work at venues where they might have been hairstylists, nail salon, people like anyone that can dish up dirt and they get in the rotation. And I remember we shot you ever heard of Janet Charlton? No. You might recognize her. She was a gossip columnist. And I think did stuff for TV, like Entertainment Tonight, but that's how she made her living. And she was, like, one of the more famous ones. Okay. And we shot a commercial at her house one time in La. And she was there hanging out, and I was like, you got to tell me some stories. And of course, she just loved that kind of thing. And she would just sit down and regale us with stories about Michael Douglas and his secret sex addiction. And you always said, like, well, my sources tell me she had a list, a rolodex of people on the bankroll, that she would pay a few bucks if it was not a big deal to a lot of money if it was a big celebrity with big news. Right. And that's pretty much standard. Like you were saying, there's this guy named Paul McMullen who wrote for, I think, News of the World, and, you know, Daniel Elliot. I know that name. Indiana Jones sidekick. Can't remember his name, but the older British guy. Yeah. Okay. He was just a huge star in Great Britain. And he had very beloved, too. He had a daughter who was addicted to heroin, and after he died, she took a big turn for the worst, and this cop tipped off, I think, another person who in turn tipped off Paul McMullen, but the cop got a few hundred pounds for it that this girl was like, she's kind of a prostitute. She's so much of a heroin addict. So whatever you want to do with that. Paul McMullen goes and offers to pay this lady, like, drug money for sex or whatever, and she agrees, and all of a sudden, he starts reporting on it. Wow. He's got photos and everything. Well, she ended up killing herself. Oh, my God. And he now says, I take responsibility for that, which is meaningless. Sure. But, yeah, it all started with a cop knowing about this and then tipping off the reporters. That's so sad. It is. Cops are not immune to this kind of thing, too, believe it or not. Josh another way they'll get their information is from the celebrities themselves. From what I've gathered, you fall into three categories. You either fight the tabloids, you either are lucky enough and are smart enough to kind of be low profile, and you're not really a subject of tabloids. There's a lot of big stars you've never seen the tabloids. Harrison Ford. Yes. Or number three is you play ball a little bit. Right. Which means, you know what, I'll give you a little information here and there. I'll leak out some stuff here and there. If you play nice with me, I'll play ball with you. Maybe I'll let you know, like what restaurant I'll be coming out of one night. You can photograph me, give you your little time. And sometimes movie studios will leak stuff to get up a little press. They did that a lot back in the day, but it still goes on. Yes. It's like a symbiotic relationship between the person who needs their star to maintain its position through things like, basically, you're a star because the public is aware of you. Yeah. No such thing as bad press. Like, you might be in there for your cellulite, but what if someone picks up the magazine? They're like, oh, I wonder whatever happened to her. I thought she was dead. And all of a sudden they're like, she's not dead. She just has cellulite. How sad. How sad. But at the same time, I feel better about myself. Exactly. So I guess one of the ways that you stay in the tabloids is through having your picture made, as we say here in the south, a group of people known collectively as Paparazzi, and they actually, I found out, are named after a paparazzo photographer. You didn't know that? Named Paparazzo with a capital P. He was a character in Filemini's. Ladylce Vita. That's right. Movie. And apparently they were already extant, but they got their name through this character. But even then, they weren't crazy. It wasn't until the 70s, again, thanks to Jean Pope, that they really became the kind of reckless, relentless nuisances that we have today. And it was all because Jean Pope was obsessed with Jackie O and Aristotle, and he would pay so much money for anything on them that the photographers were, like just really became aggressive and assertive because of it. And they're way worse in Europe because of Gene Pope and because they initially started doing this stuff in Greece and in Europe. Right. And that still is connected to the state, to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. They were supposedly the driver had been drinking, but they were supposedly being chased by paparazzi on motorcycles. Yeah, very sad. But that's all. Generosa Pope, Jr. I'll bet that guy wore huge black glass, thick ones like Robert Denier at the end of Casino. Those are great. Supposedly Felini, too. I dug this up, took the word from an Italian word that described the buzzing sound of a mosquito. Oh, that's nice. That's unverified. But he said in an interview in Time magazine in the 70s that he's like, yeah, I always just associate it with something buzzing around you and in your way. That's paparazzi. And there's that movie, too. Paparazzi. Is that what it's called? In 2004? Yes. Where the dude, what's his face goes back and beats up Colehauser. Yeah. Did you see it? No, I ran across it on IMDb today. It's not bad at all. It could very easily be based on the life of Alec Baldwin. Yeah, sure. I think the categories you were describing, the people who are just so big that they can't keep a low profile, but they also don't want or need the tabloids on them. But I've also very much gotten the impression it's like there's a lot of people out there, who feed it to them, who want it, who crave it, and I can't feel bad for those people at all. Yeah, it's a tough thing because there are people plenty, like you're saying, like, plenty of people out there who are big stars, but you never see anything about them in the tablet is because they just stay out of it. They stay away from it. Yeah, I'm trying to think of one. I mean, there's so many. That's probably why I can't think of it. But, like, Harrison Ford is a good example, I guess, except when he started dating cliff to flockhart, they were in the tabloids a lot. But I also suspect, like, most of that stuff was all very pleasant, like hand holding things. Yeah. But she was in the tabloids a lot because of her weight. So that fed into that. Maybe she'll be happy and eat again now that she has Harrison Ford. Yeah, he's just like, eat this. Eat that, too. Here, eat this. All right, let's talk about the law. Yes. This was really interesting, I thought, because the first thing you think of wait, the rest of it was not interesting at all. No, I thought this was super interesting, though, because the first thing I think of is, why aren't these people suing every day? Suing these tabloids? Some try, some do. Some have been successful for a while. For the early tabloids ones, like what were they called? Like, Confidential, I think was one of the early tabloids. Like The Toddler, just whatever stupid name about airing dirty laundry that was the name of some pulp tablet in the dirty laundry was probably one of them, I'll bet. And they got away with that stuff because well, for two reasons. This guy wrote Bill Sloan. Yeah. I watched a Wild Hog e My Baby, which is pretty much this definitive history of the tabloids. And he's got his bona fide because he was an editor for the National Enquirer. Right? Yeah. And he said there's two reasons in the if you were a legitimate start, these things were so in the gutter that the stoop to suing them was problematic. And one, it was the attention that lawsuit would attract because the regular press was going to start talking about it. It would make you look as bad as well, it would draw a lot more attention to the original story. Right. And the second thing is, even if you want that publisher doesn't have the money to pay you. Yeah. Good luck, then. Jean Pope once again changes everything. Jean Pope and Rupert Murdoch. All of a sudden, these things have enormous circulation. I think Jean Pope took the inquiry from, like, 15,000 or 100,000 to 5 million at its peak in the suddenly, they did have deep pockets, and things changed. And Carol Burnett kind of still to this day stands as, like a bellwether for the celebrities versus the tabloids as far as the. Law goes, yeah, she sued after 1976 article said, and I have to read this quote, it's pretty good. At a Washington restaurant, a boisterous Carol Burnett had a loud argument with another diner, Henry Kissinger. She traipsed the around the place, offering everyone a bite of her dessert. And they didn't put her dessert in quotes. I would have carol really raised eyebrows when she accidentally knocked a glass of wine over one diner and started giggling instead of apologizing. So they basically said she was blitzed at this restaurant. He's a big fan, probably. Yeah. And she sued and won $1.6 million. And we'll find out here in a second. This is one of the hallmarks of their litigation. Settled out of court for much less. Well, very quietly, she got a big settlement, because in 19 is like 100 billion today, I think. And then it was reduced by an appeals court, which is usually step two in these kind of suits. Like 200 grand. Yeah. And then it was settled out of court, so I would imagine for even less than that. But it was still a big deal. It was the first time, really, that, like, a major star was able to win a defamation lawsuit against a tabloid. But it was one of the I don't want to say it was one of the only times. It was one of the very few times, especially if you are going on the premise of all the people who want to sue the tabloids and don't actually bring a suit. All right? Because things have changed now. The tabloids have these reputations for being extremely fearsome litigators where if you want to sue them, you thought that story that ticked you off was bad. They're going to get anything they can, and they're going to do it through the court. So, like, when aretha Franklin or no. Elizabeth taylor. Yes. When she tried to sue, I think the inquirer or when she did sue the inquirer. The Enquirer's lawyers tried to subpoena all of her medical records for the past 30 years. So they go after everything. They tried to drag your life into the spotlight to make it really not worth your while to sue them. Yeah. This celebrity attorney that was interviewed for this awesome New York Times article, vincent Chiefo, everyone's Italian. Everybody is Italian said that it's basically he calls it the scorpion defense, which is you don't attack a scorpion because you will get stung. Aside from not the most complex analogy. I like it. No, it's pretty straightforward, I guess. Do they need to be complex? But you can call it that's the snake analogy. That's the spider analogy. That's the two year old analogy. Oh. Like, don't mess with the two year old. You'll get thrown up on or bin. Okay. Pooped on. Yeah. That's what they should use, because the scorpion can only do one thing. Two year old can humiliate you in a number of ways. Have you ever heard. So there's this whole thing that scorpions commit suicide if you set them on fire by stinging themselves. Really? And apparently there's a lot of, like, YouTube videos out there. People like doing this with scorpions, like setting them on fire, and then the scorpion will jump about and sting itself and eventually die. Well, I'll be trying to put the fire out. They found that scorpions are almost entirely immune to their own venom. And that really all this is, just a reaction of being burned alive. They're flailing about, and one of the flails is like, their stingers moving, and sometimes it's stings itself. So it appears to dumb kids who set scorpions on fire that scorpions committing suicide. Terrible. Isn't that awful? That's a great tangent, though. Thanks, man. All right. Don't burn animals or insects of any kind, kids. It's just mean. And it means you're setting yourself up for being a sociopath later in life. Also, legally speaking, with tabloids, you have to prove mouse. Yeah, that's the big one. Not only that what they printed was false, but that they knowingly printed information they knew was false. Yeah, because it's got to be libelous. It can't just be maliciously libelous. They just printed a rumor about me that wasn't true. It's got to have malice behind it. Libel is printed. Slander is stated with your mouth. Those are the two differences. Or I guess you could blink it out with your eyes. That's true. So basically, the scorpion defense and then the delays, the first thing they're going to do is start filing motions. To delay, to delay, to delay. Spend a lot of money. A lot of money. And if you think about it, there's nothing to really gain here, necessarily. It's your reputation. And so a star who has a bunch of money says, I have a bunch of money, and I'm really mad at these guys, and I want to teach them a lesson, so I'm going to sue them. And basically the first tactic is the tabloids try to make it not worth your while that you'll drop it because you don't really need this money. You're looking for a judgment, and hopefully you'll get bored. Well, and the tablets don't care. Even if they drag the thing out and print a retraction six months later, no one reads retractions or cares about retractions. Well, six months later, that's well put, because apparently part of the judgment of some of these in successful suits is that you can't write about the star for a set amount of time. Yeah, they'll cut a deal sometimes and say, you know what? I'll drop the lawsuit. Just give me a break for the next year. Right. And then they put on their calendar Tom Cruise one year from now, set reminder to start effing with him again. Another way that tabloids stay out of court is most of their articles are read, screened by an attorney or attorneys. They have on retainer. So each article it's printed kind of comes with this implicit stamp of approval from a legal expert. Yeah. They want to like sure, you really don't have a case if you want to sue against this. Yeah. They want to walk right up to the line of libel and stop there and they're pretty good at and then urinate on it, you're in aid on it. And I imagine the writers are really good at it and then as backup, they have their own attorneys that are even better at it. Sure. And so they're like, yeah, this is not libelism. Prove it. Spend half a million dollars trying to prove this. And some people do. Like Aretha Franklin, I think settled. Tom Cruise. Schwarzenegger. Kate Crews. And one. Did she win? Because Katie Holmes was filed in March. She is a star. 50 million. She settled for a donation to her charity. Nice. Unless she has done it twice. She did it just this past March. She filed suit against them for this one cover about the drug bags under her eyes and they're like, Katie's drug problem, why she won't leave Tom. All this and also the article kind of goes after Scientology. Big mistake. Well, based on that list, nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, it makes you wonder, like I wonder how much Scientology encourages suing for defamation and articles that also include stuff against Scientology. Yeah. Because Travolta just had the big Ralph with his little supposed todry affairs here in Georgia. Right. And then I guess another hallmark that's not really in it's not really in the article, but I think you can make a pretty strong case is that sometimes a lot of times the tablet gets things right. Yeah. But the way that they do it often is very much unethical and immoral as far as the standards of the press is concerned. And that's what's been going on with Rupert Murdoch. Like a parliamentary panel basically said you're not fit to run news corps any longer because this scandal is so huge. With the phone hacking scandal. Oh yeah. I can't remember what episode we talked about it, but there was a girl who was kidnapped in the News of the World. Writers were hacking into her voicemail and then deleting them. The police thought she was still alive and it was possibly affecting the course of the investigation. They identified 4000 celebrities, athletes, politicians, people of note whose emails were hacked. 4000? Wow. And then another thousand that had likely been hacked. Some people have already sued in one. Like Siena Miller, Steve Coogan and Tristan Shandy. Some people have already won, but for the most part these people aren't going to get any damages awarded. It's basically just no News of the World shut down now, but it was out of hand. Wow. And now they're showing that they were also hacking email, which Great Britain has this kind of computer theft law now, which makes email hacking way worse than phone hacking. So if that opens up to be a big thing, people are actually going to start doing time for it. Good. Yeah, that's what I say. But as I was saying, sometimes they get things right. They do. Over the years, we'll mention a few OJ. Simpson case, the National Enquirer, and it seems like it's generally the Enquirer that sort of scoops the legitimate. It's never like the star. Yes. So the National Enquirer scooped in the OJ. Trial the story about his shoes, the Bruno Molly's. Yeah. They scooped the story of the dealer that sold him a knife similar to the murder weapon. Yeah, I guess. Knife dealers, the way they scoop the shoe store. Remember, there are bloody footprints. I thought this was awesome. They really went to town because there was a Bruno Molly bloody footprint at the scene. And OJ. Simpson said, I've never owned a pair of shoes like that picture. They went back and found footage of him from 1093 wearing them on the field, like reporting from a football game, and proved that, yes, indeed, he did have those shoes. And he's like, oh, those shoes, right. Yeah. Bill Cosby's, kid, Ennis. Remember when he was killed and the Enquirer offered $100,000 reward for information, and that actually led to somebody coming forward and giving the information that led to the capturing of the killer. That's right. Jesse Jackson's illegitimate child. Yes. In 2001, he came out and was like, yeah, I guess he found out. It's true. Yes. Gary Hart, when he was running for president in 88 I remember this well. He was on the monkey business down in Miami with what was his name? Donna Rice. Yeah. Funny photo. When you look at it now, I haven't seen it, I don't think. She's just, like, sitting on his lap, and he's just got a big grin on his face, and he's got a T shirt that says Monkey Shines Crew. And it was all over the place at the time, but he dropped out of the race. It was because of this picture in the inquiry. They scooped everybody on it, and Rush Limbaugh. Yeah. My favorite drug addict that was exposed, rush Limbaugh. Yeah. Remember he was buying OxyContin from his maid lot. He was on, like, how many pills a day he bought? Well, I don't know how many a day, but he bought apparently 30,000 pills from her. I think he was on some ungodly amount, like 20 or 60 or 80 pills a day. So I remember hearing it, how is he alive? Or even not standing up. Yeah, but that was the inquiry that did that. But again so there could be a could have come from a tip, right? Yeah. It could have come from the maid. Yes. They could have gotten this information from wiretapping, from whatever. It doesn't mean it's wrong. But just one of the hallmarks of a tabloid is that they'll follow sometimes looser ethics than maybe again, a New York Times reporter. Tabloids today, Josh, like you mentioned, at the peak, the National Enquirer was selling about 5 million copies in circulation. Now, all of the leading ones in the United States combined sell about 5.4 million. So they've really gone down. And one of the reasons why is because they were so successful that mainstream media became much more tabloidy and tabloids became much less different. The field of competition increased. Yeah. And basically everyone was kind of doing similar stuff now. And they had pointed out the article during the Lewinsky trial, sales went down because stuff you were seeing on CNN and was just as salacious as anything you would read in the Star. And again, it's like the mainstream media kind of took a cue from tabloids, as they have so many other times. They were so pissed off about that with the Clinton thing. They were probably just like, let's make up some stuff. What if he used a cigar? And they were like, well, that was crazy stuff about yeah, exactly. It was all true with Clinton. Man, that was nuts looking back. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, then that's tabloids chuck. Tabloids. If you want to learn more about tabloids and see a picture of the beloved Batboy, you can type in tabloids tabloids in the search bar@housetofirst.com. Which means it's time now. It's time for listing or mail. All right, Josh, I'm going to call this don't cry for me. Josh and Chuck. Hi, guys. I'm currently working in Argentina conducting research and teaching English on a Fulbright Scholarship. I wanted to let you know that your podcast serve as a great resource for English learners in other countries. I've been introducing your podcast to students and adults I meet who are interested in furthering their English and learning more about US culture. Nice. Yeah, a little scary, too. The idea of a podcast culture does not yet exist in Argentina. When I introduce the idea and your program to people here, you're very curious and eager to listen. They make great wine, too, by the way. Arizona. Yeah. Okay. That's good stuff. Your podcast is providing a fun, informative way for students here to practice listening to different English accents, to try and pick up on some colloquialisms and jokes, to learn new vocabulary I feel a lot of heat all of a sudden. And to become more informed on the various issues we discussed. The idea of people listening to podcasts purely to further their own knowledge is a part of US. Culture that I am proud to share. And thank you very much for that. Spreading your fan base in Argentina. Angela park. That's very nice. Thank you very much for that. We're becoming cold like figures like Rodriguez. Who? There's this singer songwriter from, I think the late 60s, early seventy s. And he just went by the name Rodriguez. He released a couple of albums that totally flopped here and he just went the way of obscurity. Didn't realize that in South Africa these two albums achieved like, just incredible status over there and everyone wondered what happened to him. And finally, years later, he found out he's like a mythical figure in South Africa. And now there's a documentary that just came out about the whole thing. It sounds like a movie or something. There's a documentary? Well, it sounds like a feature film, like something someone would make up. I saw a movie like that. You mean? I went to Silver Docks and saw the imposter. It was very much like that where one of the producers afterwards at the Q and A was like he was asked if they were going to turn it into, like a feature film. He was like, we can't. There's just too many. It's too outlandish that if you fictionalized it, people would be like, this is stupid. Why did you make these choices? I want to see it. Yeah, you should. It's very good. Awesome. Okay. If you have a doc recommender a documentary recommendation. So I guess it would be a documentary recommendation. A docu rek. Thank you. We're always looking for that. Is that correct? Docu react? Because I think I've seen that written before. Really? Yeah, I just made it up. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook. Comstuffysheno and you can email us your wrecks to stuffpodcast@discovery.com. For more on this and thousands of other top visit howstaffworks.com brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 camry. It's ready. Are you?"
c89014c8-3620-11ea-b32d-3f5617070aa5	Short Stuff: Fruit Flies, Why?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-fruit-flies-why	Have you ever wondered why we do so much scientific testing on fruit flies? Turns out they make better models for humans than you’d think.	Have you ever wondered why we do so much scientific testing on fruit flies? Turns out they make better models for humans than you’d think.	Wed, 04 Nov 2020 10:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2020, tm_mon=11, tm_mday=4, tm_hour=10, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=309, tm_isdst=0)	11410749	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. Jerry's buzzing around out there somewhere. I'm sorry. And this is short stuff. Like, I think, yeah, the seats fly something that if you took high school biology, you talked about these little fellows. The what fly? The titzi fly. I thought we were talking about fruit flies. Isn't that the titzi fly? I don't think so. Is that different? Yes, I'm pretty sure. I always thought the titi fly was the same thing as the fruit fly now. No, because I think the title of fly is that how you say it? Passes around dengue fever. Oh, well, just never mind, then. Everybody, what we're really talking about is the fruit fly, aka the drosophila. And it's impossible to read this next word without reading it like this. Melanogangster. But it's not gangster, unfortunately. It's melanogaster. Yeah. Most people call them josophila, though. Oh, I've always heard drosophila now. Oh, man. I don't know. Now that you say that, I've never heard it out loud. I've always seen it in writing. When you said most people say it that way, you just lied. So what I mean is oh, my gosh, yes. I totally just said, thank you for calling me out for that. Just in a lying machine, apparently, because I didn't realize it. They're millennial gangsters, no matter what. Okay, so we're talking let's just call them fruit flies. How about that? Or teet sea flies. But there is a bunch. And by the way, teetlies are large biting flies, so that is definitely not these. Jeez. Now we have to do a short stuff on those guys. Thanks, Chuck. Literally, probably one eight of the show is now misinformation. So fruit flies specifically, how did you say it? Drosophila. That's what I said. It's much more beautiful than what I said, so I'm going to go with that, too. Most people say drosophila. Those particular kinds of fruit flies, drosophila, melanogaster, they are widely used in scientific experiments, and it turns out, as a lot of people know, that we use fruit flies and experiments, they've actually bestowed a tremendous amount of information to us humans through their biology, through their genetics, through their very existence. We owe a great debt to them scientifically, because a lot of them have been asked to sacrifice their lives for the furtherance of human knowledge. Yeah, and there's a bunch of reasons which we're going to get to kind of here and there in a second. But you dug up this kind of interesting bit from February 1947, v two rocket full to the brim. Well, not full to the brim, but a lot of fruit flies were loaded up on this thing, right. Traveled 67 miles up into the air, which is technically an altitude, which is 1 mile into actual space, according to NASA. Right. And they were the very first animals to go into space. Yeah. And they actually survived that trip and not one of like they were the first animal. They were like a test animal to see. Scientists were like, well, no one's ever been to space. We have no idea what happens out there. Maybe these things are going to come back all mutated and everything. And when they didn't, when they actually survived the flight and the reentry, they said, well, let's start sending more larger animals up. And they did. And eventually we ended up on humans. That's what we're sending up these days. That's right. But it was very instructive to see those flies come back without seven eyeballs or twice the size or ten times the size. They were fine. They didn't hulk out. Yeah. And by that, no purple ripped pants to be found by that time, by 1947, they had actually been used in biological studies for well over a decade. In the 1930s in particular, they basically helped establish the field of modern genetics. A guy named Morgan, Thomas Hunt morgan basically showed that inheritance is passed along via chromosomes using a fruit fly study. And he did it in months rather than years that his other fellow early geneticists took to prove their studies and actually end up winning a Nobel Prize for it. And in fact, at least five people have won Nobel Prizes from directly working with fruit flies. Yeah. I mean, if you want a Nobel Prize, not a bad place to start. That's right. The reason why or maybe we should take a break and then talk about some of the reasons why. Okay. Right after this. All right. The reasons why fruit flies are really great are multifold. One of the reasons, if you're going to study genetics, what you need to study is generations. Right. And fruit flies are really quick. They can create a new generation in about two weeks. Yeah. So that means you can study generation after generation in short order. They are very easy to breed in the lab. They're small, they don't put up much of a fuss. No. All they ask is easy to care for. Yeah. They just want a little cornstarch and sugar soup and they're happy. Yes. Little fruit, maybe. Yeah. You don't even have to give them fruit. That's really corn, starch and sugar soup is fine with them, but yeah, ultimately, I'm sure they prefer the real deal. But if they're being raised in a lab their entire life and countless generations of their lineage before them have been raised in a lab, they'll take the cornstarch and sugar soup if that's all they can get. Right. But why, my friend, if you're going to study human genetics, would you even bother looking at a fruit fly? Well, that's a great question, Chuck, and the answer to it is that we share a surprising number of genes with fruit flies. Apparently, 8000 of our 20,000 to 25,000 genes are analogous to fruit fly genes. It's really amazing. Yeah. So if you study those genes. And fruit flies you can extrapolate to humans what they do. What happens when you poke them with whatever? What happens if you shine a light on them? If you're doing an optogenetic study, there's a lot of questions that we've answered through genetics because of that benefit of having similar genes. And apparently 75% of the genes known to cause diseases in humans are shared between humans and fruit flies too. It's so cool. Another cool thing you can do if you want to say, I don't know, what if you live in the Arctic and you're always or the greater northern climates of Canada and you're just basically cold all the time, what is that going to do to your gene activity and your metabolism? Well, let's put 2000 fruit flies in a chamber and make it super cold all the time and look at them and see what happens. You can get a large population study very easily because these little fellows are so tiny. Yeah. They also share, in addition to genes, a lot of the same biochemical pathways that humans have, too. One example I saw is that they don't actually get Alzheimer's, but they have all of the same pathways in brain structures that Alzheimer's befalls in humans. So we can study those pathways and try to treat Alzheimer's just by looking at these pathways in these brain structures in fruit flies. Yeah, I also thought it was funny when you look at the downside of fruit flies, aside from just some of the genetic components, the biggest downside, it seems like, is that they're fruit flies. And fruit flies are super annoying. They really are very annoying. They're apparently what's called a cosmopolitan species. So wherever humans are, they're going to be there too. And the reason why is apparently because we live in conditions that they find very suitable, like moderate temperatures that are fairly stable and we like fruit, too. And sometimes we leave our fruit out and it gets a little past ripe and the fruit flies say, thank you, sir or madam, they doff their little top hat, click their heels together with their spats and they go to town on that juicy banana, which I guess if you have a juicy banana, you want to throw that out. Yeah, but did you see that listener mail, by the way, about the banana bread banana? No. Someone emailed about something you said and said that I think one of the big reasons, too, is because they get really sweet is why you want to use an old banana. I got you. But anyway, the fruit flies love all that stuff. So if you live near a dumpster, unfortunately for you, which I did in my apartment in Los Angeles, oh boy, I had a dumpster behind my apartment, which is where I found my cat Lauren, by the way, or if you compost, God help you, it's a great thing to do, but you're going to be dealing with some fruit flies. You are. And again, I mean, there's really not a lot besides annoyance that fruit flies provide humans. Like, they don't transfer or transmit communicable diseases. It's not a disease vector. And on the flip side of that, they've actually stood in as models for disease carrying insects. We know a lot about how mosquitoes transmit disease by studying fruit flies as models. So they basically annoy us, but they've furthered our understanding and medicine in countless ways, and yet we're still like, yeah, but they're annoying. You know what I mean? Yeah. You know, that's so humid. It is, but they're not like that rat that seatsy fly. Now, a dengue fever spreading mofo, and apparently if you do compost, like, inside, and even if you have a thing with a lid they're going to gather around, you can set up a little vinegar jar, like a canning jar with vinegar at the bottom and then a top made of plastic wrap with some holes in there. And you can trap them and even remove them safely, I think, if you want. Yeah, just throw them out in the yard and say, go find a juicy banana because I don't want it. Although it is true you can use those for banana bread. I forgot. Yeah. So fruit fly is a hole. The next time you see a fruit fly, don't SWAT at it. Say thank you. Fruit fly. Your kind has been very beneficial to my kind and I appreciate that. That's right. Since Chuck said that's right and tapped his watch, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is the production of iHeartRadio's how Stuff Works, works. For more podcasts from my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
https://podcasts.howstuf…icists-final.mp3	How Publicists Work	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/how-publicists-work	Some people call them flacks. Other people call them liars. But if you're in the public eye and suddenly have an image problem, you'll call them your best friend.	Some people call them flacks. Other people call them liars. But if you're in the public eye and suddenly have an image problem, you'll call them your best friend.	Tue, 15 Sep 2015 13:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2015, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=15, tm_hour=13, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=258, tm_isdst=0)	41016077	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 Jerry. So stuff you should know. This is it. It sounded like you're introducing the final episode, my Voice. This is it. Feels like it's the final episode. You won't be able to talk anymore. No, I'm getting there. You don't know that. How's it going? It's going pretty well, man. How about with you? I think both of us had a bit of a dark time researching this article. Why? Well, because well, we're going to get flak. That's a teaser from publicists. Because what I learned is that publicists are professional liars. I would say that depends on the circumstance. Well, what do you mean? Well, you're saying there are publicists who don't lie? No, I'm saying it depends on whether the publicist is going to the media or the media is coming to the publicist, depending on the circumstance. What I am saying is, no matter what who you work for, if you are a publicist, then a percentage of your job will be lying. Right, okay. Depending on the circumstance. Yeah. You lie about something good, billy Ray Cyrus is like, I am going to donate a bunch of time and money to a local homeless shelter. Yeah, you don't have to lie about that. The publicist gets on the horn, starts letting everybody know, you guys should come cover this. Billy Ray Cyrus goes and does that and everything's good. Then on the way home, Billy Ray Cyrus decides to celebrate by drinking a bucket of tequila and runs his car into a whatever. The publicist then starts getting calls and says he didn't drink a bucket of tequila. That wasn't even him. That's overstated what really happened with this. So the circumstances depend on whether the publicist is sibling or not? Oh, yeah. I'm not saying that all publicists do is lie, but I'm saying if you work as a publicist, part of your job is to cover tracks into lie. Got you. Don't hate the publicist. Hate the system is what I say. Yeah. They're definitely part of a larger system. Yes, a larger system which includes all of us who digest news. Yeah. Especially, say, like, entertainment news, that kind of thing. From my understanding, there's two routes a person can take as a celebrity. You can either just go off and be a normal person, and depending on your level, you might have paparazzi following you, that kind of stuff. Once you get to a certain level, it doesn't matter what your decision is, or you can hire a publicist and feed yourself right into that machine to get as much publicity and as much press as you possibly can. Yeah, well, I think any celebrity is going to have a publicist, but it's really a matter of your directive and your goal. Right. I think some of those people like to be like the old adage, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Yeah, I ran into that. That's more of a PR term. So if you're into PR, you're probably representing a company or an organization or something like that. A publicist is somebody who typically represents a single person, an artist, an author, a musician, something like that. That's really the only definition I can find for a publicist. And the job, the goal of the publicist is to help maintain and promote the public image of that person that they represent. That's right. By having a good relationship with the media. Yes. That starts that's the publicist. And by the way, that no such thing as bad publicity. I tried to find the origin of that and the closest thing I could find was PT barnum, but I don't know if that's true. I don't think that's verified. Let me say Mark Twain. Yeah. PT. Barnum or Mark Twain. Everybody says Mark Twain thing, and I don't think that's even true anyway. I think maybe that used to be true. What? That it was a Mark Twain thing. No such thing as bad publicity. I think at one point that may have been sort of true. These days there's clearly bad publicity. Sure. So you said the word flak earlier as a teaser. Apparently two flak, or Aflac, is a term originating from Gene Flak, early movie publicist in Hollywood. And that's with the CK. That's right. Flak. To take flak is named after a type of German gun in World War II. A German antiaircraft gun. Two different things. But in this case, it is a pejorative term for publicist. They don't like it, the PR flack? Yeah. You shouldn't say that to someone that works in PR. No. Or call them a liar. They don't like that either. Yeah, I looked it up. Apparently it means that you can't be trusted. You'll do anything for money. That's what a flack is to them. One article I read said that's like calling a personal injury attorney and ambulance chaser. Yeah. Just not a nice term. Got you. So there you have it. So a publicist, like you said, works for their client to get their good deeds out, and if they don't have good deeds, to spend things to make it look like they do. Right. Here, hold this. Baby lamb. Yeah, but we take your picture. Exactly. And then they get photographed later eating euros down the block. The two events were totally not connected. No. So what they do is they pitch ideas to the media and they probably have to be good writers themselves because the press release oftentimes is a starting point. But press releases, as we know, can get lost in the shuffle and never see the light of day. Yeah. Seems like a huge waste of time. It can be. But if you have a good publicist, they will be well connected to the media to ensure that publicity blast is not lost. Right, exactly. So there's direction, one which is from the publicist to the media. And the publicist is going to have all these contacts with different entertainment reporters and business reporters and anybody that could possibly run a story yeah, anybody that could possibly run a story on their client. Right? That's right. And they'll say Billy Ray is going to donate some money. Why do we pick it on him? He just seems like the type who would donate a bunch of money to a homeless shelter okay. And go down there himself and help out. Great. So Billy Ray is going to be down there. Plus it rolls off the tongue. Billy Ray. Sure. Why don't you send one of your covers down? Let's get some coverage for this. Right? And since they're friends, since these people have worked together for decades now, this reporter and your publicist, the reporter actually might respond and show up or the editor or the news producer or whoever the contact is. That's great. You hired a good publicist and now this story is going to make it out there. That's right. Because they didn't just write up a press release with a bunch of exclamation points in the headline and fax it to every media outlet they could find and get zero response. Yes. A publicist is only as good as their relationships. I think the other way on that street that you were talking about is from the journalist back to the publicist. If they hear I heard Billy Ray Cyrus drank a bucket of tequila and ran over a prostitute with his car, they will then get in touch with the publicist, and then they go, jack, buddy, hey, we go back a long way. Would I lie to you? Would I lie to you? So that's how that goes. And they will be more forthcoming with people who it's a scratch your back, you scratch mine type of scenario. Yeah. Like that reporter that actually showed up at the homeless shelter and covered it and made a nice piece and everything. I'll give you the scoop. When that guy calls, he's going to get the better treatment from the publicist than somebody who ignored the pitch before. That's right. It's back scratching. A lot of back scratching, feeding the machine. I've seen a lot more women as publicists than men, and I've always wondered why that is true. I don't know if that is true. In researching this, I saw about an equal amount. I think that as well. But it seems like there's an equal amount these days. It seems like every publicist I've ever known has been a woman. And I just figured it's because women may be more level headed and more able to, like, smooth out a situation with some big dumb guy, but I guess the guys who are publishers aren't big dumb guys like me. I'd be a bad publicist. Yeah. So what would your response be if somebody called to find out what stupid thing your client did or why they did some stupid thing. I'd say. You know what? Truly none of your business. Bad publicist. Yeah, well, that was something I ran across. Saying something like, my client needs their privacy respected right now. Sure. Would just immediately shut down a relationship that you've cultivated over the years. You have to give as a publicist. There has to be something that you give. So you better have something that will placate the reporter, but will also it's probably not the truth, because that reporter will go off and write the truth about your client, and your client will have just gotten horrible publicity because of you. So it's a balancing act. Yeah. Or they'll just say, let me send you over gift bag from Fred Siegel. You like the last one. Right. But publish may also, and it depends people that have a staff of people working for them, sometimes the lines are blurred on who does what. But a publicist can arrange interview requests and set all that stuff up. If you have, like, a book tour or you're a politician or your band with a new album coming out, they might arrange all those interviews, in which case, they are prepping two things. They are prepping the interviewer saying, you can't ask about the bucket of tequila. Right. If you want this interview, I'll give it to you, but this is off limits, all these things. And then, as we've learned when we've had people work with us in publicity, they'll be prepping you as the interviewee. If they ask this, this is how you should probably deal with it. Don't answer that. Yeah. Bridge back to what you were saying before, and my favorite thing ever are videos where celebrities walk out of interviews because the interviewer has asked something they weren't supposed to ask. Yeah, those are great. Yeah, I just sit around and watch those all day. Yeah, you probably find a pretty good supercut of them. Yeah, probably so. All right, well, let's take a break, and when we come back, we will talk a little bit about the skills you need as a publicist. All right. We've mentioned lying, and, you know, I joke, but for real, if you want to be a publicist, you better have a certain comfort level with stretching the truth and lying, because you're going to have to do that. If you're not comfortable with that, you shouldn't go into that line of work. Yeah. Is that safe to say? I think very. You need to be good with people and cultivate those relationships. You need to be a good writer. Well, not only do you have to be a good writer, you have to be a good journalist. And a lot of publicists have a background in journalism, because I kept running into this in this article, in another article you sent, the number one rule of being a publicist is to think like a journalist. Even better than that, is to not only think like a journalist, but be able to write like a journalist, too. Because as we demonstrated that the publicist media relationship is a two way street, the publicist needs the media to publicize, in a flattering manner, their client. Sure. But the media needs to publish this because they've got deadlines and they need to come up with story ideas. And if something is brought to them, that's great, that's good. But that media professional has a reputation to protect. It can't be like Billy Ray Cyrus got off of his couch and mailed a check for $500 to a local homeless shelter. Yeah. Boring. Yeah. And it came in a pressure lease in a fax machine. That reporter is not going to have a very good reputation. But if a publicist comes to this reporter with a great headline, creative pitch, a good story, that's tailored to that reporter and their beat, and even more than that tailored to that reporter's audience yes. There's a good likelihood that reporter will say, I'm listening right next to music to a publicist here. Sure. Just to be listened to. Yeah. That's when you throw it into fifth gear. You can't be afraid of rejection. You've got to be outgoing and you've got to take your licks, because a lot of your attempts are going to fail just by nature of the job. So you can't get your feelings all hurt. Yeah, I guess you could. But you don't want to show that because then the journalist would be like, jeez, Chuck's such a baby. You are going to be eating alive. I didn't run the story. And he's complaining, trying to swim. I saw him choking up in the bathroom. While they may get a good laugh out of that, probably won't want to work with you as much. Right. You got to be very patient and you have to be very flexible, because if you're working for celebrities, it is a very tough job. That's another thing, too. So your hours are basically all hours whenever you're needed. Right. So not only does your publishers frequently also have to do other stuff, or people associated with the publicist have to do things like pick up things for the client system. We do, yeah, sure. In addition to that, like, the higher up you go on the food chain, which we'll talk about in a minute, the more that client feels okay with emailing you at 300 in the morning saying, like, I need to be reassured about my celebrity status or whatever yeah. And the publicist needs to respond. You're basically on call all the time. Also at three in the morning, your client may have done something really horrifically stupid. Yes. And some paparazzi caught it. And now words starting to spread and you're fielding calls from reporters at 300 in the morning to get a statement on what your client did. Yeah. When Twitter came out, I remember thinking at the time, like, publishers aren't going to be around anymore because people are doing this themselves. Well, they've actually figured out ways to use Twitter benefits, ways to use Twitter. But Twitter is also their biggest security blanket as well. Because of Twitter, more and more celebrities are saying really stupid things. The publicist is then going to have to cover their tracks. Yes, that's a good point. So they'll take down the tweet and then try and spin that, or just the apology is always very funny to me, the awkward. Well, it's never like, did you hear about Chris Carter, the NFL guy? He's a former NFL player, wide receiver for the Vikings, right? Yeah. He is in hot water this week because he spoke was hired by the NFL to come in and speak to the rookies. They often do that for guys that had been in trouble to come in and say, don't do what I did. Scared straight. Yeah, sorta. And he said in his talk to the rookie symposium, said something about if you get caught with, just make sure you have a fall guy on your team. Like the guy in the car that's like, it's my weed. Wow. And he got in big trouble for that. And his apology was like, that's not the kind of advice I would ever give young people. But that's the advice you exactly gave young people. How can you say that days later? It's just so obvious. It's a forced insincere apology. So either had a bad publicist or didn't listen to his publicist. Because part of the publicist job is when you're going to make the statement, the public statement, the public apology or whatever. Sure. The reasoning behind it, the rationale, the wording of it, just the logic behind the apology is probably going to be crafted by your publicist. At least they're going to help you with it. At the very least, they're going to want to help you with it. Right. Because they're probably scared stupid that you're going to make it worse. Right. And it sounds like there's a lot of crisis management, and that is a part of it. But publicists also are just trying to cook up opportunities. I think that that's way more the day to day. Yeah, for sure. Depending on the client, of course. Sure. But I remember our former boss, Connell, was in a band years ago, and I read online somewhere that his band went to Elton John's. Do you remember the story? No. Went to Elton John's house and spelled out their band name and fire on his tennis court. No, I hadn't heard that. To try and get on his label or something. That's a great way to do it. I know. And I went and asked him. I was like, dude, I can't believe you guys did that. And he went, we didn't do that. I was like, no. And he's like, no publicist made that up. It's like nothing true about it. And he's like, no, they completely fabricated that story as a publicity stunt that never happened. Yes. So why even go to the trouble of it? You can just release a story that says that you did that. Yeah. Isn't that amazing when something like that could so easily be fact checked, like by calling Elton John. Well, that's the other thing. I don't have anything to call Elton John. So I'm curious. I wonder how many media stories are just totally fabricated. As a matter of fact, I'd be you out there in podcast playing, let us know if you know a media story that was just totally fabricated that everybody takes as fact. Right. We want to hear it. I love stuff like that. I do, too. All right. We mentioned earlier that you might end up getting the laundry or dry cleaning as a publicist. If you're the publicist intern. Yeah. That's probably what's going to happen, is you might get asked to go get the laundry, and then you'll say, sure, I'll take care of that for you. And then you will go down the chain until you find the underling who is trying to be a publicist who still does things like that. Right. This person may or may not be in college, but it's probably college age. That's something that I ran across. If you want a career as a publicist, you do not need to spend a single penny on higher education. No. The entire career of publicist begins as a hands on experience. You need to be literate. You need to probably have a knack for writing in a journalistic way sure. And crafting good headlines and by proxy, good email subject lines. But if you have that already before college, you don't need to go to college. No. You can go and major in journalism or communications or PR, but it's not like you get that diploma, that PR diploma, and you're going to get, like, some entry level job as a publicist. You're still going to have to work your way up. See, it says right here I have a PR degree, so where's my job? Right. My advice is to skip college and go straight into the workforce as early as you can if this is what you want to do. I feel, and I hope that there is becoming a bigger understanding that there are certain fields out there. There are careers out there where you don't have to go to college, and there are careers out there where, like, you should go to a vocational school to learn that trade. Yeah. That college is not necessarily this end all, be all that. You have to spend money after money after money to get a degree that might even not be used in your field. I didn't need a degree to do what I'm doing. No one ever has to see it. Right. And this is a perfect example of that. Chuck, like, to be a publicist, you do not need a degree. You need hands on experience. You need basically what amounts to an apprenticeship. That's right. Yeah. Good way to say it. So go in and get that job in the mailroom or as an assistant or as an intern. And it would be great if you still live at your parents house at this point because you're going to get paid, like, next to nothing. Yes. And you're going to be doing all the grunt work. Yes. But if you go in there with your mindset to, I'm going to learn this, I want to learn this, and move up, you're going to be in the right environment for that. Absolutely. Like we said, you might be picking up dry cleaning. You're going to be returning a lot of phone calls, drafting a lot of probably not so fun press releases that has graduated from the intern. Yeah. Well, I'm talking about being like, a junior assistant right after you get hired on. Yeah. And press releases that aren't like the sexy ones. You're not going to be writing, like, the press releases for Billy Ray Cyrus, in other words. No, those are sexy. You'll be writing them for his dog. Okay. Sure. Freddie. Freddie Cyrus. Freddie Cyrus. Yeah. Okay. You are going to be handling your publicist that you work for, their schedule, their contacts. You're going to be putting together preskits and EPKs, electronic Prescott and blasting those out. Basically all of the nuts and bolts of the job you're going to be doing as a junior staff publicist or an assistant. Right. Not a bad gig if that's what you want to do. Now, if you stick to it and you're good at it, you're going to end up being a publicist. Right. Not only are you getting the experience you need on the job, you're also in a place where you're networking, too, because that is probably tied for first as far as thinking like a journalist goes. You need to be a pretty good networker. That's right. And you know what? Let's take a break, and we will talk more about networking and some of the skills that you still need. So can I make a confession? Yes. I'm possibly the worst networker on the planet. I'm really bad at it. Yeah, it's not your bag. It isn't. Some people are good at networking. I'm pretty good at it. You're good at networking? Yeah, because I enjoy it, and I don't consider it networking. Sounds like just doing something to serve you in the end. I don't look at it that way. I look at it as like, I enjoy making professional colleague. I enjoy meeting and getting to know professional colleagues. Yes. And then later on, if I can hit them up for something or if they hit me up, that's great, but if not, it's just something like, got you. So the proper response to somebody when they come and ask you for something, you're like, oh, I saw this coming. Yeah. That's not the way to respond. Probably not. I'm trying to put myself out there a little more. Yeah. Why is that? I think that's a skill that everybody should have. Yeah. All right. Instead of being like a misanthropic recluse, put yourself out there. I agree. Well, one of the skills that I don't think we pinpointed was networking. Without seeming like you're networking with the sort of keep what I was just talking about, I think maybe that is it too. I feel like networking is a task, whereas if I just relaxed and enjoyed it and just communing with a fellow human being, it's not what it's all about. It's all it is. That's a scary if I just took it like that, then I'm sure it would be much more relaxing. I read a blog and I sent it to you, and I want to shout them out because sonic Bids, S-O-N-I-C-B-I-D-S. It's a blog where they did an interview that was pretty insightful, actually. They did a double interview, a dual interview with Julie Lichenstein of 37 Media and Lily of Golightly Media. And I think they work with bands and musical artists mainly. Yeah. But it was super insightful, and they said, Just some little tidbits here. I was always curious how they get paid. And I think if you're a publicist for a person and, like you are on retainer, then you just get a salary, or if you're part of a firm that just works for that person. But you can also just be hired for a campaign. Right. So if you're a band and you've gone to the trouble of going in and hiring a producer to produce your album sure. And you've made a studio quality album that you're proud of, you might want to hit everybody up or gather around another two grand to hire a publicist for a month to release that album correctly. Not a bad idea. And just hiring a publicist isn't going to automatically make it great. No. You need to say, can we see some of the other campaigns you've run? Sure. What are your ideas for this campaign? Who have some of your clients been in the past? What's some of the press that you've gotten, your successes? Yes. You don't want to just be like throw a dart at a phone book. Right. Do your research because it's too grand and you're an up and coming band, and that's not chump change. But if you look at it as a wise investment and you do invest it wisely in a good publicist, it could make a huge difference for you. The Greed julie said that they tried to get out for a major artist three or four months ahead of the release of the album is when they want to start their job. So it's not like, hey, it drops next week. Let's think of some good ideas. They want some good lead time. And they said that they like to work around goals. If it's like a tour, like for us going on our tour right. We don't have a publicist. No, but we have promoters working with venues that sort of do the job of a publicist as far as trying to sell tickets. Right. But if you are booking a tour and you have a publicist, they're going to be the ones that are getting you on the local radio stations, morning TV, getting you in the local newspaper or alternative newspaper to get you some press. Like, this is stuff you can do yourself. But one of the things that you are hiring when you hire a publicist is their contacts. Yeah, absolutely. Like, you don't have the contacts, you just the band. One of the problems is it's going to be tough for you to think objectively. Like, you're not going to understand why every journalist you talk to doesn't want to automatically do a long form piece on how great your band is published is going to be dispassionate enough and removed enough that they can see it objectively through a journalist site and then pitch it in a way that's probably going to get better. More bites. Yeah, that's a good way to put it. Because the artists we've even experienced, this is the ones who gets their feelings hurt, saying like, oh, man, they interviewed us last time, why did they do it this time? And they're always great about massaging the ego a little bit, saying like, it's okay, guys, it's no big deal. Yeah, because that doesn't do much for us anyway. Lie. We got this other thing that's better lie. Right. The other thing they're going to be doing if they work for you is they're going to be sending you weekly or bi weekly reports on what's lined up, who passed on stuff, who did stuff like that. They're keeping you informed. Yeah. You're not just like in a black hole. And some artists like to be well in touch on that stuff, and some probably don't care about being bothered. Right. They just want to be on Conan. Conan shot in Atlanta, 15 minutes from our house where we live, and we couldn't get on Conan. I know. And it was while our TV show was debuting. I know. You don't have to remind me. Let's talk Penny. C Sansi vieri. Yeah, from HuffPo. She is the author and CEO of Marketing Experts, Inc. And she listed out nine things that a good publicist does. What's number one? Chuck, can you guess? Think like a journalist. That's right. You already said that. And you were right. It's the number one rule. Number two rule is know the rules. Right. Got to play within the game. And you can bend rules, but if you start breaking them, people have a long memory. Well, yeah. If you go on and read, just type the phrase rules of pitching and publicity. Into your favorite search engine and it will bring up apparently one of the things journalists like to do in their downtime is write lengthy blog posts mocking PR. And publicists don't follow the rules of pitching. So one of the rules is no phone calls. You just don't use the phone. All email. Yeah. Especially if you're cold calling people. I guess if you have a relationship with somebody, you can pick up the phone and call them, but you don't send an email blast and then a day later follow up on the email by phone. Apparently that's the worst thing you can do. Yeah. You don't want to bug people. No. And it's very easy to come off as, like, pestering a reporter as a publicist, I bet. So you need to know the rules or your publicist needs to know the rules. Here's a good one that I didn't think about reading outside of your market. I'm sure it's pretty easy to just think New York and La. What else do I need to know about? Well, not even that. It's like if you're a band outside of your industry yeah. And just start to think of like, oh, well, we actually sing the song about the oil industry and oil prices are going through the roof. So maybe the Today showed wanted to talk to us about our song. Didn't think about that. I'd be a great publicist, except songwriter. I'm terrible at networking. Google Alerts, that's kind of a no brainer, I would think. Understanding the importance of local media, that's a good one. Because while your artist is not going to be super stoked about appearing on Good Morning Toledo, if there's a tie like you're from Toledo, like you, yeah. Then that's probably a smart thing to do because the local media loves people that were from there that moved away. Right. Maybe they still live there. Plus Mrs. Sansi Vieri makes this point, or Mrs. Santa Vieri sorry, makes this point that you never know where a local contact is going to end up. Sure. It might hit the big time. It might work for USA Today in a couple of months. Yeah. It doesn't get bigger than that. And if they hit the big time on their end and they have you as like, a contact, it could help you out big time. That's right. And then earlier you mentioned something about subject lines for emails. I never really thought about this, but Penny says can I call her Penny? You can on a first name basis. I call her Ms. Sansa Vieri. Okay. Well, she says that crafting a subject line is one of the most important things that you can do as a publicist and that they agonize over this. And it makes total sense with the glut of emails that people receive, especially journalists. You want to grab their attention. Otherwise it's just going to be by time. Yeah. Read, drafting, editing, tweaking. She says it's just like Maddening, how much you have to do that. Yeah. That would drive me crazy. Yeah. Because it's the Minutia. So much importance on the minutiae. Yeah. But it's true. You have to put a lot of thought into it. But you also probably can't come off as having put too much thought into or else it seems desperate, which will turn somebody off. Our publicists want to kill journalists and vice versa. Yes. It sounds like a weird relationship, for sure. Yeah. And then also, do you look up media leads? No. So basically there's services out there where journalists say, I need a quote on I'm doing a piece on nuclear fusion, and I don't even know what that is. Oh, yeah. Source. And then this service that the journalist calls puts out like a daily or maybe even more than once a day newsletter blast to PR people who pay for the service, and then they go through and say, oh, I've actually got a nuclear physicist on my payroll, and I'm going to connect him. We've been connected that way before. How? Who? When we had different PR firms working with us, at times, they've gotten in touch and say, it said so and so at SpaceX wants to know if you want to come on and talk about this. Or when we did that stuff on ABC about when the housing crisis hit. Yeah. Because we're financial experts. Yeah. So stuff like that. It used to come across our desk every now and then. Well, there's subscription services that connect people through leads. From what I'm seeing is Twitter is now filling that void a lot, where you can just search Twitter for the hashtag H-A-R-O. Help a reporter out. Yeah, the reporters. And then also, I guess there's a lot of PR tastemakers out there sure. That are super connected and will basically tweet a lead. And you don't have to pay $1,000 a month for that subscription service. You just follow certain people on Twitter. And as a PR person, you might have somebody that's a client that you connect. Yes. That whole new job of being an aggregator, a curator. Yes. Like, people do that, and that's all they do. But we also live in an age where people are famous for being famous. Man I need to take back a little bit of my tirade about liars. I think that what I'm talking about. Are people publicists for, like, big celebrities and stuff like that. Okay. We've had publicists work with us, and I bet 80% of the clients that they work with are like people like us, where you don't have to lie and spin. Yes. We're always on our best behavior. Yeah. It's just regular stuff like, let me find a good opportunity for you and connect you. I was overstating. And I think that's just the far edge of the celebrity end of things. Got you, because I just got to thinking about what if they're listening. I don't want them to think I didn't think they were doing a good job. Did a great job. Way to back off of that one, Chuck. I got one more little thing on Jim Moran. Moran? You just said moron. M-O-R-A-N-I think. Moran. No, not the way the French say moron. He was known as the master of the publicity stunt back in the day. Like, he did things what his big thing was to take a saying and try and disprove it for a company. So he literally went to Alaska on behalf of GE to sell a refrigerator to well, it says an Eskimo, but I guess an Inuit is what you would say today. Yeah, he walked a bull through a china shop in New York City. How did that go? It's a stunt. I think they broke some things. He got on a horse for a politician and changed directions midstream. On the horse? Like rode it through a river and change directions. You can do this. And then in 1959, for the premiere of The Mouse That Roared, the great Peter Seller's movie, he opened an embassy. Remember, the movie was about a small country that declared war in a big country because they wanted to declare war in the US. And then surrender and then get financial aid from around the world because their economy was in trouble, but they ended up winning or something. He opened an embassy in Washington for a mythical country. Yeah, nice. Speaking of, by the way, I finally saw Doctor Strangelove. Oh, really? Great movie. One of the best. It's up there for sure. One of the best satires. Let's say it's a great movie. Great movie. And Peter Sellers, man, he did great. But also, I mean, like, George C. Scott was amazing. He was amazing. And the guy I can't remember his name that played the Colonel or whatever. The one who lost his marbles. Yeah, he was so good. Everybody was Slim Chills or slim Pickens. Slim Pickens. Chill Wills was another, like what country western actor? Chill Wills, I think, is his name. Chilwells. You'd recognize him if you saw his face. Okay. Chill Wills. All right. Of course. Chill Wills makes an appearance in the households. You got anything else? No, I got nothing else. Thank goodness. If you want to know more about published, you can type this word in the search bar@housestepworks.com. And I said search bars this time for listener mail. Did have one more thing. What was it that movie? America's Sweethearts. Did you ever see that? With John Cusack. I know you said Billy Crystal was quite a publicist, a pain in the butt Hollywood couple. Oh, best portrayal of a publicist is on Seinfeld. The mom from that 70s Show. Remember, she played Seinfeld's publicist. Oh, she was, yeah. She tried to get the airline pilot kicked out of Jerry's Show, and he ended up getting I think it's the one where Kramer is at JFK or LaGuardia making bets on arrivals and he ends up using the Son of Sam mailbag as collateral. Right. Great episode. But the mom from that 70s Show played Jerry's Publicist. Kitty. Yeah. He was also in France. What was she on france. She played Phoebe's half brother. Giovanni Ribisi played his girlfriend or wife. Oh, yeah. Which is a weird like a mismatched couple. That's odd. And I think they got her to be a surrogate for them. Okay. When Lisa Kudrow got pregnant in real life, I think that's how they handled it. We have watched a lot of TV. All right, I'm going to call this one we Were Actually Right and this lady was Nice at a dinner party. How's that for a centric life? Okay. Hey, guys. I have a little story. I was at a small dinner party where the host is making his own sea salt. The topic about it's one of those dinner parties, the topic of kosher salt came out. So I dropped the fact from your salt episode that kosher salt is actually just salt used for drawing blood out of meat to make a kosher, not salt blessed by a rabbi. A fellow guest disagreed, to which I responded, I'm quite sure about this. The host then said, raise your hand if you're Jewish. And the guy that disputed me raised his hand, felt rather embarrassed while he explained to me what kosher means and that salt also goes through the same kosher process. No, I never explained how I backed down and didn't try to defend the fact that I was told it's. Not that I doubted you guys, so I jokingly said I'd write an email to complain, but it's because appeal is disrespectful to correct someone on their own heritage. Good move. Yeah. I also didn't want to start any petty debate with someone at someone else's dinner party. Also a good move. So I decided to take in the embarrassment while he was explaining what kosher is at the same time eating a plate of pasta with chorizo. Hope you find this amusing. Please keep up the good work. If you read it on the show, please give a shout out to my friend Amber who introduced me to the show. And that is from Chloe Sasse. So wait a minute, chuck, were we right and the guy was wrong? We were right. The Jewish guy was wrong. Because I looked it up today just to be sure. And apparently kosher salt is kosher because in fact, they said it should be called koshering salt because it's used to make things kosher. It is not the salt itself, but it's kosher. It would have kept Chloe out of that kind of situation. Chloe, it sounds like you have a lot of tact and dignity. Yes. Congratulations on that. Sounds like you have a guy's bit of a glow party, not ruining the dinner party. So that is from chloe in Sydney, Australia. Thank you. If you want to get in touch with us, we want to hear about all of your misadventures out there based on stuff you should know. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on Facebook.com Stuffytnow, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@howstepworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web stuffyouchtoe.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseoffworks.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 the app today."
86bde39c-3b0e-11eb-9699-775613ec8896	Les Paul & Leo Fender Part II	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/les-paul-leo-fender-part-ii	Today we continue the story of Les Paul and Leo Fender, inventors, innovators and rivals. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Today we continue the story of Les Paul and Leo Fender, inventors, innovators and rivals. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Thu, 26 Aug 2021 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=8, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=238, tm_isdst=0)	45950513	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Welcome to stuff you should know a production of. iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, everybody. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's out there running around somewhere. And this is stuff you should know. Know about Fender and Les Paul Part due. Should we recap real quick? Yes, I think so. That seems appropriate. All right. Well, where we left off with part one was Leo Fender. Lifelong engineer, tinker and non musician. Has made a career making amps and trying to figure out the problem with electric guitar feedback. Les Paul was a budding superstar guitar player and session player. Also, tinkerer trying to figure out this problem of amplifying the electric guitar without feedback. And they were introduced in 1947, trying to figure this out together. And then enters a third gentleman who may have had more to do with the invention of the solid body electric guitars. We know it than either one of them. Yeah, for real. This is where things get a little bit shady, little murky, when Carrie Grant enters. What's the guy? Guy's name? His name is Paul Bigsby. And I've heard of the last name. I've seen those guitars before. Is the company still around? Yeah. So here's the deal. Bigsby is now most well known for what's called the Bigsby tail piece, which is he's the guy who kind of invented the Whammy bar. If you know nothing about guitars, but you've ever seen, like, Eddie Van Halen play not all guitars use these things. But if you hit a note and then you reach below the guitar and grab that little steel bar and make it go, wow, that's a Whammy bar. Bigsby invented that. And he is still most well known. Like, he can get a bigsby tailpiece put onto a Les Paul or an SG or you can't defenders because they have their own. I guess you could with a Telecaster. But any guitar without a Whammy bar, you could put on a bigsby tailpiece. They're beautiful. They look great. And that's what they're kind of most well known for today. Okay. Got you. But at the time, he was the oldest of so Leo Fender, if you didn't realize, was older than Les Paul. And Paul Bigsby was older than Leo. He had started out his career as a motorcycle racer, then went on to make motorcycle parts, I believe, and then moved on to instruments. And he was known to Leo Fender and that they were competitors because Bigsby also made electric steel guitars at the time. I don't know if they were friendly, necessarily but I do know that they definitely work together in Fender's workshop, kind of working on electric instruments together. So I would guess you'd have to be somewhat friendly. It wasn't like Macy's and Gimbals or anything like that. Yeah, I think that's about right. Okay, so they definitely work together at some point in time. And they were friendly enough to do that. And they were dedicated to creating that big electric sound out of a guitar. Whoever has seen the guitars that he made, they were beautiful. It was a lot like Gibson. They were artisan. Just crafted works of art, basically. Yeah. One at a time kind of things. Exactly. And so he already had paul Bigsby already had a name for himself in that respect. And he was hanging out at a radio station, as guitar makers do in La Kxla, which featured country music, played live. Kind of like grand old opera stuff, I guess. And a country musician named Merle Travis was there, I believe, playing. And Merle Travis knew Paul Bigsby, at least by reputation, and said, hey, I heard you can build anybody whatever they're looking for. If I draw you a picture of a guitar, can you make it for me? And I guess Paul Bigsby said, Challenge accepted, good sir, and we should probably fast forward about a month or two. Yeah. And again, I want to stress the fact that at one point in 1947, les Paul, Leo Fender and Paul Bigsby are all together in a garage in Southern California. And this is like I mean, it makes my mind explode to think about those three men in a room together working on something. I'm trying to think of another industry where, like, three separate top brands got together like this, and I can't even think of anything to compare it to. It'd be like if Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Paul Giamatti all got together? I couldn't think of it. Yes. So, anyway, a very just special moment in history. So, yeah, he comes back a few months later with his guitar. Leo Fender is backstage at a show, and Merle Travis is there playing, and he pulls out this thing that Paul BiggsBY made. And if you look up Merle Travis Bigsby guitar, this thing is beautiful. It is a gorgeous guitar and looks like it is a real deal, solid body, electric guitar. Yeah. And he pulls it out in front of Leo Fender, no less, who said, hey, Merle, that's a pretty neat looking guitar there. You mind if I get my hands on that for a little bit and just check it out? I want to see what it's all about. Right. And Merle Travis was kind enough to let Leo Fender borrow it. And Leo Fender? So we should caveat. This supposedly Leo Fender or healing today would be like, no, that's not true. No, this is not correct. But supposedly there are informed people who say that Merle Travis let Leo Fender take his guitar that Paul Bigsby had made for him back to Leo Fender's workshop and basically have a reverse engineer session all over it. Yeah, this is where it gets a little hanky, because Leo Fender was a great man and a great inventor of things. But what he was really good at was improving things. He was like the Japanese. Yeah, maybe. And they make some pretty good guitars, too, I think, right? Well, Japanese are well known for taking something that's pretty cool and then just improving the heck out of it. Like you say, you should do it. Yeah, exactly. Definitely a point in history, sort of a crossroads where some people are like, Leo Fender stole this from Paul Bigsby and was able to mass produce it whereas Bigsby was intent on making these artisan pieces one by one and just got left in the dust. There may be something to that. If you look at the head stock for that original Bigsby guitar and you look at the headstock and the headstock is at the very end of the neck where the strings end up and where the little tuning pegs are. Yeah, it looks a lot like the Stratocaster headstock. Almost exactly like it. And he denied kind of even ganking that. But in meetings at Fender later on, there were higher ups at Fender that said, go out and make it something like that bigsby. They literally said that. So it's kind of undeniable at this point. He was even sued. There was a lawsuit that Bigsby sent a balcony. Sure. And they basically said there were too many just sort of similar kinds of things before this. So it's not going to hold water. Well, not only that, there are other similarities, too. Like, you talked about that little Whammy bar. The Bigsby had one. It's called the Bigsby Pure Vibrato where basically you're pushing down on a bar that's actually manipulated. I don't understand. Actually, Chuck, what is manipulating? Maybe you should take this part. All I know is that it affects the sound like that. But I don't know the mechanism by which it does, though. It's really easy because it's purely mechanical. The guitar bridge is the part where if you're right handed players where the right hand is and that's where the strings are rooted. So what the Whammy bar and what the big tailpiece did is it lifts up the back of the bridge and it literally manually loosens the guitar strings until you release it and then it snaps them back. So if you press on it, it's literally losing the guitar string enough to make it go, oh, neat. Okay. And you remember when you do this around the pickup the metal strings, the steel strings affect the electrical signal that's produced. So if you're messing with the strings, you're messing with the electrical signal and hence the sound. Right. The other thing we should point out that Leo Fender probably kind of stole was all the tuning pegs on the headstock are all on top and in one line. So if you look at Telecasters and Strata, Casters and that's sort of the Fender thing they're all in a row because it's just really easy to access them as a player. Whereas Gibson models were based on acoustic or Spanish guitars where there are three on one side and three on the other. And in order to tune those lower strings or, I guess the higher strings, you have to reach under and around. And Leo Fender was I guess he saw this design and was like, hey, that's kind of brilliant, actually, to put them all on one side. That's superior, frankly. Yeah. So it's really tough to get around. There's plenty of pictures out there. If you put that first bigsby Merle Travis guitar next to the first guitar that Fender ever mass produced, it's pretty much the same thing in a lot of ways. I don't know. It was tough to swallow. But like you said, the idea of impugning Leo Fender's character, it doesn't quite make sense because he was a great guy, and he did do a lot for the industry. And he founded Fender, which just that alone is pretty amazing, too. But one of the things that he doesn't necessarily get credit for, at least outside of, like, musician circles, I'm guessing, but is the base that he created. Right? Yeah, the precision bass. Before the electric bass guitar, the basses were all the big, standard upright basses. And they were a problem because they were huge. You either had to strap it to the top of your car and potentially have it get beat up by weather or you had to ride separately from the rest of the band because that thing filled up the entire back seat. They were just big and bulky and hard to transport. So Leo Fender, again, was not the first. A guy named Paul Tutt Mark, who worked on he was a big lap steel maker, and he founded the audio box company, which is still around oh, yeah. 15 years before the Fender P base, the precision bass, he invented what's generally known as the first electric solid body bass guitar. It just didn't take off. Like the precision. And again, the P bass is called a precision because the upright bass doesn't have frets. So if you knew how to play it, you know how to play it, but you couldn't be like, go to the fourth fret. You would just sort of I see. Not guess, but you would generally know where it falls. The electric bass guitar. The P bass had frets, so they said it has more precision. So that's why they call it that. But that's another thing that's easy to overlook to the electric guitar. It's pretty different from the electric Spanish guitar, but it's still in the same general. It's like a progression from that. The electric bass is like whole cloth and a new invention, basically. And it changed everything, too. I mean, like, I was reading an article, I think, that you sent from maybe Pitchfork, where it was talking about just how much that changed things, having that around, like, basically Motown and then later on, funk. None of that would have existed without the electric base. Another one bites the dust and, like, Pink Floyd dark Side of the Moon and Parliament. All these bands are predicated on the fact that there was, like, a nice, slappy electric base that you just couldn't get around. You couldn't ignore it. It became like a part of the band rather than just some background thing that was more visual than audio or white oral. Yeah, because the upright bass kind of ended up having the same problem as the acoustic guitar. And that once they had electric guitars that upright bass wouldn't really cut through live. And so a song is driven by the rhythm section, the bass player and the drummer. When you ever hear about the rhythm section, they drive the heart of the song. Everyone follows them. Like, as much as you think as the guitar is out front, it's not leading the band. The low end is what's actually leading the song. And everyone else kind of falls in line with that because they're setting that beat with the bass and the drums. But he's working on this. And again, not to get in the weeds of the amps but this whole time he's making leaps and bounds on amplification that works at really high volume with his Fender amps. Yeah. And then one of the other things that made Fender really innovative was he created, like, instruments for everyday people. That was the big innovation for him. Like, his company set out to create to bring this stuff to the masses so that teenage kids could save up from their after school job and buy one of these things and buy an amp and start a band and maybe actually get kind of good. I hate to use this word, because it's so overused these days but he kind of democratized starting a band. Whereas before, you had, like, a 20 piece band and you had to know all these people and you had to do dance halls and everything. And now, because everything was amplified and electrified you could get away with just three or four pieces and everybody could hear you and they could hear you louder than they could hear the big bands from before because it was amplified, but it was affordable. And he also made them really durable too. Yeah, and it was because he introduced kind of like a factory process to it. Whereas over at Gibson and Rickenbacher and Bigsby they were all still making these hands kind of not one at a time but they were making them by hand very slowly. One of the big reasons he was able to factory is it was he was basically the only company using a bolt on neck. So in other words, you take the neck and you literally screw it in to the body of the guitar on the back. And that's why any time you see a Fender guitar on the back I have this little silver square plate where the neck meets the body and under that is where it's bolted together. Gibson and basically everyone else was using what's called set neck, which are glued on. And you might think that, like, hey, bolting sounds a lot better than glue. Yeah. But what glue does is that actually adheres it and makes it more like that log, almost like a true neck. It makes it part of the body and gives you more warmth and a little more sustain, and it's just a bit of a different sound. Whereas the Bolton guitar got a little more known for sort of being kind of pluckier. And they both have their advantages. Some people swear by one or the other, but nowadays, neither one of them is superior to the next, really. It's just sort of two different methods. Got you. But I could also see that bolt almost represents that mass production, too. Yeah, for sure. So Chuck Leo Fender is working on that. We'll call it bigsby inspired design. And at the same time, Les Paul is about to have a life changing experience in Oklahoma, of all places. Right. Yeah. So he, like I said, it was not a good husband to either his first wife or his second. Really. He had a long time affair with a woman with a stage name of Mary Ford. She was a singer and also a champion guitar player. And they had a duo going on. It was Les, Paula, Mary Ford, and they had tons and tons of number one hit records. And they had been together for quite a few years before he even got divorced from his first wife. But in 1948, while traveling, I think, back to La. From Wisconsin, they were in a really bad car accident on the icy roads near Davenport, Oklahoma. And it was a really bad wreck that could have killed both of them. Yeah. So they were both thrown from the car along with all their equipment. And from what I understand, mary's injuries weren't nearly as bad as Les is. His spleen was all messed up, a bunch of other stuff. But the big problem for Les Paul was that his right elbow was shattered. And at first the doctors said, well, we're just going to have to amputate your arm. And that obviously would have been that for his guitar playing days. Yeah. Apparently when he was faced with this news, one of the first things he started doing was coming up with how to create an effect where you could play guitar one handed, but he luckily didn't ever have to actually follow through. And invent that because some doctor was aware of his status and that he played guitar and like that they couldn't take his arm. So he set about trying to figure out how to solve the problem while keeping his arm and allowing Les Paul to somehow play one way or another. Yeah. I mean, he basically gave Les Paul the choice. He was like, you can either amputate it or we can try this procedure where we kind of screw your arm back together, and we don't know if it will work. And he said, but it's going to be permanently bent in some kind of direction. And Les Paul said, Why don't we at least try it first so we know if it works before we cut the arm off? And he said, and just bend it and point it toward my belly button and leave it there. Yeah. So he could play guitar. And that's what they did. And for the rest of Les Paul's life. Like, if you ever see a picture of Les Paul, that right arm is bent. Yeah. And the doctor, just to put a little flourish on it, made it so that his thumb was always in the thumbs up position. So it always looks like Les Paul was really happy about whatever was going on when that picture was taken. All right, so that's where Les fall is. He recovers. It literally takes him about a year in the hospital to fully recover from his injuries. So he's on pause when Leo Fender builds the Fender esquire guitar and debuts it at the National Association of Music Merchants convention in Chicago. I say we take a break here, and then we come back and talk about that and keep going. How about that? That sounds great. Okay, we'll be right back. All right, Chuck. Leo Fender takes his Paul Bigsby inspired guitar and creates a prototype out of it that's known as the Esquire. And I think there are some differences between the Esquire and what would become later known as a Telecaster. Right. It's not the exact same thing, just with a different name. Yeah. I think there was only one pick up, and the telly ended up having a couple. But when you look at pictures of the Esquire, it's the same body shape, very utilitarian, not the most comfortable guitar to play, which we'll see later on. Was kind of a big deal in the creation of the Stratocaster, but it was a real deal guitar, and it was loud. It was clear it could be mass produced. And everybody basically said, this is the future. Yeah. Is at the National Association of Music Merchants Convention going, hey, you like you like this? You like this guitar? And they all said, yes, very much. So he went back after the convention and kind of tinkered with it a little more. He had a collaborator named George Fullerton, and they ended up producing from the Esquire. There were a couple of problems with it. Apparently from the steel strings, when they were tuned tightly, eventually the neck would start to warp a little bit. That's a big problem. So they figured out how to reinforce it with the rod. They solved some other small problems and then ended up coming up with the broadcaster. Right. That's right. A guy we should mention here is I think Dave called him his marketing sales guy. It's true. He was that Don Randall. But he was Leo Fender's 50 50 partner in the Fender Music Corporation and a huge, huge part of the story that we really won't get into. But Don Randall was there the whole time and sort of was everything that Leo Fender wasn't. As far as when you're looking for a good business partner out there, hitting the bricks, selling this thing, drumming up deals. And the broadcaster, the ads came out and he got that first cease and desist from Gretch. They made drums and guitars, and there was actually a drum set called The Broadcaster with a K. It sounds like a sound you make when you burp and choke at the same time. Yeah. Broadcaster. No, Gretch. I misread that one. Sorry. No, broadcaster with a K sounds evil, remember? Yeah. Gretch still makes beautiful guitars and great drums, but they had a drum set with a K, so they said, all right, we got to think of a different name. And so TV was the latest thing, and so they literally called it the Telecaster because of that. I know. And people were like, Boy, howdy I love this. They did. So that was a big deal. The Telecaster was, I guess, the first mass produced, widely available electric guitar, solid body electric guitar that shredded that you could shred on, I guess. Yeah. It kind of started at all. Yeah. And so Les Paul, by this time he had gotten in that car wreck in 1948, you said it took him about a year to recover. He got divorced from his wife. He ended up marrying Mary Ford. And together, his music career got even greater than it was when he was working with Bing Crosby. This is when they had four slots on the Billboard top charts at one time on one week. That's enormous. They were the first to do it, I'm sure maybe some others, like Michael Jackson, the Beatles and a couple of others have done it since, but that really kind of gets across just how huge Les Paul was as a popular musician. Right? Yeah. Mary was great, and everyone loved her. She had a beautiful voice. Again, he was not a good husband to her. Eventually, when they got divorced, it was on grounds of cruelty was one of them, because he was just a workaholic and would never stop, and he would not let her stop. And she was like, they were really wealthy at this point from their career, and she was like, can we enjoy life a little bit? Can we stop and live? And he was like, no, we're not getting anything accomplished if we're doing that. And the stage act was a little I guess, for the time, it was what it was. But it was kind of misogynistic. He would make cracks about Mary singing in between doing the dishes and kind of making him dinner, and she would sort of laugh. And it was their banter but the whole thing was kind of gross in retrospect. Yeah, for sure. Especially today. And then the cats on the Unicycles with the sparklers. It was just widely considered to be over the top. Yeah, way over the top. But because Leo knew less Paul I mean, like you said, they and Paul Bigsby were all working in a garage together working on electric guitars. Like, he knew he was friendly with them enough so that Leo Fender and Don Randall said if we could get Les Paul who's the most well known guitar player in the world to endorse our Fender guitars this would be a huge deal. Huge. So they sent them a Telecaster and with a note saying, like hey, this is where I'm going. I'd like you to consider coming here with me something long. I'm paraphrasing. And Les Paul was like, no, that's all right. I don't really like this guitar that much. Yeah, I think he was fairly kind about it but he just said, the sound is too bright. Had that bolt on neck, and it's a different sound. And he didn't like it. And remember, that was the whole reason he dedicated himself to coming up with the electric guitar and cracking this code for a decade or more, a couple of decades by then because he was searching for that one perfect sound. And so that actually he didn't give up the Quest after Fender said, here's my guitar. And it didn't work. Les Paul, despite having been turned away by Gibson a full decade before went back to Gibson and said hey, you guys have to listen to me this time. This is where things are going. Look, Leo Fenders just come out with this telecaster. It's very clear that you guys need to be developing a solid body electric guitar. And Gibson said, Funny you should mention that because we've been working on it ever since we saw that Esquire at that music convention. And it knocked our socks off. That's right. So they were kind of already on it. They were different. They were sort of modeled after those acoustics with the tuning pegs on both sides. The Gibson guitar was really heavy. And it's funny, later on, many guitar players started with what would end up being the Les Paul. Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. And all these people play the Les Paul early on, and I think Pete Townsend And they all eventually switch to Fenders later in their career because the Les Paul weighs between nine and \u00a310 and the straps and telly's weigh about \u00a37. That's a big difference. Two or \u00a33 strapped on your back when you're touring is a big deal. I can tell the difference when I play a heavy guitar being 50 years old in my basement after a few hours. So I can imagine what like touring year after year what kind of toll that takes. For sure. But this Gibson was heavy. It had that glued on neck, which gives you a little more warmth, a little more resonance. And it was a really good guitar. And so they say to bless Paul. Now he's being courted by Gibson officially, like, hey, what do you think of this? We will let this be your guitar. We will slap your name on it. We'll give you a 5% royalty, and you've got to play it exclusively. And he said, the done deal, my friends. Yeah, because he always only played Gibson. He loved Gibson. This is like a dream come true for him. And for them also to come back to him now. Had to feel awfully sweet. But it was so stupid, too, because this is a decade after he went to them with this idea the first time, and now they're finally getting around to it. But it was a big deal. So Les Paul now played Gibson guitars exclusively, and they named that first model the Gibson Les Paul. Yeah. I wonder if in that meeting, he said, can I also tell people that I designed and invented this thing because that's what I'm going to do for the rest of my life, just so you're cool. Yeah. Which is really something, because he's he apparently didn't there's a guy named, I think, Paul McCarty. George McCarthy. I think George McCarthy. I'm sorry. I'm pretty sure his name is George McCarthy. He was the president of Gibson at the time. His last name is McCarthy. Let's just call him that. Or Mr. X. Mr. X was the president of Gibson at the time, and he largely designed the guitar. But, yeah, they kind of let I guess as part of the endorsement deal, they let Les Paul just basically claim it. Like he had a lot to do with it. He made some Tweaks, for sure, but he never designed a Les Paul. That is also a fact. Right. And he did not invent the electric guitar. A lot of people still say that Les Paul invented the electric guitar, and he was always happy to just sort of nod his head. Right. All right, Chuck. By the mid 50s, by the early 50s, Fender had the Telecaster out. Gibson had their Les Paul model out. So there were now widely available electric guitars being produced. And that sounded awesome, like the sound had finally been achieved. Loudness, clarity, shreddingness, gnarliness, all of that stuff was now extant in the world, did not exist before. Now it did. But the one that really changed everything, the electric guitar that changed it all was Fenders. If not their second model, they're definitely their second well known model, the Stratocaster. Right. Which came out in 1954. Yeah. This was a huge innovation because the problems with the telly is that, like I said, it wasn't rounded, it wasn't sharp, and I'm talking about the edges of it. It kind of dug into your body and wasn't super comfortable. So Leo Fender does what he does, which is. Make improvements like the Japanese. And he got onto the back of it and he carved out where the top of the back of the guitar meets your belly. He shaved that down to where it was contoured. And then where your right arm if you're a right hand player, your pick hand, where your forearm kind of rests on the top front of the guitar, he carved that down, too, and contoured it so your arm and your belly weren't pressed against these sharp edges. And it was just a more comfortable guitar all the way around. It had a cool look. This was a time in the early 50s, mid 50s, when these cars have these big fence on them and everything just had this sort of look like it's hard to describe how weird the stratocaster and how sort of modern and futuristic it looked at the time because we all just see that as like, oh, that's what a guitar looks like. Exactly. But at the time, it was revolutionary. And everyone literally was like, what in the world is that hot looking thing? Yeah, one of the other things that made it look hot, those fins had a purpose. The horns at the top of the guitar where the neck met the body. It carved out space so you could get your fingers to press those frets on the higher notes a lot more easily than you could have before when you were reaching all the way around it, which, again, allowed for greater shredding. That's right. And the Fenders did those on both sides, whereas the Les Paul was only carved on the underside. So you could still get to some strings, but it took a little bit of finagling. Later on, Les Paul would come up, and I have one of these, too, what's called the double cut, where it's cut on both sides, and the Gibson SG, which is cut on both sides. But originally it was just Fender doing that. And then the Les Paul did something that just did away with that altogether and made the coolest guitar of all time, the Flying V, which is the one I always associated with heavy metal. And by less Paul, of course, I mean Gibson. But that's the one, like, Jimi Hendrix played that one. I can't remember like, a bunch of people played it. You've seen this before. But he played a strat. But he also played a Flying V. I seen pictures of it on the Internet, but it's what you associate with just rocking out with a guitar. And it turns out the thing was designed in one of the most mind blowing facts I learned in this podcast. I couldn't believe it because I associated with 80s hair metal. And it had been around for a good 30 years by then. And, like, the when this thing came out, it's like the coolest looking guitar of all time. For my money. No, I love the Flying V. And I'll probably own one at one point. At some point. You should look up reverse FlyingV because they are one of the ugliest guitar. Yeah, I've seen that before. But, yeah, Gibson was tinkering around. They made the Flying V and they made the Explorer, which is the one that kind of looks like a lightning bolt, and then the Firebird. And those all did okay, but they weren't like and Leo Fender did the same thing. After The Stratocaster success, he came up with the Jazz Master and the Jaguar and he thought these were all improvements on those guitars because they added a lot more options for switches and switching in additional pickups. But they were I mean, they're kind of cool now, but they were a little busy for a lot of players back then. So they didn't take off like The Strat did. It was just this utilitarian, really comfortable players guitar that everyone really wanted after Buddy Holly jumped on TV and played one because Buddy Holly was huge. Yeah, he was huge. And he was actually bigger in the UK. Than he was in America at the time. And I didn't realize this either. This is another factor of the podcast. There were two tours of the UK in 1958 that changed music history. I just think it's so cool. But one was Buddy Holly. Who? Buddy Holly and the Crickets went on tour in 1958 with The Stratocaster front and center. And then Muddy Waters came to the UK. And Muddy Waters have been around for years by then. He actually was just kind of like an old relic in America by then. But it was super cool in the 60s in the UK. To be into old style blues. So they brought Muddy Waters over. Muddy Waters didn't show up with the Spanish style guitar. He showed up with The Stratocaster and blared it. Then those two tours produced bands like The Beatles, The Who, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin. Basically, every band in the British Invasion were in the audience as kids are slightly younger men for those two tours and were inspired to go on and form some really amazing bands afterward. Yeah, it was funny. It was kind of like either you were in the Beatles camp where you saw Buddy Holly and you wanted to do sort of upbeat pop music or you were Eric Clapton going to see Muddy Waters and you wanted to do this sort of raunchy blues rock thing. Right. But either way, it was a Stratocaster front and center and another well, I guess we should take a break now before we get to the next guy, right? All right, let's do it. All right. We'll take our final break and talk about surf guitar legend Dick Dale right after this. Okay, hold on. Let me do it differently. We're back. All right. So all these people are being influenced by people like Buddy Holly and Muddy Waters. Then comes a gentleman named dick Dale in the 1950s. Everyone knows him now, of course, is the head of the surf guitar surf music movement. And that was big. That wasn't just like a sort of like some people listen to that. That was, like, the most popular form of music for a little while in the 1950s. And Dick Dale's thing was he was the first guy to really want enormous amounts of volume, like, more than just, like, let me amplify this so we can cut through. He wanted to blow people's eardrums out, and he actually accidentally blew out Leo Fender's eardrum when they were working together, trying to figure out this problem. Leo Fender bent down and said he thinks he hears a he said, don't play for a minute. He literally put his ear on the amplifier speaker, and no one knows what happened if he bumped the guitar or something, but cranked all the way up, which is how you would listen for a buzz or a he literally destroyed one of Leo Fender's ears. So now he's down to one ear and one eye. Yeah. Leo Fender famously clutched his ears and went, Gretch, my ears. They said, hey, we'll see you for that. It's like Marty McFly getting blown across the room in Dock lamp sort of is. But he was a huge influence on achieving volume for rock bands that would come along later. I actually saw him in Athens, not toward the end of his life, because he just died a few years ago, but it was 40 watt. It was amazing. That's awesome. But that was a very cool show. Yeah. Supposedly he inspired Jimmy Hendrix. He was like a guitar god himself. For sure. An overlooked one. I saw, I think, an article. You said that he's not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which is, like, the Kookiest thing I've heard in a while. It's ridiculous weird. Yeah. So he's playing the Strat. The Beach Boys are playing fenders. We have to shout out legendary session based player Carol K. Sure. A woman among men who played defender, precision, base, funny race. Yeah. I mean, if you think of just about any popular song from the 1950s and 60s, there's probably about a 75% chance that Carol K played based on it. Oh, Neeta. Every Motown song, every Beach Boys at record, like, you name it. Wow, that's really cool. I hadn't heard of her. Yeah, there's a great documentary called The Wrecking Crew about these legendary studio musicians who basically played all that stuff. Like, The Beach Boys didn't play their instruments on the records. What it was the Wrecking grew. Be quiet. Don't tell me things like that. I'm sorry. Brian Wilson is a genius, but he played base on stage. Carol K played base in the studio. Okay, so Leo Fender here's the thing about him. Remember we said that he was a tinker and engineer? Those guys don't translate to head of highly successful and quickly growing company very well. Right. They tend to get a little stressed out and overwhelmed. And that's exactly what happened to good old Leo. He apparently had ulcers, which has nothing to do with stress, as we learned, thanks to the guinea pig scientists who drank a bunch of that bacteria to prove that it was caused by a bacteria rather than stress, do you remember? Right. Anyway, so he tried to sell out in the early sixty s, I believe. Yeah. And I guess Randall didn't accept it. Why not? I think they've been partners for so long. Randall, it seems like, genuinely thought, like, you don't understand the value of this company. You're asking for a million dollars. And so he started courting other companies. He courted Baldwin to sell the whole company. He courted eventually CBS, CBS Records, and they ended up paying what would be the equivalent of $110,000,000 for the Fender Music Corporation. And Don Randall and Leo Fender each got checks for $5 million, which is about 50 something million dollars today. That's amazing. Wow. Don Randall was great, great guy to have in your corner, huh? He really was. And they were friends. And I think Leo also had this he was just always in bad health, and I had never heard of this be. It a case of strep that apparently literally never went away. Like, he had it for years and years and years for a week. Sucks. But I can't imagine having a chronic case of strip. Yeah. So I think part of the terms of the deal was there were two parts of the company that were brand new, that didn't make any money. They actually lost money, which was the Fender Roads electric piano, which everyone was like, what the heck is this? Of course, now it's amazing. And then the Fender acoustic division, which really never did take off, like I mentioned earlier. And part of the deal was that they had to include those, even though they weren't profitable. He said fine. And then they had to keep Leo on for five years as a consultant, which they were happy to do. And I think he couldn't do anything else with anyone. I think he had a noncompete for ten years, but he would go on later to start new companies, even after that. And he died in 1991. He lived a pretty good life. Pretty good, long life. Got to tinker for a pretty long time. Ended up being a wealthy man and really kind of like, became one of the people who's known as the inventor of the electric guitar, for better or worse. And blessed, paul's story kind of took a slightly different turn than Leo Fenders. Leo wanted to fade into the background. That decision was made for Les Paul, not necessarily in conjunction with his wishes. His innovations with electric guitar, his and Leo Fender's creation and introduction of electric guitars changed music like we saw created rock and roll creative the foundation that Rock and Roll was built on. And all the kids said, we don't really like Les Paul's music anymore. So he created this monster that ended up swallowing him, basically. And he kind of faded off into nothingness there for a little while. He was going to become this obscure, incredibly wealthy guy. Yeah. He got divorced from Mary, like I said earlier. He ended up getting custody of the kids, which was just crazy at the time. And that was kind of the only thing she wanted. It was a really ugly kind of public divorce. Yeah, that's ugly. It was very sad. And I mentioned the Gibson SG earlier. The solid guitar. They made that to be lighter and to kind of compete with these. That was originally called the Gibson. Les Paul SG. And eventually he didn't like it at all, so they took his name off of it, and then it was just the Gibson SG. He just kind of faded away. He lived to be 92. I mean, he had a great life, like you said, as a wealthy guy who he would always play these live kind of small club gigs in New York and very famous people like Slash would stop through and everyone would come through to play with Lesball. And he would regale people with stories. And it wasn't like a sideshow act. He couldn't fill large halls anymore, basically. Yeah. But he got the recognition that he, I'm sure, liked he seemed like a pretty good guy as long as you weren't married to him. But he's known as the Guitar God's. Guitar God. I saw put somewhere that, like, if you are a guitar player, a guitar hero, you look up to Les Paul for what he did. Not just with creating or helping the creator, at least saying that he created the electric guitar, but also for all the other innovations that he really did invent multi track recording and sound. Yeah. And just to sort of button up the story of the guitar itself, they only made them in 58, 59 and 60 made 2400 of these. And after Muddy Waters is when people like Eric Clapton and Pete Townsen and kind of any big English guitar player at the time played Les Paul's. Remember how I was seeing at the very beginning in the first episode, how when Fender was up, Les Paul was down on the other way around, the strap kind of changed the world. And then the strap became kind of uncool for a little while in the 60s when all these guys started playing the Les Paul Jimmy Page, of course. And people were like, Wait a minute, we need Les Paul. There was only 2400 of them. So they started making them again by popular demand in, I think, 60 something. Yes, 68. And they never went out of production again. Yes, 68. To start making them again. And since then, there are plenty of people who have both. But the question is sort of always, unless you play like an off, like a Rick and Bucker or something. People are always like, you Gibson person or offender person. Sure. And I'm a Gibson person. Always happen. Well, Les Paul ended up he died in 2009, but he ended up being the only person to date who has been inducted in both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is pretty cool. Pretty amazing. Great story. That's it. The story of the solid body electric guitar as told through the eyes of Leo Fender and Les Paul. The end. Thanks for indulging me on this. It was a good one, man. It was nice to hear you just jazzed like a precision jazz base. Well, after 13 years, we finally tackled something I knew something about. Whatever. Well, if you want to know more about the electric guitar, go pick one up, see what happens, and maybe you'll start your own Shredding rock band yourself. And since I said Shredding rock band, of course it's time for listener mail. You know what? Let's not do a listener mail today. We do this occasionally where we will not do listener mail and ask people for a favor. We do this, like, once every three years. Never been good at self marketing, but we like to call out occasionally for people to go on itunes or your Pod Player Choice. Leave reviews, leave ratings. It helps us out. I don't care how long we've been around. We still need people saying positive, hopefully positive things about us out there. So instead of listening, just do us a favor. Tell a friend about us. Tell a relative, tell a co worker that they might hate us or love us. Well done. That's why we only do this at once every three years. That's right. So clunky. Well, like Chuck said, we would love it if you left us a review, specifically a positive one, but whatever. Speak from your heart. How about that? That's what Josh and Chuck think you should do. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch with us as well, as always, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
c5663bd6-5460-11e8-b38c-efb95b627c32	Selects: Operation Mincemeat: How A Corpse Fooled the Nazis	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/selects-operation-mincemeat-how-a-corpse-fooled-th	In World War II, a secret department of British ‘corkscrew thinkers’ hatched a plan to use the cadaver of an unclaimed homeless man to turn the tide of the war in the Allies’ favor. It worked. Learn all about it in this classic episode.	In World War II, a secret department of British ‘corkscrew thinkers’ hatched a plan to use the cadaver of an unclaimed homeless man to turn the tide of the war in the Allies’ favor. It worked. Learn all about it in this classic episode.	Sat, 19 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2021, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=19, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=5, tm_yday=170, tm_isdst=0)	43126393	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's, SYSK selects I've chosen our episode on Operation Mincemeat from February 2016. It's a really great example of English drollness pulling through for the rest rest of the world, it's featuring Ian Fleming or Ian Fleming, depending on your preference. And Raw doll, it's just a bonkers history episode all around, so I hope you enjoy it. Welcome to stuff you should know a production of iHeartRadio. Hi and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's charles W, Chuck Bryant. There's Jerry Rowland. This is stuff you should know. Chuck. Yo. I'm 39 years old and I still can't say my own name correctly because of my stupid, thick tongue. You're going to be 40? Yeah. Too crazy. Yeah. You used to make fun of me, and now you're old. Well, you're still older than me. I know. Nothing can do about that. It's cool, though. Yeah. You're aging very well. No, you're aging really well. You mean the teeth falling out, the weight gain and the gray beard? I still say you're aging very well. I appreciate it. Let's go, hair. Take off your hat. I still got good hair. Boom. Look at that. I got hat head now. Beautiful. Okay. People think I'm bald. Some people do. Oh, really? Like, you're always wearing that hat. I don't know. Suspicious people. Yeah, like the drummer for the Chili Peppers. Anthony Keita Flee. No. The guy from James addiction. Nope. I don't know. Then not John Presanti. Chad Smith. The guy that looks like Will Ferrell. Will Ferrell? He's always got that hat on backwards. He's bald. Oh, yeah, totally. Like Michael's Bald. Remember, he always wears a D rag. He's super bald. So I get why people are suspicious. If you're a public figure that has a patented hat piece, then it's probably because you're bald. But not in my case. What a weird way to start the show, especially this show, Operation Mincemeat, which is a ghoulish gallows humor. Awesomely. World War II british name for this operation. Yeah. This will live alongside our Nazi spies invading Florida podcast. And the History Girls covered this very topic as well. Yeah, man. There's nothing I love more than little known history. This is it. But this is great. Little known history. Yeah, and it shouldn't be little known because after the Trojan War, maybe the largest and most successful military deception plan in history. Well, there's also have you seen that documentary Ghost Army about Operation Fortitude? No. They used a bunch of blow up tanks and planes, like inflatable tanks and planes to make it look like there's a whole Allied division over here so that we could invade Normandy more easily. It's like a Looney Tunes cartoon. Awesome. But yes, this ranks up there with literally with the Trojan horse. It's that ingenious and that wonderful. Yeah, but so let's set the stage right. Okay, so in early 1943, the war was very much undecided. It could have been anybody. Europe was under the control of Hitler, huge amounts of Europe. They called it Fortress Europe because the Nazis had just overrun the place, were dug in, and the Allies knew that they needed to get into Europe to topple Hitler or else, like, they weren't going to win the war. Sure. So Churchill suggested attacking Europe's underbelly, which is maybe Italy. Greece under. He called it the underbelly. Not very flattering, but he called it Europe's underbelly. So everybody. The Allies, the Greeks, the Nazis, the Japanese people in Hawaii everybody knew. Yeah. They weren't American quite yet. Okay. Everybody knew that the Allies were going to attack somewhere in that area. Yeah. Come up through the Mediterranean. Even Hitler feared this the most. Right. That was key. Right. I mean, everybody knew the Allies were coming, and they were going to come there. But this land mass, this area of land and sea is large enough that you can't just be like, oh, they're coming down there. We got it covered. Yeah. We'll cover it. All you need to know kind of specifically where they were covering. And there were just a few places where they could have come. One was Greece. That was where Hitler always suspected. One was Sardinia. Right? Yeah. And then another was Sicily. And in 1943, I think January, the Allied powers met in French Morocco and held a conference. The Casablanca conference. Very sexy name. Yeah, it really was. And they said, okay, we're going to invade Sicily this July. We're going to call it Operation Husky. Now we have to do everything we can to not let the Nazis know that that's where we're going. And that actually hatched eventually, what's called Operation Mincemeat. Yeah. You know what, studying this stuff, and I'm not a big war buff, although I'm getting more so, but reading up on this stuff, like, the old wars are so much like the board game risk that it's startling. Yeah. Literally, when you look at the stuff, it's like moving troops to where you think people are going to attack you. Right. And rolling the dice a bit. And if you're right, then great. If not, you're screwed. Very much so. Which is why it's such a huge shift that we're seeing now in moving to unconventional warfare, because that's scary stuff. Yeah. I think pretty much all war is scary. Yeah. Well, of course, I'm not saying, like, Normandy was a cakewalk or anything, because they knew what they were going on. Right. Man. I watched Saving Private Ryan again the other day. God, it's crazy. That thing is almost a snuff film. It's not as bad as We Were Soldiers, which is a snuff film, but it's I never saw that one. The Mel Gibson one. Yeah. Dude, it's the most graphically violent mainstream movie ever made. Really? Yes. Wow. Yeah. Like, there's a part where they have a camera shot over this guy's shoulder, right. So his helmets in the near foreground. And that guy takes a hit to the head and blood spray covers the camera lens. For the next little while, his brains just cover the camera. It's disgusting. Do you like saving Bryan Ryan again, though? Yeah, it's a great movie, but it is really violent. That's another thing about getting older, is that stuff affects you more and more. The more you come to terms with your own mortality, the more valuable life becomes. The more valuable even a character in a movie's life becomes. You know what I mean? This stuff gets to you. Agreed. It's called growing up, my friend. I'm becoming human, isn't it? Gross. All right, so on September 20, 1939, there was a director of British Naval Intelligence named Admiral John Godfrey, and he distributed something called the Trout Memo. And it was written by his assistant, lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming. Familiar name. Yeah. Creator of James Bond. That's right. The guy and I think most people know that he served at this point. Yeah. But if you didn't, that's a nice little factoid for you. So he wrote the Trout Memo, and they called it the Trout Memo because they pointed out in the intro that the trout fisherman fishes very patiently, but he changes venue frequently, and he changes his bait very frequently, too. And so they're charged with deception. They wanted to come up with all these different ideas, all these different bait and venue changes that they could come up with. Yes. And this was a time, too. We should point out that spying is always vital, but, man, in World War II, it was going on all over the place and a huge part of the war. Right. So we need to do one on the Enigma machine, by the way. At some point we do, because that's one of the unsung heroes in this operation. Absolutely. All right. So with the Trout Memo in, fleming wrote well, co authored 51 different operations suggestions, and number 28 was one called A Suggestion Parenthesis. Not a very nice one. The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thompson. I'm so pleased that you said Basil instead of Basil. Yeah. In fact, that was a $1,037 novel, the Milliners Hat Mystery, and he was actually a World War I spy. Oh, really? Yeah, it's all coming together. So he was a spy writer. That Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Doug crazy. That's where this originates. That's right. The following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thompson. A corpse dressed as an airman with dispatches in his pockets could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in obtaining corpses at the naval hospital, but of course, it would have to be a fresh one. So the idea is, let's get a dead person. Let's dress them up like a soldier, give them some sensitive documents that leak this invasion. Fraudulent. Fraudulent, yeah. Very important that leak the invasion of Greece, which is not really happening, and they're going to mount up troops there, and we'll actually go in Sicily. They're going to find this body. They're going to think they've stumbled upon this great happy accident, and we're going to fool them. So, yeah, that was the whole idea. That was the general basis of it. And Churchill loved the idea because apparently he liked what he called corkscrew thinkers, because he knew Hitler thought in a straight line. Yeah. And by corkscrew thinkers. I think that would be our equivalent of outside the box. Exactly. Yes. Churchill was like, this is great. I love Churchill. Let's drink some scotch and do it. Yeah. Let's look like a bulldog while we do, too. So that idea was roughly outlined by Ian Fleming and then the Churchill's core screw thinkers, the Xx committee, led by you and Montague Chumley. Yeah. His name is not spelled Chumley. No. How is it spelled? Are you ready for this? Yeah. Chum. Chumley. Yeah. And apparently, when he met people, he would say, Lieutenant Charles Chumley. C-H-O-L-M-O-N-D-E-L-E-Y. He would spell it out. What? Do you really? Yeah. Are you making fun of me, or is that for real? No, he was a very quirky guy, and that's how he described himself as toothpaste, as if it had been squeezed from the tube, like he self described. He would go hunting with a revolver, like bird hunting. He's a weird guy. I actually watched a quickie BuzzFeed video on this, and they pronounced it Charles Cholomondele. Did they really? Yeah. Nice. I'm glad we did our research. Exactly. Shout out to BuzzFeed. So you and Montague, right? Yeah. The other guy, he is noteworthy in a number of ways, too. Apparently, he's just the greatest guy ever. Most interesting man on the planet. And he actually wrote the book, the first book on Operation Mincemeat, because he was one of the people who came up with this and implemented it. The man who was never there. The man who never was. Got right in the movie, too. Yeah. Of the same name. Starring Montgomery Cliff. I believe. No, starring Cliff. Cliff. Cliff. Cliff Claven, cliff Webb. But not Montgomery Cliff. No. Those two are virtually interchangeable. Sure. So you and Montague was already notable because at school, he and his brother had created the rules for Ping Pong. No way. Yes. I did not know that. Among other things. And his brother, equally interesting, equally rambunctious, went on to become a spy for the Soviets. Oh, wow. Yes. So he turned yes. Against England. Yes. Wow. Against everybody except for the Soviets. Well, Montague, he was formerly a barrister and attorney, and this is why he actually did not go serve on a ship. And the other guy, Chumley, never flew a plane. One was Air Force. One was Navy. And apparently, Montague, as an attorney, was very good at just seeing all the angles. So they said, you, sir, are perfect for this job. Nice. All right, Chuck. Yes. So we have the rough outline that Ian Fleming came up with, the Xx committee led by you and Montague and Charles Chumley. Yeah. Part of mi five, I believe. Okay. Said, we're going to take this particular idea and really run with it. And like you said, they were going to. Well, the first thing they did was start setting about creating a backstory. Yeah. Well, they had three months, so the clock is ticking at this point. Yeah. Because here's the thing. They set the invasion right. In January, and they set the invasion for July. Now, you needed enough time to plant this corpse, this fake dead courier, into Nazi hands with enough time so that the Nazis could digest it, analyze it, decided it was truthful, and then react the way you wanted them to, which meant that they had no later than May, or else this plan was out the window. Yeah. You wanted them the ultimate goal was to have the Nazis put their troops in the wrong place. And that takes time. Right. So they looked around and they decided that the best place to carry out this operation was Spain. And Spain during World War II was allegedly ostensibly neutral. Sure. But they had a lot of access sympathies, a lot of connections to Nazi Germany. And there was a particular Nazi agent, a spy working in a port called whoever. Right. Sure. And his name was Adolf Klaus. And Adolf Klaus was known to be very methodical, pretty brutal and ruthless, extremely gullible. Yeah. He was a straight line thinker he was Hitler. He wasn't one that could think outside the box and think, maybe this is an elaborate hoax. The guy didn't even own a real corkscrew. They targeted this guy cut the top off of wine bottles. Yeah. They specifically targeted him, which is amazing. So they wanted this guy, who was fairly gullible, but also known as a very respected Nazi agent in Spain, to be the one who came up with this corpse and cadaver. That's right. So before they ever had any corpse or cadaver or anything like that, montague and Chumley start setting about creating a backstory, and they created this guy named Major Martin. Martin. William Martin. That's right. And they created Major William Martin, and they created this whole persona. And this wasn't the first time they'd done it. They actually had chops with this kind of stuff. So they had created a fake spy network that made Nazi Germany think that they had a whole double agent network in the UK. And all of them were fictitious, not real people that you and Montague and Charles Chumley had created these fake personas. Amazing. And had fed the Nazis misinformation through these people that didn't really exist. So they took that understanding and that thinking of what it takes to create a fake persona. And they said about creating one for Major William Martin. Yeah. And there's a great BBC documentary on this, and they interview a lot of the players, including a lot of the women who worked at Mi Five in the office, and they were all just so delighted. They all described this as, like, the most exciting adventure they'd ever had. I'm sure it was like something out of a spy novel, and they were living it. Right. And so they all had great fun creating these characters, these made up people. They wanted to give him a fiance because the idea is that they find this body with not only these documents in a briefcase, the important documents, but to make it believable, he had to have believable, what they call pocket litter or wallet litter. Right. Which is if you find any person on the street, ask them to open their wallet. You're going to be able to tell a lot about them. Sure. So just stuff to legitimize it. So they said, let's give them a fiance. And all the women in the office wanted to be the fiance. Oh, yeah. So they all submitted photographs. They picked this one lady, Gene Leslie secretary. Okay. That's the lady on the beach. Yes. Picture of her in a bathing suit on the beach. So this was going to be planted on his body. They all wanted to write the love letters back and forth, but they picked a woman named Hester legert, the head secretary of Mi Five. And she wrote even though she was dispensed, she wrote all these heartfelt love letters. The first couple of drafts were really dirty, and they were like, you got to tone the sound a little bit. Is that what you think happens in a relationship? No, not me. The fictitious lady. So everyone's really excited in the office. Chumley is wearing what would eventually be the uniform of Martin every day to give it that worn in look. Awesome. Montague actually ended up having an affair with the secretary who gave him the photo as the fiance. Okay. They had a real life affair as Bill and Pam. Pam is the made up fiance. It got a little weird. That is a little weird. Like, they wrote each other love letters at a real life affair, calling each other Bill and Pam. So there was some strange role playing going on. I'm sure he was married at the time. His family had been shipped to America, so he was not doing the right thing there. He was a louse in that department. Well, you know, also, Raul Dahl, the guy who wrote James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and Chocolate Factory, he was a spy for the British. He was in the British military, and his whole job was to basically bed the wives of American officials here in Washington. Really? Yeah. Did he do so? Yeah, he made his way through Washington society. Wow. Apparently with great zeal. All right, so they're cooking up this backstory. They get other great things for the wallet letter, like theater ticket stubs and an overdraft letter from his bank, and just these things that make it seem, like, super realistic. Right. And what else? I think they gave him a St. Christopher medal. Maybe they wanted to strongly imply that he was Roman Catholic, and that'll come up. That will become very important in a minute, right? Yes, very much so. They've got this backstory, and apparently they were working feverishly on this stuff, having the weirdo affair, wearing the uniform, all that stuff, before they'd even gotten final approval. Just because they didn't want to stop work and then have to pick it up feverishly. They wanted us to keep going. So they finally got final approval from admiral Godfrey to carry out this thing for real. And when they got final approval, they said, okay, we need a body. Yeah. And they figured, no problem. They were looking at first they needed somebody who had relatives that didn't care what happened to the body after death and could keep their mouth shut. They needed a body that was of military age sure. Didn't have any signs of visible trauma or run over by a bus or outside of scurvy. Sure. And that preferably. They would have died of pneumonia. And the reason that they wanted him to die of pneumonia is because they were going to make it look like this guy had been in a plane crash. But it survived the plane crash, but it drowned at sea. Right. If he had pneumonia, then his fluids would be filled with lungs. So that when the Spanish conducted an autopsy, fluid. So that when the Spanish conducted their autopsy, they'd be like, this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. I've never seen fluid filled with lungs, but that's how much fluid there is. The problem is they didn't get their hands on a guy with pneumonia, and they didn't even know exactly where to get a person at first. It wasn't until they turned the guy who ran the mortgage at St. Pancras hospital, which is the worst hospital name of all time, they turned him and got him to assist them that they finally got their hands on a body. Yeah. His name was sir Bentley purchase, which is a great name, great British name. And he was a coroner of the largest mortuary at Saint Pancrest. Terrible. And he had, apparently, a wicked sense of humor. It was pretty complicated to give directions to his office, so when he gave Monty the directions, he said, or you could just get run over by a bus. Nice man. The British during war time, where they're having a blast. Their sense of humor was wonderful. So they got Bentley purchased, and he said, I've got a dude. His name is Glendor Michael. Yeah. That is not how that spelled either. No, it is G-L-Y-N-D-W-R super Welsh. Yeah, he was a Welshman. Born in the son of a coal miner. His father killed himself by stabbing himself in the throat. I hadn't read that. Can you imagine a word, old man? And it didn't say, like, slit your throat. It said he stabbed himself in the throat. Right. Which is weird and sad. So his dad died when he was a teenager, mother died when he was 30, alcoholic, had a rough go because of the depression and basically killed himself by ingesting rat poison. So that is not necessarily resolved, whether it was suicide. Yeah. So the Bentley purchase wrote down that he killed himself. Yeah. It was ruled a suicide. Okay. But the way that he ate the rat poison, it was on a crust of bread, so he was hungry. They wondered he may have been so destitute that he ate a crust of bread that he found in an abandoned warehouse and it was smeared with rat poison, and that's what he died of. Wow. But they found him in this cold January 9 in this abandoned warehouse in London, and he had just eaten some rat poison, but he survived for two more days. And so Bentley purchased got his hands on him and said, I think I found your guy, dudes. Yeah. And they did. There were some issues, one of which is they needed a photo of the guy for an ID. He didn't have any photos. And every time they took a picture of the dead guy's face, they were like, he looks like a dead guy. Yeah. Really scoured. You can see your fingers holding his eyes up. So they scoured London looking for a lookalike and eventually found a guy at a fellow intelligence officer who looked just like him. Awesome. So they use his face awesome. For the idea. It's all coming together. Yes, it is. I'm sure they were like, wow, Providence is really smiling on this. Yeah. And if you're feeling bad for Glendor, just hang tight. Yes. I still think you can feel bad for Glendor. Well, sure. Talk about a rough life, man. Yeah. Jeez. Do you remember that one Saturday Night Live where Robert Duvall was, like, super special guest? He wasn't even hosting or mentioned. No. He just showed up on this game show called Who's More Grizzled? No way. And he talks about, like, it was him and Garth Brooks. How did I miss that? And he talks about how one cold winter, his wife died and he had to keep her out in the barn until the ground thawed so we can bury her out back. What? Yeah. It was just weird like that. It wasn't even really funny. It was more just like, wow, that really is hard. But the whole game show was who's more grizzled. And he won, of course, because it's Robert Duvall. Yeah. He's more grizzled than Garth Brooks or Chris. Yeah. Even poor garth. Not poor Garth Brooks. What are you talking about? I'm talking about the Chris Gaines thing. He chose to do it. He's a wealthy man. Yeah, I don't feel too bad for him. I think that was evidence that he was surrounded by yes men at the time. Yeah, maybe. That was a weird thing, though. Yeah. He faked a soul patch that wasn't even real. No, I mean, even if it was real, it was part of his character. Yeah, sure. I thought you meant it was sharpie, maybe. Okay. The hair was definitely colored with sharpie. All right, so where are we here? We've got a body. We finally got the photograph of them. Yeah. That's amazing. I didn't know that part. Yeah, and there's another thing. We found this awesome. A military analysis of it. Yeah, that was kind of cool. Somebody wrote a military analysis of this. I don't remember who. So I can't give them a shout out, but we'll put it on our podcast page. But they point out that one of the reasons this was so successful this operation, was one, these guys at Xx Committee just had free run to break the law, bend morality, do all sorts of stuff. They just were able to go do their thing. But the other thing was that they really kept this lid on this stuff, and it was all disseminated on a need to know basis. So when they had this guy, they got Glenda, kept him on ice for three months. As they finished his backstory, they're running up against, like, go time. And then I think in February or March, april, maybe, I'm not sure of the date. Do you know that what happened when they finally carried out Operation Mincemeat? Let's just say spring, because I know that they kept them on ice for a few months. Yeah. So they're up to the point where the decomp is about to give away that this guy didn't just recently die. Yeah. And that was a big fear that the Spanish coroners would be able to tell, too. Okay. Which will come up in a minute. Okay. And they're also getting to the point where they're reaching the end of the amount of time that they need to give the Nazis to absorb this misinformation. Sure. So they finally get the guy's persona in place, they have the body, and now it's time to actually carry out the operation. And like I was saying, they kept a lid on all this, so it was a need to know basis. So they got their hands on a sub commander who could keep his mouth shut, and they gave him a metal cylinder with the corpse of Glenda or Michael. Now, Major William Martin. Yeah. When you say subcommander, you mean submarine. Yes. Not a commander below? Regular commander. Yeah. That's submarine commander. Yes. They gave him the cylinder and they said, we're going to tell you what's in here. Do not tell anybody else. So apparently the people staffing the sub that this was some sort of weather buoy. Yeah, it was marked optical Instruments. But you're right, he was the only one on board, supposedly, that knew there was a body inside. Yes. And they put a life jacket on him, stuffed him in the cylinder, put them on the sub, and took him over to Spain on a submarine. Well, let's back up for 1 second because we forgot to cover the main letter in the briefcase. Really important. This was the all of Operation Mincemeat. It did not hinge on theater ticket stubs or bank overdraft letters. That's merely pocket letter. It hinged on a letter hinting strongly that the invasion was going to come up through Greece, Sardinia. Right. And that was the other thing, too. It wasn't like official document, invasion is going to come through Greece. Yes. It was a letter from one general or admiral to another high ranking guy, I think General Nigh. They composed a bunch of different letters themselves. And finally they said, why don't you write it in your own words, in your own language, in your own handwriting, everything. So it really was written by this high ranking US. Military official or British military official who wrote this fake letter. And he made a joke about Sardines, a terrible joke, which was the little hint that was just clever enough to work. Right. And so in it, it basically says, we're going to strike through Greece. That's where the invasion of Europe is going to be. But we're also going to tell everybody that Sicily is the cover. Right, right. And this was a stroke of genius. Oh, yeah. Because in this false letter, not only does it show that they're coming through Greece, which they weren't, but it says that Sicily is the cover, which would make the Nazis think that if anyone ever did actually leak the real invasion plan of Sicily, the Nazis would think that was misinformation. Dude, it was so ingenious. That's crazy ingenious. And I think about here now, Chuck, we get to the point where we should talk about the Enigma machine and the role it played, right? Yeah. Well, basically, we all know that the Enigma machine was the code breaking machine invented in the UK. To decipher well, the Enigma machine wrote the code, I think. Oh, it wrote the code, yeah. And they deciphered code that they got. They deciphered it at Bletchley Park. But I think the Enigma machine was the actual code writing the encrypting machine. Okay. I could be wrong, but okay, well, so we definitely need to do a podcast on that because we're mixed up already to get it straight. But at any rate, the long and short of it is in Beckley Park. Was it Beckley Park? I always say Bletchley. Was there an Ellen there? I draw the whole ugly word out. They basically had it was like reading the Nazi's email, essentially, on. A daily basis, on an hourly basis. Hourly basis. They knew exactly what was going on, so they would know if they were buying this whole thing as it happened in real time. But even before that, they were able to craft this misinformation based on the Nazi's assumptions. So everybody wants to hear that their assumptions, that their beliefs are correct. People are more apt to buy that things that confirm their suspicions of their beliefs already. Right. Yeah. Hitler was worried about Sicily. He was. So he already thought that Greece is going to be where we invaded. Yeah. And then secondly, we knew that he had heard rumors that Mussolini was going to be toppled soon, so he was reticent to commit troops to Italy. Right. So this revelation that came in the form of this letter, this false letter, completely supported everything that Hitler and the Third Reich believed as far as the European invasion was going to go. And we were able to do that thanks to the smarties at Bletchley Park. Right? Yeah. And this letter, too. Here's another little tidbit. They put a single eyelash in the fold of the letter so they would know when they eventually got this letter back. If there was no eyelash, they would know that the Nazis had in fact opened it because the idea was they would open it, reseal it, and act like we never saw it. Right. But there wasn't that eyelash. Then they'd know. Nice. So rudimentary. But it worked. Oh, yeah. Should we take another break? Let's take a break. Okay, so, Chuck, we are at sea aboard a submarine. That's right. Chile down here and dark. It is. And you're not supposed to be smoking cigars. No, you're not. Despite Gene Hackman doing it in Crimson Tides. Yeah. What a bad idea. So we're off the coast of Spain. We're off the coast of whoever. Not an easy word to say, but it's important. Spain. And again. This is where Nazi agent Adolf klaus yeah. They kind of want to float the body right up to this guy's backyard, basically. So they did. He was released from this canister. I read somewhere else that the canister itself was fired on with submachine guns on a sub. So you could just call them machine guns there, and it was sunk and the body drifted off towards I thought they just dumped the body. Yeah. I'm not sure because I found a book on Google Books. It was like from 2007, and it was a history book. Got you. And it made it sound like the people working on the sub all knew what was going on. But that's in stark contrast to everything else we've seen. Yeah. So they may or may not have sunk the weather buoy, who knows? But either way, Major Martin was released into the current. That took him right to whoever, and he went. I think he was found by a fisherman that same day. Yeah. And at this point, the Brits started sending telegrams about a very important missing person. Frantic. Yeah. Like they wanted this to get intercepted, obviously. And that worked as well. This is all really going exactly as they'd planned. So they sent the British Council in Spain, in Huevula or in Spain to Huevila and said, this is really important. You need to get your hands on the briefcase, find out what happened to this guy and get your hands on his briefcase. Yeah. And Klaus was going briefcase. Right. His monocle popped out and the British Council in Spain didn't even know what was going on. Yeah. They thought they saw everything from the same aspect of reality that the Nazis, they need to know basis. Exactly. So the British Council are trying to get this briefcase kind of frantically, and the Spaniards were like, you know what? We are just going to keep this on lockdown for now as we investigate the whole thing. But we got it covered. Remember, we're neutral, so your briefcase is safe. And the British Consulate said well, okay, one thing. This is very important. This guy was Roman Catholic. You can check out the metal in his pocket, so please don't dissect him. It's against Roman Catholic beliefs and traditions to dissect their autopsy body. I hadn't heard before, but apparently in the 40s that was the case. Spain was way down with that super Roman Catholic. And they said, oh, yes, of course we won't do that. So apparently that's how they got around the fact that Glendor hadn't died of pneumonia. Yeah. And the other way they got around it was they had a plant in the office who talked to the coroners and was like, guys, it's hot and this body is going to start riding real soon, so how thorough do you really want to make this? And they said, you're right. Let's go have some wine. Some what do they call it over there? Wine? No. What's the fruity? Sangria. Yeah. Let's go have some sangria and knock off early. And that's exactly what happened, thanks to the plan. Great. So this is going on. There was a small wrinkle at this point. The briefcase went to Madrid. Spain wasn't going to hand it over to anyone, but the Brits were trying to get it in the hands of the Nazis, and they're actually having trouble getting it into the hands of the Nazis until a guy named Carlo Culintal. He was Hitler's most trusted guy in Spain. He got wind of it and kind of took over for Klaus, was like, I'm going to get this briefcase. And he did. Nine days later, after the body washed ashore, the letter ended up in the hands of the German. The German worked his way up the chain. Yeah. To Hitler himself. Yeah. I went to Gerbils first, and Gerbils, even in his diary, they found later, had suspicions about it. Oh, yeah. Because he was a corkscrew. Thinker and he was like, wait a minute, this is pretty convenient. Yeah, this is really fishy here. But apparently he never said anything to Hitler. He got distracted. He wrote about it in his diary, but the documentary said his thinking was, well, if Hitler believes it, then that's good enough for me. That seems like a bad idea. Yeah. And homeboy Carlo Culinthal there was always a lot of speculation on why he just ran with it and didn't ask more questions, because that was his job. And it turns out his grandmother was Jewish, and he was very paranoid about this being found out. So he thought, this is it. I've come upon the greatest find of the war, and it's all mine. No one will ask any questions about me after this. Wow, that worked out really well. Yeah, very convenient. And thanks to the Enigma machine, they knew, the Brits knew pretty quickly that this was working. And I guess Montague and Chumley sent Admiral Godfrey a transmission that said operation Mincemeat swallowed rod, line and sinker. Yeah. Apparently you're not supposed to elderly anymore, by the way. We got an email. I knew that. Or seniors. You're supposed to call them older adults. Seniors. I didn't know that that was a thing. Yeah, older adults. So they're interviewing these older adults, these British ladies that are in their eighty s now, and they were just all so still excited. They said, when they because with the Enigma machine, they were basically reading their emails and they were like they knew they were buying it. They're buying it. And everyone was just like flipped when that came through the office. It was just like party time, basically. So the operation mentioned me really worked really well. So much so that apparently Hitler moved a panzer division, which totals about 90,000 troops from Sicily to Greece, and all the artillery and armaments and everything, not just soldiers. So long, Sicily. We're going to Greece. And then up came the allies through Sicily. 160,000 allied troops stormed Sicily and only 7000 lives were lost. Which is still a lot of people who died. But apparently, as far as military historians are concerned, and I think the military at the time, that was a way fewer lives lost than they expected had Hitler not swallowed Operation Mince. Me yeah, they expected 10,000 casualties in the first three days and 300 boats sunk in the first two days, and it ended up being 1400 in that first week. Soldiers and about a dozen ships in that first week. So that's not bad. Yes. And not only that, but it had another effect. Big one. The Soviets. Yeah. So this is not something that they teach in American history classes in US high schools that much. No. The operation Husky, it was that penetration of Europe's underbelly, right? Yes. And suddenly Hitler said, I'm about to storm Russia, but I really need these troops down here in Europe because I got big problems. Yeah. And that allowed, basically, Russia to topple the Nazi regime and Mussolini get toppled by the Brits. Yeah. It completely changed the face of the war. Yeah. This one idea cooked up by me and Fleming in part, isn't that crazy? It's pretty awesome. You got other stuff. There's a book called Operation Mincemeat by a guy named Brett McIntyre all right. That came out in 2010. That's a very good, well cited book that we inadvertently cited here or there. And then there's The Man Who Never Was, which was written by you and Montague, which is not just about Operation Mincemeat, but also about basically how to carry out deception plans. All right. Remember earlier when I said, don't feel too bad for Glendor Michael? Even you said, well, the dude died, possibly a suicide, because he was penniless and going nowhere about that. But 50 years after he was buried in, the British government added they basically buried him with military honors. The Spanish did. Yeah. He's buried in Spain. Yeah. But the British came from the Brits, I think, to do so. His head stone came from the Brits, but the Spanish buried him with, like, the 21 gun salute and everything. Yes. As Glendor Michael served as Major William Martin r. M. Royal Marine. Pretty cool. Yeah. So this alcoholic drifter who never served in the military never served in the military, buried with full military honors. Yes. And completely changed the face of the war, thanks to being a body that fit the bill. And if you like ghoulish photos, there's a very famous photo of him being propped up in his life jacket in uniform as they were basically loading them into the cylinder that you can see by searching, I'm sure. Major Charles Martin. That's right. No, William Martin. William Martin. Something like that. I still want to know what was going on with that weird role playing there with the dude. That's odd. Bill and Pam. Yeah, because they interviewed the lady, and she was just like, oh, it was all very exciting. That's a great British lady accent. Older person. Yeah. Older adult or no. If you want to know more about Operation Mincemeat, just type that word into your favorite search engine. Or go check out the stuff you missed in history class episode. I said Stuff you missed in history class. It's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this bread crust. We had that discussion about the crust. This is from dad. Dear Chuck and Josh, your discussion of the in slice of bread and the body language episode brought ridiculous grin to my face as I walked around my neighborhood. Don't worry, though. My neighbors have thought me to be eccentric for years now. Look at that guy. He's smiling. What a weirdo. He must be a pinko. When our daughters were still tiny, my wife and I realized we were doomed to 18 years of eating bread crust pieces ourselves. If we didn't figure something out. And quickly, our solution. We started calling those pieces the Lucky piece. And boy, did we rook our innocent, trusting toddlers. Turns out your supposition is correct, Chuck. At least for children under eleven years old. Even if they're honor students as mine, where they will fight you for the right to eat that savory, oh so desirable piece of luck. Nice idea, younger adults. Rock on, guys. And please keep my goofy grins coming. That is from Ted. C-O-I-N-E with a little coine. Is that a sentagoo? No. I don't know. I didn't take French. Legume. What do you call that? A legume accent? Legume. Yeah. So, thanks, Ted. I'll just call you coin. Yeah, thanks, Ted. Looks like coin. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Ted contacted us on Twitter. He wanted to send us this email. So there you go, Ted. Wow. If you want to get in touch with us, you can try all the ways, like Ted did. You can contact us on Twitter at s yskpodcast. You can send us an email to stuff podcast@householdworks.com. You can join us on Facebook.com. Stuffyshoodnow. And you can hang out at our luxurious home on the web. Stuffyshoodnow.com stuffysheano is a production of iHeartRadio Radio. For more podcasts, my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows."
1fc50597-292a-4b37-b744-ae7d01204dd8	“Postmodernism:”	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/postmodernism	See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.	Tue, 26 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2022, tm_mon=4, tm_mday=26, tm_hour=9, tm_min=0, tm_sec=0, tm_wday=1, tm_yday=116, tm_isdst=0)	54792849	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"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 Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should should know. Postmodernism edition. I'm strapping on my ice skates. I know, Chuck. I was thinking about it. This may very well be the most difficult topic we've ever tackled. Is this hard for you, too? Oh, yeah. It's hard for everybody. It's hard for everyone. Oh, good. Yeah. No, it's very difficult. It's really hard to define. It's really easy to mischaracterize things as postmodern and lump stuff in, even though it is technically that. And worst of all, it's really easy for people to be snobby to other people about what is or isn't postmodernism. So it's going to be rough. I think that's why I'm a little not nervous, because he really cares. Right. It's just a podcast, but just unnerved because philosophical movements, art movements that have fuzzy boundaries, it's tough for me. It always has been. I deal a little bit more in the concrete. Yeah. So it's going to be interesting, especially when you look at some more I don't know about cynical, but just sort of straightforward definitions of what is postmodern art. And most people will say, like, well, it's art that happened between 1955 and 1970 and right now wrong. Well, it's not wrong. It's an era like that's where it gets slippery. Right. Because art is defined by errors. And even though people did things in the different eras, that thematically and stylistically apply more to other eras, would you call The Godfather a postmodern film? No, but it was made in the postmodern film era. Precisely. So the differentiation here, then, is that it begins the differentiation here is the postmodernism that we're talking about is not just art. It's not just film, it's not just architecture. It's not even just philosophy. We're talking about an entire worldview that all of us collectively share. Most of us, I should say, I think the west, you could say, if you want to call it that, shares this culture, postmodernist culture, post World War II generally. Yeah. Some people put it at the 70s. Some people put it at the 60s. Other people even go as late as basically 19 70, 19 80. But it's not just an art movement. It's not just a type of film. It's not just a type of literature. It's a way of looking at the world that in turn shapes how we create or exist or live in or deal with the world, and we do it together. It's culture. But the reason it's so fuzzy, Chuck, compared to other things, is because it may still be going on right now. And if it isn't still going on right now, it ended so recently that we're still so wrapped up in the turbulent effects of it that it's hard to see which way up, down, sideways. So it's really difficult to nail down, but it's really fun to try, I've found. And it's the kind of thing where they probably won't put a year marker until 30 years from now on what postmodernism is, which we'll get to totally. And even then, it's not a cut and dried thing because of change like this happens over the course of a decade or two. Yeah, or more even, for sure. I would posit that we're in those decades of change right now. We're in a transition period between postmodernism and what's next. And I think that's one reason why everything is just so uncomfortable right now, in addition to a pandemic being dropped on top of us at a really uncomfortable time. And I would also say, after reading a lot about this stuff, I think art, visual art, like, let's just say painting. I know there's a lot more to it than that, but as opposed to literature and film, I think the boundaries there are a little more rigid than in other things like literature and film, where they draw demarcation lines between premodern modern and postmodern eras. A little more succinctly. Technically, anything made these days would be considered postmodern art just by the virtue of the fact that it's now, whereas you would not say a film is necessarily right. I quit. No, you did great. We're doing great. Just hang in there, man. Just double up the strength of your fingernails and claw in further. Okay. I just feel the emails being typed. It's fine. You know what? We could go super postmodern and just totally ignore them like they don't exist. Because what is really an email, you know what I mean? Yeah. Or we could a really post modern email reply would be, I read your email and here's what I think and just stop at T-H-I-N. Yeah, that's pretty great. That would be great. So this is going to be fun. We're talking about post modernism, and this is one of those things where we have to define it from the outset, which is the problem with postmodernism, is figuring out how to define it. And before we go any further, every hat I own right now, I'm taking off for Dave Rus, who helped us put this together. He did a great job. He did a wonderful job. It was not fair to throw this at. No, I was really interested to see what he would do, and he really rose to the occasion. Like, he did a great job. He kind of started with this anecdote about a student of an art professor who asked his class, like, what is postmodernism? How do you define it? And the student said, basically something that the professor later ripped off. Which is where you put quotations around everything. Yeah. It almost feels cynical in a way. Yes, 100%, doesn't it? A million percent. Like the age of cynicism. Remember the sarcasm of the 90s, right? Yeah, exactly. You just did it. So all of that is 100% the fabric, the cultural fabric of postmodernism as we'll see a tearing down not just institutions and authorities and all that stuff, but other people just doing it as like just the most casual thing in the world, just tearing down. That is the cultural basis of postmodernism. Yeah, like if someone were to talk about Andy Warhol soup cans, they can say, well, that's his truth in reality. But you would put that in quotes, right? With your hands at a party, you put truth in quotes. You put reality in quotes. And that's what that student was saying. You put everything in quotes. Because the philosophical basis of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as universal truth. There's no such thing as reality like your reality cans and quotes. If you wanted to be a total jerk, you could do soup in quotes and cans and quotes and Andy Warhol in quotes, right? And Andy Warhol would love it. He would roll over in his grave, but it'd be like a dance move more than something out of agony. That's kind of what the student was saying. You put everything in close because nothing is there is no universal truth. And that is where postmodernism broke from its immediate predecessor, which is modernism, which said, no, there's all sorts of universal truths. And that carried on an even longer tradition of the idea that there's universal truths and we can try to find these through different ways. Right? And with modernism, it was like, let's not use religion, let's use reason. And it's like a post Enlightenment sort of frame of mind where we can figure out these universal truths and we can apply them to our artworks, whether it's literature or any kind of visual art. Right? So with modern art. As weird as it can seem. As abstract as it can seem. What they were doing really ultimately at base followed in the tradition of. Like the Romanticists before them. Of the Renaissance painters before them. They were all trying to move towards what's called sublime sensibility. Which is this idea that there is a universal truth. There is universal beauty. There is universal like happiness. Nature is a universal. It's shared in common to all people. It exists in and of itself. And they just kind of chose a different way of going after that. Rather than painting like Cherubs and the most amazing clouds you can possibly come up with behind the Crucifixion of Christ or something, they tried to evoke it through those shapes and colors and abstract paintings, but they were still at base after the same thing, which was uncovering that universal truth of beauty. Right? And then we talked about it before I took a philosophy class in college that both blew my mind and I just didn't even understand. But I tried. I think I actually made an A in it because I tried really hard in that class. No, kids. I tried hard in every class, but especially hard in philosophy. But I remember studying Nietzsche and some of it hitting home a little bit in that even though Nietzsche was for sure like Pre postmodernism as far as an era is defined, but had these thoughts of postmodernism in that Nietzsche came along and said, you know what? There are perspectives. There is not a universal truth because we are all individuals and we all have our own unique perspective on what beauty might be or what truth might be or reality might be. So I remember that speaking to me some more than, I guess, the modernist thought. Yeah, because it makes sense, that whole kind of thing. Like what is the color green to you? It's not the same to me. Or if you look at an apple on a table and then you move around the table, the apple changes shape. So depending literally on your perspective, you see things differently. And so what Nietzsche was saying is that if you take that and multiply it by however many billion people are on the planet, how can there possibly be such a thing as a shared reality? How can there possibly be such a thing as a universal truth? There can't. It's just not possible. Because not only do people see things differently, they have different experiences in their lives that alter perception even more minutely. It's just too complex. Humans and then collectively, humanity is too complex to have universal truth. And so that was kind of the basis of his perspectivism that you were talking about. And then in turn, by proxy, he said, well, then that means that all of these meta narratives, the stories that we tell ourselves, they're meaningless. They can't be true either. Yeah. So what Postmodernism would end up becoming is a rejection of modernism. And that would play out across all kinds of different kinds of art forms that we're going to talk about in a little bit, but philosophically as well, because if science and reason bring us world war and nuclear bombs, then there's going to be, I think, a tendency to reject that. Yeah, I think we talked about it before. I don't remember in what episode, but that World War One was like. It revealed the full horror of just putting all of your faith in science and reason, that it would lead to technology that led to destruction. And then that was followed up by World War II and the Holocaust. It was followed up by things like lobotomies and phrenology and just mass destruction, the nuclear bomb. All this stuff came from the application of science and reason faithfully, unerringly. And so Postmodernism said, we need to get rid of this completely and totally. We need to tear it all down and start over. So the whole movement started out as a response, a reactionary response to the horrors of a different movement. And I think anytime you have a movement that's born out of repellent response to something, it's going to be reckless. And I think in that sense, postmodernism isn't always has been reckless, because, again, it's all about tearing down, and it started with tearing down all of the pillars and the golden calves of modernism. Well, reckless or free? Both. It's definitely both. All right. I think it's very much both, because I think, as we'll see later on, postmodernism ultimately led to its own horrors that we're living with today. And it was out of recklessness, I think. Okay. The digital age. That's part of it, for sure. Should we take a break? I think your dog says so. Did you hear that it is national pet day? 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, we're back. My dog barked again to signal us, and I guess we should just go ahead and say that the term itself, postmodernism, was coined by a French philosopher named Jean Francois. How would you pronounce that? Is it leotard? Leotard or leotard? Okay. And this was in 1979, so people put the postmodern era again, they're fuzzy numbers, but I've generally mostly seen sort of mid 1950s to early 1970s is kind of the beginning. Right. And so this was a 1979 when it was actually defined by Jean Francois, who said, I defined postmodern as incredulity toward meta narratives, which you already talked about, the sort of stories that we tell ourselves that sort of give structure to all of our existence. Yeah, it's like I saw it explained as meta narrative is the blueprint that we carry out our actions and our lives in. So that without a blueprint, a plumber just laying pipe. It's just randomly laying pipe. There's no point or reason to what they're doing. But if they're following a blueprint, it gives their work meaning, guidance. There's a purpose to it. And so meta narratives can take all sorts of different forms from the free market is going to deliver us all to this prosperous, happy, progressive future, to religion. Explains why we're here. Basically any grand story that's like the big picture, that's a meta narrative and we've got a lot of them. And Postmodernism said not a single one of those is legitimate. Well, I don't know about legitimate, but not a single one of those should be looked at as the truth. Okay. I think they can be considered. But the problem, I think with modernism, or at least as far as the Postmodernist goes, is that they laid claim that these are the universal truths. Okay, I think that was a very important nuance point that you're right. All right, I retracted my original statement. Okay. We need a ding chuck at one point. That'll be my only ding. I don't know, man, you've been dinging it up already. I just haven't used the sound effect. Okay, but we talked about cynicism. It's also about skepticism, right? Yeah. So I think that's part of the sarcasm and the irony. When you are sarcastic towards somebody, when you're ironic about when you speak ironically about something, you're expressing skepticism that what that is is true or cool or real or anything, whatever it is you're saying, as long as it's sarcastic or ironic, it's a form of skepticism. And that is kind of like the hallmark cultural move. Hallmark is good. Okay. That's the cultural hallmark of Postmodernism, I think. Irony and skepticism and sarcasm. Okay, I agree with all that. We need Chris hardwick on here just to say points. Oh, that's a good one. What's he doing these days? He could probably do that. I think he's still doing the talking dead. No, I'm sure he does plenty. Yeah, he's a Brandon to himself. Yeah, he's like the Ryan Seacrest of podcasting. Sure. He probably podcasts too, though. Probably. But I think Chris Harbor is still the Ryan Seacrest of podcasting. Should we talk about art? Like painting and stuff? Yeah, because I think we laid the groundwork here. But let's just go over this real quick one more time. Postmodernism is a recoil repellent response to modernism, which produced all sorts of world wars in the nuclear bomb and was based on authority figures and rigidity and universal truths. And you have to follow this and you have to look at this this way. And if you paint a different way outside of that, it's not really art. And the art world was one of the very first outside of philosophy to kind of rebel against that. The idea that there's anybody who could say that's art, that's not art. And one of the first people to really do that was the dada is Marcel Duchamp. Yeah. So here's the thing with talking about eras of art. If you look at some of Duchant's work in particular, we should just go ahead and reference probably one of the most famous, which was what he called a ready made, which was to take, in this case, a urinal. Not build a urinal, but take a mass produced urinal, signed a name on it. A pinname, in this case was R mut Mutt and called it Fountain In. And this was a piece of art. And if you look at this piece of art, it is decidedly postmodern. But it was made, what, five to six decades before anyone would define art as postmodern art. And it lives, like, squarely in the middle. I don't know about the middle, but it lives squarely in the modern art movement. Like the difference between and I read a lot about this between modern art and postmodern art is philosophical. It's also, like, cultural. And it was mainly men who were making the art. Postmodern art really brought along different cultural perspectives and female perspectives. It was also, I read, very goal oriented, whereas postmodern art cared more about process. Apparently, modern art was very much still goal oriented even though they saw it as a rejection of the still life of the bowl of fruit on the table before them. A lot of the work still sort of echoed that kind of thing. Then you have Du shot coming along. But this toilet, which is completely postmodern but lives in a modern era, right? Like you were saying, he came decades before the postmodern era in exactly the same way that Nietzsche was laying the foundation for postmodern era philosophy and culture. Decades before the postmodern era, too. Even further back than that. But there's just no way of looking at Duchamp's work any other way than this is a postmodern artwork. And not just that one. The fountain that was his bread and butter was using these readymades. And that was a huge foundation of the actual postmodern art movement that came later. Which was, first of all, tearing down the distinction between high art and low art because Duchamp was a serious artist exhibiting in serious galleries and museums and things like that. But he was also buying urinals, signing them and calling it art. So in one way, that makes it way more accessible to you and me. It makes it less scary. Like, art is less scary. You don't have to be an expert to come into the art world now and appreciate art or laugh at art or let the art stop taking life quite so seriously. But at the same time. The fact that he went and bought something he paid for something from a plumbing supply company that was mass produced also laid the foundation for guys later like Andy Warhol. Who melded consumerism into art to create pop culture. Which opened the door for commoditization of art. Which then opened the door for what we live in today. Which is. Like art is advertising. Basically. There's almost no distinction whatsoever. It's everywhere. And it's hijacked to sell things as much as it is to actually make art. Or make something beautiful or good or thoughtprovoking. Yeah. And I don't know, I think that the transition to post modern art is really interesting because it opened it to different classes. Modern art was almost exclusively based in Europe and Russia, I guess. Whereas post modern art after World War II, you could say all of the west basically was taking part, but just sort of outsider art and conceptual art and to things to where we have today, where someone will put a pile of sunflower seeds in the middle of the floor and call it art. That is the postmodern sort of rejection of what was already, I think, a pretty radical departure as far as the art world is concerned with modern art. Because when you have people like Jackson Pollock or Picasso or the Cuba stuff, there was already, I think, a lot of that stuff was a little bit slower to accept from sort of the traditional pre modern art critics. Right, so Postmodern just blew past it. It definitely did. And then so Warhol comes along and creates pop art, and everybody starts definitely riffing on that vibe. But one of the other hallmarks of postmodern art is borrowing and remixing, mashing up other styles, other types of art from different areas, different media, and just kind of mixing it together in a brand new way. That's one of the hallmarks of postmodern art as well. Yeah, I love that David Byrne quote you sent, because he's sort of the quintessential postmodern musician and he said he was all about the mashing up and the mixing up of things, and it was just sort of a really free and creative time. So he was all about it, right? Yeah, for sure. And I mean, especially now, today, the world we live in, postmodernism has a really bad name almost across the board to everybody, but there was definitely a time where it was, like, glorious and beautiful and fun, and David Byrne was definitely there for that. Heyday, for sure. Can we talk about a couple of these other famous Postmodern works? Yeah, the Treachery of Images is another one. And again, I think this was in the modern era, technically, but it was one of the first seeds of what was to come. This was from Renee Marguerite, and it is the very famous picture of a pipe, a smoking pipe with a caption in French. It says, this is not a pipe. But what would that be in French? My French speaking friend? cinepa and Peep, he sounded literally like the Google person or the YouTube translator. Josh says, I did not know you had that as a moonlighting job. I do, and I'm making almost no money off of it, but it's a labor of love. But this is a great example of what was to come with Postmodernism, which is, here is a picture of a pipe. It's clearly a pipe, but it says, this is not a pipe. Because perspective, baby, that's not my reality. There is no objective truth. Yeah, that's another thing that Postmodernism kind of came along and warned everybody about, is us putting all of our faith and just casual trust in the images and words that we've created to create our culture. Right? Yeah. So Marguerite was saying, and this is like quintessential postmodernism, that this is not a pipe. It's a picture of a pipe. You can't trust it, you can't use it. You can't stuff it with tobacco and smoke it. Don't call it a pipe. It's not really a pipe. And that kind of like Postmodern thought where there was no real meaning to pictures, images, words, sounds, aside from what we ascribed to them. It kind of eventually morphed into this weird thing where we got really comfortable with that David Burn idea of remixing everything, of using these different things and these different codes to create new meanings. But at the same time, we were stimulating reality in different ways. And so eventually we started to lose the ability to distinguish between reality, anything approaching what we would call like, real reality and simulated reality, which was all the words and images and pictures that we just kind of take for granted are real, but actually aren't. They're all just symbols that we've stopped seeing as symbols. And so what Postmodernism was warning about, what McGregor was warning or kind of reminding us of, ended up subverting itself and creating an inability in us here, living today to distinguish between simulated reality and real reality. Because you're a terrible example of this, but the average person out there. When's the last time you actually went out in the woods? Sure, it's probably been a really long time. When is the last time you saw a video or an image of the woods into your brain? You're like, oh, yeah, I've probably been in the woods pretty recently. No, you haven't. You haven't been in the woods in a year. You saw it on TV last week. That's the most recent brush with the woods that you've had. That's what has been the result of Postmodernism. And it's interesting that they were originally warning about it and then came to kind of throw the shackle on all of us. Yeah, I like this other example because I think when people of the time might have seen Mcgreet, this is not a pipe. I'm sure, like, your average person might just say, what are you even talking about with this? Or somebody might see that today and say that. But in the 60s, Dave found this other great example that very much evokes that this is not a pipe. Work from Joseph Kosoth. One in three chairs. And I think this one is more likely to get through to someone who doesn't may not typically understand this kind of philosophy, which is a real folding chair, and then it's flanked by a black and white photograph of that same exact folding chair and then a placard with a dictionary definition of chair. And I think this is a little more accessible for your average Joe to maybe come up and say, oh, I get what they're doing here. I might not fully understand it, but I see what they mean. This is a chair and this is a chair and this is a chair. Plus it's not in French. Yeah, exactly. It automatically makes it more accessible than the average chair. Yeah. How would you say that in French? Do you even know one in three chairs? Tray chairs? Is it chairs? I haven't gotten to that on my YouTube channel yet, so now I can't remember which chair is. But I'll bet some people are going to write in and tell us. Yeah. But you know what all of this did was. Speaking in terms of this kind of visual art is it opened the doors not only for different cultures and different people in different classes and races and men and women all across the gender spectrum to open up their minds and create. But a lot of times it was shocking. And it allowed them to really push the boundaries of what art could even be. Which was a new thing I was reading up. Do you remember the huge controversy in the late 80s? It turned out to be I didn't remember that. But with that image, piss Christ, I don't remember that. It was an enormous thing. The National Endowment of the Arts got its funding slashed as a result because it turned out so this artist I can't remember his name, but he did a photo series of crucifix and different body fluids like his own blood, and this one was submerged in his own urine. And it's actually pretty until you realize what you're looking at. And it set a lot of Christians, including Jesse Helms, off, and they went crazy on the National Endowment of the Arts. The artist lost a bunch of funding. Yeah, it was a big deal. And it brought to the Ford this kind of culture clash of no one, especially not Jesse Holmes, can say what's art and what's not art. This artist has created something and he says, this is art. It's art. And that in and of itself is a very postmodern way of looking at things. And also, it turned out the artist himself is like a devout Catholic. He didn't mean it blasphemously at all. Not at all. I'm sure it was I can't remember exactly what his purpose of it was, but I don't think he meant anything to happen like it happened. Right, but even that, that's just besides the point. The point was there was a fight over what's art, and a lot of the arch conservatives won that fight by slashing the National Endowment of the Arts and giving it a bad name because it's a federally funded agency. And so taxpayer money was going into it. Taxpayers who. Didn't think that was art at all. Didn't want their money going to it. It was quite a big kerfuffle, but it was super postmodern while it was happening. Right. And they were like, what's wrong with a bowl of fruit on the table? Can we just paint that forever? Exactly. Everyone loves the bowls of fruit. How about some more of those Georgia oakie flowers? I love those for some reason I can't quite put my finger on. Oh, that's funny. Should we take a break, or should we talk about literature then take a break. It's up to your doggy. All right. Nico says, Go forward with literature. Okay, cool. The modernist movement with literature featured people like Joyce and Virginia Wolf. And this is, again, sort of with modern art. Boundaries were being pushed in different directions from sort of the old school of literary styles. All of a sudden, you had stream of consciousness happen, nonlinear narratives happening. This is where free verse poetry was born. But then postmodernist came along and they went, oh, you think that's pushing the boundaries. Let me introduce you to Thomas Pinchon and Joseph Heller and people like this, who really took things to an instagram, to the point where you found that one book that just stopped in the middle of the first chapter over and over. Yeah. There's a book by italo, Calvino, called if on a winter's night, a traveler It's from 1979, quintessential Postmodern novel. And in that it's written in the second person perspective. So he talks about you. So you're the main character. And it starts out by saying you're about to begin reading italo. Calvino's new novel. If on a winter night, a traveler Relax, concentrate, dispel every other thought. So the author is directing you, the reader, to begin the novel that you're reading. So you're immediately the character, like he's writing about you in this page, and then it very quickly careens from what you would consider real. Like, the book runs out on page 32 in the book. The reading still goes on. Yeah, it's just in the book that happens. So now you, the character, have to go to the bookstore and you get another version, and you end up reading ten different beginnings to the same book. But the upside of it is you fall in love with Lud Mila, the bookstore shopkeeper, as well. So it just is completely out of left field. And you could say absurd. And that is quite essentially postmodern, too. James Joyce wasn't doing anything quite like that. No, not at all. And this is where I have an appreciation for it, I think. Very clever. I see what you're doing there. But I would rather read a good novel from beginning to end with a great story. So that is a real criticism of postmodernism, because everything's meaning is up for grabs. It's up in the air. There's no universal truth. And if you can put meaning in air quotes as well, that means by proxy that everything is meaningless in a certain way of looking at it. And so, yeah, it's cool. That was an interesting thing and it kind of was clever. But is it as satisfying as it is meaningful as, like you said, a good novel, like an actual novel that follows, like, maybe a little more structured rules? Some people would say no, but a lot of people would say yes. And they would point to the idea that there's this kind of nihilistic bent in postmodernism in every form, whether it's visual art, film, novels that makes it less important in a way. And again, I personally think it's because postmodernism was born as a repellent response to a long standing thing and that immediately was automatically born on shaky, reckless ground. And that how can you create something beautiful if you don't think there is such a thing as beauty? How can you create something meaningful if you don't think there is such a thing as meaning? And if there is no such thing as meaning, then stop writing because you're just doing that for money now, at this point, right. Which I think was the goal oriented movement of modern art, it didn't specifically say, but what else would the goal be rather than to have a showing and sell paintings? Yes. Some of the other sort of elements of postmodern literature, one is paradox and randomness books like Slaughterhouse Five and Catch 22 you started seeing and even though there were nonlinear narratives before, you found stories that were really told out of order at this point. And it even had facts that don't align with one another, where you might say, well, that doesn't even make sense sometimes, according to what I had previously read even earlier in the same book or chapter, sometimes purposefully obfuscating meeting or disorienting the reader. And then this whole idea of intertextuality, which is sort of the mash up that David Byrne was talking about, but in this case, with literature incorporating plot lines and characters from other works or other tropes and literary ideas, kind of bringing them all into one book. Yeah, like a good example of that is not found in literature, but in TV, in the character of John Munch, who's a detective who started out as a detective on the TV show Homicide Life on the street. And then that same character appeared on Long SVU. He was a recurring longtime character on that show. Right. Is it the same actor? Yes, same actor, same character. Is this part of the same elsewhere universe theory? Yes. The Tommy Westfall universe. Yeah. John Munch is like one of the fulcrums of the universe because he's also been on X Files, he's also been on The Wire. He's this character that people love and love to bring into their own show, even though they had nothing to do with Homicide Life on the street. And so that's a really good example of intersexuality. This character keeps popping up in different works, and it's the same character. And in him appearing there, it's saying, this show exists in the same universe as this show. And yes, you can all trace it back to the same elsewhere finale, which I think we talked about in our Nut so fan theories episode. Yeah, tarantino does that a lot, too, with the Vega brothers and was red Apple cigarettes. Yeah. And there was a character in Jackie Brown that was also in I can't think of his name. One of the FBI guys, Michael Keaton, played him out of sight. But I think that was a recurring character without any real sort of it's not like Alfred from Batman appearing in different Batman movies. It's sort of out of context intersectuality, if that makes sense. It makes total sense. And then also, Tarantino is a good example of postmodernism as far as, like, pastiche, which is just such an obnoxious word. But once you look into it, it's basically just borrowing other styles, kind of in the post modern sense, mashing them together. So Tarantino was like crazy about 70s kung fu stuff or 70s gangster flicks, right? And he would use those. He would actually take characters who are based on those other eras and those other styles and put them all into the same movie, into the same universe together. That's pastiche. And that's another very postmodern thing. Wes Anderson is another good example. His unparalleled love of midcentury looks and design, that's a pastiche. Although it turns out he's a PostPost modern director in almost every sense of the word. Yeah, I mean, I think Pulp Fiction is very commonly referred to as sort of one of the hallmarks of postmodern filmmaking in that not only the mashups, but the non linear storytelling, the good guys are bad guys, bad guys are good guys. The sort of rejection of purpose, like what's in the briefcase. And I think that's why I never really cared that much. But I think it's why it drove a lot of people crazy, because his film Goers were so trained to have to know what's in that briefcase because it should have some sort of meaning. And he was kind of turned it on its ear a little bit and then everybody copied for the next decade, Pulp Fiction. There were so many bad sort of bad half ripoffs made. Yeah. I'm not going to say any there's one I could call out, but I'm not going to text it to me or something. I will. But have you seen Severance on Apple TV? Yeah, I'm about halfway through. I love it. It's so good. That's like a good example of that, leaving people wanting more and just absolutely not giving it to them. Sorry. There's no resolution. It's just crazy how strong out you feel after the last episode. Oh, boy. I can't wait. All right, I think we should oh, shoot. We got to take our second break now. Yeah, we definitely do. We'll talk a little bit more about film and sum this all up, maybe. Sure. All right, we'll be right back. 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 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, so Pulp Fiction is routinely singled out as a postmodern film. The one that's considered probably the godfather of all of them is Eight and a Half by Fellini. Federico Fellini. I've never seen it. Have you? Yeah, sure. Godfather not in the movie since right. So we don't confuse everybody. I think he planted that about 40 minutes ago. And half. Yeah, I've seen eight and a half. If you've taken any sort of film appreciation class in college, you're going to see it. It's Felini one of Fellini's masterpieces. The whole movie could be described as a meta fiction because it's a film about making a film. It's really good. It's dreamy and trippy and confusing. It's full of a lot of dream sequences, and reality and fiction are blurred. Highly recommend seeing Eight and a Half and then reading a lot about it afterward. I love that. Makes sense about it. That's one of my favorite types of movies. It's a movie that you can watch and then go find a bunch of film crit on it that explains it or pointed out that just discusses it. I love that kind of thing. I finally saw Casablanca, by the way. Oh, great. What do you think? I'm not going to say, like, medium. It was really good. I would not put it among, like, the best films I've ever seen or ever made. But even as a mainstream film yeah, I thought it was really good, but I definitely didn't see like, oh, my God, this is the best film I've ever seen type of feeling. Yeah. I think people leave out it's one of the best mainstream films ever made of, I guess the first half of the century or the middle of the century. I would even expand it out to you. I loved it. I think it's just a great movie, but I saw it finally. But I think maybe the expectation it's sort of like when I saw Citizen Kane for the first time after so much build up. It really delivered on that as far as, I think, just breaking boundaries of filmmaking and raising the bar. And I don't feel like Casa Blanca did that. I thought it was kind of just a normal, really good movie. Yeah, very normal in mainstream. Very good one. Agreed. So eight and a half. It's like you said, it's a meta narrative, basically. And anytime you see something like Dreamy or weird or people play themselves or strange versions of themselves, you have stumbled into a postmodern film. A really good example of that is basically everything Charlie Kaufman's ever written or directed. Synecda Key in New York is probably one of the most post modern films ever made. But then also it's like eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind. But people are like, this is truly postmodern in every sense. But it checks enough boxes that you could say that's definitely a postmodern film. Same with being John Malkovich. Yeah, an adaptation. I mean, that's the currency he deals in. I still haven't seen the most recent one with Jetze Plymouth. I got to check that out. I'm thinking of ending things. Yeah. Is that what it's called? I think so. I saw the Nicholas Cage movie that's coming out at a screener. Was it good? It is very good. But it's very postmodern, too. Like, Nicholas Cage plays himself and it's just completely off the rails from time to time. And in a lot of ways it reminded me of Adaptation, where it purposefully goes off the rails to make a point like Adaptation did. And so it borrowed from that. And it certainly seemed that way even more because Nicholas Cage is in it. But it's a pretty good movie. It's worth seeing, for sure. And shout out while we're off track. I just saw the Nicholas Cage movie Pig from last year about a former chef who is a truffle hunter and is trying to find his pig and stuff. You should know listener, I believe, because he was a movie crush listener. Michael Sarnowski directed that movie. Oh, neat. I've heard good things about it. It's fantastic. That's awesome. It's really good. I will definitely check it out, then. All right, let's wrap this up, I guess. Should we talk about, I don't know, criticisms? Sure. Also, we just need to definitely give a shout out. Postmodernism and architecture is also a thing that's Frank Geary right. It's almost its own track, but it had an even more abrupt change than, say, like film or art did. It went from minimalist functional design to just take everything apart, tear it down, and put it back together in weird ways. And yeah, Frank Gary is the embodiment of the postmodern. Starchitect is what they call them. Yeah. And I think a good example if you want to look at modern versus postmodern, you can look at the two Guggenheims, from Frank Lloyd Wright in New York to Gary's in Spain. I was just in New York and went to the Guggenheim and saw the Kandinsky exhibit. Highly recommend going to that before it closes. Nice. Or anything at the Guggenheim because just being in that building is quite an experience. Still have never been. Oh, my God. You're kidding. No, it's the best one. It's the best Guggenheim. It's my favorite museum in the world. Really? Yeah, because you're in and out in a couple of hours, it's not intimidating. You just ascend up that circular ramp and see a lot of great art over a couple of hours and then you're out of there and the building itself is art. Very nice. Well, check it out. Like, going to the Met is intimidating. The Guggenheim is not intimidating. I'm going to get super efficient and watch Pig and go to the Guggenheim in the same day. Totally should go to New York. Don't watch a movie in New York, watch it on the plane. There you go. I have to really select my airline carefully. All right, so criticisms of postmodernism, like you said, it is a bit of a punching bag these days and maybe kind of always has been, but you have people from both sides of the political spectrum criticizing postmodernism, whether it's sort of the old school leftists who think like, no, it has nothing to do with social progress. All this individualism is no good for our movement to conservativism, conservatism, conservativism, which is we do not like this whole there is no right or wrong. It's all about your perspective things. Because there's definitely right and wrong, everybody. Yes. How can you ban a book when it's not demonstrably wrong for asserting a viewpoint that's outside the norm? That's a very good point. Yeah. So of course they don't like the idea of moral relativism. But I was surprised that the leftist thought that until I learned that Leotard himself was basically like, yeah, this is a strange, new, unhappy direction that we're going in. And they laid it at the feet of the failure of Marxism to kind of bring about, like, collective social progress. And then the response to that was Thatcher's and Reagan's neoliberal policies that basically said, deregulate everything, make as much money as you can at the expense of whoever you need to, and let's go global, baby. And that is part and parcel with postmodernism as far as economics is concerned. And if you're an economist and a philosopher and you're looking at postmodernism, probably to you, late capitalism and postmodernism are basically interchangeable words. And that's another reason why so many people are so sick of postmodernism. Because there isn't anything right. There isn't anything wrong. There is no truth, there is no morality. It's just get as rich as you can is a huge part of it too. The commodification of art really kind of laid the groundwork for that and it's permeated everywhere, right? So now people say, okay, we're sick of postmodernism, we think it's dead. What's next? So Chuck, what is next after postmodernism? Well, I certainly don't know, but you sent along some interesting reading for me to ponder and the general thought is that we are in an era now of and again it won't be properly defined until ten to 20 years later. But hypermodernism, which is what this article calls postmodernism on steroids, where advertising is art and where tech companies are the governments of the world, or at least as influential as the governments of the world and the religions of the world, or metamodenism, which is not quite hypermodernism, right? It's sort of harkening back to modernism, yes, but with the advantage of having seen the failures of modernism before and then having lived through Postmodernism. So it's this idea that there is such a thing as beauty and truth and nature and that they are important and they matter and there are things we should move towards and that we should be positive and inclusive. So Ted Lasso is like a cartoonish embodiment of metamodenism and we see this clash going on right now, chuck, there's a huge clash in every kind of culture war. It's between people who are saying like, no, we need to keep extracting and consuming, and other people are like, no, we need to go a different track and say save the planet, or whatever. And some philosophers say this is the split that postmodernism kind of broke into and right now we're figuring out which direction we're going to go in. Save the planet, ruin the planet. That kind of black and white choice is basically being laid out for us right now and that's our place in history and no one has any idea which one's going to win out. Although some people say hypermodernism already has. We're just too much slaves to our devices. We've just been co opted by technology too deeply already to get ourselves out of it. Other people say not so fast, including Ted Lassa. Well, all of this stuff that you sent me about modernism made me finally understand one of my favorite singer, country artist Sergio Simpsons first record was called Metamodern Sounds in Country Music. And now that title makes more sense to me than it ever did because he is a country singer who sort of defies the modern country singing movement by harkening back to another time. He's like a progressive, liberal country singer. So that doesn't go over well in a lot of circles of country music. Is that fair to say? I think so. Like when he got Kobet and he was sort of speaking out about it. I was reading Fox News comments about this. And people were like, who even is this guy? He's no country star. I've never even heard of him. He was dressing like a deer because they don't play him on modern country music stations because he doesn't sing about tailgating. But his first record is called Metamoden Sounds in Country Music and it's fantastic. He sounds like a mashup of Wayland Jennings and George Jones. If that tells you where he's going, how could you go wrong with that? Exactly. With a little bit of Joan byez thrown in. Yeah, why not? So Sergio Simpson is possibly the future, or bitcoin mining is the other future. It's our choice. Everybody who knows where we'll end up, but we'll find out. All right. That was postmodern surface. Yeah, we did. And that's the stuff you should know, Way, if you want to know more about postmodernism, there's a lot to go read about it. There's a lot to read about hypermodernism metamodenism postmodernism. It's really interesting. Rabbit holes to go down. You can make a hobby out of it. And since I said you can make a hobby out of it, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to follow this up. This was about the short stuff about nose breathing and that you got a toothache from nose breathing. This is from a quote, qualified dentist working in the UK. Nice. Named Tom Park. Hey, guys. I'll kind of skip the greetings for length, but he goes on to say the maxillary sinuses, usually referred to just as the sinuses, sit next to the nose about in the region of your upper cheeks and extend to the front of your face on either side of the nose. They're very close to the ends of the roots of your molars, pre molars and sometimes canines, where all the nerves supplying your teeth enter those teeth. When you have sinusitis, this can feel like a toothache. Even a couple of weeks after the block, no symptoms have settled. And lots of people come to the dentist around winter time with toothaches, which is ultimately put down to this phenomenon. Oh, man. I had it myself once. And the jog I went on was agonizing. And my empathy for my patients grew considerably. That's nice. This can also occur when you read in very cold air through your nose, if that air then goes into the sinuses, but it's usually more transient. I hope this helps. Perhaps Josh should check with his own dentist to see if he has cavities that need managing. Well, this was like a decade or so ago. What's the dentist's name, the qualified dentist? Tom park. Thank you, Tom. This is probably more like, oh, my God, 20 years ago when it happened. Thankfully, I definitely did have a cavity that needed to be filled back there. But I went to the dentist recently, Chuck, and get this. My dentist said that she's going to need to raise my sinus. And I was like, how do you raise the sinus. She said, well, they used to do it with a hammer and chisel. We still got the hammer and chisel, but we have a better way of doing it now that's less painful. But they used to go in and put, like, a chisel up under your sinus and then tap it and actually raise your sinus. It sounds medieval. Are you going to do it, quote fiction? Yeah, I'm going to have to because I need, like, a little bit of bone put back there. And they can't do it without raising the sinus. Man I'll keep you posted. I'll be without my tooth. Man what's going on with us? I don't know. We were genetically conferred with terrible teeth, I think. And by the way, Tom Parker says, by the way, also, your description of the audience in Manchester who didn't clap until the very end made me laugh out loud. As a man, CUNY and myself, I can tell you that we are not easily impressed. So good on you for earning that clap from dentist Tom Park. Go to Tom Park. If you're anywhere in the UK, you should make that trip to see Tom. He's got the empathy. That's right. He loves Ted Lasso. Loves. If you want to be like Tom Park and write in about something we talked about, we love that kind of stuff. When somebody comes back and crosses a T or dots an I or adds an Ellipse, even although we don't like the ellipses that much. And you can put that all into an email and send it off to stuffpodcast@iheartradio.com. Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts My heartratio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You 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. 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."
4571e8f4-ba8a-11e8-9ed2-db9fd62db68c	Short Stuff: When Elvis Met Nixon	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/short-stuff-when-elvis-met-nixon	Elvis really did meet with Richard Nixon. Because Elvis wanted to help fight the drug trade. True story. Hear about it in today's short stuff.	Elvis really did meet with Richard Nixon. Because Elvis wanted to help fight the drug trade. True story. Hear about it in today's short stuff.	Wed, 27 Mar 2019 13:55:22 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2019, tm_mon=3, tm_mday=27, tm_hour=13, tm_min=55, tm_sec=22, tm_wday=2, tm_yday=86, tm_isdst=0)	13555369	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and there's Jerry. And Elvis is in the building, in spirit, at least. And so is Richard Nixon. Everybody's mad about that. So it's the short stuff, like I said. That's right. And this is about the very famous meeting of Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. And we got this information from December 2010 article in Smithsonian magazine by Peter Carlson, which had some great details about this very famous meeting on December 21. Yes. Which is that you might have thought was Photoshopped. Well, do you remember one of the first photoshops we ever got from our pal Van Nostrin was of us as Elvis and Nixon. That's right. And then, totally unrelated to it, our other pal who Photoshop says sometimes as Aaron Cooper, actually, he does it all the time and he Photoshopped us as Elvis and Nixon, too. And I think they were swapped. Pretty amazing stuff. Wow. Well, the wonders of technology. The thing is, though, right? The thing is, this is not a Photoshopped image. It's a very famous image that you could get well before Photoshop was over around back in the 80s. But it is of a meeting that very few people knew about until the Chicago newspaper in 1988 said, hey, everybody, the National Archives has a bunch of pictures of Elvis and Nixon together shaking hands, and you can buy them if you want. And it became the most requested picture in National Archives history in like a week. Yes. And like Elvis as Elvis, it wasn't like he wore he's like, well, I'm going to wear my suit today and just tone it down. He's fully Elvis. Purple Velour suit with a cape, if I remember correctly. Yes, and there's a movie about this, too, by the way. There's two of them. Oh, really? There's one from 97 and one from, I think, like 2000 something. Well, the one that I saw was the most recent one with Michael Shannon. Yes. As Elvis. Yeah, not a bad it wasn't great, but Michael Shannon is awesome and everything, so it was worth it for that. Did they make, like is it a feature length movie? Yeah, weird. But it followed the story because, I mean, this is about like 48 Hours is the whole story. Yeah. So here's how it goes. It's Christmas time. Wait, I'm sorry. Hold on. One more thing, chuck, I want to interject before you get started. It helps a lot to imagine Elvis totally wasted on speed throughout this entire story. Okay? Just bear that in mind. So it starts on Christmas. There's a fight at the house between Elvis dad Vernon and Elvis wife, apparently, about just Christmas spending, which I think is interesting. I got the impression that they were on the same side against Elvis. Oh, I don't know. I think so, maybe. But in any regard, Elvis leaves. He's not too happy. So he does that movie trope thing. Where you just go to the airport and say, put me on the next flight to anywhere. And that happened to be Washington, DC. Goes to DC. Stays there for a little while, and then decides to fly to La. To his house in Beverly Hills, which, by the way, is an airbnb now. Is it? It is, but it's on airbnb. But all the dates were blacked out, and it didn't give a price because I was like, I'm totally going to try and stay there one night, sure, at some point in my life, right? But, yeah, I don't know what the deal is, but you can go look at the house. It's pretty sweet, as you would imagine. Okay, so Elvis buddy and confidant and assistant, Jerry Schilling, gets a call. He's like, I'm going to be in La. Man. Pick me up. That's great. Jerry Schilling, he does pick him up. And here's where we should just say that Elvis, at this point in his life, was obsessed with martial arts guns and weirdly law enforcement and collecting law enforcement, like honorary sheriffs and honorary badges, that kind of thing. And the thing that bound all of these common, these interests together, was drugs being on lots and lots of drugs. Yeah. And Priscilla says this in her book. He was obsessed with the narcotics badge, the narc badge. And she said he felt that if you had that narc badge and you could fly to any country with your guns and your drugs and get away with it, no questions asked. Wow. So that is the fantasy of a drugaddled brain. Yeah, sure. Also. But it solves a practical problem, too. I love my guns, and I love my drugs, and I need to get them around. So I got it. I'll bet a Federal Narcotics Bureau batch, which is the predecessor to the DEA, I'll bet I could just flash one of those, add that I'm Elvis Presley and that I got this from Richard Nixon, and boom, right through with my big garbage bag full of pills. All right? So he's in La. He says to Jerry Schilling, he's like, now I want to go back to DC. He didn't tell him why. And then on the way, on the flight, elvis writes a letter to President Nixon. Sir, if I can be in any service to you, I want to help the country out, and I would love to meet you. Stays in DC. Under a pseudonym and tells Nixon his pseudonym, said he's going to be there in DC. And I want credentials of a federal agent. Yes. So he writes this letter. They take the red eye from La. To DC. They drop a letter off at 06:30 A.m.. They check into a hotel personally. Elvis dropped us off at the gate of the White House. Yeah. And they check into a hotel, and Elvis gets restless. He's not slept, by the way. Imagine that. And he decides he's going to go to the Bureau of Narcotics himself and just kind of sniff around and see what they've got going on there. So while I'm guessing, Jerry Schilling was getting some rest in a shower at the hotel room, elvis is off at the Federal Narcotics Bureau, hasn't slept, probably out of his mind on drugs, talking to them about badges and stuff and how we'd like to meet Richard Nixon and get a badge from him. What's amazing, although it's really not amazing if you stop and think about it, is that when they drop the letter off at 630, within five and a half hours, elvis was on his way to the White House to meet with the President. All right, let's take a break there. We'll tell you about the further details of the story right after this. All right, so the letter is delivered to an aide of Nixon named Bud. That's his nickname? Bud kroh or Kroger, I think. Kroh. Probably K-R-O-G-H. Krog. So he delivers this or he gets this letter to Bud Krock. Because the front gate people are like, Elvis delivered a letter. And it's not just like if any normal American had delivered a letter. This one actually got to Nixon's aide pretty quickly. Yeah, he was a fan of Elvis, and he's like, you know what? This is a great idea. Like, Richard Nixon is not cool at all. No. And if he met with Elvis Presley, that's really good for his image because Elvis is the coolest guy on the planet. Well, 1970, he was up there. Okay, so he likes this idea. He persuades eventually the Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman, to make this happen. And at noon that day, Elvis shows up at the White House ready to go with a gift of a gun. He brought a cult 45 and a display case to gift the Nixon, which he just took from the wall of his house in La. Sure. He's like, quick, and I agree. And it is. It's a beautifully mounted firearm, if you're into that kind of thing. You would be like, yes. Especially if it came directly from Elvis personal collection. Sure. I'm not a gun guy, but I would love Elvis 45. Okay, sure. So the Secret Service, of course, says, yes, thank you very much. We'll take that before you can go into the Oval Office. And from what do we say, bug crows? Is it Crow Croft? What do we settle on? Let's just go crawl. How about Bug Kay? Yeah. So Bug Kay recounted his impressions of the story because he's in the room. He made this thing happen because he's an Elvis saying N and A to Nixon. And he said that when Elvis walked into the Oval Office, it was plain that he was awestruck. Sure. But he regained his footing pretty quickly, and it's like mixing it up with the President, having a talk with him, a very serious talk about the problem of counterculture in the United States, right? Very interesting. The whole thing was so odd because Elvis was a drug addict, and he talked about the problems of drugs, and he, from what I understand, had a clearly distinct line between being riddled with prescription drugs and illegal like street drugs. Right? Because naively, if it's a prescription drug and it comes from a doctor, it's legitimized. Like, it's fine. It's legal. Even if you have a totally illegal amount of them on you, it's still legal. It's still a prescription drug. But a street drug, I've heard before. I don't remember where I read it. It may have been the Uncle John's bathroom reader that he used to get so worked up about the idea of drug dealers in Memphis down the street that he'd want to go out and shoot them. And he'd be wasted on drugs at the time. And his entourage would have to calm him down and keep the guns away from them and keep them just in his house to keep him from going out and exacting vigilante justice of the local Memphis street drug dealers around town. Yeah, I mean, I think I've said this in the Graceland episode. My family's from Memphis and my dear sweet grandmother passed away, like, fully believing and saying out loud, elvis doctors killed him. He didn't know what was going on. They had him going every which way but loose because of their prescriptions. And I'm like, no, Grandma. He didn't tell her no. On her deathbed. No. It was like Elvis was a junkie right over and whispering into her ear. All right, so Elvis is awestruck. This guy Bud Kay is taking notes because this is pre Oval Office taping by Nixon. Elvis is awestruck. They're talking about the counterculture. Elvis is talking about the Beatles, how they're anti Americans and they're bad for America, and they're talking about drugs. And Elvis is showing off his collection of badges and then basically saying he basically asked him flat out, I would like a narcotics badge. Can you make that happen? Yeah, harry let's go to the church. Marion pretty much, yeah. And Henderson says, Well, I don't know. Can we, BUDK? And Budkey was like, yeah, we can probably make that happen. He's like, all right, let's get it done then. So that was it. I mean, within probably about an hour, bug Kay and Elvis went to lunch, and Bug Kay produced the badge for him before the end of lunch or right after lunch ended. So funny. He also got some other like, he had his bodyguard and chilling with them, and Nixon gave them some what do you give them? Cufflinks. Then elves. This was like, well, Mr. President, they have wives, too. So he went and got him White House brooches. And Elvis just, like, leaves the White House with all these gifts, basically, right? He made a basket out of his shirt. But like we said, there was that one very famous photo. And no one knew about this. Elvis wanted to keep it quiet. I imagine nixon, sadly, wasn't able to use it as a PR move. Yeah. Although I think also he was probably like, what just happened after Elvis came and went? He was just available. Yeah. It is a little crazy. The whole thing is pretty crazy, Chuck, for sure. But the year after, a columnist named Jack Anderson broke the story, and apparently nobody really didn't go anywhere. It didn't become part of the cultural memory. And it wasn't until 1988 that the Chicago newspaper reported about the photos that that was when it hit just right. I think in 1971, people were like, it wasn't kitschy yet, but in 1988, people were ready to be blown away by the idea of Nixon and Elvis together. That's right. And so it was in the National Archives. Then all of a sudden, you can make a request for the copy of that photo, and within one week, 8000 people requested that. And it's still I'm not sure if it still is, but for a while, it was the most requested photograph in the history of the National Archives. Pretty amazing. There you go. Yeah. It was finally supplanted by Obama meeting with that alien in the Oval Office. That famous photograph. That's right. No, when Obama met with the lead singer of Corn. Right. There you go. Yeah. You got anything else? No? Well, good, because we don't have time. Afraid it anyway, it's a short stuff. We'll see you guys later. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howtofworks.com?"
http://netstorage.discovery.com/DMC-FEEDS/MED/podcasts/2008/1215463241875sysk-most-expensive-toilet.mp3	What's the most expensive toilet in the world?	https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/whats-the-most-expensive-toilet-in-the-world	The most expensive toilet in the world is made of solid gold and can be found in Hong Kong. Learn more about the world's most expensive toilet in this HowStuffWorks podcast.	The most expensive toilet in the world is made of solid gold and can be found in Hong Kong. Learn more about the world's most expensive toilet in this HowStuffWorks podcast.	Thu, 12 Jun 2008 18:15:06 +0000	time.struct_time(tm_year=2008, tm_mon=6, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=18, tm_min=15, tm_sec=6, tm_wday=3, tm_yday=164, tm_isdst=0)	5131952	audio/mpeg	https://chtbl.com/track/…3c7-ae270180c33e	"Brought to you by the Reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to stuff You Should know from Housetofworkscom. Brought to you by consumerGuide Automotive. We make carbine easier. And welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, a staff writer here@houseupworks.com with me. As always, it's the greatest editor on the planet, Candice Gibson. Candice, how are you? I'm quick, candice, tell me, what is the most expensive toilet in the world? Come on. Three, two, one. Hang on. The jewelers. It's solid gold. It is solid gold, y'all. It is a solid gold toilet. And it's not just a solid gold toilet, it's part of this huge display. Right? I have a solid gold lavatory, right? And there's actually non laboratory parts of the displays, like gold Buddha and stuff. But far and away, the biggest tourist attraction here at Hang Fung Jewelers in Hong Kong is the solid gold laboratory. Which is why it was such a surprise when Hang Fung announced early in 2008 that they were going to start melting down parts of it. And people were mad. And not just because they had to go really badly, because you can't actually use the bathroom. The toilet is for display only. Exactly. But it was just such an odd attraction. People wanted to preserve the solid gold toilet for posterity's sake. Right. So Hang Fung actually did start melting down parts of the laboratory because the price of gold had reached $1,000. Yeah, the dollar had weakened. Thank you. Subprime mortgage debacle and gold went up. So Hang Fine decides to cash in. I mean, we're talking tens of millions of dollars for a ton of gold. And they assured everybody, though, that the solid gold toilet was going to remain. Can't say the same for other fixtures of the laboratory, like the golden shower, the golden sink, that kind of thing, but the solid gold toilet remains. That is the most expensive toilet in the world. Indeed. And it's a testament to luxurious bathroom retreats everywhere. It is. That's kind of a big trend right now. Indeed, it really is. And now the bathroom used to just be another room in the house, but it really is becoming sort of a spa retreat for people. People are adding marble countertops and sunken in tubs and chandeliers in place of vanity lighting. It's huge right now. It really adds to the value of your home. You know, I actually read a study that showed that luxury bath upgrades return something like 93% of the investment, which is just ridiculous. Kitchens are like 72%. Isn't that wild? It is wild. And you know, it's funny, Josh, because the kitchen really used to be sort of a place where people would go together. Inevitably, whenever you throw a party, people end up in the kitchen, much to the hostesses chagrin. But now people are apparently congregating in bathrooms, a, because they're big enough, but B, because just some are. That nice. Well, you know, I'm not quite sure that the guests are actually congregating there. I think they're kind of assembled there against their will. But I read at least one article, one in the Wall Street Journal that was centered around this couple who threw an engagement party, a large one, in their bathroom. And their bathroom, like you said, it was a nice one. This one had a koi pond, fireplaces, and certainly lots of marble and all that. But these people aren't just complete wackos. I mean, this is something that's becoming a trend in America. Bathrooms are starting to step up and say, pay attention to me, pay attention to me. And people are doing just that. People are doing just that, and they have more reason to with innovations like the neo rest. Yes. 600 toilet. This is my favorite toilet in the world. I like this even more than the solid gold toilet, mainly because you can actually use this one. And this is a really nice little potty companion. It actually opens its lid when it senses you approaching it warm so that your tush doesn't have to touch cold porcelain. Right. There's a cleaning stream of water, a jet of water, followed by a puff of air to dry you off. Pretty much the only thing the Neolithic hunter doesn't do is talk to you. Wouldn't you agree? I agree. So you've got this great neo rest toilet. Where are you going to do? Put in some slubby shower or something? No, there's plenty of other amenities, too, that are available. Have you heard about this Idola shower? I have not. Dude, this thing is a stand up shower, but it has UV lights around it, so you actually tan while you're showering. Wow. That certainly is an upgrade from the bathrooms of your stuff pits. And so people used to urinate and defecate and open areas. Sure. Yeah. But I mean, what came after that? It wasn't a direct leap from Seth pits to outhouses, was it? No, it couldn't. It's renters came next. Oh, got you. Yeah. And then out houses, right? Yeah. And then essentially the nearby 600, right? Yeah. It's pretty much the progression. It's like that a picture of the evolution of man, except with bathrooms. Well, if you want to read more about the most expensive toilet in the world and other lux bathroom fixtures, check out the article entitled what's the most expensive toilet in the world? It's a flush on howtofworks.com for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houseofworks.com. Let us know what you think. Send an email to podcast@housestofworks.com brought to you by The Reinvented 2012 emery, it's ready. Are you?"

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